by Mary Portas
Bending down towards me, she’d spot a telltale scrap of jam left from that morning’s breakfast and pull out her handkerchief. She’d spit on it, wipe my face clean, then smile and bend down to give me a kiss. ‘Now let’s get home, shall we? That lamb isn’t going to cook itself, is it?’
Bic biro 1
Tish is sitting quietly in Mum’s chair, Michael is doing his homework at the table, Lawrence is staring lovingly at his Jungle Book album and Joe is snapping his fingers continuously as I sit beside him watching Crackerjack.
Is it any wonder that I’m the noisy one when I have Joe to contend with all the time? He makes me scream with rage because, however fast I run, Joe gets away from me; however high I climb, he goes further. If we play football, he puts me in goal and shoots balls continuously at my head. Lawrence and I are always chasing after him but Joe isn’t interested. Dad still laughs about the time he was trying to teach Joe how to click his fingers and I was sitting on the potty watching them. My brother couldn’t get it but I did, and he was outraged that his baby sister had got one up. I think he still hasn’t forgiven me. Soon I’ll perfect the art of whistling with my thumb and first finger just to really annoy him.
Of my three brothers, the only one I never argue with is Lawrence because he’s smaller than me and all he ever does is smile.
‘Mumma’s only bubba,’ Mum will singsong to him, as he sits eating his tea, and we all know how she feels.
Tish is the only one of us who isn’t quite as sure about Lawrence. She was hoping for another sister to play with when he was born because I have never matched up. But I can’t understand why all she wants to do is stay at home, play with dolls and continually wash the bedclothes lining their pink cot. The only time Tish ventures out is when Mum takes her into Watford to go shopping on Saturdays. When the two of them leave, I sit for hours on the garden wall waiting for them to come home, feeling the rough glass that tops it biting into my legs.
But when days stretch on for what feels like for ever, I don’t want to be stuck in my bedroom. Sometimes Michael takes Lawrence and me down to Radlett Rec where we use brightly coloured fishing nets – yellow for me, green for Lawrence and red for Michael – to hunt for tadpoles. Loading them into plastic buckets, Michael leads the way home, Lawrence and I following behind, staggering under the weight of the buckets as pond water slops all over the pavements. There’s usually only about three inches left by the time we’re back but we put the tadpoles into an old metal bath that sits in the corner of the garden and wait for the frogs to hatch.
Radlett Rec is a long walk from home so the pull of Parkgate School – and its wide-open playground – is irresistible. It’s around the corner from our house and we’re happy to risk the wrath of the school caretaker, Mr Bunker, in exchange for a game of football.
Trouble is, Mr Bunker is constantly on the watch from his house beside the school.
‘What are you lot up to, then?’ he screams, if he catches us. ‘Get aaaaaaart o’ here.’
Most of the time we run fast enough to leave Mr Bunker huffing and puffing in our wake. But such is our fear of Mum finding out we’ve trespassed that Joe didn’t say a word when he fell off a roof at Parkgate and limped home with a painful arm. It was only when Mum noticed him sitting pale and quiet that he was forced to confess it was hurting.
‘Why’s that?’ Mum asked, her eyes narrowing as her suspicions deepened.
‘I was playing.’
‘Where?’
‘Just around.’
‘Where around?’
‘A couple of streets away.’
‘Which street?’
‘Southwold Road.’
‘And where on that street, Joe?’
‘Parkgate.’
Joe’s face turned from white to green when Mum asked him to lift his arm so she could have a look. He was taken to hospital that night and came home with a plaster cast that made me sigh with envy as I watched people scribble in biro all over it.
‘Now will you children learn your lesson once and for all?’ Mum pleaded.
We didn’t, of course. As I got older, I always took the chance to sneak into Parkgate with my brothers and never realized that it was only a matter of time before I, too, was caught. It happened as we fled Mr Bunker, as usual, one day and my shorts got caught on one of the metal spikes on top of the school gates. As Michael and Joe ran towards home, their laughter trailing behind them, I stared down into Mr Bunker’s bright red face, which was covered with blackheads as big as saucers.
