This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing

by Jacqueline Winspear

  I loved going to the farm. I loved it whatever the weather, though winter could be a pain because even in winter there was work to be done and winter in England can last until late spring. My mother would wrap aluminium baking foil around our feet, which already had two pairs of socks on them. Then she’d secure a plastic bag around each foot because our rubber boots leaked and we couldn’t afford new ones, though Dad tried to repair them with the sort of boot repair kit you could buy in those days. She’d decided that aluminium foil would help keep us warm after reading about the new “space blanket” material used by astronauts to keep the chill of outer space at bay. If that new material was basically silver stuff, then surely baking foil would do the same job. It didn’t; when we took off our boots in the evening shredded silver foil would shower across the room like confetti, and our feet were still blue and damp.

  Every morning, Mum would meet Auntie Glad at the top of the hill by Bishop’s Lane and we’d set off to the farm, often with other women who were either pushing prams or riding bicycles with one or two children on board. Gladys Trower was my mother’s friend whom she’d met on the farm. She wasn’t a real auntie, like Auntie Sylvie or Auntie Dot, but she was loved enough to be elevated to “auntie” rather than the more formal “Mrs. Trower.” As soon as we’d gathered at the hill, off we’d go, the women on bicycles flying along, crashing through puddles, bouncing in and out of potholes and across rubble on that rough track down to the farm. I felt strong, being part of this coterie of womanhood. I knew even then that they were tough, that they could do anything and that no one could push them around. I even had an idea that the farmers they worked for were just a little bit intimidated by them—and who could blame them? These were women who could hold their ground—they had muscle of body, mind and spirit.

  Now I live in the place where mountain biking was invented—in fact, I have a mountain bike—and at weekends bikers going for the burn huff and puff their way into the hills. Road bikers cluster to whizz around the corners on our narrow highways, showing off their glutes in spandex as they terrify the drivers of cars. Well, they terrify me, that’s for sure. Yet I know those hardy country women could pass every one of the gym-built city slickers, and they could do it while wearing heavy jeans or skirts with their Wellington boots, and sweaters and jackets in winter. Oh, and there would be a baby in the back seat and shopping bags on the handle bars, and they would do that ride on bikes with no gears and often no brakes, following a hard day’s work on the farm. Sometimes when I see mountain bikers in their spandex and aviator sunglasses, I can’t help thinking wimps.

  12

  School—Legally or Not

  At the house in Hartley, we only had to flick a switch in each room and the light came on—oh the wonders of electricity! Maybe that’s why I had that strange fascination. Some years later there was a character on children’s TV called Catweazle—a time traveler from the Middle Ages who referred to the “electrickery” that made the lights come on. I was a bit old for the show, but I loved the idea of electrickery. Trickery? I thought it was magic. There was no filling of oil lamps or the lighting of wicks and worrying that a blaze might start if the source of light tipped over.

  The Victorian cast-iron stove, on the other hand, had to be made up every day, and every week it had to be cleaned out, brushed of ash on the inside, and polished on the outside. I can still smell the “blacking” that we used—a rich blueish-black polish the color of midnight, made especially for cast-iron stoves. I’d become good at polishing, so the stove and the hoods over fireplaces in the dining room and sitting room became my jobs.

  While my father nurtured my love of the outdoors, Mum was the one to read to me and to have me read back to her. She would frown if she didn’t think I was coming on fast enough and warned me that when I started school, I’d be the dunce if I didn’t learn. I’d seen pictures of dunces in books. I dreaded being a dunce, of having to stand in the corner of the room wearing a pointed hat with a big D on the front so that everyone knew how thick I was. My mother had never been a dunce. So many times she told me how bright she was, how she’d won that scholarship, and how her hopes had all come crashing down when her parents said she couldn’t go to the expensive girls’ school, because her teacher had warned them about the cost of the uniform. Another teacher who my mum revered had broken down and wept when my mother told her she couldn’t take up the scholarship. I knew that story down pat, even the bit where my mum seemed sad, remembering the teacher who’d cried at the unfairness of it all.

  My mother was the teller of stories, the holder of family tales—and I heard every single one, the sad, the happy, the funny, the tragic. If I knew anything by the time I started school, it was that things could be very unfair for even the best people in this world.

