Veronica's Bird

by Veronica Bird

  From this new house and workplace combined, I could look across the street gazing at my Sunday place of refuge while on the town side was the sweet shop, but as near as it might be, it was as far away as if on the other side of the Channel.

  The smartly dressed cobbler and his sons were now our immediate neighbours, always a bell-weather to us, demonstrating how one could live with a little care. I deliberate often on those days and wonder what they thought as the bellowing roars of rage from next door transferred through flimsy party walls, followed by the crashing of pots and pans. It was never a contest between us; they lived a life of cleanliness and tidiness, we wallowed in a black pit of grubbiness.

  A little further east along this road, more of a hop and a skip in the direction of Goldthorpe, was Doncaster Road Primary School. I attended this from the age of three, a wartime habit where I remained after VE day. Our class was by no means out of the ordinary to begin learning to read and write at such an age. It meant, we children, were kept out of the feet of busy mothers who had been employed to lend a hand towards the production of war materials. I assumed it had to be a Government plan, needing an up and coming stock of relatively intelligent children to fill the empty places created by the ruthless protraction of the war.

  I remained there until nineteen fifty-four when I was eleven. With so many other children with parents from poor backgrounds, I merged effortlessly into the rows of wooden desks, taught for two years by a severely reduced number of teachers. Most had gone off to war, many had been killed, some had taken up the opportunity offered to go on to University; it left us with much older men and women to take their places often with the last vestiges of Empire and its old-fashioned ideas to pass on to us. When it came time to revise for Boarding School, I found myself struggling to swot up on some high-powered test papers which did not relate, in the slightest, to our teaching in Doncaster Road.

  Down the street would come the babble of excited football supporters on Saturday afternoons. Flat-capped men flooded the street with a boozy, belching bonhomie on the way in, and, depending upon the result of the game, crept grumpily off to the pubs or cheered as they balanced precariously on the edge of the pavement, to everyone they met, as they queued for fish and chips if the Tykes had won. Today, our prim, spotless houses, each with two television sets and strong locks on the houses show how far removed that world has moved from a time when our doors had been left open. There had been a familiarity, almost tactile in its warmth, lost for ever with the disappearance of the mining communities.

  There was one exception to the drudge of our lives in those days, a one-off event each year meant to be an exciting day out for us all. It was simply the biggest occasion in our skimpy calendar. The Miners Welfare Club in Carlton would arrange for about sixteen coaches of families to go to Southport for the day. That year, we were separated in the convoy, with Mam and Alwyn together in one and me and the others in another. As luck turns on a spin of the top, her coach was in collision with a lorry before she had reached the half-way mark. Mam and Alwyn were sitting up front where they had found a good seat with a front view. They were hit by flying glass. Her dream day out was stopped before it started and they ended up in hospital having their facial cuts seen to. The cash compensation from the Coach Company was hardly what was wanted. It was so hard; it was the only day of the year Mother could enjoy herself, fully away from the house, the job and the anger, enjoying her children’s excitement. It had begun in happiness, with our sandwiches clutched tightly in our hands, a smile on everyone’s face. It ended in a short terror, a swirl of antiseptic, and a ration of pain.

  We had moved, not because we needed more room, not because it was better, but because of the shop attached to the front; like my grandmother in Carlton we were to be a fish and chip shop business. The shop window faced out onto a stone-flag courtyard where the beginning of the Saturday queues would form. Today it is a women’s hair-dressing salon with greater aspirations than our fish shop could ever be. Otherwise, we were just as cramped as before, with father and mother in one bedroom, all the boys in another and the girls in the third room. At the back of the shop was a staircase down to the kitchen with a blackened range sitting on a stone flagged floor. Potato peeling went on in a work- shed out in the dirty yard and further, but not that far away, stood a shared privy. It is still there although it now rebuilt as a much smarter brick built store. (think health and safety). There were no floor coverings in the bedrooms, so we remained permanently chilled in the winter. The only heat came from the fire with its miserable slack and even that struggled to combat the ice-cold damp which came up from the cellar into our feet.

  The fish and chip shop was entirely my mother’s domain. Dressed in her headscarf knotted up on her head she became well-known in the local community. Father never lifted a hand to help though it was contributing successfully to the family income. She was seen each day in her white jacket, and a blue butcher’s apron, always easy-going to her customers. The only time Mam allowed herself to take a break was on a Thursday afternoon, for two hours, when she crossed over to the other side of the road to the church to play Whist.

  With this house came more single-minded meanness. There was a tin bath in the kitchen to remove the daily grime of coal dust from my father’s body. Thinking he was doing himself a good deal, he got hold of a proper bath and had it installed in the tiny kitchen forgetting how big the bath was. He was forced to build a wooden shelf to fit on top of the rim which enabled us to sit when we ate. To say, ate, belies the idea of a normal meal with the family grouped around a table. Father owned the only mug and eating utensils which he kept to himself and washed them up before putting them away. So, although we found enough room to sit, we had to pick our food with our fingers and wipe any grease on our clothes. I should add, that although Dad had a new bath, the water still had to be heated in buckets – there was no other source of hot water.

