Chapter 2
First Ade
The shop gave me something I had wanted all the years of my life and had never had: a best friend. In my youth every one of my sisters had had one bosom companion with whom she spent most of her time and exchanged confidences. Our family album was full of snaps of them. Marjorie and Nelson (no, not the Admiral, some girls had unusual nicknames in those days) on the battlements at Hastings. Amy and her friend Edie with two boys at Brighton, boys from another part of the country, boys Mother would definitely not see and would definitely not approve of if she did.
I listened to the stories of my sister Agnes’s friend Alice’s lovely family, who also lived at Poplar. Agnes seemed to spend her time there ‘laughing fit to kill’. One day Alice’s father came home to inform the family, very sadly, that a mate at work had cut his throat. The father was terribly upset at the death of his mate. ‘Fred’s cut his throat,’ he said desperately to his wife. She, busy in the kitchen preparing the meal, said casually, ‘Has he cut it much?’ as one would say, ‘Is it raining?’ In a spurt of fury at what he thought was a wife’s callousness he yelled, ‘He’s only cut his bloody head off!’
These best friends all had confidences to impart; I always felt out in the cold. But as Mother always said, ‘It’ll happen when you least expect it.’ I certainly wasn’t expecting to make a woman friend at my time of life and in my present circumstances. I had a husband, two children and a sixteen-hour-plus working day; I would have said I had no thinking time, let alone friendship time. But there it was and, positions reversed, it was the same for my friend. Ade was a working mum with a husband and three sons. Her real name was Adeline. She used to say she was born while her father was on a ‘beano’ from his factory. Beanos for the working men were extremely jolly, if beery, times, for the charabancs were loaded with crates of the men’s favourite tipple. They seemed to alternate their time between visiting public houses and lavatories on the way to and from their destination, which seemed to be the least important aspect of the trip. The rest of the time they spent singing all the old and favourite songs of the music-hall days. Ade said her father, so she was told, rolled home singing ‘Sweet Adeline’, hence her name.
She was about twelve years older than I was, a plumpish, rosy-cheeked Cockney gal with bright, reddish hair, smartly dressed in what my sister Amy would say was ‘a common style’. In fact Amy despaired of me and the company I kept. I suppose, chameleon-like, I merged with my environment. Indeed, Amy reported to me that a friend of hers, meeting my family and me after a number of years, was surprised to hear how common were the tones of our voices, but of course Amy and family were now natives of suburbia. I didn’t think she was any different and I didn’t think I was and so I was a little hurt to be designated ‘common, with a common friend’. My father said, ‘Common? What’s common, Dolly? Don’t worry, gel, that means there’s a lot of us about.’
Ade definitely did not think me common; to her I was on the ‘posh’ side, but ‘luvly’ with it. She was good for my ego even though I laughed at her compliments. She thought I was very clever to know so many words but I think she thought me a bit of an innocent. For my part I did not think her vulger in her amusing remarks. She was just honest in thought, word and deed.
I didn’t delve into my friend’s private life, although she would have told me all if she felt I wanted to know. She had a deep, sergeant-major’s voice and an extremely quick wit. She was generous to a fault and I often wondered if that was the reason for the husband she possessed. If I’d never got to know Ade I would have thought it one of life’s mysteries. I don’t suppose anyone else thought about her domestic set-up, for, although she was politely on good terms with her neighbours, she was not Ade to them, but Mrs —, a double-barrelled name, an unusual name, difficult for us commoners to pronounce correctly, a trap for the lower classes, just as such names as St John, Farquharson and Majoribanks are. Ade herself would have pronounced her surname incorrectly if she hadn’t been married to it. We were once looking at a catalogue of plants and shrubs when she decided she’d have a Cotton Easter for her garden and was amused, and proud of me, when I said it was known as a co-to-ne-aster. Naturally, big-headed Dolly pronounced Ade’s married name correctly the first time.
