Alone
Page 1
PIP GRANGER
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ALONE
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552155366
First publication in Great Britain
Corgi edition published 2007
Copyright © Pip Granger 2007
Pip Granger has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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CONTENTS
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Also by Pip Granger
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Part 1: Cries in the Night
1 A Bit of a Bloody Nuisance
2 No Rest for the Wicked
3 Marts Toast, Daddy
4 The Knee-High Smuggler
5 Pots
6 Heartbreak House
Part 2: Hard Knocks
7 The Family Brains
8 No Passport to Pimlico
9 Mother’s Little Helpers
10 Happy Families
11 Goodbye, Pots
12 The Three o’Clock Tribunals
13 Uncle Tony
14 Milking Almonds
15 The Red Mist
16 Raz and Rita
17 Never the Bridesmaid
18 Mother Said So
19 Work, Work, Work for the Master
Part 3: The World Outside
20 Valerie
21 Bye-bye, Val-Val
22 All My Fault
23 Dr Kingdom’s Special Trial No. 13
Epilogue
For Joyce, my dear old friend
Also by Pip Granger
and published by Corgi Books
NOT ALL TARTS ARE APPLE
THE WIDOW GINGER
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
NO PEACE FOR THE WICKED
Acknowledgements
This book is a memoir of my childhood and the things that made me what I am. It is neither a history, nor an autobiography. Telling the story means that I have to include personal events from other people’s lives, but I have no wish to bring back distressing memories for those involved, so I have changed the names of almost everyone in the book, and altered any details of their lives not vital to the story. Several minor characters are composites of various different people: they all have fictitious names. If anything here reminds you of actual people you know or knew, I can assure you it is a coincidence.
I would like to thank: my husband, Ray, who is a constant support and an absolute star; my dear friend and first reader, Jill Nicholson; my editor, Selina Walker; my agent, Lizzy Kremer; and all those who beaver away behind the scenes at Transworld, especially Judith Welsh, Sam Jones, and Diane Meacham for my beautiful cover.
PROLOGUE
Hard to Bear
I sat very still and held my breath, in case the two men standing close by heard my breathing, or the rustle of dried leaves beneath my brand new, navy blue Clark’s sandals.
‘Night, Reg. See you down Walfamstow tomorrow?’
‘Yeah. I’ll see you there, Eddie. Me dad’s just got himself half a dog, and it’s running in the 4.30.’
‘I hope he bought the front half!’
Reg chuckled. ‘Wouldn’t matter. Bleeder seems to be running on three legs whichever way he’s facing, doesn’t stand a snowflake’s, but me dad and his mate reckon he’s young, he’ll come on in time. Personally, I think that if he was an ’orse, he’d be dog meat by now …’
Their voices faded away. I heard the bolt on the public bar door shoot home, closely followed by the one in the saloon. The Bear was closing, so it had to be gone eleven by the time those very last customers had stumbled into the night and crossed the narrow lane to stand beside my hiding place. I peered through the leaves of the dog rose and watched as the lights in the pub across the road went out one by one. It seemed to be hours before the place was closed up, but eventually the last bedroom light winked out and I was left utterly alone in the night.
At least, I thought I was alone. I must have dozed off, all wrapped up in an old eiderdown, because the next thing I knew I was jerked wide awake by a sound so inhuman that it turned my skin clammy and my mouth dry. Every hair on my body seemed to stand to attention, like so many little antennae searching out the direction of the danger. The sound came again, a long, low, grumbling, rumbling growl, followed by a rattle and then a huge, gusty sigh. I was rigid with fear, convinced that I was about to be eaten alive by whatever was out there. I was under no illusions. Anything that had a growl that deep and a sigh that loud had to be really, really big. It would have no trouble at all getting through the dense hedge into my secret den. All it had to do was to barge hard, and the dog rose and honeysuckle would part company from the field maple and hawthorn that hid it from the world outside, and I would end up being something’s supper. I sat and waited for the end to come, hardly able to breathe. My heart was hammering so hard in my ears that it drowned out the stealthy footsteps I knew were coming closer.
