This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing

by Jacqueline Winspear

  Pete Eldridge sold the garage when he and his wife, Kay, moved to Tenterden. We visited them once, and Mr. Eldridge gave John and me little “Esso” key rings and other trinkets he’d received as giveaways from the petrol companies. Now the new garage owner was demolishing the old stables and was building a big, modern petrol station and garage, and was parking cars for sale over the back, near the duck pond. Then we heard someone had bought land behind the pub and wanted to develop it, but old Mrs. Oyler put a stop to that, as she had before when a former publican tried to do the same thing. She’d lived in the area from girlhood and knew many of the ancient land laws. She pointed out that, according to a particular centuries-old law, the land could not be developed. So it wasn’t—at least not then.

  We were shocked again when Fred Cooke sold the general store at the end of the street. The Cookes had owned that store for years, before my parents came from London to live in Kent, and they had been there through so many of our trials and tribulations. In his big bulbous grey Standard Vanguard van, Fred Cooke had searched high and low, driving to farms and out-of-the-way villages, to find the doctor on his rounds on the day my mother went into labor with John. And it was the Cookes who had waited up for us when John was rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix. I can still see their daughter, Lyn, holding out her hand to me as we clambered out of the car late at night—Fred had flagged Dad down as soon as he heard our car turn into The Terrace. “Don’t worry about that boy,” he’d said. “He’s not finished causing me trouble, not by a long chalk—he’ll be out of that hospital and right as rain, just you see.” My brother was already known as something of a “Dennis the Menace” in the hamlet.

  Now the Cookes were moving on, to take over a shop in Frittenden.

  To add to the misery, Dad managed to rupture himself that spring and by summer was scheduled for a hernia operation. He tried to work at the same clip, but couldn’t, so some jobs had to be passed onto Bill and Dave, his former workmates. Money became short, and of course there was the dreaded mortgage. Mum decided to apply for my brother and me to receive free school meals. I was mortified, because I knew what that meant.

  At my secondary school, every Monday we had to line up outside the school’s administration office, where the school secretary sat as gatekeeper to the entrance hall and also to the headmistress’s office just along the corridor. When you reached the window, having lined up for what seemed like hours, you would hand over five shillings and the secretary would tick off your name. Miss Nelson, the headmistress, then gave you five pink dinner tickets, which were used to get into the dining hall each day. It was a way to keep tabs on us, to make sure we were all eating, I suppose. If you were bringing your own packed lunch for dietary or religious reasons, you had to have special permission, based upon a letter from your parents with details of your nutritional or spiritual preferences. If you were eligible for free meals, you presented the letter from the local council confirming your status, and you were issued with dinner tickets of a different color, a shade of green, so everyone knew you were poor and your parents couldn’t afford the five bob a week to feed you at midday.

  The first time I presented my letter from the council, Miss Nelson said, in a loud voice so the entire line of girls could hear, “Jacqueline Winspear, free school meals this week.” I wanted to die of shame. The same happened the following week until I could stand it no longer and simply used money I’d saved from my summer job. It was no good taking food from home, because Mum would never have written the necessary letter to support my taking a packed lunch—as far as she was concerned, “I pay my bloody taxes, and you’re entitled to this.” She was right, of course, but it didn’t negate the shame.

  Dad went down with a very serious bout of pleurisy that winter, just as he was getting back on his feet and work was starting to come in again following the hernia operation. I remember telling Mum that perhaps she shouldn’t smoke so much, invoking what I’d learned about smoking in biology at school: we were all breathing in the smoke and it wasn’t doing us any good. It didn’t have any effect whatsoever—she even called her cigarettes “my cancer sticks” to scare me, though she slowed up a bit when my single bed had to be moved downstairs into the sitting room so Dad could sleep there to keep warm, and I slept with her in their attic bedroom. The bedrooms had been changed around soon after John came home from the hospital, when it became clear that a girl of my age shouldn’t be sharing a room with a little boy. I moved into the room vacated by my parents at the front of the house, and they moved up a floor into the attic, which was not like an attic at all, but was a lovely large room with a vaulted ceiling and views across the Weald of Kent as far as the eye could see. In some ways, I wish I’d asked for it to be my bedroom, but I was also scared in that room, because the roof beams creaked at night. I already knew the house was haunted, though Dad had assured us that all the ghosts moved out when we moved in. “Would you want to live with this family, if you were a self-respecting ghost? No, mark my words, they’ve moved on.” Dad kept our fey Winspear feet firmly on the ground.