‘You again?’ he roared, as his hand closed around my ankle. ‘That’s it! I’m taking you home to your mother.’
She sighed as she opened the door and saw me being dragged home by the scruff of my neck.
Joe bends down beside me now as he picks up the box that’s sitting at his feet. It’s the present that Aunty Mary has just given him for his birthday. Opening it slowly but surely, my brother pulls out a shiny new roller skate and brandishes it in the air, like Arthur pulling Excalibur out of the stone.
‘Joooooooooooooooooe,’ I wail.
‘What’s the matter, Mareeeeeee?’ he crows. ‘Don’t you want a go on them? You’ve got to be nice if you want me to let you.’
Joe knows how much I want his roller skates. They are amazing – long metal bars with wheels on the bottom and red-leather straps that tie over your plimsolls. I want to put them on and stand at the top of Sandown Road. I want to race down the hill knowing that the only thing which will ever stop me is flinging myself over the wall outside Chiswell Wire Factory. I want some roller skates of my own. I want to scream.
Running upstairs, I fling myself onto my bunk bed before reaching down to pull out my doll. I’ve never had one before. But Mum was so surprised that she bought it for me when I said in Woolworths that I liked the doll. I’ve named her Sandra. She has dark hair and a purple flowered dress.
Lying on my back, I pull Sandra out from underneath the bed. Someone has written ‘FART’ on her forehead in blue biro. Staring at her, I start to wail.
Crayola crayons
I don’t know if the Swinging Sixties ever came to Watford but if they did I didn’t notice it. Rainbow psychedelia didn’t make it as far as the suburbs of outer North London, which were mostly concrete grey. Instead, the world I inhabited seemed full of older people from a different era, a time of war, rationing and hardship.
Some, like my dad’s colleague Doug Beavis who had been a prisoner of war, had mostly left the past behind them. Doug would come over, sit at the kitchen table, laughing over a cuppa with Mum, and the only reason I knew he’d been in a Japanese war camp was because he didn’t eat much of her cake. She told me it was because his stomach had shrunk so much it was never the same again.
Others, like the two elderly sisters called Aggie and May who lived together on our street, still trailed their past behind them. Having existed on the edges of poverty all their lives, they lived frugally and wore boxes over their shoes when it rained. They weren’t so unusual, though, because money was tight for many people where I grew up – including my parents. As well as his Brooke Bond job, Dad did deliveries at weekends to earn extra for the mortgage. When he was once carried home because his lumbago had got so bad, my mother strapped up his back after rubbing it and he was out again the next day. For a time, the kitchen was also often filled with small plastic boxes that Mum spent her evenings packing with tablets to earn some more housekeeping money.
The place where I most felt the hangover from decades before, though, was school. While the Beatles were telling people that all they needed was love, some of my teachers still clung to values more suited to the Victorian workhouse, women and men so lacking in human warmth that their wrath was enough to make seven-year-olds wet themselves in panic.
My nemesis was a woman called Mrs Rigby, who became my form teacher when I started at Holy Rood Junior School, where all the local Catholic kids went. Until then, I’d loved infants’ school – reading about Fluff and N
ip, Janet and John for Miss Eccles, a teacher I adored. But things changed when I moved up to Mrs Rigby’s form. In her late fifties, Mrs Rigby had dark curly hair, false teeth that were too big for her mouth, and she smelt of the peppermints that she furiously – and continuously – sucked, as if to keep at bay the anger and bitterness inside her. It wasn’t enough. As her wrath struggled to find an escape, Mrs Rigby’s cheek muscle would twitch with the effort of keeping it contained.
Never good at maths, I was not one of her favourites and my marks only got worse the more I came to know her. After getting a C grade, I insisted to my mother that Mrs Rigby had accidentally mixed up my work with Mary Kearns’s. Mum went into school one afternoon, talked to Mrs Rigby, then took me home without a word. The Arctic chill of her anger was far worse than any telling-off and shame filled me when I realized my mother knew I had lied. My fear of maths only worsened.
Dread would fill me whenever Mrs Rigby announced that we were going to do times tables, and I would wait for the inevitable moment when her beady eyes locked with mine. ‘Mary Newton,’ she’d snarl. ‘Stand.’
