Mother Knew Best

by Dorothy Scannell

  The next morning, however, I realised we were living in a fool’s paradise to think anyone could take Mother’s place, for we were rudely awakened by Father’s shouting, ‘Bloody wars, gel, you’ll have to do better than this, I’ll get the sack.’ We had all overslept. We rushed about leaving the house at minute intervals, without breakfast, tearing down the Grove as though our lives depended on it. Amy was very upset for she felt she let us all down. She could hardly avoid feeling this with recriminations pouring on to her shoulders from all directions. After all, she had possessed the alarm clock. She made up her mind to greet us that evening with a house spick and span and a truly delicious meal. Again we all believed her, for she really did mean it, but Marjorie and I arrived home from school to find Amy fast asleep. She had worked so hard all day attempting too much at once, washing, ironing, housework, cooking and, going upstairs in the late afternoon, had only sat on her bed for a moment. Exhausted she had fallen into a deep sleep.

  Arthur complained that the collars of his shirt were creased and by Wednesday Amy had used up all the housekeeping which was supposed to last until Saturday. She had done lots of fancy cooking (with little cakes in crinkly paper to impress her boyfriend), and daily we were becoming more despondent, and, of course, bankrupt.

  It wasn’t any better for Mother. The hospital had decided to give her a starvation cure and on the Thursday when the doctor said she could have food again, she was given a piece of boiled fish which she said was as big as a walnut. The hospital sister then cheerfully told the doctor Mother had eaten a beautiful meal of lovely fish. Mother was feeling in a deprived mood therefore when Arthur and Father arrived for the visiting hour with their tales of woe and bankruptcy, not to mention rich food. Whether it was the minuscule size of the hospital fish or Father’s low spirits, or whether Mother felt better, no one ever knew, but, much to the doctor’s annoyance, she discharged herself, came home with Father and, without one moment’s convalescence, became Mother again.

  How different it had been for Father when he had been ill some years before at the little house. He did not disappear quietly and unobtrusively from our lives as Mother did, for we were woken one morning by the sound of a giant breathing painfully. The doctor arrived, diagnosed pneumonia, and ran from the house. Two policemen arrived with the wooden-slatted stretcher on wheels, the same stretcher which was used on Saturday nights to run a drunken man to the police station. But to show that Father was an accident and not a drunken man, the stretcher had an arch of black oilskin. Father was placed on the invalid carriage, wrapped in a red blanket, and strapped down. One policeman wheeled the stretcher while another walked by the side to assist its smooth passage along the bumpy road. Mother walked on the other side of the stretcher for Father was so ill she was going to stay with him through the crisis. The rest of the family followed the invalid down the Grove, those who weren’t crying were trying to squeeze out a few tears for the sake of appearances, at the same time feeling a little ashamed that Father might be mistaken for a criminal because of the policemen and the wheeled contraption.

  Mother came home so happy that Father had come through the crisis and one Sunday morning when she knew he was to sit on the balcony at Poplar hospital, she dressed us in our Sunday best and we walked to Poplar hospital to see him. We waited against the wall of the East India Docks until nurse brought Father out to a long chair. We crossed the road to the hospital railings. The older ones could see over the spearlike tops of the sooty iron railing, and the smaller fry squashed their faces in between the slats lower down. The nurse raised her hands when she saw us all, whether in surprise or horror I don’t know, but she disappeared inside the french doors of the balcony and emerged quickly with two more nurses, one wearing a frilly baby’s bonnet with a large white bow under her chin. They stared at us and we stared back, very respectfully of course, and when one nurse bent down and said something to Father we heard him shout in a strange voice which had gone all high and piping, ‘Yes, and they’re ALL mine.’ He threw his arms wide and appeared very excited. When we came home and told Mother about Father’s high voice, she said, ‘Well, it was touch and go.’

