Mary stopped what she was doing for a moment and turned to face her sister.
‘You’ve got to make out that you’re not bothered. If it had been me, I’d have laughed along with them.’
‘But I’m not like you. You think everything is a laugh.’
‘Not everything,’ Mary reasoned. ‘I didn’t think my job at Greens was funny. But if you get upset every time something goes wrong, then the girls are more likely to carry on teasing.’
It was sensible advice. Joan nodded and gave her sister a small smile, resolving there and then not to take it to heart every time something didn’t go as she’d have liked.
School life did improve as she determined to get on and make the best of things, but nonetheless, at the end of term Joan could scarcely believe it when she was awarded third prize for her efforts across all subjects. This time her face glowed with pride as head teacher Mr Russell handed her a brand-new atlas in front of her applauding peers.
After school finished that day, Joan, brimming with pride, rushed home and burst into the kitchen, calling breathlessly, ‘Mum! Mum! Look what I’ve got!’
‘What is it?’ asked a smiling Annie, drying her hands on her apron.
A beaming Joan showed her the book. ‘It was my prize at school. For third place.’
‘That’s wonderful, Joan,’ said Annie. ‘Third place! Amongst all those children! I knew you’d do well if you stuck at it. You’re as good as anyone. Just remember that.’
Joan treasured the book, carefully handling the pages so as not to damage them, as though they were part of an important historical document. From then on, she felt much more confident and far happier at school, her prize testament to the fact that she was at least as smart as those around her.
To the girls’ relief, Kate, Tom and Mike only stayed at Battle Road for a few nights before they found rooms for rent in a house further along the road. The girls had been delighted when their grandparents had brought their wind-up gramophone and record collection to the house but were even more pleased when Tom and Kate left them behind after moving out. It meant that the girls could play the records whenever they liked – so long as Annie agreed. Then again, Annie had always liked music and singing, so she rarely objected.
There was quite a lot of classical musical, which Tom enjoyed, and songs from the Italian operatic singer Enrico Caruso. In stark contrast, they also found rousing cockney songs from the long-running music-hall show Casey’s Court. This featured comedian Will Murray and a cast of child performers – including a young Charlie Chaplin – who acted as cheeky cockney street urchins in a variety of sketches and songs. The show, which ran from the early 1900s to the 1950s, was so popular that the phrase ‘It’s like Casey’s Court in here!’ became used whenever there was an unruly gathering of children, and the girls often heard it directed at them by Annie.
Casey’s Court records featured cheeky remarks and songs such as ‘Jolly Good Company’, ‘Whistling In The Dark’, ‘It Always Starts To Rain’ and ‘Tie A Little String Around Your Finger’, all accompanied by a barrel organ, somebody playing the spoons and other ad hoc instruments. The Jarman sisters loved listening to these records because they made them laugh and smile, and they soon got to know all of the words, which they would sing merrily around the house. Annie would often join in and although they made her smile too, a small part of her felt that they were rather common. She hoped the neighbours couldn’t hear them.
There were other family visitors to Battle Road over the summer. Most weekends, Pierce’s sisters would accompany him, much to the annoyance of Annie and her girls. The girls’ cousin Kit stayed with them for a while too. It was Kit who, knowing that Mary was seeking a full-time job, noticed an advert in the window of the newsagent’s in the High Street. An office worker was needed at the Silverlight Laundry in North Street.
‘An office worker,’ said Annie, smiling at Mary when she told her about it. ‘That sounds impressive, Mary. You should definitely go for that.’
‘But it’s not anything I’ve done before, Mum,’ replied Mary. ‘Do you think I’ll be able to do it?’
‘I’m sure you can,’ said Annie. It was the same positive message she gave to all her daughters. ‘You’ll learn.’
The laundry was owned by Mr and Mrs Gates, a couple originally from London. When Mary went along to apply for the job, Mrs Gates liked the fact that she was a fellow Londoner, confiding in her, ‘I like having girls from London working for me. They’ve got more sense than the locals.’
