Mother Knew Best

by Dorothy Scannell

  I was an unemployed failure, a drain on my family. I decided I would walk part of the way home to save Mother some money, and I passed a large building in a turning near Ludgate Circus, outside which stretched a long queue of girls. I joined on the queue and waited hours, for the queue stopped moving when the interviewer went to lunch. Then I was on top of the world again, out of those many, many girls I had won the job. ‘That’s because of your lovely smile,’ said Mother.

  It was a boring office, the staff played practical jokes on each other all day long, at least when Captain Nicholson wasn’t there. He was the owner, an irritable-looking man, tall, thin, with a military moustache. My desk was by the glass entrance doors and I would glance up sometimes when people entered. One morning, I had been there about a week, Captain Nicholson stopped at my desk instead of sweeping through without looking at anyone. Everyone looked over surreptitiously, Capt. Nicholson never spoke to the staff. I gave him a bright smile, I knew he was going to praise me for my work. He put his face close to mine and hissed, ‘If I see you smile again, I shall pay you orff.’ I was so frightened I laughed hysterically into his face and was despatched with my cards, and sent home in tears. Father said, ‘Don’t let that miserable old bugger upset you, gel, I know what some of them are like. I’ve had to nurse a lot of them and show them what to do,’ and he gave such a comical imitation of some of the officers he had ‘nursed’ that Mother and I were soon laughing. ‘Cheer up,’ said Mother. ‘Don’t make your unhappy life miserable, you’ll soon get a job.’

  I got a job the following week with wholesale grocers in Spitalfields. I was happy as a sandboy there. The warehouse men, like twins, in brown overalls and grey caps, Bert and Fred, would plunge the cheese-tasters into a big cheese and give me a long stick to have with crusty bread and huge lumps of butter from their slabs. I answered the phone, stamped the letters, learnt to type with two fingers, and was the office pet. Work was lovely. The office manager was a dear old man. One day he asked me when my birthday was. I said it was that very day and he gave me a huge box of chocolates tied with a big red ribbon. I had stupidly been joking, I never thought anyone would give me a birthday present. I told him of my dishonesty and he allowed me to keep the chocolates on the understanding I realised that in life honesty was the best policy. It didn’t sound quite right to me in view of the fact that I was allowed to keep the chocolates. Mother was proud that I was thought of so highly. But all good things come to an end, I knew that by now, and into the office came another office manager, a Mr Wilson, an old sergeant-major type with no sense of humour in the whole of his Gallipoli bosom. He ousted the kind office manager, and brought his niece in ‘to help me.’ Since I had so little to do I should have seen the red light. His niece was a jolly girl and we had great fun together. One day we were being merry when Mr Wilson said if I had nothing to do I should take myself off to the warehouse and clean out ‘the desk.’ This desk had been the lying-in home for all the warehouse cats from time immemorial and I cheekily said I was not employed as a warehouse-cleaner. Instant dismissal and sad arrival at no. 13 Grove Villas. It was amazing how my father was always on my side in these crises. ‘Bloated capitalists,’ he yelled. ‘Write for a week’s money, it’s your entitlement.’ I wrote and received a letter to the effect that if I desired another week’s money (12s. 6d.) I must do another week’s work.

  My next job lasted one day. It was very strange and I never knew what it was all about. It was in an office above a shop on Ludgate Hill. I was told to sit in a tiny office, without a window and look at some old magazines while the man who engaged me went into an inner office with a woman of about thirty. I sat there all day and got fed up looking at these old magazines, all about engines, then the man came out, gave me three shillings and said my services were no longer required. Again I made a written request for one week’s money. This time the letter was returned marked ‘Not known at this address.’ Mother seemed to think I had had a lucky escape from some dark mysterious terror.

