by Betty Burton
Ah, but I tell you, my father didn't think it was fair enough. There was always trouble. Every time I bought something there was a row. As soon as I got through the door with a bag, he'd draw his eyebrows together and wouldn't he glower at the bag, why you'd think whatever was in it would shrivel up or bust into flames.
'There'll come a day when you'll need that money,' he'd say, 'but don't come crawling to me, because you'll find none here.'
I wasn't afraid of him, he'd have liked me to be, but I wasn't.
'You needn't to worry,' I'd say, 'I'd do owt before I'd crawl to you or any man!' And I meant it. And I haven't changed! I'd stand there not giving an inch and see bitterness take over his face. I began to hate coming home when he was there even when I hadn't been spending. That's a terrible thing to say about your own father — but it's true.
Looking back I can understand why he said I was a fool with my money. He worked at the pit, not on the coal face where the good money was, but in the engine sheds. I never found out how he came to be doing that because he came from a well-off family — they owned quite a big shop in Nottingham — so he must have been brought up with things a lot better than they were in our house. But he didn't have to be bitter.
D'you know, I've never thought about this before ... he used to be a radio fanatic — always had house full of men, the whole place was strung up with wires, and there was these jars full of acid that used to be something to do with it, oh yes was quite the high sarrag about radios then ... what I was thinking about — it must have cost quite a bit to buy all that stuff when you think about it — nobody else had anything like it as I know of — oh yes, he was the big I Am there. I'm just wondering ... perhaps he thought he was going to be God's gift to radio but couldn't afford it — he was like that — thought good things were wasted on the 'igh palloi.
He thought women should be submissive, which my mother was. And he was a bully because when I stood up to him he would always turn on her saying that she encouraged me — but she didn't ... didn't dare! So in the end I stopped standing up to him. I wasn't going to let him stop me, though, but it made me underhand and secretive. It isn't in my nature to be like that, it never was. It took a lot of the pleasure out of buying something new.
I was only young when I first started earning. In them days, if you were clever at school, you could go in for a test and if you passed you could leave, aye, and go to work in a factory — just think about that — and it always seemed it was the girls that passed — isn't that terrible? ... anyway I used to run home with anything new I'd bought, even the sound of the bag crackling would make it exciting. And we had hat-boxes then — but it was later I started buying hats — you can't imagine the thrill it was taking off the ribbon and going down into all the tissue-paper. First, when he started his carping, I used to take things straight upstairs and not bring them out until he had gone out. But after a bit he'd only got to see me with a bag to start a row.
But I was still determined he wasn't going to domineer me. To keep the peace I never brought owt into the house, I used to sling it all into the back of the coal-shed until he was out of the way, or put things on in the toilet which was next to the coal-shed and sometimes change back later on.
When I think about it, it's a marvel what I used to do with five or six shilling a week. There were no credit cards like there are now. There were clothing clubs and tallymen ... I haven't heard of a tally-man for years, I wonder if they're still about ... if it weren't for the clubs and the tally-man I don't know how most folks would have got on.
Then there were a bit up-class people like Mrs Pickup.
Now, she kept a little shop, what you'd call a boutique now, where you could get really nice things and pay them off weekly. It weren't a deal different from the clubs really, except for the kind of things she sold. Pretty things. Fashionable and not meant to last, they did though, they were real quality. Nearly all my money went to Mrs Pickup ... well at least until that day as I'm telling you when I saw this here snow fox.
Up till then I had never bought anything at Moxon's, and when I said I was going to have the fur, I didn't think how I was going to pay. Everything I ever had was on the never-never. And I'd never thought about how much it would cost. You could get a red fox with two tails for one pound ten (a pound fifty like), well you don't want to ask — I nearly dropped through the floor — this white one was five pound. Well, it was a fortune.
Moxon's was so high-class it never occurred to me they'd have anything to do with never-never ... well I tell you, that was an eye-opener. The assistant would ask you straight out, 'Cash or account, madam?' The butties' wives and managers' and stockingers' wives, they all did it. I was really shocked when I found out ... working-class people hated not being able to pay cash down, we were ashamed of it, yet everybody had to do it ... and that was what shocked me at first, Henry Tibbett's wife and that lot, with all their money weren't a bit embarrassed at not paying cash. The only difference between the clothing club and Moxon's is that they called it having an account — aye and they didn't charge as much interest at Moxon's.
I don't know whether it was because I went in dressed up, but they just asked me straight out when I went in to price the fur, 'Would you like to open an account?' Not a bit furtive, not at all, just straight out, 'Would you like to open an account?' And I came home with the snow fox and some pretty new shoes and a hat — and I could have had a date with the under-manager. Ha, but I didn't want to spoil it, him finding out I worked at the mill ... well, I reckon I must have found a gold mine of really nice things there. It meant working some extra time, but it was worth it.
I can remember it as though it was yesterday. Going home with all my bags and boxes and knowing that my father had gone down to London on some union jaunt, so I could go straight into the house and show my Mam and our Rose.
