Mother Knew Best

by Dorothy Scannell

  Next to the baths was the blacksmiths and I used to love to watch him shoe the horses. He was only a little man but he had huge forearms. I wondered why the horses didn’t cry out in pain when he put the hot sizzling shoe on the hoof. Mother said she always knew when I had watched the horses being shod for I smelt of stables. The gutters in my childhood were always filled with chaff from the horses’ nose-bags.

  We went to the ‘pictures’ on Saturday mornings. The Picture Palace was like a huge garage with dirty red doors opposite Mrs Crutchington’s shop and it cost a ha’penny. It was called the Star Picture Palace and we would all cheer when the pictures finally started for the screen was a long time flickering and shaking and tearing itself in two with brief glimpses of the previous week’s serial before it settled down, and whenever it broke down during the performance, which was often, we would all boo loudly. A lady played the piano, sad music, frightening music, and happy music according to how the film was progressing and what was taking place. Because we had so few ‘arrants’ to do, we were nearly always the first ones there and so sat in the front row where the cowboys were nine feet tall, the horses hunched up in the middle and the heroine had a ‘Dish ran away with the spoon’ face.

  Marjorie was the most terrible person to accompany to the pictures. Even when she was older she didn’t improve much. We all left the world mentally, but she left it physically as well in a sense. When the heroine was tied to the railway line, and tried to fight her captors, Marjorie would fight in her seat. When the poor mother was pleading with the wicked landlord for her starving children, Marjorie was on her knees pleading too. Her screams of terror when the heroine was about to be tortured seemed louder to me than the frightening music being played by the lady pianist and I would thump Marjorie to bring her back to the world. All in vain, she never felt or heard me, and I ceased going to the pictures on Saturdays long before Marjorie did, for she could wait patiently until the next episode of an exciting serial. Rather than wait and wonder, I decided not to go. I hated serials, I just had to see a complete picture, and most of the films shown to the children had been cut and made into serials, for by chopping the films into little bits they would last the Picture Palace for weeks and weeks. I always thought it had been raining on the screen and it wasn’t until years later I realised it was the poor quality of the film. The black streaks moved everlastingly up and down.

  Saturday was disinfectant day, too. The ‘disinfecting’ the children called the white cloudy liquid which was supplied free by the council provided the requisite number of bottles was taken each Saturday morning. We had to be very careful not to spill any for my brother Cecil had warned us, when passing the job over to Marjorie and me, that it ‘rots your boots,’ and being clever I knew that once it had rotted my boots then it would start on my feet. Father used the disinfectant for cleaning the drains which he did with great vigour as though he was attacking the devil. All the time he would talk about the ignorant people who turned up their noses because they thought free disinfectant was charity and if they took advantage of it people would think they were accepting charity and were also dirty. Disinfectant from the borough was for the dirty poor most people thought, but I knew we were sensible for Father said it was lovely stuff. I have seen him pour it over a cut finger and it would heal in no time. Mother said some women put it in their wash to make their clothes look white, but Mother said hers were white through proper washing. We all have our standards.

  High Street, Poplar, on a Saturday morning was a human ant colony, a never-ending stream of children hurrying along, or having a rest, with clinking bottles. Well, we hurried one way when the bottles were empty, on the way back we carried the bags in different positions to relieve the strain on our arms.

  The disinfectant depot was not the ‘dust instructor.’ The dust instructor was where the dustmen took the rubbish; it was really the dust destructor, but everybody called it instructor. The disinfectant depot was past the Nautical College, a beautiful white building, in the High Street. We turned into a steep cobble-stoned yard where all the children had to start running—it was well known that no one could walk down that slope. We had all tried. In winter it was extremely treacherous and we were thankful it was on the way in when we were carrying empty bottles for if we had slipped on the way out we might have been rotted all over. Sitting in the depot at an enormous dark green carboy was a man with a grey cap, a silent man who never spoke, but just held out his hands for our empty bottles. We always said ‘Thank you,’ for Mother reminded us every Saturday about doing this. The large cork of his carboy was pure white and spongy where the disinfectant had touched it. That was proof Cecil spoke the truth.

  The workhouse was attached to the depot and across the yard we could see little men in coarse grey suits and caps going to and fro through barred windows and yellow-faced vacant-looking old women staring at us. I knew the workhouse was a sad place because my brother David would recite a poem about Christmas Day in ‘IT.’ I always took this poem very seriously.

  One Saturday morning on the way back from the Depot we rested outside Coldstreamer’s, the grubby little general shop with stairs up to the glass door which was plastered with advertisements for Mazawattee tea and Edwards’ ‘dessicated.’

  I was very fond of the Mazawattee tea advertisement for my maternal grandmother had won ten shillings per week for life for submitting a winning couplet to them. Ten shillings per week for life in 1900 was a fortune. Mother never shopped at Coldstreamer’s, secretly thinking it a gossip shop where lots of women collected. Mother never gossiped or said anything unkind about anyone. Mrs Coldstreamer had a lemon-shaped face, lemon-coloured hair and she possessed a lemon-coloured cat, a huge beast. In the dark little window were displayed black bowls filled with butter beans, rice, sugar, etc. all very dusty and ancient-looking.

