Mother Knew Best

by Dorothy Scannell

  Early the following morning Father set off for that unknown part of London and having obtained the job searched about to find accommodation and rented the little house, no. 3 Grove Villas. He sealed all the rooms and put sulphur candles in each one for he knew that houses in such areas were ‘buggy,’ and Mother moved from her nice clean sunny house in Beckenham with its large white scrubbed kitchen, to this cellar of a place in an almost foreign land. Years later she told me that although she kept it from my Father and the children, when she first set eyes on the house and the area she really thought her heart would break.

  My mother’s name was Leah. She was a very pretty woman, everyone said so, with auburn curly hair which she wore in a bun on the top of her head, but the little curls would not go straight so there was always a row of tiny curls across the top of her forehead. Her eyes were grey and she had a very straight nose, and a smiling mouth. She had small hips, was high-busted, and had small slender hands and feet. She was about five feet two inches tall, yet her mother had been nearly six feet tall and her father over six feet. I always thought Mother was short because she was one of twins. Mother had ten children and was always smiling, and her twin sister Emma had no children and was very serious.

  Mother was one of thirteen children and her father worked as a carter at the Hall in Dinton, Wiltshire, where my mother was born. She said her father was a handsome man with dark curly hair and they had always thought their name was Mitchard—it was so in the family bible. But when his children went to school, for which he paid 6d. per week for each of them, the village schoolmistress and some local bigwigs decided that this was too high-flown for their station in life, and that they should be called Meatyard. When I was a little girl I was very angry at this for I thought Meatyard an ugly name, but Mother said, ‘In those days, dear, we knew our place.’

  I was glad when years and years later Somerset House could not trace her by the name of Meatyard when Father was applying for his pension. They wrote and asked if Mother had ever been known by any other name, and she was traced by Mitchard. Originally I think it had a ‘de’ in front of it, for Grandfather was supposed to have been a descendant of the Huguenots.

  Her mother was a very houseproud and stern woman, but her father was more gentle. If he held a gentleman’s horse for him or helped a visitor to the Hall he would sometimes be given 6d. and he would hurry straight home with it to Grandmother. Grandfather had a bible which was very old and very beautiful, and had the Apocrypha in it, in which he would enter all the children’s births. The bible was read at every meal in Mother’s house when she was young.

  Nevertheless she was a bit of a rebel. The children had to curtsey to the squire even though he galloped past without acknowledging them, and spattered them with mud. One day Mother resolved not to curtsey to the squire and his lady when they rode by in their carriage and pair, and she walked on without ‘bending the knee.’ This act of rebellion so infuriated the squire’s lady that she drove straight on to report the incident, or rather non-incident, to the village school-mistress and the rector. Mother was punished for her dreadful behaviour but, still defiant, at the next passing of the squire and his lady, she and her loyal brother made the most exaggerated of curtseys and bows, almost touching the ground with their heads. Their childish sarcasm and spirit was lost on the lady of the manor, for she appeared haughtily pleased.

  One of my uncles gashed his hand very badly on a scythe. The squire sent him home to Grandmother to bind it up, so that he could return to work immediately. But it was too serious for Grandmother to attend to and she gave him money they could ill afford, and off he went to the doctor’s, a five-mile walk away. The old doctor knew that his hand must be very badly gashed to need medical attention, and also knew that my uncle had walked five miles from his own village but he said, ‘Show me your money before I look at your hand.’ Mother’s brother, with a touch of her spirit said, ‘If thee’st woan’t look first, thee’st woan’t see it ’t all,’ and he walked the five miles home. Grandmother stayed up all night with him attending to his injured hand. He returned to work at dawn.

  My Grandfather came up to the Great Exhibition of 1851 by stage coach and when old Lady Wyndham of the Hall died in London he had to bring her home by stage coach. My Mother said nobody knew she was dead, for she didn’t look any different. The men had no time off from work, not even on Sundays, and Grandfather would get up at 4 a.m. to tend his cottage vegetable-plot to provide food for the family. At hay-making time all the children would help, and once Mother ‘got at’ the cider and she said it made her run backwards all the way home.

