The locum resumed his seat, glancing at me every now and then with a look of revulsion tinged with what I hoped was pity. Slowly he pronounced his verdict. All I could hear in my ears was the song of the film, ‘Oh doctor, I am...’ ‘Madam,’ announced the doctor, ‘we all possess bacteria, but you, madam, possess your own private bacteria. [I thought I sounded all exclusive as though I was superior enough to own my private executive jet.] You, dear madam, fight a constant battle with your own bacteria. [I didn’t know that!] But now you have, I am sorry to say, lost the battle you wage permanently. Your skin has erupted in defeat.’ I would have liked to burst into ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, as a warning to my bacteria to be ‘up boys and at ’em’, but I was weak in defeat. However, this dear man put me on penicillin. It was the first time I’d had this drug and my bacteria cried ‘Alleluiah’ and stamped their little hob-nailed boots. They’d won a second battle. I came out in a secondary rash, a penicillin rash, worse than my own private bacteriological one.
I agreed with Ade, life is hit and miss. Not every doctor is a miracle healer.
Chapter 4
Just William
Chas threw himself heart, body and soul into our business and we were busy from morn till night. With no time for a mid-day meal, we lived on rolls and tea, taking our main meal in the evening with our children, Susan and William. Susan, nearly thirteen, was at a girls’ grammar school. She had homework to keep her busy in the evenings but was a girl who made friends easily, and kept them. She had a happy social time at weekends, so, although she would have preferred our previous life at Forest Gate with mother always there to greet her, she settled down quite happily. For my son the changeover was not so easy, although he did not complain. We were on a busy main road with no children as neighbours. Here he could not go out to play. He sorely missed his two dear friends, George and Harry, who had lived nearby at Forest Gate. They had kind parents and William had joined in their happy childhood life, starting their own ‘archaeological’ dig in their back garden! Their father owned a dolly mixture factory and he would make ‘meals’ for the children’s games: pork chops, chips and peas, or fruit and custard, all made out of sugar on little plates.
William had been happy at his infants’ school, too. He seemed to have been born with an adult manner of speech but this was accepted as being William. It was a modern school for those times and each child was treated as a separate individual. They were taught to play together in order to live together. The mothers in my road had been my friends, our husbands serving soldiers; we had worried together, cleared up our bomb damage together, and together we watched over our children, taking it in turns to collect them from school, checking that they had not absent-mindedly left any of their belongings behind in the school cloakroom. The children played happily and safely in our quiet road, mothers were not far away if needed.
At his new school William’s manner of speech caused great amusement among the other children. For instance, at a time of argument, dissension or playground battles, he would suggest ‘taking the matter to arbitration’. My instinct told me his verbal literacy was not appreciated by the head or his teacher.
‘Surely William would complain if things were not all right? He seems happy enough to me,’ declared Chas hopefully, probably wishing that I was as conscientious with regard to the shop as I was about William. My son never complained that he was unhappy, although his body did, for he too developed a severe rash which would just not respond to treatment and in the end he had to attend hospital.
Susan, on holiday from school, took him to the hospital and arrived home again almost in tears. The lady specialist had enquired where was the child’s mother, she must attend. I spent an uncomfortable half-hour with this sincere and earnest lady. She dismissed my reasons for previous non-attendance with a wave of her hand. ‘A busy shop!’ (I’d have liked to see Chas’s face at that juncture.) She was extremely beautiful, with shining black hair, enormous, emerald-green eyes and alabaster skin, her beauty marred for me only by her large, unfeminine ears, which she had accentuated with golden hoop ear-rings.
Suddenly her impatience seemed to leave her and she placed one hand on my knee and spoke kindly, slowly and deliberately. When my son returned from school each day I must drop everything, go upstairs with him to our flat and let him talk to me, read his books to me, or do anything else he wanted to do. I was stunned by this ‘prescription’; it was all I ever wanted to do; possibly this was the part of the day I hated most, a queue of people and a small boy squeezing his way through to a flat without a welcoming mum. Perhaps the dear lady realised she was losing her battle with me, for she became impatient again and said sharply, ‘The customers are of no importance. [I could visualise Chas’s face at that moment.] Cannot I make you realise that you, of all people [why me, I wondered], have been given a rare gift, an unusual happening in this life, a child who is an intellectual individualist!’ She then brought her big guns into play with the words, ‘ would give my ears to possess a son like yours.’ I wondered why she had chosen her ears to suggest a bargain which could never be clinched, and I returned sadly home. ‘Surely you told the doctor how busy we are?’ said Chas.
When I visited my son’s school to tell the head the result of my visit to hospital, I felt she was not impressed by modern methods of child diagnosis, for she said, ‘He will not conform. He must conform to stay at my school.’ Apparently William’s non-conformity was displayed in his peculiarity with margins. I was shown my son’s exercise book. He reduced the number of words on each line so that the margin went, like half a pyramid, from the top left-hand corner, where it was narrow, to the bottom right-hand corner, where it was wide and there was a space the whole width of the page.
