by Jo Malone
‘Money down the drain’ is what she really meant to say.
I felt gutted, and was angry with myself for being sloppy and letting my guard down but I learned three things that day: always find Tracey something to do, never take your eyes off the ball, and be willing to toss it out and start again if it’s not absolutely perfect.
Soon enough I had the whole operation down pat, to the point where Dad trusted me to make product alone. I preferred making creams to doing homework, and I couldn’t wait for class to end so that I could return to my ‘job’ in the kitchen. To other kids my age it would probably have been the most tedious thing in the world, but I loved every second. If it’s true what Confucius was quoted as saying, ‘Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life’, then this was when my soul latched on to my future. This was when all the scattered pieces knitted together – the enterprise of the magic shows and the markets, the days observing Madame Lubatti, and the at-home product-making, combined with the lessons I’d learned from Mum’s work ethic and Dad’s think-on-his-feet creativity. I like to think this was when the entrepreneur in me was born. At the age of eleven.
SEVEN
One Friday evening, Dad piled us all into the car, saying he had a surprise in store. He swivelled around in the driver’s seat to face Tracey and me. ‘Who wants to go to the seaside?’ Our squeals of delight put a smile on Mum’s face.
‘Okay! Let’s go to Brighton for the weekend!’ he announced.
We booked into The Old Ship Hotel on the seafront, which seemed like an expensive treat but Mum, like me, probably assumed that Dad had come up trumps playing cards. After fetching the luggage, he gathered us together in the room we all shared. ‘Eileen, Tracey, you sit there,’ he said, gesturing to one of the single beds, ‘and Jo, I’d like you to go reach inside my trouser pocket.’
He spoke to me like he did when guiding a member of the audience through a magic trick, and so I placed my right hand inside his left pocket and fished out a thick, brown envelope stuffed with what felt like paper. ‘Go on, open it,’ he said.
I ripped open the back and took out a fistful of £20 notes, more money than I had ever seen him have. Mum appeared even more surprised than me. There must have been about £200 in there (the equivalent to £800 today).
‘It’s for you, Eileen,’ he said.
Mum was speechless.
‘My first wage packet . . . from my new job,’ said Dad, as I spread out the notes on the bed, counting them.
Dad had landed a job as a conservation architect with English Heritage. He would work on major projects, too: if any feature of an historic monument or building needed repairing or renovating, he and his team had to ensure that all alterations respected and conserved its original character. Years down the line, in 1986, he would be involved with the restoration of Hampton Court when a fire devastated one entire wing.
But the restoration that mattered most was his marriage, which he knew had been brittle for quite a while due to his own neglect. As I continued to count the money, I could see in his face the intent to prove himself to Mum, as if he was saying, ‘I will look after you. I can look after you.’
I don’t know what he got up to when he was away, but the trip to Brighton seemed to signal a sea change; his grand gesture to tell us as a family that things would be different now. Granted, a new job guaranteed nothing but he had clearly smartened himself up and found gainful employment, and that was a start. Dad’s soul needed the stimulus of creativity and the respect of being valued by others. This new job, which would sustain him throughout the remainder of my childhood, was the shot in the arm he needed to pick him out of the doldrums.
He took Mum shopping to The Lanes where, in a boutique on one of those famous narrow streets, she picked out the most beautiful black velvet Jaeger coat. Dad’s eyes lit up when she tried it on, happy to spoil her for the first time in years.
So much had gone wrong between them, and there had been so much sadness, so many accusations, so much name-calling, that I doubt either of them could truly reclaim the past, but I think Dad’s hope was that they could draw a line and move on. It clearly meant something to Mum, because I saw a flicker of happiness return to her eyes that weekend. As we drove back to Kent, singing along to songs on the radio, I honestly felt that things were going to be different from now on.
