Mother Knew Best

by Dorothy Scannell

  There were two attractive shops, Konskiers, and Silverblatts where Amy, who was seven years older than me, bought pretty underclothes and ‘bust bodices’; and some Jewish fashion shops with chic hats, coats and frocks; and Neaves, a huge open-fronted credit drapers with hundreds of pairs of heavy hob-nailed boots hanging so low on string that men would have to duck to get inside, otherwise they’d get a nasty knock. Inside were piles and piles of striped flannelette working shirts, without collars. The assistants wore brown overalls so it wasn’t posh and I thought it the dullest shop in the world. Women would take a dog-eared torn book to Neaves and pay 6d. per week to get clothes on credit.

  Between the regular stalls, where the stall-holders were as well known to us as the shop-keepers, were wide spaces where travelling pedlars sold their goods from the ground. It was exciting to see the different foreign people there each week for they had a lively patter, some very comical, all fluent. There was the gipsy with large golden ear-rings and golden sovereigns stitched round her brightly coloured head-scarf. She had a dozen beautifully coloured love birds and if anyone paid her, usually a young man or woman, she would put out a little stick towards one of the birds and it would fly down, forage among a box of small coloured paper squares and bring out a ‘fortune.’ Near the gipsy was the man in the frock coat and top hat. He sold medicine which was magical, for it cured every illness known to mankind (and some not yet discovered). Warts, loss of hair, influenza, gout, intimate ailments. I had no idea what an intimate ailment was, yet I knew it was a disease which must not be enquired about from grown-ups. My brother Cecil said of this magical medicine, ‘It polishes your boots lovely.’ The medicine man would talk non-stop about all the places in the world where he had cured people after doctors had given them up; even royalty, abroad of course, were in his debt. He had his own special bottle of medicine from which he drank from time to time, and this he kept in his pocket. His pitch was on the corner of Kirby Street where the Salvation Army band would play on Saturday nights, and when the cymbals clashed and the band started up, he would say, ‘Oh, Jesus, what a holy row,’ but he still went on talking non-stop and I was sure he could never be silent. I wondered if he was married and what it was like at home for his children. Obviously none of them would ever be ill with free magic medicine, but I thought they might be dumb’ for they would never get a chance to speak while he was there.

  Further down was the man in irons and chains. My brother said he was Houdini’s cousin. He was short, ever so strong-looking and was always stripped to the waist, sunburnt and covered with tattoos, flowers, birds, butterflies and words. Across his chest, and back, and round again towards his neck was a huge serpent, tattooed in red and blue. As the man moved, the snake writhed as though it were real and its long fangs stretched upward towards his throat. I had to put my head almost upside down to see some of the tattoos the right way. People paid money to see Houdini’s cousin escape from the chains and iron bands. One day I saw him being chased by a policeman, who just lifted the chains off the chain man, so then I knew that policemen were very strong, for I never saw anyone in the crowd ever get the chains off.

  I went to Sukey’s stall for a ha’porth of pot-herbs, and it was good value, for Mother said it was enough to flavour her stew or rabbit. Sukey was lovely, in a snow-white overall, the happiest and fattest woman I had ever seen. I always thought she was sitting down at the little table-stall and it came as a real shock when I grew older to realise she had been standing up all the years of my childhood and that she was her own human arm-chair. Next to Sukey was the rabbit woman. Mother would get a wild rabbit for sixpence. Of course she needed two for our family, but when Father’s pay increased to £2 a week, later on she would sometimes have an Ostend rabbit. Mother never liked to see the eyes of a rabbit, they used to make her feel sad, and I thought she was remembering them running about in the meadows when she was young.

  Agnes would sometimes get the dinner for Mother. Mother would give her sixpence and she would buy half a pound of leg of beef, a ha’porth of pot-herbs, a pennyworth of suet, and three ha’porth of potatoes, and for this sixpence there was a dinner for all. I suppose the young ones had gravy and dumplings. Mother used Edwards’ dessicated soup powder (it wasn’t powder really) which she thought ‘made’ the stew. There was, of course, her big rice pudding to follow. Sometimes she would buy an enormous cod’s head for a penny. (Such a lovely lot of fish left on the head!) We had stews mostly, but sometimes on Sunday for 2s. she would buy an ‘oven breaker,’ which was the large back ribs of meat, and she would do it very slowly in the oven. Often, herself, she had a ‘kettle bender’ which was a cup of crusts with hot water, pepper and salt, and a knob of margarine. She said it was like broth and she always had this meal before Father came in for his.