  The introduction of the Fish and Chip shop, a useful and valuable facility in an area such as Doncaster Road, brought additional work upon us all. In the yard, we had a rumbler, a potato peeler, which was kept in the shed. As soon as the potatoes had been reasonably stripped of their skins we had to finish them off by removing the eyes before placing them in very heavy pans. If the rumbler broke down we had to do all the peeling ourselves often in freezing conditions. Peeled, we lifted them up the flight of back stairs and entered the shop where they were chipped. Producing raw chips ready to be fried, in winter was generally loathed for in those preglobal warming days, it led to chilblains and reddened hands. There was no heating in the shed and the pressure was always there on a Saturday, especially when football was being played behind the house. The queue before and after the match for Fish and Chips would snake into the distance, causing a constant cry of ‘…. more spuds.’

  We approached the back yard through a lived-over arch, separating the Sweet shop and our house, reached by a steep ramp which led into Snowdrop Terrace where we would play around the lamp posts in front of a row of terrace houses until late at night in the summer months. In fact, it made little difference in the winter as we could kick a ball under the street lights. There was a sort of grass square laid out many years ago by an enlightened town planner who had never, and would never live himself in such a poor area of the town, and I cannot remember it ever being cut. Lank grass mixed with dandelions and pieces of greasy chip paper, usually a page from The Mirror as it was known then. One house on the green, singled itself out for us as a family, for a young girl had committed suicide there, with an overdose of pills. With other suicides, this time within the family, I became aware at an early age, of the stresses which can cause someone to take their life; that knowledge would never serve me better than when I began to work in the Prison Service.

  Snowdrop Terrace has gone, swept away by the urgent need for more car-parking. The lank grass has been replaced by tarmac – it leaves just memories of an age long past. When I visited it the other day, the ghosts of my childh
ood sat at the side, and gazed on willing me, perhaps, to shed a tear but there were no happy memories to cry about and I was glad to leave and move on in my life.

  You would have thought we could at least, have enjoyed a plate of fried cod and chips well-dusted with salt and liberally doused in vinegar, after the long hard work, but all we got were the left-over batter pieces lying abandoned and congealing in the draining tray. It would be rare for us to have been given fish and chips ourselves. I suppose I should be grateful to have grown until I achieved five feet five inches tall – any shorter and I might not have made the Prison Service height requirements.

  My father’s pub, so to speak, the Dove Inn, closed the loop which made up this part of Doncaster Road, marked out by the sweet shop, the cobbler and the church and was our world within the town. The stone built pub is still there, a convenient rendezvous in his day for Father and his brothers after work. We would hear his heavy nailed boots clattering down to the back yard to visit the privy next door to the fish shop, covered in coal dust and sweat, needing a beer but having to wash first. We would wait for his entry into the kitchen, judging the mood of whether he had had a hard day or not. Heads down, we would eat our supper of bread sometimes with dripping or, if very lucky, jam on bread, though never with margarine and not a hope of butter. We would eat in silence. When father returned from the Dove we studied him again through hooded eyes to see if he had had too much to drink. If so, he was known to summon me along with Alwyn and forced to have a bath in Izal disinfectant or drink Epson Salts as a variant. When asked the first and only time why he did this, the reply came ‘….to clean your insides out.’

  Here, amongst the Barnsley community, violence was not uncommon, but Welfare was never called in, and if any one of us had made that decision, the repercussions falling on our heads if we had said something would have been too awful to contemplate. Besides, in those days, the authorities would never have believed a child.

  His cruelty continued. I had been given, along with Alwyn, a most precious and longed for, bar of Fry’s Peppermint cream, the one in the characteristic green wrapper. This was a one-off, a present from a relative, to be enjoyed slowly, perhaps kept for three days as we devoured every morsel with delight, retaining the last piece as if it was the key to Pandora’s box.

  My father, enraged that I could enjoy myself in such a way, snatched it from my hand and quickly scooped out the peppermint cream centre with clumsy hands. Then, he filled the hole with mustard and made Alwyn and I eat the mess until we were sick. My mother was helpless to object in such circumstances. She was exhausted, suffering from pernicious anaemia which was beginning to wear her down. The result was, she did not have the strength to protect us anymore.

  The threats to send me away to a Children’s home did not go away. To keep out of my father’s mind and especially the length of his arm, I maintained my Sunday attendances over the road. Other families, I knew, would go on picnics in the summer and walks in the autumn along the river banks, or as a treat, go to the ‘flicks.’ Not once did our family spend the day together, and I do not remember seeing the whole family as a group at one time. The words ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘totally’ were real in our family, and often come to mind these days as I pull out memories for this book; then, I could only look across the street at other families coming home from a day-out and wonder why we did not do the same from time to time.

