Veronica's Bird
Page 6
CHAPTER THREE
THE CHEAP OPTION
Cheap option – synonyms
Got it for a bargain; bought for a song; dime a dozen; marked down; bargain basement; cheapo.
During the holidays, I had gone to live with my sister Joan and her husband Fred Ward. My mother was constantly ill, tired out and unable to cope with the demands of my father and the family. Joan had taken charge and brought me and my youngest sister Susan to their house in Doncaster Road, No.85. Leaving my mother sick and stressed, was a wrench, but holidays were only short periods which meant I was soon back in school. It was in nineteen fifty-four I began to feel a nagging prickle in my neck, something I could not, at first, put my finger on. Life, surely, had to be better, separated from my father. I was in a nice house, with my youngest sister and nieces to share my bedroom in the attic.
Joan was often tense but I put that down to work pressures for their fruit and veg business had taken off and was thriving in fifties Britain. Her input was needed, or more accurately, demanded by her husband.
I began to be aware of a sense of being watched. This was not the same as being studied to see if your clothes were clean or your school books were ready to go. Instead, there was a vagueness in the feeling, certainly a foreboding as if there might be a return to the explosions of rage engulfing me and I would be back in my father’s world where he could be found over-turning a table as he detonated himself with fury.
This vagueness began to materialise. I would see Fred staring at me over the kitchen table. His questions became endless, inquisitive ones, prying into my private life at Ackworth. Why did he want to know what I wore? Why did he query who I mixed with? What boyfriends did I have? What were their names? And always ended with, ‘…did they have a lot of money?’ Much of what he said had a sexual connotation with the classic idiotic phrase: ‘he fancies you,’ spoken with a leer, which Joan attempted to push aside with a wave of her hand as if it had never been said.
Any feeling of unease is hard to describe with certainty. I could not define it, let alone interpret what was behind his words. To try to explain how Fred felt about life in general, it might be an idea, to give you one example.
Fred had learned he had a wealthy married cousin who lived in Maidenhead, a long way from Barnsley, one hundred and eighty-two miles in fact. He took it upon himself one day to take the family and me to visit his relation, no doubt to see if anything might rub off on him. We piled into his shooting brake, I think today we would call it an estate car, and began the long drive from Barnsley to Berkshire on the Thames, eventually stopping off for lunch.
‘What’s the address? Queried Joan while we ate.
‘Not sure. It’s down by the river. The Thames. Big house, I expect.’
‘Do you mean to say we have come all this way, driven almost two hundred miles with no idea where we are ending up?’
Fred looked dangerous. He knew he had made a mistake in not finding out the address before we left. ‘We’ll find it,’ he replied through gritted teeth. ‘It’s a very big house. Can’t be too many of those.’
Joan shook her head in despair at his ignorance. Maidenhead was not Barnsley, not by a long chalk. I stared out of the window at the lush Berkshire countryside with its neat houses and clean streets. It was a world away from Doncaster Road with its sooty slate.
I had no idea why we were there nor what Fred intended to do if we ever found his cousin’s house. He had been unable to tell them he was coming as he had no address to write to them, nor a telephone number for the same reason. It seemed daft to me and a total waste of time, and petrol.
We drove through the streets of Maidenhead looking for large houses of which there were many until we came to a very nice area overlooking the Thames. I could imagine parents of some of my friends at school living here.
‘There! There it is! It must be,’ hooted Fred swerving dangerously in his excitement. There was indeed, a very large house in a leafy glade. It looked right if nothing else.
‘How do you know? You can’t be sure. There are dozens of big houses here.’
‘Not as big as this one though,’ he retorted, ‘and it is right by the river.’ He was now convinced he had made the right decision. ‘Come on, all out.’
Fred marched confidently to the front door, manicured lawns lapping the drive as if it was a calm green sea, and rang the bell. He turned around and smiled at us as if to acknowledge how clever he was. And, with such a big house, surely something good would rub off. ‘I can just smell the money.’
The door opened by a woman who was clearly a housekeeper for she wore a spotlessly white apron.
‘Ah, good afternoon. My name is Fred er, Frederick Ward.’ He began to explain who he was and the connection with his cousin. He was just passing (from Barnsley!) and felt it was right to pop in and say hullo.
‘I’m so sorry Mr. Ward but your cousin is away with her husband at present in France.’
Faces fell, for differing reasons. ‘But,’ the woman continued, ‘I am sure they would want me to invite you in. At least I can get you a cup of tea and I have been baking this afternoon so I have a home-made cake. Perhaps a slice of lemon and walnut?’
We needed no bidding, now we knew Fred had been right all along in finding the house.
Inside, the rooms were quite beautiful. It quietened Fred and Joan as we walked through the hall on Indian rugs. Fred winked crudely at us. We were led into a withdrawing room. You could not describe it as a lounge.
‘I won’t be a moment. I have the kettle on anyway.’ Our unnamed house-keeper disappeared towards, I assumed, a kitchen bigger than our house, as we sat in whispered conversation, matins in church before the vicar arrives, studying pictures and a grandfather clock. The room smelled of leather and oiled oak and the clock tocked with accustomed and metronomic regularity. Alongside the garages was a boat cradle but no boat.
