Mothers and Daughters

by Fleming, Leah

  Most of the girls were flat-chested and neat, but Joy had busts that wobbled. It was bad enough having skin a shade darker than anyone else and blacker hair, and, worst of all, having the curse once a month.

  ‘Do your bosoms hurt when you run down stairs?’ she’d asked Connie, who looked blank and then burst out laughing.

  ‘If only … My bosoms aren’t worth a second glance. I have to stuff my bra with socks,’ she confessed. ‘Be grateful you’ve got a figure.’

  Joy was not impressed.

  She had not forgiven Ivy for those cruel words, lashing herself with them inside her head over and over again. She was a big fat dumpling, anyone could see that. Thanks goodness it was Friday afternoon and they’d meet up in Santini’s with Rosa to plan their outfits for the next Silkie gig.

  Every time she looked in the mirror all Joy could see was her bulging tummy and fat chest. Connie was so thin and tall, and Rosa so wiry. Joy felt like a big lump of lard beside them. Mummy liked to cook for the guests and she was expected to eat the leftovers even when she wasn’t hungry. ‘Eat up, you are a growing girl. A clean plate, please. Think of all those starving orphans in China!’

  There was no escaping food. Every month they all trouped to Auntie Ria’s flat for spaghetti and ice cream after a concert, and Mr Milburn, who was a new permanent and rented the front bedroom while Dr Friedmann was abroad studying, was kind and brought her sweets in boxes from his trips during the week: boxes of fudge that said, ‘A Present from Filey’ or ‘Southport’ or ‘Whitehaven’. He had a small Morris car and gave Joy lifts into town. The back seat was crammed with cases of medical supplies and surgical appliances that were like strange corsets with tubes and straps and funny bulbous ends, harnesses coiled in his case like snakes. The front was a squash and their knees were jammed together when he drove. ‘He gives me the creeps,’ she’d once sniggered to Connie. ‘I’m not his “dusky princess”.’

  She wished it was hometime. There were five floors from the gym and the physics lab in the basement, to the chemistry lab and forms at the top. There was cookery in an outbuilding and separate yards for boys and girls. It was not a bit like Connie’s school and there were boys: spotty and swotty with armpits smelling from their Bri-Nylon shirts.

  Rosa was full of the Catholic College boys, heartthrobs called Julian, Chris, Howard, and especially Paul Jerviss, who swaggered around thinking he was James Dean at the bus stop.

  Moor Bank didn’t seem to sport anyone handsome, just a load of lads making jokes about girls’ figures, lads called Eric, Brian and Tom, who treated the girls as if they were simpletons.

  Only last week she’d accidentally bumped into Graham Best, one of the boys in her class on the bus, and he had called her a ‘fat, slit-eyed wog’.

  If only she was as slender as Mummy, who was tiny-boned, with small feet, but Joy was made like the Winstanleys, curvy and awkward. Everyone called her bonny. She hated that word.

  ‘Bonny means I’m fat, not pretty. Why can’t I be like the others?’ she sighed. ‘Tall, skinny and clever.’ If only she was into sports like Connie. Moor Bank had playing fields miles out of town, so their teams were hopeless at cricket and tennis and football. Joy managed to skive off hockey by missing the bus and arriving too late to be picked. She hated exercise, although Latin dancing and jive was fun, but no one ever asked her to practise in the playground with them.

  Only last week she’d made the mistake of complaining to Mr Milburn as he sat at the breakfast table eating Force Flakes and toast. He was a vegetarian and so one of her jobs on a Saturday was to buy tins of nut cutlets from Uncle Levi’s herbal store on the market, where Neville sometimes helped out.

  Mr Milburn had offered to teach her to waltz and quickstep once. They practised on the wind-up gramophone in the front room. That was not much fun either, for he’d held her so tight she could hardly breathe, close enough to smell his tobacco breath, and he stepped on her toes. He had no sense of rhythm.

  ‘If only I was good at something,’ Joy moaned. ‘It’s no fun being C plus in homework, in dancing class, in the school choir. I didn’t make the semi chorus. They sing all the best bits in the Speech Day concert.’