‘I got it, Mum!’ Mary told Annie excitedly when she returned home that day, beaming from ear to ear. ‘I start tomorrow.’
Annie too was delighted at the thought of having an office worker as a daughter. It was definitely a step in the right direction and she managed to drop it casually into many conversations with the other mums. This was something she didn’t mind the neighbours hearing.
However, it quickly became apparent, both to Mary and to Mrs Gates, that Mary wasn’t cut out for office work. She had to help with the accounts, and dealing with figures was not her forte. Mrs Gates, despite insisting that her staff address her as ‘madam’, was a kind and caring woman, and she took pity on Mary, offering her a job in the sorting and packing department instead. It was overseen by Mr Lavender, whose penchant for chewing tobacco made his breath smell considerably less sweet than his name.
Mary was grateful not to be sacked but found the work and conditions of her new role unpleasant. The main laundry floor had a staff of around thirty girls – some would be ironing, others packing. Mary had what she considered to be the worst job: sorting dirty washing and putting it into the large washing machines. However, as always, she could see the funny side of most situations and the rather unpleasant job was punctuated liberally with laughs.
The pockets of garments all had to be checked to make sure that they were empty before the clothes were put into the wash. Sylvia Blundell, who was working alongside Mary, was going through the pockets of several waiters’ jackets that had come in from a local hotel, when she found what she thought was a long balloon. Deciding to have some fun, she blew it up and walked through the factory, playfully hitting the other girls on the head with it. As everyone screamed with laughter, Mrs Gates walked over to see what was causing so much hilarity.
‘Sylvia, put that … thing away!’ she cried, alarmed at the sight. It was only later that the girls learnt, from one of the older employees, that what they thought was a balloon had actually been a condom.
That summer, Mary and Joan’s heads were being turned by the presence of overseas soldiers camped in the fields and woods off Battle Road. While most British soldiers were fighting abroad, the UK’s defences along the south coast were shored up by thousands of Canadian troops. With their accents, uniforms and a certain swagger, they attracted many admiring looks from the local women and impressionable teenagers such as Mary and Joan.
During the day, these exciting young men were on manoeuvres and carrying out military exercises. At night, they would sit around the campfire, enjoying treats such as toasted cheese sandwiches. On Sundays, they would march smartly down the High Street to the parish church in the town centre, coinciding with the arrival of impressionable teenage girls. Church had never been so much fun.
By chance, Mary became a regular visitor to the Canadian troops’ camp when she changed roles again at the Silverlight Laundry. She had been asked if she would like to move out of the sorting and packing department to become an assistant to the woman who drove one of the collection vans, picking up dirty washing from clients and returning it cleaned and pressed.
‘Yes, please,’ she had told Mrs Gates eagerly, keen to get away from the stifling heat and chemical smell of the laundry.
Mary enjoyed her new role with the driver, Mrs Westcomb, although she did miss working with the other girls she’d befriended in the sorting department. However, after a few months, Mrs Westcomb left the company to be with her husband, and an eighteen-year-o
ld local lad named Gordon Mitchell applied for her job and got it. As he was waiting to be called up for the army, the laundry manager, Mr Leslie, told him to teach Mary how to drive so that she would be able to take over once he had gone. Mary found it quite easy to learn, as there was so little traffic on the country roads – petrol was rationed and anyone who owned a car was careful not to use too much fuel.
When Gordon’s call-up papers duly arrived, Mary took the driving seat and thoroughly enjoyed it. To her delight, she found that she got on really well with the girl of her own age assigned to be her assistant, Iris Packham. The working day became huge fun and the pair became good friends outside of work too.
