Dolly's Mixture

by Dorothy Scannell

  The gossip went on and on and Chloe and Ed returned no more to the district. I did not say ‘I told you so’ to the sad salesmen who called on us with their tales of woe. When the ghastly thing happened I was suddenly ashamed of my previous suspicions of the missing pair. Chas nearly choked when I suggested that their going coincided with an amnesty declared by the U.S. for soldiers who had not returned after the war. He closed the sitting-room door, looked furtively round in a Jimmy James manner and said in a hoarse and frightened whisper, Tor God’s sake, Dorothy, do be careful what you say, please, for my sake.’ ‘Your Charlie’s an innocent boy scout,’ stated Ade. ‘I could have told you them two were bleeding crooks, it stuck out a mile. I wouldn’t have touched their shop with a barge pole, and all them people who trusted them want their brains tested.’ Ade wished she had been with me to witness their departure, for she said she would have called out, ‘And a soldier’s farewell to you.’

  Chapter 10

  Animal Crackers

  Until I went to North London I had been nervous of strange dogs, particularly large ones. Here, through customers and friends, I came to know many lovely specimens of the larger canine breeds and, once warily introduced, I became interested, amused, and even fond of some of them.

  One of our customers owned two Great Danes, magnificent creatures. Royally they would stand outside our shop, their eyes glued on their master within. I was amazed to learn that each Great Dane possessed his own individual, three-foot, interior-sprung mattress to sleep on.

  Marjorie’s large animal was a brown, rough-haired mongrel. He had been named after a brand of tobacco, Bruno, and I believe they came by him by accident, having no intention at the time of acquiring a pet. He was brought into their shop one day as being ‘surplus to requirements’, and Marjorie, her husband Alfred and son Richard, fell in love with the cuddly puppy. He grew into a very large dog and, although a mongrel, was always a perfect gentleman.

  One of our customers went through a depressing period after the last of her three children left home to get married, and to cheer her up her husband brought home a beautiful spaniel puppy. On this she lavished all her maternal feelings. The puppy, however, proved more demanding than any of her children had been. He possessed immense capacities for expressing himself by howling and refused to sleep peacefully anywhere except in the master bedroom. This would have been acceptable for the sake of a quiet night for themselves and the neighbours, but he still would not quieten down unless his mistress held one of his paws. He lay on the carpet while she dangled an arm out of bed. Woe betide her if she dozed off and let go of his paw. She told me her arm went dead in the night and was positively frozen in the winter. In the end, as Master Puppy did not improve with age, Mr and Mrs obtained sleeping-tablets, not for the strong-willed insomniac spaniel but for them-selves.

  Another customer of ours, a dear old man, a widower, was inseparable from his large, black labrador. One Saturday afternoon, however, the widower came alone into our shop. ‘Where is Blackie?’ I asked, hoping that the dog was not ill or, worse, lost. ‘Oh, it’s impossible to drag him away from the television when there’s a football match on,’ he explained.

  A beautiful poodle puppy entered the lives of a charming family – mother, father and daughter. It was a present from the parents to the daughter and she adored the dog. Alas, he did not stay as sweet as he was when they first had him. No toy dog he, for he became one of those large, magnificent poodles. I remember my father telling me that the poodle was originally the true hunting dog. This chap was a member of that indomitable breed. He could not bear to be parted from any member of the family and eventually refused to let them leave for work in the morning.

  In the end the family hit upon a clever plan to escape from their beloved pet, although the manner of their going was, to say the least of it, unorthodox. On retiring, father would take into the bedroom sandwiches and a thermos. In the morning he would leave for work by climbing from the bedroom window. Mother and daughter would rise normally and go about their duties until the time came for their departure. There was only one thing their pet hated more than their leaving and that was the telephone. Whenever it rang he would tear across the room to attack it. On his way to work, therefore, father would telephone his house and, while the dog was attacking the telephone, mother and daughter managed a hasty exit.