  Those cruel times (I use the word advisedly), allowed me to brood on the idea that my father was, as he was, because of the accident he had had in the mine. He had sustained the massive blow to his head from rocks caught up in the fall. What might have happened as the surgeon poked around in my father’s brain? He must have pulled out fragments of rock and coal as he sought to clean up the damage to his head but maybe he pulled out something vital at the same time? Perhaps it was that event which brought on his mood swings, his drunkenness and the sheer bloody-minded cruelty? But, when I asked one of my older sisters, did she remember such violence when she was young, her reply was that Dad had always been the same: antagonistic, difficult, a self-serving man. She said the focus was on me and Alwyn at the time simply because we were the youngest.

  Whatever the cause, it frayed at my mother’s reason and health, leading to need regular injections to counter the debilitating effects of her anaemia. I began to listen to the neighbours who seemed to know something about the disease which was difficult to spell, and to pronounce, yet showed its effects in such a frightening way. I had heard from an aunt it was called the ‘Sighs,’ a mystery word until I heard my Mam, one day sighing as she attempted to draw breath, which characterised the illness. Others, equally strangely, referred to it as ‘The Fogs’. Mam would agree with that, describing it as if she was in a thick fog which caused a mental fatigue and general apathy to spread through her. It was this last development which alarmed me the most for it was at such times I could feel her slipping away from me. In addition to this problem I learned she had contracted Lyme’s disease possibly caught from a tick. This often led to depression and fatigue both of which now exacerbated the anaemia. She began to age before my eyes. She became a leaf curling and fading in autumn. I was in a panic that she might leave me altogether, removing the last shield against my father’s anger.

  To alleviate my worries, I would go and see her in Barnsley hospital where, at one time, she was being treated for the anaemia. After I had said goodbye, I stood looking up at what I though was her window, and she must have been looking out for me. She suddenly pulled aside the curtain and looked down. She waved, a small but defiant wave towards the gate as if to say, ‘…. I’m alright, go home’.

  As she began to detach herself from her strength, I reached the age of ten. It was the last year of Primary School and my last Sports Day, a fairly major event in my calendar for, despite not having a good diet, there was a strength in my legs which allowed me to run that much faster than my friends. I began to appreciate I could move quite swiftly when pressed and gave me an ability, at last, to be better than others in my year if only, out of class. This year was to be different; or rather, the Sports Day was proceeding as the school intended and would start on time. It was only I who had a problem. I had no shoes or knickers, both of which I needed to participate. In anguish, I pleaded with my mother to pin together a pair of her adult size knickers around my waist but I still had no shoes. There were none under the bed nor lying on the stairs, so, in the end I had to miss the big event where I could have shown what Veronica Bird was made of.

  It was the one place I could have shone for my family, where, maybe, Dad might have smiled at me if not offering his congratulations. A nod of his head, ever so slight maybe, to recognise my prowess. But, no shoes meant, no running. Owning clothes in our house was shambolic, utter chaos reigning everywhere, with no-one knowing whose clothes belonged to whom and, like musical chairs you had to be very ready when the music stopped. This was just such a day. My brothers and sisters had all slipped out of the house for one reason or another, each with a pair of shoes, not to return until later in the day. By then, it was too late. The cheering parents had gone home, the finishing tape rolled up in the sports teacher’s drawer ready for the next year, the Headmaster pleased with attendance…overall.

  This disappointment came in 1953, the year of the Coronation with all the exciting and memorable moments it conjured up for most people in this country. For me it would be more of the same; I was in a pit, not of coal but of hopelessness, a bleak and impossible future ahead of me as I waited for the next fearful event, and I could see no way I could dig my way out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A WORLD AWAY

  A few years earlier I had been lucky to visit a doctor’s house in Mexborough. I expect it was because I delivered a box of fruit at some time for there was no other reason I could have been in the house. Vast rooms with tall ceilings, led on to others, hung with beautiful curtains, carpets to sink into and a pervading warmth. I walked around, spinning as if I was a t
op, arms spread wide to take it all in. The incident had almost been forgotten when I noticed a girl one day, well dressed, in a school uniform. She was even walking nicely. As she passed me I heard her talking to her mother. It was what we would call a ‘posh’ accent, but that did not make it an unpleasant sound. It was certainly different, strange, alien even, to my own simple selection of Barnsleyaccented words. In many ways, she was a world away from my own life yet I could have touched her as she overtook us.

  ‘That’s the Ackworth School uniform,’ replied my mother in response to my questioning. ‘If you wanted to, you could go there but you would have to take an exam, and then there would have to be an interview.’

  How she knew all this I don’t know. Such far removed comforts were not of normal interest in our family, nor, to be fair, in many families in Doncaster Road. We just didn’t associate with people who sent their children to such a nice school. Mam explained what an interview was. I was nine years old and unsophisticated. ‘’Do you have to speak like that girl….at the interview I mean?’

  Mother hesitated for just a moment. ‘I don’t think they would turn you away because you didn’t have a posh accent. You see, these sorts of schools are looking for the brightest children in the country; ones who could go on to University…. even girls, so your accent is not what is important, it is what you can achieve.’

  Mam saw the deepening interest in my eyes. She made a small grimace putting a dampener on my newly-forming ideas.