We were happily playing cards one Sunday night (Chas, then a waiter, was working) when Chas’s brother Phil called. ‘Oh cards,’ he said delightedly. ‘Would you care for a game?’ asked my father. ‘Well, I’ve only come to give Dolly a message from the old lady (his mother) but I’ll have a hand with you.’ We had five shillings in the kitty, which was a large prize for us, and we all hoped we would win. Phil played his hand, wiped the floor with us Cheggie card players, collected the kitty, thanked us charmingly for a happy interlude, and left. ‘Bloody bust me,’ squeaked my father as the door closed on my ‘rich’ brother-in-law. ‘That takes the cake!’ The rest of the Cheggies were in hysterics at father’s reactions, for he was sure that Phil was nothing less than a con man. Dear Phil. Father never forgave him.
Chapter 8
House Beautiful
Netta, Chas’s sister, who owned a drapery store a few doors away from us, had an artistic bent. Her taste in furniture and decor was so very attractive. I used to compare her husband’s interest in his home with Chas’s lack of it, for Netta’s Jim would do the decorating. Admittedly, he did this slowly because he wanted a perfect finish, whereas Chas knew I would go crazy unless my home was decorated and straight again in a few hours. I should have tried to hide my impatience from Chas, for this gave him the excuse not to find time to decorate. It was a job he detested. However, when I viewed Jim’s latest effort in his large dining-room I became quite jealous, and when one of my customers said she knew of a man who would decorate our lounge quickly and reasonably I jumped at the offer. The man worked in a garage during the day, and by night and to earn money in his spare time he did decorating as a hobby.
One evening a large and oily-looking man appeared, an enormous, cheerful young fellow. He refused to have a meal and said he had brought sandwiches which he would eat while working. He would work through until he had finished the job, if perhaps I would paste the paper. ‘I’d love to,’ I said. At 10 p.m. Chas went to bed in an irritable mood. At 3 a.m. the room was finished. Indeed it was. ‘It always looks different when dry,’ said the man. I had chosen a cream paper, a plain one, which would tone with the brown furniture in the sitting-room. I had been a little worried at the young man eating his thickly-buttered sandwiches while handling this pale, plain paper but, impatiently, he had refused my offer of a napkin. I hadn’t liked to inspect his work too closely while he was doing the job, so I washed the floor and eventually went to bed at 5 a.m. I had a clean, attractive lounge.
I found it hard to wake the next morning (of course, it was the same morning) until Chas dashed up and said, ‘Just come down and look at this, will you?’ In the harsh glare of daylight my lovely cream walls were covered with greasy fingerprints and handprints, and above these were other strange, greasy marks. Of course, not only had my man used his hands, I remembered he’d used his Brylcreemed forehead, too, to hold the top of the paper against the wall while he was hanging it. ‘Didn’t you see what he was doing? You were here all night,’ yelled Chas. ‘What could you have been doing?’ Perhaps I could buy some pictures to hide the stains, I said, trying to calm Chas down. ‘Pictures! On the wainscotting, under the window sill? You’re mad,’ said Chas. I tried to iron out the marks by putting a hot iron on to blotting paper, hoping to soak up the grease, but it just spread it further.
I departed to Netta’s for sympathy. She received me shaken and upset and silently took me upstairs to view her beautiful grey and red room. On every wall and on the ceiling were splashes of grease and yellowish stains. She had casseroled a chicken for dinner and, whilst getting it out of the oven, the lid had slipped. While she was trying to hold the lid on the whole dish shot up in the air and showered every wall. ‘Where’s Jim?’ I whispered funereally. ‘He’s gone for a walk,’ said a sad Netta. How could I show her my grease? One can always find someone in a worse position than oneself. Chas was so sorry for Netta.
All this unsuccessful activity inspired Marjorie and Alfred in their confectioner’s shop opposite. I envied Marjorie, for theirs was always a joint, husband-and-wife, team effort. They never seemed to tug in different directions as Chas and I did. They chose the paper together, pasted, cut, fixed and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. The ceilings in our respective residences were very, very high, necessitating the use of ladders and planks. Alfred was on top of the ladder one evening when Marjorie called to him. He walked backwards into space. Poor Alf. Chas said, ‘And you want me to decorate for you.’ He was so belligerent. He acted as though I had invited him to commit hara-kiri.
