My dad never read on into David’s adult life. Perhaps he thought I’d lose all grasp of the story. Perhaps I simply got better. It left a deep impression on me though. I still can’t read those early chapters without hearing my father’s calm quiet voice saying the words – such a different voice from when he was in one of his rages.
When I’d stopped whooping, I was still so weak that Biddy had to borrow a baby’s pushchair to wheel me around in. I went back to school eventually but it was hard going. I’d missed so many lessons. There are still black holes in my basic knowledge. They’d learned the alphabet when I was away. To this day I find it hard to remember whether ‘f’ comes before or after ‘h’, and what about ‘o’ and ‘s’, and where does ‘q’ fit in? I have to sing the alphabet song inside my head to work it out.
I missed the rudiments of maths too. I’ve never quite understood sums. When I’m calculating, I still frequently use my fingers.
Biddy didn’t worry that I’d fallen behind at Lee Manor. We were about to move so I’d be going to a brand-new school. We were going to get our own home at last.
* * *
Which sisters have a father as irritable and unpredictable as Harry?
* * *
It’s Prudence and Grace in Love Lessons.
‘Oh, Miss Know-It-All! Only you know damn all, even though you think you’re so smart. You need to get to grips with maths, even if you’re just going to waste your time at art college. Remember that, missy. You thought you could swan off and do your own thing, tell bare-faced lies to your own father, waste everyone’s time and money—’
He stopped short, his mouth still working silently though he’d run out of words.
‘Bernard? Do calm down – you’re getting yourself in such a state. You’re making yourself ill!’ said Mum, catching hold of his arm.
He brushed her away as if she was some irritating insect. He focused on me. His face was still purple. Even his eyes were bloodshot with his rage.
Harry wasn’t really a bit like Prue’s father – but they certainly ranted in a similar manner!
12
Cumberland House
MY PARENTS HAD had their name down for a council flat for years. They’d given up on the whole idea when a letter came. Three new six-storey blocks of flats had been built on Kingston Hill. My parents were offered number twelve, on the first floor of the south block.
Cumberland House looks a bit of an eyesore now, three well-worn square blocks with satellite dishes growing out of the brickwork like giant mushrooms. In 1951 they seemed the height of luxury. There was central heating! No more huddling over a smoking fire in the living room and freezing to death in the bedroom, having to dress under the eiderdown in winter. There was a fireplace just for show in the living room. We used it as a centrepiece. The Peter Scott print of wild birds hung above it, with our three painted plaster ducks flying alongside.
We had constant hot water. This meant we could have a bath every single day. No waiting for the boiler to heat up and carting tin baths around. We could have a bath first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Biddy could wash our clothes whenever she wanted. Well, she didn’t ever want to wash them, though she did so diligently. She was a feminist long before the word was invented. When I asked her about washing some PT kit one time, she snapped, ‘Why should I have to wash it?’ I said without thinking, ‘Well, it’s your job, isn’t it?’
I wasn’t meaning to be cheeky, but Biddy was outraged. It made me rethink the whole concept of what a mum was supposed to do. Jo and Bessie and Fanny’s mum cooked and cleaned and washed the clothes – though David Copperfield’s mother lay limply on her chaise longue while the servants did the chores. My mum, with her smart clothes and her lipsticks and her cigarettes, wasn’t anything like their mums.
There was a communal laundry room for each block of flats. There were no washing machines, just big sinks in which you scrubbed the clothes using a wash board, and then you squeezed the water out using a big mangle. Biddy seldom fancied carting our clothes downstairs and chatting to the other women. She washed at our kitchen sink, wringing the clothes out fiercely and spreading them out on the dryer. She ironed everything with elaborate care. She even ironed Harry’s socks, spreading them out and ironing up to the heel, and then neatly tucking them into paired balls for the airing cupboard.