  She was getting worried about me now. My career, was to say the least of it, erratic and she asked Amy, who worked for a local engineer if she would speak for Dolly, which Amy did, and Mother helped me get ready for the interview. She wanted me to be specially presentable for she wanted Amy to be proud of me. She had bought me a beige woollen jumper suit through a friend who obtained it at wholesale price. Mother thought it looked both good and ladylike and the colour suited me well. I had a little beige hat from the ‘jumble,’ beige gloves, beige stockings and beige shoes. Father said I could ‘take the biscuit’ and laughed. Mother called me back when I reached the front gate and said, ‘Wait a minute’ and ran upstairs. She came down with a look of delight on her face and I thought she was the most unselfish person in the world. One of my sailor brothers had brought her home a pale lavender scarf, hand-painted with orchids in purple, white and yellow. It was known as Mother’s scarf and kept in tissue-paper in a little box in the small drawer of the mahogany chest-of-drawers. It smelt of lavender as she placed it round my neck and I felt very proud and honoured and said I wouldn’t even crease it. Mother said it ‘made’ the outfit, and off I went followed by the admiring glances of Mother, Father and Marjorie.

  As I went past the library I wished I had been getting a book out for I could have surprised the assistant into thinking I was a lady. Finally I reached Pennyfields, the Chinese quarter. I thought I would make a detour. For one thing I might be taken for the white slave traffic in my best clothes, and for another, I was always afraid a Tong war would break out. I had a friend who lived in Oriental Street which was next to Pennyfields and she remembered the Tong wars. They weren’t allowed out to play while the war was on but they looked out of their front room behind the lace curtains to see all the little Chinese men running along with their wounded. They wheeled these men on covered hand carts. The carts looked like Chinese dhows on wheels. But the Chinese only fought each other. They had puckapoo shops and lots of people who lived near there bought a puckapoo sheet each week. It had Chinese lettering on it so I thought they were clever to know when they had won. My mother thought it was terrible to gamble at puckapoo.

  Charlie Brown’s was near Pennyfields. It was a big public house and he had a lot of unusual curios the foreign seamen sold him. My friend said Charlie Brown had a pickled baby in a jar. He was her landlord and he came to collect the rents on a white horse. She said he was a lovely landlord and if he knew it was a child’s birthday he would give the child 6d. from the rent. She said when it was her birthday her mother would give her a nudge when she was paying the rent to remind her so she would get her sixpence. I wished we’d had Charlie Brown for a landlord, just to see his white horse, but I knew I wouldn’t get sixpence, my mother would never nudge me. Why she wouldn’t even have let me go to the door on my birthday if Charlie Brown was our landlord. Mother was so funny not wanting people to give us things I thought.

  Finally I arrived at the Lion Packing Factory and rang the bell in the little waiting-room, for it said on it, ‘Please ring.’ A spotty young man with a pencil behind his ear came in and when I said I was Miss Chegwidden and I’d come for an interview, he blushed and said, ‘Follow me, please.’ I followed him into a large office where there were a lot of spotty young men sitting at a counter on high stools. They all had pencils behind their ears, and they all looked at me trying not to let me know they were looking. As I passed a thick green curtain, I was startled out of my interview feeling, for Amy’s head popped out and she hissed, ‘You’ve got Mother’s scarf on.’ I felt awful that she had accused me, in front of all these strangers, of taking Mother’s scarf without permission. She must have known it was a thing I would never do, and I started to tell her how I came to be wearing it, but she said,

  ‘Go on, don’t stand gossiping here, Mr Bartlett’s waiting for you.’ I was so upset by Amy’s accusation and by her informing the office I was wearing borrowed finery, that I don’t think I answered up very brightly at my interview, but I go
t the job, I suppose really because Amy was a wizard with figures.

  I worked for a Mr Ablett. Acid tablet the boys called him. He was very kind to me, but he and Amy disliked one another. She thought he was always gazing at my legs and he was disdainful of Amy, because although she had a fiancé, the rich Swiss in charge of the foreign office was head over heels in love with Amy, and showed his feelings not only to Amy but to the world. Mr Ablett, a religious man, thought Amy was playing fast and loose. I tried to leap on to the stool like the young men did. I thought in this way I could hold my skirts down and not expose my legs, but I overshot the stool and had to be assisted from the floor to a chair and smoothed down by Mr Ablett.