Olive was the girl for decorating. Quietly, calmly, efficiently she worked and the finished job was perfection. Not even a professional could fault her corners, nooks and crannies. She made it appear such a simple job I thought I would decorate our bedroom. Unfortunately I bought a paper which needed matching and I was so horrified at the amount of wastage that I decided it to hang it unmatched. I ran short of paper even then and couldn’t match it, for I had bought a bargain lot of old stock. Then I had to buy a dado to cover up the discrepancies where some of the paper met (or, rather, did not meet) the ceiling. I also put dado down by the wainscotting, for the shortages had occurred there too, yet I had been so careful in measuring.
I called Chas up when I had finished. ‘Christ Almighty,’ he said. ‘Well,’ I replied (I thought he might have said, ‘Not bad for the first attempt,’) ‘nobody comes in here but us and we only come to bed to sleep.’ ‘Well, what else is there to do in a bedroom?’ replied my beloved in injured tones, as though I was accusing him in some strange way. ‘Marjorie reads in hers,’ I ventured. ‘Don’t you start that sort of thing,’ commanded Chas, as though reading in bed was the beginning of a decline in the standards of clean living.
‘How did my friend do your lounge?’ enquired the customer who had recommended Greasy George. ‘Marvellous job,’ I replied. I was anxious not to lose a customer.
Chas had lost us a customer by not thinking before speaking, although I wondered if it showed a hard streak in his nature. I was puzzled, because normally he was a man deeply sympathetic to people in trouble. We had a charming spinster lady, a very good customer not only on her own behalf, for she was in comfortable circumstances, but she was also the managing director of a large firm a long way from our shop. She had called almost the first day we took over, when she happened to be passing by. She must have liked something about Chas or me, for every week we received an immense order from her canteen and thought ourselves very lucky, for her factory was very near the large supermarkets which were springing up on the main road. But faithful to us she stayed.
The loves of her life were her black cat and her budgerigar. One day when I went into the shop she was crying and Chas was patting her shoulder. ‘The lady’s pussy is poorly,’ said Chas to me by way of explanation for this unusual and sudden intimacy with a customer. However, Pussy recovered (we had daily bulletins) but soon after the cat’s convalescence a real tragedy struck. She returned home one night to find little budgie lying on the bottom of its cage on its back, legs up in the air. ‘What shall I do with him?’ she wailed to Chas. Chas, having assumed that because of the bird’s abandoned posture he was now a demised bird, said cheerfully, ‘I should give him to the cat.’ The shock of this cold-blooded advice cut short the spinster’s dirge. She paled visibly, gave Chas a look of hate, and left the shop. ‘What a dreadful thing to say to her, you must have a cruel streak,’ I grumbled. He scratched his head wonderingly. ‘Well, if the bird is dead it won’t feel anything. If she loves the cat it would make a nice, tasty change for it.’
He pretended to be proud of this brilliantly witty and satirical remark to the sad but influential spinster. I think he was just being obstinate and would not admit he had made a faux pas. A compassionate man, he did not understand the deeper complexes of feminine hurt; tragedies to us girls were just light, everyday nothings to him, hardly ripples in life’s rushing river.
We saw no more of the lady managing director but it wasn’t
our last experience of sorrowing cat lovers. One young man would come into the shop to help his mother, a widow, carry the shopping. He was a serious and attentive son, an only child. The mother worked in a nearby factory but I never knew what occupation the father had followed or whether his passing had caused as great and lasting a bereavement to his wife and son as when one of their cats died peacefully in its sleep.
