by Tim Lott
As the 1950s turned over, a vast motor trying to catch, awaiting some spark, England appeared as a ball at the height of its parabola when thrown into the air, apparently motionless. The restrictions and rationing still weighed down heavily. Jack danced, and worked, and went to the movies, and worked, played snooker, and worked. He read his books, Peter Cheyney, Neville Shute – the dull, decent Englishman winning through – Agatha Christie and his favourite, Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out. Anything a bit sexy, a bit murderous. The job at the greengrocer’s was working out well. A bit of bunce on the side, it was a cash business, understood. Arthur was married now, to Olive, who worked in a chocolate shop, Joy Day in Ealing Broadway. Ken, catching on to the vast wave of post-war divorces, had given Rene the Big E and taken a job as a salesman, at which he acquitted himself with near-genius. Hetty worked at teaching the birds a new pointless word or two. Art was in love with another woman, whom he would one day marry and produce a Down’s Syndrome baby.
Jack’s life ambled along on automatic. He could sense things loosening around him; the clothes were becoming more casual, the directives rarer, the coupons less often required. Wages were still rising and there were new items in the shops, ‘contemporary’ they called them, inspired by atoms and science, new colours, new shapes. It was all at the Festival of Britain. Jack went to see the Skylon, the Dome of Discovery, laid out on the South Bank like a window from Eagle comic. They served tea in polystyrene cups; he hoped that wouldn’t catch on.
The festival was all very well, about time the country looked forward for once. But England still felt the same somehow – safe, dull, unenthused by the prospect of change, clinging to the muddy soup, the dingy colours, the heavy wood.
Chapter Eight
Now, for the first time, my mother begins to take on definition in the deep blur of family history, as she moves into a time when those who can testify still survive, a time when her image begins to stamp itself on to photographic plates and prints, on to memory traces lodged somewhere magical in the slab of brain, on to that which we think of as heart.
For no particular reason that I can fathom, there is an absence of photographs of Jean between babyhood and teens, but I see nothing sinister in this, only the casual entropy of history. For the most part I can only guess at the ages, except in one portrait, which is dated 1945. It is printed by the Home Counties Press, 246 King Street, Hammersmith, and is copyrighted. Home Counties Press own this image of my mother, it is on loan, I suppose, although the inscription on the back, in the barely joined-up print of Jean’s handwriting, reads, ‘With Love to Norman. Jean.’ There is a number, Wax 3668. ‘Wax’ is an abbreviation of Waxlow Manor, the ward of Ealing in which Jean lived with her parents.
The print shows her as a pin-up, as cheesecake in Photoplay. She is fourteen years old, but looks sexually mature. She is wearing a tartan bow around her throat and a dark blouse. She looks slightly beyond the camera, as if at the future. To look right into the lens would be brazen, invitational. Her expression is one of expectation and confidence, the face innocent of any pain. Although it is not soft-focused, the sense it conveys is of something imperceptibly blunted and rinsed. Her hair, a magnificent auburn, is side-parted and flicked back to show a high forehead. Her nose is too nubby to be beautiful, but her eyes are spectacular, gentle, easy to hurt. The imprint of them, those orbits of old ink, ache and dart inside my chest as if black, tiny birds are working there, trying to crack something open.
In none of the other photographs is she quite so beautiful; sometimes she is merely pretty, other times even plain. The impression of her face varies widely with the light and the angle of pose, endlessly vulnerable to impression. Here, in milky light in front of a thatched cottage, she seems knowing, a faint sexuality that is not neutralized by the folksy gingham dress and plain cardigan. Perhaps it is the cigarette she is smoking, something I can never remember her doing in my lifetime. Here she is on an English beach, her long hair cut back to shoulder length. She looks dark as a gypsy and she holds a blade of long dune grass, as if it has been requested, for the purposes of prop. Her short-sleeved, striped shirt, piped with white, is cut close to emphasize her figure, which is spectacular. Hetty swears she must wear contour support (a fuller figure – confidentially) but it is all hers, the stature and curve of Jane Russell, but without the decadence; somehow the stateliness of cleavage suggests an instinct for motherhood rather than passion.