  Mum’s stories and her obvious love of learning inspired me, so I could not wait to begin my education. However, due to the fact of my birthdate, I was too young to be enrolled for primary school that September, even though I was more than ready in my mind and in hers—but you had to be five years of age to be registered. Much to my mother’s chagrin, I could not be registered to start the following Easter—I would turn five one week after the summer term started, so I had to wait until I was five and a half to begin my formal education in September 1960. But my curiosity about school became overpowering, and on the sly I’d been secretly attending primary school from soon after my brother’s birth. All’s well that ends well, but a few people were not best pleased with the modus operandi I employed to get into school.

  By the time John was born, the National Health Service was fourteen years old. Health support systems had been put in place for the many babies born after the war, and on into the sixties—who knew we would be referred to as “Baby Boomers” one day? My mother had a weekly “new baby” appointment at the health clinic, a post-war prefabricated building where John was weighed, measured, inoculated against ills that had killed infants and children just a decade earlier—diphtheria, polio, smallpox, whooping cough—and he was generally examined to ensure he was progressing as a newborn should. He screamed from the moment he was taken into the examining room and put on the scales to the moment he was brought out, so there was never any doubt that the boy had lungs and fully operational vocal chords. I found the whole thing tedious and on one occasion, as my mother was called from the waiting room for her appointment, I decided I’d like to see what school was all about.

  Conveniently it was right next door. I only had to slink out of the clinic, past the less than observant receptionist, and I was facing the back door of the school. On the day of my expedition into the world of formal education, I slipped into the nearest classroom—most of the doors were open to allow a breeze to flow through on a hot summer’s day. I’d found a class where the teacher was reading a story, which was perfect. The children were listening, hanging onto the teacher’s every word, so no one really noticed me, though Paul, the boy who lived up the road from me, frowned, and I experienced a frisson of jealousy when I saw him nudge the girl sitting next to him, causing her to look round at me. They were five, just, and I was still four, so they had a certain edge. In time that girl, Jenny, was to become one of my dearest friends; it broke my heart when her family emigrated to Canada.

  There came a point where the teacher drew her attention away from the book and asked a question about the story. My hand shot up along with half a dozen others. The teacher scanned the room, ready to choose someone to give their answer. That’s when she saw the interloper. It was at that very moment the headmaster entered the classroom along with the school secretary to let the teacher know he’d just heard that a child was missing from the clinic, and to look out for her. I’d been rumbled. The teacher pointed at me and I was led from the room like a common criminal, though I swear the adults were all laughing. My mother wasn’t, though—she had been worried sick, and had imagined all manner of terrible things happening to me. It was only as we walked
away from the school that she smiled, and began asking questions about the story the teacher had been reading. I absconded several more times during those weekly visits, but now the clinic staff knew where to find me, and generally the teachers just accepted that there was a little girl who might wander into their classroom once a week. I hadn’t been fussy about which class I’d join—though the nearest rooms were for Infants 1 and 2, the five- and six-year-olds, and Junior 1, the seven-year-olds. I just wanted to be in school.

  Eventually the headmaster allowed me to join Mrs. Bishop’s class—she’s the teacher who discovered me among her pupils on that first school adventure—so Mum would drop me at her classroom before taking John over to the clinic. Now I live in the United States, where many schools have their own police departments and even a four-year-old would be under suspicion and probably searched for weapons when found wandering around a school to which she had not been enrolled.

  Here’s what I remember about my first official day at school. I remember my uniform: a grey skirt, white blouse, green cardigan, green knee-high socks and new Clarks brown sensible shoes. My father had polished them with dubbin in anticipation of the wear and tear that school might inflict upon them, and followed the application by putting them in a warm oven so the oils soaked in to render the leather shoes waterproof, thus ensuring they lasted for as long as possible. Then he polished them to a shine you could see your face in. Every evening, when my dad polished his own shoes, he would polish my shoes for school. He might have been a house painter, but my father wore a clean, pressed white shirt every single day and walked up the road to the bus stop for all the world looking as if he were going to work at a bank, taking his overalls and painting apron, plus his own brushes—always the very best he could afford—in a small case.