It is natural that parents should desire to do the best for their offspring; my mother’s wish in life had been that we emulated her and became happy and content in the ‘way of life in which it has pleased our Lord to call us’. On the other hand, although my father insisted that parents should, with regard to their children, ‘love ’em and leave ’em alone’, he always reiterated firmly and loudly when we were talking of our dreams and ambitions for the future, ‘You must get it down on paper.’ In other words, certificates of examinations passed were the only passport to success for we children from the working class. This was the proof needed to open the gates to a different life. And there was only one way to do it, through school and evening classes, for sometimes our parents at Poplar had been at their wits’ ends to supply us with the bare necessities of life; private tuition or coaching was for people from another world.
For Chas and me, now on the threshold of becoming successful traders, the opportunity was arising for us to provide better help for our children. Susan’s life seemed set fair. William, I felt, needed all our help to get educationally. on course. Chas bought a typewriter, thinking William might like to learn to type and bash out his thoughts that way; there we made a rod for my back, for on early-closing days William would station me at the typewriter and walk up and down the room dictating at a furious speed on all subjects under the sun. He educated his mum, really, and woe betide me if I couldn’t keep pace with him. He’d ‘tut’ testily, repeat his last few sentences without hesitation and off we’d go again. But as Chas repeated, like a magic incantation, ‘He seems happy enough,’ our busy life continued. However, William did complain when, later on, I insisted he wore ‘regulation’ garb to school – flannel suits, grey, and square-toed shoes – when all his companions were wearing narrower trousers and winkle-picker shoes. When it was too late for me to change my mind (I regretted my obstinacy with regard to his schoolboy clothing), he said he was grateful to me because ‘All my friends who wore pointed-toed shoes now have pointed feet!’ He was honest and kind and, because he had a reputation for being a wit, it was all too easy, busy as we were, to blind ourselves and assume he would be all right when he got out into the world. Although sometimes I was a bit apprehensive of his outspoken manner being mi
sunderstood, he had the capacity for making people laugh, whatever their class or intellect.
William had one annoying habit, however, and it was difficult to cure him of this. He would invite upstairs to our flat whoever called at our door when the shop was closed, and it was not always convenient. One Bank Holiday we had closed the shop for three whole days and on the first day had picnicked at a beauty spot in the country. That year the weather had been wet and humid and unfortunately we had chosen the wrong venue for our jaunt, for I was literally smothered with mosquito bites which had turned into vicious blisters. Chas had been bitten on the top halves of both ears. The next day, Susan being away for the weekend, the three of us were alone, and by evening I was in agony with my bites. I looked and felt ghastly, and the only way I could sit about comfortably was to discard clothing. It was impossible to do this completely but I put on a sleeveless, low-necked, airy-fairy nightdress, frothy and frilly from low neck to short hem. Someone had bought this for me at Christmas; it was definitely not me. Chas had anointed the top halves of his ears with some dead-white medication and looked like a creature from a science fiction film.
At 10 p.m., when we were just deciding to retire for the night, the doorbell rang. William dashed downstairs and, to our utter horror, returned with a boy of his own age – and an elegantly dressed lady. Apparently the youngster was a friend and the lady his friend’s mother. She was very embarrassed, not only at viewing William’s unconventional-looking Mum and Dad but also at the late hour of calling. Apparently some major event was in the offing and she had called with an invitation for William to join them. She spoke in the high falutin’ tones of the upper classes. This tone of speech had all my life thrown me in some strange way, making my mind numb and causing me to have to search for the most ordinary words with which to speak or describe things.
On my lap I had a tray bearing a cup of tea and a plate with a slice of bread and butter and a cold sausage. Chas, hospitable at all times, went into the kitchen and returned bearing the same tray-loads for our guests. It never occurred to him that such cold comestibles, in such surroundings, with disease-ridden hosts, might literally be difficult for such elegant and immaculate-looking people to swallow. At the very least, the cold, wrinkled sausages hardly looked appetising. Suddenly I remembered William telling me that his friend’s grandfather, a surgeon, an elderly gentleman over eighty, had not been well, and in my best hostess manner I said to the lady, ‘How is your father?’ ‘His speech is somewhat slurred and he says strange things,’ replied the lady. ‘Oh,’ said my son, ‘the hot weather does affect elderly people; you might observe that from my parents, for my mother appears to be auditioning for Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, while my father relaxes there with half-embalmed ears.’
For one awful moment there was silence. I felt dreadful. Then the elegant lady collapsed into peals of uncontrollable laughter. In the end we all thoroughly enjoyed our evening, or, rather, night, for our guests were unable to tear themselves away until well after midnight, and we all became great friends.
But of course I knew that William just had to come to terms with conventional schooling to be a success (get it down on paper) and to this end I sought the advice of a lady in the world of education whom I’d met through the hospital doctor who had been enamoured of my son. She recommended a private school. After the initial shock Chas said, Yes of course he would pay for private education if that was the best for our boy. Here was the problem, for it was thought he should not board, he needed the security and privacy of his own home. Then the educational lady had a bright idea. ‘What about a school at Hampstead?’ The school recommended was a modern type of school, there was no educational pressurising of children, each child was allowed to follow his own (or her own, for it was co-educational) bent. I was very excited by this idea, it seemed the very school for my son. I had seen a famous author, on television, talking about the school. His son was a pupil there, along with the children of other artists, actors, etc. They prided themselves on being a classless community, or so I gathered. Non-religious, non-political, no pressurising to do this or that. Children did well there, for they were free to come and go as they pleased, and, being free, they did better than they would have done in a regimented atmosphere.
