This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing

by Jacqueline Winspear

  That year, 1966, was also the year that the Drills decided to sell a few of the houses in The Terrace, and ours was one. Getting “chucked out”—that was my mother’s term—had become a real possibility, so my parents decided to try to buy the house. Thus 1966 became the year we took on a mortgage. It was fortuitous that a new government initiative was launched, offering mortgages at low interest rates for qualifying families seeking home ownership. Only it was not just a mortgage. As far as my mother was concerned, it was THE MORTGAGE, in capital letters and neon lights, and the way she uttered those words, they might as well have formed the title of a scary thriller. I could imagine the book’s cover, with my mother in a noirish pose, her hands clutching the sides of her head, eyes wide, screaming, “Remember, we’ve all got to pull together, because of . . . THE MORTGAGE.” She’d worked her way through a lot of paper “reckoning up” the household finances, and the new mortgage meant she would have to leave the farm—something she was quite looking forward to because another season requiring her to go dung spreading was just one season too many.

  The trouble was that, as my mother soon discovered, even with her qualifications in administration and her experience in the Civil Service, landing a new job wasn’t going to be easy. But she prevailed. When she heard that our dentist needed a new assistant—training on the job offered—she jumped at the chance and was hired. She started the new job just before the end of the school summer holidays, so we’d at least have the summer on the farm, followed by our first family holiday in Devon with all the uncles and aunts and cousins. Dad had passed his driving test at last and we had the Morris Traveller. We also had a dog—Rex—who joined our family a year earlier. Our lives were showing such promise—a house that was ours, a car, a new dog—and a real holiday!

  For my part, I knew that more responsibility was now on my shoulders. Both Mum and Dad would not be home until after six in the evening, so I had to make sure John changed out of his new school uniform so he wouldn’t tear it up when he went down the woods with the boys from up the street. I also had to give him something to eat to keep him going until we all had our evening meal together—we Winspears tend to get cranky when our blood sugar is low—and then I was to start work on our proper tea. Easy, as far as I was concerned, though I had a long slog home from school with Jenny.

  The thing Mum most feared now was losing her job, or Dad losing his job, because the shadow over our heads of The Mortgage, and if we weren’t able to pay the bills it would mean The Bailiff—picture my mother on the front of another book, screaming, “The bailiff’s coming!” Though I had no real idea who the bailiff was, she had been threatening his appearance for years. Mum knew all about bailiffs from her childhood, and it was a fear with deep roots in her psyche. If my brother and I had a fight, you can bet we stopped as soon as the bailiff was mentioned—according to my mother, he would chuck us out on the street if the neighbors complained. My brother was threatened with the bailiff on the day he decided to unravel a whole roll of toilet paper in the outside WC, and I was told in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t get my chores done in the house, then Mum would in turn lose her job, and we would be homeless. I didn’t doubt that it could happen.

  We’d been back at school about a month when John came home with a bad stomachache. I can still see him rushing past the side window in the kitchen, straight into the outside WC. It was to be a few more years before we received a government grant to put in an indoor bathroom. My brother was quite poorly, so Mum called Dr. Wood as soon as she was home and he came to the house. After examining my brother, he said it was a bug. He prescribed plenty of water and predicted that John would soon be as right as rain. I stayed away from school the following day to look after my brother because Mum could not take any time off from her new job. I didn’t mind because it was Miss Chapman’s cookery class on a Friday afternoon, and not only did I hate the class, but Miss Chapman picked on me relentlessly. It wasn’t any easier at home, because when I gave Mum the list of ingredients we were required to take to school for the lesson each week, she always said, “What do they think we are—made of bloody money?” To be honest, we were making silly things like cakes and pies; probably half the girls not only already knew how to make cakes and pies, but had to cook an entire dinner as soon as they got home from school. They could certainly make a hot cocoa, which was the first ever lesson in Miss Chapman’s domestic science class.

