It’s all daft, isn’t it? This rubbish you read in romantic magazines – Charles Garvice and Ethel M. Dell – as if it was something mysterious and beautiful. It’s a revolting business. People walk in and out the room when you’re in the most peculiar position, you’re looking your worst and you’re suffering the tortures of the damned. It isn’t a bit like what you read in books. Not for the mother. It’s all right for the father – he just sits around.
The reason I had three children was because birth control at prices the working class could afford was only just beginning to come in. The well-to-do have always been able to have birth control either by doctors providing them with things, or with cosy abortions if they didn’t work. But all we did was try to be careful. Nobody told me about the ‘safe’ period. We didn’t chat about those sort of things then.
Mind you, I don’t think there is any safe period. The Catholics call it Roman Roulette down our way. I’m not one but when you look at some of the huge families that Roman Catholics have, either they wanted a huge family or they kept slipping up badly. It depends a lot on the sort of husband you’ve got, doesn’t it? I mean if a husband can regulate his desires to the safe period it may be all right. But what I know about men, they never regulate themselves. It just depends on how they feel. If they’ve had a damned good day at work they feel like a kind of a whoopee at night and they don’t bother to inquire. Or if you tell them it’s not all right they say, ‘Oh well, let’s take a chance.’ They don’t have to have them, you see. Makes all the difference in the world.
After I’d had two children I heard about a birth-control place in Ladbroke Grove for working-class women. It was in a very poor neighbourhood next door to the employment exchange; at that time there was a lot of unemployment around and the men used to hang about outside. The premises were a converted shop, and though it wasn’t labelled birth-control clinic all the men knew what it was; the women who went there used to feel so conspicuous, we used to slink up to and into the place as though we were doing something really depraved. The men used to grin as you went in – but it was worse when you came out. ‘All ready for it now, darling,’ they’d say – or words to that effect.
The methods they had then weren’t nearly as convenient as they are now. They were somewhat irksome to say the least and you had to keep coming back to be refitted. The thing was unattractive to look at and uncomfortable to wear. And you had to wear it most of the time. I mean you couldn’t ask your husband after you’d given him his supper whether he would be liable to require the contraption tonight – it’s not a sort of fireside conversation, is it? Anyway people like us didn’t discuss things like that – not working-class families. The whole thing was shrouded in gloom and mystery. You went to bed and you drew the blinds and you put the lights out and everything went on in the dark. It was all bound up with the way English people felt then about sex. Even amongst married people it was sort of faintly illegal. I suppose we consider that anything that’s nice and that we get for nothing must be illegal. As far as that contraption was concerned, if you went to bed without it and then discovered that it was required, it was either too late or it was the death knell of that spontaneous combustion that the love act ought to be. I mean, you just imagine when you’re sort of full of love and somebody nudges you and says, ‘Have you or haven’t you?’ If you haven’t, you’ve got to get out of bed and do all the preliminaries, so by the time you get in again all the emotions you had have evaporated in the cold night air. So that’s why we had three.
After Albert joined up I moved down to Hove. My mother got me a six-roomed house for a pound a week. It was cheap even then. Of course we’d not had a house in London and we’d only got enough furniture for three rooms so I put a bit in every room. At least everybody had a bedroom to themselves. The boys thought it was marvellous all having a room each instead of all being in one as they were before.
In spite of the fact that people were leaving the town there still seemed to be plenty about and a fair amount of life considering that it was wartime. And there were the troops, Canadian troops, not American. It was really too marvellous for words after living in London, where the ratio of women to men was about five women to one, to have all these spare men knocking around. And they’d come up and talk to you. They used to spin you the tallest yarns how they’d got ranches out in Calgary and Alberta and places like that and hunting lodges in the mountains. I didn’t believe them, of course, though I pretended to. What did it matter – they looked so marvellous in their uniforms?
Our local pub used to be full of them and six formed themselves into a singing group and they’d entertain us. They’re very sort of forthcoming, Canadians; they don’t suffer with inhibitions like the English. And they used to start singing and the whole pub would join in. Even Albert when he was on leave liked it and he’s not very gregarious. We used to have marvellous times at the local. Mind you, anywhere looks better to a female if there’s a lot of men about even although you’re not having anything to do with them – just the fact that they’re there and they’re surplus.
In a way I felt sorry for the British soldiers because these Canadians took the girls away from them. If you went into a pub with one of ours, he’d buy you one half-pint and you’d have to sit and sip it the entire evening. Whereas of course the Canadians could afford to buy whiskies and gin. Can you wonder that all the girls went stark raving mad for them? This business of everybody being so virtuous and all walking on the straight and narrow path – it’s only because the opportunity is lacking.
