The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  At the time, I didn’t really understand what had happened to him, or feel a great deal of sympathy. I was too preoccupied with school, and my friends, and exams coming up. Apart from Reg, friends rarely came to the house; I was worried they would see my dad, hidden away in the front parlour, or, even worse, hear him shouting.

  I don’t know what sort of civil service pension he received, but he must have got some sort of disability allowance, after all those years in the RAF and the MU and other government jobs, but I am sure it was minuscule.

  10

  MY MOTHER

  I still don’t know to this day how my mother coped, how she managed to pay the rent, household bills, with four young children to feed and clothe. Yet when people asked her, she would say, ‘Oh, bags of money, I’ve got bags of money.’

  As far as I know, we did not get any free school meals, if such things existed, for I took dinner money to school. Each Monday there would be pandemonium while my mother rushed round the house, opening old purses, looking under the sofa, to find enough money for our bus fares and dinner money. Each week, Monday caught her by surprise, as if she had never seen it coming, as if this week would not contain a Monday.

  She was always a bit scatty, not very well organised, not very neat and tidy, with few domestic skills like sewing, and not much of a cook either. Unlike my Aunt Jean, my father’s sister, she could do everything – cook, sew, stitch, make, do, create, paint, as well as holding down a responsible job as a teacher and bringing up two girls.

  My mother never complained or criticised people, but, as the years wore on, I think she did resent the fact that the Davies relations, all of whom we imagined to be well off, did not do more to help in our time of need. They obviously had their own family concerns and problems. The most they seemed to do was have me to stay for holidays, which was great for me, got me out of our house, but they never invited the twins or Johnny. Perhaps it was because I was older, easier to look after.

  The only real help we got with my father was once a year he went to some convalescent home near Grange-over-Sands, in the southern part of Lakeland. This was technically to help my mother, give her some respite care, rather than help my father, so some authorities must have been aware of the situation. My father hated it. When my mother visited him in the home he would shout at her, ‘Get me the hell out of here!’ He didn’t seem to be aware that he was there for my mother’s benefit not his, to give her a break.

  My mother’s escape was in books. While we owned no books of our own, apart from those three Daily Express volumes, there were always lots of library books in the house. She went every week to Tullie House, where Carlisle’s library was then situated, and took out her full quota.

  She preferred the novels she had loved before the war, rather than any modern, angry-young-men-type fiction, the sort of gritty northern novels that started to appear in the mid-1950s. She mostly reread authors she had already been through several times, such as Somerset Maugham, Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and Dickens most of all. She went through the whole of Dickens every year. I can still see her standing at the kitchen stove, waiting for the tatties to boil, while holding up Oliver Twist or The Pickwick Papers and laughing at her favourite scenes, insisting on reading out the good bits to anyone within earshot, whether they wanted to hear or not.

  She rarely managed to sit down to read as she always seemed to be standing – at the cooker, at the sink, in the coal cellar, or outside in the washhouse. She stood up to eat, in the kitchen, at the stove, while going back and forward to give us our food at the table, maintaining she would sit down and eat hers later. No wonder she had varicose veins.

  We had no fridge, no washing machine, no phone and of course no car, so very often she would shop twice a day, provisioning from meal to meal. I read somewhere that the average housewife in 1951 spent fifty-seven minutes a day on grocery shopping. I bet my mother spent more. She had no sense of direction and would often get lost. We would be left in the house, noses pressed up against the front window, longing for her to come home, worried we would never see her again. I got told off once for having allowed Johnny, when I was supposedly in charge of him, to stand up at the front window, on the windowsill, wearing only a vest, his little willy pressed against the cold window pane. My mother was ‘black affronted’ – i.e. seriously embarrassed – when she eventually appeared in the street, worrying more about what the neighbours might be thinking of this deprived-looking, abandoned family rather than Johnny’s personal discomfort.