Once again, as when an infant, in this photograph she is perched on a dustbin in the back garden of the house on Rosecroft Road, covering her face as if fake-shy. Evening shadows reach out towards her like pianist’s fingers from the rough pathway. There is an air-raid shelter and an old garden sieve in the background.
Here she is, on an empty pebbled beach, in a bikini, which must date the photo to sometime in the 1950s, after the Bikini Atoll A-bomb tests. Her hair, again, is shorter. Perhaps she is beginning to lose it now. She is wearing heavy, unflattering sunglasses. So this one, with her best friend, Irene Downhill, must be earlier, for her hair is at full length again. She is wearing a light, single-breasted A-line coat, just above ankle length. Irene stands to her left, her toes turned slightly inward, flesh showing through the criss-cross straps of her flat leather shoes. For some reason this makes her presence seem sad. Yet, as in all the other photographs of this time, both women are smiling; for some reason, to not smile at a camera becomes taboo about now, in mid-century England. The camera, and its ephemeral product, are being sapped of gravitas.
Here is her mother, Grace. Just as there are no pictures of Jean as a child, there are none of Grace as a young woman. She is always old, as I remember her, with a pronounced nose and a figure like a pillarbox in a sack. Her hair is scraped back and gathered into a bun the shape of a ring doughnut on top of her head. She looks tough, and I remember that she could be astringent, unlike Billy, her mild, dutiful husband. And here is Billy, standing in the back garden. It is a dull photograph, in which he wears a plain sports jacket and buff slacks, and a diagonally striped tie, but something has gone wrong in the processing and there are two white flashes exploding on either side of him, as if something celestial is unfolding.
Here are the first photographs of Jack and Jean together, Jean burnished into teak sitting on the back of the Vincent Comet. Grace, looking like a game OAP, would also take rides, urging Jack to greater speed. Jean is wearing an overcoat and what look like Doc Martens shoes. There is a field of thistle in the background.
Jack and Jean in a hotel by the look of it, Jean in a white blouse with a spray of white carnation on her breast, a lick of hair playing down on to her right eyebrow. She looks luminous, perfect, except for the slight hook in her nose, inherited from her mother. There is the smallest gap in between her two front teeth. Jack, his collar scruffily overlapping the line of his lapel, holds her through the crook of her arm with his big left hand. The other encloses her smaller, unworked hands, in the soft singularity of his palm.
Here they are on their wedding day. Jean has a small crucifix around her neck and is holding a spray of slightly desiccated roses. There are white flowers in her hair and her pulled-back veil falls to her elbow. She is smiling up at Jack, showing her big teeth. Her neck is good, clearly defined from the chin. Jack gazes down, his face a mass of satisfied lines, his quiff improved by Vitalis, his tie a satiny flap beneath his shirt. There is a white carnation in his lapel. They hold hands. Although the photograph is obviously posed, according to the photographer’s cue, I imagine, I know, that the sentiment was real and true. This, then, was the happiest day of their lives.
Jean met Irene Downhill the year the pin-up shot was taken, in 1945. Both worked in the rag trade, at the Berkertex factory in Southall Broadway as machinists, production-line seamstresses. Irene made sleeves, Jean made bodices. Although she was only fourteen, this was my mother’s second stab at a job. Her first had been as a hairdresser; she had been briefly apprenticed after leaving Dormer’s Wells School in Dormer’
s Lane. Unlike Jack, she had been offered no scholarship on leaving the elementary school, Lady Margaret Junior. Perhaps some seed of future self-doubt was sown here, in this most routine of failures.
Irene did not talk to Jean while they were at the factory. She had noticed her, with her hair, and her bust, and her slightly prim yet self-confident face. But Jean had not really mixed with the thirty other girls working there; she was very young, maybe slightly shy. One day, Irene noticed that Jean had not been in for a while. She’s poorly, said the foreman, grimacing politely. Pneumonia. You could die from it. Someone organized a whip-round for her, poor thing. They pooled their coupons and sent Irene to buy some chocolates and a bunch of daffodils. She had to queue, of course; you had to queue for everything, whether it was bacon or Bile Beans, or Iron Jelloids, or Bovril, or Virol – Convalescents Need It! – sometimes for hours. Irene was given the afternoon off to shop and to drop them over, although she hardly knew Jean.