The tea arrived in a silver tea-pot and matching hot water jug, as one might well expect in such a well-heeled mansion. The smell of the newly baked cake tickled anxious noses after our bowl of chips in the town. The slices looked large enough even for Joan.
It was during this delicious tea I saw Fred’s eyebrows go up in his face settling into a grimace. He was quite clearly stressed. Eventually, he gesticulated to Joan, then back to some silver framed photographs on a side table. The house-keeper had just pointed out a recent photo taken of his cousin at some resort or other.
Fred rose. ‘We mustn’t keep you any longer. You must be a very busy person,’ he said, surprising us all. He had a dozen questions yet to ask so it was most unlike him to leave before he had started. He signalled with his hand for us to get up, his fingers flapping up and down in his palm with some urgency. We all said goodbye and walked swiftly down the drive to our car. Meanwhile, a mystified house-keeper waved us off wishing us a safe journey northward.
‘What was that all about? I wanted another piece of that cake?’ demanded an equally mystified Joan.
‘Jesus. That was the wrong house. That was not my cousin by any stretch of the imagination.’ Fred chuckled, away his embarrassment. ‘They can’t help us.’ We drove on wondering what the owners of the house would say when given the news their cousin had turned up with his family for tea.
It was this need to pry and Fred’s complete disregard for the niceties of life which began to breed in my mind. I began to see a very different side to my brother-in-law. There was a creepiness about him as if he had to know everything about a person, what his or her weaknesses were and how he could exploit them. He stuck his nose in everywhere he went, even turning up at their doors only to find no-one in. He would then walk round to the back of the house and peer in through the windows pressing his nose against a pane of glass the better to see if anyone was still there, or hiding. Sometimes they were, bending down below the windows so they could not be seen, for it meant inviting him in for a drink and a long tirade on life if they did.
The weirdness of his actions
continued. His cellar at his house was always filled with whole stalks of bananas ripening, ready for the market. He would come down the steps leering at me to see what I had achieved, for it was my job to cut the hands out forming the familiar bunches. Then I had to pack them into twenty-eight-pound cases and lug them up the stairs. His eyes would follow me all the way.
To get away from the deprivation of our own house, was, you would think, a blessing, but it was very soon to turn into a nightmare. It became difficult to separate the cruelty of my father from the eeriness of Fred’s ways. Both were horrid, though many people simply did not understand why I was so diffident when asked, ‘Aren’t you lucky.’
For starters, there were the three holidays we had in Blackpool. Fantastic you might think to yourself. Isn’t she lucky (again). Three times I went to Blackpool, each time staying in a seedy hotel currently ranked eight hundred and seventy- seventh out of nine hundred and fourteen hotels in the town. Before this, Fred and Joan had stayed at the Redman’s Park House which has certainly improved since those twostar days, but, after the first few years of their marriage Joan left Fred behind and took a woman friend instead. It became apparent as to why I was brought along for it was here I became useful. Joan could go on holiday with a friend provided always she took her three daughters with her, and this conflicted with her desire to dance. She would dance every night until the dance floor closed at eleven. I was a most useful baby-sitter. Joan’s obsession with dancing meant that the day Jack, my epileptic brother died, I had to remain alone with the girls in the hotel while she returned to Barnsley to attend the funeral of her eldest brother who was only twenty-three years old. It meant I could not go to see my brother off. I wasn’t even asked if I wanted to go and have no clear picture of the service and how the family reacted to his death. Joan returned that night and off she went again as the waters closed over the sad affair and life returned to normal.
She would always choose the first or second week in September, before Ackworth went back for the winter term. Her friend Betty would always accompany her and the two of them would dance the evening away. Because I was left alone so often in the hotel, the owners, along with some parents who were attending their children’s National Swimming Championships clubbed together for my last night and took me to the Pleasure Beach. To my tearful thanks, they also gave me some money to take home.
Fred’s prying nature led him to drive over one year to call unannounced at the hotel. I do not believe it was because he was suspicious of his wife, he just needed to know everything which went on in his tiny world. Finding his wife not at the hotel, he went on to the dance. It was a wasted journey. Joan was a faithful wife needing only to get away from the stifling atmosphere created in the home. I was not party to the conversation when they met at the Tower Ballroom but it was probably phrased in words of one syllable. This obsession extended itself. It was as if he needed to know the exact whereabouts and the precise words spoken by his entire family whatever the time of day. It was his paranoia which led him to suspend a microphone over the house telephone so he could listen in to conversations made by whoever answered the call.
So, the end of school term saw me travel back to Joan’s house, fuller in face, very fit and dressed in clean clothes. When I went to school I weighed 4stone 4pounds when the average girl at the time was 7 stone 4 pounds. My accent, also, had removed itself to the far corner of the room, replaced, not with posh, but with smoother vowels and less accented phrases. Nonetheless, the original could be resurrected at will if I wanted to tell a funny story in fluent Barnsley.
Being away from Mam so much, I realised she would also have liked to listen to my funny stories and explain to her what I was doing at school. She would have wanted to have listened for it would have driven away the demons in her life for a few minutes and made her understand that her daughter was going to make it in life. It would have brought a smile to her face. The hardest part of this small story is that she never had the opportunity.