  John was still not well all day Friday. Mum called the doctor again that evening and was assured the bug would work its way through—apparently there was something “going round” and lots of children were coming down with it. It was the new school year, after all, and these things happen—in fact, they happened every year.

  Both Mum and Dad left for work on Saturday morning and I remained at home to look after my brother at the start of what was to become one of the scariest days of my eleven-year-old life. Mum had said I should run to the shop to buy some ginger beer as soon as it opened—after all, her mother had always sworn by ginger beer for a bad stomach. I was at the shop with my list, and though I bought the ginger beer, something stopped me giving it to my brother—which is just as well, considering how the day unfolded. Instead I thought he needed something to give him some energy, to build him up a bit to fight the bug, so I mixed a teaspoonful of glucose with water and took it to him.

  I knew glucose was helpful to give you energy if you had a stomach upset—I had them all the time so Mum would give me glucose water if I looked “peaky.” At age fifty, and having had no help from any doctor regarding lifelong stomach problems that had escalated during a book tour, I took the advice of a friend and traveled to Provo, Utah, to see an ordinary family doctor who had a worldwide reputation as someone who could help with intestinal issues. It was well worth the trip, because he drew a direct line from those massive doses of penicillin I’d been given following my scalding at fifteen months—a time when a child’s gut flora is at a crucial stage of development—and the digestive problems I’d had my whole life. I suspect my parents accepted the doctor’s diagnosis of my brother’s illness because they were so used to me having stomach upsets, and believed it would pass. I understood exactly how my brother felt—or I thought I did.

  John was in Mum and Dad’s room, tucked up in their bed. I sat with him and drew pictures of Father Christmas and a sleigh filled with toys for him as he snuggled into me holding his side. Fred Cooke at the shop along the road had already put up his Christmas display; it always went up on October 1st, and we were very excited. I drew pictures of a car John had his eye on, and I showed him what a whirlpool looked like, spinning the spoon around in the glass of glucose water, then lifting his head so he could drink it as it spiraled in the glass. By afternoon, I was sitting with my arms around my brother and worrying, counting the hours until Mum came home. I ran to the telephone box at the end of the road once to call the dental surgery, but Mum said not to worry, it’s just a bug, and she wouldn’t be long, reminding me that I shouldn’t really call her on the dentist’s telephone line. But I knew she would be long.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, John started screaming in pain and I didn’t know what to do. At some point, I knew I had to do something, but I was so scared I’d do the wrong thing—and perhaps my fear at the time has played a part in the fact that this is where my memory fails me. Did I call the doctor or the ambulance? Did the doctor come and then call the ambulance from the shop? I just know that by the time the ambulance came, my brother was in critical condition. John was rushed to Pembury Hospital, my mother by his side, while Dad and I followed in the Morris, and in torrential rain. The windscreen wipers had packed in, so for most of the journey, Dad had one hand out of the window on his side wiping water off the windscreen, while I kept the inside free of condensation.

  John was taken straight into what we used to call the “Casualty Department.” By the time Dad and I arrived, he had already been seen by the surgeon on duty, who ha
d needed only seconds to diagnose the problem. Dad and I lurked at the door, watching as the junior doctor with a broad West Indian accent leaned over my brother, asking questions.

  “When did you last urinate?” asked the young doctor.

  John strained to understand the question.

  “Don’t be bloody stupid,” said my mother, her tension showing in her manner. “He’s a little boy.” She held my brother’s hand. “When did you last have a wee, love?”

  I chimed in. “I got him to go at about four o’clock.”

  Then we heard another voice—a loud, pounding, American voice—as a stocky man with a bald head came striding along the corridor. A nurse ran behind holding a clipboard. He reminded me of that politician I’d seen on the news, the Russian one they called Khrushchev.

  “That boy should have been in surgery two days ago,” he yelled at another nurse. “I’m taking him into that operating room alive and I don’t know if I can bring him out of there alive, he’s so far gone.”

