Alone

by Pip Granger

  For a moment, the silence at our table was deafening, then Mother calmly picked up the carafe of water that had come with our meal and hurled the contents into Father’s face. Before anyone else could react, Father’s hand connected with Mother’s cheek with such a resounding slap that everyone in the café stopped talking and stared at us. When Mother picked up a bottle by its neck, and was obviously preparing to clout Father with it, the patron strode over and intervened, grabbing the bottle before it could land on its target. He spoke urgently and Mother translated; it seemed that we were being asked to pay up and leave. Without another word, or a glance right or left, Mother hustled Peter and me out of the place and left Father to pay the bill. We waited outside for him to join us, and when he did, all hell broke loose. Mother swung a heavy bag of smutty books at Father’s head, and although he ducked, he didn’t duck fast enough. The bag caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder, and books scattered everywhere.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done, you stupid bitch!’ Father yelled and punched her on the nose. Blood spurted all over her best green blouse. I began to howl with shock and fear, and poor Peter stepped between them in an attempt to put a stop to the violence. He was shoved roughly aside and landed with a thump in the gutter where he was narrowly missed by a man on a bicycle who, in swerving to miss him, almost got hit by a truck. The cyclist joined in the quarrel, gesticulating wildly. Our parents ignored him, their attention fixed solely on each other.

  Mother pulled back her arm and delivered an uppercut between Father’s legs, which doubled him up in such agony that it made him heave, and while he was bent over, losing his stomach contents, she landed a blow on the back of his head with her heavy handbag. Father sagged to his knees, surrounded by books. Mother was just prevented from delivering the coup de grâce by a muscular gendarme who grabbed the chair she’d snatched from one of the tables on the pavement and had raised high, ready to crash down on Father’s bowed head.

  By this time, Mother’s rage, misery and humiliation were so complete, all reason had fled, and she hauled out and socked the gendarme in the chest with her clenched fist. He was not pleased. Mother was promptly slapped in irons, or, more accurately, handcuffs. The gendarme fished his whistle out of his top pocket and blew a shrill blast to summon reinforcements when it looked as if Father was about to stagger to his feet and rejoin the fracas in defence of the wife who had just tried to batter his brains out. There’s no rhyme nor reason when it comes to drunks in their cups.

  When another gendarme appeared on the scene, Father was also put in handcuffs, despite his strenuous efforts, and we were all marched away. Once we reached the gendarmerie, Mother and Father were put into adjoining cells, separated, presumably, to avoid any more bloodshed.

  Nobody spoke English, and neither Peter nor I spoke much French beyond ‘Bonjour’ and, in my case, ‘Une glace chocolate – er, please,’ because, once I’d tasted it in France, chocolate ice-cream had become my favourite thing in all the world, but my French didn’t run to ‘s’il vous plaît’ at that time. So, Peter and I held hands and stood in the middle of the room where the gendarmes hung out and eyed the officers warily, while they in turn tried to mime questions, instructions and suggestions at us, but to no avail. We were so scared that our brains had shut down. All we could do was stand there. In the end, amid many a Gallic shrug of frustration, one bright spark thought of getting a translator and hurried off to find one. He returned with a plump lady with large, dark eyes, enormous bosoms, a very ample rump and a ready smile on her very red lips.

  ‘’Ello, little ones,’ she began, with an encouraging and sympathetic smile. ‘My name is Madame Bernard. I keep the charcuterie a little way along the street. I understand that your people are in the cells for a little time, until they are in command of themselves once again. What are your names, little ones?’

  Now, we had had it drummed into us by Father that you never told the police or Customs anything, so, as one, we clamped our mouths shut and just looked at her, too terrified to speak. Madame Bernard rattled off quite a long speech in French to our captors, who nodded enthusiastically at what she said.