  Money became really tight that winter and we had to be careful with the coal. One Saturday, while Mum was at work and Dad was sleeping, I came up with a plan. It was a bitterly cold day, nearing that point in the afternoon when the winter sun is low in the sky and edged with purple, a sign that dusk is just around the corner. I knew we needed logs but couldn’t afford them, so I told John we were going across the field into the forest to bring back wood—and this was the right time, because we would have to return in darkness. I didn’t want the neighbors to see us coming home with what was effectively filched wood. I’d remembered where some trees had been taken down the previous year and left in a great pile to season. The trunks were narrow enough to pull home, though they’d been cut to about fifteen feet long. I thought I could drag two home, resting the thinnest part of the trunks on my shoulders, and John could drag one—that would give us a lot of logs. We might have been siblings who fought a lot, but when we had a plan requiring cooperation against an outside foe, we were as tight as clams, and this year had seen us battle one enemy after another.

  We bundled up in our duffel coats, boots, gloves and scarves, John wearing his woolen balaclava and me with a knitted hat pulled down so low I could just about see. Frost was already thick on the ground as we marched across Five Acres, jumping over the stile and making our way gingerly down the Burton Way into the woods. We walked on toward the wood pile, stopping to listen every few minutes. No one else was about. Not that we expected anyone to be about, but we were also used to things going wrong, so we listened to make sure. When we reached the pile of wood, I lifted one narrow tree trunk onto John’s shoulder and then managed to balance two on mine. We’d walked about a quarter of a mile through the woods when, halfway up the hill that led to the field we had to drop the trunks because they were too heavy to drag up the gradient. Instead we hauled them one by one to the edge of the field, where we took up our respective loads again and began walking across Five Acres. I remember struggling with the weight of my two long tree trunks, but at the same time I wanted to keep John going. Every time I looked back at him, a boy of nine pulling a heavy tree trunk behind him, I wanted to weep—his head was down and he was puffing with sheer effort as he battled fatigue to bear his load. My shoulders were beginning to hurt where the wood was digging into me and I’d shoved my gloves into my pocket so I could get a better grip, but we had to carry on—we needed to get the wood to the house. We rested at the next stile, working together to push the long trunks over the gate. We were almost home.

  The footpath alongside our house at the end of The Terrace was narrow, so once again we had to carry each trunk separately, dumping them outside the shed close to the wide tree stump we used as a base to chop wood. Mum heard us maneuvering the wood down the path and came running out of the house.

  “Where have you two been? I’ve been worried sick about you since I got home�
��and you left your father on his own.”

  I was out of breath and pointed to the tree trunk. All I could say was, “It’s already seasoned—it’ll burn.” Then John and I turned around to bring back two more trunks.

  Mum was fighting back tears as she began sawing the wood into logs, while I split each one with the long-handled axe and John stacked them beside the shed. And while we were all tired and upset, I knew that this was our family at its best—working together against whatever might befall us. In that moment the enemy just seemed to be that year’s fate, as if our ship had sailed under a very dark cloud close to rocks with no wind to be picked up by the sails.

  That Monday, as I handed over my letter from the council so I could be given the green dinner tickets that showed everyone I was receiving free school meals, Miss Nelson commented upon the scratches and bruises on my hands and arms.

  “What have you been doing?” she asked, her tone as snippy as ever. I could not stand that woman.

  “Chopping wood to keep my dad warm—he’s very ill,” I replied, with a definite tone of defiance in my words.

  Without waiting to be dismissed, I took up the tickets, shoved them in my pocket, and walked off. She didn’t call me back to reprimand me for insolence, and I wasn’t going to thank her for giving me the tickets. Perhaps she saw something in my eyes, that I was more than ready for a fight with authority and I might just win. Then anarchy would prevail, because she was not universally liked and she knew it.

  Despite my father’s promises, as logs burned in the fireplace that evening I wasn’t at all convinced that this time next year we’d be laughing, or would even have cause for the odd smile.

  But the following year even more change was in the air. Mum read about new government grants to upgrade houses without indoor lavatories or bathrooms, so she applied for the grant and in short order received word that we had not only received a grant to put in a bathroom, but to have a new kitchen installed. At that point we had an old bathtub, but it was in the kitchen, so if you wanted a bath, it had to be filled from the copper or an electric boiler that we used for the bedlinens, and you just had to make sure the family knew you needed the privacy to bathe uninterrupted. If someone wanted to use the outdoor lavatory, instead of coming through the dining room and kitchen—which you would usually do to get to the back door that led outside—they had to go out the front door and walk around the path at the side of the house.

  With the new bathroom fitted—you still had to go through the kitchen and a new back entrance hall to get to it, but that was no problem when you’ve not had any bathroom before—next came the kitchen. The old Rayburn that had replaced the original black cast-iron stove was pulled out, and instead of a copper to heat the water, an enclosed solid fuel fireplace with a back boiler was installed in the sitting room, plus an immersion heater in the new hot water tank for backup in summer when we wouldn’t need a fire. We had a new electric stove and fitted cabinetry. Dad really went to town on the house, as if the remodeling bug was nipping at him. He knocked down the wall between our sitting room and the dining room—both very small rooms—although we couldn’t afford fitted carpet for the larger “lounge” for some time. Unfortunately, all this improvement meant we couldn’t run to the purchase of a vacuum cleaner, so I felt like Cinderella, forever on my hands and knees brushing with a hand broom.

