Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue
Page 17
The bicycle is taller than Cora, and much heavier too, and she cannot easily reach the handle bars or pedals, but kind, patient Eva, who was never too busy to play, and was a willing participant always, regardless of what your game interrupted, hoists Cora on to the seat and holds her until she tires. Eva stands for what must have felt like hours, singing to my mum as she rides: ‘Oh, Flo, why do you go/ Riding alone in your motor car?/ People will say you’re pec-u-li-ar/ Sing-u-lar, so you are/ … There’s room for two, me and you…’
‘Again,’ instructs Cora, and so Eva sings again, ‘Oh, Flo, why do you go…’ They ride for miles, travelling to unknown, mysterious places, accompanied by their special bicycle song. Pins slip from Eva’s hair and drop to the ground disregarded; she needs both hands to steady Cora and the bike. While Eva sings, they gaze through the attic window, looking across the rooftops towards the hills and moorland. Cora pictures magical journeys and fairytale trees. Eva’s thoughts are known only to herself.
Willie was still not feeling tiptop. The tonic he used to douse his malaria did not always keep it at bay. He’d lie cocooned in hot sheets slick with sweat, but icy cold the minute he tried to move. Willie’s bakery book contains a recipe for a second tonic, stronger than the first, with amounts more appropriate to emergency treatment than regular use: Quinine 0.67; Diluted Sulphuric Acid 2.5; Phosphoric 54.6; Alcohol 8.1; Water to 100. In an attempt to control his discomfort, Willie seems to have dosed himself with larger and larger quantities.
Sometimes Willie was forced to go to bed as soon as he returned from the bakery. And it wasn’t just the sweats: his stomach was plaguing him too, a scouring sensation he couldn’t account for. Cora and Annie heard him groaning. ‘He’s moaning again,’ Annie would say, and disappear upstairs to rub Willie’s back with Sloan’s Liniment. What good a jar of Sloan’s Liniment could do was anybody’s guess, but it seemed to ease his pain and was the best thing Annie could think to offer. Doctors cost a shilling a visit and would only insist: rest, plenty of milk, a good diet. On evenings like these, Willie was adamant: ‘Don’t let Cora see me like this.’ She did not need to see him: his groans were bad enough. She also saw how Annie’s lips tightened as she headed upstairs. Even at this young age, Cora knew her sympathy exceeded her mother’s.
Occasionally, however briefly, Annie had to get away. The grocer’s shop next door had a telephone tucked at the back of a storeroom and, on those days, she asked her neighbour if she could make a call. Taking Cora with her, Annie led the way up a set of stairs that smelled of Izal and old biscuits. Cora had no idea who her mam was calling. In her world, telephones were as rare as private cars. George was a headmaster by this time, however, with a private telephone in his study. ‘This is our secret, Cora,’ Annie always said. ‘This is just between the two of us. You understand?’
Towards the end of 1933, Willie was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer. There would be no more elaborate loaves and fancy pastries. His days at the bakery were over. Ulcers were not so easily treatable then as they are today; major stomach operations could be life-threatening. As predicted, Willie’s doctor advised a good diet, nothing acidic, plenty of rest, lots of fresh milk and – no alcohol.
His bakery days behind him, Willie joined the long list of the unemployed. By 1933, Chesterfield was as gripped by the Depression as the rest of the old industrial landscape and, although it had no place there, Willie’s worsening health was absorbed by that much larger story. With so many men in need of work, his being at home wasn’t much remarked upon. Clusters of men stood outside factory gates looking gaunt and strained; some, with war medals clipped to their lapels, daring anyone to challenge them as wastrels. ‘The shadow of unemployment’ was much debated, but talking about it came nowhere close to the actual experience. People were scratching for slack on the coal tips again; children – and grown men – went without shoes, or felt each stone on the pavement through paper-thin soles. Some men, ashamed of their situation, disappeared after breakfast to reappear at night with a story they’d concocted about their day. Willie felt it important to make a distinction: there was a difference between being off sick and being unemployed.