  So Mother was right to say we were lucky for her stay in hospital was brief, Father’s successful, and Marjorie’s visit very brief, but tragic for me, well, for my reputation. She was always fiddling about in drawers, or enquiring into things which had no earthly bearing on her circumstances, present or future, and even though I was reading an exciting book I was conscious of her ferreting. One afternoon Mother and I were in the kitchen and Marjorie was ‘busy’ in the scullery, when she suddenly called to me in a voice of excited discovery. I went irritably into the scullery where she was standing at the kitchen sink with father’s cut-throat razor in her hand. She was holding it, open and aloft, and as I entered she said, ‘This is marvellous. Look, it can even cut a hair off the back of my hand.’ Before I had time to tell her to put such a dangerous thing away, she shouldn’t have been going to Dad’s cupboard in any case, with a theatrical sweep she drew the razor across her hand. The blade fell, slicing the back of her hand. For one horrible moment we both stood still, then she said, ‘Oh, just look Dolly, you can see my bones,’ and then the blood came pumping out. I yelled for Mother who grabbed the pepper pot, smothered Marjorie’s hand and said, quite casually I thought, that Marjorie must go to the hospital to have it stitched. Mother said to Marjorie, ‘Don’t be frightened, you will have your big sister with you.’ The big sister was apparently me. The first time I had been honoured with this title. Mother must have thought that in bestowing this title upon me at this time of crisis I would rise to the occasion.

  Although feeling cold and sick I determined to succour my little sister even though I felt angry with her for her dangerous and unnecessary experiment. It wasn’t so bad when Mother gave me 2d. for the bus fares to the hospital, I put my arm protectively round Marjorie and led her up the area steps. She would chatter on about the bones, the blood, the razor and I couldn’t ask her to stop for I knew all ladies loved to talk about symptoms of illness and details of operations, but on the bus the blood began seeping through the towel, and the sight of this combined with Marjorie’s vivid details, made me feel very far away and strange.

  We got off the bus at Blackwall tunnel and as I took Marjorie’s arm for support to walk the few yards to the hospital gates, the bus conductor, who must have been upstairs during our journey, leant from the bus and shouted rudely that we hadn’t paid our fares. The bus was starting to move and I ran towards it with my 2d. The conductor insisted I wait for the tickets (he was honest if I was not, was the implication), and when I turned round Marjorie was disappearing inside the hospital. Now I felt so ghastly that the effort of opening the door to the casualty department caused me to stagger, for my knees seemed to be bending against my will. A fair, angelic-looking doctor approached me. ‘Hold on,’ he said, so kindly. ‘You shall lie down, what is the trouble?’ ‘It’s not me,’ I stammered, ‘It’s my little sister, she’s cut her hand on my Dad’s razor.’ He dropped me as though I were a leper, and I wondered why I had thought him angelic-looking, for he became very angry. ‘Get outside,’ he said, ‘and put your head between your legs.’

  The shock in his change of attitude shamed me so greatly that I found strength to leave the hospital, and when Marjorie came out looking like a cat that has got at the cream, I was sitting on the ground with my head against the wall, dying, I was sure. She helped me up and helped me home, still going into detail, this time about how wonderfully the wound had been stitched. ‘It’s exactly the same as needlework, Dolly,’ she enthused. The thought of a needle going through flesh was the final straw and as Mother came down the Grove to meet us, I fainted.

  Still no sympathy from Mother as I sat by the fire and sipped the hot sweet tea she had made for me. ‘Well, you wouldn’t be of much help in a crisis, I’m afraid, Dolly.’ I glared at Marjorie who had given me such a wretched time, she was being treated like a heroine, and I h
ad the rest of the family to face yet. My cowardice under fire would surely be repeated to each member of the family as they arrived home. Marjorie never reproached me, but her hand remained scarred and so did my reputation.

  Chapter 10

  Paper Tiger

  Six days shalt thou labour, says the good book, but for my mother Sunday was not the day of rest scheduled by the scribes. On this holy day we were all at home getting under her feet. Mother rose just as early on Sunday mornings as she had done every day of her life, often leaving a sleeping household to go to Holy Communion at All Saints, and she had done some hours of housework before the family came straggling down in ones and twos. If no one was coming to tea she was able to have a few hours rest on Sunday afternoons, for then the house would be quiet with Father dozing in his chair, spectacles on top of his head and his library book swaying drunkenly in his hand. The younger ones were at Sunday school, the older ones visiting friends or taking a walk.

