One day I was brave enough to go into the shop to inquire about the price, and discovered that it cost two pounds, eighteen shillings and sixpence. I said, “Thank you very much,” and left doing my very best to appear as if I didn’t care after all. I didn’t have that kind of money and an entreaty to my mother was met with an almost humiliating peal of laughter followed by, “Do you think money grows on trees?” Or she would open her purse to show me the meagre contents. Or, even worse, she would say, “So, now you know what it is to want—call it an experience.”
School ended in late July, and on the final day before the summer break I took one more look at the Cinderella watch and then sloped away toward the bus stop. I must have seemed crestfallen by the time I walked into the kitchen that afternoon, my forehead worn into a frown, because as we finished our tea that evening, Mum laid out a plan. She had probably been trying to work out what to do about my dark demeanor ever since I came home.
“Blackcurranting starts on Monday. If you like, you can work mornings and we’ll keep a tally book for you. You might be able to earn enough money for your watch.”
I liked that idea very much, and I was ready to put my back into the job.
On Monday morning we walked down to the farm, the sun already warm on my tanned arms and legs, the day starting out humid. As soon as we arrived, we walked over to collect a few fresh wooden trays from a pile at the bottom of the field, and sheets of the fine waxed paper provided to line them. Mum demonstrated lining the tray and then showed me how to pick, using my forefinger and thumb to pinch away each sprig of blackcurrants from the bush. Then she showed me how to do it even faster. She warned me to be careful, that I’d be docked for damaged fruit, and that I’d also be pulled up short for an underweight tray. Mum started me off picking the first bush before she set to work on the second. When I finished one bush—and she said she’d check to make sure I was a clean picker and that only green fruit was left behind—I was to move onto the next bush beyond her, and so on until we’d finished that row. I tried hard not to squash fruit, and was doing my best to coordinate my thumb and forefinger and therefore execute a perfect tearing of the sprig from the branch.
I finished my first tray and set it beside my mother’s already picked tower of trays. I was not intimidated by her speed, but lined a fresh tray and went back to work. My mind wandered as I increased my pace, filling the next tray faster, my fingers now weaving through the bush until I’d picked it clean. Then came a shout across the rows of blackcurrants, one of the workers letting the pickers know that the tractor and trailer with the weighing machine was on its way. It stopped every few rows for the farmer to weigh the picked fruit, which would then be taken to the storage shed to be collected by lorry that night. These blackcurrants were bound for the Ribena cordial factory.
As she made her way back down the row with her full tray, my mother stopped to check every single bush I’d worked on, and then she pointed to my trays. “You need to pick cleaner—hurry, you’ve got enough time to get those leaves out of your trays before Mr. David comes for the weighing.” David was the farmer’s first name, and because his brother had the neighboring farm, they were known to workers as “Mr. David and Mr. John.” I cleaned my trays, and began to worry. When the trailer reached us, Mum lifted up her trays one by one to be placed on the scales. Mr. David weighed each tray, marked her tally book and handed it back to her. Then she lifted my trays, and handed him my tally book. He looked at Mum, then at me, and smiled before weighing the trays and marking up my book. Children weren’t officially supposed to work—there were laws against it—but I knew many who did, their picking recorded on their mother’s tally book, a boost to the family income. My mother made it easier by creating my book using drawing paper and marking up columns on the pages, so I wasn’t using an official farm document for keeping track of my earnings—and those earnings would be all mine, for my Cinderella watch.
“You’ve worked enough this morning, love,” said Mum. “You can go and play now—but wash your hands in the stream first.”
I was hot and sticky, so I ran into the woods, took off my sandals and stepped into the cool stream, bending down to reach through the water until I could touch the stones and sand at the bottom, and rubbed my hands together. Then I stepped back and sat down on the sun-dappled bank amid the pungent wild garlic and deep yellow celandines that grew alongside the water. I grinned. I’d just earned some money. I didn’t know how much, but I’d earned some money.
Some days were more productive than others. If it rained hard, we couldn’t go to work, but we had to get the picking done soon, otherwise the fruit would spoil under the heat of summer sun. The stain on my hands from one day merged into the juice from the next, and during that season’s work, I never managed to rid myself of the purple taint on my fingers, even though I slathered them with the special gel Dad used to clean paint from his hands. Blackcurrant picking continued for two or three weeks. It was the last of the season’s soft fruits; strawberries had been picked in June and early July, and loganberries on another farm. All too soon, picking ended and the seasonal workers left. Mum and Auntie Glad, and the other regulars, Joan and Flo, moved into the oast house for the next job—mending hop pokes for the coming hop-picking season. Then apple picking would begin, our lives and income dictated by the rhythm of the agricultural year.
I loved the oast house. I felt comfort in the heady aroma of last year’s hops, musty and pungent, and the clammy warmth the ancient building generated. I would watch the way the women wielded long needles, blanket-stitching torn seams of thick hessian sacking with heavy string, and all the while chatting, telling stories, gossiping. I wanted to mend hop sacks and earn some more money, but Mum said it was too difficult for little hands, and to go out into the fresh air with the other kids or read my book. My brother was only two so he played with his toys, or slept. Finally, he was getting the hang of sleeping.