One of the stops on their laundry round was the Canadian soldiers’ camp. With her slim figure and flaming-red hair, Mary attracted quite a bit of attention from the troops, including one young man in particular, whose appearance startled her. He was an Aboriginal Canadian who lived on a reservation back home. Known as Woppamoose, he was a hulking, taciturn man, and the younger Jarman girls were frightened of him whenever they spotted him in town. They had never seen anyone like him, so Mary was surprised and a little unnerved when one day he asked her to go to the pictures with him. Not quite knowing what to say, she eventually settled on, ‘I’ll have to let you know.’ Back home, when she talked to her mother about it, Annie was adamant.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t know him.’
However, to both Mary and Annie’s surprise, Pierce took umbrage.
‘He’s a fella in a foreign country, fighting for Britain,’ he said. ‘You go to the pictures with him, Mary.’
Mary could hardly believe that her father, usually very protective of his daughters, was encouraging her to go on a date. Annie, despite her rather domineering personality, thought better of arguing with her husband when he was in such spirits. Mary hadn’t been keen on going out with Woppamoose but now felt that she had to, so she decided on some back-up.
‘You come, too,’ she said to Joan. But Joan had no intention of playing gooseberry.
‘I can’t come with you. He’s taking you out,’ she replied. ‘He won’t want me there.’
‘Well, just come and sit nearby … Please.’
Joan considered this. ‘I’m not sitting on my own but I’ll ask Maureen if she wants to come,’ she said.
At the cinema, they sat through a typically jingoistic Pathé News reel putting the best gloss, as always, on the latest confrontation on the war front. This time, it was dramatic footage of Germans shelling British merchant ships in the Channel from large guns on the French coast, complete with noisy explosions. As the packed audience sat spellbound in the darkness, a cheer went up when the narrator said, ‘But the fact remains that not a single ship is hit or lost.’
There was a further cheer when he added, ‘The Hun are not having it all their own way. Earlier in the bombardment, RAF take to the air, swiftly crossing the Channel and searching out the gun emplacement.’ In this way they were able to ‘blast the enemy into silence’.
The audience then relaxed to watch Errol Flynn star in Virginia City as a Union officer who escapes from a Confederate prison and discovers that the former commander of the prison – played by Randolph Scott – is planning to send $5 million in gold to save the Confederacy.
That evening at the cinema, Joan and her best friend Maureen turned out to have one of the most entertaining nights of their lives. Not that they watched much of the film – despite the allure of the dashing Errol Flynn. Seated just behind Mary and Woppamoose, the pair of them giggled throughout at the sight of his huge frame next to seven-and-a-half-stone Mary. They were an absurd-looking couple.
Once home, Annie joined in the laughter when Joan told her all about it, and Mary couldn’t help but smile too. Annie’s laughter brought on a severe coughing fit, though, and the girls looked at one another in concern. She hadn’t been well for the past couple of days, and they were worried.
It wasn’t an entirely new problem. Back in London they were used to her taking to her bed after a severe bout of rasping that would have her doubled over in pain and gasping for breath. She would have chest pains and night-time fever, and feel exhausted. On several occasions she had spent time in hospital to recuperate, where the ‘treatment’ was little more than plenty of rest, regular fresh air on the veranda or anywhere else outside, and healthy food. The fresh air of the Hailsham countryside had been keeping the cough at bay for the most part but now it had come back with a vengeance.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’ Mary asked. It was a while before Annie had the breath and energy to answer.
‘I just need to rest for a while,’ she said, hating to make a fuss.
Over the next few days, as the coughing fits and wheezing increased in regularity and severity, Annie grew worried too. The illness which she had done her best not to think about was becoming worse.
CHAPTER 4
The Telegram
Happier times. Annie pushing Mary and Joan in a pram, with Pierce (right) and Annie’s brother, Uncle Mike (left).
THE GIRLS HAD become used to their mother’s ill health in London but were blissfully unaware of just what was wrong with her – and Annie considered them too young to know. Both she and a worried Pierce never directly addressed their greatest fear of what it might be. Besides, as a proud Londoner, Annie – just like her mother – didn’t want to make a fuss. She didn’t want her girls to worry.