  John’s appendix had already burst, probably that morning, and he had raging peritonitis.

  Dad was in shock and my mother silenced. I knew this was a man who took no prisoners—I’d heard that phrase on an American TV show.

  “I think he means the operating theater,” I whispered to my father.

  The surgeon—whose name I cannot remember—introduced himself to my parents, then waved to the orderlies, who wheeled my brother away. As he set off after my brother toward a sign indicating “Operating Theater,” he was already taking off his jacket, throwing it to a nurse and holding out his arms so she could slip on the overall as she trotted alongside. Another nurse, already clad in green scrubs, touched my mother on the arm, looking from one parent to the other. “He’s here on a fact-finding tour and is one of America’s best surgeons. He’s very good—if anyone can save your John, it’s him.” Then she ran down the corridor to join the famous American surgeon who was going to try to bring my brother out of there alive.

  When the operation was over, Khrushchev walked into the waiting room, his green scrubs stained, sweaty and damp. He told my parents that the next forty-eight hours would be crucial and we should all go home and get some rest—there was nothing to be done by sitting there, waiting. If my cousin who thought us fey had been with me that night, she would have thought I’d completely lost my mind.

  It was past midnight when I slipped into my narrow bed in the room I shared with my brother and closed my eyes. Though I was exhausted, I could not sleep. John was always a noisy sleeper, snuffling and snoring, and I would often ask him to try to be quiet. Now, on that night, with my brother far away in Pembury Hospital, I could hear him breathing, and it scared me because the breathing I heard was faltering, was becoming fainter and fainter and fainter. I was now too tall to sleep under the bed if I was scared. Instead I said aloud, “John, just breathe with me, listen to me breathing and breathe with me.” I accentuated the sound of my breath and I heard him begin to follow me, shallow at first and then gaining strength. I fell asleep as I heard his breathing fall into a rhythm. I remembered everything the following morning, and upon seeing the empty bed, I shivered with fear of what the day might bring. I was sure of one thing, though—that my brother was still alive.

  We were halfway to the hospital that Sunday morning when I told my parents what I’d heard in the room. To their credit, they didn’t make any comment, though I remember them exchanging looks. Those looks were nothing like those they exchanged later when the surgeon who reminded me of a Russian politician told them that at one point, around midnight, he thought they’d lost my brother, that he despaired of saving him, but then John’s breathing picked up and soon he was out of trouble. Not quite out of the woods, but perhaps out of that particular tree. My brother and I might have had our fights—and we could really get into it—but I had once been told he was my job. I think it was a responsibility that was very much alive in my soul.

  My mother’s employer, Mr. English, told her she was not to come back to work until John was safe and sound and out of the hospital, so she remained by his side, sleeping in a bed in his room. The American doctor, who called John “my miracle boy,” came to his bedside every day. There was a beautiful Dutch nurse, Nurse Van Klonk, who had to give John his antibiotics each day, injecting the infection-fighting liquid into an IV, before embarking upon her next task, which was to syringe out the septic matter that came from a tube that went from his nose into his stomach. We all adored Nurse Van Klonk, and though the American doctor was hard to adore, we loved him all the same. He had saved my brother’s life and he had done it with all the bluster of a sheriff in one of the Westerns Dad favored.

  The daytime ward sister was a short, round Irish woman with a laugh that echoed along the hallway and signaled her imminent arrival as soon as she embarked upon her rounds—and my brother was always her first stop, not only because he was the most serious case on the whole floor, but because she had a soft spot for him. On one occasion, she was taking John’s blood pressure when my father walked into the room and greeted John with, “’Allo Mush—how’re you feeling?” before leaning across the bed to kiss his son and run his fingers through my brother’s blonde hair. The word was spoken to rhyme with “push” and means “man” in Romany, though it is one of those words that had also become part of London’s working class lexicon. Dad often called John by that name when he’d been up to some mischief. Sister loved the nickname, and thereafter would enter the room and say, “How’s my Mush today?” in her Irish brogue, before checking the tubes attached to his little body. Then Nurse Van Klonk picked it up, and we all thought it was hilarious, a Romany word spoken with a Dutch accent.

