We did have dinner for six in a posh restaurant in the West End, although by the time the evening came, having changed my mind about the whole idea, I felt as though I was literally being dragged there. But it was my fault, the dragging feeling, for, as Chas said, ‘Dolly is like this.’ (Sometimes the word varies to that, since my inconstancy of mind and subsequent lack of enthusiasm is never forgotten.) ‘Perhaps this occasion will teach her a lesson. I tell you, I dread waking up in the mornings for then it is that Dolly gets all her “good ideas”.’
So it was that, with a false smile, I greeted Ade, Benny, Edie and Alby when they arrived in the shiny limousine Chas had ordered. Immediately I sighted Edie my thoughts went back to the programme girls at the old Stoll theatre in Kingsway, for in her much be-frizzed hair stood an erect blue bow. It looked much too large for her tiny, marmoset face. Her long dress was also blue, lacy and very flouncy. But Ade! Well, I forgot I was bored and reluctant to go; surely she was a Dame Nellie Melba, or Clara Butt, for her magnificent body was gowned in classical black velvet; pearls draped her throat; she wore long, white gloves. ‘You look like a prima donna, Ade.’ ‘Primo Carnera, you mean, Dolly. Old Solly’s wife insisted I borrow it, she had it for one of her grandsons’ barmitzvahs.’ ‘Old Solly’ was the gentleman Ade machined for. I wondered if we were not overdressed for the restaurant we were bound for. To my mind it was just a glorified Joe Lyons, but Edie had been impressed for, ‘You can’t just walk in there, Dolly, you have to be “booked”.’ Her tone gave me a vision of the six of us at a laden table while at the doors and windows the starving pleaded for entry. ‘You are not booked,’ would be the head waiter’s cry.
We sat at tables round a polished floor, a floor for dancing or cabaret. A very large table, or tables in a group, had been placed next to ours. It was a celebration dinner for a young man’s twenty-first birthday, and Ade and I were fascinated by the enthusiastic relations assembled around this, aunts, uncles, cousins. I wondered if dad had saved for this night for years on an endowment policy. Then the waiters brought to the birthday table an enormous dish covered with a huge silver cover and, as the band played the young man’s favourite tune, the boy was invited to lift the cover. Underneath was not the huge turkey I had guessed there would be, but his school cap, tie and football boots!
Ade and I got so friendly with the birthday people that, by the end of the evening, after they had invited us to have a birthday drink, our six became part of the family, as also did the band. They asked for requests and Edie asked for Alby’s tune for her, ‘My Blue Heaven’. I could see why she had garbed herself in blue for the evening. The end of the night’s festivities was approaching when Ade went to the platform and spoke to the leader of the band, and then stood by the pianist. Suddenly I felt worried: she was going to sing! ‘Oh no, Ade, don’t.’
The evening had gone so well, I didn’t want my Ade to embarrass anyone, not only with her singing voice but also with what she might sing. A thorough coward, I made my way to the door; I would languish in the cloakroom until all was over. Benny caught my eye, took hold of my hand and said, ‘Don’t worry, Dolly, it’ll be all right. Come and sit in the corner with me.’ There was the usual restaurant noise, people talking and laughing, crockery and cutlery clattering. Perhaps it would drown anything untoward. I couldn’t look at Ade and closed my eyes.
As the first notes reached my ears I opened my eyes with a start and looked at Benny; he was smiling a proud and gratified smile. It surely couldn’t be Ade, this rich, marvellous, contralto voice? The words, ‘Mighty Like a Rose’, flowed like wine. All outside noises ceased and when Ade had finished the applause was deafening. ‘Encore, encore,’ and then she sang (looking every inch a prima donna) ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. I hadn’t known it was such a lovely song with such marvellous verses.
The birthday boy’s mother was crying, my scalp had gone all tight, and crowding round the doors were people from other rooms mingling with the restaurant staff. Even the chef was there. ‘Did you know about Ade’s voice?’ Benny smiled. ‘I know all about my lovely Adeline.’ I wanted to ask so many questions. Why was Ade leading such an ordinary life, why was she bent daily over a machine when she had possessed this miraculous gift? But somehow I couldn’t. ‘All right, Dolly?’ said Ade, as we came home to ordinariness again. I supposed everything was all right; all I could think of was some Bible saying or other about hiding one’s light under a bushel.