She was greeted by Mrs Haynes, Jean’s mother, a kind woman, big, lovely, thought Irene. Her own mother, it turned out, knew Grace, from the Silver Threads club at the church in Allenby Road, where they played housey-housey and went to beetle drives, and from where they took charabancs to the seaside. Mrs Haynes showed Irene upstairs to Jean’s tiny bedroom. She was a tad nervous at first, afraid she would find Jean at death’s door. But Jean was sat up, bright as a button when she saw the flowers and chocolates. Irene sat down for a natter and a cup of tea, it was rude not to.
They found themselves talking nineteen to the dozen, letting the tea go cold. Irene, looking at her across the Singer machines, bolts of cloth and white wax markers of the workshop, had imagined that Jean was a little bit hoity-toity, being so pretty. Also she talked very precisely, very just-so. But she wasn’t stuck up, not at all. She was nice, that most prized and sought-after quality. Boys touched up bad girls but married nice ones. And she was cheerful, perky, not bolshie or too smart. That was a big plus too when it came to men.
Jean told her about her big brothers, Alan, a little simple but sweet in his heart, and Norman, smart as anything, he was away at the moment, she wouldn’t say where. She was pleased as punch at the flowers and had already eaten half the chocolates.
Irene resolved to come again. It was funny how they just hit it off, and soon it was once or twice a week, bringing biscuits, fruit, magazines – Woman or Woman’s Own. She flicked through it on the bus, the 105, on the way over. There is a unanimous acceptance, read Irene, that to be loved and loving is better than being brainy, rich or nobly born. Signed, the editor. Hear, hear. She hopped off the bus, before it had properly stopped, the way you did, for a giggle.
The more she talked to Jean, the more they seemed to have in common. Of course, Jean was different in a way, more at ease with herself, while Irene was always a bit edgy, on the touchy side. But they both loved clothes, and dancing, and sport. Boys as well, she supposed, though they didn’t talk about that very much; they were only after one thing.
Jean was back at work in no time at all. By now they were tight, firm friends in an exclusive, sealed unit, within which they would remain until one or the other got married, when friendship would naturally recede. For now, though, they were together, not even another girl to interrupt or dilute the friendship. It was normal; you got a Best Friend – always female, for neutral male friends were unknown, since upon contact they converted alchemically into ‘boyfriends’. Then you waited for the man to turn up. They were not teenagers, they were girls, and would remain so until they became wives and mothers. Even then they would still be girls, but they would have earned respect, having done what was required, done the right thing. Life was prescribed, immovably, linearly, in this way: school, work, best friend, marriage, housewife, mother, then grandmother. Then death, painlessly, in your sleep, although you never talked about that.
What did they talk about all those hours? Silly, really, but it was hard to know. Where they were going, where they had been – the Pally this week, or the Montague, or Ealing Town Hall. The boss at work, that great lummox, the weather – the coldest for fifty years – the bright vermilion colouring of Jean’s new skirt, she made it herself, a dirndl, she would wear it with a taffeta under-slip, and a nice off-white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and leg-of-mutton sleeves. Utility was fading now, those neat, puritan lines, designed by Molyneaux, Hardy Amies, Hartnell. Square shoulders, boxy, straight with skirt just above the knee, regulated pleats. Good riddance. The queuing, the dance steps. The way that boy looked at them, he was a wolf, they were all wolves. The movies, especially the romances, not the war ones, there had been enough of that. Jean hated to see or hear anything horrid. Relatives and what they were up to. Where was Norman? She still hadn’t met him. Their dreams, of course, half-formed, tiny. A week’s holiday in a caravan at Brighton. A house of your own with a front and a back garden. Nothing intellectual, or clever, not s – e – x, nothing at all really. Just chit-chat, gossip, filling the warm spaces in the air with words, out of habit or embarrassment. Waiting for the man to turn up who would look after you for the rest of your life. You had until you were about twenty-five before the worry set in, before your assets began to fade away: the shape, the hair, the skin.
