by Knight, Lynn
Marjorie Iliffe could not have been more different from Joan Mason. Her clothes were plain, verging on drab; there was nothing fashionable about her appearance. To see Miss Iliffe in the street, you would think her anything but a dancer, but she had a string of letters after her name and her abilities as a teacher more than made up for any lack of flamboyance. Hers was a larger, more disciplined school; Miss Iliffe’s girls wore uniform, sleeveless tabards (more cutting out of blackout cloth and sewing for Annie). Marjorie Iliffe inspired tremendous loyalty.
All dancing schools put on shows, but the demand was even greater during wartime. Willing mothers ran up stage clothes out of yards of American cloth for troupes rehearsed as rigorously as soldiers on manoeuvres, and begged and borrowed props wherever they could (in Joan Mason’s days, the corner shop pitched in with clay pipes and marshmallow ‘ice cream’ cornets).
Dancing on stage was a tremendous thrill, but my mum also organised her own shows, each one a little more ambitious than the last. Annie’s kitchen provided rehearsal space, Grace Blake and Janey Davis perching on the mangle while Janey’s sister Mabel practised her solo. Local children paid a ha’penny to watch the result. Concerts performed with friends from the dancing school enjoyed a little more finesse and commanded a higher ticket price. For a penny, neighbours saw Cora and Daphne Edwards dance in Marlene Hill’s backyard, dressed in the outfits they’d worn on stage.
‘I want ’er,’ one hulking lad shouted from the audience, pointing at Cora, ‘Er in t’middle, ’er in t’ pink,’ and started clambering over the other kids to reach her. The dancers paused mid-step but Reg was evidently in earnest. Daphne and Cora flung their clothes into their suitcase and ran, with Reg and a group of younger boys in pursuit. They were saved by hopping on to the Whittington Moor bus.
The girls were given the opportunity to perform at a bigger venue the next time round, and raised ten shillings for Mrs Churchill’s fund by dancing in the backyard of the Railway Inn. Clementine Churchill wrote to thank Cora and her friends for assisting ‘the Brave Russians in their terrible struggle’ (a steno-graphed letter, but a signed letter nonetheless). There were larger, formal fund-raisers too, via the Iliffe School of Dancing. The war enabled Miss Iliffe’s pupils to dance on every stage in Chesterfield – the Regal, the Odeon, the Victoria, the Corporation Theatre, Hippodrome, Lyceum and Market Hall – the last under the auspices of white-haired ‘Auntie Minnie’ who organised shows for the servicemen stationed nearby. After the dancers had taken their bows, hundreds of male voices raised the rafters and the hairs on the back of the neck with ‘Let the Great Big World Keep Turning’.
The best shows, though, were the ones at the Regal which ran for several nights, replacing the B-movie and preceding the main feature: a hour or so of ballet, high kicks and acrobatic poses, and then Lassie Come Home. Some rehearsals began after the cinema closed for the evening. It was nearing midnight by the time the dancers reached their homes; another long walk for Annie and Cora through Chesterfield’s empty streets. Almost everyone else was a-bed, but all around them blazed the bright, bright light of double summertime.
Nightly shows, greasepaint; stage lights, sequins and taffeta: it was just like being a real dancer, especially when Warner Brothers sent the Regal a congratulatory telegram – ‘Chesterfield should be proud of its amateur talent’ – when Miss Iliffe’s school staged its own performance of Hollywood Canteen. But the best write-up belonged to a different show altogether and came courtesy of the Derbyshire Times:
‘Visitors to Chesterfield on Saturday afternoon would view with some amazement the monster queues outside the Regal Cinema. That for the better-class seats stretched from the entrance, down Cavendish Street, round the corner into Saltergate, and up as far as Elder Way. The queue for the cheaper seats was as long. They waited from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., not to see Clark Gable, Garbo, Gone with the Wind or Mrs. Miniver, but the purely local talent appearing in the Salute the Soldier stage show.’
They were waiting to see my mum – and all the other dancers who performed that night in 1944. Annie and Eva were among them, settling into their gold plush seats with a cone of caramels between them. Dick and Betsy were too elderly to attend, but would hear all about it later, back at the shop. And here comes Cora now, tap dancing across the stage in a whirl of pendulum wings and triple-time-steps, arms outstretched and smiling, cuffing the boards with her silver shoes.