‘Oh, I didn’t ask for my request for Dolly,’ remarked Chas sadly on the way home. ‘What a pity,’ said Ade. ‘Never mind, Dolly, the thought was there.’ ‘Was it a tune you have for each other, like our “Blue Heaven”?’ asked Edie. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘it’s the only tune he knows by title, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, At Last I’ve Found You”.’ ‘It’s “Love”, not “Life”,’ shouted Chas, suddenly bereft of the lovely sentimental feeling Ade’s singing had induced.
In Chas’s days as a waiter, his restaurant was serviced by a Palm Court Orchestra, which possessed a repertoire of about ten tunes. The restaurant comprised three balconied floors, with a deep well for the ground floor and the second floor representing another well in reverse. The orchestra played on the balcony of the first floor. ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ was the sung solo. At the piano was a grandfatherly type of gentleman in evening tails; the soloist (who normally played the cello) was an elderly lady in long, black, satin gown with lace handkerchief at her wrist. For this solo the two figures from the past were accompanied by a ‘gipsy’ on a musical saw. Chas said proudly to Ade, ‘This solo brought the house down, the customers went mad for it.’ Since ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery’ came round about every hour all the years Chas waitered there, it was hardly surprising this ballad stayed with him eternally, even though I insisted it was ‘Life’ and not ‘Love’. ‘Of course, you would be different,’ he said indignantly when I was amused by the incident and remarked that I had always hoped Chas would one day be a finalist in an important quiz, when ‘his’ tune was played, and he would be the only entrant to know the title.
I thought it a pity Ade had not made a record of her voice. It would be something marvellous to leave for her boys and their children. ‘When I’m gone, Dolly, I want to be gone, I want my boys to get on with their own lives and not hark back to the past.’ She was the least possessive of mothers.
Chapter 7
Shop Talk
The next year simply flashed past and our shop was looking very different from the Steptoe’s yard we had inherited, cream paint everywhere and, running the whole length of the shop, a refrigerated counter. Chas, much to my annoyance, had ordered this to be specially made. I felt we were doing very nicely and needed less improvements, not more. I had no desire to be a Mrs Sainsbury (in reality we were Mrs Marks and Mr Sparks), for I would rather have spent the money on home improvements, but the shop was Chas’s baby. He insisted, ‘We cannot stand still,’ and I worried incessantly that he worked so long and so hard.
I had to admit, though, that it was a happy shop – indeed, I can only remember one difficult customer among all the many we served and she wasn’t a customer in the accepted sense in our shop. A foreign lady of Jewish extraction, she was well-dressed, capable and organised. She came to us only for bacon and cheese, and she didn’t come into the shop as a normal person would but hovered about outside, looking up and down the road as though expecting a friend to appear. It only later occurred to me she may have been watching for the rabbi. She insisted the bacon and cheese she purchased should be to the exact weight she required. The cheese must be from the middle of the large cheese, therefore rindless, and the back bacon also from a spot in the animal to her choice. She was arrogant, didn’t worry about the trouble she caused, and I was nervous of her. One day, after I had cut many pieces of cheese, not one piece to her ultimate satisfaction, Chas read the riot act to me. Then this lady took to waiting outside the shop by the large window, peering in at the cheese I was cutting and the bacon I was weighing up for other cus
tomers. When both were to her liking she would tear into the shop and make her demands, pressing her face almost on to the scale while, with trembling fingers, I laid cheese and bacon gently on it, praying that the scale would not register above the quantities my thorn in the flesh required, and I always wrote the exact weight and price on the paper. In the end we took to dashing into the back room when she entered, hoping she would go away; but she never did and Chas usually gave in first and served her, grumbling at me for my timidity. Release for us came in the shape of a bridegroom for this difficult lady.
We were surprised and delighted when she came in to bid us goodbye, thanking us for our charming service to her for so long, and departing with her final middle piece of cheddar and prime lean short back smoked Danish rashers. ‘Cor,’ said our dear friend the butcher, hearing of the lady’s nuptials, ‘who’d ever take on that old tart? He must be a bleeding madman.’ But he wasn’t a madman, he was positively charming, and I knew with such a fastidious wife he would be assured of choice cuisine. They went to live in a tiny village in the West Country where there was one shop which embraced post office and general store!
