This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing

by Jacqueline Winspear

  “I don’t know why you brought him here, Jimmy—he’s not seeing her. He’s not seeing her, and he’s not seeing my boy.”

  “Oh come on, Joyce—come on, love. He’s not getting any younger.”

  She was adamant. I was worried and my brother began to cry. I had never heard her speak to anyone in the family like that, even if there had been a row.

  I’m not sure how long it was before my mother relented and allowed her father into the house, but I remember him sitting in the armchair next to the television, my baby brother on his knee. John was wearing the blue romper suit she’d knitted before he was born, in the days when she would lean over the kitchen sink and retch while holding the bump in her middle and I would ask if I could help her because she was scaring me.

  The thing I remember most is my grandfather’s big nose. It seemed enormous to me. He was still wearing his flat cap and he hadn’t taken off his overcoat. My father had come home from work and was being polite. My mother made a pot of tea; her face was dark, and she was shaking. Was this when I first started to notice the shaking? When I became aware of her wide eyes, a hallmark of the Graves’ Disease—an overactive thyroid—that would affect her for years and require many treatments with radioactive iodine? I know I clambered into her lap and felt her bones digging into me, so I went to my father instead, who put his arms around me, as if knowing I was scared.

  “He scared me, too,” cousin Jim told me, and recounted the times our grandfather would visit them. “I always ran to my room because he frightened me, but my dad would call me down and I’d get into trouble because I didn’t want to go.”

  Was it the stories our parents had told that made us scared? And when did my uncle forgive the old man? My mother always told me that one of the most heart-wrenching things she’d ever witnessed was her older brother raising his hand to his own father to protect their mother. But there was that other side to the story.

  “When they had a row,” my mother explained, “Mum would pick up a vase to throw it at the old man, so one of us would grab the good vase and put a milk bottle in her hand instead. And then we’d get Rene to have a nosebleed. That would stop the fighting.” My Aunt Rene had a delicate nose, apparently, and could spike a bleed just by thinking about it. My brother was the same. The first few times blood began spurting from his nose, I was always blamed and given a “what for” slap by my mother—even though I hadn’t laid a finger on him. It took a while for them to realize he had a sensitive nose, which later required a procedure to cauterize a blood vessel.

  Reflection came to my mother later, when we were talking one day about those early years of her childhood. I was almost forty and had a desire to confirm my own memories of her stories. “You know, I’ve remembered Clara liked a drink too,” she said, talking about her mother. “She’d send one of us along to the pub with the money for a Guinness. She’d always have a bottle or two tucked away behind her chair.” She looked out of the window. “And in the war, when the old man was away in the army, guarding Italian prisoners of war, he’d come home on leave and there was nowhere for him to sleep, so he’d just sit there on a chair in the kitchen, nodding off.”

  Maybe that was just one night, because another aunt recounted being brought home from evacuation when she was fourteen and sleeping in the dining room on a chair while her parents were bedded down on a mattress in the same room. “It was terrible,” she said. “They were ‘at it.’” I tried not to laugh—there was something amusing about the way she said they were “at it”—though I know it wasn’t funny at all. Perhaps I was embarrassed by her candor.

  All those girls married good men—local boys who weren’t drinkers or abusers. My father would never have raised a hand to his wife or children, and my mother’s weapon of choice was usually her tongue, which she could use to devastating effect. My cousin Larry has a different perspective on the family dynamic—with all those uncles and aunts, I also have a whole busload of first cousins, each one with memories of our parents’ stories. His father told him that when he was growing up in the same neighborhood, their family felt sorry for my grandfather because my grandmother turned her children against their father and he was never welcome in his own home. During her final years, my mother told me her parents had decided to get back together again after being separated, and though their children were all grown, they told her not to do it, not to go back to him.

  My mother’s father died alone and was apparently dead for three days before his body was found. A man with ten children died alone. Despite all that had happened, and all those family stories, I find that so very sad and now I wish I had known him. My mother could not stop laughing when informed of his death—I can still see her bent over laughing, tears splashing down her face—and she didn’t go to his funeral. I have no idea if he was buried or cremated, or where his remains were laid to rest—if they were. My brother has no recollection of him at all, and I wonder how many of my cousins knew him. We all know he liked a drink, though.

  5

  Just Kids

  Stop. Rewind. No, a bit more. Stop—there it is. Now play.

  Before we move on, let’s look at my grandmother—my mother’s mother. Clara Frances Clark, née Atterbury. She’d fallen in love with my grandfather, James William Clark, and sent a Dear John letter to her fiancé, who was at that time serving on the Western Front. I wonder if she was still working in the Woolwich Arsenal at that point. The vision in her right eye was compromised following an explosion at the munitions factory—a disaster that had taken the lives of several girls working nearby. Her sister, stationed next to her, was also injured.