I had been lucky that Christmas holiday. Against their better judgement, Fred and Joan, maybe through embarrassment if they had refused, had agreed for me to spend three days with a good school friend at their house in Harrogate to see in the New Year. I took a bus from Barnsley, excited at the idea of being away from the town, with a good friend to chat to about things we wanted to discuss, without Joan or Fred chipping in.
I was picked up in Leeds by the Broomheads, my friend’s parents, and we drove back to Harrogate to what I was told were fifty-three rooms in their house. On arrival came my first embarrassment; it showed up the huge gulf between our two families. I did not have the clothes with me to enable me to dress for dinner, and by that, I mean dress. It was New Year’s Eve and everyone dressed for dinner. Tactfully, carefully, Prudence, my school mate, suggested I wear something of hers and I came down to dinner in a dress I could only dream about. Her father was a successful surgeon and owned three cars including a Daimler which was positioned on the forecourt declaiming to the world that right here, was a success story. ‘I’ve done well.’ The beautiful house included a library of books: in Doncaster Road, we had never had a book in the house. The point did not go unmissed by me. For the girl who had never owned a book in her life came a clear message: ‘you could do better.’
We had a marvellous time, with the whole family being so kind I could have wept, that others could be so caring. Prudence was removed from Ackworth a little while later and sent to Cheltenham Ladies College. I often wonder if it was because I, a coal miner’s daughter, was forming too strong a friendship. Perhaps that is totally unfair but whatever the reason I have been trying to contact her ever since to thank her. I haven’t found her yet but I am still trying. And maybe, there had always been a plan to send her to Cheltenham. I do not want her parents to think I was ungrateful for that wonderful weekend.
It was the day after New Year’s Day when I left. I was collected by Fred in a grim mood who said: ‘There’s been trouble at your Dad’s house. It caught fire over the holiday. There’s a terrible mess.’
I sat, unsure how to reply. I was no longer living with my Mam and Dad but how was my mother? Was she alright? When I saw the house, it was ruined with smoke and water. It stank of charred timber. The floor was covered in broken glass and filth; water was everywhere. Mam merely stared into the distance, all hope gone.
‘Cigarette,’ she said. ‘A cigarette down the side of a chair.’ Her ravaged face told its own story of a party gone wrong, beer having got in the way of sense. The dog, a Peke had been killed by the smoke.
I was driven off by Fred back to their house and the next day thrown into non-stop chores, rising in the middle of the night to climb onto Fred’s lorry to drive to the market where he had an open veg. stall in Barnsley. Sacks of any vegetables are heavy, let alone potatoes, which all had to be carried to the stall by hand before being manhandled up into place. There were no fork lift trucks in those days. This would be followed with the need to tackle the washing of the three children’s clothes, the ironing and the cleaning; sort of Cinderella syndrome without the glass slipper, the ball, the coach or the waiting Prince. At the end of the day I had to stay in, baby-sitting, to allow Joan and Fred out on the town. It was lucky that I only had another week before I went back to school. Dad’s house was repaired eventually but whether there was any insurance to pay for it all I have no idea. I don’t think house insurance would be too high up Dad’s budget.
*
One week back at Ackworth, settling in again to the tranquil routine of the school I was called to the Headmistress’s study, an occasion which always drummed up nerves, never quite knowing the reason for the summons. The door closed quietly behind me and I was told to sit down, again in a quiet voice.
‘I’m so sorry to tell you Veronica, that your mother has had a stroke-’
‘Is she-?’
‘Yes, she is still alive but she is very ill. She’s…. paralysed.’
‘Can I go and see her?’
It had to be the fire, the loss of the few, yet precious possessions she owned, the continuing break-up of the family. There was not a single light at the end of the tunnel for her. Poor Mam. And now, paralysed? What did that mean?
It was February. The days were becoming a bit lighter when I was told to be down in the Hall in half an hour. Fred arrived to take me to see my Mother. At the time, I did not understand she was slipping quietly away from us and this would be my last chance to see her. I had been told, and had believed, that for the want of an ashtray this might never have happened. Years later, I found out the real reason behind the fire. It was nothing like the story I had been given.
The fire had started at three thirty in the morning well after the revellers had gone to bed. Mam had nudged Gordon at half past three in the morning, waking him as usual to go to the early shift. As she did, she said, ‘I smell smoke.’ Gordon could not smell anything but had to get up anyway, so he went downstairs in his string vest for none of us had any money for pyjamas. As he arrived at the bottom of the stairs he could see a chair on fire which was spreading up to a wooden cupboard over the kitchen sink. The room was full of choking smoke and the dog, a Peke and the budgerigar were already dead.
Gordon smashed the kitchen window and shouted upstairs for the boys to pour water on their floorboards for the fire was immediately below their bed. Meanwhile he threw water on the chair. There was no point in ringing for the fire brigade. We had no telephone ourselves and the nearest telephone box was several hundred yards up the road. Gordon would have had to get dressed first and as he ran up the street the house would have collapsed into a pile of ashes before the arrival of the fire tender.