More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  The constant need to ensure they did nothing that might give rise to complaints made domestic life very stressful for my parents. Any storm in a teacup could mean the difference between keeping our leaking roof over our heads and being thrown out on to the street. An incident that occurred when I was eight brought home to me just how potent was their fear of being made homeless. The man next door had a large pigeon coop in his garden and lost a fair number of his birds to the neighbourhood cats. One day he decided enough was enough and erected a high fence of timber-framed chicken wire on top of the existing one, extending its height to ten or twelve feet. It surrounded the entire garden—including the sloping roof of the outside toilet beneath the upstairs kitchen window—giving it the appearance of an incongruously sited tennis court.

  Carrie and Will, always prone to peculiar home improvements and evidently taken by the idea, chose to follow suit. Almost overnight more chicken-wire fencing went up, blocking Tiddles’ route from our kitchen window to the garden. Negotiations immediately began on the cat’s behalf, with my father calling upon his considerable negotiating skills to try to reach an agreement with Carrie and Will while my mother used all her charm on our neighbour. Neither side would budge. They were all determined that their gardens would remain cat-free zones.

  Tiddles suffered, scratching and mewing to go out and trying without success to find a way through the impossibly high fence from the sloping roof of our outside loo. He fretted and caterwauled and soiled both the rooms in which we lived. My animal-loving mother simply couldn’t comprehend how anyone, let alone members of our own family, could do this to our pet. In the end it fell to my father to solve the problem.

  A week later, I learned that my dad had secured a new home for Tiddles with a kind elderly lady on a country farm. There he could spend the remainder of his days with all the space in the world to roam. I was heartbroken to be losing him but I had witnessed his appalling distress and understood there was no other way. My mother put on a brave face but her eyes were red on the morning of his departure. We owned no cat basket for his journey so my dad had decided to improvise with a holdall. Tiddles took one look at it and disappeared under the sofa. I tempted my old tom cat out far enough to grab him by the scruff of his burly neck and stuff him into the bag. He struggled as I zipped it up. My parents looked on as I told Tiddles firmly it was for his own good. Suddenly the cat was quiet. My father took the holdall and quickly left the house. Immediately the front door clicked shut behind him my mother burst into tears, confirming the fear that had been growing in my mind all morning.

  ‘He’s not going to a farm, is he?’

  My mum shook her head. ‘Your dad’s taking him to be put down because people don’t want him in their gardens,’ she said bitterly.

  She began to sob and I joined in, wracked with guilt over the part I had played in sending Tiddles to his death. So much for happy endings.

  After that, my mother refused ever again to speak to the man next door, which was hardly fair since Tiddles’s fate had in truth been sealed by Carrie and Will. But because of our dependence on their goodwill, she was never able to confront them over the matter. It was another reminder of how little control my parents exercised over their own lives. My mum’s hope was that, one day, the council would eventually rehouse us, she would have some autonomy over her own household and I would have a room to myself. But it became increasingly apparent that we were low priority as far as the council was concerned. I was the only child in the family so, theoretically at least, we were not overcrowded. Until our turn came the only escape for my parents was work by day and the pub or racetrack by night.

  I regularly went dog racing with my dad but my mother rarely joined us. Perhaps she was secretly jealous of my father’s passion, since even on their wedding day, she claimed, he had deserted her at the pub reception to catch the last few races at the Wick.

  As a small child at the track I would be surrounded by men standing on tiptoe, jostling, pushing and jabbing rolled-up racecards in the air, all eyes fixed on six greyhounds tearing round a wide circuit after an electric hare.

  ‘Gertcha, four!’

  ‘Get out there, six!’

  My father would put his strong arm around me, sheltering me from the shoving men but, just like theirs, his gaze would be on the finishing line as he willed his dog towards it. Racing greyhounds had names like Mick the Miller, Prairie Peg or Pigalle Wonder. No Rovers or Fidos here. I would look up at my father, seeing how tall he rose above the other men—a giant with thick, grey, curly hair.

  The second the race ended I would know from the expression on his face whether he had won or lost; whether he was crushed, excited or simply relieved to have held on to some of his money with a place bet. He would tell me the numbers of the winning dogs so that I could check the hundreds of discarded betting slips on the ground to make sure none of them had been thrown away by mistake. I never once came across a winning ticket but it kept me busy while he made his next selection. I would find him at the Tote, asking a lady behind a metal grille for ‘six to win’ then ‘four and six about’. Greyhound betting was complicated, perhaps even to some adults: there were forecast bets, reverse forecasts, quinellas, triellas and accumulators; bets on ‘win’ dogs or dogs to come first or second or in either order.

