by Jo Malone
She looked relieved but the way her grip tightened around my hand suggested she was scared, almost holding on to me. ‘Oh, good girl . . . You show us the way home, then.’
When I told Mum what had happened, she didn’t seem surprised. From that day on, she made sure that Madame Lubatti had her address written down on a tag we used to pin inside her coat. I saw nothing odd in that; to me, it was no different than having my name stitched into the one I wore to school.
I had no idea that the woman I adored was beginning to unravel and lose her mind, slowly and imperceptibly becoming a stranger to all that she was familiar with.
FIVE
One Sunday evening, a bunch of tall men in suits turned up at our house and seemed to catch Dad off guard. Tracey and I were ushered upstairs the moment Mum answered the door, so I have no idea what they wanted or what was said. But after they left, the intense argument that ensued between my parents was enough to suggest that our unexpected visitors had something to do with a gambling debt.
Dad had been staying out until three or four in the morning, which, I came to learn, meant he had been chasing his losses. Consequently, my parents started to squabble a lot. The reasons behind their numerous blow-ups were mostly shielded from us but, more than once, I heard the exasperated refrain from Mum that she was ‘sick of cleaning up your mess!’
Another one of those messes was revealed when a letter from the council arrived in the post, detailing numerous unpaid parking fines dating back months. Mum had no idea about this mounting debt so she grabbed Dad’s car keys, marched outside to his car, flipped the boot and there they were – a stash of unpaid, crumpled tickets still in the envelopes that traffic wardens had left on the windscreen. Dad didn’t return home for two days following that discovery.
There was no shielding the tension in a house as small as ours. Mum’s simmering frustrations seemed to keep her on edge, and Dad’s stubbornness left him brooding and monosyllabic. The uneasy silences at mealtimes were only interrupted by the sound of cutlery on ceramic, and Tracey and I learned to keep our heads down in that deeply uncomfortable atmosphere.
When their marriage was good, they were in harmony, but when things got bad, it was awful – the way they yelled at one another left my stomach in knots. From this point on, when I was aged eight and Tracey three, there would be many a time when I’d sit on the stairs, hands over ears, trying to shut out the noise. Sometimes their arguments could drag on for days. But I knew things were really serious when I smelled roast lamb, because I knew exactly what that meant. It was Mum’s idea of payback.
Dad hadn’t been able to bear the smell since he was a young man in the navy when the only edible thing left in the freezer was mutton that had turned bad. Days from land, hardy sailors didn’t grumble about things such as out-of-date food, so he had to eat what was placed in front of him, which explained why the faintest whiff of lamb would make him retch. And it was a button that Mum didn’t hesitate to press.
I’d smell her preparing the lamb and I’d dread Dad coming home because he’d walk in the door . . . and gag. Cue another blazing row. For that reason, the rich aroma of roast lamb is not a smell that unlocks any happy memories for me now. I prefer to dwell on the image of Dad, all smiles, sitting in his armchair as Mum hands him a mug of tea, as if no row had ever happened. That’s how swiftly their conflicts could end; the switch between night and day. If lamb signalled trouble, a good old British cuppa meant there was a truce, however short-lived those truces tended to be.
I can’t say that my school years were a bed of roses, either. I have few fond memories of my time at comprehensive school. For me, this period was a rite of passage – the quagmire between childhood and adulthood that I had to wade through.
I struggled academically, seemingly unable to retain any information; nothing would go in. Take French, for example – I couldn’t fathom the language or the text. The words on the page looked more like scrambled Morse code and it didn’t help that the teacher came from north of the border and had a thick Scottish accent. The harder I tried to concentrate, the more jumbled the text became.
Outside of the classroom, there was one sport I loved: netball. I played centre and made it into the school team. I loved being centre, in the thick of the action. But, ultimately, playing netball didn’t help my grades.