At that time I was doing daily work, charring. With the boys to keep, Albert’s money as a corporal wasn’t enough so I had to go out. The lady at one of the places I worked kept open house for the Canadians: officers of course not troops: and from time to time these officers would start chatting me up. They loved Brighton. When they had left Canada they thought they were in for a grim time but as they said, it was not only a home from home but it was far more. I remember Madam colouring up a bit when one of them said this, perhaps she thought I didn’t know what was going on. Then they’d say how hospitable people were over here and I’d say, ‘Yes, but you wouldn’t find them like this in the normal way, it’s just that the war brings out the best in people as well as the worst.’ That was a sort of innuendo.
Well, month after month went by and then one morning I woke up and somehow I could sense a difference in the town, a kind of quietness. I couldn’t think what it was. Something seemed to be missing. Anyway I went to work and the lady said, ‘They’ve gone.’ ‘Who’s gone?’ I said. ‘All the Canadians have gone.’ ‘They couldn’t have,’ I said, ‘they were here yesterday.’ ‘But didn’t you hear, all through the night those lorries? They’ve all gone. I shall be absolutely lost having nothing to do for them,’ she said. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that.
I’ve often wondered though what became of them all. I’ve never met any who came back. Some girls I knew got married to them and left to join them after the war, and of course there was the quota of unmarried mothers. But Brighton was like a gold-rush town around that time – like Canada had been with the Klondike – one moment it was filled with riotous assembly, with laughter and noise and then it was as if the mines were depleted. Suddenly the men were gone. Mind you, I think the publicans thought the gold had gone too; their trade fell right off.
Then gradually the town got back to normal as the local men came out of the Forces, but before that happened it seemed to me like a ghost town and my idea of a ghost town is a town full of females.
When Albert was demobbed in 1945 we were faced with a problem. He could have had his old job back but that meant moving to London and we couldn’t get anywhere to live there. Also the boys were doing well at school. So we decided to stay where we were. Albert tried to get a job as a milkman but at that time there weren’t any going.
When he went to the labour exchange there was the choice of two places. One was with the gas company as a kind of stoker a
nd the other one was a furniture remover. So he went to the furniture removers and they offered him the job. The wages were very low, only five pounds a week which even in 1945 wasn’t much. But even at that it was better than it had been. In the old days it was like being a docker. You went into the warehouse and if there was no work you got sent home again without pay. But although the wages were low the work was interesting which I think is important. I mean it’s far more important to have low wages and do a job that you really like doing than to have high wages and grind away week after week at something that bores you to tears.
It wasn’t static, not sitting on your backside in an office from nine to six. It wasn’t even like a milk round where you’re going around the same old customers for seven days a week twice a day. You’re going everywhere or anywhere. Albert went up to Scotland, into Wales, right down into Cornwall and he was meeting different people all the time. And he learnt about furniture and antiques of all kinds.
Eventually he became a packer because he was such a careful workman and he used to see to the most expensive china – like those Dresden figures that were in all nooks and crannies and worth thousands of pounds. He still got the same money but he looked on it as a sort of promotion. The hours were irregular – when you’re moving someone’s furniture you can’t say, ‘I’m knocking off now,’ when it comes to five or six o’clock. It can’t be left in the street, can it? But we didn’t mind irregular hours because we’d been used to them when he was a milkman.
At first I got very worried when he was late coming back at nights. I used to think of all the terrible road accidents that there were and wonder if something of the sort had happened to him. But, as he said, if anything did hit their pantechnicon they wouldn’t have suffered I remember one very foggy night, it was ten o’clock and they should have been back at five. I was that worried I rang up the manager of the firm to see if he’d had any news of them.
He said, ‘Mrs Powell, I’m worried too. They’ve got ten thousand pounds’ worth of antique furniture on board.’
There’s words of comfort for you!
I said, ‘To hell with your antiques, I’m thinking about Albert.’
That riled him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what do you think I can do? Take a lantern out to look for him? If so, you’ve got another bloody think coming.’
And he slammed the receiver down. Talk about old-world courtesy.
Albert’s had some strange jobs. One place they went to was an old lady’s house where she kept twenty-four cats. The council had put a compulsory moving order on her. It was too terrible for words. The place smelt like a sewer. And this old dear was in tears because these cats had got to go to a cats’ home. She knew them all individually – she’d lived with them for years. They’d each got their own basket with their name on. Albert and the others hated doing it but if it hadn’t been them it would have been someone else.
At another place they were getting a piano up the stairs and halfway it stuck and they couldn’t move it up or down. Well the old dear whose piano it was came down with plates of Hovis bread and butter. She said, ‘Hovis gives you strength.’ Well, I don’t know whether it did or not, but when they’d eaten it they gave a mighty heave gouging a great lump out of the wall and the piano went up. The company had an extremely irate letter from the landlord afterwards and they had to repair the damage. But as I said they ought to have passed the letter on to the baker, it was his fault.
Then there was a couple of young men that lived together – they had to move six times. Very charming young men so Albert said, but probably they got so charming around the place that they had to move on. Anyway every single thing in the house was marked with their initials. Except the pots under the bed – they were marked HIS and HERS.