The best thing of all about Cumberland House was the fact that it had two bedrooms! My parents had the biggest bedroom, of course, but I still had a whole room all to myself. I was six years old and I had my own space at last. It wasn’t decorated as a little girl’s room. I’d read about Ellie’s pink and white bedroom in an abridged version of The Water Babies and I’d felt as awestruck as sooty Tom, but it didn’t occur to me that I could ever have a room like that. We had very little money, and Biddy and Harry weren’t the sort of parents who made frilly curtains or wooden furniture.
My bedroom had a built-in wardrobe so I could hang up my favourite dresses in a row: my rainbow party frock; my white dress with the cherry print and little cherry buttons; my blue and green flowery dress with puff sleeves; my pink dress with the fruit pattern and the white collar; my sundress with frills at the shoulders like little wings. There were also the clothes I didn’t like. I detested my navy pleated skirt, which was stitched onto a white bodice. The pleats stuck out at the front. Biddy was forever telling me to pull my stomach in. I also hated my good Harella coat, fawn with a fancy velvet collar. I was supposed to wear it with a pale brown velour hat. I had to wear both the coat and the hat to my new school and got horribly teased. The boys adopted my velour hat as a new football. I can’t say I blamed them.
I had my own proper big bed, brand new, but I had to make do with my parents’ old brown eiderdown. It had a gold-thread pattern and it felt silky to the touch, but it was a hideous colour. I had a brown ottoman too, an ugly piece of furniture from Ga’s junk room, hard as a rock to sit on, but the seat lifted up like a lid and I could store all my drawings and paper dolls and notebooks inside, plus all my ‘sets’. I had a doctors and nurses set, a red plastic case containing various odd instruments and a toy thermometer and stethoscope. I also had a nurse’s apron and cap marked with a red cross. I was therefore the doctor and the nurse, so all my dolls got first-class medical attention when they were poorly.
My toys all seemed career-orientated. I also had a bus conductor’s set with a dinky little ticket holder and a machine to punch the ticket; a small grocery shop with tiny jars of real sweets and little cardboard boxes labelled Daz and Omo and Persil; and a post office set with a rubber stamp and pretend postage. I politely played with these a few times, but if I wanted to play buses or shops, I found it easier imagining it. These little props always reminded me that I was simply playing a game. Still, they were useful when the little girl next door, Suzanne, came in to play with me. It gave us something to do together. I liked playing with Sue but if I was truthful, I preferred playing by myself.
I had a second-hand chest of drawers. The drawers all stuck so you had to jiggle them around and tug hard at the handles. Once I pulled a handle right off and got severely told off. It might be an old junk-shop piece of furniture but it was all we had.
I kept jumpers and cardigans in one drawer. Biddy hadn’t inherited Ga’s sewing skills but she liked to knit. She made me jumper after jumper, using her favourite ‘rabbit-ears’ stitch. Biddy said they looked ‘jazzy’, and used very bright contrasting colours. They were tight and itchy, and although they were beautifully knitted, Biddy never quite mastered the knack of stitching the sleeves onto the main garment. I always had odd puckers on my shoulders. Sometimes the sleeves were so tight I held my arms out awkwardly to ease the tension. We didn’t wear uniform at Latchmere, my new school. I wished we did.
I kept my Viyella nighties and my vests and knickers and socks and pocket handkerchiefs in the bottom drawer, all jumbled together. Biddy wanted to keep them neatly separate, using the two half drawers at the top, but I wan
ted these for my special things.
I kept tiny books in the right-hand drawer. I had the little illustrated prayer book that had once been Biddy’s. Ga gave it to me one day. I was surprised. My dad had once been a choirboy – I’d even seen a photo of him in a long gown with a white collar, standing with his brother Roy – but to the best of my knowledge Biddy had only set foot in a church twice: once when she was married and once when I was christened.
It was a beautiful pearly white book and I longed to show it off at school. It had my mum’s name neatly written in the front – Biddy Clibbens – but in the back I found a pencilled parody of the Lord’s Prayer. It was just a silly schoolgirl version, not really blasphemous, changing ‘daily bread’ to ‘daily bath’ and that sort of thing, but I got terribly worried. We had a fierce scripture teacher at school, who scrubbed our mouths out with carbolic soap if we said rude words and rapped us on the knuckles if we printed God or Jesus without capital letters. I was sure she’d think my mother would burn to a crisp in Hell if she saw her schoolgirl prank. Biddy found me agonizing over her naughty rhyme.