Then, as now, there was an appetite for personal stories of difficulty or endurance and, thanks to greater numbers owning cameras, an increasing demand for photographs of the general public. ‘Guineas for kiddies’ snapshots. Send Yours Now,’ Woman’s Life pleaded on its front cover. Pictures appeared week after week, none of them, in Annie’s estimation, anywhere near as lovely as her daughter. Local newspapers printed readers’ snaps too; Annie looked out a picture of Cora. Though it seems out of character for her to advertise their distress, I assume she wanted to salvage something from their situation, especially with Christmas drawing near. The photograph was accepted, printed, and paid for. Its caption read: ‘Daddy is out of Work, but Cora believes in Santa.’ Willie was furious.
14
Afternoon Visiting
THE STAPLE GOODS SOLD BY THE CORNER SHOP DID NOT change that much, though, by the early 1930s, their numbers had been swelled by modern living. Almo, Compo, Glaxo, Kelso, Mazo, Rinso, Omo, Puro…the number of products ending in ‘o’ far exceeded any that could be sung by a barbers’ quartet. Even the manufacturers of animal feed joined in with the baser notes of Chikko. This formula permeated everyday speech: my mum thought Annie’s steam puddings were cracko.
Donald Duck lollies provided a ha’penny lick; Vita-Weat, Ryvita and Energen were sold alongside the usual loaves of bread, while the begoggled chauffeurs decorating tins of Chocolate Assortment had long been replaced by slim young women with flyaway scarves and a casual wave for the pedestrians they were zooming away from.
Station Road acquired its own fish and chip shop: Arthur and Elsie Scott were doing good business in a small hut opposite the wood; Friday nights now sang with salt and vinegar. If Mrs Rudge, the current greengrocer, had fewer customers than Betsy, some said it was because her fruit was hard as nag nails, others thought her high heels and dyed hair were a factor. ‘It wouldn’t do for us all to look the same,’ said Betsy in her pacifying way, while privately observing how quickly fresh fruit and vegetables were relegated in budgets already pared down to their basics. ‘House’ shops came and went – people setting up shop in their front room, selling chocolate, cigarettes and tinned goods for a matter of months, or longer if they made a go of it; Fiddler’s shop, higher up Station Road, served customers in the next stretch of houses. There were new publicans too, Mr and Mrs Simms, who, like the publicans before them, befriended Dick and Betsy, retailers sticking together.
Mrs D of Derby is 35 years old and has five children (all boys) and lives in a small Corporation house. Her husband is an unemployed labourer and her housekeeping is £2 1s 0d of which she gives the following particulars of expenditure:
Rent 12 6
2 boxes matches 0 2
Gas and Electric Light (6d each) 1 0
1 lb soap 0 5
Clothing Club 3 0
1 packet wash powder 0 2
Boot Club 1 0
1 packet starch 0 1
Coal, 2cwt 3 0
1 lb soda 0 1
Milk 2 9 ½
1 packet salt 0 1
Bread 3 3 ½
¼ lb cooked ham @ 1/10 0 5 ½
Insurance 1 6
Old potatoes 0 6
2 lbs margarine @ 4d 0 8
1 lb New potatoes 0 3
½ lb butter @ 1/- 6d
1 lb onions 0 2
6lbs sugar 1 3
Radishes, spring onions and
½ lb tea 0 9
lettuce 0 6
¼ lb cocoa 0 4
Cauliflower 0 2
½ lb lard 0 3
Oranges 0 3
½ lb cheese 0 3
Piece of meat (beef) @ 1/3 1 3
1 doz eggs 1 6
Breast of mutton @ 8d 0 4
1 lb bacon 0 11
½ lb corn beef 0 3
1 bag self-raising flour 0 5
1 lb loose peas 0 4
Sweets for kiddies 0 2
Total £2 1s 0d
– From Margery Spring Rice, Working-Class Wives, 1939, a detailed portrait of working-class life in the 1930s that ‘stripped off the veil of indifference which concealed the hardship of millions of women’
Some things remained the same. The butcher’s pressed meats still shaded from pink to pale grey, ha’penny ducks continued to seep dark brown gravy. Gas mantles were still on sale. For the first few years of my mum’s life, her height was measured by comparing the distance between the top of her head and the bottom of the gas light when she stood on her grandma’s table. Roach powder remained as essential as ever – for Betsy as well as her customers. One night a week, before going up to bed, she sprinkled the hearth, and came down to find a mound of blackclocks the next day. Lads still congregated outside the corner shop, still dragged on a shared Woodbine, though, these days, their cigarette smoke curled around talk of TT races and the town’s skating rink.