Then one day, as I returned from playing with the farmer’s children, clambering up the wooden steps onto the cooling floor—the part of the oast house next to the roundel, where mounds of hops would be shoveled in after drying—Mum looked up from her stitching. “Mr. David came up with the blackcurrant picking money. He said you could take round a wheelbarrow to collect your earnings.” The women laughed. I could hear them as I jumped down the stairs and ran to the farmhouse side door where Mr. David had his office. He was waiting with the small brown paper envelope—I later learned that Mum had asked him to make up a wage packet for me instead of just slipping the money into hers. She wanted my accomplishment to be special. “Well done,” he said, but hardly had time to finish before I ran off around the back of the oast house, whereupon I studied the figures on the front before opening the envelope and counting my earnings three times. One pound, eighteen shillings and elevenpence. Not enough for the Cinderella watch. That evening, Mum and Dad agreed it might be cheaper in Maidstone, the market town an hour away on the bus.
Tuesday was market day in Maidstone, and I don’t know why Auntie Sylvie and Uncle John came down with John, Larry and Martine, but I think it must have been some sort of holiday, because both my parents were off work and so were my aunt and uncle. It was decided we’d all go into Maidstone on the bus. Here’s what I remember about the bus. It was raining that day and the bus seemed to be slower than usual, which was a special sort of hell for both Larry and me because we suffered from travel sickness, despite being given Kwells and my mother pressing a penny into each of our hands, promising, as always, that they were special magic pennies that stopped you being sick. We all went straight to the top of the double-decker bus, where Larry sat in front of me with Uncle John. Dad sat next to me, with Mum across the aisle with my brother. Larry lost his breakfast about halfway to Maidstone, and I remember Uncle John holding him to the window and whatever it was he was throwing up splattered sideways and ran down the window next to me. I closed my eyes, clutched harder at my magic penny a
nd thought about the Cinderella watch.
In Maidstone, my brother was left in Auntie Sylvie’s care, while Mum and Dad led me away from the market and toward the shops. We found a jeweler’s on Week Street with the Cinderella watch in the window. We all stared at it, then I looked up at my parents.
“Come on then,” said Dad. “Let’s go in.”
We entered the shop, and as the bell over the door summoned the owner, I stared at the glass cases on either side of the wall. Rings, brooches, watches, necklaces, bracelets. It was so sparkly.
“And how may I help you, sir, madam?” The jeweler looked at Mum and Dad in turn.
“The young lady is your customer,” said my dad, his hand on my shoulder. He gave me a gentle prod, encouraging me to step forward.
The jeweler looked down at me as I blurted out, “May I look at the Cinderella watch, please?”
I half-felt my parents move away. This was my wanting, my money, my purchase. They were leaving me to it.
The man unlocked the velvet-clad doors that opened onto the window, reached in and picked up the Cinderella watch. I swallowed a mouthful of saliva, and tried to swallow my desire along with it. He put the watch in front of me, slipped the blue strap away from the shoe, and set it on a velvet pad. I stood on tiptoe to look. He held out his hand for my wrist and I gave it willingly, pulling up my sleeve. I felt the weight of the watch as he secured it, and I held my breath.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, half relieved when he took it from my wrist and set it back in the shoe. “How much is it?
“Two pounds, ten shillings and sixpence.”
I tried not to appear downhearted, but I knew my parents could not afford the difference and I imagine it showed on my face.
“How much money do you have, young lady?” he said.
I pulled my little coin purse from my pocket, unzipped it and poured my hard-earned cash onto the counter. He counted the money.
“Ah,” he said. “Very good. I have something special to show you, and it’s only just come in.” Again he went to the window, this time he turned holding a watch with a round face, plain numerals and a thin black leather band. “This is a very fine, elegant watch for a young lady such as yourself.” He removed the watch from the open box, releasing it from a royal blue satin pillow, then reached for my wrist again, securing the strap. He picked up a pen and pointed to the face. “Strong stainless steel.” He hovered the tip of the pen in a circle above the dial. “Clear numbers.” Then he drew attention to the strap. “Genuine leather. You will get what you pay for at one pound, eighteen shillings and sixpence.” He allowed a pause before pointing to my first choice, which was still on the counter. “The Cinderella watch will be out of fashion in a few months—we only stocked it because the film is doing the rounds again. It has a nylon strap and a plastic dial. What you’re really paying for is a glass shoe.” He tapped the pen against the shoe. “If I were you, I’d go for quality. Not that shoe.”
I turned to my parents.
“Gentleman’s right, Jackie—go for quality.”
So I went for the quality and said I’d like to buy the watch with the leather strap. I was asked if I would like to wear my new watch and I said I would keep it on. Much was made of wrapping the box with the royal blue pillow and handing me the receipt to put into my coin purse along with the remaining five pennies. We thanked the man and left the shop, though I lingered on the street to stare at the window as the Cinderella watch was replaced on the display shelf in its glass shoe. That lovely glass shoe. The man waved, and we went on our way.
