Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue

by Knight, Lynn

  A further occasion to see gypsies – or the promise of them, at least – was the annual Feast on Stand Road. This was an early-evening excursion for Eva and Cora; Annie disliked fairgrounds and Willie preferred to visit after the pub. (Pub or no, he was a crack shot with a wooden ball and nearly always brought home a coconut.)

  If Cora hovered near the edge of the fair, tiptoeing as close to the caravans as she dare – hardly close at all, though it felt dangerously close to her – she might, just might, spot a gypsy. The half-light rarely revealed anyone, but there was never anything disappointing about the Feast. A bombardment of noise and excitement, swingboats flashing colour out of darkness, raucous voices adding to and clashing with the hum of generators and the medley of fairground tunes. Penny rides and penny fortunes, merry-go-rounds and helter-skelters, a whirl of noise and gaudy paintwork, the smell of sweat jostling with that of spun sugar, frying onions and sixpenny scent.

  Some Feasts had sideshows; one year, a flea circus, a pitiful attraction in which fleas the size of house flies navigated miniature bridges and other obstacles placed in their path, and walked round and round an oversize table. Larger crowds (no less curious than their nineteenth-century cohorts) queued to see the Freak Show, approached via a walkway raised like a gangplank, but with handrails. Two pelicans, snapping sentries, stood either side of the entrance; one sharp beak clipped my mum when she and Eva reached the tent. A further rope penned them, forcing all spectators along a narrow path designed to channel their excitement for what lay ahead. A waif-like girl with a delicate face and long fair hair sat waiting in a white muslin gown with a blue sash. Her sleeveless dress revealed that she had tiny hands and fingers, but no arms; a tiny silver wristwatch emphasised the delicacy of her tiny wrist. The crowd slowed down to stare, examining her on all sides and from all angles, before disappearing into the night to get their money’s worth on something else. The poor girl remained there, roped off, marooned in the middle of the tent.

  Popular children’s hairstyles of the day were the pudding-basin haircut or the bob with a side parting, and strands of hair caught up in a slide or bow (the bow half-mast come playtime). My grandma favoured neither style for Cora. She took her lead from Royalty.

  You could follow the lives of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose in newspapers and women’s magazines. The first royals to truly grow up in the eye of the press, they were snapped whenever possible and fed to an eager public whose fascination with the little royals (and girls too, how charming) meant their lives, clothing and hairstyles were well documented. Modern Home promised ‘Princess Elizabeth’s Life Story’; Home Chat invited you to save coupons for a child’s cut-out frock ‘like Princess Elizabeth wears’.

  The Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose wore their hair slightly longer than the fashion and it curled in natural waves. My mum wore her hair slightly longer too, and she had curls, soft ringlets, although hers had to be created overnight. No matter how tired she and Annie were, Cora’s hair was dampened and twisted on to the cotton rags she slept in to produce loose ringlets the next day. Cora enjoyed the effect as much as Annie. She also wore her hair in a fringe, a style favoured by some of the toffs, and which was, I suppose, entirely appropriate for a child chosen by Princess Alice.

  My grandma’s generation was steeped in pageantry and flag-waving. Born in an age of deference, Annie was drilled in the Kings and Queens of England, and taught them in her turn (a parting gift from one grateful school was a history of the monarchy, bound in suede – purple suede, of course). Royalty always fascinated her. Deference informed my mum’s childhood too. Her infant years were chequered with school holidays for royal occasions. School closed for royal weddings (and George V’s funeral); pupils regularly saluted the flag. A whole week’s timetable was given over to the 1935 Silver Jubilee, with a day off for the actual event. Annie and Eva both ordered Jubilee picture books (one between two households wouldn’t do).

  Buoyed up by this general enthusiasm, Willie bought a Silver Jubilee flag, not a little tu’penny-ha’penny flag to wave in a deferential gesture, but a large Union Jack which he hoisted outside the landing window. If he thought to curry favour with Annie, it was another poorly judged scheme. Annie had better uses for a shilling and no desire to make a show of the house.