23
Endings and Beginnings
ON THE AFTERNOON OF 21 AUGUST 1944, A DOODLEBUG HIT Tower Cressy. Glass shattered in the windows of its capacious nurseries; flames shimmied up the metal fretwork of the NCAA’s sun balconies. Those extravagant towers were reduced to desiccated dust. A second blast underlined the dereliction one week later. On 27 August, shortly after 7 a.m., smoke rose once again from Tower Cressy.
The hostel was unoccupied at the time. The NCAA’s Sloane Square offices remained open throughout the war, but the Association moved to Wokingham for the duration and was without a children’s hostel for some years (its Sydenham branch being commandeered by the fire department).
I think of how easily paper catches fire, and see flames lick the edges of pages containing irreplaceable details: the stories of all those women who gave up their babies for adoption, my mum’s birth mother included. But this may be pure fantasy. My mother was told that the NCAA hostel was bombed during the war, the implication being that papers were destroyed along with it, but this was probably an assumption on someone’s part, many years after the event. You do not plan to evacuate a building and leave all paperwork behind. Whatever the facts of the matter, details of my mum’s brief sojourn with the NCAA no longer exist.
Monday 21st August 1944
Today we nearly caught a Doodle Bug! It fell on the imitation Tudor Castle on Campden Hill. This afternoon at 3pm I was busy sorting things for the Fair when a Doodle got nearer and nearer. The office was full of people and no one bothered. Having dived under desks so often and the Thing has been far away that I took no notice. Then I turned to run, but it dropped, and did the house shake and did we hear falling glass…
We ran in all directions to find out where it was. We mounted to the roof and just saw the smoke blowing away. Martin, Miss M’s nephew, set off and brought back news it was Aubrey Road and Walk at the corner – Cressy House. Auntie Nell rang up at once as she realised it was near me. We also rang around. It gave us quite a turn. So I made some tea to settle us down. Miss Ashton and I set forth on an expedition of enquiry. Most of the shops round Holland Park tube station had lost their windows. We found the shell of the house. It used to have four towers. All that pretty property is blasted. Mrs Bennett, one of our voluntary workers, was in the baker’s, and the owner dragged her to the back as the windows cracked right down. I returned to my flat only to find I could not get in at the front door. The blast had blown off the lock. Two windows also gone. But my room was intact…the bomb had blown the curtains right across.
– From Few Eggs and No Oranges, the wartime diary of Vere Hodgson, who worked near the NCAA hostel, Tower Cressy
Did fire obliterate my grandma’s blue-grey file too? I can’t think how else she destroyed it; my mum never saw it again. Thankfully, she saved the Tower Cressy brochure. My mum came upon it shortly before Annie’s death, and felt it should come into her keeping. I don’t know if Annie had intended to pass it on, but she was proud of ‘the posh adoption’ home my mum came from. Even when Cora was small – and knew nothing of her adoption – Annie entertained her by singing, ‘I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls,’ and hinted of her mysterious beginnings. (Back to those heady thoughts of Princess Alice.) ‘I think you were born in marble halls,’ Annie used to tell her, though my mum took this to be one of the tall stories of childhood. My grandma kept Cora’s Adoption Order, but that blue-grey file was different, I suspect, because it represented my mum’s life prior to Annie and Willie. In destroying those papers, however, my grandma was merely doing what adoptive parents were
actively encouraged to do in those days hemmed in by secrecy and taboo – completely eradicate the past.
My mum was sixteen when Annie finally told her she was adopted. A friend (having no idea that two little girls had already spilled the beans), advised her to do so before someone else did. Annie said relatively little, spoke of the adoption home, ‘the grandma’ who was present in court, and of ‘the girl’ – a nameless ‘girl’ – it was made clear that my mum’s birth mother was some mere chit of a lass. My grandma clearly did not want Cora to have much information. And, for an extremely long time, that is how things remained.
