More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  ‘The child’s got too much imagination’ was a comment I heard almost daily. It was meant to be a criticism but my father always took it as a compliment and continued the instalment-plan payments.

  Great Uncle Will and Great Aunt Carrie, who lived downstairs, became my surrogate grandparents since my father and his own mother, Will’s sister, Lil, were estranged. One Sunday afternoon, while I was still a baby, there had been an argument over the cooking of a joint of roast beef during which Lil had stormed out of our house, never to return. Both too proud to make the first move, my dad and his mother refused to contact one another and were never reconciled. We did once try to visit her, at my instigation: having no memory of my grandmother I was curious about her and questioned my father until he relented. It was a short trip—she lived in Stratford—but a long and tense journey for my dad. How would his mother receive him after not having laid eyes on him in almost ten years?

  We knocked on the door and waited. In the end a neighbour came out and told us my grandmother wasn’t in. It sounds bizarre, in these days of mobile phones and texts and round-the-clock communication, to pitch up on the doorstep of somebody you hadn’t seen for years on the off chance she might be at home, but it wasn’t so unusual then. We couldn’t call ahead because we didn’t have a phone. Maybe my grandmother didn’t have one, either, I don’t know. But on that wet afternoon, as I watched my father’s fingers nervously lighting damp cigarettes, I had a clear sense of his disappointment, though he never once gave voice to it. We simply turned round and went home. The visit was never attempted again. Feelings ran deep in my family—even about something as inconsequential as the cooking of roast beef.

  So Aunt Carrie and Uncle Will Tolliday filled this family void. Described by all who knew them as ‘characters’, they were both frustrated entertainers. Carrie had a belting voice in the style of Gracie Fields and whatever Will lacked vocally he made up for with a terrifying and inventive act which involved an intricate and grotesque mask of rubber bands that covered every inch of his face. They would perform at the drop of a hat at various East End civic theatres, to patients trapped in hospital wards—any venue that would invite them.

  The Bridge House, a little brown-tiled pub at the end of our street, was once treated to an impromptu show by Aunt Carrie while several of the notorious Kray twins’ henchmen were trying to enjoy a quiet drink. After a few rounds of rum and blackcurrant, Carrie swept through the saloon bar singing ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’ and swiped the glass from the impressive fist of a lantern-jawed villain. His eyes narrowed as she upbraided him in song in front of all the other customers. Finishing, bravely, on an astoundingly long note, she completed her performance by downing the man’s drink. A hush descended on the bar. My mother leaned in quickly and whispered to him, ‘She don’t mean no harm. She’s a relation of my husband’s so if you can see your way to forgive, I’d be grateful.’ She offered him her charming smile. After a slightly worrying pause, a low, rumbling chuckle could be heard. As it developed into a bellow of deep laughter everyone joined in. My mother had won him round.

  At home Aunt Carrie and Uncle Will always had some creative project going on but they acted on strange whims, suddenly dyeing all their net curtains a shockingly bright canary yellow, for example, or painting each individual brick of our house a different colour. Carrie was also in the habit of pumping floralscented fluid round her ‘front rooms’. She minded me during the school holidays while my mother was at work and we would listen to Mrs Dale’s Diary on the radio before sitting down to a lunch of tinned steak and kidney pudding, mashed potato and marrowfat peas. On long winter afternoons she would teach me complex card games like cribbage and solo. Resting by the crackling coal fire in the evenings she would weave romantic tales for me of how she and Uncle Will had met. I listened in wonder—until the object of her affections came home from the Bridge House with beer on his breath and a drunken domestic ensued, which rather ruined the magic.

  In spite of their public ebullience, Will and Carrie were perturbed by any noise from upstairs—they were elderly, after all—and my parents, forever grateful to them for taking us in, bent over backwards to avoid annoying them in any way. The creaking of loose floorboards as we walked to and fro above their heads was a particular irritation so we all moved about on tiptoe, even my father, who was a heavy man and over six foot tall. Sometimes, to muffle the sound of my footsteps, my mother tied ribbon round my black plimsolls, encouraging me to imagine I was a ballerina. I would pretend to be Anna Pavlova dancing the Dying Swan, teetering lightly around the room en pointe.