Her husband also possessed an unusual Christian name, although Ade called him Ben, sometimes Ben Hur to me, adding, ‘He’s no bleeding charioteer, Dolly. He never singed anyone’s ground on two wheels.’ Ade and her family were newcomers to the district, as we were, yet it was obvious she must have met Ben in another walk of life than her own. She told me she started her working life in domestic service and I was sure that was where she had met Ben, although I knew he had no visiting relatives and there were no uncles, aunts or cousins to Ade’s three boys. Ben was a small, mousey-looking man with a lovely voice, a quiet, cultured voice which, in my opinion, should have belonged to a professional man. Yet he had a menial job in a warehouse, a job where he was lost to the world somehow and swallowed up by the people who worked there. He was a nonentity. They were indeed an odd couple to be man and wife. He was more like an older brother to Ade, an older brother whom Ade had promised her mother on her death bed she would ‘look after’.
Ade marshalled her Ben in her sergeant-major’s voice and, as Ade was at work, he helped with the domestic chores. She’d say, ‘Come on, Ben [or boy, or Benny lad], let’s be ’aving you, feller,’ when she thought he was a bit slow in starting a job which needed doing. Yet I knew that without Ade as a splint Ben would have dissolved like the snowflakes children bring into the house to show their mothers.
Probably it was the one-hundred-per-cent-plus maternal feelings within Ade which kept her married to Ben. The boys, too, were protective of Ben and I felt that, having met and married Ade, he had come into safe harbour. His life may have been strange compared with the lives of other working married men, but he was content. He adored his Ade and loved the three boys. The oldest boy was also ‘different’ from the other working-class lads and, although he had an exceptionally good brain, one knew that he too was going to need Ade’s support in life, for he was abnormally absent-minded and impractical. Whereas Ben could live his life content under Ade’s strong wings, she worried ceaselessly about Johnny, her oldest boy, feeling guilty that she had given birth to him. I often wondered at the time whether someone else was Johnny’s father; perhaps someone Ade had met on holiday. She would say to me, ‘Sex, Dolly? Sex is not always true love, you know, I think it’s like bread and jam, sometimes it’s bread, butter and jam, a change from permanent bread and marge.’
Ben probably knew of what I suspected were Ade’s past ‘preserve pleasures’ but to him they were probably her entitlement, since he could not supply this necessary force in her life. He had his special place in her world and loved her for that. The youngest boys were twins and were self-sufficient and capable. They had been apprenticed as engineers and were now fully fledged and working, anxious that their mum should give up work; but Ade worked relentlessly on. The house she and Ben were buying was a lovely, solid place with a beautiful garden. It took a great proportion of their money but it was to be a nest-egg for Johnny, her oldest, although only Ben knew this.
Ade had worked at a rope factory at one time and the tales she told of the girls there made my hair stand on end. She thought me quite an innocent and could hardly believe that I came from her background and had been to the same type of school as she had. She loved me to be horrified, really, although I usually ended up by giggling. She had not fallen for the current craze at the rope factory, tattooing, and was always glad for the sake of her boys that she had not been a ‘silly young thing’, at least in that respect. She would tell me how frightened the men in the factory were of the girls working there. In those days man was master in his own home but the rope factory girls were a different breed from the church girls I mixed with; here was I, married with a family, yet I never knew such Amazons existed.
Ade would say that when a man
, not used to factory life, entered the shed full of women, the unsuspecting creature was set upon, debagged in the centre of the floor, and his nether portions were painted with blue paint. I said to Ade, in horrified tones, ‘How on earth would the poor chap get it off?’ ‘That was his worry,’ said Ade. ‘In any case he’d soon “wear it off”.’ She was amused when I enquired whether a newly painted man might not complain to the management. Those Amazons must have been a force to contend with but, like crossing the Equator the first time, at the rope factory a man was initiated only the once.
Ade was now a machinist in a sweat shop where she earned good money, for she was a power machine operator and did specialised work. She became a regular customer of ours quite by accident. Chas, the perfectionist, was always criticising me either for something I had neglected to do in the shop or for something I had done in a dilatory or careless manner. Ade got her weekly shopping at another corner shop, near her work, but one Friday evening she realised she had forgotten an important item and popped in to us in passing. We were busy and I suppose Chas was nagging me about something or other. His nagging and my replies kept our customers permanently amused, they loved every minute of it. Ade stood waiting for the item she had forgotten, all the time secretly annoyed by Chas’s treatment of me; for Ade, the mother, was always on the side of the helpless and unprotected, which she always assumed I was.