'Eh, our Jess, I don't know how you dare,' our Rose said. 'Fancy getting white! There'll be soots on it as soon as you set foot outside the house.' And she went on about how was I going to get it cleaned — our Rose was always practical like that, I hadn't given a thought to owt like that. But my Mam, you should have seen the look on her face. I can just see her, brushing her hand down the whole pelt, trying out the jaw of the fox that was the fastening clip, and polishing the eyes with her apron. And when I was all dressed up she said, 'Well, our Jess, it's fair beautiful. I always knew you were cut out to be a lady.'
Can you imagine what I felt like going out that evening? I could walk out of our house dressed to kill and come back again knowing that my father was two hundred miles away. And I was meeting a soldier down town, one as always got turned out immaculate.
When I got home that evening there was just my Mam and me having a cup of cocoa, she suddenly went to the dresser and fetched out a photograph ... a big one, they used to be called cabinets. She didn't say anything but just opened up the cover. I couldn't really believe it — it was me, yet it wasn't quite, yet it was so much like me. My face, hair in the same curly fringe, my way of holding my head when I know I'm being looked at, and my same smile. She had on three ropes of pearls and her shoulders were bare except for a fur draped round them — a snow fox just exactly like mine.
'I just thought I'd show you,' my Mam said. 'Don't tell your father or there'll be hell to pay. It's been in the attic twenty year or more. I just thought I'd show you.'
'Who is she?'
I could tell she felt she'd already gone too far. She started to take the photo back upstairs.
'It's all in the past,' she said.
'Mam, you can't not tell me now. She could be my twin, couldn't she?'
She didn't say anything for a bit, then all she said was, 'She was your father's twin, and it's no good asking me anything else because I don't know, and if you ever ask him he'll know it was me as showed you.'
I don't know if it was because I looked so much like her and knowing that he had cut her out of his life ... and ours too, she were me auntie ... but I made up my mi
nd I wasn't going to put up any longer with the way he treated me.
He came back from London full of it, he actually sat in the kitchen telling us about the petition they'd gone down to London with. He seemed a different man ... if only he could have always been like that, but when he was at the pit he hardly said a word. I had already decided I was going to stop that hole-in-the-corner business of getting ready to go out, and with him being so pleasant to everybody, it seemed like a good omen.
When I came downstairs ready, he and Mam and our Rose were sitting at the table drinking tea. He was reading out the petition to them. He looked up and saw me ... It still gives me the horrors thinking about it. It was like a devil in him. He didn't move a muscle, but it seemed like he was hitting me, beating me. I couldn't repeat the terrible things he said, nor couldn't I believe he could think such things about me. What it amounted to was, he said I had been going with men — you know what I mean — he said the only way a mill-girl could dress up like that was if she was doing something dirty ... I shall remember his words to my dying day: 'Strutting about the town like a bloody whore, dripping in white furs and pearls.'
Well, I wasn't wearing pearls and never had, so I knew then that it wasn't only me he was talking about, perhaps it wasn't me at all. I dare say it was why he was always so bitter with me ... but that didn't make it any easier looking at his hate and listening to his bitterness.
My Mam and our Rose looked terrified, and it came to me calm and clear that while I was there I was making everybody's life a misery, and it would only get worse. Aye, and my Mam were such a gentle, nice person ... I wish you could have met her. Anyroad, I just turned my back on him and went upstairs and changed into some everyday clothes. Then I took out every bit of my finery from the places where it was hidden and put everything in a big box, and put my bits and pieces of working things in a case.
I went back downstairs, they were all sitting like gravestones. My father didn't move. I had all my payment cards from Mrs Pickup, going right back, and Moxon's account payments, and I laid them out in front of him like a game of patience and on top I put all my overtime chitties. He didn't move an inch. Then I went.
He was sitting facing the yard window, so I knew he could see me. I put my box of lovely things on the stones, fetched the paraffin can and poured it over and set a match to it.
I used to see my sister at work, and my Mam would come to my lodgings when he was gone to the pit. Sometimes I would see him in the street, but he never looked at me even if we came face to face. Over the years he grew to look more and more bitter-looking, and I could have cried for him. Soon after I left, our Rose married and went away down South. He had twelve grandchildren and never spoke a word to one of them, and my Mam was an old woman at forty-five.
I thought about all this yesterday. Our lads, and their wives and most of the grandchildren, a great table full of us, having shrimp cocktails and bits of things on swords at that posh restaurant, but it weren't the place, it was us, still sticking together. I know everybody don't get on ... it'd be a queer family if they did, but I've always said blood's thicker than water. It's like being part of a long story, a saga, all the ups and downs, the young ones just starting, not knowing, and me being part of it.
And I thought about him and I thought what a fool he had been denying himself all that.
Anyway, I thought I would tell somebody. They've always been on at me to write things down, and I've always been meaning to and now you've bought me this smashing little tape-recorder for my birthday I'll be talking to you quite a lot.
THE MELON-SEED GIRL
THE MELON-SEED GIRL
I have often wondered how a beggar claims a lucrative stand. Is there some kind of agreement, franchise or concession on the begging patches outside the big stores in Johannesburg? The taking of these positions isn't casual, in fact the beggars appear to be organized and keep regular hours. They are always black. There are white beggars, called Poor Whites, but they are a furtive lot, some haunting hotel entrances with thin stories about having lost a wallet, or being mugged by the tsotsis, others waylaying travellers on isolated roads, blocking the way with clapped-out old vans. Latter-day highwaymen.