  ‘I ’ave told the gendarmes that the gendarmerie is no place for such petits enfants, er, for such small persons. That, naturellement, you are very afraid. I will take you with me to my ’ome, for a little food and drink, and I will keep you with me until the gendarmes liberate your mère et père. You may ’ave to stay the night, but do not worry, you will see your people in the morning, or, per’aps, much sooner than that. Would you like to come with me?’

  Peter and I looked at one another, united in greed. We didn’t tell her about the omelette and chips we had just downed, and we simply nodded.

  ‘Bon! Let us go.’

  Still Peter hesitated. ‘Can we tell Mummy and Daddy where we’re going? They’ll worry,’ he whispered.

  Madame Bernard nodded her understanding and spoke to the man that I had decided was in charge. He, in turn, held out a huge, beefy, red hand to Peter and led him to the cells, while I waited with Madame and a small circle of policemen. We all looked at one another without a word. Peter may have found his tongue, but I hadn’t. I used the opportunity to take in my surroundings instead. It was quite a large room, with lots of chairs, a table and walls plastered in notices, posters and pictures of people, men mostly, with lots of French words printed under them. The place smelt strongly of dark, French tobacco, strong coffee and the vinegary smell I associated with wine that had been left lying about for a spell. How I knew that particular smell I cannot say, because wine never hung about in our house long enough to become vinegary. I can only assume that I knew it from when it had been drunk and had come up again, or from my trips to Soho, to Le Touquet and to Paris.

  Peter returned and whispered in my ear, ‘They’re all right. They said to go with the nice lady and that they’ll see us later.’ And so we allowed ourselves to be led away to the flat above Madame’s charcuterie.

  I was so tired by this time, and so nervous at being left with a complete stranger, that I burst into tears as soon as we entered Madame Bernard’s cramped and gloomy flat. Madame was very kind, but although I was used to being left in the care of grown-ups, I did usually know them, if only a little bit. I didn’t know Madame Bernard at all. I was in such a funk that I hardly took in my surroundings beyond noting heavy dark furniture, and gloomy paintings of dead birds, dead fish and heaps of fruit in ornate, gold-coloured frames. I can’t even remember what that sweet woman gave us to eat. All I remember is Peter hissing at me, ‘Stop being such a sissy’ and Madame gathering me on to her ample lap and shushing me soothingly, assuring me that I would see my ‘mère’ and ‘père’ very soon. I didn’t like to tell her that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see them, especially if they were still fighting.

  A young gendarme came and collected us shortly after our croissant the next morning. Luckily, in France it was not an offence to be in possession of a couple of khaki kitbags full of erotic literature, otherwise our troubles would have been far greater than they were, because our stock would have been confiscated and we needed the money badly. We had a new house to furnish and the rent to pay. When the nice head gendarme was satisfied that no more blood was likely to be shed, he had the books returned to my father, popped some nuggets of nougat into Peter’s and my pockets, offered Mother, the one who understood French, some sage matrimonial advice, and sent us on our way.

  It was only much later that I wondered who had been translating Angélique’s letters and writing the replies, and realized that it must have been one of Father’s cronies from the French House in Soho.

  It astonishes me now that we survived those trips. After all, Father drank heavily, and yet he was flying a light aircraft and, once we landed, driving like fury to get back to Soho to distribute the loot among his investors. He didn’t restrict himself to books, booze and French fags, either. If funds allowed, then perfume and wristwatches also crossed the Channel with us. Sometimes, I�
�d dabbed so many perfume samples behind my ears while Father did business with the shop assistant, and had so many watches stuffed up my jumper, that I smelt like a scent factory and ticked like a ruddy time bomb.

  I must have been an effective ‘smuggler’s beard’, though, because the Customs officials on both sides of the Channel got to know me well, and we were rarely challenged. In fact, the French Customs officers grew fond enough of me to slip me little treats – a chocolate croissant, some nougat, a paper twist of sugared almonds, a ripe peach or a small, mouth-watering pastry – while a colleague dealt with the entry or exit stamps in our passports.