  She never seemed to make lists of meals for the week, which other mothers apparently did. Most normal mothers, during the war and post-war years, had a strict routine, with the same meals every day of the week – roast on Sunday with roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, cold meat and salad on Monday, leftovers minced up the next day, stew on Wednesday, a pie or sausages the next day, fish on Friday, sandwiches or salad on Saturday.

  It was not that she didn’t care or was not interested – she worried all the time about what she was going to cook for us, asking us what we fancied, as if there was a choice. I don’t think we ever had a roast, not of the lamb or pork or beef variety, and a chicken only appeared at Christmas. Mince was her standby, with tatties, which we had several times a week. She also made a lot of chips.

  She did buy scrag ends of meat, which was all she could afford. It would be cooked forever, to make it edible, or minced up in her hand mincer, which was a lethal metal instrument, able to mince up even the boniest, scraggiest ends of meat. One of my jobs was to take it to pieces once a week, clean out the gristle and reassemble it.

  If you ever got meat for school dinners, that was awful as well, all bony and gristly. You would try to swallow it, and start to feel sick, or slide it out of your mouth and hide it under the table. You couldn’t leave it on the plate. There would be no pudding, if you didn’t finish your meat, think of the poor people, there is a war on.

  All salads were awful, raw grated carrots and thick lettuce leaves and a piece of tomato, plopped on the plate with no artistry or arrangement. Half a boiled egg if you were lucky. Perhaps a slice of Spam. There was no olive oil or balsamic vinegar, no fancy foreign stuff, but we did have Heinz Salad Cream, which you poured on everything, or HP Sauce or tomato ketchup to cover the chips. I hated the taste of salad cream, yet everyone scoffed it, treated it as a delicacy.

  We did have olive oil, of course. You got it from the chemist in a little bottle with a cork stopper and put it in your ear. The drops were meant to soften the wax and debris in your ear so that it would fall out. The thought of eating oil, putting it on your food, was laughable. Who on earth would want to do that? As for garlic, you had to be French to know what to do with that, and anyway it made your breath smell, forever, so who would want that either? Mushrooms were available, and people did get up early and go out to the Solway marshes to pick them, but not for us. They were also seen as funny foreign foods – in this case, the foreigners seemed to be the English.

  Anything funny or fancy was considered unmanly. People who fussed over their food, knew the difference between one lettuce and another, preferred one brand of tea to another, must clearly be effeminate. Eating was a task, a routine, something that had to be done, not an experience.

  There was one dish my mother did make which we all loved and that was stovies. I think that was the Scottish name for it. It was like a hotpot, or tattie pot, which most northern families lived on. It had some sort of cheap meat in it with a bit of black pudding, dripping, lots of potatoes and onions. It simmered away in the oven for ages and we all loved it.

  We ate a lot of bread and dripping, which was very tasty, and also fried bread, even better, and, best of all, French toast. This was a treat when she could spare an egg, into which the bread was dipped before being fried – yum yum. With most foodstuffs rationed till the mid-fifties, it was not just a matter of having money for good food but enough coupons.

  The big treat on Sunday morning was to have a fried break
fast, often the only egg we were allowed during the week, plus bacon and fried bread. Every time my mother allowed us a whole egg she would tell us the same old story about a poor family in the Gorbals during the war. The mother would stand outside the tenement, so everyone could hear, and shout at her children who were playing, ‘Come and get the top off your dad’s egg.’ This was the mother showing off that they had eggs that day. She laughed and laughed, every time she repeated it. She also had a similar supposedly funny story about a young woman who had just got engaged who stood at her door, her hand in the air displaying her engagement ring for all to see, who would cry out loudly, ‘Has anyone seen my milkman?’ She also loved an appalling song called ‘The Laughing Policeman’ and rushed to turn up the radio whenever it came on, almost having hysterics, laughing at it. She enjoyed all the subtleties of Dickens, yet laughed at this awful record. I assume it was the memories it brought back.