Feeling my legs go to jelly, I’d will myself to get the answer as I stood up.
‘Eight times seven!’ Mrs Rigby would fire at me.
Numbers scrambled through my mind before everything went blank. I stared in terror at Mrs Rigby. All I could smell as I shrank inside myself was the sweet aroma of just sharpened Crayola crayons muddled with the sharp tang of bleach coming off the lino floors. Watching the muscle in Mrs Rigby’s cheek twitch ever faster, I knew that at any minute she might stand up and rap me across the knuckles with a ruler. It was the only time in my life that I was speechless.
Shamrock and ribbons
I stare at myself in the mirror. It’s St Patrick’s Day and all the other girls at Holy Rood will be wearing green ribbons in their hair. I have been pleading with Mum to buy me some.
‘What do you want with all that?’ she cries.
‘All the other girls will have them! Margaret McGuire and Theresa Keating. Geraldine Quinn and Shirley Breen too. Please, Mum.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘And they’ll have shamrocks.’
‘Why on earth they want to do all that I just don’t know! Clinging onto the old Irish ways, sitting in pubs and singing songs. Why would people want to spend their time in a pub?’
‘But I don’t want to go to the pub.’
‘I should think not, Mary Newton!’
‘I just want a ribbon.’
‘Like I said, I’ll see what I can do.’
After days of waiting and hoping, I am now ready to go to school on St Patrick’s Day. My hair – a chin-length bob with a blunt fringe that Mum cuts at the kitchen table because she’ll never let me go to Maureen’s Hair Salon with her, however much I beg – is tied in bunches. But instead of green ribbons, a couple of khaki elastic garters hang lopsidedly in my hair. Usually they hold up Joe’s Scout socks but today my mother has tied them in my hair for St Patrick’s Day.
‘That’ll do!’ she’d said absentmindedly, as she rushed back downstairs to get the packed lunches ready.
‘But it’s not ribbons!’ I’d wailed.
‘And who’s going to be looking at you anyhow, Mary Newton? Now, come and get your sandwiches.’
I stare in the mirror at my hair. This moment is the closest that I will ever get to hating my mother.
99 Flake
The sun beats down as I stare into the picnic basket. An egg sandwich sits wilting in the corner, its crusts curling in the heat. Beside it an apple and a piece of sweating fruitcake wait for me. We’re sitting on Hastings beach on a day trip with St Helen’s Church. About a dozen of us got onto a minibus at the top of St Albans Road this morning and did the drive to Sussex. I much prefer coming here than going on the pilgrimage to Walsingham where we have to spend a lot of time walking behind a cross singing ‘Ave Maria’ and beating our breastbones.
There are kids everywhere. Some are paddling, others are building sand castles and the rest are playing a game of rounders. They wear T-shirts and shorts or dresses and sandals while the men in the party, who arrived on the beach wearing suits, have taken off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves. Aunty Cathy has put the lace mantilla she usually wears at mass on her head to protect her from the sun as she sits and talks to Mum. Two brightly coloured windbreakers have been dug into the sand behind them to keep the breeze off and I know they won’t move for the rest of the day.
Aunty Cathy is one of Mum’s best friends. They met when my parents moved to Watford before I was born and Cathy was asked by Father Bussey to look after our family because we were new to the area. She’s been doing it ever since and is in and out of our house all the time, in between looking after Uncle Tom and their four children. With red hair so like Mum’s that people often mistake them for sisters, her face is always freshly scrubbed, and sixties fashions are an anathema to Cathy. Knee-length cotton dresses that flare out from the waist and cream orthopaedic sandals are her preferred outfit. But then again Cathy needs sturdy shoes because she always walks with purpose as she bustles around organizing us all – along with the church jumble sale, youth club, nativity play and local Brownie pack.
I love Aunty Cathy. She’s strict but kind in equal measure and I feel still inside when I’m with her. She’s even promised to take me on my first ever holiday because we never get to go on them. Each year Michael buys a copy of Exchange & Mart and circles ads for caravans to rent. But while Dad nods and always promises to go and have a look, he never does. Cathy, though, is going to take me to Devon and she says it’s full of fields, cows and clotted-cream teas.