  Rosa was appearing in the King’s Theatre again, as the leader of the Mini Maids dancing chorus in the pantomime. Rosa didn’t have to try hard at anything; even her curls bounced naturally and needed no rags in them. Her eyes were dark and bright and she was tiny and full of energy. She talked for hours about her rehearsals and how the chorus girls went to the digs of Jonnie and the Giraffes, the rock band who were heading up the star cast. She got autographs to sell and time off school to head up the children’s ballet when Miss Liptrot, who was once a pupil at the Sorrows, persuaded the head teacher, Sister Assumpta, to let her dance and guide the youngsters.

  Rosa always got what she wanted and now she was into boys big time, which was boring, chasing them at the bus stop and hanging around just to catch the right ones. She was shameless.

  Connie didn’t like Joy clinging on to her school gang either. Only at weekends did they all get together for rehearsals, when Nev bossed them around. Sometimes she just wished the week away, waiting for the weekend to come along.

  ‘I love Thursday,’ she said. ‘It’s the turning point of the week after sports afternoon, on the homeward run to the Friday gathering in Santini’s.’

  Connie stared at her as if she was talking Spanish when they met at the bus stop later.

  It was no wonder she stuffed herself with Mars Bars and Fry’s Five Boys dark chocolate, she thought miserably. She would sit on the bus looking out of the window, stuffing toffees in her mouth, dreaming she was in Hollywood, chosen as a child star like Mandy Miller or Diana Day.

  ‘I wish I was France Nuyen, the tragic Liat in South Pacific, mysterious and beautiful,’ she murmured.

  They’d been to see the film five times and Joy cried every time, trying to imagine herself in the arms of John Kerr, the handsome Yank who had to choose between duty and love.

  Joy found romance in the pages of the red-covered Mills & Boons in the library. Enid Blytons were boring now that there was something more grown up to interest her. These books were in the adult section so they were sneaked out on her mother’s tickets and read with a torch in her room. They gave her wonderful dreams of handsome men ready to carry her away to happiness and marriage, but who would lift her onto their horse when she weighed in at a massive ten stone?

  Connie always laughed at her reading romances and said they were sloppy.

  ‘It’s all right for you, Connie,’ Joy sighed to herself, staring into mirror. ‘Look at me. Who’ll want to marry me? I’m a freak,’ she said, and hung a silk longyi over the mirror in disgust.

  ‘See you tomorrow, for rehearsal,’ she said now, slurping her ice cream through a straw in Santini’s after school.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’ve got a place in the second lacrosse team,’ Connie mumbled, sipping her frothy cappuccino. ‘It’s an away match and some of my gang are going to the flicks afterwards.’

  ‘That’s OK, I’ll join you later,’ Joy smiled, trying not to look too disappointed.

  ‘Sorry, but we’re not too sure of our plans yet. We may go into Bolton, it depends,’ Connie replied quickly. ‘Another time, perhaps?’

  She was being mean and wanted to be with her own crowd. They didn’t want a Moor Banker around, thought Joy, bowing her head into her soda before turning to Rosa.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

  ‘What?’ said Rosa, as if she were miles away. ‘Extra practices for my Intermediate exam. If I pass this I can become an assistant teacher at the studio. I’ll be too tired then to do anything but sleep.’

  ‘I could come and join you,’ Joy offered. Her weekend was fast melting into nothing, like her ice cream.

  ‘Thanks, but it’s a bit of a crush in the flat with the babies, and I’ve a pile of homework to catch up on. Yes, even I do prep. It’s part of the
deal with the Head,’ said Rosa, trying to let her down gently.

  She would just have to make her own amusement. Saturday would drone on for ever. Mummy expected help with the bed-changing and linen. Shopping was Joy’s job, to earn her pocket money. She would buy a pile of sweets to make up for all the boredom. There was only a second division home match and Auntie Lee was resting now – having another go for a baby, Mummy whispered – so she mustn’t bother her either. Perhaps a trip to see Granny Esme would while away a few hours. None of it would be any fun on her own but it was better than staying in.