  She did make some good puddings once a week, the cooked ones, not jelly and custard or tinned fruit with Carnation evaporated milk, though we liked those as well. She made what we called steamed puddings, boiled in a bag, full of lard and flour, with some fruit hidden inside, such as apple or rhubarb, topped off with whatever sweet stuff she had to hand, such as jam or marmalade.

  Everybody also had a lot of rice pudding, especially at school meals, and spotted dick and, worst of all, sago, semolina and tapioca. These were traditionally hated by most children, especially girls, who would go ‘yuck!’ and pretend to be sick. I rather liked all the puddings.

  There was no central heating in the house, just a coal fire. My bedroom, and my bed which I shared with Johnny, was normally absolutely freezing. In winter the window frames would be covered with frost – on the inside. I devised a way of getting into my clothes and putting my socks on while still in bed. Otherwise if you stepped out of bed in your bare feet and on to the linoleum, which covered all the floors in the house, you might be there till spring, frozen to the floor.

  Behind the open fire, stuck somehow into the wall, was a small boiler which gave hot water for a bath. Yes, we were lucky in our relatively modern council estate, unlike so many people. We had our own indoor bathroom and a lavatory where, if we were lucky, there would be a roll of Izal toilet paper. It was thin, like tracing paper, and scratchy and horrible and felt uncomfortable on your bottom. Almost as bad as when I was in Motherwell visiting my relations in the Buildings where the communal lav was on the landing, opened with a massive iron key. The only way to wipe your bottom was with torn sheets of newspaper, hung up on a nail.

  Baths at Caird Avenue were very rare. It took forever to heat enough water and our bathroom was horrible, so unattractive with wet towels lying around. Later, we had a copper boiler installed in the cupboard beside the fireplace, a so-called immersion heater, the water heated by an electric rod, but this was hardly any better and very slow. After one person had a bath, it took about two hours to heat enough for the next one.

  In the washhouse outside, my mother hand-washed all our clothes, using a dolly tub, into which hot water was poured, which again took forever, and a scrubbing board, with the help of either a big slab of carbolic soap or some of the new trendy but expensive soap powders such as Rinso, Oxydol, Omo and Persil. Then she put the clothes through a big old mangle to get rid of most of the water and hung the clothes out on the washing line in the back garden.

  Monday was wash day for most people and on Monday mornings all mothers prayed for it not to rain. Even if it stayed fairly dry, clothes were still pretty damp and for the rest of the week they would be draped on a clotheshorse round the fire. The constant fug in the living room was a combination of steam and smoke from the coal fire. Not ideal for anyone with asthma.

  The walls too were usually festooned with clothes, such as my shirts, once I became a teenager, while the twins had their slips and dresses hanging there. There was a picture rail round most of the walls, from which pictures never hung, used instead for hanging clothes. My sisters, as they got older, used to sit around in their bra and knickers waiting for their frocks to dry on the clotheshorse or picture rail before they went out. I shouted at them to go to their bedroom and not lounge around (un)dressed like that.

  As well as the coalmen, other horses and carts went regularly up and down the street, delivering milk, potatoes, vegetables and other goods. My mother was constantly sending me out with a shovel to collect up any horse manure to put on the garden. Our garden was a dump, nothing grew there; my father never attended to it, even when he was well, but my mother had got it in her head that if we only threw on enough horse manure it would miraculously turn into Kew Gardens.

  There was a lawn of sorts at the front and I would be forced to cut it with the hand lawnmower, which was rusty and useless, and also trim the front privet hedge. I would moan and moan – ‘do I have to?’ – then rush at it, making a real hash of it. As the oldest, I was expected to do it, Johnny being too young and the twins being girls and not expected to help with things like the garden.

  The twins, when they were young, had long, curly fair hair which looked nice but caused endless tears and tantrums when my mother tried to brush it. She could never get it straight and they would never sit still. Annabelle grew up rather slender and pretty, while Marion was taller and more solid. At school, Marion always protected Annabelle if she got picked on – in fact, Marion was known to beat up girls at the Maggie Sewell and gave awful cheek to any teacher who told Annabelle off.