  I remember one Sunday morning vividly for it was my first experience of physical violence in our house. My brothers had become interested in boxing and intended to join a boxing club. My father was very pleased he had sired men boys but Mother was most disapproving, for she thought boxing a coarse and cruel sport, and could not understand how one man would wish to hurt another. She was disappointed that any of her boys should wish to take up what she felt should not be called a sport. Father dismissed Mother’s disapproval as a weak and feminine attitude, and made matters worse by actually obtaining two pairs of boxing-gloves and promoting himself to tutor, so that the boys would be in a position to protect themselves when they joined the club. No novices they, under Father’s instruction.

  The small back yard was to be the boxing-ring and to this spot we all repaired much to Father’s annoyance. He insisted it wasn’t a suitable spectacle for the feminine sex, but this made the girls all the more eager to stay. Perhaps he was embarrassed by the critical audience he knew he would have while teaching his sons the art of fisticuffs. His exasperation reached brealdng-point when the ginger man next door, the pigeon-fancier, stationed himself on the garden wall and gazed silently, but somehow gleefully, at the instructor. Since my father had nothing in common with the neighbours, only ever giving them a polite but cursory nod, the interest of this man was the final straw, so back we all came, pouring through the scullery past Mother’s cold looks, into the kitchen.

  The small space between the dresser and the kitchen table would do for a practice ring and Mother was warned not to keep coming in and out for the door would open right into the middle of the ring, either separating the two opponents or subjecting her to an unintended blow. My father gave a practical demonstration of what boxing was all about, much to the impatience of the boys, who just wanted to be left alone to slog it out. He assumed the elbows upward Corinthian stance of the bare-fisted pugilists of the past. He always had a strange way of explaining things for he talked in actions more than words. My mother seemed to understand his waving hands, nodding head, and shrugging shoulders always, not to mention the movement of his eyes, and seemed for ever interested. I never could and gave up trying. Marjorie seemed fascinated by Father’s sign language, although she couldn’t understand it, and I knew she never would. She sat with a permanent stare when Father was drawing his day’s doings to an interested Mother.

  He was like a ballet-dancer prancing about the ‘ring’ and it was all very entertaining, but eventually the lessons were finished, the boys away to other pursuits. Father, satisfied he had done his paternal duty, went back to his book, a little doubtful that his sons had been intelligent enough to grasp his ‘simple’ tuition. Winifred, the strong athletic member of the family had been fired with enthusiasm by the lesson and putting on a pair of boxing-gloves, she challenged all and sundry. We were all too sensible to accept the challenge, but Father, in a weak moment, said he would have a little spar with Win.

  He sat in a chair while his gloves were being tied for him, giving Win last minute hints, and as he got up from his chair, still instructing, before the silent bell had gone, before he was ready and while he was partly off-balance, Winifred caught him with a right upper cut to his jaw, putting all her strength behind it. Father seemed to go up before he went down, knocking his head on the dresser. His elbow caught on the dish of hot prunes Mother had placed there to cool and as he slithered to the floor the hot brown sticky juice ran down his bald head. He gazed at Winnie like a goose looking down a bottle, bravely attempting to get up, until he saw that Winnie, having tasted first blood, still had the light of battle in her eyes and was waiting on prancing feet to deliver the final knock-out blow. Winnie commenced the victory count as Mother came in at the noise. She looked crossly down at Father and said, ‘I would have thought you could have found something better to do, Walter, than indulge in horse-play with the girls.’ She was annoyed at the waste of the prunes and the sticky mess everywhere and this brought Winnie to her senses, and peaceful again she began to help clear it up. She was smiling broadly as my father approached her and said, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘You shouldn’t have done that to me, gel, always remember, play fair, play fair.’