  I went to Buszards in Oxford Street and purchased handmade chocolates for Mr Ablett to put in the Christmas boxes the firm sent to customers, and he gave me a diamond-shaped velvet bag with home-made chocolates in it because I had got everything correctly. I would have been happy for life there and would have done well, I feel, but the firm moved to Surrey, and it was back to the City again as there wasn’t much locally in the way of vacancies for office girls.

  Chapter 17

  Impending Doom

  At seventeen, as Mother considered me to be now a young lady, I was allowed to put my hair up. I would have liked to have had it bobbed, but daren’t mention such a criminal act to my parents, for they had never got over the shock of Amy’s brazenness when she had arrived home one day minus her lovely long, thick, dark tresses. She pranced into the kitchen thinking she looked truly beautiful. I thought she did, but Mother, shocked to the core, said in a great temper, ‘Get out of my sight, away from me, for you look just like a little monkey.’ Father, always alert to the rights of the individual, even though it never got him anywhere, despatched one of the boys to the barber’s for the return of Amy’s shorn locks. I thought he intended to use them in his plumbing work, mixing them with tallow, even though the coil of waxed hair he used in his work was yellowish and snuff-coloured.

  The barber, a Jewish man, called, strangely, Jesus, refused to part with Amy’s hair and my father got in a swearing temper. I thought his remarks about Jesus not at all religious. Dad was certain that some blue-blooded duchess or, even worse, the rich wife of a bloated capitalist would be lording it about in a wig made of Amy’s rich dark hair, and she the daughter of a red-hot socialist. I got the impression from my father that all aristocratic men were disease-ridden and all possessed bald-headed wives because of the rich food and wine they consumed, and I was so glad my favourite meal was sausages and I knew I would hate wine. No, it was much better to be poor—healthier according to Father—holier according to the vicar and so much easier to enter the kingdom of heaven—even though putting up my abnormally thick and unruly hair was proving a difficult task for Mother and a miserable time for me.

  Mother had to agree it did not suit me in a bun on the top of my head. Someone remarked at that stage that it looked as though a swarm of birds or bees would fly out of my crown if a gun had been fired. In the end, my hair was divided into two thick uneven plaits. I wore a plaited circle over each ear called earphones. Ever after I lived in a quieter, more muffled world. As I almost had to lip-read and gazed intently at people while they were speaking to me, I gained the fine reputation of being a most sympathetic listener, and because of my direct staring look, a sincerely honest girl.

  To keep my unruly earphones from falling down I was forced to use packets of iron hair-pins and my ears became almost permanently doubled over as ledges for my plaited coils. Coinciding with the raising of my tresses I suffered other dis-tresses; I suddenly became acutely self-conscious, and shy. I went through an agonising period of daily stage fright. Walking in the city streets to and from work and at lunchtime was sheer torture. I would wonder if I could walk across the pavement and reach the kerb with normal strides, or if I would be forced to take a couple of small mincing steps to get me down or up the kerbs safely. Would my normal paces take me beyond the kerb making me fall, or would I have to execute a shuffled hesitation at the kerb, and so cause a pile up of stockbrokers and city gents and ladies walking quickly behind me, unaware of impending doom? I would be underneath, unable to make a quick getaway.

  In addition to this very real fear, if that wasn’t enough, I was sure that my bloomers would fall down one day in the City. Suppose they fell down just as I was negotiating a kerb, how could I emerge from beneath the pile-up minus my bloomers, although perhaps if there were other ladies in the pile-up I could say they weren’t mine? I took to wearing packets of safety-pins round the whole of my waist, pinning to my vest and petticoat the offending garment which was so set, I was sure, on doing an Isaac Newton on me. When I undressed at night and piled up the piles of hair and safety-pins, Marjorie said I could have opened an ironmonger’s shop. Mother laughed at me and said I must avoid shops which sold magnets, or I might be dragged inside. When she saw my worried face she said, well, perhaps only pinned to the window.

  My seventeenth year was a fearful one for me, small wonder that reaching the haven of my home, I stayed there, finding a more relaxed world of satisfaction in my books, and the green apples which I consumed non-stop. The doctor must have been wrong when he had insisted I was a gastric child, for I loved green apples, and they caused me no discomfort.