The leather watch lasted a good few years, and was still on my wrist in my early teens, when Celia became bored with her big flashy red watch and it was handed down to me.
I continued working on farms throughout my schooldays. Though it might seem harsh now, where I was from it was common to see children working—after all, that’s what those long summer breaks away from school were originally designed for; children were needed to bring in the harvest. By fourteen I’d picked every kind of fruit grown in Kent; I drove a tractor before a car. I’d fed lambs abandoned by their mothers, moved cattle from one field to another, whitewashed farm outbuildings for the summer and done many of the usual jobs that kids do—babysitting and house-cleaning, shop work, waitressing, washing up at a restaurant, Saturday girl at a hairdresser’s when I was thirteen—which I hated, because the very nature of being a Saturday girl involved all the dirty dogsbody jobs: scrubbing the floors, sweeping up hair, washing mirrors, filling up the small bottles of shampoo from the gallon can, so customers thought they were getting some fancy shampoo, but really it was cheap stuff that even my mother wouldn’t put on her hair. I had to use that shampoo on the floor and to wash the cups and saucers we used to give the ladies a cup of tea. I also had to shampoo hair when the older ladies came in, which was always a bit tricky because some of them had hardly any hair, so it was basically a bald scalp I was looking at while trying not to worry about the hair that was coming out in my hands and wondering if it was all my fault. One of the hairdressers, Cathy, had a terrible temper and was always shouting at me. I told my parents about it, and was surprised when Dad said, “Next time that happens, you down tools and you walk out of there.” I loved that phrase, “down tools”—and imagined myself throwing some combs and a mop on the floor and walking out, though I thought I wouldn’t have had the courage to do such a thing. However, the next time Cathy shouted her head off at me in front of a whole salon of ladies, I rested the broom against the wall, took off my overall and walked out—but not before I’d held out my hand for the ten bob she owed me.
I didn’t like strawberry plugging either. That was a job I did with a friend when I was ten. We’d walk to the farm a couple of miles away—not the farm where my mother worked, but another near my friend’s house—and go straight into one of the barns where a long line of buckets filled with imperfect strawberries was waiting for us. The perfect fruit had already been sent to market for distribution and retail sale. There were two upturned wooden crates for us to sit on at the end of the barn, and a stack of empty buckets to one side for us to use as we worked. Our instructions amounted to taking one full bucket after the other from the line and then working as quickly as we could, we had to pull out the plug and any mold in each strawberry. We would throw the plugs and moldy bits into one empty bucket and the good part into another. That long line of buckets filled with imperfect fruit had to be finished before we went home, and those strawberries stained our hands and soon made them so sore the skin on our fingertips broke open. Our backs would ache after several hours of sitting on wooden crates and leaning forward to do our work. The buckets with the good parts were bound for the jam-making factories, and the rest would either go into pig swill or chicken feed. I have noticed that American strawberries don’t seem to have that plug that goes down into the fruit from the stem, something I rather like about American strawberries, though they don’t taste as good as strawberries grown in Kent. Needless to say, I also prefer homemade jam.
The job I detested most, though, was a summer packing eggs at a place where the manager couldn’t keep his hands to himself. I always had two or more jobs on the go. From age sixteen until I went away to college, I would sneak out of school early three days a week for my job as the evening receptionist for two local doctors. At twenty-one, when I presented my resume for my first real job, I was exactly what the photographs predicted I would be: an old hand when it came to work, a Saturday’s child. But I’d learned a valuable lesson at an early age—that if you wanted something, you had to take care of business yourself.
17
The Railway Child
Sometimes, when I look back at those early years as John and I grew up in the house at the end of The Terrace, the word “rhythm” seems to echo time and again, and I find myself repeating it—the sort of repetition a copyeditor flags when she goes through a manuscript. When yo
ur days revolve around the land and the seasons, there’s more of a sense of life’s backbeat, from turning the soil in winter, to spring seeding, to the harvests of summer and autumn.
Though to outsiders our lives might have seemed as soft and undulating as the countryside around us, my mother’s stories, told each day as we sat down for our tea, seemed to catch us on a wave and propel us through a series of highs and lows. “I told him straight” or “I put her in her place!” were common refrains, because if there was one thing my Mum could do, it was put people in their place. Then she would tell a joke, something about what she saw and how she quipped, and we would laugh because my mother was a very witty woman. With a certain pride she’d told us that her father had admonished her with that well-worn phrase, “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.” To which Mum would respond, “But it takes a witty woman to be sarcastic.” Oh, she could be sarcastic!
But if Mum rendered us co-stars in her story simply by making us the audience, then Dad grounded us. He always grounded us; with a comment he could calm the air following the out-of-key bang, crash, boom rhythm of one of Mum’s stories, bringing us down to earth safely again.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 16