They had two of them, and when they went all to pieces at the death of the first they were unable to follow their normal lives for a long time. The young man stayed at home with his mother, grieving, and they paid for an autopsy on the cat. When Chas delivered their groceries the woman, looking at the remaining cat, said sadly, ‘She knows the other one isn’t coming back.’ The young man’s friends were rather heartless, asking each other if any one knew of a good taxidermist or, better still, a good medium. ‘Are you there, Timling? Purr once for yes, twice for no.’ Fortunately his friendships survived, for the wretched young man knew his friends were just trying to cheer him up with their jokes, even though he thought they had a shocking way of doing it; but, after all, what would they know of the love of a man for his cat? (His friends had no pets.)
He just couldn’t laugh at the stories his friends told him, for, instead of keeping his mind off his beloved pet, they only tended to make him think of it more, for his friends talked cat all the time. They told him of the maiden lady so worried because her beloved cat looked ‘different’ and, thinking it was less lively than usual, called the vet. He examined the cat and, to the lady’s horror, pronounced it pregnant. ‘Impossible,’ said the lady. ‘My cat never leaves my side – indeed, it has never met a strange cat.’ The vet was puzzled. Was he losing his touch? He was sure the cat was going to be a mother. He re-examined the animal. His findings were the same. ‘Well then,’ said an indignant owner, ‘I must call on another veterinary surgeon, for I assure you this condition in Petsy is absolutely impossible.’ The vet bade the lady goodbye and walked, deep in thought, to the door. He turned round to ask her to keep him informed of the second vet’s diagnosis, but at that moment from underneath the settee emerged an enormous ginger cat, to the vet’s experienced eyes a virile Tom. ‘There you have it,’ cried the victorious vet. ‘There’s your father!’ ‘But that cannot be,’ insisted the obstinate owner, ‘for he is Petsy’s brother.’
Ade, too, had had her troubles with other people’s animals, though not of the domestic variety. Her twins once spent a glorious summer in the country with Cousin Job and his wife Sarah, a childless couple not really related to Ade but connected through a distant relative of Ade’s dad. They had a small farm in Dorset and, when Job came to London for the first time to visit an agricultural show, he was so lost and so frightened by the London traffic that he sought out Ade and stayed with her. He was so happy to be with them that he invited them back for the summer. Benny was out of work at the time (the depressing Thirties), Ade was working part time, Johnny couldn’t be persuaded to leave home so the twins went on their own. They arrived home after their very first country holiday saying they had had a mavellous time, both intended to be farmers when they grew up. It wasn’t until Ade met Job and Sarah some years later that she heard of the twins’ country escapades, for Job had taken on the role of father figure and meted out justice on the spot, there being no point in telling tales. Now he was able to relate with humour harrowing incidents which time had turned into warm memories.
The twins had been fascinated by the pigs and had been allowed to take over the feeding of these animals. Having been informed by a village lad that ‘Yon pigs’ll eat anythin’ afore ’em,’ Job was horrified to find that the twins had been feeding cinders to the pigs, who had devoured these unusual morsels with great gusto. The boys listened with delight to the lovely crunching sound made by the pigs, sure they had discovered a new source of feed for farmers. ‘Animals’ nuts!’ was their Eurekan cry.
Job decided to take the boys to the cattle auction, where they heard him admire a litter of black pigs. The next day they watched a farm worker tarring the roof of a shed. When he had gone home to dinner the twins decided to give Job a lovely surprise to make amends for their wrongful feeding of his pigs. They would transform the pigs, all pink ones, into the black spotted creatures Job had admired. Job hit the roof when he viewed the result. His tarred pigs looked very peculiar. Fortunately the twins had allowed the pigs to retain their pink faces but, all the same, Job had to call in the vet for advice on cleaning. The vet decided that the twins were misguided and not malicious, so he took it upon himself to give them lessons in animal care and they had some exciting trips with the vet round the lovely Dorsetshire countryside. He drove a pony and trap and sometimes allowed the twins to take over the reins. Unfortunately he had neglected to talk to the twins about insect behaviour. One day they discovered a wasp’s nest and poked it about with a stick.