Some afternoons, I’d come home and want to cry with frustration because I felt stupid; in fact, I worried endlessly that I was stupid. The teachers were of little help, and I didn’t feel able to speak with Mum and Dad because they seemed to have enough on their plates; moreover, I didn’t want to let them down with my poor performance. Not that they took much interest anyway. I can’t remember one parents’ evening or sports day that they attended. I used to run around the 200m track looking for their faces in the crowd, but they never showed and I never made a big deal about it.
Besides, my academic struggle seemed incidental compared to my parents’ financial struggle. Mum often appeared harried or overwhelmed, and we hardly ever had mother-daughter time any more. The tactile days of being snuggled up on the sofa watching TV were long gone. But I understood the reason – she was single-handedly running Madame Lubatti’s salon. When she did manage to take a breath, it was Tracey, as the youngest child, who needed her attention first. I understood that, too. And when Mum found real downtime, she would ‘sugar off’ down the road, seeking refuge and a good chat with a friend. I was the one who had to go and find her to say dinner was ready, guessing which house she was in: Maureen’s, Sheila’s or May’s.
One of the times I remember receiving a concentrated period of TLC was when I suffered a bout of chicken pox, and Mum managed to drop everything to be with me for five days. I lay on the sofa, she nursed me, stroked my hair, and rubbed calamine lotion into my spots. Sickness brought rare one-on-one time with Mum and she was wonderfully attentive. After recovering, I returned to school but something wasn’t quite right with my eyes afterwards – I couldn’t see the blackboard clearly and my left vision was blurred. A routine eye test led to a referral to hospital where I was initially diagnosed with a lazy eye. The solution? A hideous pair of ice-blue, thick-framed NHS glasses.
I wanted to cry when I looked in the mirror – they were so ugly-looking. But the specialist wasn’t done: underneath the glasses, he placed a big, white, sticky plaster over my ‘good’ right eye, which was designed to make the lazy one work harder. And he wanted me to walk around for the next two weeks looking like that! Bearing in mind that I was, by now, also wearing a set of metal clamps on my teeth, it’s not hard to imagine why my self-consciousness increased tenfold.
I hated those specs so much that I flushed them down the toilet at home, telling Mum that I’d lost them during PE. She ordered me another pair. I ‘mislaid’ them again. So we returned to the optician to seek another option and, during my next examination, it became clear that my bout of chicken pox had actually damaged the nerves in my left eye. No amount of glasses or patches would have solved it, he said.
At the age of eight, the news that I no longer had to wear NHS glasses seemed to eclipse the somewhat grimmer news that my left eye was permanently damaged. But I never felt handicapped by this impairment because my good right eye compensated and I learned to muddle through without glasses. That’s not to say I’d seen the last of my NHS specs.
One morning, Dad came downstairs grumbling that the toilet was blocked, so he called Spot, our window cleaner/plumber who lived up the road. Within ten minutes, Spot walked into the kitchen holding two pairs of dripping spectacles. Mum’s face! She was furious that I had lied, and probably a little shocked because I was the responsible daughter; the goody two-shoes who never got into trouble. Discarding my NHS glasses rated as the most trouble I’d get into as a child, even if Tracey and I were constantly at loggerheads.
As she got older, her tantrums became more regular and she started acting out, presumably in response to the unsettled atmosphere in the house. We went through a sibling
bickering stage – the annoying little sister versus the ten-year-old with pretensions of independence.
When she started voicing the fact that she ‘hated’ sharing a bunk bed and room with me, Dad came up with a solution: he installed a plywood partition that acted as a dividing wall across the centre of our already average-sized room, leaving each of us with a window. One edge of the partition ran flush to the front wall, the other fell short of the interior wall, leaving a narrow gap that allowed me access to the door. Tracey took this set-up seriously, literally laying down a border in white sticky tape. ‘You’re not allowed in my side!’ she said. ‘Only walk on that line!’