  When I started to make friends with other children at school it began to dawn on me not only that our domestic circumstances left something to be desired, but also that my family was, to say the least, a bit strange by other people’s standards. Some of my classmates’ parents had fared better than mine on the housing list and had already been moved into the new council tower blocks near Victoria Park. Their flats were luxuriously airy and light, yet warm in the winter—the kind of homes you might see on television adverts for gravy, where happy families sat smiling around the table as Mum, sporting a frilly pinny, served a slap-up meal in her spanking new Formica kitchen. Other friends lived in post-war prefabs, ramshackle but still standing, with wonderfully overgrown gardens.

  What they all had that we didn’t was space. They also had brothers and sisters, and the moment I was over their doorsteps my nostrils would be assailed not by something akin to the floral scents that permeated Aunt Carrie’s ‘front rooms’ but by an unfamiliar cocktail of stale milk, sweet vomit and the unsettling aroma of cloth nappies boiling in a saucepan. ‘Hold my sister for me,’ somebody would say, casually handing over a small alien creature. These girls were already trainee mums, tending confidently to their younger siblings, but I was terrified by the tiny, bawling infants that wriggled furiously in my awkward embrace, their faces scrunched into tight, red balls of discomfort.

  Everyone else’s parents appeared to have at least two children, and whether the adults had themselves grown up in happy or dysfunctional families, or in severe hardship like my mother, they all seemed to aspire to raising several kids, either to recreate a rosy childhood or to compensate for a rotten one. For a little girl whose ménage consisted of parents, assorted pets and the two oddballs who lived downstairs, it was something of an eye-opener.

  Our extended family, on both my mother’s and father’s sides, was scattered, and with no phone and no car, it wasn’t easy to stay in touch on a regular basis. Occasionally we would visit my father’s sister, Aunt Joan, in Chigwell, but there were no big get-togethers with uncles, aunts and cousins all present. My dad’s brother Lenny had died in the Second World War and his youngest sibling, Johnny, was nearly twenty years his junior. They seemed to have lost track of one another after my father’s fall-out with his mum. As it was impossible for my parents to entertain relatives or friends in our cramped quarters at Lefevre Road, either we had to visit them or everyone went to the pub.

  The exception was my mother’s adored brother, another Johnny, a stevedore at the docks in Wapping. We often spent weekends with him and his wife Kath at their tenement flat at Riverside Mansions. While they drank with my parents in a pub by the Thames called the Jolly Sailor, I played outside with my five cousins, pacified with pennies and pop. We never crossed the threshold of the saloon bar, but from the street we would hear the drunken chatter subside from time to time when the jukebox played a sentimental tune or someone began to sing a heartbreaking Irish song about love and separation. ‘I’m a Rover’ was a favourite, and we kids would join in outside.

  …Though the night be dark as dungeon

  Not a star to be seen above

  I will be guided without stumble

  Into the arms of my only love.

  My father must have felt like an outsider among all the Catholic dock workers in the Jolly Sailor, and perhaps excluded by my mum’s close relationship with her brother, too, but if he
did, he kept it to himself.

  After a raucous Saturday night, there would sometimes be a church procession on Sunday. My younger cousin Catherine, dressed in lace like a baby doll, glided past Riverside Mansions one morning as though she had been set on a white raft sailing through the narrow docklands streets. I would be sent off to Mass with my cousins to stand mouthing an unfamiliar catechism while the priest came along flicking incense on us. Then, as if on cue, I would faint, sliding to the ground and regaining consciousness just in time to hear my cousins yet again blaming my father’s religion. ‘You’re a Proddy dog. The incense found you out!’ I don’t think I’m the first person to suffer from fainting fits in church. It was probably due to low blood sugar or kneeling and standing up again too quickly, but there again, maybe my cousins were right.