  I used to love watching her pack Father’s lunch. He would have a huge Cornish pasty which he called ‘Man Friday’s Footprint’ and a tea parcel. She would take several thicknesses of newspaper, fold them, and in the middle shake a mound of sugar, then on top of this some tea from the caddy, followed by another layer of sugar; on top of this again would be poured a thick river of creamy Nestle’s milk and then more layers of sugar and tea. Father would boil it all up in a billycan and he loved it. Sometimes for tea he would have a large plate of toasted cheese. I would watch him put vinegar and pepper on it, and it looked like nectar to me, but I never had any. Mother said it would give me the nightmares and of course nobody in his right mind would want the nightmares.

  Once, for a special treat, Mother bought some little cabinet puddings from the coffee shop across the road where my brother Arthur’s friends lived, and the little individual puddings in their tiny basins caused great fun. Black treacle was very good for us, Father said, and we had it on Mother’s huge suet puddings. My brother Leonard always had to have the pudding cloth, for he was always afraid some of the pudding near the string, where the cloth became creased, would be wasted.

  Mother would tell me that when she was first married she would buy a large leg of mutton for 2s. 6d. She always bought white cheese but my friends’ mothers bought red cheese. She would buy Sunlight soap for washing the clothes, but John Knight’s Family Health for washing us. She always tried to buy a small amount of butter for me, because I was delicate, and for herself, because she would sometimes make her main meal of bread and butter. Neither she nor I liked jam, and with jam or treacle you just couldn’t taste the margarine.

  Oxenham’s of Chrisp Street was a grand emporium and on very special occasions Mother would buy hair-ribbon for my younger sister, Marjorie, and me. Mine was always crushed strawberry and Marjorie’s blue. Mother would lovingly stroke my ribbon with her finger and say, ‘Crushed strawberry is the colour for Dolly.’ But since I had reddish curly hair I didn’t fancy the crushed strawberry colour and sometimes if I wanted to annoy Mother I would call it pink; she always answered, ‘No, dear, it isn’t pink, it really is crushed strawberry.’ Since I’d never had strawberries it meant nothing to me. I hated pink. We would be given a packet of pins for a farthing change; the packet was green and each pin was in its own little hole. The assistant on the ribbon counter suffered from a head complaint and I would wonder on my way to Oxenham’s whether she would have short curly hair, bald patches with tufts, or if she would be wearing a mob-cap. If she was wearing a mob-cap it would mean she had no hair at all, then I thought she would look like the picture on the map of the man further along Chrisp Street who talked without stopping for breath. He held a baton in his hand and kept pointing to a head on a map. The head was like the countries in my brother David’s atlas which he brought home from school for homework, for it had lines and rivers all over. On the ground in front of the man was a scarlet plush chair with a gold cord across the front of it. My brother said, ‘He tells your bumps,’ and I thought the cord across the chair was to stop someone falling on to the ground with fright if the man told that person’s bumps something nasty.

  When we reached the finan
cial stage of sometimes having the Ostend rabbit instead of wild rabbit, then Coppins the butcher’s was a port of call for he sold English meat, not ‘catmag.’ Old Mr Coppins treated Mother like a lady and she would laugh with him, but I thought he was a most frightening bad-tempered man. He would go berserk if a woman poked her finger in any of his meat and bring his chopper down hard, just missing the poking finger with its black-edged nail. When I went to his shop for Mother by myself I would stay right back against the wall because of his down-coming chopper and be very glad to leave his shop, for he was always red-faced and swearing.

  The one chemist in Chrisp Street was Tucks but I only went there once, for he gave me my medicine in a large green liniment bottle. When at Mother’s insistence I had finished the last dose, out fell a piece of sticky paper. To our horror attached to this horrible brown paper was an enormous bluebottle. My father said I could have been arsenicked, poisoned. We always went to Abelsons further away in the main East India Dock Road. He was a very charming, very polite Jewish gentleman with thick pebble glasses, very guttural and adenoidish. We would wait excitedly for, on completion of our business, he would say, ‘And ith there anythig elth?’ and this never failed to amuse us.