  If, by some mishap, we were held up by Customs on the English side of the Channel, then a bottle of brandy, a hundred fags, a few books or a small wad of banknotes usually sorted the problem out very quickly. The English in general were tired of austerity, and that included some of our Customs officials. Also, if they suspected what we were up to, I believe they were deeply reluctant to arrest a man with a little girl in tow. Some of these men were parents themselves, I expect, and didn’t want to subject me to the humiliation of having my father arrested before my very eyes for a few smutty books and the odd half-ton of fags.

  Once we’d landed and cleared Customs, we’d take off again and return the plane to the flying club. Then we’d unload the booty, taking care to slip Sylvia and George some smokes and a bottle of something for their private stash, then zoom along the country lanes on our way back to Soho to distribute the booty. We both knew that Mother was likely to be less cross and out of sorts at being stuck at work all day while we were off gallivanting in France, if we returned to the Rest Centre (and later, to our council house in Harold Hill) with lots of lovely fivers, a carton of fags and a bottle of something alcoholic. Mother wasn’t interested in perfume.

  After the shameful banana incident, I always made sure we had a treat for Peter too, either comics bought in Soho with some of our profits, or some little sweet treat bought in France. To this end, we would save some fags and booze from the stock and did our best to track down Father’s pals, Campanini, Legionnaire Jim, Ron and Frank, because they usually paid cash on the nail. Only when we had some cash did we finally venture home.

  It was a strange way of life for a little girl, I realize now. Most small girls played with dolls with their friends, but I had no friends, because I always spent my days with Father; he and his pals didn’t seem to know any other children, and therefore, neither did I.

  At the time, it felt normal to me, if lonely, and it was only when I started school that I realized that no one else led my kind of life. It was there that I honed my watching skills. It was as if I hoped to learn by observation what that elusive ‘normal’ was, and with luck, make a passable imitation of it. If I could do that, then I might, just might, be accepted at last. And if not, then I was going to have to get used to the idea that, just like my parents, I was odd and different and I was going to have to get used to being on the fringes – forever an outsider looking in.

  5

  Pots

  One of the main aims in a child’s life is to be exactly like their friends and neighbours. It’s not their fault, they’re just made that way – plus it is always safer to blend in with one’s background. And it’s not just children, either; many adults feel the same way. As any redhead will testify, if you can’t be picked out from the crowd, you can get away with more, it’s as simple as that. Sadly, my family might just as well have been a tribe of flaming copper-knobs, because there was absolutely no question of us blending in with our new neighbours.

  ‘I don’t want to live on some godforsaken housing estate in the sticks,’ Father announced when he heard that we had been allocated a house on a large council estate in Harold Hill, and so were able to leave the Rest Centre at last.

  ‘Well, we can’t stay here, so unless you have a better plan – and the money to pay for it – Essex it is. There’s a permanent job waiting for me at a new school. I went for the interview last week and I heard this morning that I’d got it. A permanent post means holiday pay, which will be handy.’ Poor Mother must have been heartily sick of trying to rely on Father to provide some stability and pay the rent. A council house and steady teaching work must have felt like absolute heaven to her.

  ‘Looks as if you got the whole thing sewn up while my back was turned,’ said Father, bitterly, but he didn’t carry on the argument.

  It was the early 1950s. I am not entirely sure why we wound up in Essex, but I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that new housing was desperately needed in and around London to replace the large swathes of the capital that had been destroyed in the Blitz – and there was plenty of available building land to the east.

  Another consideration was that Ford, in Dagenham, and many other large manufacturers, were based in the area. The factories, which had been turned over to war work, geared up to start producing as soon as the fighting was over and reliable sources of raw materials became available again. Britain was on its uppers, and needed to export to refill the coffers that six long years of war had emptied.

  As manufacturing restarted, demobbed servicemen and London’s dispossessed moved out to Essex to take up jobs and the new homes provided. And, of course, there had been a baby boom after the war, when the servicemen returned to the arms of their wives and girlfriends – with inevitable results. This meant that Essex’s brand new residents had children who were reaching, or had already reached, school age, which in turn meant there were lots of new schools that needed teachers to staff them.