She received a single bed while I ended up with a flat, sunshine-yellow, faux-leather sofa that was so shiny it looked plastic. I never understood why I couldn’t have a normal bed like Tracey but Mum must have traded these items for some face creams or something, so I begrudgingly accepted its arrival, even though it provided the most uncomfortable sleep. It was cold in the winter and sticky in the summer, even with sheets on. In fact, putting down a sheet made things worse because, when restless, I’d find myself slipping and sliding on to the floor. The only benefit was the two drawers underneath which gave me extra space to put away all my ‘tut’.
I spent more time in my section than Tracey ever did in hers. As long as I had my books, Jackie and My Guy magazines and vinyl records, I was content. I’d lock myself away and listen to the Motown tunes of the Jackson 5 and the Supremes. Baby Love, released the year after I was born, was the first record I bought but I would have other favourites over the years, like Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas, and Rock the Boat from The Hues Corporation. On Sunday nights, I religiously tuned in to the Top 20 on BBC Radio 1. I wouldn’t say I was the biggest music fan but I did go through a stage of tying a tartan scarf to my wrist in homage to the Bay City Rollers, whose posters fought for wall space alongside David Cassidy and Donny Osmond. But beyond music at home and netball at school, I had no real hobbies to speak of, mainly because my weekend pursuits had largely revolved around magic shows, the markets and the skincare salon.
Elsewhere in the house, the discord between Mum and Dad meant they rarely slept together any more, so my sister often shared Mum’s bed, making our partition feel even more redundant. I essentially got my bedroom back when the lights were out. Dad used the sofa downstairs – on the nights he came home, at least. He stayed out more now; sometimes, even for entire weekends. But when he was around, the living room suited him – and Mum – because he could stumble in at whatever hour and not wake anyone.
On the surface, everyday life appeared unchanged. I accepted my parents’ arguments as part of that routine, the same way we Brits accept lousy weather as part of our summers. The weather between Mum and Dad was forever changeable. Dramatic comings and goings were part of their ebb and flow. Arguing is what they did. Not too many weeks passed by without a shouting match. In the end, it reached the point where it became noise, and you learned to live with it.
SIX
It felt like I became an adult around the age of ten.
From that time onwards, ordinary childhood memories are scant, replaced, or maybe eclipsed, by the responsibility of effectively running our household and taking care of my little sister. I became the person my parents relied on, leaned on. ‘It’s okay, Jo’s here – she’s got it!’ Dad would say. ‘Jo, can you do this? Have you done that?’ asked Mum. Or I constantly heard, ‘Where’s Jo?’ from one of them.
Even though Maureen would occasionally pop round to help with the housework, and Beryl would sometimes babysit, I felt the onus was on me to keep on top of everything. And I took on that responsibility, wanting to help.
Mum was spending longer at the salon, due to Madame Lubatti taking more of a back seat, and Dad, like every other man of his generation, didn’t really do the chores, so those duties, by default, fell to me. I would clean the house from top to bottom: hoover, polish, make the beds, wash and dry the dishes, empty the bins, build the fire, babysit for Tracey, cook for Tracey, put Tracey to bed, and get Tracey ready for school. I also tackled the laundry that piled up beside the washing machine without ever being placed inside – we had a twin tub, and I’d do everyone’s clothes first before having to wash and tumble dry the sheets before going to bed. The funny thing is that none of this work felt like a chore because I found it calming to put everything in order, to make the house as clean as Aunty Maureen’s. On some deeper level, I believed that if I kept everything neat and tidy, perhaps everything else in our house would fall into place and feel calmer, too.
I also felt the need to keep our fridge and cupboards stocked, especially when our provisions were running low. I would rummage down the back of the sofa or go through the pockets of Dad’s coats and suits to find loose change. Invariably, that hunt would yield enough coppers for me to nip out and buy a loaf of Mother’s Pride, tinned soup and Heinz baked beans. I didn’t always have to walk to the nearby shop because a white grocery van visited our estate twice a week, courtesy of a nice man called John. It was a galley-sized corner shop on wheels and he’d stop in the same spot down the road from our house, allowing me to top up basic supplies. I knew what we needed more than Mum did, which is why I was the one who wrote out our weekly shopping list before joining her on a hurried dash around Sainsbury’s.