Our shop knives, long and as sharp as the Samurai-sword bacon slicer, were always kept near the weighing machine in order of size; safe in this niche, no child could take them down unawares. The trouble was that, when we were extra busy, I had the habit of putting them down anywhere, just as I did with my pens and pencils. This sort of thing infuriated Chas. While Ade was patiently waiting on this busy evening, on her first visit to our shop, a dreadful thing happened. I had put my knife back with its fellows but the wrong side round and in the wrong order and Chas, rushing past the scale to another part of the counter was suddenly trapped with his back against a shelf and a long, sharp knife poised menacingly over his chest. ‘Dorothy!’ he yelled in terrible tones, his eyes popping out and an expression of acute terror on his face. I rushed out from the back room to see him standing there with the razor-like blade touching his white overall in the heart position, while the handle of the knife had got tightly wedged beneath the scale. I had created a perfect murder weapon!
The customers fell silent at Chas’s tragic cry, then suddenly came Ade’s strong and sceptical voice. ‘You wouldn’t bleed’ – her accusing shout to Chas. Chas, Dolly and the customers were convulsed with laughter.
So as the months wore on Mrs became Ade to us, I became Dolly to her, Chas was ‘Charlie boy’, Susan, our daughter, was ‘Sue-gel’ and William, our seven-year-old son, ‘young Bill’.
She was my friend.
Chapter 3
High Life
‘Would you like to go out one evening each week?’ Chas thought I was bored, my life was definitely without any social dates on the calendar. ‘But where?’ Chas meant me to have a sort of bachelor night out. By the time he’d cashed up and had a meal the television was enough socialising for him.
Then Ade came up with a suggestion which at first seemed outrageous, for her especially. Ben had joined a men’s club attached to a church some way away and there was a Church Ladies’ Guild too. Should we join, with Ben’s introduction? ‘What’s the vicar like, Ade?’ ‘Oh, a cross-eyed Christ.’ But she wasn’t being profane or unkind, the vicar to her was not an ordinary man, and this one was cross-eyed. ‘I should go,’ said Chas, anxious to have a night alone without my chattering. ‘Churches these days have all sorts of interesting things going on, it won’t be just hymn singing and psalms.’
So, accompanied by another unlikely worshipper, I went. I blushed for Ade once or twice, feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself, but I needn’t have done so. I wasn’t the only one, apparently, to see beyond her rough voice and cryptic manner to the true-blue gem beneath. We made quite a name for ourselves, I tend to think, as a couple of real characters, even though once or twice I was sure we were regarded as a pair of eccentrics. Ade always made me giggle, for she had a knack of nicknaming people immediately after her first appraisal of them and the nicknames were always so apt.
The vicar popped in each week to open the meetings with a short prayer. Sometimes he made a jocular remark or two at which the ladies, with the exception of Ade and Dolly, laughed heartily. He was a kindly man but one of nature’s bores. His misplaced eyes did not help any charisma he might have developed over the years. His wife, a tiny, shabby little woman, nicknamed ‘The Sparrer’ by Ade, chirped constantly of her Clement’s marvellous attributes. Possibly thinking Ade and Dolly were human and worldly, she confided in us one evening that her Clement was a ‘bit of a lad, a real boy, in his private moments’. ‘Gawd,’ said Ade to me, ‘he ought to be, he sees everything twice over.’
We had raffles and competitions and were surprised at the intense competitiveness amongst the ‘Guilders’ for the oddest shaped potato, the funniest man’s tie, the prettiest display of flowers in an egg cup, etc. One lady got so excited that her bouquet of ferns in an egg cup had received a ‘mention’ from the speaker, who always had the difficult task of judging the competition, that she proceeded to the platform to thank the speaker and to say it was the happiest evening she had spent for many a long day. We didn’t go in for the competitions usually, but Ade did enter for the oddest shaped potato competition with a beauty she found in the greengrocer’s.