  The job I had at General Buildings, Aldwych, was just up my street. The work was simple, the office staff easy-going, the wages enough for my needs and I settled down happily sure that an easy-going Mr Right was just around the corner. Mother would be pleased and life would go on without problems or calamities. At this firm was a young man, of good background, who came from Surrey. There was nothing between us, he was younger than me, he came to me for advice, and from my eighteen-year-old maternal and older-woman position I advised on life’s problems and encouraged him in his ambitions to get on. Someone had given him an old motor-bike and he would tell me of his prowess on this wonderful and modern machine. As Mother believed me when I exaggerated as to my progress, so in a motherly way I believed this young man, and when one evening he suggested he drove me home to Poplar, I agreed, for I was saving up for a winter coat, and to save the sixpenny fare was a great incentive.

  I waited in the Aldwych for this young man to appear and hardly recognised him for he was dressed as for a trip to the moon with an airman’s flapped cap, enormous dark goggles, a mask, a thick fleecy-lined leather coat, wading leggings and laced boots. This ensemble convinced me he was the expert he had always vowed he was.

  I sat on the pillion, finding it difficult to balance myself, and had to stretch painfully to get my arms around him. If I had not been afraid of hurting this young man’s feelings I think I would have changed my mind about saving my fare at that moment. I was embarrassed, too, that my skirt had gone up to show more of my calves than was decent. However after the driver bashed the pedal down several times with no result and I was wobbling dangerously, suddenly with a terrific roar we shot off and I felt we were heading for the inside of the law courts. In a flash I knew this young man was not the efficient dirt-track rider he had boasted to me he was. I was panic-stricken and in pain for scalding hot splashes of water were spurting over the inside of one of my legs. Terrified I would fall off the back of the pillion and be run over, I tugged at my chauffeur with all my strength, anxious not to be the girl he left behind. He was mouthing something I couldn’t decipher (I learnt later he, too, was terrified at being pulled off the bike, my hold was so limpet-like), and we reached Aldgate in no time, swaying perilously all the time. We went round the wrong side of a tram in Commercial Road, the tram-driver swore at us and people on the pavements stopped and stared in amazement. I was sure I would not see my family again and was sorry for the unkind things I had done and said to them all my life. They were all so lovely in my final memories of them. Fortunately the young man was efficient at turning the bike and we arrived in Arthur Street. Shaking, dirty, bits of grit in my eyes, my hair had come down, my leg was red and wet, I tottere
d up the Grove, thankful Mother hadn’t seen me, unaware that news had already spread like wildfire before me. ‘Your Dolly’s in Arthur Street with a big man on a motor-bike.’

  I entered the peace and calm of no. 13. Mother was sitting in a chair with her Judge Jeffreys face on. She usually jumped up on my arrival, but this time she sat silently still. Marjorie, and Agnes who was visiting and waiting for her husband, and Amy and her fiancé stood by, a silent jury. No one smiled or said hallo, and I stammered out, ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Matter?’ said Mother, ‘You have something to tell me.’ ‘No,’ I said, looking every inch a criminal. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well,’ said Mother in a tone of great triumph, ‘You were seen with a man getting off a motor-bike in Arthur Street.’ She said Arthur Street as though it were Sodom and Gomorrah. I glared at Marjorie, obviously the spy responsible for my presence in the dock. Marjorie promptly burst into tears. Mother was now angry that innocent little Marjorie should be accused and Mother didn’t want the subject turned by attention being paid to Marjorie. Agnes started to cry in sympathy with her sister. I thought Mother enjoyed her judge’s role in a way, for she was sure right was on her side. The difficulty was that I was not sure what crime I was charged with, and it would have been impossible to ask, for that would make Mother more cross than ever. I saw my Ethel Mannin book opened on the dresser. Oh, God, surely Mother hasn’t been reading that. Ethel Mannin was so modern and before her time. I knew what page the book was open at. ‘She came willingly to his arms and it seemed to them both that two dark rivers had mysteriously flowed together, first on a high flood in spate and then reaching the calm flowing of one river now,’ or something to that effect. Perhaps Mother knew what it meant. I didn’t.