I suppose I was too dopey with fright to think straight, but it took me ages to realize that the beast in the night was in fact the poor old bear that lived in the garden of the pub, banged up in a cage and so in no position to invade my camp. I knew the bear quite well, as it happened. In fact, I had spent many a Saturday and Sunday lunchtime with that bear, waiting in the pub’s garden for my mother. I knew that he liked Smith’s crisps sprinkled with just a little salt. This doesn’t mean that I had ever got close to him – not within his reach, anyway. I had always chucked the donated crisps, still in the crinkly packet – which he chomped up, then spat out – through the bars from a safe distance. He might have l
ooked like my teddy, only with much darker fur, but I knew that he would eat any child that was careless enough to stray within his reach, because my brother Peter said so, and so did everyone else. Anyway, he had a crazed look in his eyes. That look meant that I always kept a deeply respectful distance between him and me.
I don’t remember if I ever got back to sleep that night, but I do know that I crept out of my hiding place as soon as the very first glimmer of light filtered through the leaves. The relief was enormous. It had been a scary old night, and I wanted to get home and safely into my bed before my mother woke up. First, though, I nipped over the road to say good morning to the bear and give him the remains of a Marmite sandwich that I’d snatched from the kitchen counter on the way out of the back door the night before.
We stared at each other for a while in the chill morning air as he munched, and I thought about how sad he looked in that tatty old cage. Silently, I promised him that I would give up hamsters and pet mice immediately and for ever, and never visit a zoo again. Then I ran back over the lane and across the dew-soaked grass to our house in Wincanton Avenue.
Sliding quietly in through the unlocked back door, I tiptoed past the living room, where a strange man was snoring loudly on the dragon rug that Mother had designed and hooked during the long winter evenings a year or so before. Odd bods sleeping it off in various parts of the house was a fairly regular occurrence, so I didn’t give him a second thought. He was sound asleep, and therefore relatively safe, and he hadn’t been sick, so there was no cleaning up for me to do.
Reassured on these points, I carried on up the stairs, taking great care to skip the steps that creaked. I made my way, silent as a wraith, to my bedroom at the front of the house. I had to be safely in bed before my mother woke up: I was pretty sure that she had no idea I’d been out all night, and I wanted it to stay that way.
I had discovered my camp opposite the Bear almost as soon as my mother, brother Peter and I had moved into the Wincanton Avenue house, when I was about six and Peter was ten. By that time, we were already good at assessing the need to make ourselves scarce, and knew that it was always handy to have a bolt hole to disappear to when things got tricky. We had hideaways all over the place, some that we shared and some that we didn’t. We needed them because home was a cross between an active volcano and a leaky boat. It was volcanic because our mother was inclined to blow every now and then, and when she did it was a good idea to be out of the way of the flying debris, which could come in the form of vitriolic sarcasm or an actual dinner plate. Better still, if we could sense the storm brewing, or read the signs right, remembering previous ‘morning after the night before’ days, we could ride out the eruption at a safe distance, tucked away in the garden shed, up a tree somewhere or in one of our camps.
Dog rose den, though, was all mine. Peter never came there, even though it was virtually on our doorstep. I don’t think it was ever talked about; it was just taken for granted between us that we each had to have a private place. There was a four-year difference in our ages, after all, which is aeons when you are very young, and he didn’t want his baby sister slung round his neck all the time. As it was, when I first started school he was chief-in-charge of walking me home and staying with me until Mother got in, which meant that he couldn’t hang around with his mates until he was freed from sister-sitting duty.
The leaky boat aspect of our home life was due to the fact that Mother could be just a tad flaky at times. It was the 1950s, separation and divorce were shameful events and society did little or nothing to support single mothers, especially if it was felt that they’d brought it upon themselves. After all, enough husbands and fathers had perished in the war, and it was an utter disgrace if a woman and her children carelessly managed to misplace theirs! Like a lot of things in the age of austerity that hit post-war England, compassion was rationed to those who really deserved it; widows did, orphans did, but divorcees didn’t – it was as black and white as that.
With life being so tough, Peter and I understood that we had to be as little trouble as possible; that we had to smooth Mother’s way where we could; and, above all else, that we had to keep schtum about anything that might upset or anger her. We knew that she’d been lumbered with us, and so we had to make the job as easy as we could. We knew that if our little boat sank, we’d wind up in the Cottage Homes along with all the other unwanted children.
Our life together must have always been difficult, I now realize. I have only to remember all the stories surrounding my birth to get some inkling of that. It was, apparently, nothing short of a miracle that I was born at all. And once I had got here, it was a case of one family crisis after another, in what, at the time, felt like a seemingly endless stream.
PART ONE
Cries in the Night
1
A Bit of a Bloody Nuisance
It was dark and it was cold as my mother dangled helplessly by her bra strap from the wing mirror of the little black MG and listened to the stream as it gurgled its way under the bridge to the sea.