  One year we spent Christmas with Uncle Johnny and Aunt Kath—a real treat as Christmas at Lefevre Road was often fraught. There wasn’t room for a proper tree so my mother would stand a small artificial one with silvery tinsel branches on the sideboard and painstakingly decorate it with lights and baubles. We had very few 13 amp sockets so the fairylights had to be plugged into the main light socket in the ceiling (all sorts of things had to be plugged into those sockets, including an electric blanket I had on my bed during the winter). My dad would come in from work and throw open the door. Being so tall, he would catch the wire and the whole lot would come crashing down. I have a memory of my mother once stamping on all the fallen baubles in frustration, crying, ‘That’s it! I give up!’

  The flat at Riverside Mansions wasn’t exactly palatial but there was a real sense of a family Christmas there, with presents hidden in every room to be hunted for in a clamour early in the morning. In material terms my cousins were poorer than I was, but they had something I didn’t: each other. I shared a bed with my cousins Pat and Catherine. On the night before Christmas, as I lay there between them, still wide awake, Pat, sensing that I was fretful, took me in her arms and cuddled me. For the first time I was acutely aware that, as an only child, I was missing out on a sense being part of a loving clan of children. My cousins might have scrapped like cats and dogs but they would support each other through good times and bad.

  There were other cousins I got to see less frequently because their parents had settled in Essex, part of the diaspora from the East End tempted either by the promise of work at the Ford car factory or by the offer of a brand-new council house. My father was always disparaging about Essex. The new housing estates there were, he said, ‘ersatz’ and he dismissed Dagenham as ‘Corned Beef City’. Looking back, these estates were rather sterile and soulless. The residents became overly houseproud and couldn’t help being sucked into a culture of keeping up with the Joneses. Front lawns were fastidiously manicured, cars washed even when they were already clean and curtains twitched in streets where very little happened. To an East End kid, a Sunday afternoon in Essex was depressingly quiet. In Becontree or Chigwell even the lone bell of an ice-cream van, isolated as it was from the accompanying sights and sounds of Sunday activities at home—the bustle of Brick Lane market, drunks singing in the pubs, radio broadcasts wafting from open windows—struck a mournful note. In spite of our less than ideal living conditions, my parents much preferred the rough and tumble of East London and would never have entertained the notion of moving away. For all its shortcomings, it was home.

  Chapter Two

  The Number 8 Bus

  My dad cycled to work every morning and, as a small child, I was sometimes allowed to go with him, propped on the crossbar of his bike. He would weave his way through the City traffic and, as we approached Tower Hill, the Mint would suddenly appear, more imposing even than Buckingham Palace. On entering the building we followed long corridors whose high ceilings were studded with chandeliers, my father pausing to speak to important-looking men in rooms where plush, draped curtains swirled on polished floors. I wandered around, looking up at fine old paintings on the walls as they talked of ‘bonuses’, ‘incentives’ and ‘demarcation’. Then I would descend with my father to the furnace room, where ‘his men’ were waiting for him. After the graciously appointed upper offices, it was a vision of hell.

  As soon as the door to this inferno opened I was hit by a blast of searing heat. At first, dazzled by the light, I could make out no more than the black silhouettes of men heaving long-handled pans of molten metal. As my eyes adjusted the smiling faces of my father’s colleagues would come into focus: they always made a huge fuss of me because I was ‘Bill Wassmer’s kid’. Boiled sweets or spearmint gum would be pressed upon me while locker doors were hastily and courteously closed on the busty pin-ups glued alongside photos of Billy Fury or Elvis.

  The men looked up to my father because he was their shop steward. Before long they would have even greater reason to respect him: he was soon to engage in what would turn out to be a long drawn-out battle over plans to relocate the Royal Mint to Wales. It was a mission that was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life and in the process he would cross swords with three chancellors of the exchequer.