  I had new hair ribbons for my first day at school, and stood still while Mum braided my hair into two long plaits, each tied with a green bow. Though I could sometimes be fidgety when she braided my hair after buying me new ribbons, she would always sing “Scarlet Ribbons” as she brushed and braided, and I so loved the way she would brush in slow rhythm to the song.

  Mum had taken a morning away from work on the farm to accompany me to school on the first day. She told me in later years that she had a lump in her throat as we boarded the bus at the end of the road and I said to her, “Don’t sit with me—I don’t want the other children to think I’m a new girl.” At first I didn’t know any other children who went to school on the Number 97 bus—we lived at the farthest end of the Cranbrook Primary School catchment area—but I wanted to be among them. I was wearing my green blazer with the school insignia on the pocket, and had a small wallet with a plastic window for my free bus season ticket and a cross-body shoulder strap to make sure the ticket wouldn’t get lost. The school uniform had been bought from Don Baker’s shop next to the Corner Café on Stone Street in Cranbrook, because Don Baker let his customers purchase “on tick” and came around to the house on a Friday evening to collect the weekly payment toward the bill. The shoes came from Freeman, Hardy and Willis, because they had the special measuring machine for children’s feet, and my mum was adamant that we would always have shoes that fit, because she’d never had decent shoes as a child.

  Mum accompanied me from the bus stop, along the street, past the church and into my first proper classroom, Infants 1. The teacher, Mrs. Willis, told me where to sit and to “Wave to Mummy.” I gave a quick flap of my hand and began to talk to my neighbor, a girl named Wendy who would become my best friend. From the time we started school, people thought we were twins—we both had blonde hair, brown eyes, and were about the same height, though by the time she hit her teens, Wendy was a good inch or two taller than me. I thought she was just lovely, and I adored having a real best friend. My first ever friend and I wasn’t related to her! Both Wendy and I were ahead with our reading and writing, and made it a point to keep neck and neck. I already knew how to spell my name and address, and could write sentences and short—yes, very short—stories, and I quickly learned how to spell Wendy’s name. In time Wendy taught me how to spell her name in sign language. Both grandparents on one side of her family were deaf, so she was learning to sign by default.

  One day, without meaning to, I managed to get Wendy into trouble with the teacher. I think I must have been bored, because I’d finished a writing task early, and in a moment of deep affection I wrote her name on her desk to let everyone know that it was her desk and no one else’s. I never wanted another neighbor. As the teacher came around to check our work, she saw the name and reprimanded Wendy, threatening to send her into the corner with her face to the wall. I was stunned into silence. When Wendy said that she hadn’t done it, the teacher said, “Don’t be silly—no one else knows how to spell your name!” I should have confessed right there and then, but I was scared. Mrs. Willis could sting you, if she slapped you around the legs for an infraction. But Wendy didn’t hold a grudge, and as soon as the bell went for playtime, we rushed outside to continue whatever game we’d been playing that morning before we’d had to file into the classroom in pairs to start our lessons.

  Funny, I just stopped writing because I wanted to see if I could still sign Wendy’s name with my fingers. And I can.

  My mother only came to school with me on the first day. From then on I traveled on the bus alone, arriving home just after four in the afternoon. Sometimes I was home before Mum and John, though I had my instructions. Take off your school uniform, fold it and put it away, and change into your old clothes. Take off your school shoes. Peel the potatoes for dinner. And if it was still light and they weren’t yet home, I’d run down to the woods with the dog, clutching a book as I sat in my favorite spot by the pond until Mum called from the attic window. You could hear her voice echoing across the fields for miles. Jaaackeeee. But I loved it if she was home before me. If it was raining, I knew she would be home. Those were the days when I would deliberately leave the hood down on my school raincoat during a storm, so my hair would get drenched as I walked slowly down The Terrace. I’d enter the warm kitchen, and as Mum turned to see me, she’d tut-tut-tut, grabbing a soft, warm towel from the rail above the stove, holding me to her so she could pull off the wet raincoat and rub my hair dry. I loved that. I loved the rubbing and warmth, the smell of the farm’s fresh air on her skin, and her telling me that I’d catch my death if I wasn’t careful, and I wasn’t to be so silly again to get wet like that because it’ll go straight to my chest and then what would we all do? Sometimes John was asleep, the day outdoors having lulled him. I always hoped he’d be asleep, because then I had Mum to myself and we’d talk over a cup of tea about what I’d done at school, and she’d usually have me read to her so she could make sure I was keeping up. Then she’d leap up. “Look at the time,” she’d say, which was a bit pointless, because the black Bakelite clock on the mantelpiece above the stove, the one in the shape of a grand Grecian palace that came from Nanny, never kept good time, though she had the watch Dad had bought for her when they were engaged. That was the watch that, if it stopped working, she’d take it off and, grasping it by the strap would slap it across the table a couple of times, look at the dial, hold it to her ear and then say, “There, that did it.” Slapping the TV, slapping the watch, slapping the radio—which we called a wireless—if something wasn’t working properly, she would always sort it out with a sharp slap. It was a method she also employed when her children didn’t seem to work properly.