A few months passed and my parents managed to maintain a rare equilibrium. I couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t argued for so long, and the harmony felt glorious. Mum continued to build her business, working from her rented room in Chelsea. Dad thrived in his new job and continued to find favour on the home front, cooking dinners and generally stepping up to the plate as an attentive husband. Meanwhile, I kept the house ticking along while doubling up as Mum’s assistant on that ever-busy production line. No great transformations took place. Life simply slotted back into our version of normal.
By now Dad had a racing green Jaguar XJ6 saloon, which, although second-hand, was an important status symbol as far he was concerned. Complete with the silver, leaping jaguar adornment on the bonnet, that car said, ‘I’m back – life is looking up again.’
The addition of his salary also opened up new possibilities for us as a family, which was why Mum decided we could spend the summer at a rental property in Constantine Bay, Cornwall. A real get-away-from-it-all family break, the kind we’d never previously been able to afford.
The all-white property, surrounded by a stone wall, was called ‘Crow’s Nest’, reflecting its commanding cliff-top location, overlooking a windswept expanse of golden beach and grassy dunes. As soon as we pulled up, I sprinted inside to be the first to claim a beach-view room, and I couldn’t believe the size of the place. It seemed big enough to get lost in, providing Tracey and me with endless hours of hide-and-seek fun. ‘Fun’ sums up the holiday – a memorable time that seemed far removed from our usual reality. Mum and Dad weren’t running off to work, there were no face creams to make and, for the first time, I had a taste of what blissful, uninterrupted family togetherness meant.
Dad made the most amazing picnics and we’d take the windbreaks down to the beach and find our usual spot in the sand. I had my first schoolgirl crush on a surfer who hardly said two words to me, was ten years my senior, and turned out to be married. Tracey and I flew kites, built sandcastles and paddled in the sea – we paddled because we couldn’t swim, having never been taught – and we enjoyed nights playing games in the drawing room in front of the log fire. Mum and Dad truly unwound for the longest time that I could remember. And yet, behind the giggles and lightness of being, something niggled me about Mum. On a couple of mornings, she seemed strangely lethargic; at other times, there were flashes of melancholy. But then she’d be as right as rain, thoroughly in the moment and enjoying herself. Something wasn’t quite right about the way she behaved, and something was going on between her and Dad, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
We left our happiness behind at Crow’s Nest – that house proved to be our Cornish snowglobe, and that holiday marked the end of my parents’ second honeymoon period. Within weeks of returning home, and about six months after Brighton, Dad’s mask slipped. He stayed out late and sometimes didn’t come home; he was back to being the chancer, acting on impulse, triggering the same old arguments. I half-wondered if Mum had seen this coming in Cornwall, and that’s what I had observed about her – the private realisation that she had been kidding herself that things could be different. Dad couldn’t suppress his old ways any more than she could suppress old resentments.
I was in my third year at comprehensive school when he disappeared again. It was only for a few days but it sideswiped Mum. It was a devastating betrayal, a betrayal of the belief that he had made her hold again. I came to understand its force over the next few weeks as she gradually retreated from us and herself, going inward and growing quieter, even when Dad returned. I think she tried to keep going and stay strong, but that characteristic st
rength started to drain away and she looked defeated.
I was tackling a load of laundry in the kitchen one Saturday morning when I went to take some towels upstairs to the airing cupboard in my parents’ room. I thought Mum was allowing herself a rare sleep-in past 9 a.m., but I found her lying on her side, eyes open, with a glazed look on her face.
‘You all right, Mum?’ I asked, but she didn’t respond. Even when I approached the bed and leaned down, she didn’t talk or move; she only breathed and stared ahead.
Terrified that something was seriously wrong, I went to fetch Maureen who, after taking one look at Mum, used our phone to call Dad, who must have been working on this particular Saturday. When he arrived home, Tracey and I were kept from going upstairs while they attended to Mum behind the closed bedroom door. Then the doctor turned up and I sat on the sofa, worried witless, wondering what on earth was happening.