  There she was, standing at the bus stop in her navy-blue gabardine mac and felt hat on a Friday night, knowing she was going home to fish pie, and feeling like a lump of lard.

  She had resigned herself to a lonely ride home when who should come and sit beside her but Neville, looking like a Belisha beacon in his black and white striped blazer and cap. He was fast losing his Lancashire accent, being at the Lawns School, and talking like one of the Battle of Britain pilots in The Way to the Stars.

  ‘I say, what luck. How’s things?’ He plonked himself down beside her. His voice was high-pitched and unbroken but his legs were sprouting like rhubarb stalks. He didn’t give her a chance to answer, going on about getting the Silkies a turn in some talent competition near Bury, and about his part in the school play.

  They were doing Shakespeare – an all-boys production of As You Like It – and he was playing Rosalind. ‘I’m the only boy in my year whose voice hasn’t broken,’ he laughed. ‘But I get all the best costumes. What are you up to this grey wet weekend? Hope it’s better than mine.’

  For all his gossip and banter, there was something about his confidences that made Joy think that he too was a bit out of place with the toffs from the Lawns. Boys could be just as cruel as girls, she knew.

  ‘What are you up to tomorrow?’ Joy asked.

  ‘I have to do my stint on the stall and then nothing but prep. I hate prep.’

  ‘So you’re not in the football team?’

  ‘What me, with my two left feet? And it’s rugby, not football, at the Lawns. I’m hopeless.’ No surprises there, she thought.

  ‘Me too,’ Joy said, smiling at his blue eyes and mass of freckles. ‘I’m too slow and too fat.’

  Neville looked her up and down. ‘You are a bit on the podgy side for an oriental, but you could always change that,’ he said, looking out of the steaming window.

  ‘How?’ Joy said.

  ‘Go on a diet. Cut down your meals, eat only certain things and you’ll lose weight. I read about it in Woman’s Own. The Banana Diet, it’s called. It works miracles but you have to stick to it for two weeks.’

  ‘I hate bananas, won’t apples do?’ Joy asked, curious now.

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s bananas or nothing,’ Neville replied. ‘Fancy going round the shops tomorrow? We can buy some bananas off the market, if you like.’

  ‘Go on then, seeing as you’ve twisted my arm. We can have fish and chips and go to the Gaumont, if you like,’ continued Joy, all smiles now.

  ‘I thought you wanted to go on a diet?’ he said, pinching the flab on her arm. ‘You can weigh yourself on the scales in the market hall. Those won’t break!’ he laughed.

  ‘Don’t be so rude. If I go on this diet you’ll have to keep it a secret. I’m not very good at doing new things,’ Joy added, feeling now as if a whole new opportunity was slowly presenting itself. Going round town with Neville was better than nothing, and he liked window shopping as much as she did. He knew all the latest fashions and the latest hits. Starving yourself on bananas didn’t sound so thrilling, though.

  ‘Have you heard of the Banana Diet?’ she asked Connie later on Friday night.

  ‘No. Diets are for invalids. I expect it’s some craze from America. Why?’

  ‘Neville was asking about it,’ Joy lied, sensing it wouldn’t do to spill the beans.

  ‘Bananas are the perfect food,’ said Mr Milburn, listening into their conversations, as usual. ‘Troops in the jungle lived off them. I hope you’re not thinking of dieting. You are just right as you are.’

  ‘What’s Neville bothering about diets for?’ said Mummy.

  ‘Nothing. We’re just going shopping and then to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Connie’s got a match and plans, haven’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be late back. Ivy won’t like you going out with her precious son. She has him wrapped around her little finger. They spoil him rotten, sending him to that private school and giving him airs.’ It was not like Mummy to be snappy.

  ‘Neville’s OK on his own,’ Joy said.

  Mr Milburn snapped two half-crowns on the table. ‘You go and enjoy yourself, dusky maiden from the Far East, lovely lotus. You’re only young once,’ he winked, and Mummy whipped his plate away with a sniff.