  On this Saturday morning as we rested with our burdens, into the shop window climbed the huge lemon Tom. I could see Marjorie’s indignation beginning to take on its righteous role, ‘Look at that Tom,’ she said, ‘he shouldn’t be near food.’ Tom sniffed at every bowl in turn, then when Marjorie was worried he would lick the beans or the rice, or even the prunes, he turned to the brown sugar and to Marjorie’s choking horror, he slowly lifted one leg, looked straight through the window at Marjorie and defiantly soaked the brown sugar which I noticed did not change colour. I suspected he had done that trick before, hence the sniffing. Marjorie said she must tell Mrs C. who would be so pleased to know. Whatever emotion that good lady would feel, with a shopful of customers, I knew it would not be pleasure and I tried to dissuade Marjorie by saying that there was nothing to worry about for our mother didn’t buy anything there. My ‘it’s all right for us,’ attitude made Marjorie turn on me. ‘There’s other people, you know, Dolly,’ she said. She went up the steps and as the bell rang as she opened the door I thought discretion was the better part of valour and ran home to tell Mother what Marjorie was doing. When Marjorie arrived home she was seething. It seemed her reception from Mrs C. was not as she had imagined it to be, no grateful thanks, but extremely short shrift. Apparently she said to Mrs C., ‘You will be pleased with me for telling you, Mrs Coldstreamer, that your Tom cat has just wee-weed in the brown sugar in the window.’ That good lady replied, ‘Well, why should it worry you, your mother will never buy it.’ It was Marjorie’s first lesson that virtue is not its own reward.

  There was always the street to play in, lovely Bath Street, for there was nowhere to play in The Grove. On Saturday afternoons and after school we would always ask if we could go out to play. Our friends were always there before us for they took their thick slice of bread into the street to eat. Mother made us sit at the table all together to eat our tea and she sat down too at the top of the table behind her huge brown teapot. She would say, ‘Don’t talk to any strange men, and come in when the church bell rings.’ The church bell chimed for the hours but we knew she meant the evensong bell at 7:30 and without fail at the first evensong peal we
would be away home as Mother had told us to.

  We took with us pieces of rope for skipping, but sometimes one girl would have an enormous thick tarred length of rope which stretched right across the road, then it was a mass effort, boys as well. The boys looked very awkward and could not skip like the girls. ‘Allee in together girls, never mind the weather girls,’ we would chant. The first one in under the heavy swinging rope had to be very durable with extra strong legs for it was some time before everybody was in and skipping, and if your legs turned weak the rope would give them a nasty bruise. The two children turning the heavy rope had to be Amazons too and woe betide them if they let the rope droop and so caused us to be out through no fault of our own.

  Sometimes we would have a grotto season. Someone would build the first grotto and then on every street comer a grotto would arise. The older girls, Winifred and Amy did quite well out of their grottos, Winnie calm and business-like, Amy small and artistic. Marjorie and I were afraid to participate in our friends’ grottos for Mother was against what she thought was begging. ‘Nothing but charity,’ she would say, ‘Never let anyone know you are poor. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being poor, it’s the pleading of poverty which is so shaming.’ Winifred and Amy were more daring—how they hid their ill-gotten gains I don’t know. In the end, of course, they were found out.

  The grottos were a work of love and squirrel-like searching for stones, flowers, leaves, broken ornaments, texts and pictures from magazines. I once saw a little blue egg on a grotto yet the only birds I ever saw, all the time I lived in Poplar, were sparrows. Perhaps in my ignorance I thought all birds were sparrows. Winnie and Amy would place their grotto near a public house—clever Winnie, for they might catch a reeling man whose thriftiness was befuddled by an extra pint. Winnie was found out because a man gave her a lot of money for one kiss. This monstrous act was reported to Mother who promptly bankrupted the grotto business. After this, how could us younger ones start up in business? We felt the older ones had all the fun when they were young.

  My best friend in Bath Street was Ivy White. She had an older brother called soppy Joe. He was quite elderly and always wore a blue serge suit and a bowler hat. He had a very big head with bloodshot eyes not placed quite straight in his head and he ambled about in a slow running way. Ivy told me her brother was silly because as a baby he had eaten a whole bar of carbolic soap by mistake. I thought this must be true because very daringly I licked a bar of carbolic soap at home. So terrible was this one light lick that I knew if a baby ate a whole bar it would send him silly. Why, it would even send a grown man silly, although of course a grown man was more sensible than a little baby.

  My friendship with Ivy began to wane on the day of the outing. I had no choice, for she had made me feel different from the other girls and spoilt everything. The poor children of Poplar were to be taken for a day’s outing to the country by a welfare organisation. We were to obtain our tickets beforehand at a nearby vicarage. Ivy was horrified when I joined the queue for my ticket. ‘Why, Dolly Chegwidden,’ she said loudly, ‘you can’t come on the outing, you’re rich.’ This statement coming from my friend, a girl I thought the same as I was, shocked me and I ran home to Mother in tears, expecting her to deny Ivy’s accusation. But worse was to come, for Mother looked pleased and said, ‘To be poor and look poor is the devil outright.’ I knew then I would not go on the outing with my friends. I wished Amy would come home, she would get my ticket. She had been on one outing for a day and another for a week, both for starving dockers’ children. She just joined on the end of the queues and when the woman said Amy didn’t look very starving, Amy still didn’t run home in tears, she just acted her part out.