  Fate still had another shock in store for Father that Sunday. He was to bite the dust again, this time because of my stupidity and absent-mindedness. We all had our regular places at the table. I always sat next to my father, and that dinner-time I was the last to reach the table, my mind still in the Doone valley with Jan Ridd. My father had risen from his chair to reach across the table, and not realising we were a chair short, I took my father’s chair and sat down. Suddenly he came backwards into space. As he fell he grabbed the tablecloth and his hot meal showered on to him. The floorboard cracked and I thought he had broken his back. My mother came in from the scullery, still cross with my father and said irritably, ‘Whatever are you up to now, Walter?’ which made David say, ‘You mean, down, Mum,’ sending him off into roars of laughter at his own joke which he thought extremely clever and quick-witted. As my father rose, holding his back, he turned aggressively to me and said, ‘Practical jokes are not only bloody silly things but they can cause permanent damage. Don’t you ever play a practical joke on any one again.’ Since I hadn’t been joking and wouldn’t dare to do such a thing and because I was relieved that my father had risen from the floor for I had been certain his back was broken, I burst into tears. This upset Mother who said to Father, ‘Now Dolly won’t eat any dinner,’ thereby again putting the blame on the poor innocent man. ‘I think I’m a bloody sight safer at work than home,’ he shouted. Winnie fetched him a chair, still beaming and wearing her invisible laurel wreath, the boys were still laughing and Amy was looking secretly pleased. I had a headache.

  My mother had a fund of pronouncements which she delivered from time to time with such a severe and serious mien, I felt these sayings were invented for me, and I believed all her trite remarks implicitly and when young accepted them without question. My father was lord and master of his house—or was he? Was he not a paper tiger that Mother had invented for some subtle reason of her own? He said once that my mother made him an ogre to his children. True, she would say, ‘Hush, now, be quiet, Daddy will be home soon and he will be tired after a hard day’s work,’ and we hushed immediately, but I never heard my father ask us to be quiet. When talking about children with friends he would say, ‘You should love ’em and leave ’em alone.’ I believe he felt if children were born of healthy and normal parents, they would, because of nature in some way, know what was best for them.

  Mother thought it a crime to argue with one’s husband in front of the children; for parents to frighten a child by fighting together in that child’s presence was to her one of the really wicked things, and she would almost cry out when she heard of little children sitting on the stairs listening to their parents fight. ‘It may affect a child all its life,’ she would worry. So one of her maxims was, ‘It is better to give points away for peace,’ but of course she wasn’t submissive and by her
calm non-acquiescence, I think she gained her point. Certainly she loved and admired my father, although sometimes if he grumbled about conditions she would say, ‘You are a disappointed man, Walter.’ This always infuriated him and he would rub his balding head and grit his teeth and I am sure he would have liked to give Mother a push. I am sure she knew this too, but she still said it and I wonder if she was not really the master of the house. His comfort was her first concern: ‘A man must respect himself before he can respect others,’ and she would have given her life for him or for her children, yet she was her own woman, always. She felt a woman must always act in a way to command respect from her husband; to be flighty, or allow even one’s husband to feel a woman was ‘willing’, was one sure way of losing a man’s respect. It was a man’s prerogative to ask; a woman must never, never ask, although it was her duty not to refuse her husband.

  It’s true my father was a disappointed man, and I suppose neither he nor my mother should have been living in Poplar. They were both intelligent, both having been to school when other children of their ages were sent out to work. I had unusual grandparents in that they paid sixpence a week to send their children to village schools, so that both my parents could write well, had a knowledge of figures and, as my father said, were well versed in ‘the three Rs,’ although he said this in a sarcastic and humorous way. He did try to retrieve the family fortunes from time to time, but as these ventures all failed, to the amusement of the family, he felt Mother had brain-washed us all to support her and gang up on him.

  He was very taken with advertisements in the News of the World if they said it was easy to make a fortune in one’s spare time. He once saw an advertisement on mushroom-growing and could see the sovereigns rolling in. Much to Mother’s silent disgust and pity for his gullibility, he spent all his money on the materials advertised. He was a wonderful craftsman, and along the whole length of the backyard he built a wooden growing-box. After much swearing and warnings to the family that, when the magic mushroom loam was planted, the growing-box must not be opened, or even approached, until a certain hour on a certain day, we all waited and waited for the day when the opening ceremony would take place and the Chegwiddens’ ship come in.