  Perhaps that less than perfect vision affected Clara in all sorts of ways, because I have seen a photo of my grandfather in those days—courtesy of cousin Jim and his research—and cannot imagine what she saw in him, though Auntie Sylvie has told me that he was a snappy dresser, a very smart man. But maybe it was his love of literature—according to Mum, the only time he seemed pleased with her was when she recited poetry for him. My grandmother loved books, too. She could read a novel a day and still keep a house with ten kids in it—she would read into the night, apparently, though obviously given the number of children she was easily distracted from a story. Clara passed on that love of books to her children, especially the girls—my mother and aunts have all been passionate readers. I could imagine them rushing en masse into the library on Wells Way in Camberwell and there not being any books left on the shelves by the time they left. Well into her eighties, my mother was reading five books each week and was always ready to discuss them. My aunts have all been the same.

  My grandfather had enjoyed a good education paid for by two maiden aunts, and set stock by his children’s schooling—which makes it more unbelievable that he allowed himself to be talked into refusing my mother her chance. Could it have been spite? A sort of payback for the time my mother had her Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner moment with her father? Remember that scene in the film? Tom Courtenay played the teen, Colin Smith, who was sent to a reform school after he was caught stealing money. The governor—Michael Redgrave—believes in the restorative power of sport, and pins his hopes on Colin, the talented runner, to win a race set up against boys from a local private school. The young offender understands Redgrave’s manipulative ways, but bides his time, waiting until the closing moments of the race—he is well ahead by this point—where he can be seen by every spectator when he just stops and stands and watches as all the other runners go past. It was an “f-you” moment. My mother did that to her father, in a way. He was proud when she was selected to recite a poem at a school event. He might have even come home with a new pair of cheap canvas plimsolls for her to wear—usually he cut off the heels of charity-shop women’s shoes for his daughters, which is why they all suffered with bad feet later in life. Hard to believe that when he and my grandmother had only two children, before the other eight came along, one every eighteen months
like clockwork, there had been new clothes for the two older girls every week. Or were there? I’ve wondered about that story.

  He’d coached my mother on her performance, but instead of reciting the assigned piece, she surprised everyone when she stood up on the stage, gave a wink and launched into the lyrics from the old music hall song “MacNamara’s Band”: My name is MacNamara, and I’m the leader of the band . . . She was eleven at the time and delivered the performance as if she were a drunk, causing the audience to break into laughter at her comic timing. I think it might have been a song my grandfather would sing when he was in his cups. He left his seat and walked out of the hall with my grandmother in his wake. My mother caught the stinging end of his leather belt later.

  Mum seemed to idolize her mother, spoke highly of her—until later years, when the odd comment was passed, as if she had begun to doubt herself. There was that reconsideration of Clara’s liking for Guinness; and my mother would sometimes say to me, perhaps when we were talking about her childhood evacuation from London at the outset of war, “I don’t know how she could have done it, how she could have sent us away.” I was helping my mother to the bathroom at the hospice where she was spending her final days—she would be dead within twenty-four hours—and was assisting her in a most intimate way when she said, “I wish I could have helped my mum like this. I wish I’d been there for her.” Several very obvious aspects of their relationship began to dawn upon me, to the extent that I surprised myself because I had never thought about it before, and I was well practiced in having to think about everything in my family, always alert to any looming disaster that might come in like a rogue wave and sweep us unawares into a sea of chaos.

  When I was a child we’d go up to London on the train or the coach a couple of times each year—perhaps Easter, or Christmas—and I’d go to spend a week with my father’s parents in the summer, a treat I loved. Nanny Winspear would order a small bottle of chocolate milk, a “Milky,” to be delivered every day, because she knew I loved it and it wasn’t something Mum would ever have bought, even if we could get chocolate milk, which we couldn’t. And Nanny let me drink anything through a straw, even my tea. My parents didn’t have enough money to go to London more often and I don’t think they would have anyway, and in time my fortnightly visits to the Kent and Sussex Hospital ophthalmic department, plus my mother’s appointments for her thyroid checkups, all took a lot of fare money. During those London visits we’d go to Nanny and Grandad Winspear, and we’d see Auntie Sylvie and her husband, Uncle John, or Auntie Dot and her husband, Uncle Pete. But we’d never visit Clara. After my mother died, I asked Aunt Rose about it, and she told me that, when my grandmother had gone to live with her, she’d call whichever aunt or uncle we were staying with to find out if my mother was coming round to see her own mother, and Mum would always make an excuse. Aunt Rose said she didn’t know why, but, “Your mother probably had her reasons.” I asked Auntie Sylvie about it, and she said, “Oh you know, your mum was busy.”

  Why did my mother avoid her own mother? Clara came to stay with us just once in Kent. She came down on the motor coach. I remember her showing me how to light a fire; I knew already but I liked to watch the way she rolled the paper. She made us hats out of newspaper, and water lilies which we floated on puddles, and she listened to me read—every day I had to read to her. I know she thought my brother was a holy terror—and let’s face it, he was.