Eva took the plunge and shingled her hair, allowing its newly shorn ends an irrepressible bounce. She returned from the hair-dresser with her rope of hair weighting the bottom of a pillowcase like some slumbering creature. No more elaborate ornaments and combs; the days of scattering pins were behind her. Eva looked attractive with short hair and wondered why she had left it so long. She took herself to Arthur’s Studio and sat for a celebratory photograph.
These days, Eva often read the newspaper aloud. Dick read slowly, making out words in a laboured way, but Betsy was wholly reliant on Eva. For local news, they preferred the Yorkshire Telegraph & Star to the Derbyshire Times, and caught up with national misdoings and scoundrels via the News of the World. Eva marked titbits to amuse Annie and saved the Gloops cartoon, the weekly story of a lisping cat, and his antics with Aunt Emma, a typically hatchet-faced ‘spinster’, for Cora. For six coupons posted to the Star, Cora could join the Gloops Club. (‘All Gloops members are enrolled on equal terms, whether sons of the Prime Minister or daughters of the Sweep.’) The next time she visited the corner shop, a badge, a special password and a set of rules awaited her. ‘Gloops’ members should always try to be happy by Thmiling! Thmiling!! Thmiling!!’
As a treat, Cora and Katie Stokes were taken to Saturday-morning cinema, where they learned to thumb their noses like George Formby, and on trips to the seaside. (Usually, Eva or Betsy accompanied Annie and Cora on days out: one or the other, rarely both, thanks to the tyranny of the shop. Dick always stayed behind. To his mind, sandcastles and sticks of rock were female pleasures, and the walk would have been difficult for him.) Katie did not have a suitable frock and so Annie made one for her, with a pair of matching knickers so she could paddle in the sea. A day on Blackpool sands, a packet of warm egg sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade that was never quite as fizzy when they came to drink it as when they took it from the shop window.
Most of the time, Cora and her friends played on the rough ground between the corner shop and the pub, as had Annie and Eva before her. Trips to other people’s houses were infrequent, but sometimes she called for Katie, whose family fascinated her. Katie’s mother, Edna, was one of the girls who used to sluice her brothers’ backs when they returned from the pit; Katie’s father, Clem, had not worked since his return from the war. His was a desperate existence: long years spent propping up his smashed jaw. This thin, gaunt man rarely left his fireside chair. Though he always smiled and said hello to Cora, he rarely said anything more. Clem had plenty to be silent about.
Like many poorer householders in the 1930s, Edna and Clem could not afford to furnish both downstairs rooms; their front room contained a bicycle and little else. As with all the houses at Wheeldon Mill, their kitchen was the hub of the home. To accommodate the whole family, plus their lodger, Edna’s brother, Charles, required some engineering. The family ate in shifts, there being too few chairs for everyone to sit down at once.
Doughty Edna was a sturdy woman and a loving mother with a big lap, like Annie’s. Cora often found her cuddling Georgie, who, even at the age of six, refused to be parted from his titty bottle of cold tea, but sat on their back step with his comforter. Katie’s eldest brothers worked down the pit; her middle brother, Punka – a name acquired when he was small and always up to his eyes in dirt (and mischief) – was still at school.
Edna’s brother was called Charles to his face, but was known as Charlie, and would probably have been described as a ‘mucky toff’. Though his weekday garb consisted of work trousers, shirt and braces, weekend evenings transformed him. When Charles went out – and only ever into Chesterfield town centre, he did not frequent the Great Central Hotel – he put on a new personality, together with his Saturday togs. This would-be dandy dressed with enormous care in a dark suit, black overcoat with an astrakhan strip, and a starched shirt and butterfly collar. His charcoal-grey gloves buttoned at the wrist; he wore spats and a grey homburg; his sharp moustache harked back to his Edwardian youth. On Saturday evenings, Charles could be seen striding down Station Road, swinging a black cane before him. Though his sister spoke in a Derbyshire brogue, his accent was slightly clipped. He wanted to make something of himself.