  There’s so much I remember of those early days at school. As the warmth of early September gave way to autumn and then winter, almost every day I brought something new for the “nature table” in our classroom. There were leaves of crimson and gold collected as they fell from trees, a clutch of brown cob nuts, flowers, grasses, a snail shell, a feather, an abandoned bird’s nest. Each morning the school caretaker, Mr. Chambers, would deliver a crate of thirty-two small bottles of milk to the classroom—one for each child, part of the post-war “f
ree milk” initiative that was scrapped by Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s. In winter, Mrs. Willis would set the frozen bottles atop the tall coal-burning stove in the classroom. Columns of cream so cold they had poked through the foil tops slowly began to melt, so my memories of winter in Infants 1 are of acrid, cough-inducing coal fumes and milk burning brown as it oozed down the side of the stove. And I remember my freezing cold fingers and toes as I waited for the bus to and from school in wintertime.

  I’d very quickly learned that arithmetic was something to be tolerated because there were other lessons I liked. I loved mixing up powder paints and I loved practicing my handwriting; light pressure on the upstroke, and harder on the down. At the end of my first year in primary school I won first prize for handwriting at the Hawkhurst Flower Show, and my best friend, Wendy, won second prize. I didn’t even know the entire class had been entered along with other schools in the area, so I was thrilled—and even more thrilled at the five-bob prize money.

  Mum made us save most of any money given to us, so I was sent along to the general store at the end of The Terrace to see Fred Cooke, who ran the sub post office inside his shop, and with my winnings I bought two half-crown savings stamps, the ones with a picture of Prince Charles on the front. The sixpenny stamps bore the image of Princess Anne, all blonde curls and a big smile. You could cash in your savings stamps for a premium bond when you had enough money—and if you had a premium bond, you might win a fortune in a drawing. Oh, how we wanted to win a fortune. All the ills of the world would go if we, the Winspears, could only win the football pools, or if one of Mum’s premium bonds would come in for us. “I think my numbers will come up this week,” said Mum every week as she filled out the football pools, a line of crosses against the teams she predicted would draw. She stuck to the same numbers every week because she hadn’t a clue about football. I don’t think anyone who did the football pools knew much about the actual teams, but they all had their favorite numbers. The pools man would collect her form on a Thursday night, along with the shilling it cost to play. I was six years old when a man called Keith Nicholson was the first person to win over one hundred and fifty thousand pounds on the football pools. To us, it might as well have been a million. I can see his wife, Viv, being interviewed on TV, holding out her arms wide and saying, “I’m going to spend, spend, spend.” My mother rolled her eyes and said, “Silly cow, she should keep her mouth shut.” Of course she was miffed that it wasn’t her winning big, but she had a point—the couple went on a spending spree, and after her husband was killed in a car accident while driving his new flash car, poor old Viv ended up bankrupt. Her second husband was killed in another car crash, and her next husband was abusive. These stories made my mother bound and determined to remain anonymous when we won—though I thought people might catch on, because Mum said the first thing we’d do was put in a proper bathroom. Funny, that, considering the house wasn’t even ours, and if we had a great influx of winnings, we would probably spend, spend, spend on a new place to live. Not a flash car, though, because we know what my dad was like with cars. It would be a few years before he passed his test, and the Morris Traveller, registration number PJG 876, was to come into our lives.