  My father would take his tickets, put them carefully in his pocket, engulf my small hand in his and sweep me along to the bookies near the track. They stood on boxes, chalking and re-chalking the changing odds on their blackboards, all the while keeping an eagle eye on the Gladstone bags full of cash at their feet. Once my dad had studied the dogs in the enclosure I was allowed to choose one. I knew that head down and tail between the legs were good signs. If we won, we’d make for the track caff for a celebration supper. The latest thing was Russian salad, which consisted of tinned mixed vegetables in warm salad cream. My father was in his element. This was his favourite place in all the world.

  My mum found a different way to relax. After a hard shift at the coffee house she would come home and do the housework, tidying, cleaning and trying to find somewhere to store everything. Clothes went into the sideboard and my school socks hung over dinner plates in a rack on the cooker. It must have been so demoralising for her. When she had finished she would light up her first Rothmans cigarette of the day, her hand trembling uncontrollably until all the stress began to drain out of her. Then she would get herself ready for a night out at the Bridge House: hair teased, combed and lacquered to within an inch of its life, cheekbones rouged, nose powdered, lips painted, comfortable work shoes replaced by stiletto heels. A black patent handbag filled with make-up and tissues and a coat with a real fur collar completed the look. I marvelled at the transformation—to me she was more beautiful than the star of any movie.

  Sometimes we would all go to the Bridge House, where the landlady would allow me to sit on a stool behind the bar with Sandy, the pub dog, perched on my lap. I dipped cheese and onion crisps into glasses of Britvic tomato juice, watching the customers lose their inhibitions along with their sobriety, breaking into song, tears or laughter as the mood took them. At other times, my mother, the night owl, went alone. It was only a five-minute walk but one that involved passing the coal merchant’s dark and menacing forecourt. Late at night, I’d listen for the familiar footsteps, the sound of her heels clicking on the pavement outside, sometimes with a tipsy trip, signalling that all was well.

  My world then was bounded by a handful of landmarks: school, the dog track, the pub and the Rex picture house. But somewhere out there, past Spitalfields and the City, was the West End, where my mother took me twice a year to have my hair cut by the children’s hairdresser at Selfridges. ‘Curly cut,’ she would instruct. ‘Parting on the left.’ I would sit in the elegant salon watching the snowy-white muslin curtains at the windows waft gracefully in the breeze. Afterwards came the scent of eau-de-Cologne as gentle fingers massaged my scalp. Looking back, it’s hard for me to fathom why my mum chose to
splash out on such a treat for me, let alone how she could have afforded it on her wages. Perhaps she just wanted one luxury for her child. Perhaps, for half an hour twice a year, it was a treat for her, too, to allow herself to imagine she shared the lifestyle of people who had their hair cut at Selfridges as a matter of course.

  Apart from such outings, the West End remained as much of a mystery to me as Venice and the Bridge of Sighs in The Book of Knowledge. Then, one evening at dusk, I saw Great Uncle Will striding down our street dressed in a stunning military-style costume: epaulettes perched on each shoulder, gold braiding across his chest. I thought he must have joined the cavalry. The real source of this splendid uniform turned out to be even more glamorous. He had been for a job interview and was now a newly appointed commissionaire at the London Palladium. Off he would go each evening, returning in the early hours of the morning with tales of having opened a door for Frank Sinatra or Marlene Dietrich. I realised now that the West End was within reach. Somewhere at the top of the road, a number 8 bus could take you out of the East End and into a wonderful world full of stars and endless possibilities.

  Chapter Three

  By Hope, By Work, By Faith

  I am nine years old and my teacher at George Lansbury primary school is a woman called Joyce LeWars. She is from Jamaica and walks with her head held high, proud, strutting—her body so curvy it seems to have been drawn from a series of circles. I creep up behind her when she’s climbing stairs and hear her humming a strange but cheerful tune. I wish I could join in. She’s the happiest person I know.