‘You silly little prig!’ she said, laughing at me, but she got an eraser and rubbed vigorously until there wasn’t a trace of it left, simply to stop me worrying.
I worried a great deal. Biddy didn’t seem to worry at all. She’d been bright at school and at eleven had passed her exams to go to the girls’ grammar school. Ga was so pleased. She’d lost her chance of a proper education but now her daughter could benefit. Biddy had other ideas though. She didn’t take lessons very seriously and got distracted by boys. She was happy to leave school at sixteen.
For various reasons I left school at sixteen too. Poor Ga. I wish she could have stayed alive to watch her great-granddaughter Emma grow up – at last a bright, focused child who worked diligently, came top in all her exams and is now a senior academic at Cambridge. And she can sew!
I kept Biddy’s prayer book – without the Lord’s Prayer – with my Mary Mouse series and a whole flock of Flower Fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker. I loved these little books and spent hours poring over the carefully painted pictures, making up stories about all the fairies, gently stroking their long shiny hair, sometimes tickling their bare toes. I never bothered reading the odd little rhymes on the facing pages but I learned all the flower names. The sweet-pea picture of the big sister fairy tenderly adjusting the pink bonnet on her little baby sister was my all-time favourite.
I had two storybooks by Cecily Mary Barker too, stories that I loved, more stirring than the Faraway Tree books, more accessible than David Copperfield. The Lord of the Rushie River was about a sad little ill-treated child called Susan, desperate for her sailor father to come home. She’s carried away by her friend the swan, and of course she’s reunited with her father at the end of the story. She’s worried about her ragged clothes but the swan snatches her a beautiful rainbow-embroidered dress.
I tried to make friends with the swans on the Thames when Harry took me to feed the ducks, but their beaks seemed very forbidding and I didn’t like the way they hissed at me. They certainly didn’t look as if they’d take me for a ride on their feathery backs and find me a lovely new dress.
The second book was Groundsel and Necklaces, a tender little tale about a child called Jenny who ends up with 365 necklaces, one for every day of the year. I read these stories over and over again. I loved stories about sad, spirited little children going through hard times. I already knew I wanted to write that sort of story myself one day. I cared passionately about dresses and treasured my own rainbow party dress with smocking from C & A. I didn’t have any jewellery at all at that age but read the page where the necklaces are described over and over again. I never dreamed that one day I might have a ring for – well, not every day, but at least every week of the year.
I had my little books in the right-hand drawer. I kept my crayons and paints and pens and pencils in the left. I didn’t have proper sets, though in my teens I’d buy myself a beautiful Derwent coloured pencil every week with my pocket money until I had the entire range in every single shade. Meanwhile I kept my mix of crayons in a biscuit tin with a picture of a little girl called Janet on the top.
Janet was a very popular child model in those days, her photo in all the women’s magazines. She had wispy hair, big eyes and a soulful expression. She was wearing a seersucker frock on my tin and peering slightly cross-eyed through several branches of apple blossom. I’d have Janet on her tin beside me as I drew and crayoned, and so long as I was out of earshot of my parents, I’d chat to her companionably.
I also had a small Reeves paintbox, though I was never entirely successful when it came to watercolour painting. I could control my crayons and get the colours to stay in the lines, but the paint ran away with me. I’d try to create a fairy princess with hair as black as coal, but the black would run into her pale pink face and she’d end up looking like a coal miner. I’d start a beautiful mermaid with long golden curls and a shining tail but the blue sea would splash right over her and dye her hair bright green.
I kept my doll’s house and my toy farm on the top of my chest of drawers. I was never really a country girl and didn’t play with my farm very much. Maybe this was just as well, as the little cows and sheep and chickens and turkey were all made of lead, and I was exactly the sort of silly child who might have licked them. The farm stayed undisturbed most days, the cows not milked, the sheep not shorn, the eggs uncollected. I was busy next door, playing with my doll’s house.