As soon as he left, I bolted upstairs to find Mum wearing her nightie, sitting in a chair, shoulders slumped, with hands crossed over her chest, gently rocking in her seat. One look at Dad’s ashen face told me this was serious. In the end, he couldn’t take it and went downstairs to the kitchen. Tracey went to hug Mum but Mum only looked through her, and my sister stepped back, looking as confused as I was frightened. Maureen tried to placate our concern. ‘Don’t you worry, girls. Your mum’s having a funny turn, that’s all this is. We just need to let her rest. She’ll be back to her old self very soon.’
But I knew that wasn’t true. I knew it from her unconvincing smile and Dad’s shellshocked face.
That night, he put Mum to bed and slept on the sofa downstairs. But I couldn’t rest, petrified that she was either going to die or be taken into a home like Madame Lubatti. I checked on her repeatedly and, at some point during the early hours, I prayed for the first time. As a family we were Church of England but we weren’t religious and never attended church, so I don’t know where the need to pray came from, but it felt the right thing to do. With my eyes tightly shut, lying on my stomach, and hands clasped together, I recited the ‘Our Father’, as remembered from school assembly. I recited it several times because if there was a God, and He really did listen, then I wanted His attention. I wanted Him to help Mum get better. And I wanted Him to stop me feeling so scared and alone.
When I woke, the smell of a fry-up was drifting through the house. Dad was downstairs making breakfast. I went to check on Mum and she was unchanged, lying on her side, knees half-bent, with the duvet pulled up beneath her chin, eyes open. The most upsetting thing was her silence – she had locked herself away on the inside, retreating to somewhere deep where she presumably felt safe and couldn’t hurt any more. Later that day, when the doctor came round again, I overheard the words ‘nervous breakdown’, and that’s when I first understood what had happened.
Many years later, I would discover from a family member that Mum had suffered a breakdown in earlier life, before she married Dad, when living at home with her parents. Clearly, there was a fragility of mind she had shielded from me up until that point. Personally, I was scared enough by the sight of one breakdown, especially when I heard the doctor mention the possibility that she might have to be admitted to hospital if her condition didn’t improve.
That prospect generated a multiplicity of invented scenarios as my panicked thoughts went into overdrive, imagining our whole world imploding: If Mum’s taken away and Dad does his usual thing and disappears, there’ll be no one to look after us, and if there’s no one to look after us, we’ll be taken into care and . . .
And that was how I worked myself into a real tizzy, convinced that Mum was going to be carted away, while Tracey and I were seized by Social Services. In my eyes, the medication left behind by the doctor only seemed to make Mum even more listless and I didn’t foresee a speedy recovery. The only option I could see to keep everything together – to protect her and us – was to take charge and fend off all those outside forces that threatened our family.
‘Is Mum going to be okay?’ I asked Dad in the kitchen.
‘I don’t know, Jo. I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. He looked like a little boy lost, and I watched him roll cigarette after cigarette, trying to smoke away the stress, taking hurried drags every three or so seconds.
‘Dad, I’m going to look after her – you go to work. We need the money,’ I said, telling him that I’d skip school for the next two or three weeks. He raised no objections.
I think this was when I well and truly became the adult in the house, because I was worried no one else would. Or perhaps it was that I didn’t trust anyone else to be. Of course, neighbours rallied round, bringing food and checking in, but Mum had mumbled something about not wanting anyone to see her, not even her own sisters, Vera and Dot. They stopped by maybe once or twice but I don’t think anyone fully realised how much I covered for Dad.
I didn’t give school a second thought. I had more important things to worry about, such as, ‘How are we going to eat?!’ I looked in the kitchen cupboards and we had soup, bread and beans to last us one more day, not that Mum was eating yet. Then I remembered Family Allowance Day, meaning I’d have £2 to spend, and £2 felt like a football pools win. Based on my experience with John, the van man, I could make a small amount go a long way. I grabbed the allowance book, got Mum to scribble her signature, and raced to the post office to cash that slip. With money in my pocket, I nipped to the butcher’s, bought half a pound of mincemeat and then went to the corner shop for the essentials. Sometimes, Dad would bring home a Chinese takeaway, or Maureen would drop round a casserole, but it was mainly me doing the cooking – making a salad, beans on toast, soup, spaghetti bolognese or shepherd’s pie. Home economics classes had taught me well.