I was so sure my son would be accepted that I ignored the first, faint stirrings of all-not-being-well augured for the future. Our charming lady educationalist, who became such a staunch friend of William’s, had great difficulty in obtaining an interview for us at the school. ‘Individualist?’ queried authority at this progressive school. ‘In what way?’ Apparently they were protective of their pupils, for they were children of well-known personalities. However, assured that my son was not a fearful character, an appointment was made, and mother and son travelled to this new type of school which, I was sure, was to be the means of starting my son on a life of satisfaction, happiness and success. I thought we looked the part of the upper-crust mother and son, he in his grey flannel suit and non-winkle-picker shoes, me in my green Harris tweed reversible overcoat. We only needed a shooting-stick to complete the public-school open-day image.
We went down the driveway of the school and must have passed near the kitchens, for a dreadful smell of stale cabbage assailed our nostrils. It really was putrid and William said he hoped, if it was a free-will school, that forced feeding was not on the menu. No one seemed to know anything about us, and in the end an arty-crafty-looking lady, her hands full of coloured bands and wearing a whistle round her neck on a piece of red tape, deposited us in a sort of hut, an annexe of the school, which contained a desk covered with an untidy litter of papers, books, plimsolls, etc., a bench, and an odd assortment of office chairs, deck chairs and sports paraphernalia. She then galloped off blowing her whistle, surrounded by a bevy of girls in shorts. She called to a group of boys on the way, ‘Anyone for netball?’ I thought she was a bit like Joyce Grenfell doing her sports mistress act, but it obviously was a non-authoritarian sort of school, I was pleased to see, for the teacher did not mind at all when one girl opted out of netball at the last minute. The girl said she’d rather play with Anthony – at least, that is what it sounded like to me – but at any rate it seemed sweetness and light, if a bit disorganised. I was amused at the thought of William’s old headmistress amidst that gaggle of pupils who couldn’t seem to make up their minds what they wanted to do.
After a long time, when the smell of stale cabbage was beginning to make me feel sick, a man appeared in the annexe. He introduced himself as a housemaster and chatted to William and me. I felt we’d made no impression of our eagerness to join, for he remained aloof and appeared not to be listening. He then intimated that William would have to be, intellectually, up to the educational standard for his age and took him off to his study for a sort of entrance examination. I was pleased we had given our children only one Christian name each. Chas at the time had insisted on this frugality of names as he’d got so fed up with writing three or four, and once, six, Christian names on the insurance application forms for his ex-clients, when he was a man from the Pru. My instinct, however, told me that my son would not become a pupil at this unconventional school. It seemed to me more conventional than the normal grammar school. The entrance examination, on paper, would, I felt sure, be as difficult in its way as the entrance examination to any high school; and as for the school priding itself on being a classless society, I already felt like one of the great unwashed. I spoke a different language. My genuine Harris tweed outfit, real crocodile bag, William’s beautiful, pure flannel, high-class school outfit, plus his expensive, square-toed shoes, could not hide my plebeian status. My father, in his young days, had always said it was difficult, if not impossible, to crash through the invisible barrier of class, even though he always insisted it was callously visible in England. I remembered being so cross with him when I was young and was raving over the charming manners of a certain vicar and his wife. ‘They think the East End is a jungle, you know, they come here to
work like missionaries,’ father said.
Because I had not expected to feel like this now I had money to pay for fees, it was all the harder to bear, but I smiled sweetly as William returned with the master. ‘We have no vacancies at the moment,’ said the tutor, ‘but if you will pay a registration fee we will contact you next term when we have a vacancy.’ Gallant to the last, I wrote a cheque. Even though the registration fee was a nominal one, I thought having my own cheque book might impress. They had coated the pill but I was not brave enough to swallow it. I knew I would hear nothing from the school ever again and I never did. It didn’t seem to worry William and, indeed, he seemed relieved, for he was sure he would have starved there because of the impression the dreadful smell of cabbage made on him. Of course, it might have been the ‘royal’ drains. I spoilt the effect of writing the cheque with my lovely silver pen, for as I searched my handbag under the eagle eye of the master out tumbled two squashed and dirty-looking dog-ends, fit, of course, for the gutter. What person of note saves a cigarette end?
However, Chas was right, I needn’t have worried for our son. Out of the blue I was informed by the educational authorities that it had been decided my son should be attending grammar school, and I was invited by the head of a successful grammar school not far from us to come to the school and have a chat with him. I was very nervous because I had heard from mothers of other boys who attended the school that the head, a doctor, was a man of brilliance and a strong disciplinarian. I so much wanted not to say the wrong thing for William’s sake, so anxious was I that he should be accepted at this school with its wonderful reputation.
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