  Although Chas said any dog we had would be thoroughly spoilt by us, and did I realise the extra work such a pet would entail, I still thought I should ask William if he would like to have a dog. He said he would love to have one, but only if he could have a long-haired, shaggy animal. At my surprise he said it would be useful for entertaining, for people could wipe their sticky fingers and cutlery, etc. on the dog’s long fur. When I said ‘Ugh! William!’ he laughed and informed me that this was the origin of the shaggy-dog story. A Victorian hostess worried by the complaints of her guests (sticky fingers and cutlery) actually bought a shaggy dog and trained it to walk among the guests at dinner time for this very purpose.

  William was, however, very fond of our shop cats which we had inherited from the old accountant. We had two originally. Min, the mum, was the tiniest adult cat I had seen, a cat with the soul of a tigress. Bob, her son, was an enormous fellow, castrated, slow, lazy, happy to spend his days on the window-sill outside, where he basked in the sun and purred at the many strokings and pats he received. Chas remarked, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cat walk so slowly as Bob does. I don’t think anything would ever make him move.’ He was to regret those words.

  One day we were waiting for the electrician, as the cellar lights had fused. Bob was on the window-sill, and across the road was a small child holding a large Alsatian dog on a lead. Suddenly this dog sighted Bob and swooped across the road to our shop. I fled upstairs just as lightning entered into Bob’s soul and he shot down to the cellar. Chas was transfixed by Bob’s speed as the Alsatian dog shot into the shop. By now I was in the bathroom and, as I opened the door a chink, up the stairs came the mad, barking dog. I pushed the door to as the dog tried to get in. I screamed down to Chas; he couldn’t hear me with the bathroom door closed, he hadn’t seen the going of Dolly, and I was furious he hadn’t come to rescue me. Then I heard dreadful noises from downstairs, crashing of bottles and cases, yells, and I thought the dog was attacking Chas. I crept half way down the stairs as the dog came up from the cellar. I yelled at it, ‘Get off, get off.’ Fortunately the garden door was open and the dog tore out into the garden. I slammed the door, bolted it and went in search of Chas. He was sitting on the floor nursing Bob. There was blood on Chas’s hands but this had been caused by Bob scratching in a panic. In the dark cellar Chas had somehow rescued Bob and had managed to scare off the dog. ‘I thought you would have come upstairs to rescue me,’ I said reproachfully. ‘Do you know,’ said Chas wonderingly, ‘it never occurred to me!’

  Min’s daughter, Maudie, was also one of our brood. Not yet old enough to be a mother, she was very maternal. She once discovered on a bombed site a bag of kittens which some cruel person had thrown there. The poor little things were still in the eyes-closed stage and she rescued them one by one and brought them home, depositing them in an empty box in the cellar. She got frantic trying to suckle them and I never heard a cat purr so loudly. Of course they were too young to be hand fed and we had to take them to the vet to be put down.

  Chas, too, became very attached to the shop cats. He would talk away to them in the tone a mother uses to a young baby as he prepared their food and I was forever taken back in my mind to the days of our feathered friends at Forest Gate and my father’s quizzical and sceptical look as Chas talked to his birds. If my father doubted my husband’s manliness because of his bird talk, I wondered what he would think of Chas’s cat chats. Chas would make very sure that all the cats were safely in at night and his falsetto wailing for Min and Maudie was something to hear – or not to hear, depending upon one’s mood and activities at the time. I was sure his cat-calls could
be heard streets away – indeed, one man said it was like the commencement of a ‘screaming’ opera.

  Chas was broken-hearted, therefore, when tiny Min died out of doors one cold winter’s night many years later. He had searched fruitlessly for her; it was the first time she had not appeared at his call and in the morning he found her lying beside the bush where one of her sons had been buried. It was difficult for me to express my sorrow. If I’d tried to cheer him up by saying, ‘Don’t upset yourself, it was only a cat,’ he would have accused me of not liking animals. Min was just a cat, but we all missed her.

  My father, Walter Chegwidden, the Poplar plumber, would have thought that Chas’s love for the shop cats denoted a soft, unmanly streak in my husband’s character. He might even have opined, ‘Like father, like son,’ not really approving of my pa-in-law’s absence of male friends and his gentle devotion to his wife and family; except that on the subject of cats my father was unusually silent, fearing that his mention of these feline creatures would bring forth from mother reminiscences of the time when my father was callously cruel to one of these, God’s creatures. Remembering that day, however, I was inclined to blame my mother, for it was she, on that occasion, who drove my father to the point of no return.