  When my grandfather was dying Mother was up in London and every day Grandfather asked for his ‘smiling Leah’ but she couldn’t go because she had five small children and was very poor. He said if she didn’t come by Wednesday it would be too late, and on Wednesday he died. Mother was brokenhearted for she loved her gentle father.

  Mother, like the rest of the country girls, went into domestic service at an early age. At her first place in service, the lady of the house gave her one of her cast-off dresses. It was in a fine woollen checked material with tiny buttons from neck to waist, and had a high neck with real lace round it and velvet edgings. One day the house was burgled and Mother was required to attend court as a witness. She wore this dress, her only off-duty one, and in her hair she pinned a little lace rose she had made. The next day on the front page of the local paper was a full-length portrait of Mother with a report of the case. The judge complimented Mother on her elegant appearance, saying she brought sunshine into the court, giving her evidence in a most intelligent manner, and he felt that any employer having a servant like Mother would be proud of her. The next day Mother was summoned to the mistress’s room and informed that she must never wear that frock outside the house again. She was to keep it to wear only in the tiny attic which she shared with the parlour maid.

  She left shortly afterwards to work for the Greens, who were very fond of her. She was an exceptionally fine needlewoman and in addition to her duties as maid, her spare moments were spent on the mistress’s clothes or the beautiful linen.

  She loved the children of the house and they loved her. The little boy became Lord Green, Master of the Rolls, and my Father said he wasn’t surprised, for whenever he met Mother in the park when the children were with her, the little boy would give him a judge’s serious questioning gaze and make my father feel guilty for speaking to my mother. No followers were allowed; it was written in the ‘domestic articles.’ The same little boy knew my mother had a strong sense of humour and loved to make her laugh at the wrong times. If they had important people to dinner and she was called in to help the butler and the footman, he would try to catch her attention and do something to ‘start her off.’ Mother laughed at the time they had royal V.I.P.s to dinner, and young Master Green going into the dining-room to say good night to his parents said, ‘Oh, I see you are using the best silver tonight, Papa.’

  Mr Green was apparently a ‘perfect gentleman’ but extremely particular and fastidious. One evening the bell rang for Mother and she climbed the many flights of stairs only to find that Mr Green thought his bathmat wasn’t quite straight. Another time he rang because his hairbrush wasn’t level on his dressing-table—a very fidgetty man. His young wife, however, was just the opposite, happy-go-lucky and quite unfussy. One evening when Mother had known Father for a long time she became very brave and let him in through the kitchen door when the family would be safe at dinner. In her horror she saw young Mrs Green coming down the stairs to the kitchen, and Father was hurriedly pushed behind the sink curtain. Mrs Green hoisted her skirts for Mother to unlace her corsets, and Mother’s hands shook with fear.

  Once when the Greens were entertaining, the servants had been working like slaves from dawn and the butler sent Mother downstairs with the key to the wine cellar with instructions what to bring up if he rang. No one ever had the key to the wine cellar except the butler, and the other servants coaxed M
other to get them a bottle of very fine old port. The others persuaded Mother to have some and in a short time she was flushed and light-headed. The bell rang and she went up to the dining-room and by some miracle performed her duties properly, but after the guests had left, old Mrs Green the Master’s mother who lived with them and managed the house, rang for Mother to go to her boudoir. ‘Leah,’ she said, ‘I thought you uncommonly flushed tonight at table, I am going to give you some of my homeopathic medicine in case you are sickening for something,’ and Mother had to drink a large dose of an obnoxious mixture in front of Mrs Green. This amused the other servants no end.

