Dolly's Mixture

by Dorothy Scannell

  The wet evenings we spent in the little bar where the owner was a delighted barman. He had installed a fruit machine, although there was hardly any room. It took sixpences and people poured money in, simply out of boredom. Every morning the owner would empty the machine. We never saw anyone win. On our last evening there a honeymoon couple came to life again. They were, obviously, the owner’s favourite guests, not a bit interested in food, rapturously in love. I envied them their seventh heaven; I couldn’t imagine my darling letting food be of no interest to him for two whole weeks! The bridegroom bought drinks for all while the bride confided in me. No, not the lurid details of their nights-to-remember, but other very interesting matters. The fruit machine had been pronounced out of order on the day of their arrival and the service mechanic had hung about its neck the appropriate sign, informing the owner that a new machine would arrive in three weeks’ time! The owner had promptly removed the sign after the mechanic’s departure. He had also acquired the hotel after the organisation had awarded their accolade. Many of the other guests had cut short their holidays, transferring to other hotels, but, as we only had barely a week, we stuck it out.

  Possibly to make amends, or to prove that really he was a munificent man, the hotel owner decided to celebrate our departure with a special dish. Dry Madras curry. I was the lucky one that evening, for, braving the owner’s displeasure, I stated that I detested curry. He announced his Blue Riband dish to all the guests who sat with a warm glow of anticipation at the thought of this special treat. It arrived, and hysteria spread from our table to the whole of the dining-room. One main dish was placed on each table, a mysterious concoction of dried rice and some brown ‘material’, and given pride of place in the middle was a small bowl of curry powder.

  In the bar that evening the owner remarked that he wondered sometimes why he bothered, for the majority of people didn’t appreciate fine dishes. His customers apparently were gourmands and not gourmets. He was an awful man and certainly profited out of the Englishman’s natural trait, reluctance to make a scene, or even complain.

  Alfred has never forgotten the night in the bar when (the owner appearing to be in a kindly mood) he asked if we could possibly have some sandwiches. The owner shouted, ‘Good God, haven’t you had enough to eat?’ Then he continued to rave angrily that we were most inconsiderate. While we were on holiday, he worked from morn till night, up early, finishing late in the bar. Alfred stood his ground well, I thought, at this tirade, and said he was only asking if it was possible to purchase sandwiches, as dinner had been early and we were all used to a snack at bedtime. The word ‘purchase’ mollified the owner and he said he would make an exception and get us something. Of course, everyone in the bar then wished to get on this sandwich wagon and while the owner was away we had a sort of guessing game as to what sandwiches he would return with, for he had not given us a choice of fillings. Crab? Ham? Tongue? – and then our host returned. He was carrying a plate of Marie biscuits which worked out at two apiece. ‘You will need extra drinks with the food,’ said the owner. Alcoholic, of course!

  Chapter 15

  Change of Heart

  Susan was in love. I knew it before she did. I knew before she ever spoke about it. I was happy for her and I was sad for her. Suppose her love was not returned? Anguish for her. If her love was returned, what would happen about the young man who already was sure he would marry Susan? That romance had started through school dances. A boy and girl affair. Now she had fallen out of love, if, I wondered, she’d ever really been in love. I had always thought it a calm affair. A dependable young man, a quiet girl, almost like brother and sister, or peaceful friends. He would be the sort of husband never to leave her side; he would help with the chores, do the shopping, clean the windows. It was like the goal my mother wished for me, ‘getting a good dependable job with a pension at the end of it’.

  It was the life many parents wished for their children, a normal life; but Susan, to my mind, had had no girlhood. She had been by my side during Chas’s long illness. Her boyfriend had been away for two years, abroad on national service. It was no life for her, doing the cooking and helping with the housework. She did it willingly, but I wondered if, in the years to come, a peaceful marriage might not turn into a boring marriage. At the moment it was all work and no play for her. She wrote letters to the national service boy and sometimes visited friends from her school days.