  My mother’s passion and pride in life was her window-box, always bright with plants and flowers. It wasn’t in the normal position, on a window-sill, but ran the whole length of the top of the area wall, bordering the basement steps of our house in Poplar. Father had made this box for Mother; not that he had a yearning for an oasis of beauty in that East London district. He seemed never to notice the drabness of the surroundings, although our house did contain one specimen of Father’s contribution to the world of art. An old army colleague of my father’s had painted a picture for him. My father was proud of this and it had pride of place on the wall in our parlour. When we children puzzled as to what the picture depicted, my father would say proudly, ‘It’s futuristic,’ but, once having hung it, I never remember seeing him gaze at it in admiration at any time. With its hanging, it seemed to me, his stake in the world of colour and beauty was publicly announced and his conscience appeased. I couldn’t understand anyone wanting such a picture, for it was nothing like the pictures I was used to and which I could understand, such as ‘The Stag at Bay’, ‘The Reapers’, ‘When did you last see your father?’ etc. Father’s soul-mate had squeezed all the tubes of oil paint he possessed on to the background, allowed them to run together, and had then varnished the object. I thought of it as ‘The Splurge’. Father said beauty was in the eye of the beholder and each person would see in the mosaic what he wanted to see. The Chegwiddens, including Father, all stopped looking.

  But we all loved Mother’s window-box flowers, for they were a curtain between us and the outside, flowerless world. In a nearby street of terraced houses lived the Gibbs family, friends of the Chegwidden children. Jackie Gibbs was my brother Cecil’s bosom pal. Jackie possessed a beloved pet, a male cat. This cat, too, loved Mother’s flowers and every day without fail took a constitutional from his house to ours for the sole purpose of ‘watering’ Mother’s flowers and plants in the window-box. These daily visits infuriated Mother. When she was in the kitchen her eyes constantly strayed upwards to gaze on the objects of her pride and joy. Father and Dolly always left the world when reading, and as Mother sighted the arrival of Jackie’s cat her sudden and loud yells made Father and me nearly jump out of our skins. Perhaps Father was riding possee and about to come upon the wicked sharp-shooter, or he was the sheriff, legs astride, hand on gun, facing the deadly enemy, or I was on the school platform just about to be decorated by the Important Personage for a deed out of this world, ‘Dolly, heroine of the fourth’, when our worlds were shattered by Mother’s shouts and dash to the basement door to stop the unwelcome visitor commencing, or completing, the dirty deed he had come so far to achieve. Mother’s interruptions also stirred in Father and me feelings of guilt that we were happy idling while she was working non-stop. It was like being woken up from a lovely dream too soon and I found it extremely difficult to get back into the world of books and fantasy.

  In desperation Father obtained a catapult, intending to curtail once and for all the cat’s unwelcome visits. Mother remonstrated about this because she thought her yells and fist-waving quite sufficient a deterrent. Secretly, she also thought that Father and I wasted too much time reading, it was a sort of laziness, an opting out of life. So she was pleased that her untimely interruptions worried creatures other than the marauding animal. However, the great day came when Father, who now read with the dreaded weapon by his side, was able to dismiss the cat from our lives and Mother’s window-box for ever. Mother was preparing lunch one Saturday; other members of the family were due at any moment. As usual Father and Dolly were reading. It was a warm summer’s day and the basement door was open. A shadow fell across the room. The cat had arrived to attend to the flowers. It gazed into the room and saw Dolly and Dad there. They never shouted at him, there was nothing to fear here. He actually stared at my father as my father took aim, slowly and professionally, with the catapult and small, round stone. I wanted to get up and shoo the cat away, although I thought my father just wanted to hit the window-box. Except for his wonderful batting average I had not heard he had any other sporting prowess. Suddenly, wham! The missile shot through the open door, hitting the cat between the eyes. Its blood-curdling scream turned my blood to water as Mother came tearing into the room, crying, ‘Oh Walter, what have you done?’ The cat shot up into the air and disappeared. We assumed he was lying dead on the other side of the window-box.