My new-found appreciation of how much food cost and how long it lasted meant that I was ever watchful when Mum picked up fillet steak from the butcher’s, not braising steak. I’d tentatively question her choice. ‘Mum, do we really need that when—’ but she’d cut me off and soon put me in my place, so I learned to say nothing. I certainly came to understand the relief that Family Allowance Day brought each Thursday when she, and everyone else on our estate, marched down to the post office to collect the £1-per-child benefit. Mum also depended on Dad’s housekeeping money, which he still had to stump up while scraping together an income via his art and magic.
Many working-class men paid housekeeping on Fridays but Dad consistently struggled to accept, or meet, that responsibility. Mum often had to remind him, and I’d feel the relief as much as she did when he handed over the cash. I was relieved for two reasons: one, it meant we’d be okay for another week; second, it reduced the likelihood of them arguing. It was hard to forget the times when he didn’t pay.
More than once, Mum was left livid after he snuck out the back door without paying, presumably needing the housekeeping money for cards. My dad had the biggest heart but his perspective and priorities were so cock-eyed. If you’d told him you hadn’t eaten for days, he’d have given you his last meal. But, at the same time, he wouldn’t stop to think about our needs as a family if a poker game was lined up. The more I did around the house and the more I had to ‘make do’ for dinner, the more I shared Mum’s frustrations and understood her anger.
She had a lot to cope with, on both the home and work fronts. To Tracey and me, she appeared to be the forever-graceful swan, breezing through our days while being all things to all people: mother, wife, career woman, effectively a joint-business owner, and friend to the dear ‘aunties’ she now struggled to make time for. What we couldn’t see was how furiously this swan was paddling, trying not to let the exertion show.
With so much on her plate – keeping us afloat, keeping Madame Lubatti’s salon on track, keeping up appearances, and keeping her own equilibrium – she didn’t have the room to be the parent she wanted to be, and she certainly didn’t have the happy marriage she deserved. I honestly don’t know how she kept it together. But, like most ten-year-olds, I thought that was what mums did – they coped, come what may.
As if circumstances weren’t challenging enough, the Government cut everyone’s electricity supply. The moment Big Ben heralded the arrival of 1974, the prime minister enforced the ‘Three-Day Work Order’, which restricted households to three consecutive days of power per week in order to conserve coal stocks. Candles and torches were how everyone got by. I remember walking to t
he local shop to buy a stash of candles in preparation for the austere measures that Mum said wouldn’t last long, but we found ourselves switching between the light and the dark from 1 January to 7 March. We were never short on coal, so heating the house – or, rather, the downstairs – was never an issue. One freezing morning, however, my mood managed to match the bleakness of this time.
I woke up feeling profoundly miserable with our lot: the constant friction between Mum and Dad, the constant mess, the constant housework, and the constant cold upstairs that left another sheet of ice on the inside of my bedroom window. I got out of bed, wrapped the duvet around me, pulled back the curtains and stood at the window, after hearing kids’ voices outside. I scraped a peephole in the solidified condensation, and watched some children kicking a ball about, making the most of the daylight. Even if I had wanted to join them, I couldn’t – the rule about not crossing the boundary of our front wall remained in force.
I then heard Mum and Dad arguing again. It wasn’t even breakfast. I remember every detail of this moment. On the window in front of me, a piece of ice dislodged and slid down the pane until it settled and started to melt slowly inside the mouldy crook between the frame and the sill. And I thought to myself, I don’t want to live like this when I’m older. I won’t. I can’t.
When people ask where my drive comes from, I think elements of it can be found in that promise I made myself, however directionless it may have been at the time. I didn’t have a clue how I was ever going to break the mould – such minor details rarely concern ten-year-olds – but I had a clarity that told me enough: I didn’t want mess; I didn’t want a marriage filled with bickering and upset; I didn’t want limitations; and I didn’t want to wake up in the morning and feel cold. All I knew, and all I silently vowed, was that I’d never grow up to feel this kind of struggle again.