  ‘That’s enough of that, Mr Milburn. Your grandmother, Ma Nu, was Burmese, and her father an English man, but you are a British girl, not an oriental,’ she explained.

  ‘British men have a thing about oriental girls with bright smiles and flowers in their hair. They gave them such a welcome in Rangoon after the war.’ Milburn was at it again, teasing Mummy, and for a second Joy thought she was going to swipe him one with his plate.

  But I’m not like Mummy, she sighed. I am fat and dumpy and slow.

  Perhaps if she went on this Banana Diet, things might change. How exciting to think she might change her shape, merge in with the rest of the girls and not be different or picked on. She would get to like bananas even if it killed her.

  To Joy’s surprise the Banana Diet was much easier than she thought it would be if she shut her eyes and swallowed quickly before she felt the gagging in her throat. She started getting up late and had no time to sit down for the usual cooked breakfast, producing some Energen rolls and breaking them into bits and nibbling them when she felt hungry, or took some fruit instead. At break she ate another banana and instead of school dinner she walked around the town to make the time pass. She felt a bit queasy by home time, deciding to walk all the way home uphill for the fresh air. She ate her evening meal without a pudding and no one bothered her when she went to bed early with a hot-water bottle, to read in bed and take her mind off the hunger pangs.

  The first few days were the worst, but she found to her amazement that she was good at something at last. She felt such a sense of achievement and power when she said no to tempting foods and treats. Joy was on a mission to succeed and once she got over the emptiness in her stomach and her stale breath, she felt fine.

  When she turned up at jazz class the next weekend, and they all gathered round the juke box in Santini’s, to everyone’s amazement she said she felt sick and didn’t want ice cream but drank only a plain soda.

  No one guessed her ploy but it got increasingly harder to skip meals around the table without a lot of planning. If she ate slowly and talked, chasing her dinner around the plate, no one noticed how little she ate, but it had to be put in the bin before Mummy caught sight of the waste. She hated waste. On Friday afternoons all Joy could think about was weigh-in day tomorrow so she tried not to eat at all before then.

  On Saturday morning she walked into town and got herself weighed on the machine tucked behind the herbal stall.

  At nine stone the results of her efforts were obvious. Her bust was shrinking before her eyes and her tartan trews felt slack.

  After two hours of dance and a long walk home, she allowed herself a banana milkshake. Sometimes in school she felt a bit wobbly but she could tell by her gym suit that her shape was changing. Everyone was beginning to admire her determination. Girls kept asking her about the Banana Diet after lessons. She had to prove she could see it through to the end.

  Once or twice Connie stared at her oddly. ‘Have you been sick or something? You look different,’ she said, sipping her frothy coffee while Joy sipped her black coffee, making it last.

  ‘Still a long way to go,’ she said, mentally adding, until I
look like you.

  If she’d lost enough weight, the treat of the week was a milky coffee with no sugar in Santini’s, but it made her head spin. She was in control now and she was finding the art of eating very little easier. If she felt ravenous she walked faster until it passed. The weight loss was getting slower now she was under eight stone, and so she had to step up the dancing and uphill walking. It all took so much time.

  By the time she was down to seven stone it was almost impossible to disguise her skinny shape, so Joy knitted herself thick sloppy joes in the evenings with wool bought from the money saved from school dinners and bus fares. The best bit of all was her periods had stopped. When she told Connie the glad tidings she was so envious she began the Banana Diet, but she lasted only two days. Joy was euphoric. Here was something she could do better than her cousin.

  Mr Milburn kept looking at her closely. Joy had no breasts now to make his eyes goggle. She was disappearing into her sweaters and she had fine hair growing on her face, which was a bore. She felt tired all the time, and when they were in dancing class she was pushed to keep up with the music.

  Mummy started to hover over her at mealtimes now, watching and spying on her, so she had to slip bits of food into her lap when no one was looking, or fill her cheeks and then go to the lav and spit them into the bowl.

  Connie noticed one lunchtime. ‘Why are you doing that?’

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ Joy snapped, surprised how angry she felt being spied on. She was so hungry but she was terrified that each mouthful might make her put on weight and grow fat again.