We lived for a time in Rosebank, which is in the modern, leafy suburbs, the shopping area is all jacaranda trees and fountains and modern sculpture. Not an area where one found Poor Whites — perhaps there were unwritten apartheid rules — anyway, for whatever reason, all the Rosebank beggars were black.
There were three main department stores, in two of which one was never served by anyone with an Afrikaans accent, but by a very superior English-type assistant modelled upon what was supposed to be pre-war Bond Street, but just missing it. The third store was cheap and cheerful, blatant and vulgarly intrusive on the rest of the tasteful scene. It announced itself in huge letters 'OK STORES'.
The patch at the front of the OK was worked by a legless beggar of about thirty-five. He was broad-shouldered and very handsome, with high cheekbones and good teeth. I never went into the OK but he was there, seated on a four-wheeled trolley like Porgy, with a few cronies playing dice and sharing cigarettes.
The patch at the back of the OK, by the carpark, was worked by a small girl. At a guess she was about eight years old. Thin, bony and always dressed in the same cheap cotton shift and woollen beret. Everyone who used the store received a grin from her as she held out an armful of necklaces. You can get these necklaces anywhere now, but then you had actually to go to Africa to buy the delicate, warm, brown melon-seeds made up into long strings of flower-motifs. I often wore them, they didn't last long because the thread holding the seeds together was cheap — built-in obsolescence.
For the first twenty years of my life, I had that kind of English working-class upbringing where you are taught to look upon tips and hand-outs as degrading, at the same time as learning to share and share alike. Consequently, I had no idea how to behave towards maimed beggars, or the old ones who stood in doorways holding out shrivelled hands and making frail noises. The English working-class philosophy didn't work here where there were large numbers of beggars.
Sometimes I filled my purse with coins and gave to all and sundry. Other times I went out of my way to avoid them. Whatever I did I always ended up feeling guilty. It wasn't quite the same with the melon-seed girl. Whenever I went to the OK she would grin and hold out her necklaces. I would smile and give her ten cents. She sold necklaces and I bought them. A straightforward deal. I had dozens of the things.
Living with us at the time was Sara, a Swazi. In the more usual order of South African society ours should have been a servant/mistress relationship, but she wasn't cut out to serve, nor I to be served. We were thrown together by the company who could arrange lifestyles at a distance of thousands of miles. The flat was serviced which meant that Sara and I had nothing to do all day except prepare an evening meal, so we spent hours and days talking about our families, about how different and how similar life was in our respective homelands.
She had been living in Johannesburg since she was about fourteen and was proud of the fact that no one could put one over on her so, although she was the younger, she took me in hand when she found out that I was a mere country-girl, and English at that. She taught me to watch for the butcher who weighed his fingers along with the steak, and which was a 'going-to-Portygee' and a 'not-going-to-Portygee' greengrocer, how to get to the library without running the gauntlet of the alcoholics, and other essential knowledge of city life.
The first few necklaces she let pass, indicating her disapproval only by a pursing of her lips, but then one day she thought things had gone far enough.
'You have been to the OK beggar.'
It wasn't a question, nor yet quite an accusation, more a statement of fact that needed to be discussed. I felt caught out and began to make excuses, which shows something of the kind of relationship we had.
'Well, I thought I would send them home to my mother.'
Sara and my mother were
on pretty good terms. They wrote to one another. I never found out what they wrote about, but I sometimes heard my mother's phrases in Sara's mouth: 'You should be more careful! ... Don't let them get away with that! ... Don't go out without shoes.'
She opened the discussion.
'These sort of rubbish is no good for The Mother.' The Mother was a kind of title Sara had given my mother. 'The Mother like nice thing.'
'They are nice.'
No accounting for taste! She didn't say it with words — just the eyes.
I should have shut up, but blundered on.
'Well, it's really that little girl at the OK. I can't pass her.'
'Why not?'
'She expects me to stop. She'd be disappointed.'
'So?'
'She's so little.'
Sara blew away my explanation.
'And she looks so thin.'
'Well, you buying these thing don't do her no good. She sells these rubbish just only for her father to buy his whisky.'
'How d'you know that?' I need not have asked. Sara knew!
'Everybody know!' she said. 'He always have sit at OK with the whisky in his cart.'
'Who? The one without the legs?'
'Yes, he.'
'Is he her father?'
'Of course. She sells beads to get his whisky.'
There was no more to be said. Sara was teetotal, whisky did the Devil's work. Everybody know!
Now it was out in the open — her disapproval of my melon-seed deals.
Sara was my best and only friend in that city, so from then on, not wanting to upset her, I was more discreet.
When winter comes to the South African veldt, it comes with bright sunshine, clear blue skies and bitter, bitter winds that feel as though they have been sucked up on the Russian steppes then expelled down the skyscraper canyons of Johannesburg. So, when the May winds started, I stopped my meandering round the Rosebank piazzas and went instead to the city centre.