  Mother and I ran up the basement steps. There was no cat to be seen. What had happened to it? Mother imparted the news to Father, who first looked relieved, then, suddenly, was all bravado. ‘Well, he’ll not come visiting again, I’ll wager.’ The family were sitting down to lunch when down the steps fell a frantic Cecil. He was so distraught and excited that his words seem to choke him, but at last he shouted, ‘Someone’s shot Jackie Gibbs’ cat and it’s gone cross-eyed.’ Silence from Father, Mother and Dolly, the three participants in the drama. Laughter from the rest of the family, unbelieving of Cecil. Cecil, annoyed and disappointed at the reception of his world-shattering announcement, went on, ‘If Jackie Gibbs’ father ever finds out who did it to his cat, that person will know what for, that person will never live to shoot another cat.’ This news seemed to please Mother in some way, while Father’s collar seemed to have become rather tight, and as Cecil, now having possession of the floor, continued sadly, ‘Oh, mum,’ whoever could do such a wicked thing to a little cat? Why, he must be a murderer!’ Father pushed his meal away, saying to Mother, ‘I’m not really hungry, warm it up for my tea,’ and left the room.

  For the next few weeks my father made a detour, avoiding Jackie’s house, when he went to his club, and when a little kitten took refuge in our kitchen at the height of a storm he suggested we take it in permanently and give it a home. He placed a regular order with the cat’s-meat man and perhaps in this way assuaged his conscience.

  Chapter 11

  Sinking Feelings

  The downward trend in my life’s graph began slowly, when easier times were just around the corner. Susan had decided to leave school now that she was sixteen, much to the disappointment of her teachers and more than much to my distress. For her, university entrance would be a simple matter, according to the powers that be, and I felt a radiant excitement thinking of my daughter in the halls of learning. She was outstanding in Latin and English having been awarded the special memorial prize for the latter. Susan gave her reason for leaving as, ‘Exams terrify me and make me physically ill.’ I dismissed this reason as nonsense, for she did so well in examinations. I knew I was fighting a losing battle to try to persuade her to change her mind; for one thing, Chas was not an ally for me. He held the view that our daughter was old enough and wise enough to choose her own way in life.

  As usual I thought that Dolly
knew best, and I battled on, each day trying to find new and persuasive arguments. All this amused William and he became the recipient of the whole family’s annoyance, for he was the only happy member of the family at that time. At last Susan, at the end of her tether, said, ‘Oh, mum, do shut up,’ and it was at this point I knew I had lost the battle. With dignity I said, ‘Very well then, Susan, I will say no more, except that, unless you take yourself to task, you will lose all you value.’ Susan, relieved that the matter was settled, walked away. Then I realised I hadn’t presented her with all the excellent reasons as to why she should go on, and I followed her with a fresh onslaught. At this William became helpless with laughter, and poor Susan, frantic that it was all going to begin again, gave him a mighty thump. Anyway, I realised I was a bad loser. Susan began work in a City office and seemed happy with her lot. For my part I wished there were no such things as written examinations.

  Then Chas became ill. He had a heavy cold which needed a few days in bed, but we were so busy he struggled on. The cold worsened, he had a bad bout of ’flu, and I coped, somehow, in the shop. Unfortunately Chas seemed unable to shake off his illness and one day had a slight haemorrhage which frightened him. He went to hospital for tests and I was alarmed to hear from a customer, who was in the same hospital queue with Chas, that my husband had been selected for attention out of turn because of his ghastly appearance. Therefore I was delighted when the tests proved negative. It was assumed he would gradually recover from his severe bout of ’flu. Probably he would have done, given an ordinary job and a wife able to nurse him but, worried about me, he struggled downstairs to take over again, finally retiring upstairs looking much worse. It was obvious he would need care and attention and Susan decided, or perhaps I did, that she should leave her job and look after Chas. I thought she did very well, but it was difficult for both of them. She, only a girl, had no experience of post-’flu depression and her taking care of her dad meant to her getting him dainty meals, making the flat look nice; it didn’t include ‘tea and sympathy’, which Chas needed to take his mind off his wife downstairs. He was frantic with worry and guilt about me, so that each day there was no improvement in his health.