  Then came the day when I knew her love was returned. She went out at weekends and came home radiant. Her letters to her boyfriend abroad became difficult for her to write and she would take all evening over them. She went about in a happy, almost dream-like state, content, it seemed, to let events look after themselves. But I knew an explosion was ahead, hurt for the boy in foreign climes, perhaps even more hurt for his parents, for Chas and I had become great friends with them.

  They were a charming couple, the boyfriend their only, much adored son. They loved Susan, they liked us, she would be an ideal daughter-in-law, life was filled with happiness for them, their son was safe for life. They had both been towers of strength to us when Chas was ill, helping in the shop and the home. They were sure, at their first meeting with me, that I was an incompetent housewife, and the ma-in-law to be took charge of me, for which I was much relieved. The first time we met them they came to dinner. Anxious to give them a marvellous meal, yet rushed off my feet in the shop, I had prepared pork chops, braised onions and roast potatoes, which I put in my marvellous, new ‘pre-set’ oven. The meal would shut itself off at the appropriate time. The frozen vegetables would take only a few minutes after the shop was closed. My pièce de résistance was a fabulous trifle, with sherry, fruit, nuts, cherries and thick, whipped cream. It looked so professional I was proud of it. The boy’s parents arrived just before the shop closed and the sweet mum said she would attend to the meal, put on the vegetables and make the gravy. Minutes later, she arrived back in the shop. The oven was empty, what could have happened?

  I closed the shop in a daze and went upstairs to search for the pork chops. Disbelievingly I checked the oven. It was hot and empty. Susan arrived. ‘What about the trifle, then, mum, is that all right?’ I opened the fridge. No trifle. But we found the pork chops, all cold and uncooked, with the potatoes and onions. ‘Don’t worry,’ said the calm new mum, ‘I’ll fry them, you look for the trifle.’ We eventually found this in the bathroom. ‘Put it in the fridge, it’ll be all right, the jelly has not even melted,’ said my new organiser. This was my first meeting with the boyfriend’s parents, but it certainly broke the ice. An hour later we sat down to our meal. ‘I am looking forward to that delicious trifle,’ said the kindly new dad, adding, ‘Shall I get it from the fridge?’ He nearly dropped it as he lifted it out. ‘Cor,’ he said, ‘I bet this is lovely and rich, it weighs a ton.’ ‘Well, I was a bit extravagant with it,’ I replied modestly, a revived Fanny Craddock.

  The spoon bent as I tried to serve the trifle. ‘Let me try,’ said my lady guest. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘how many jellies did you use, dear? Only one is necessary.’ ‘I only used one,’ I said indignantly; but some evil spirit must have been hovering o’er me whilst I perfected my creation. The trifle was as solid as concrete and to this day I do not know how it happened.

  After the first fiasco, I wasn’t looking forward to meeting Susan’s true love and his relations. The fact that her beloved was a solicitor worried me no end, and my inferiority complex regarding people from another walk of life gave me anxious moments. I mentioned this to Marjorie. ‘Oh, I know him,’ said Marjorie brightly, and almost reverently (which didn’t help my ego). ‘He is a regular customer of ours.’ (This made him all the more acceptable in her eyes, I supposed.) Then she added, ‘I always call him sir!’ Oh God, how could I entertain someone my sister felt she had to address as ‘sir’? ‘What does he buy?’ I asked her, hoping to find some comfort from his daily purchases. ‘Oh,’ said Marjorie, ‘he only ever buys Fruitella toffees, he’s our best customer for them.�
� ‘Always strawberry flavour,’ she added.

  ‘Sir’, apparently, lived with his widowed mother, so that let me out from meeting a father as well, and he was very thoughtful, for, when I invited mother and son to Sunday tea for our first meeting, he suggested they came after tea, in the evening, as we were so busy in the shop and Sunday was our only free day. The great day came. What would he think of our place? I nagged William and made Chas impatient, while Susan worried not at all about his or our reception of each other, or the look of her home.