  After my father became a full-time invalid, bedridden at home, I found that two or three of the teachers at the Creighton became especially nice to me, taking me aside, asking how things were at home. I was a bit taken aback by this. I never told them he was ill, so I don’t know how they found out. I don’t think my mother ever went up to the school. She wouldn’t have been able to find her way there anyway. So perhaps there were some sort of social services, keeping an eye on us, through the MU or the civil service.

  Despite all this deprivation, with so little money coming into the house, I went to violin lessons. The twins had gone to piano lessons for a few weeks, hence the piano in the parlour, till my father took over the room. It always surprised people when I told them. My family’s situation did not appear to suggest the possibility of such middle-class activities.

  I started the violin when my father was still at work full time, when I was about ten, and it was all my mother’s doing. Her father had played the fiddle, self-taught, and she loved Scottish tunes and Scottish dancing and was very keen that I should learn music. Though she might have appeared feckless, and un-pushy, when she got something into her head, she would nag on and on, or sigh and look sad, till eventually you did what she wanted.

  I was sent to a teacher called Alf Adamson, who had a country dance band that toured the Borders. He also had a full-time job as a driver and delivery man for Ringtons tea. That was all they delivered, door to door, packets of tea. There were lots of products like that, brought door to door. How on earth did they make any profit?

  I hated practising, always leaving it to the last minute. I did learn to read music, and enjoyed listening to music, country stuff as well as classical, but I soon realised I had no aptitude. My mother insisted I carry on. I must have gone to violin lessons for about five years in all, for I last appeared in public aged fifteen at the Carlisle and District Music Festival, held every year at the Methodist Hall. I came fourth, out of four, in my section. I think by then, because he had found out my father was an invalid, Mr Adamson was no longer charging my mother – out of sympathy. Can’t have been to encourage my talent . . .

  I always felt guilty, that I was letting her down, that she had invested so many hopes in me, and presumably quite a bit of money, when she had so little, with nothing to show for it. I also felt ashamed and guilty that I hated going to church with her, especially, oh horrors, if she took my arm. I was of course, the man of the house, now that my father was an invalid.

  Warwick Road Presbyterian
Church was so dark and dismal and depressing, full of elderly, stiff, uncomfortable people, dressed in elderly, stiff clothes, most of them Scottish, with a dour minister, endless prayers and awful sermons. I quite enjoyed the hymns, though, despite the fact that the congregations were sparse and none of them could sing.

  All four of us children had to go to Sunday school in the afternoons, our faces long, our hearts sinking. Traditionally, this was the time when working-class parents had their one moment of the week of sexual bliss, or not. Not in my parents’ case, once my father was bedridden.

  The Sunday school teacher, a very small, angular spinster, made me learn one psalm a week for a year, which I would have to recite, before starting another. At the end of the year I was presented with a Lord Wharton Bible, which was considered a huge honour. I don’t know who Lord Wharton was but presumably a Presbyterian who had left funds. I used to wish he hadn’t bothered.

  Very often my mother would force me to accompany her again, to evening service. Force is the wrong verb. If I said no, I hate that church, which I did, she would not argue but put on her sad, mournful, soulful face. I would give in. And off we would go, me trying hard to reject her arm in my mine.

  Although we said our prayers, and went to church, I don’t believe she was particularly religious. My father had no interest at all and never went, even when he was fit. All the same he would not allow me to ride my bike on a Sunday or play football. The whole Scottish ethos was that Sunday was a day on which no work could be done and no pleasure or play of any sort should be enjoyed. That was how they had been brought up. That was what they believed.

  ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!’ she would say, looking out of the window at our jungle of a back garden, then smile and pause. ‘Hunter, what does “God wot” mean?’ As if I knew.

  She endlessly quoted great chunks of half-remembered poems and phrases from her childhood such as ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’ and ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight’. She could reel off loads of Kipling and all of Robert Burns, whether we asked her to or not.