  While John was in the hospital, I broke my finger playing netball at school, and slipped away from my brother’s bedside to ask a nurse if I should do something about it—she sent me up to casualty, where another nurse confirmed the break and bound the injured finger to the next. It didn’t get me any special treatment, though, not like all the new toys, cards and balloons that were now adorning my brother’s room.

  It was as John made a slow recovery in hospital that a terrible disaster was visited upon the people of Aberfan in Wales, when a colliery slag heap collapsed and in a matter of seconds had enveloped a school. One hundred and sixteen children and twenty-eight adults were killed. I remember my mother weeping as she read the newspaper, sitting beside my brother’s bed as he slept. An IV drip-dripped antibiotics and fluids into his arm, while tubes in his nose and at the site of the surgery all worked together to bring him back to health. “At least I still have my boy,” she cried. “Those poor, poor people have lost their kids—but I still have my boy.”

  Two weeks after John came out of the hospital he found an old meat skewer in the garden that Dad had used to secure string when he was marking off a row of potatoes. Having discovered this new tool, my brother managed to poke it in his eye while using it to take a toy car apart. There was no serious injury, though Dr. Wood commented, “That boy will be the death of me.” As far as Mum was concerned though, that was it—John’s burst appendix, my broken finger and then John almost poking his eye out—the three things had come to pass, so she could rest, bring down her guard.

  Then Abnett’s closed and Dad lost his job. And we had The Mortgage, only now, as my mother said, it was “around our necks.” I imagined a series of four nooses, just like I’d seen in Dad’s Westerns, only they were underneath a banner proclaiming the cause of our collective demise. “THE MORTGAGE.”

  20

  Fat Arse

  I still have the rubber stamp with “Albert Winspear, Painter & Decorator” above the address of our house at the end of The Terrace and our telephone number. Dad starting up on his own meant a telephone had to be installed—eventually. We still didn’t have a phone when Jennifer emigrated to Canada when I was thirteen. My recollection is that I was sixteen when we finally had our own telephon
e line, because I remember at around that age running to the telephone box at the end of the road when the house next door caught fire, and they yelled out for someone to call the fire brigade. It was only as I walked back down the street in my pajamas and with no shoes on my feet that I wondered why they hadn’t called themselves—after all, they had a telephone and we didn’t.

  In the meantime, anyone seeing Dad’s advertisement in the Weald Events, a local weekly free booklet filled with community announcements and classified ads, would have had to write or call at the house if they were interested. There were two postal deliveries then, so a postcard or letter mailed in the morning could arrive by the afternoon, and one from farther afield would be delivered the following day. I didn’t realize exactly how good the British postal service was until I came to live in the United States and was told that my letter to an address just seventy miles away would be delivered in about four days, and two if I chose to pay for Priority Mail.

  Dad was able to get work almost as soon he was laid off, but even though Mr. Abnett sent clients his way, our luck had yet to swing round in the right direction. And my Jenny was leaving for Canada—I was shocked for weeks when she told me the news. Each day we would talk about Canada on the way home from school, often with both of us close to tears. Soon her parents were selling everything they owned; every single item in their house had a sticker on it with a price, so if you visited and you fancied a coffee table, you could walk out with it for ten bob. Or the kettle, or the chair in the corner, the one Jenny’s dad would sit on when he conducted the name game at her birthday parties. For the name game, he had a list of about twenty place names and everyday items, and had drawn pictures of their constituent parts—as he held up two pictures at random, we had to guess the word. So, if he held up one picture of a weight with “One Ton” written on it, and another with a bridge, someone would yell out “Tonbridge!”—the name of a town in Kent. An old maid in one hand and a stone in another yielded another town, “Maidstone!” And so it went on.