  OUR KING, A SHINING EXAMPLE OF FITNESS

  There can be no need to draw to your attention to one feature which stands out from the remarkable pictures of the King with the soldiers of the Empire which appear in to-day’s issue, for it will be obvious to every reader. The King, as revealed by these pictures, is clearly not only of fine, soldier-like bearing, but of excellent physique.

  ‘He looks like a Test cricketer just back from Australia,’ we heard someone in the crowd the other day say of His Majesty. It was not an idle compliment, it was the truth…

  …The King is indeed filled with that kind of energy and enthusiasm which can only come with robust health and a good constitution. He has come to the Throne at a time when ‘keep fit’ is a slogan, when a determined effort is being made to improve the physique of everybody, men and women as well as children, so that they may the better take their share of the tasks that lie ahead. And in his own person he is a shining example to us all.

  – From a leader, Annie’s Daily Sketch, 15 May 1937

  Even more elaborate celebrations were planned when, in 1937, the Duke of York ascended the throne. The Coronation medal Cora received at school was as nothing compared with the cut-out Coronation game Annie bought her, complete with crown and sceptre, liveried footmen, carriage and courtiers, not to mention tiny cardboard princesses. It was all such a relief after Edward (another topic for Sunday afternoon debate: the family loved Edward because he talked to the Derbyshire miners and was a friend of the common man, but – that woman! While Annie and Eva discussed the Abdication, Cora drew a picture of a figure with corrugated hair and wrote underneath it: The Woman He Loved.)

  Chesterfield fêted the new king and queen with bunting, banners and streamers. Flags flew from the roof of Eyre & Son’s; Woodhead’s Grocer and Café (which could always be relied on for decorum) favoured window boxes with red rhododendrons, blue hydrangeas and marguerites. Eva’s Coronation Souvenir Book, with its bright gold boards and colour images (plus a surprisingly cordial press for Wallis Simpson), was far superior to her Silver Jubilee volume. The Daily Sketch promised Annie the Best Royal Pictures Ever (one penny).

  But it rained like the devil on Saturday, 12 May. By lunchtime, Chesterfield’s High Street was a vision of soggy bunting and drooping flags. The town’s main celebrations were deferred for a week, but numerous children’s teas went ahead, including the one Cora attended at Wheeldon Mill, a squall of sticky buns and weak orange squash in the hangar owned by local businessman Joe Pass.

  All manner of children’s treats took place during my mum’s childhood; countless buns were consumed at trestle tables and sack races run, with a colliery band oomphing in the background, but the most memorable, as far as Cora was concerned, was organised by the Derbyshire Times.

  On alternate years, the Derbyshire Times provided a Christmas Treat for the children of Chesterfield’s unemployed, and made an appeal for donations. Benefactors’ names were printed in the paper; in 1936, the proprietors kicked things off with £10. All surplus money supported a fund which, since its inception, had provided nearly 10,000 pairs of boots for the borough’s poor and destitute children. While weighing up their charitable instincts at the breakfast table, readers could turn the page and observe those with far deeper pockets than themselves: the Marquess of Tweeddale, the Viscountess Massereene and others of their party, photographed shooting in Derbyshire’s Alfreton Park.

  The ‘ladies of Chesterfield’ dressed more than 800 dolls for that year’s Treat, which were put on general display before being distributed. The 2,300 children invited to the event (which included the children of widows) necessitated parties on two consecutive afternoons.

  My m
um was entertained by Punch and Judy, conjuring tricks and knockabout clowns. There were sweets as well as cakes for tea; a tinsel headdress for each girl and paper caps for the boys, but the whole thing was quite overwhelming. A thousand-plus children enjoying themselves in a cavernous hall make a terrific din. Cora’s chief memory was of the community singing and of the helper pointing out each phrase on a vast scroll of paper, panto mime style. Though she did not know ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’ (someone’s idea of combining a moral lesson with a party song?) when she arrived at the Treat, she was word-perfect by the time she left. My mum was one of the girls who received a doll (other gifts included pencil cases, books and tea sets), a pretty blonde doll in pale pink net. She swapped her for a dark-haired doll in a silver lamé jacket, which at least looked a bit more like her.