  It all sounded ideal, but what Mother had not envisaged was that our faces would not fit, that life on a housing estate would be Father’s definition of absolute hell and, as a result, he would become even more unreliable. That said, I don’t think it occurred to either of my parents to attempt to blend in. They revelled in being rugged individualists and even if they hadn’t, they’d have had little choice in the matter.

  Luckily, we lived far enough away from Mother’s new job for our unorthodox home life not to impinge on her work, but it did make things very difficult for me. I wasn’t used to playing with other children for one thing, and this made me shy, awkward and, in some ways, curiously grown-up. I had spent my young life hanging around with at least one murderer, as well as a good sprinkling of smugglers, spivs, gangsters, eccentrics, singers, writers, actors, dancers, prostitutes and homosexuals, which was a universe away from playing with dolls and skipping ropes in the street with other little girls. I suppose that such worldliness in one so young must have been very alarming to parents who were so much more conventional than mine. Having a mother and father who stuck out like angry rhinos in a playpen did not help at all, and the other little girls in our street were kept well away from me by mothers who were anxious for their daughters to grow up into respectable wives and mothers.

  Peter fared better, partly because boys enjoyed more freedom of movement than girls, so their mums probably didn’t always know that they were playing with him. Besides, his access to fast cars and aeroplanes made him a really desirable pal to have, and it was well worth risking parental wrath for the chance to swan about in a motor and, better still, to fly in a Tiger Moth. Few working people owned cars in 1950s England, and I don’t think I ever met anyone – apart from the people at the flying club, that is – who flew light aircraft and indulged in victory rolls above the roofs of their houses. But Father did. That was enough to bring every small boy in the area to our doorstep – and to help keep every small girl away.

  ‘Life was hard for many women in the Fifties,’ my mother explained to me in later life. Her hazel eyes became sad as she stared back into the past. ‘During the war years, we may have been scared out of our wits by bombs and war news on the radio, but compared to the pre-war days, we knew such freedom.’ She went on to tell me how many women had gained pilot’s licences and had flown aircraft – not in battle, but from one aerodrome to another, so that the planes were where they were needed. S
he was absolutely right, it was a far cry from the lot of women in the 1950s.

  ‘And a lot learned to drive as well, and many girls found themselves driving ambulances and staff cars in all sorts of places that they never dreamed they’d see,’ she said wistfully.

  In the war, single women were, in fact, moved all over the place as land girls or factory workers and, if well educated, as code breakers at Bletchley or clerks in the War Office, or some other ministry. Some French-speakers were trained as wireless operators and agents and dropped behind enemy lines to help the French Resistance with their efforts to knobble the Germans. Initially, the powers that be reckoned that nobody would suspect a woman, but they were wrong there: the mortality rate among wireless operators, men and women, was very high.

  ‘It was such dangerous work, you see. Jerry only had to get a fix on your radio, or some bastard decided to betray you to the Gestapo, and it was the firing squad at dawn, after you’d been tortured for any information you might have, of course. Being a female didn’t save you. Oh no, it only meant that the chances were you’d be raped before they shot you. There were lots of women in the services too, Wrens, WAAFs and the rest, but unlike the “special forces” they didn’t see combat or engage with the enemy.’

  I listened with rapt attention. I always found the period just before and after I was born absolutely fascinating, even when I was young. ‘But all that changed in 1945,’ my mother continued. ‘The men came home looking for jobs, they needed us women to be chained to the bloody kitchen sink and flat on our backs in the bedroom again. We were supposed to provide home comforts for our returning heroes, and to breed like mad to replace the lads lost in combat. The government wanted to make sure that the numbers of boys was kept up, you see, so that the poor little sods could grow up to defend the realm, in case we got ourselves embroiled in yet another war. As for girls, they were to be trained up for their domestic duties.’