  When the doorbell rang that Sunday evening my face fixed into a paralytic smile. Susan tore down to open the door and chatelaine-like I stood at the top of the stairs with my ‘How d’ye do, charmed to meet you,’ speech all rehearsed. Why I ever worried, I do not know. Harry, Susan’s true love, was a down to earth young man. As my mother would have proudly said, ‘There’s no “side” to him,’ and within minutes it was as though we had known his mother for years. She was tall and slim with a quiet voice and a natural manner, and when during the evening I discovered she had, like myself, been a member of a very large family, we had a delightful time, for her own had been like ‘the Cheggies’ and we swopped family anecdotes and were young together again.

  Harry’s mother had had a hard life, for her husband had died when Harry was only three months old, and she had been forced to return to work to support her two sons, Harry being the younger. I admired her for the way she had faced up to things and her modesty in not boasting about her two successful sons. Harry loved his grandparents, who were both great characters, and he had spent many happy childhood hours with his mother’s large family of brothers and sisters, who had made up in no small measure for his own lack of a father. His grandfather, one of the old school, was a butcher. He had a stall in the market and was a real martinet with his customers. Just like old Mr Coppin, the butcher of my childhood, Joe Watts, Harry’s grandfather, would crash his chopper down within inches of customers’ poking fingers. He felt a great antipathy for the little Jewish man on the next stall to his, and was permanently frustrated because the little Jewish man would just not allow himself to be ‘insulted’. He liked Joe Watts, his wife and children, and the more he admired them, the more irritable Joe became. ‘Why, you’re nothing but a ruddy toe rag,’ he’d say in temper to his ‘colleague’. This would cause the little Jewish stall-holder to fall about in hysterics and in gutteral tones he’d say, ‘Now, now, now then, Mr Watts, you don’t mean this, you know you don’t. You couldn’t mean that of your friend, I know you’re only pretending.’ It was Joe’s aim in life to convince his ‘friend’ of his true feelings. Joe never realised this aim and the family were amused when, at Joe’s funeral, a wreath was sent by the little Jewish man, ‘From Joe’s greatest friend for so many years, working happily side by side.’

  Harry’s grandmother, too, was a great character. Although she’d had many children, only seven survived, but she faced life, like my mother, with an indomitable spirit. She was nicknamed ‘The Old Dutch’ by the children and grandchildren, and she was a far more practical lady than my mother had been. She had always desired a beautiful and fashionable home and, even though her husband had a busy business, in common with many women in those days she received only a small part of the proceeds, for he was a ‘man’s man’ and the money disappeared more outside the home than in. Women accepted this and made do on what they did get. As I used to watch with watering mouth while my father ate his toasted cheese, so Harry’s mother would watch while her father ate his finnan haddock. He would always give the children the ‘ears’ of the haddock.

  The Old Dutch would gaze at magazines displaying beautiful rooms, perhaps late at night, when she had a few moments peace when all her family were asleep. Suddenly, however late the hour, the mood would take her and, carried away by the advertisements, she would stay up all night wallpapering. In the morning the family would come down to find a most peculiar room, for by the end of the night, when she was exhausted by her marathon efforts, the paper tended to get uneven, unmatched and strangely crooked. But the Old Dutch was always extremely pleased and proud of her own work.

  Her family did well in life and she was proud of her clever grandchildren. She was always very proud, too, of her ‘love letter’ from Joe, although it was hard to imagine him as a romantic lover. But when people spoke of keeping love letters she would admit that she had kept hers. It was a letter she had received from her husband while he had been in hospital. It contained one terse line of writing, and ended, ‘Love, Joe Watts,’ perhaps the first time he had mentioned or written the word. It was, therefore, her love letter.

  As we were proud of my father’s slender feet, so Joe’s wife would say with pride, ‘My husband has small hands and feet, you know, and a smooth skin with no hairs on his chest.’ I believe the mothers of my day thought small hands and feet and hairless bodies a sign of breeding in their men, raising them, in some mysterious way, above the working class and endowing them with some shadowy, aristocratic forebear.