  I went to see my friends off hoping that the woman at the brakes would see me and insist on my going, but Ivy was watching me carefully and I knew she would tell the woman I was rich, so I looked the other way when the woman smiled at me. I went home feeling I was happier when I didn’t know I was rich. Mother said, ‘Disappointments are good for young people,’ which stemmed my tears because I felt angry.

  One day the Sunday School included in an outing Len and Amy who left in the early morning with their sandwiches and a whole penny each to spend. The excursion was cancelled at the last minute but the vicar threw open the vicarage gardens for the children. Amy persuaded Len to spend his money while she was spending hers and finally they went home. ‘Did you enjoy the day at the sea?’ asked Mother innocently. ‘Oh, yes,’ cried Amy, ‘It was lovely.’ Then you are a little liar,’ Mother said, ‘for I have been watching you from the bedroom window.’ Amy had forgotten that Mother could see across the railway to the vicarage gardens. Mother reproved her, and off Amy went to bed in a temper. First Amy paid a visit to Mother’s room and tore the velvet off Mother’s best hat, then satisfied she went to bed. Father grumbled at Amy for her sins, then she crept to his chest of drawers and tore into little squares some photographs Dad’s best friend had taken of him. She did not put them down the lavatory through fright as I would have done. She laid them all out in his drawer so he could see them. Although I knew she was beyond the pale for the terrible revenges she took on those who crossed her, I thought she was as brave as any war heroine and I was secretly jealous of her. I could never have faced Mother’s, ‘Oh, Amy, Amy, how can you be so unkind?’ I would have drowned in my tears, whereas Amy was pleased to the last. She would have made a wonderful suffragette.

  Chapter 6

  A Winkle-Eyed Lot

  The Great War, or the 1914 war as we called it, the birth of my youngest sister, and starting school for the first time are all wrapped up in the same memories and I never knew which was the worst thing out of these three.

  My father arrived at Valetta on the day that Marjorie was born and so she received the middle name of Valetta. I didn’t know whether it was in honour of the War, the place or my father. I was very jealous that my young sister was famous because of her name, and I was annoyed that she had been born at all. When people would say, ‘Little Marjorie Valetta, a war baby,’ or Mother would say her last baby, little Marjorie, was a war baby, they all seemed to say it so proudly, and little Marjorie would look all modest. Yet I knew she felt pleased and famous, and I used to grit my teeth because I always wanted to say, ‘Only just,’ which would have earned me a sad glance from Mother.

  I have hazy visions of my father going off ‘to the front’ for before leaving Mother in tears she had to help him lay all his kit out in the little back yard so it could be checked and inspected by him in a military fashion.

  He didn’t have to go to war, he was forty-nine and too old, but he had joined the Territorials to get a holiday each year and when war broke out, feeling guilty that he would have had a holiday without fighting, he volunteered for the Royal Fusiliers in London and gave his age as forty-six. Mother said he shouldn’t go, but Father felt he must. He couldn’t go back to the West Kents for they would have known his age, and he couldn’t go with the Territorials for they knew it too. But I thought the Royal Fusiliers sounded lovely, like a bugle. He laid all the pipes in the trenches in France for the Pioneer Corps, and spent his fiftieth birthday at Ypres.

  I thought, early on in the war, that the front was like a barrier at a railway station: the Huns would be waiting at this white barrier (it was always white in my imagination), and when my father arrived with his grey tool chest and his men, then battle would commence.

  My brother Arthur, who was seventeen, followed my father to France very quickly, and as he was a gentleman in civvy street so he looked immaculate in his uniform. I was not concerned that two of the men in the family had gone, for lots of fathers and brothers were going to the front and I felt it had something to do with that terrible picture that was everywhere—on the railway wall, on the church railings, the bank, and ever so many on the police station walls. I knew it was a picture of Kitchener because my older brothers and sisters would play battles, but I hated the picture, for Kitchener had fierce yellow eyes whi
ch followed me all along the road. I used to walk backwards and in a circle and the eyes still looked straight at me. I touched the picture once and was surprised not to feel his pointing finger, for until I touched the poster I was sure his clenched hand and large stiff forefinger were sticking out from the hoarding and walls.

  My father had a bearskin which had to be returned to his old regiment as he was now in a new regiment, but one day the older girls were playing battles and jumping up from the trenches caught the bearskin alight on the gas mantle. Someone was despatched to the shops for a new inverted gas mantle before darkness fell while Mother vainly tried to repair the bearskin. She tried everything, even horsehair from her mattress but the shiny black hairs on the bearskin now had mangy patches, and I remember it hanging on her bedroom door like a diseased cat or a cat that had been in a fight, for the cats in the Grove were always fighting and mangy.