  Winifred was always losing her money in Chrisp Street for she went shopping with a note folded very small in the palm of her hand and when she went to pay for her goods would find she had no money. She would retrace her steps and nearly always found the note, for she had made it look like a tiny piece of thrown-away paper.

  On Saturday nights the Jewish man on his sweet stall was a music-hall turn. He had the patter of an Alfred Marks of that day. He would gather up whipped cream walnuts, candy and toffee and sell them all in one parcel amid screams of laughter, but everyone waited for the punch line. On one side of the sweet man was the large flower lady, enormously breasted, bright-faced, with arms red from being in and out of pails of water. She made wreaths for funerals. On the other side of Sweet Harry was a gentle blind man. With eyelids closed he would sell matches and bootlaces from a little tray suspended round his neck. He always wore a bowler hat and every few seconds he would say gently, ‘Is there anyone else, is there anyone else?’ Sweet Harry with perfect timing would tell the crowd, ‘Last night the flower woman was in bed and she said…’ and then came the blind man’s, ‘Is there anyone else, is there anyone else?’

  Clarkes the grocers would put a stall outside the shop on Saturday nights with bargains. My father said, ‘Rubbish the manager wants to get rid of,’ and this stall was managed by an eager, tiny, blond boy who would call out in a piping voice, ‘Ladies, get your woocherchooster sauce here.’ I thought him very stupid not to be able to say Worcestershire properly. One day a woman knocked a bottle of sauce on to the ground and as the brown liquid ran out I was struck by the look of sheer terror on the little boy’s face.

  There was nothing one could not buy in Chrisp Street if one was rich, everybody was so happy and jolly and all the shop assistants seemed to vie with each other to serve a customer. ‘The trouble with Chrisp Street,’ Mother would say, ‘it is impossible to send Dolly on an errand, she dreams her time away.’ The whizzing canisters containing money and bills shooting in all directions above one’s head in Oxenham’s, the barrel organ outside the public house, the man playing the violin with his eyes closed, the Indian man with his head and legs all bound round with cloth, the hot faggots, the black puddings and pease pudding, the noise, the smell, the music and, oh, the life!

  Chapter 5

  A Lovely Place to Live

  I loved Poplar, its people, its places, its atmosphere; it was the only thing I was ever brave enough to defend. Years later, when I was working in the City with ‘pin money’ girls from Kensington, Wimbledon and St John’s Wood, and it was discovered I came from Poplar, I felt they almost drew away from me physically as though I were a refugee from a leper colony. ‘Oh,’ they would say, horrified, ‘Poplar, isn’t that in the SL—S?’ or, ‘That’s where the poor come from, the down and outs, isn’t it?’ ‘How terrible it must be for you to live in such a filthy place.’

  But Poplar, to my mind, was a lovely district, for it contained all that anyone could need. Beautiful churches, schools, parks, a library, hospital, docks, a pier, public baths and even a swimming-bath. We had a nautical college and a bookshop famous all over London.

  It wasn’t necessary for one to be able to read to know, even from a long way off, what goods some shops sold, for many of the shops had, outside, very large and exciting signs of their trade. The barber had a long pink and white striped pole and Father said it was something to do with blood-letting in the olden days. The ironmongers had an enormous key, the butcher a picture of a ferocious well-fed bull, one shop had an enormous pink teapot aloft on the roof and this shop, a grocers, was always known as Teapot Jones. The shop which sold clothes to seamen displayed an enormous thigh-length boot, and I used to tell Marjorie it was a seven-league boot of a giant. But the sign I thought must have cost a lot of money was outside the Pawnbrokers’ shop which was called the Pledge Office—three golden balls. I thought they were solid gold for the sun was always shining on them when I went out in the morning.