  Joe would listen to the fat stock prices and switch off the radio in a rage, his temper rising with the prices. Then he’d switch on again for the news, which would enrage him afresh. He was sure that the country was going to the dogs and considered the modern generation spineless. ‘They want the bombs raining down on them,’ he’d yell. But when war broke out he was always the first one into the Anderson shelter in the garden. He always insisted on a hot drink last thing at night, war or no war. It was a must. The Old Dutch, fearless, would leave the shelter to go to the house to prepare it, but as soon as she was almost through making the cocoa Joe would start beseeching her to come back to the safety of the shelter, telling her she was crazy to go out during a raid.

  Like my father, Joe was intolerant, selfish, and much loved by his wife, children and grandchildren, for he was an amusing character. Joe would have agreed with my father’s reply to my mother’s proud ‘There’s no shame in being poor’ quote, for my father always said, ‘No, the shame is in remaining poor.’

  The Old Dutch was a practical lady with a romantic soul, for she had christened her first born, Harry’s mother, Raine, and one evening when Raine visited me part of my bedroom ceiling collapsed. ‘Do you remember, the ceilings were always collapsing in those old Victorian houses?’ she reminded me, and I told her about the poor East End family I knew. One Christmas time the family had been destitute but, miraculously, a welfare organisation, having heard of their plight, presented them with food for their Christmas dinner. They sat round a well-filled dinner table, content for a moment just to gaze at the beautiful sight. Carried away, the father, a desperate man, acted completely out of character, for religion had played no part in his life. ‘Don’t tell me about yer God, I’ve got a hungry family at home,’ he’d say when a vicar tried to persuade him to send his children to Sunday School. But this Christmas Day he felt stirrings of gratitude at the sight of his dinner table and the eager looks of his children. Perhaps better times were on the way. Was this a sign? To the amazement of his wife and children, and with a sort of hypnotic religious fervour, he said, ‘We’ll say grace.’ They bowed their heads as father thanked the Lord for their wonderful meal to come, adding the hope that this was the first of many such meals. As he finished grace and the family picked up their knives and forks, the kitchen ceiling collapsed in a cloud of plaster, dust and dirt, covering the entire table and transforming the diners into ‘flour men’.

  Chokingly the father screamed, amid the cries and wails of his poor family, ‘That’s what yer get for being bleeding grateful for bloody charity. Don’t ever mention religion to me agin.’ The family hadn’t and wouldn’t dare to, but they knew that, had their father not turned religious, they would at least have wolfed some food.

  Chapter 16

  Mother of the Bride

  Like other mothers before me, I had always intended my daughter’s wedding to be a day to remember. A beautiful bride in white, heavenly music, a reception at an exclusive pl
ace – I had it all arranged in my mind, without, of course, asking the the two most important people, the bride and groom. I could hear ‘The voice that breathed o’er Eden’ while I was slicing the bacon and I hummed it to myself weeks before the great day.

  But Susan had no intention of being a white bride; the Carnival Queen affair had been more than enough for her. She and Harry wanted a quiet wedding. Well, perhaps they were wise, I agreed. A nice, quiet, church wedding? ‘Oh, not in a church, mum, in the Registry Office!’ They were not churchgoers and were of the opinion that they would be making a convenience of the church if they used it only when it suited them. Never mind, there was always the excitement of choosing a new house. ‘No, dear, we prefer to be independent. We will take a flat until we are able to buy a house ourselves.’ Ah, but there was still the reception. ‘We don’t want a formal affair, we’d be happier asking our friends home here.’ Home, here! But what about the outside lavatory? Oh, God, shades of the past. Then Chas threw his spanner into the works, a large one. He wouldn’t close the shop for anything. It was ‘Scannells never close!’ He must keep faith with his customers.

  So the great Thursday dawned. I had no time to go shopping for my outfit and ended up buying a ghastly affair, a mauve woollen suit. Deprived of my dream wedding I had been determined to wear something so elegant and sophisticated that I would be recorded in the photographs for eternity as ‘the fashionable mother of the bride’. As usual, it was the hat which floored me. On important occasions I had thought, slept and eaten hats, but not once had I obtained one which I loved, or, even more important still, one which loved Dolly’s face.