In the coming days, I quickly realised that my limited supplies wouldn’t last much beyond Tuesday, and we still needed to depend on Mum’s income. I noticed her enamel buckets stacked on the countertop, and that’s when I had a brainwave: if I can be ‘mum’ in Mum’s absence at home, then I can be ‘mum’ on the work front, too. I didn’t know what the clients had thought when she stopped turning up for work – to the best of my knowledge, they hadn’t been informed – but I would now earn the money we needed. She had enough ingredients in the house to make up a first batch of product, and I had made countless face creams on my own. I mean, how hard could it be?
I sat at our telephone table in the hallway with a pen and paper, pressed ‘play’ on the answering machine and wrote down the backlog of messages from clients who had rung in their orders. I called each one of them back and said their orders would be ready for pick-up on the following Wednesday at Mum’s clinic in Chelsea.
I knew that her supplier was Fields, so I found the number in the telephone directory and explained that Mum wasn’t well, and asked them to make up a repeat order of whatever she had last purchased. They were wonderful, arranging delivery to our door and allowing me to pay later, which provided some valuable breathing space. After ensuring more ingredients were in the pipeline, I set to work, placing the enamel bucket on the stove, preparing the jugs to pour the oil, and setting out the tubs to fill with face cream and the glass jars for juniper tonic.
I struggled at first to read all the labels on the different oils and waxes, but I muddled through, largely relying on my sense of smell to tell me which ingredient was which. By the end of the day, I had filled three dozen bottles and tubs. I told Mum what I was doing, even though I wasn’t sure it registered. I told her because I needed her to know that the business was going to be okay. I was fixing it. All she needed to do was rest and get better.
On the following Wednesday, I caught the train into London, carrying the product in a wheelie shopping trolley. Dad gave me money for a taxi to get from Charing Cross to Chelsea. The day before, I had bought a duplicate invoice book and written out all the orders and totals as receipts, running them by Dad to check the figures. I placed each woman’s product into a Chinese takeaway bag stuffed with white tissue
paper and laid them out against the wall. And then I waited for the buzzer at the main entrance to sound.
After half an hour, the silence was broken by the first client – a woman whose face I recognised from the TV. She asked how Mum was doing. ‘Still under the weather,’ I said. ‘Nothing serious, she’ll be back soon.’ The famous lady left with four jars of face cream worth about £4.50 each. A second customer bought two and didn’t leave before ensuring that more product would be available the following week.
Each customer did the same, placing the same order for the following week or fortnight. At the end of some brisk trade, I had made enough money to pay Fields and enough to feed us as a family. I had found a way to keep the money coming in, without depending on family allowance or Dad’s inconsistency in meeting his housekeeping responsibilities. No longer was I simply doing the chores – I was earning money on my own. Reliant on no one.
Depending on when the last client walked through the door, I’d be careful about timing my arrival back into Barnehurst station because I was scared that classmates or teachers would spot me and realise I was bunking off. I’d either catch a train long before school finished, or I’d leave it until 5 p.m.
Back home, after that first day, I took my handsome profit to buy food that would last a full week; the second thing I did was treat Tracey to a sorely needed pair of new school shoes and black plimsolls. And then I returned to the kitchen and made more product. The second week, I made an even bigger profit – and this was how I kept our lives rolling along for the next few weeks.
Dad came and went, sometimes going away ‘for work’ for three days, and I was fine with that because I had everything under control. The business was in good order, the house had never looked so spotless, and there was even a slight improvement in Mum’s condition – she had started eating again and getting dressed in the morning, even coming downstairs to make a cup of tea. She didn’t say much and remained a shadow of her former self, but it was a flicker of some self-motivation returning.