*
As the 1940s continued, there was more greasepaint and further dancing exams for Cora, and she even contemplated life on stage – if Ruby Keeler could tap dance her way out of the chorus line in 42nd Street, then why not Cora too? Rhapsody in Blue, Dancing Highlights, Night and Day… the list of local shows continued. One year, she was a pearly queen. (Picture all the mother-of-pearl buttons passed on to me when that particular dance dress expired.)
Annie continued to encourage her, but she wanted Cora to have skills to fall back on and to delay her decision for twelve months, and so Cora exchanged her button-box typewriter for the real thing and got to grips with technical college and shorthand. A year later, she was introduced to and fell in love with office life. She had also learned, via a dancing friend, that the bright lights involved dingy digs and a rumbling stomach. She continued dancing, however, and, generously, was allowed days off for exams, but regular hours claimed Cora: from office girl to junior typist, to assistant secretary to a boss who, though not quite as legendary a figure as Charles Paxton Markham, had a reputation for hard talking nonetheless.
On her very first day in the secretarial department (£72 a year), Cora typed a letter to her granddad. Though frail by then, Dick still wanted to hear all about his ‘little duckie’ and the details of her job. Collecting and delivering post, running errands; Gestetnering, typing and dictation; making tea and distributing the weekly office cakes (dry trifle-sponge-fingers seemed manna from heaven with post-war austerity hitting hard) – initially, Cora’s tasks were none too demanding. Her supervisor enjoyed poetry and promoted knitting and singsongs; when work was slack, the typists took up their needles: Knit one, purl one. Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.
In 1951, at the age of eighty-nine, Dick died. He had sold his precious wood a year earlier, thinking it time a younger man had grass to keep down and hazel to twist into fencing. The Wheeldon Mill Plantation was bought by Albert Mowbray who ran the greyhound track established in the area in the late 1930s. Mowbray lived in Thompson Street, the street named after Jim (and full of his houses). In provincial towns, connections are endless.
Dick took to his bed a few days before his death. Usually, when Dick suspected he was developing a touch of the tickatalaroo – my great-grandfather’s name for any kind of ’flu or fever – he’d send Eva to the Great Central Hotel for a bottle of whisky and disappear upstairs. By the time he reappeared, the bottle would be empty and his fever fled. But, this time, it was different. Dick felt unwell, developed pneumonia and was dead within three days.
‘Mam won’t last without him,’ Annie said. Eva and Cora were disbelieving, but Annie’s assessment was correct. After Dick’s death, Betsy took to sitting in his chair, something she’d never done before and, though strong, and in good health for someone in her late eighties, seemed to diminish by the week. She died three months later. (A relative insisted she had known there’d be a death: that morning, her tulips had drooped.)
My grandma and great-aunt asked two near neighbours they’d known for many years if they would prepare Betsy’s body for burial; this was not a task they could face (or would have expected to perform) themselves. They would be glad to help, the women said.
When Annie and Eva came back upstairs, they saw their mother’s body washed and laid out neatly on the bed, but her wedding ring was missing. It had gone. They guessed straightaway who had removed it, but the last thing they wanted at this grief-stricken time was a confrontation with a neighbour. They visited one of the women and explained the situation, asking if she’d call on the other and say the ring was lost, and would she please help them find it. Then the four of them went back upstairs and made a great to-do of shaking out the sheets and – would you credit it? – a rose-gold band rolled down the middle of the bed.
A difficult situation neatly resolved and without accusations, or with anyone losing face: it was the kind of negotiation Annie and Eva had learned from Betsy. How sad that they now had to practise it on her behalf. I’m shocked to think of a close neighbour stealing from my great-grandma, and especially in these circumstances. But I suspect my shock was greater than Annie’s and Eva’s. They knew what their neighbour’s life was. Life had taught her harsh practicalities: the living need money, the dead do not. What seems a dreadful disrespect was as much a mark of desperation. Either way, it provides a coarser tale, as well as a finale to my great-grandma’s story and life at the corner shop.