  When I was seven I moved up to the local primary school, which was named after the great Labour MP and former leader of the party, George Lansbury, who had been a prominent campaigner for social justice and improved living and working conditions in the East End. My father thought that entirely appropriate for a good shop steward’s kid. I was too big by this time to ride to the Mint on his crossbar, but old enough, he decided, to be introduced to some of his other interests. A keen sportsman, my dad had been an amateur boxer as a young man and taught me how to spar when I was only six or seven. I was, he informed me as I ducked and weaved in the garden, ‘a southpaw’. Before I was born he had travelled around the country, accompanied by my mother, to compete in darts tournaments. In our cluttered living room an elegant grandfather clock stood trapped behind an armchair. Only part of the inscription was visible: ‘Bill Wassmer—Champion…’. The rest of it didn’t matter. That was all a little girl needed to know about her dad.

  Although we took care not to disturb Will and Carrie by treading too heavily on the floorboards, behind the closed doors of our flat it was never quiet. My mother couldn’t tolerate silence, especially at night. It was like death to her. Consequently clocks ticked perpetually in the bedroom and sitting room, and whenever one of them stopped, it would be wound up instantly, as if it were a heartbeat needing to be restarted. All through the daylight hours, either the radio would be blaring or LPs would be spinning on a turntable, playing soulful ballads by Ray Charles or Frank Ifield. I learned to switch off from my surroundings while reading or writing my stories. On Sundays, however, we listened to comedy radio programmes together, The Navy Lark or Round the Horne. I laughed along with my parents, though the double entendres went over my head. I was just happy that they were happy. If I could make them laugh myself, I thought, what a great thing that would be.

  All children are eager to please but, looking back, there was an extra dimension to my desire to make my parents smile. My mother’s permanent anxiety had instilled in me, if only on a subconscious level, a desire to ‘protect’ her. So I avoided doing or telling her anything that might upset her and instead began to try to amuse her. I developed a repertoire, performing passable impressions for my parents of the eccentric upper-crust actress Margaret Rutherford, or Ethel Merman giving her all to ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’.

  Downstairs in one of Aunt Carrie’s front rooms there was a piano. I couldn’t read music, but with the easier pieces it was hardly rocket science working out which note on the sheet music corresponded to which piano key, and I taught myself to play ‘Für Elise’.

  ‘D’you hear that? Beethoven! The child’s a genius!’ cried my family.

  I accepted all attention and applause gratefully, a slightly precocious little girl seeking her place in a household of adults.

  I might have been presenting a façade of maturity, but while I perceived problems in the way an adult
would, I didn’t yet have the emotional resources to deal with them. Left to my own devices much of the time, I relied on my thought processes rather than on emotions to find solutions. By now I realised that my family wasn’t different. There was always an unspoken acknowledgement between my father and me that my mother was ‘sensitive’. I may have wondered whether she was the one who needed taking care of, but these matters were never discussed by any of us. So I laughed and clowned, wanting no more than for my mother to be happy and my dad to be proud of me.

  I can see now how this atmosphere of denial, of avoiding difficult issues, influenced most of the decisions I took throughout their lives, and certainly the biggest I ever made in mine.

  I wasn’t the only one keeping secrets. I can’t have been more than about seven when, at a loose end on a Sunday afternoon, I started poking about in our bedroom. With my parents’ double bed and my single one shoehorned into such a small space, the room was crammed with furniture. An old utility dressing table was wedged behind my bed and though it was almost impossible to open its drawers completely my small hands could reach right inside them. There I found a stash of interesting papers: my birth certificate, a black-edged death certificate for an Irish grandmother I had never met and my parents’ wedding certificate, on which my father was described as ‘bachelor’. Next to my mother’s name was an entry I could read but did not understand. She was described as ‘the divorced wife of George Townsend’.

  Later that evening, while my parents were watching television, I broached the subject of my discovery. ‘What does “the divorced wife of George Townsend” mean?’

  They exchanged glances.

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ said my father. ‘The man who wrote the certificate got things wrong.’

  I sensed this wasn’t the whole story. Over the years I would ask them again and again about the wedding certificate. I knew from the awkward looks they always gave one another that they were hiding something. I would be grown up and my father would be dead before I finally got the truth out of my mother.