  On Monday mornings there was always a queue of women standing close together waiting for the Office to open, bundles under their arms and the boys would call out, ‘Same as last week, shift and drawers ninepence,’ but the women took no notice. Mother wasn’t a Monday morning regular and indeed she never had the courage to go herself, but always sent two members of the family. Of course, Father mustn’t know, and no other fathers seemed to know of their wives’ and children’s visits to this establishment. So the suit, or whatever, was camouflaged and the children like adventurous spies always keeping a watchful eye open for an unexpected father. We were rich, for Mother wrapped Father’s suit in a sheet of brown paper which was put away very carefully each week. A friend of mine was very envious of this sheet of brown paper for she had to take the clothes to be pawned in an old piece of shirt, but once she managed to save a penny and she bought a sheet of brown paper. This was her most cherished possession for the years of her childhood and each week she ironed this so that it always looked new, and each week she regained her pride and felt she could look the world in the face. I wondered where people thought my friend took this large brown paper parcel each week. It couldn’t be the Post Office for she came home with it on Saturdays and the postman always delivered. But this penny sheet of brown paper made my friend very very happy. She was a very serious girl, extremely capable, and took her pawnbroking visits very seriously. On Mondays, in the winter, she would take her father’s watch. This family heirloom was only pawned in the winter for then her father arose in the dark and went to bed in the dark so he didn’t see that the watch was missing. Her mother warned her not to let the pawnbroker put the watch too heavily on the counter. My friend would watch him very closely, her hand at the ready, and always, when I was with her, she was quicker than the pawnbroker, and the watch always had the cushion of her hand for safety.

  Mo Finer, the Jewish dentist, had a surgery in East India Dock Road. He was a large brutal-looking man with a red face and thick lips. He always appeared to be eating and wiping his mouth on a grubby white overall. He pulled teeth free if the victim was willing to sit in the window for a public extraction, a novel if noisy way of advertising. If you were a coward then you would have to pay to have your tooth removed behind closed doors. So one had a choice, unless of course you were a penniless coward, then you were in for a bad time, for I believe Mo removed teeth free without anaesthetics of any kind. My brothers said Mo could pull a man across the road by his teeth, he was so strong. As he pulled teeth he would throw them out into the road. We never went to Mo Finer. When I became of school age I had my teeth removed by the clinic and I thought it was heavenly. Under gas I really did see the rabbit running round and round as the dentist had promised I would, and I just longed to have gas again. The dentist said I was his best patient and t
he first one ever to rush into the surgery and jump eagerly into the swivel-chair.

  The public baths and wash-houses backed on to our house and from the wash-house came an everlasting hot, soapy, steamy aroma. The door of the wash-house was always open and in the dark interior one could catch a glimpse of red wet-faced women in sacking aprons and men’s boots doing their weekly wash, or a daily wash if they took in washing for a few shillings. The clothes would dry in a very hot open oven suspended on iron rails on metal wheels. The noise of these metal wheels was deafening and the women would have to shout all day to be heard above the noise. Inside the wash-house they looked like Amazons with their sleeves rolled up above their soapy elbows, but when they came out and packed their prams with sacking-covered washing they looked old. With rusty black hats, or a man’s cap fixed flat with a large bead-ended hat-pin on top of their scragged hair, they seemed very small and bent. They would have to hold the large bundle of washing with one hand and push the go-cart with the other. Their ankles seemed to be bent over and their shoes never looked as though they belonged to them.

  When we were too old for Mother to bathe us in the little tin bath, we would join the older ones every Friday and go to the public baths. We would have to go early for a large crowd collected in the waiting-room when the young people came home from work. It was impossible for a girl to pop into the baths before a dance, etc. for sometimes it was necessary to wait over two hours for one’s bath. We always took a book to read, and always saw the local brides there the night before their wedding. I never had a satisfactory bath there for I was always nervous of authority, and as I could never be sure whether the water was the right heat when I tried it with my hands at the attendant’s request, I had a bath either too cold or too hot and often came home looking like a lobster. I could never pluck up courage, as the others did, to call out, ‘More hot, or cold, in number... please,’ even though the baths rang with the sound of such requests. When the attendant said, ‘Hurry along in number... please,’ I thought how brave the girl in that numbered bath was, to have to be asked to hurry. I wished I could just lie in the warm water with no one outside waiting for the bath. One Friday evening I was at the baths with Winifred when a neighbour’s daughter came out. She was an anaemic copy of Mary Pickford, very thin, with bent ankles on high-heeled patent shoes. She wore a moth-eaten fur and said to Winnie, ‘Oh I feel a ton lighter now,’ and Winnie remarked to me she wasn’t surprised for that was the young lady’s yearly visit. Poor frail little thing, she just wanted to look like a film star, and she was so thin I should think it would have been dangerous for her to visit the baths each week.