Instinct told her not to move, or to struggle, in case the strap or the mirror snapped and plunged her into icy water, or dashed her on the rocks she imagined far below. So she waited, her heart hammering in her ears, hoping for help to come. Her poor shocked and fuddled brain couldn’t keep track of time. They had been crossing the bridge when the MG crashed into the parapet, and she’d been thrown from the car by the force of the collision. She could never say how long she hung there, listening to the river, her heart and the ominous creaking of the mangled MG: it might have been a few moments, or it might have been hours. By the time my father, the driver of the car, came to and hauled her to safety, she had resigned herself to yet another miscarriage. There had already been several, and she supposed one more wouldn’t make a lot of difference. She’d grown used to it; at least, that’s what she told herself.
‘But you were a determined little bugger,’ she’d say, when she related this story to me. ‘You weren’t about to let a little thing like a car crash stop you in your tracks. You were going to come into this world, come hell or high water, and come you did!’ – but not before fate stuck its foot out once again five months later.
On 25 July 1947, Mother fell down the stairs at home and went into labour a month early, just hours before she was due to join her own mother for a birthday tea.
On hearing the news, Grandma grew excited. ‘You just hang on until after midnight, darling,’ she suggested. ‘Another grandchild would be the best birthday present you could ever give me.’
For once, Mother was dutiful. She ‘kept her legs firmly crossed,’ as she indelicately put it, and I was born in the early hours of the 26th.
Things didn’t go smoothly even then. Despite having survived the two accidents, Mother almost bled to death immediately after the special, and wildly dramatic, delivery of Grandma’s birthday present. Father, running true to form, had somehow managed to fall out so spectacularly with the local doctor that the man refused point-blank to attend my birth for fear of being physically assaulted. History doesn’t relate what the argument was about, but the upshot was that a military doctor had to be summoned from a nearby army camp to deal with the sudden and urgent – thanks to the stairs – business at hand. Sadly, his knowledge of childbirth was largely theoretical, as his only medical experience had been ministering to the needs of the men at the barracks. His woeful lack of practical experience led to the ‘bloodbath’, as my mother so graphically described it, that almost killed her.
As he saw my mother slipping away, the army doctor, urged by the midwife, called the more experienced GP in desperation and pleaded with him to come to the rescue. Having asked for, and received, a solemn promise that my father would not be present, the local doctor arrived just in time to deliver a single, hefty prod in the appropriate place to bring the afterbirth safely away. Even so, it was touch and go for Mother for a while until, through the fug, she overheard the midwife saying that she’d never s
een ‘such an ugly little scrap’ as me. It was then that Mother decided that she’d better live, because she was the only person ever likely to be able to love me. Mother always related this birth story – complete with gory details involving buckets of blood and my four-year-old brother, Peter, being dragged into this dreadful scene, so reminiscent of an abattoir, to say goodbye to his mum – to show that I had been a bit of a bloody nuisance, both literally and figuratively, right from the very start.
Neither of my parents was a stranger to the demon booze. In fact, not to tart it up at all, they were alcoholics, the pair of them. They were deeply involved in a passionate relationship that rose to tremendous, exciting highs and plunged to terrible and often frightening lows, and they were both just as deeply involved with the alcohol that fuelled it. I expect that explains the crash, the fall down the stairs and the violent disagreement that so unnerved the doctor that he temporarily abandoned his Hippocratic Oath in favour of keeping out of Father’s way. It also explained why our home life was so very different from that of most other people that I knew.
England in the 1940s and 1950s was no place to be marching, dancing or staggering to a different tune. Two world wars within living memory had left the country reeling, bankrupt and with a desperate need to rebuild all that had been lost. It took quite a while for it to dawn on people that things would never go back to the same old order – which in a great many cases was just as well – but that wasn’t obvious when all that most people longed for was a return to normality. Sadly, the population was not to get its just reward for the battering it had taken for some considerable time. In fact, things like rationing got a whole lot worse before anything got better. Fuses were short, life was drab and there was little room for a feckless little family like ours.
Mother and Father had met at the Unity Theatre, a left-wing playhouse that was part of a movement that had been formed in association with the Left Book Club. The movement’s aim was to further the cause, education and well-being of working men and women who were suffering so very badly during the terrible economic Depression of the 1930s. These lofty aims were supported not only by many of London’s intellectual bohemian set, but also by such well-known faces as Michael Redgrave and the black American singer and actor, Paul Robeson, who had fled to Britain to escape the racism that plagued him in the USA.