  Then Mum bought a washing machine. It was what they called a “twin tub” in those days—a cheaper type of machine with a washer on one side and a spin dryer on the other. I think they’re still made. When the wash cycle was finished, you drained the tub and pulled the laundry out of the machine and into the spinner.

  There had been a previous interlude when we had a washing machine, but it was short-lived because the thing was ancient and in all likelihood possessed by a jester spirit. Dad often worked at houses that were being remodeled and people were throwing out old items they didn’t want or where someone elderly had died and the place was being prepared for sale by the family, hence even older stuff was being disposed of. That’s how the big green washing machine, manufactured circa 1910, had come into our possession. It comprised a large metal cylinder supported by Chippendale-style legs, with an agitator in the barrel and a wringer on the top—but it was electric powered, so no one had to do the washing by hand, though Dad had to change the plug. You had to fill the cylinder with hot water and then switch it on, whereupon an agitator thumped the laundry around until you thought it had been thumped around enough. Then you switched off the machine part and started the wringer—there was a lever to alternate power—and you fed the bedlinens, towels and clothing through the wringer, making sure you’d put a laundry basket on the other side ready to catch the clean, washed load. When you were done, you emptied the thing via a small tap at the base of the cylinder. This was what labor saving looked like before the Great War. My brother caught his fingers in the wringer once and learned a lesson—I pulled away the electric cable just in time to save his entire hand.

  This ancient washing machine had its own little dance routine, because as soon as you turned it on it began to move, which meant someone had to lean against it to keep it in place. One day all hell broke loose when Mum and I went into the garden to peg out the clean laundry, leaving John to attend to the washing machine. His attention soon wandered and he ran out to play with the dog. Freed from the constraints of humans keeping watch over its behavior, the machine with the comedic turn jigged toward the kitchen door and slammed into it, so we couldn’t get back into the house again—and the front door was locked. The three of us leaned against that door, shaking and vibrating as the machine on the other side was jumping up and down to a cha-cha beat. Mum had no other option than to break a window so John could climb into the kitchen, turn off the machine and drag it away from the door. It went to the dump the following week.

  With this history, is it surprising that I crept out of school and came home early on the day the brand-new twin tub washing machine was delivered? I was so excited. By the time Mum arrived home from work, I’d read the instruction book from cover to cover and had four loads of laundry finished and on the washing line, drying. I’d washed bedlinens, Dad’s shirts, John’s school uniform, my clothes, the lot. I’d gone to each room and picked up anything that needed washing and got to work. I treated that washing machine as my own personal gift—now I wouldn’t have to launder anything by hand unless it was something delicate, and I was just thrilled to bits.

  Change, change, change. How much more would there be? By the time I was a few months shy of fifteen, it was clear Fate was not finished with us. Mum had asked for a raise at the dental surgery and had been turned down by Mr. Jones, the senior partner. I knew she wanted not only more money, but more opportunity. She was forty-two and more than ready to jimmy open doors that had previously shut tight in her face, from the time she’d had to turn away from a scholarship to the prestigious girls’ school in London.

  She applied for a job as a clerical assistant at a detention center for boys situated close to a neighboring village. Such places are often in rural areas away from public transportation, so offenders have little means for a quick getaway if they abscond. She landed the government job with ease—she already had the Civil Service exams under her belt, so it was what we might today call a “shoo-in.” As soon as she was hired, I knew—we all knew—Mum was on her way, and we were so proud of her. Things were looking up again—Dad was earning decent money, Mum was on a career path, and John and I were . . . well, we were okay. The ship was on an even keel and we were out of the Doldrums. Now we were heading for next year, when we would definitely all be laughing.

  22

  A Social Disadvantage

  I still wonder where my brain was on the day I brought home that test result informing my parents that teaching would be the best career path for me. I should have kept it hidden. They knew I wanted to be a writer. Hadn’t they seen that quote on my bedroom
wall, taken from the copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank I’d bought at a paperback sale at school? Anne had written, “No one who doesn’t write can know how fine it is. And if I don’t have the talent to write for newspapers or books, well then, I can always go on writing for myself.”

  But Mum and Dad thought the test result was good news, and later agreed that I should apply to college. I really didn’t want to go to a teacher training college, yet I also didn’t want to disappoint my parents. They knew I would be eligible for a full grant based upon their income, and the only element of cost to them would be my “spending money.” While that was something to which the council expected them to contribute, I knew Mum would complain like hell if she had to give me money. I had a full timetable at college, but I’d be working through the winter, spring and summer breaks, so I knew I’d be okay.