Two yelling and badly stung boys went dashing through the village, followed by a swarm of angry wasps. Children and adults emerged from cottages en route and followed at a safe distance. Sarah and Job had already been alerted by a fleet-footed bearer of the bad tidings. The copper fire was blazing in the outside wash-house and, when the boys reached the safe haven of home, the long, zinc bath was filled with hot soda water and the boys, stripped of their clothing, were plunged in. Eager hands holding scuppers ladled the almost boiling water over the twins, whose yells had now turned into groans. They were exceedingly sorry for themselves. Through the open wash-house door gazed open-mouthed children and adults proffering various soothing remedies for after the bath, while some old men seemed to find the situation highly amusing. ‘Yon lads’ll not poke thick theer wopses nest agen in t’urry, ’snow.’
But life in the country for the twins was not all disaster. It was a time of learning for them. Ade said there was no need for her or Benny to have to answer awkward questions as to birth, etc. – indeed, they were able to enlighten her on one or two things. She learnt why sheep sometimes have a red mark painted on their backs, how animals are mated and born. The twins spent whole days out with the village boys, engaging in such doubtful delights as boiling birds’ eggs in cans, or baking a hedgehog in clay, and they were such good gleaners that they left Sarah a good store of corn for her chickens. Sarah and Job would have been happy for the boys to stay for ever, but Ade said, ‘What would Benny and I have done without our boys, Dolly?’
Ade was telling us about Job one day. ‘He’s an absolute giant of a man, Dolly.’ ‘I once stood next to Primo Carnera,’ remarked Chas. ‘Next to, or up to?’ I enquired facetiously. Chas ignored my flippancy, which I thought was wit at its most brilliant, and I was glad that Ade at least showed her appreciation of me by laughing. ‘In Fleet Street,’ went on Chas. Sorry for my dig at him I asked, ‘What did you feel?’ ‘He was getting out of a taxi.’ ‘Oh, but what did you feel about being so close to him?’ ‘He was going into a newspaper office.’ ‘But you must have been surprised at his enormous size, how did you feel about it?’ At long last a now belligerent Chas yelled at me, ‘I didn’t feel anything.’ ‘You were lucky,’ said Ade. ‘If you two ladies wish to continue nattering and giggling, would you mind removing your-selves from the bacon machine? I have a large order to execute.’ ‘We’d better move, Ade, otherwise he’ll get a little behind with his deliveries.’ She went off laughing while I went to serve an aggrieved-looking woman. ‘I don’t know what you and that Mrs find to laugh about,’ remarked the customer.
‘The trouble with Dorothy,’ confided Chas to Benny and Ade, ‘is that it is impossible to pass the slightest remark to her without her wanting a historical discussion on it. What did he say and then what did you say, what was she wearing, what were you thinking, et cetera, et cetera.’ This was where he and I differed. If I made an interesting statement and he replied, ‘How nice for you,’ or ‘Fancy that,’ I would have felt somewhat neglected, sure that he wasn’t listening because he wasn’t interested. I told Ade I thought men lived their lives as though the
y were painting a straight line which faded with the years, so that, looking back, they couldn’t remember where it had been, whereas women kept their memories in a tight roll, protected for all time, so that they could unravel it when they felt the need to do so. Ade looked very sad. ‘You do talk lovely sometimes, Dolly. I always mean to tell the girls at work some of the things you say, but what with the noise of the machines and the rush and tear of the factory, I forget a lot of it. In any case, the girls would get you all wrong, they’d think I was friends with a nut case.’
I supposed I was a ‘nut case’, really, for all the time I was serving I was two people: one the polite, cheerful, nothing-is-too-much-trouble grocer’s lady, the other fantasising the days away, the heroine at times of disaster, the ravishing creature at the hunt ball, the sexiest lovely chased by all the most desirable men, a famous poetess, the bluest blue stocking of all the Girton girls.
Chas was forever trying to get me to say, ‘Is there any-thing you have forgotten, madam, such as...’ after I had served a customer. He always did this and often his ladies said, ‘Oh, thanks for reminding me, Charlie, that’s the very thing I came in for.’ But I hated to do it, it seemed like touting to me. I sometimes did it if his eagle eye was upon me but, coming back from my dream world, the very thing I enquired if they had forgotten was one of the articles I had just served them with. For some strange reason I could only ever think to ask, ‘Have you forgotten your toilet rolls?’
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