My mum was married by the time my great-grandparents died. She met my dad at a New Year’s dance in the late 1940s. Didn’t most couples meet at dances then? The 1950s were no kinder to married women than previous decades. No sooner was Mum married than she had to circumvent the constant banter of the (married) male office wags, asking when the little ones would be coming. ‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ Cora said. ‘I’ll catch up with you soon enough.’ Like many women of her generation, she gave up paid work to start a family. My brother came first, and then me. My brother is named for our great-grandfather; me, after noirish film star, Lynn Bari: Hollywood habits die hard. Until I started school, Cora’s dancing fell by the wayside. By the time she took up classes again – Latin American, for her own fun and fitness – she was also tying my ballet shoes, just as Annie had helped tie hers.
After Dick and Betsy died, the lease on the shop was surrendered and Eva went to live with Annie. That’s where I came to know them, in the house at Racecourse Road. The cupboard that once housed my mum’s books and toys – and which Annie had opened to show the mystery lady – was mine now, as were the books and toys. At bathtime, Eva blew my brother the same pendulous soapy rainbows she’d blown for my mum, and (some years later), thanks to Annie, he was the only boy we knew with his own Dennis the Menace jumper. I can see him now, lying on their rag rug before a blazing fire, drawing cartoon John, Paul, George and Ringos, sporting his own Beatle cut.
My grandma and great-aunt were invariably together, though Annie was still Providenting, and, for several years, Eva worked at a grocer’s shop, swapping the family counter for another, less pleasing one where she was, at least, visited by women she’d known at the Mill, who kept her up to date with its goings on. Annie and Eva (Mama and Auntie to me) were nearly always mentioned as a pair, a kind of double act, although their personalities were very different. They eventually performed a final, heartbreaking double act of sorts, by dying within ten days of each other. In the absence of a maternal grandfather (Willie being long dead), they were my maternal grandparents: my relationship with Eva was much closer than the title ‘great-aunt’ usually suggests.
When I was small, Annie had more time than she’d had during Cora’s childhood. As well as dressing me and my dolls, my grandma had other impressive talents. By some means, whose method baffles me still, she crocheted a doll’s cradle, some six inches high, which, when stiffened with sugar water, stood proud on its silk rockers. Annie reupholstered the three-piece suite from my mum’s doll’s house, complete with antimacassars: individual lace florets. Such loving care and artistry on my behalf; the hours she must have spent cutting out and gluing velvet on to that miniature furniture. Now, I notice that a patch of glue escaped from one of the seams; then, all I saw were plump red seats fashioned with love.
Mealtimes at Racecourse Road were always a treat, whether eating Annie’s meat pies, served in jam-tart-sized pastry cases; Eva’s fat chips (as good any gast
ro-pub offering and dashed into hot fat with characteristic abandon), or a kind of children’s meze they invented, offering several diminutive dishes tempting to a child. Sometimes, during Eva’s stint at that other grocery store, we ate mystery teas. With the tin opener at the ready and the bread and butter waiting, we discovered whether tea would be tinned salmon or peaches. Tins that had slipped their labels were no good to sell, but made for some entertaining mealtimes. Annie and Eva were always willing to enter into a child-eye’s view of the world. If dinner was too hot, my brother and I were instructed to take our plates for a walk down the garden. Willie’s aviary had long since disappeared, but Ginny the cat would be toasting her back against the boundary wall, conjuring phantom birds.
My mum used to hear Annie and Eva telling their stories and wonder how she could match their vivid tales. Yet this book could not exist without her memories of the childhood places and people she knew. There were many other people too; still are. They are not omitted accidentally. My mother’s later story is her own.
The possibility that my great-grandfather was Romany was one of the tales my mum wove for my brother and me during childhood, and was part of his enchantment for us. Stories about Dick invariably involved ‘Grandad’s wood’. He was an almost mythical figure and the wood itself a magical spot. Long after my great-grandfather died, Eva walked me along Pottery Lane and up to Wheeldon Mill to see the wood and the bullock grazing there. En route, there were more stories: of Eva dodging in and out of the trees with Teddy the dog, and of my mum burying treasure. The wood’s there still, but the steps Dick created from living tree roots are gone.
There were other walks with Eva, walks going nowhere in particular, but always with an element of surprise or adventure, whether through ‘the jungle’, an area of overgrown shrubs and trees, or along unknown meandering lanes where Eva introduced me to ‘bread and cheese’, the hawthorn she’d nibbled during similar walks in her own childhood.