Bored with the repetitiveness of the work at Berkertex, they moved, together, to Camps in Perivale, an American firm – the Yanks were everywhere nowadays. Got any gum, chum? Pennsylvania six five thousand! Top of the world, Ma. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. They made foundation garments, bras and corsets mostly, and some surgical wear; everything seemed huge for some reason. But it was a laugh, better than Berkertex, and better paid for that matter; you could pick and choose your job up to a certain point, the point when you started to get in the way of the men. Funny to think during the war of the women doing men’s jobs. That was all in the past now, the genie back in the bottle, thank goodness, not that everyone could accept it. There was a demonstration, it said so in Woman, for equal pay. In the picture the women all wore black masks. They were ashamed. They were probably ugly, couldn’t get a man. It is better to love and be loved.
Jean was dating now, after a fashion, a boy from the Southall football team, Ted. But she and Irene still went dancing together and always came home together, leaving each other at the door. The funny thing was, after Jean’s illness, they never went in each other’s houses, not even for a cup of tea. You kept your distance, up to a point, you minded your own business. Only so much could be said, only so far could be gone, even among the very best of friends. Especially for Jean, she never said anything in particular, really. Anyway, what do you want to talk for, when you could be having fun. And they did have fun, it was great, though they never had much to say; it was hard to explain. Ted met her at the factory gates and cycled home with her. They didn’t hang about on the doorstep, kissing, because Grace would be yelling from the window, When are you coming in then? That was all there was to it, as far as Irene could make out. Jean wasn’t telling, of course. Oh, she was a dark horse, was Jean.
Ted came and went, then there was one other boyfriend before Jack, John Watts, a matelot. He came to visit when he was on leave, which wasn’t often. That didn’t last long either. So Jean and Irene carried on waiting. Jean could design and sketch and tailor clothes, make them on a Saturday and wear them in the evening, but it was never going to be a career, because girls like Jean didn’t have careers. That was a given. The designs were copied from patterns in magazines, never customized, not even a touch. You didn’t want to stand out. Everyone just did what everyone else did – it was one of the secret rules, of which there were thousands. Irene and Jean thought, wildly, of getting a flat at one time, but they knew their parents wouldn’t stand for it. It wasn’t even worth asking.
Two or three times a week, they took the bus over to the Empire Snooker Hall in West Ealing, full of boys – they were the only girls ever there – most of them on the rough side, off the barrows; some of them, one in particular, not that bad actually, a b
it dishy. But Jean and Irene didn’t go to snare boys, although they were always ogling Jean in her tight sweater and shorts; they went to play table tennis, Jean crouching over the table almost fiercely, determined to win. She hated to lose. Such a silly game everyone thought, ping-pong, but it wasn’t, there was the cut, the chop, the topspin lob, the smash, the drop, the backhand flick – it was a whole world. The boys glanced up, pretending to be casual, as they picked off the reds, then the colours, swearing softly when they cocked it up so the two girls wouldn’t hear.
Norman, Jean’s oldest brother, so mysteriously absent, was in fact expertly weaving baskets in borstal. A petty villain, he had been disqualifed from serving in the war effort.
He had started behaving antisocial at school, at Dormer’s Wells, having failed the scholarship exam, a lot of stupid questions he didn’t even understand. Norman was repeatedly caned for trivial misdemeanours; not even misdemeanours, six strokes once for not being able to do his algebra. The teachers seemed to enjoy it; one of them, a middle-aged cripple with a club foot, waited around a bend on the concrete stairs once and tripped Norman up with his cane, laughing out loud when he took a tumble, cutting his face open. The woodwork teacher flung the work at your face if he didn’t like it. Norman skived off, and when they caught him, he was caned in front of the whole school. So Norman began to resent authority, what with one thing and another, began to get an attitude, although they didn’t call it that then – it was just showing some cocky. The school bully, Ken Haydon, was the straw that broke the camel’s back, picking on Norman after yet another caning. Norman hit him so hard, he broke his nose, then followed it up with a kicking. After that he was the school hero.