Aunty Cathy usually arrives at our house pulling a checked shopping trolley while Mum’s friend Jean Wiseman pulls up outside in her blue Hillman Imp. Mum met Jean when she was in hospital having me and Jean was having her third son, John. She is gentle, smiles a lot and looks tiny sitting behind the wheel of her car. She takes Mum shopping and the two of them also go to Maureen’s once a week to get their hair set.
Then there’s Stella, whose hair is dyed the colour of boot polish and has a constant smudge of lipstick on her teeth plus the poshest voice I’ve ever heard.
‘Shall I replenish the teapot, Theres-air?’ she said one day, when she was sitting at the kitchen table having a cuppa.
The word rolled around in my head so much that I had to look it up in the dictionary.
There’s also Sheila and Sadie and, last but not least, Aunty Ruth, who’s married to Cathy’s brother Albert. She didn’t even know us properly when she invited our whole family to live with hers when we first arrived in Watford. Dad had left his job as a sausage salesman and the house that went with it so my parents didn’t have anywhere to go while they looked for a new place. They met Ruth through Cathy and the church, and that’s the sort of person she is: kind and generous. Together these are my mother’s best friends, and as far as she’s concerned, there aren’t enough hours in the day to chat to them. Uncle Don once told us that he’d spotted Mum talking to Cathy on his way out of the bus depot one morning and they were still there when he finished the round.
I pick up the sandwich and feel the crust hard in my fingers. Lifting it to my mouth, I close my teeth around it. The taste of warm egg and salad cream spreads across my tongue. Then sand crunches between them.
‘It’s baking, innit?’ Mr Brown says with a smile, as he sits in his deck chair, skin slowly turning the colour of a strawberry. ‘Couldn’t ’ave picked a better day for it.’
Mr Brown works in the rag trade and is always coming over and trying to sell Mum clothes he’s got stuffed in a bin liner. Most of the time she politely tells him that we’ve got all we need. Her knitting needles constantly click together in the evenings as she makes jumpers, hats and socks. Or she goes to the local second-hand shops to buy us things.
‘Be a love, Mary, and get me some water, will you?’ Mr Brown booms at me.
I stare at my
bucket. It’s bright red plastic and there’s a matching shovel that I use to make sand castles. Standing up, I pick my way obediently through all the people on the beach. There are men with hankies on their heads, women sitting on checked picnic blankets spread over the pebbles and kids flying kites. Tish is somewhere sulking because her flip-flop got carried out to sea.
I bend down to fill the bucket at the water’s edge before walking back up the beach.
‘Lovely!’ Mr Brown says, with a smile. ‘Put the bucket down so I can cool my feet, will you, love?’
I stare at his huge foot and wonder how it will ever fit in my bucket. Then I reluctantly put it down near him. He heaves himself forward on his chair and pushes his foot into the water.
‘Ah!’ he says, with a sigh of relief. ‘You could scramble eggs on those pebbles.’
Mr Brown wiggles his foot around, digging it deeper and deeper. I hold my breath until he suddenly pulls his foot out of the bucket. Then I stare silently as he plunges the other foot in, hardly daring to breathe when the bucket finally splits and water runs onto the sand.
‘Me and my big feet!’ Mr Brown says. ‘Sorry, love.’
I watch water trail across the pebbles. I look at the bucket. I look back at Mr Brown. I look at the bucket again.
‘How about an ice cream?’ I hear Mum’s voice say in my ear. ‘It must be about time for us to get the 99s. Why don’t you come with me for a walk?’
I turn to look at her. She smiles and takes my hand. Only the thought of the smooth creamy ice cream and my mother’s kindly touch is enough to distract me from my murderous rage.
Bronnley soap
Apparently there is a place called Tesco that my mother Will Never Step Into.
‘It just hasn’t got the quality,’ Mum says, as she pours a cup of tea for Mr Froome. ‘Now, how about a nice piece of coffee and walnut, Dick? I know it’s your favourite.’