Our own little shopping parade was really a village in the centre of a busy town and, like a village, there were undercurrents or aloofness between some shopkeepers. Emotions bubbled like a cauldron because some shopkeepers were competitors, and not sporting competitors at that. There was talk when one shop obtained the post office licence when another shopkeeper had applied for this. We heard all the gossip, for, in a strange way, we were friendly with all the other shopkeepers. Perhaps when we started in business I was too naive about competition. I had so many things on my mind, my children for one thing, that it never occurred to me to think before I dashed into other grocery shops nearby (and there were four) to purchase something I was short of for an urgent order. At first they were aloof – they may have thought I was spying out the land and their prices – but they soon realised I had no ulterior motives and I was accepted as a friend. They returned the compliment when they were short of goods that hadn’t been delivered.
One shopkeeper would tell me that his competitor stood in his doorway opposite and watched his customers go in and out. I said that should please him and not annoy him, for it proved his competitor was not busy. I did not tell him Chas and I had no time to stand and stare. At first some of our customers were a little embarrassed if they were shopping in a competitor’s shop when I visited, but in the end they relaxed and we heard interesting bits of news about our competitors. There were some Jewish grocers and I loved to hear about their family life. One son went to Israel on a kibbutz and I would hear how the desert was being made fertile. Chas, a gardener at heart, would have loved to go to see it all. They were a jolly family, giving comical names to some of the things they sold. Prunes became ‘black-coated workers’, baked beans ‘shirt lifters’.
We laughed about the amorous milkman who would pop into bed with his favourite customer every morning, even on a Monday morning. I thought he must be a Hercules to carry on after such exhausting dawn beginnings and complete his large round with such physical energy and cheerfulness.
In sharp contrast to this free-giving and outgoing friendliness there was the shopkeeper whose wife was parsimonious and penny-pinching, yet her husband owned a thriving business. She would boast that one cabbage would last her family all week. Her family consisted of husband, two sons, a daughter and a lodger. The lodger and sons showed great sense and went off to sea but the poor daughter remained at home. Her mother called on another shopkeeper who ran a clothing club and requested the loan of a petticoat for her daughter’s wedding, for the bride to wear. Our lovely butcher arrived in our shop one day quite shocked: the mean lady had taken a wild rabbit into his shop with the request that he skin and prepare it for her.
My eldest sister, Agnes, had also gone into trade, for she and her husband were now managing a tobacconist’s near Tower Bridge and Marjorie and I tried to visit them one evening a week. Marjorie and Agnes would discuss the problems of that trade, shortage of cigarettes and how one simply had to make sure one’s regular customers were satisfied – in Agnes’s case the newspaper customers. One day a lady van-driver came into the shop requesting ‘fags’. Arthur had just begun, ‘I am so sorry’, when the irate lady snatched off his spectacles, broke them in two and threw them on to the counter before dashing from the shop and driving away. ‘Whatever did Arthur do?’ asked a shocked Marjorie. ‘Had them mended, of course,’ replied Agnes, looking at Marjorie as though she had asked a silly question.