Sometimes she could be very poorly indeed, with a dry, hacking cough. At its most violent, it would leave her on her knees, red-faced, weak and wheezing, but after a day or two of rest – sometimes taking to her bed – she would get better and be able to carry on as before. At least until the next time.
In spite of her illness, Annie prided herself on keeping a spotless house in Bermondsey, and the children frequently saw her on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor until it shone, when they came in from playing in the street. She had standards to meet after all. Ill or not.
‘Wipe your feet! Take your shoes off!’ she would shout, before resuming the song she’d been singing as she cleaned. The soap suds all around her might have inspired her particular favourite, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’.
One afternoon, she was singing at the top of her voice while scrubbing the hallway floor when she started coughing so violently that she struggled to breathe.
‘Are you all right, Mummy?’ a concerned Sheila asked, emerging from the living room to find her mother on all fours, her chest heaving and face covered in a sheen of sweat.
‘Yes. Just need … sit down,’ Annie managed to wheeze. Sheila helped her to her feet and to an armchair. Annie collapsed into it heavily and, after several minutes, eventually caught her breath. Just a little while later, Sheila marvelled as her mother got back to scrubbing the floor. It was not Annie’s amazing powers of recovery that most impressed the seven-year-old girl, but how she was able to pick up the song lyrics exactly where she left off!
‘It’s just a cough,’ Annie would say airily. ‘It doesn’t last.’
Pierce appeared to be happy to believe her – Annie considered herself to be too busy being a mother to let illness get in the way.
In the spring of 1937, Pierce finally persuaded Annie to see the doctor. After much questioning, she admitted that she had been coughing up blood and, when things were that bad, she often felt feverish too. Having examined her, the doctor told her in grave tones that she had contracted tuberculosis, and that she needed to go to hospital for closer examination.
Tuberculosis – often nicknamed ‘consumption’ because the illness’s gradual emaciation of the body meant that those afflicted seemed to be consumed − was a highly infectious disease, easily spread, and, in cramped urban areas such as Bermondsey, was much feared as a result.
With no cure at that time, a combination of rest, fresh air and a decent diet in hospitals or sanatoriums achieved a modicum of success, not least because it formed a healthier lifestyle, and also kept the patients
away from others who might contract the disease from them. However, the prognosis for those with tuberculosis was often poor.
‘I can’t go into hospital,’ Annie had said to her doctor, with rising fear. ‘I have a family to bring up. It’s impossible.’
The doctor had been firm: she needed to go.
Back at home she remained defiant but Pierce, too, could be stubborn at times. Like Annie, he had secretly feared the possibility of this diagnosis. Now he was adamant that if a spell in hospital would be of benefit to her, then she must go. He promised that the girls would be fine and that Annie’s parents could help out whilst she was away.
Eventually Annie had relented, and she and Pierce travelled by bus to St Olave’s Hospital in nearby Rotherhithe. A huge Victorian building built in the 1870s, the hospital sat behind imposing iron gates between two identical houses, which were also owned by the hospital trust. The male and female wings of the building were separated by the administrative block, and the whole hospital was nestled on two acres of land, backing on to Southwark Park. It wasn’t quite the clean, cold mountain air of Switzerland, but it gave Annie the chance to take it easy for a while.
To no one in the family’s surprise, Annie hated it there and hated being away from her family. Mary accompanied her father to visit Annie on a couple of occasions but it was felt best not to bring the younger girls. It wasn’t practical to keep a mother isolated from her children at home but at least while she was recuperating in hospital the girls should stay away and not risk infection.
Annie remained at St Olave’s for a little over a week before returning home, but it was not to be her last stay there. For the girls, their mother’s frequent spells in hospital during this time in their lives instilled in them an independence and a practical attitude. They became adept at getting on with the domestic routine and by the age of eleven, Joan often found herself in the role of surrogate mother. She enjoyed cooking and, while their mother was in hospital, took a mature approach to ensuring that her sisters, as well as her father, had a meal every evening.
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