  Mother had been with the family for many years and was earning £13 a year. She was so anxious to save up to get married that she did a thing unheard of in the servants’ hall. She asked for a rise. Old Mrs Green was horrified and indignant as Mr Bumble was. ‘Are you not happy here, Leah, you have a good home and situation, have you not?’ Mother greatly daring and having burnt her boats said she thought Mrs Green begrudged her the money she did pay, and left the room preparing in her mind to pack her clothes for she would surely be dismissed in disgrace. But much to the astonishment of the other servants Mrs Green gave her the rise she asked for.

  We would listen as little children to the tales of ‘the gentry,’ of the enormous joints of meat and of the terrible waste of lovely food. The larders were bigger than our little house, and sometimes in the morning the huge vats of dripping would be wiped clean as though someone had washed them—rats, I thought. Then the gamekeeper would organise a rat hunt and all the men would take part. I wonder if Mother thought about this waste of food when years later, with a young family to feed, she was down to her last crust. I don’t suppose so, for she always looked forward, never back. She never complained about her years in service, the long hauls upstairs with buckets of coal, the petty restrictions, and she never voted ‘Labour’ much to Father’s disgust.

  My parents were opposite personalities. He was a fiery socialist, banging the table while glaring at Mother and shouting, ‘Better conditions for the workers, better conditions for the workers. Churchill robbed the road fund of sixty thousand pounds.’ I thought that must be wrong. If my father knew it so did the police and Mr Churchill was not in prison. My mother infuriated my father for she wouldn’t argue but would smile gently and he knew, however fierce he waxed, that she would remain a Conservative. ‘Your mother’s bloody obstinate and can’t see further than the nose on her face,’ he would scream, but still she wouldn’t be drawn and he nearly choked when he thought of what Keir Hardie, Beatrice Webb and Ramsay Macdonald (well not so much him) had done for Mother and she was still disloyal to her class.

  Father was selfish and sometimes uncouth, I thought, well a little, and I didn’t like to see him arranging his truss when it became uncomfortable, although this was not to be wondered at for he had made it himself. It was an instrument of torture. An iron band sewn around with bits of padding and old shirts. Mother used to smile enigmatically and say, ‘He only thinks he’s ruptured,’ but selfish as he was she was very proud of him, and his comfort and well-being were her chief concerns. She had nursed him through meningitis after he was concussed with a cricket-ball, and two bouts of pneumonia, and the doctor told father he owed his life ‘to that wonderful lady, his wife.’ The word ‘lady’ was I thought, such a lovely reward for Mother. She must have loved my father very much, I know, for she even washed and disinfected his spittoon, daily. No one else could have done that, and she always struggled to send him out with a shilling in his pocket for she said, ‘A man must keep his pride.’

  Chapter 3

  All Present and Correct

  I was born in the house at no. 3 Grove Villas. It had, I always felt, an imposing address for that district, and could be advantageously deceiving for us, when it had to be given to people who did not know the district, for Poplar in the 1900s was in the heart of the East End slums.

  This little house in ‘The Grove’ was one of about twenty-six. The first eight were very tiny and in pairs with a side door doing duty for the front, back and yard door. These eight ‘elves’ residences were divided from the bigger bay-windowed houses by a very narrow side street called Arthur Street, and I always imagined that this street had been named after my eldest brother Arthur. Although I did not know what deed he had done to be so acclaimed, I was not surprised, for he was always so elegant in a ‘I’ll walk down the Avenue’ kind of way. He had such an air of superior condescension with a ‘Do I know you?’ attitude to us younger ones that I was convinced that in that grown-up world of his he had done something very noble, or notable. The fact that he was half a century younger than Arthur Street made no impression on me, for if it hadn’t originally been named after brother Arthur, then it had been renamed after him when he performed his mighty deed. I envied him this honour, and tried to pretend that something had been named after me. I chose ‘A Dorothy Bag,’ which was a very pretty velvet or silk bag all the young ladies carried.