16
THE THREE MONTHS that I spent in hospital – I had two periods of six weeks each – were very different indeed.
I first went because I had a gastric ulcer. It was in 1944 and there was no National Health Service then. I was suffering from indigestion according to my doctor.
I said to him, ‘I can’t understand why I can’t breathe properly.’
But he said it was indigestion and indigestion it had to be till I had a haemorrhage and was rushed into hospital to have a blood transfusion.
I often think that these people who talk about blood and breeding and who have to have blood transfusions don’t know what poor old plebeian stuff they’ve got knocking around in them. I remember when they were giving it to me I said, ‘I hope you’re giving me blue blood, I’m only used to the best.’
The nursing was splendid but the food and amenities for the patients in the public wards were deplorable. And the lack of privacy most distressing, especially for older people and particularly for those who had gone into hospital for the very first time.
None of the beds had curtains and only in the direst circumstances did they put screens around them. Some of the old people used to complain bitterly about this but it never did them any good because the more they complained the less consideration they got.
I always found during my stay in hospitals, and that includes before and after the National Health Service, that it’s best to accept everything that happens to you with the spirit of Job because that’s the only way you can really enjoy it. That way you get a reputation for being long suffering and uncomplaining and you’re held up to the other patients as a shining light.
The nurses say, ‘Look at Mrs Powell, she doesn’t ring her bell all day long and she doesn’t ask us to keep doing this, that and the other for her.’
The fact that all the other patients get to detest you doesn’t matter because they’re not looking after you. It’s the nurses you’ve got to rely on for your comfort. So I never complained about anything. I just let it all happen to me.
Once I had recovered sufficiently to be able to walk around the other patients soon forgot their animosity because I did little jobs for them – like getting a jug of water or something out of their locker or bringing them their tea. And then patients are always dying to talk to someone about their home, their husbands and their children. Curiously enough I never found many patients wanted to talk about their operations or what they were in there for. Not then.
When they get home they do, but I think it’s too near to them in hospital. They try to pretend almost that it doesn’t exist. It’s rather like a conversation I once overheard between two women.
One was saying to the other, ‘Oh, I’ve got such pains in my stomach and I have to keep on taking these Rennies to relieve it.’
So the other said, ‘Haven’t you been to the doctor, then?’
She said, ‘No. I’m scared to go to the doctor because he might send me to the hospital and they might say it’s cancer.’
Well, the pain wouldn’t go away would it? But she thought that if she didn’t give it a name, it wasn’t there. And that’s how I found they were in hospital.
Although as I’ve said I kept quiet, before the National Health Act there was plenty to complain about in the public wards.
The meals were the worst thing. They used to be served on battered old tin trays with no cloth on of course, and as I was in there with ulcers it was mainly cod that tasted and felt like cottonwool. And the mashed potatoes had hard concrete lumps in them and were nearly always stone cold. You really had to be hungry to eat it. Mostly the sweet was a milk pudding and it was either so stiff you could have bounced it on the floor, or it was hard grains floating around in milk.
And when it was time for the bedpans the nurses used to deal them out on beds as you would a pack of cards. And there we used to sit parked on them, in full view of each other, and there was one toilet roll between four. And we’d throw it from bed to bed and sometimes we’d miss and it would roll down the ward like a large streamer. And we’d go into hysterics of mirth. It was the only way to accept the humiliation of it all.
That was my first stay in hospital and I hoped it would be my last.
> But some years after, by this time there was the National Health Service, I discovered that I had a lump about the size of a small marble underneath my breast. I went straight to the doctor and he sent me to the hospital for an examination.
And what a change I found. You were treated as though you mattered. Even the waiting-room was different. No dark green paint, whitewash, and wooden benches. There were separate chairs with modern magazines – not the kind that Noah had around in the Ark.
They told me that I should have to have a minor operation for the cyst to be removed, but that I would only be in there about a week.
And again what a difference I saw. The beds for instance. The bed that I’d had before was like lying on the pebbles on Brighton beach. I got to know every lump in it and used to arrange myself around them. But now I had a rubber mattress. I felt as though I could have lain there for ever.
And the food was beautiful. All served on brightly coloured trays with the right cutlery. I remember one day I was waiting for my lunch when the matron came round; she saw my tray and said to the nurse, ‘Isn’t this patient having fish for her lunch today?’
And the nurse said, ‘Yes, Matron, she is.’
‘Well why hasn’t she got a fish knife and fork then? Change it instantly.’
I was amazed. I couldn’t have cared less because we hadn’t got any fish knives and forks at home. But that just shows you, doesn’t it?
And there was variety. I don’t think we ever saw the same meal twice in one week and that needs some doing. It just showed what kind of kitchen staff they’d got. Presumably under the National Health Act they could afford to pay them more wages than before. When I was in service you were considered the lowest of the low if you worked in hospital kitchens.
Climbing the Stairs Page 12