Of course Ade didn’t expect to win but, always a down-to-earth person, she probably wanted to challenge the air of sweet simplicity which governed all the proceedings. Her potato, an immense object, gazed obscenely from the platform table at the congregation. Ade knew the committee members would not dare refuse her entry, for that meant that a reason for the non-acceptance would have to be given. Ade said, ‘It’s not me, Dolly, that thinks my potato is rude, it’s them refined ladies that think it is. Why can’t they just say, first prize to this unusual specimen?’ The competition had been innocently held on the right night. The lecturer, a male speaker this time, and voted by unanimous consent the best speaker the ladies had ever listened to, spoke on the subject of ‘Knockers I have known.’ At this point Ade made a hasty exit to the ladies’. Thankfully, I was in the back row. As Ade returned the man was saying, ‘I knew, ladies, you would be delighted to see my rare knockers. I have brought them for you to inspect.’ He also told us of his great joy when, walking one day, he espied a lady who possessed an unusual knocker. He offered her £3 for this collector’s item and she was thrilled to be able to unscrew it on the spot for him. He said he happily left a knockerless lady holding in her hand his three £1 notes. Did we think he had robbed the lady?
The following week the Guild’s speaker was a lady musician speaking to us on percussion and rhythm. ‘What’s percussion, Dolly?’ ‘I think it’s drums and cymbals, Ade.’ She was a tall, leaping-about lady, great fun, for she divided us into sections for a roundelay. We had to sing a sort of ditty, or pastoral, in the same tones as our designated musical instruments. I was a violin, Ade a horn. I think there were several violins, as there were horns, so that my vocal breakdown didn’t seem to be noticed, for I mimed my part. However, when the baton was pointed at the horns the whole group became shy and silent, but not Ade. She stood up and manfully bellowed, ‘Welcome to the horn in the morn, oh welcome horn, I love every morn.’ I think she’d got the words wrong but her bellow was like a real alpenhorn and the lady speaker insisted Ade stand up and take a bow, while we all clapped and cheered her.
‘We’re like a lot of bleeding kids, you know, Dolly,’ said Ade on the way home. ‘Well, I thought you sounded like a frustrated sea-gull in search of a mate, Ade.’ ‘Something else to tell me boys tonight, Dolly. They’ll like the sea-gull bit.’
Ade and I shared the same doctor – well, perhaps shared was the inoperative word, for she never went to the doctor’s, never appearing to
think about the state of her health. However, she was insistent that I should go whenever I complained of anything, and she usually accompanied me. Our doctor was such a busy man I was usually in and out instantly and I often wondered why I ever bothered. I had suffered with a painful lump in a calf muscle for some time and, after I had adopted the stance of a stork and tripped Chas up several times behind the counter, he insisted I should go to be examined, much to Ade’s pleasure.
I came out of the surgery to an eager Ade. ‘Well, what did he say?’ ‘It’s my imagination.’ ‘Silly old sod,’ was Ade’s comforting reply. ‘Well, I can feel it, Dolly. I’ll come back in with you.’ ‘The doctor knows best,’ I assured her and promised to keep an eye on it. ‘I don’t like lumps,’ said a worried Ade.
Some months later we went with my lump again. This time the doctor acknowledged he could feel it. ‘It’s only a bit of gristle, you must not make a fuss over small things.’ He must have noticed I looked a bit disappointed, for he asked me what I thought it was. ‘A cyst?’ suggested Doctor Dolly. ‘Very well then, if it will please you I will mark your record accordingly. Will that send you off happily?’ I came from the surgery knowing myself to be a neurotic woman. Ade was furious but I insisted on leaving things as they were. She, however, had lost faith in our regular medico and immediately moved the whole of her family from the doctor’s list.
When I broke out in a dreadful-looking rash, therefore, I hardly liked bothering my doctor again but faithful Ade took me along. My own doctor was on holiday and we were seen by a visiting foreign gentleman. He examined me from a distance as though I was leprous. ‘Well, at least I have something this time which is more than imagination,’ I thought. ‘It’s even frightening this man who must be used to treating virulent tropical diseases.’ He might have been Peter Sellers in disguise, but in my blistered state I was definitely not a Sophia Loren. I waited for an unusual medical term to be applied to my rare state of hideousness.
Dolly's Mixture Page 2