It wasn’t especially elaborate, a two-up, two-down 1930s little number with a scarlet roof and green latticed windows, but it was fully furnished. I especially loved my three-piece suite in jade-green plastic. It gave me great pleasure just holding the little armchair and running my thumb up underneath, feeling the strange insides.
I had a proper family of doll’s house dolls, dear little creatures with woollen hair and tiny clothes, but they were made like pipe cleaners, and if you tried to bend them to sit on the sofa or climb up the stairs, a leg might snap off suddenly in an alarming fashion. Sometimes I just played that it was my house. I’d stand with the front swinging open, my face almost inside the rooms, and I’d act like Alice and shrink myself small.
I didn’t have a proper edition of Alice in Wonderland with the Tenniel illustrations. My Alice had sugar-sweet coloured pictures that didn’t fit the story at all. I also had an abridged Peter Pan with Mabel Lucie Attwell illustrations. Both stories confused me, and because I read them consecutively when I was about six, they amalgamated oddly in my head, so that Peter flew round Wonderland and Tinkerbell shook pepper at the Duchess and Alice joined up with Wendy to make a little house for the Lost Boys.
I’d have been perfectly happy left to my own devices playing alone all day in my new bedroom – but I had to go to school.
* * *
Who had a very small bedroom at her dad’s house, with a chest of drawers half painted silver?
* * *
It’s Floss in my book Candyfloss.
It was not much bigger than a cupboard. There was just room for the bed and an old chest of drawers. Dad had started to paint it with some special silver paint, but it was a very small tin and it ran out before he could cover the last drawer. He’d propped a mirror on top of the chest and I’d laid out my brush-and-comb set and my china ballet dancer and my little cherry-red vase from my dressing table at home. They didn’t make the chest look much prettier.
‘Dad’s going to finish painting the chest when he can find some more silver paint,’ I said. ‘And he’s going to put up bookshelves and we’re going to get a new duvet – midnight-blue with silver stars – and I’m going to have those luminous stars stuck on the ceiling and one of those glitter balls like you get at dances – and fairy lights!’
I always try hard to describe the bedrooms of all my girls. I feel so lucky that I can choose whatever style of bedroom I like now. It’s got a very big wardrobe along one wall, and when you open the doors
, a little light goes on. I’ve got a pink velvet Victorian chaise longue by the window. There are specially built bookshelves, a Venetian glass dressing table and big mirrors, and a special shrine of pretty Madonnas and angels and a heart-shaped gold sacred relic with a secret message inside. My fashion mannequin Crystal stands in the corner wearing a beaded black evening frock. She has matching black velvet ribbons in her long fair hair. There’s a picture of a doll my daughter Emma drew when she was twelve on the wall. There are more dolls sitting smiling in odd corners and two droopy knitted animals, one a dog and one an elephant. They are very like Dimble and Ellarina in Candyfloss.
13
Latchmere Infants
IT’S ALWAYS A bit of an ordeal starting at a new school, especially in the middle of the term. Everyone else has had a chance to make friends. You’re the new girl, the odd one out, the one with the weird clothes, the one who doesn’t know the way to the toilets, the one who doesn’t know where to sit at dinner time.
I had to stay for school dinners at Latchmere because it was too far away to walk home at lunch time. Biddy didn’t want me to go to the nearest school at Kingsnympton, the neighbouring council estate. She got it into her head that the Kingston school furthest from our flats was the best one and somehow or other wangled me a place there.
It was a problem getting me to school. We didn’t have a car. It would be another ten years before we could afford one. The tandem had fallen to bits. Both my parents now had bikes. Harry cycled twelve miles up to London on his. Biddy attempted the couple of miles to my school with me perched precariously on the back. To my shame I couldn’t ride a bike myself. Harry had tried to show me but I didn’t seem to have any idea how to steer and kept falling off with a clunk so he got irritated and gave up on me.
Jacky Daydream Page 6