  Cora must have mentioned the Boot Fund Treat at school because her Junior School headmistress, Miss Holden (who was nothing like the Infants’ tyrant) took Annie aside and advised her that this was not a suitable event for her daughter, and on no account should she attend another one. My mum was immensely relieved to be spared further regimented entertainment.

  For some of the girls attending the Derbyshire Times Treat, a doll was their only Christmas gift – as in the 1900s, poor children still looked to charity for dolls. Not so, my mum. Her circumstances were a mishmash of the times: weekly cinema-going versus the Means Test, brand-new toys versus an invitation to attend the Boot Fund Treat. Cora danced at a concert intended to raise funds for the Treat she later attended (Joan Mason’s School of Dancing put on the show). She was entertainer and recipient both.

  The Boot Fund Treat and Means Test bore the stamp of officialdom but, for Annie and Cora, these seemed like the aberrations in their life. Family treats were provided by Betsy and Eva whose own needs were relatively few, and, if Annie had money to spare, it was spent on Cora. There were comics to read – from Chick’s Own to Comic Cuts and the Beano – as well as Christmas books, and piano lessons along with dancing classes (Eva paid the 1/6 for Miss Alice Brocklehurst to teach Cora on her baby grand). Falling on harder times did not mean the neglect of former values. And Annie’s ability to run up a dress or make one over meant that clothes could always be provided. In fact, at a time when even girls whose parents were reasonably well-off had relatively few clothes, my mum had quite a number. (I know this because, a few years later, she made a list.)

  None of this would have been possible without the generosity of Betsy, Dick and Eva; and Annie, too, when she had the shillings – but their larger generosity was of spirit. Instead of the prevailing attitude, ‘You’ll have what you’re given,’ there was choice, a concept making waves in the adult world by this time, but which was far slower to percolate down through childhood. My mum chose the pattern and colour of the jumpers Eva knitted for her birthdays, and the buttons and any detailing Annie put on her clothes. ‘If I’ve got it, you can have it,’ was their view. It was still present in my childhood too with Annie and Eva. And although it manifested itself in material ways, this generosity was really all about nurturing and encouragement. In all kinds of ways, small as well as large, my mum knew how much she was loved.

  One of Willie’s less contentious schemes was his acquisition of an ornamental clock. A cast-iron clock with a small ceramic face, it depicted a country boy in a soft hat, open shirt and knee breeches, striding with his hunting horn, his faithful hound bounding on ahead. Green grass, willowy trees, fine flowers, birds flying above in an eighteenth-century rural idyll; the grass all the greener when Willie took up oil painting and added his own small dabs of paint. The clock was said to be a copy of one owned by local industrialist Charles Paxton Markham, owner of the Staveley Coal & Iron Company, magistrate, thrice Mayor, and reader of the Riot Act. This ‘man of plain words’, who ‘liked plain speaking,’ as the Derbyshire Times reported at his death, was something of a local celebrity, and was often referred to as ‘Charlie’.

  There are many stories about Charlie Markham: of how he drove his car – a yellow Rolls-Royce – into the closed gates of his home, Ringwood Hall, when his (second) wife refused to get out to open them; and of how he bought his mistress a fur coat, on condition – so the story circulated within Chesterfield’s public houses – that she wear nothing beneath it. (Though how the taprooms knew what Charles Markham told his mistress is anybody’s guess.) This great industrialist asked that, when he died, ‘the fumes and smoke of the Devonshire Works would blow over his remains’. As in life, so in death, Charles Paxton Markham got his wish. When he died in 1926, he was buried in Staveley Cemetery, a few miles from my great-grandma’s shop. His clock outlived him. Willie’s replica stood on the hearth in the second bedroom for many years, contributing its own small detail to the Markham legend. A drinking pal of Willie’s had supposedly copied the original for himself. ‘Would you do one for me?’ Willie asked. ‘ I won’t tell, if you don’t.’ (And nor did he.)