  A high railway wall ran down the whole length of ‘The Grove’ in front of the houses and my house also backed on to another very high building, the ‘Poplar Public Baths and Wash-Houses,’ so without neighbours at either front or back of us, the little house possessed a privacy unusual for that district.

  Beyond the railway wall was the station and sidings where trains were shunted to and fro at dead of night. The noise rarely woke me but if it did I never found the clanking, squealing or crashing of the trucks as they collided with each other frightening or worrying, for that noise was the symphony which accompanied my birth. On the far side of the railway, set in pretty gardens, was the parish church of All Saints, our church, with its lovely clock and spire. From Mother’s bedroom I could see the tops of the tall trees reaching up through the masses of little dwellings to pray to the sky, and, by climbing on to a chair, I could see beyond the church to the East India Docks where the ships had tall masts and coloured funnels painted with flags or stars. The sound of the shunting trains, the music of the church bells, the distant sirens of the ships, muffled like a throaty cough in foggy weather, were all a lovely and nostalgic part of my childhood.

  The house contained four rooms. One of these rooms was really a cellar for it was half below ground level. It had a window, but as half of this was also ‘underground,’ from the street it appeared as though the occupants were a new race of ‘torso’ people. We lived, as it says in the hymn, ‘looking ever upward to the sky,’ for this ‘cellar’ basement we called the kitchen was the living, sitting, all-purpose room for twelve human beings. If I read about such a family and such a room in the newspaper today, I would be horrified and agree it was deprivation with a capital ‘D,’ but for us, through the magic of my mother, it wasn’t like that at all. It was a room of great happiness and love, and we were all lively and ‘normal.’ (I think we were normal!) The fact that we were all ‘present and correct’ speaks volumes for her as a miracle-worker, for in any other family in that district in those circumstances the majority of us would have been natural or self-induced miscarriages or infant mortalities.

  I never knew we were deprived. Things didn’t worry us then. Towels, for instance, were often tails of the father’s old working shirts hemmed round; sheets for beds, what were they? Some friends of mine drank out of jam-jars. Once when Marjorie had been ill in bed and a friend from her office was calling to see her, Mother cut an old sheet in two and placed one as an under sheet and the other half as a top sheet, and provided she didn’t fidget, well then it was as good as a pair of sheets, was it not? Mother had her priorities right, children must have love and food, food for their growing bodies and love to make them secure, and plain food was always best for children, fortunately.

  The window looked out on to a cement area which the local children called ‘the airy.’ The ‘airy’ had a small drain in it and I spent quite a lot of time sitting at the window dreaming that I could see red mice and blue mice running in and out of the drain. This ki
tchen, which was approached through the ground-floor bedroom, down a steep wooden staircase, contained a fireplace with an oven attached at the side, a stone copper with a little iron door in it and a heavy wooden lid on top, a coal cupboard with a sink in it, and at the end of the room a cream-painted dresser on which the crockery was kept. Behind a chintz curtain at floor level was a wide wooden shelf on which there were saucepans and cooking utensils, always called ‘the pot board.’

  This pot board had many valuable uses. It was our shelter during the Great War air raids, and our play ‘room,’ for it made a lovely cave or hiding-place, and at the far end near the coal cupboard Father kept his wooden chest containing his working ‘tools.’ He always kept the chest painted grey with beautifully picked out white letters on the side saying Sgt-Major W. Chegwidden, his regiment and number and the two handles were made of thick plaited rope with little hairs sticking out which pricked through my dress if I sat against the handles whilst playing near the pot board. The chest was very heavy, and I thought my father must be the strongest man in the world, for he took it all the way to France with him, or so I thought. He kept his working boots next to the tool-chest and if ever there was a ‘funny’ smell in the kitchen these boots were always blamed and he was furious when he discovered ‘someone’ had placed them outside in the ‘airy,’ for they were often innocent. Once they were banished and the guilty party that time was the Stilton cheese an aunt had sent him from the country. Another time a nest of mice was found in the corner of the tool-chest.