  I was seventeen and in the first year of my A-level studies at Cranbrook School when I was called to the office—my instinct was to wonder what I’d done wrong, so I was somewhat relieved to receive a message that my mother had called to let me know she’d had to go up to London. I knew then that it was probably Clara who had died. At her funeral we all clustered in her kitchen, where Auntie Dot filled a half-pint Guinness mug with fresh water from the tap and all the grandchildren drank from that mug, each of my cousins waiting their turn, looking a bit nonplussed but accepting the unexpected ritual anyway. When the funeral cortege approached The Arrows, the pub along the road, the locals were lined up outside and raised their pints of Guinness as the hearse bearing my grandmother’s body passed by.

  It was my first trip to North America. I had just turned twenty and was bound for Toronto to stay with my friend Jenny for the summer—she had emigrated the year I turned fourteen, and we’d written every week or so since then. Jenny’s parents were planning to take us on a trip up to Ottawa and Quebec, then across to Vermont before looping back into Canada. I was beyond excited—I had been saving for a trip to Canada since I was four years old, when I’d been told about my Aunt Ruby who had emigrated “over there.” Even as a small child I was fascinated by travel, by the mystery of other countries.

  “Just you watch out for those American boys, Jack,” said my mother.

  “What?” I was packing my suitcase for the trip. I couldn’t afford to buy anything new, though I’d made a matching skirt and blouse set to travel in. It would be my first ever flight in an aeroplane.

  “The Canadians are all right, but watch those Americans,” she said. “They flash around the nylon stockings and Hershey bars, and then they think they’ve got you.”

  “It’s not the war, Mum!” I carried on packing.

  My mum didn’t date American soldiers during the war, though I think she was amused by them. Of course, you could get a reputation if you went out with American servicemen. It was okay to bring one home if you had family around to keep an eye on you, but a girl wouldn’t want to go out with too many of those boys alone. One of my aunts fell in love with and was engaged to an American officer, but she broke off the engagement because she thought that if she went to America she would never see her family again. He called her his “Red” for her rich deep coppery hair. They exchanged cards every Christmas, first just the two of them, and then from one family to another, and years later he and his wife came to England and met my aunt and uncle for dinner. Apparently, as he saw her approach with my uncle, he said, “There’s my Red,” though by that time her hair was white.

  My mother and her friends had a favorite trick they played while on the bus to work, when they saw American soldiers on the same bus. They’d sing this song:

  The Stars and Stripes fly high over Germany

  High over Germany

  High over Germany

  High over Germany

  The Stars and Stripes fly high over Germany

  UNDER THE UNION JACK!!

  Fortunately, the Americans had a good sense of humor, and laughed along with the locals. And three of them made a young girl’s seventeenth birthday so memorable in the summer of 1944.

  My mother had gone to Hyde Park with two friends, a day out in the park to celebrate her birthday. While they were walking along, talking and giggling as girls of that age will, they noticed three young American airmen coming toward them. The Americans weren’t going to pass up an opportunity to chat up the girls, so they began walking with them, asking their names and making jokes.

  “You should have seen them,” said Mum. “They wore their caps at an angle to one side, and they called us ‘Honey’ and made us laugh.”

  Mum’s friend told the boys that it was her birthday, so one of them asked what presents she’d received.

  “I just laughed,” Mum explained. “I told him, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on? We don’t get presents! No one gets presents—it’s just a birthday. Nothing more than that.’”

  The young airmen looked at each other, and one said, “Meet you back here in an hour—right here.” And they ran off.

  One hour later, the girls came along, expecting the airmen to have stood them up. But there they were, with a big bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates for Mum, and cigarettes and nylon stockings for each of the girls.

  “Oh, you should have seen them,” said my mother. “They were running along, arms out, pretending to be aeroplanes. They were jumping on an
d off the park benches, shouting, ‘Look at me, I’m a B-29!’”

  And then it was time for them to leave, to go back to their base.

  Later, in the air raid shelter as bombers flew overhead, my mother offered the chocolates to her family and other people nearby, but no one would take a chocolate because they were American, and if you had gifts from American servicemen they thought you were “that kind of girl.” So my mother ate every single chocolate one by one, while giving a running commentary on how lovely this one was, or that one, and what flavor she’d eat next. “And I blew smoke rings so it upset the people who really wanted a ciggie but didn’t want to take one.”

  I remember her laughing when she told me the story, then her expression changed and she looked wistfully out of the window, as if she could see through the glass into the past. “But we were all just kids. It was wartime in the park, and we were all just kids.”

  6

  A Gypsy Life

  My parents met when Dad’s friend started going out with one of Mum’s friends. My dad thought my mum was “A very nice young lady.” That’s what he told me years later. He probably also thought he’d hit the jackpot, because she was stunning, bright and fashionable. I believe my mother saw his kindness and soon appreciated his very dry sense of humor. My mother’s wit was in-your-face funny, though often at someone else’s expense. Dad’s was subtle—he’d say something and just wait for you to get it, and when you did, you laughed until your sides hurt. I know his proposal of marriage was along the lines of “We’ve been going out a year, Joyce, so we might as well get engaged.” A year later, on July 31st, 1949, they were married.