  One dark night, when Annie and Cora returned to Racecourse Road after an evening dance class, it was obvious someone had been in the living room. The house was silent but the table and chairs had been moved and, when they called upstairs, no answer came from Willie. They were only just starting to absorb this when Mrs Blake, their neighbour, shouted through the door and came into the house without knocking. Willie had been taken to hospital and the furniture moved by the men who stretchered him away. He had groped his way downstairs and knocked on the party wall to alert their adjoining neighbour to run to the pub and phone for an ambulance. Willie was diagnosed with a perforated duodenal ulcer.

  The hospital was a vile place with miles of dark-green walls and intimidating smells. It took several minutes for Annie and Cora to reach Willie’s ward via identical duplicating corridors. Two rows of men with putty-coloured faces and crumpled pyjamas looked up when they entered the room.

  They heard Willie before they saw him; caught his unmistakeable laughter, saw smiling faces in the adjacent beds. He was entertaining his fellow captives with a funny story. They were in need of humour there: all conversation was interrupted by men coughing and hacking into sputum dishes. Nurses patrolling the ward handed out fresh ones as if distributing sweets.

  My mum danced around the table when Willie came home, and told him everything that had happened to her that day, conjuring up and embellishing all the minutiae of school to entertain him. Even as she was doing this, Cora knew that her excitement, though every bit of it was real, was also a performance designed to show Willie how much she had missed him and how pleased she was he was home.

  A fire was lit in the second bedroom, where Willie slept by then. (Cora had been promoted from her large cot to share a bed with Annie. ‘It’s better for him here,’ Annie explained, when the move took place, ‘and will ensure your dad gets sufficient rest.’) It was winter and the firelight in the room was reflected in the handles on the chest of drawers, and snickers of flame were repeated in the wardrobe mirror. A bedroom fire was a rarity; its reddening glow was transforming.

  Willie’s brother Godfrey and his sister Gertie came to visit, bringing laughter and talk into the room, as always. For once, Willie is the centre of attention. Warmth, laughter, firelight dancing on dark wood: everything is going to be all right now, Cora is certain.

  The far end of the living room, made narrow by the stairwell on the other side of the wall, was given over almost entirely to my mum. The space beneath the front window sill, crammed with Annie’s Busy Lizzies and pelargoniums (I only have to rub a lemon-scented leaf and I’m back at my grandma’s house), made a discrete play area. A chair and a small table at the opposite side of the room made a snug corner for Annie; Willie sprawled on the sofa to read John Bull and Picture Post.

  When she was small, Cora could sit in her mam’s big lap, sinking further and further into her skirt, while she heard all about Diddums and similar characters. Lovely Annie, gentle and kind (except when it came to Willie), knew how to entertain a child. She and my mum read Now We Are Six a
nd recited its verses together; Cora coloured in Ernest H. Shepard’s illustrations (and those she left blank, I coloured later, when it became my turn). But my grandma was a schoolmistress too; there was always a hint of the schoolma’am about Annie. ‘Have you been a good girl, Jane?’ she would ask, borrowing from A. A. Milne a question that was never only playful.

  When she was able to read by herself, Cora worked her way through Enid Blyton’s books as they were published, The Wind in the Willows, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. She also read Daddy-Long-Legs – Annie and Willie loved Mary Pickford in the film and bought this orphan’s story for my mum, who delighted in its pages without knowing she had mysteries in her own childhood too. When Chesterfield’s New Children’s Library opened in 1936, Cora was one of its 5,000 members. She produced labels for each shelf of Annie’s bureau, their subjects enunciated as clearly as in any proper library – Drama, History, Shakespeare… Apart from her Uncle Jim’s house, theirs was the only one Cora knew with books and a bookcase on view.

  DOES DETECTIVE FICTION LOWER OUR ETHICAL STANDARDS?

  Do we read [detective novels] because they fulfil our ideas of life and morals? Or are they built up as they are to suit our prevalent conceptions? Are we for them, or are they for us?

  I do not know… One conclusion has fashioned itself in my mind and it is this: the mass of detective novels are pitched on so low a plane of morality that they are an insidious danger to the national morals… All this crime fiction is infinitely more vitiating than the so-called pornographic literature because the latter frankly sets out to be naughty…

  – Helen Normanton, pioneering lawyer and columnist, Good Housekeeping, July 1931