Whatever his weekend life and the dreams he was waiting on, Charles paid for them during the week. Reduced once more to shirtsleeves and braces, he lived on two ounces of polony, a cheap meat paste bought from my great-grandma’s shop and spread as thinly as possible on to slices of bread. By the fourth or fifth day, it would be greening.
No matter what hour my mum called for Katie, or invited Georgie to come and make mud pies, the light in their house seemed dingy. Late afternoon visits were especially gloomy. I suspect that, short of the sixpence needed for the meter, Edna held on for as long as she possibly could. By contrast, whenever the living room behind the cake shop was plunged into darkness, Annie found her purse straightaway. ‘Where was Moses when the lights went out?’ was her immediate bright refrain for the moment it took to find the coin.
Equally fascinating for Cora were visits to her Uncle Jim. The 1930s were good for Jim Thompson, as for many others in work. His vans still drove along Whittington Moor, advertising Thompson’s ‘Gold Medal’ Bakery (‘Hygienic’, with its Edwardian overtones, having fallen by the wayside). The business was flourishing, as was Jim’s political career. By now, he was an Independent councillor, extremely active in local politics.
Had Willie stayed well, he would have continued working for Jim. (Provided the brothers remained on good terms. They did fall out on occasion, though neither remembered why; it was not connected with the mix-up over the bakery. ‘I wouldn’t cross the road to speak to him,’ Willie insisted, though the argument was mended soon enough.) Jim and Bernard were still regular visitors to the cake-shop house, together with their wives, Edith and Ida, wafting Yardley’s Lavender and Parma Violets into the back room, and pulling gifts for Cora from within their big fur coats.
Return visits to Uncle Jim and Auntie Edith were like stepping into a different world. A maid in a white cap, black dress and frilly apron opened the stained-glass door and showed them into the hallway. (Had Jessie Mee greeted Mrs Sedgwick’s guests, I wonder?)
Hallways themselves were unknown to Cora: in all the other houses she knew, you stepped straight into the living room, having come to the back door, not the front. There were numerous rooms off the hallway, but Annie and Cora were shown into a panelled one which, on the occasions they visited, seemed to be scented with roses. This large sunny room must have witnessed some genteel parties, with ladies swishing past one another in taffeta silk. During my mum’s visits, it offered afternoon tea, scones, jam tarts and sponge cake (from Uncle Jim’s bakery, where else?), and sugar cubes you grasped with silver tongs. Cora loved this grander world and had no feeling of being a poor relation; Annie loved to visit too, but though Annie was fond of Jim and admired him, the contrast between his life and Willie’s was looking increasingly stark. No one
was more conscious of that than Willie.
Without money, it was impossible to maintain self-respect. There was Jim with his business, his seventeenth-century house, his maid and chauffeur-driven car; even his baby brother Bernard had a maid as well as a car. What could you do without money?
The cigarette case Annie bought him went first, then the cufflinks with their little ruby specks. Gold was an easy currency. Not that Willie was paid over-much. He did not slink past a pawnbroker’s window, too ashamed to show he’d been there. Willie sold his jewellery outright and had real money to show for it. If he tapped his trouser pocket, the coins answered with a satisfying clink. He celebrated with a sunshine beer.
Next, it was his tiepin with the garnet in the centre. Eventually, he sold Annie’s jewellery too. (If only he had pawned that – at least she’d have had the chance to redeem it.) Things disappeared so discreetly my grandma didn’t notice straightaway. She did not think to look for her little lapel brooch until she wanted something to pin on her jacket. She didn’t make a habit of checking her jewellery box: a rather handsome box, a deep plum velvet, in a silver filigree case. That went too, in the end. One day, there was a space on the dressing table where the box once stood. As Willie’s disappointment and ill-health raced to outdo one another, his magpie ways accelerated. Years later, you might mention a particular style of jewellery and my grandma would say, ‘Mmm. I had one of those. But it went.’