Arthur was a man who took the rough with the smooth, accepting life’s ups and downs in the same philosophical spirit, never losing his sense of humour, popular with his customers. He should have been an actor, for not only could he sing well but he could alter the tone of his voice and in some uncanny way alter the whole of his personality with this change of voice. One day a sweet old lady came into his shop. She was a vision of the past, an Edwardian. ‘Do you sell Woodbines?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Yes, madam,’ said Arthur, his voice and manner suddenly of the same period. ‘May I purchase some, please?’ requested the little lady. ‘Certainly, madam,’ replied naughty Arthur. ‘Do you require the wild ones?’ ‘Oh,’ said the little old lady, ‘may I go and ask my brother’s advice? He is waiting outside.’ Unlike our sister Winifred, however, none of us had any famous people in our vicinity, let alone as customers. Winifred told us that Mr —, a famous poet, and his equally famous wife lived near her shop. Since it was the only shop in the village we assumed she was honoured by their custom. ‘Oh, how wonderful, Win, to be able to talk to such people!’ ‘Wonderful?’ said Winifred, never ever having been overwhelmed by the presence of the famous, or even, one might say, impressed. ‘Do you know, they get all their shopping in the nearby town and have the nerve to call at my shop with their empty bleach bottles, asking if there is anything to come back on them!’ I was sad to hear this and surprised that it was he and not she who had made this request. Unlike Winifred, I would have given him a refund even if none was due, just so that I could get into conversation with such intellectuals. Not Winifred – she has always had her feet firmly on the ground and her priorities right. But I would have dreamed that the famous man or lady might have written a story or poem about me, ‘Dolly of the bleach bottles’, or ‘The Madonna of the Empties’. ‘Snow white is my wash, and so is she, who handles my empties, so carefully.’ ‘You’re barmy, Dolly,’ said my brother Len, ‘but you do make me laugh.’ He couldn’t imagine me as a grocer’s wife, and a working one at that, and said, ‘All work and no play, Dolly.’
But it is difficult to find the happy medium. Near our parsimonious, one-cabbage-per-week lady lived a very different shopkeeper. He would empty the till on certain days and with this would journey to the West End in soft black homburg hat, astrakhan-collared coat, spats, fur-lined gloves, cigar and silver-topped cane. Business before pleasure, he would visit the warehouses and place his orders for the following week, the staff laying out the red carpet for him; then he would call at the Great Eastern Hotel for luncheon or tea, taking taxis everywhere.
He was in his own mind a rich tycoon, the tax man the least of his worries, insisting the tax man would never catch up with him. He was right, for he passed on to where the tax man could not follow. I eyed our till longingly many times but of course I had Chas to contend with. My gentleman shopkeeper had been a widower. At first when I took goods from the shop for the housekeeping I kept a notebook in which I wrote them all down, but Chas thought me absent-minded because sometimes I left it until the evening to make up my notebook. So he decided to deduct a round sum each week from my housekeeping money which he would put back into the till. This was a bone of contention between us because he deducted more than I would have spent had I been an ordinary housewife. He loved the tax man as much as our gentleman colleague hated him. I wondered who was right. Chas said it was worth a lot to sleep peacefully at night, one’s conscience clear, but our t
ycoon told us he dropped off the moment his head touched the pillow. Amy said, ‘It’s all a question of glands, Dolly.’
However, I did begin to acquire luxuries, for a customer knew a little man who would lay water to our upstairs rooms. Unfortunately he used pipes which didn’t match the downstairs ones, and were too narrow to take the force of water going uphill, and we had, in the end, to get in a firm of plumbers to put it all right. All this going to my head, I persuaded (or, rather, the washing-machine salesman persuaded) Chas to purchase a washing-machine. This, although we didn’t know it at the time, nurtured a monster in its bosom. It worked by some kind of electric clock which the salesman said would last a lifetime. At the end of the first two weeks we had five new electric clocks fitted. They just fizzled out in the middle of the wash. Finally, an important ‘clock’ man arrived. He gazed at me in a strange way and said perhaps there was something in my make-up which cause the clocks to expire; some people cannot wear watches, he informed us. The manufacturers decided, however, to have one more try, and finally the sixth clock behaved itself.
The washing-machine was the noisiest contraption possible. It coughed, screamed and even jumped about the kitchen and Chas asked me to use it only when the shop was not busy. I was unable to stand and enjoy my machine doing my work for me because Chas would ring from the shop from time to time. Once he rang for me and I forgot to turn off the rinsing tap. The water was coming through the shop ceiling and pouring down the stairs as William arrived home from school. The customers were all agog, Chas was screaming at me and I was chasing upstairs, ankle deep in water, to turn off the tap, wondering what I could do to get rid of the water. William sloshed into the passage, burst out laughing and cried out, ‘“Wash Day? Just Forget It.”’ As always, he received the full brunt of my annoyance and he said, ‘Sorry, mum, I’ll help you mop it up.’ When I arrived back from cutting off the supply of water to my monster, William was bravely mopping up the passage – with the clean, white, starched overalls I had collected from the laundry that morning.
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