  Before Mrs LeWars, primary school had been a strict and forbidding place revolving around the three Rs and the slipper. Our teachers had all been middle-aged men in tweed jackets, and women who wore milk-bottlebottom glasses. And before Mrs LeWars, I had only seen one other black person in my life: a tall stranger wearing a Homburg hat and white suit, baggy trousers flapping wide in the breeze as he strode through Roman Road market. No one knew where he had come from or where he was going, but all heads had turned—adults fearful, children fascinated.

  Mrs LeWars inspired the same fascination. She managed her class with just the right mixture of authority and praise and was everyone’s mum, encouraging us all in equal measure. We spent long, hot summer afternoons writing essays and stories which she would take home for her own five children to read. They joined us one summer at a school camp in the countryside—two dozen East End kids suddenly transplanted to rural Surrey to tramp around potteries and old churches. More accustomed to playing in the wartime bombsites that still existed in London in the early 1960s, we now found ourselves let loose on a more natural landscape. We screamed as we galloped like runaway horses down the Devil’s Punchbowl—an impressively deep, dry valley sculpted by water long ago, we were told. The next day someone complained of a sore throat, brought on not by screaming, it was discovered, but by a raging virus. Those who didn’t end up in sick bay took it home with them and suffered there.

  Still, we also took home memories of a new experience. It was 1963 and our lives seemed to be changing as though the planet itself was turning in a different way. From the dodgem cars and waltzers in the fairground at Victoria Park a new music was sounding. It, too, had a different beat—created not by lush orchestral strings but picked out on guitars and rough harmonicas —a Mersey beat. In the wider world that year was notable for a series of salacious scandals, including the sensational divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. Every evening during the television news I would hear my parents complaining in hushed tones about upperclass depravity or ministerial falls from grace. Something called ‘the Profumo affair’ was on everyone’s lips. John Profumo, a respected Tory cabinet minister with a film-star wife, had been forced to resign after being caught in a web of intrigue involving call-girls and a Russian spy. The details went over my head but there seemed to be a general feeling in the air that the establishment was rocking on its heels and an old, hidebound way of life was being overturned.

  At school a new wave of forward-thinking and politically motivated teachers had been spearheaded by the arrival of a young, innovative headmaster, Mr Kent, who, at the end of that year, led a special assembly to mourn the death of American President Kennedy, giving a memorable speech celebrating democracy and equality.

  Soon another member of staff appeared, wearing long hair and a black PVC raincoat. Mr Rogers had been trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and had come to teach us ‘acting’. With him came a lot of big wooden boxes, open on one side, which could be fitted together in various combinations of shape and size to form a stage. Instead of whacking us with a slipper, he prompted us to explore it. We leaped on to it, pretending to be all manner of things—trees, birds, angry, sorry, sad.

  One afternoon Mr Rogers took four of us to one side and introduced us to Shakespeare. Christine Bolton, Pat Pask, Sharon Warren and I were then ten years old, but after a few weeks’ coaching we were also word-perfect for the Witches’ scenes in Macbeth. A month later we were confidently applying panstick make-up, cloaks, wigs and talons and stepping out on to the stage at Aldgate’s Toynbee Theatre, waiting for the curtains to open and the lights to go up.

  John Profumo, the disgraced government minister, was atoning for his sins by cleaning toilets in the same building. Perhaps he even watched the Shakespeare Festival in which we played our parts.

  Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble…

  As Hecate I had a thirty-five line speech but after Mr Rogers’s expert coaching, I didn’t forget a word. The rest of our class, together with proud teachers and parents, boomed applause from the stalls.

  On the Central Line train home to Mile End, my father looked on as my classmates carried my broomstick for me. He smiled across at me, full of pride, having had no idea we had even been rehearsing, let alone would be performing in a proper theatre. A few weeks later, coming home with my dad from the Bridge House one evening, my mother flung her patent leather handbag on the sofa.

  ‘Do you have to keep going on?’ she snapped. ‘People go out for a quiet drink—they don’t want to keep hearing about “my kid this and my kid that”.’

  My father had been bragging again, boring pub regulars not just with his account of the theatre production but with news that I had now passed the Eleven-Plus, one of only two girls in my class to do so.

  This was the exam that would separate me from the friends I had grown up with, scattering us in different directions. After the summer holidays I would be moving on to the Central Foundation School for Girls in Spital Square, on the edge of the City. My friends would be attending secondary moderns where, in 1964, academic subjects were superseded by lessons designed to prepare them for the kind of life it was assumed working-class girls would go on to lead. If they showed the aptitude for it, they learned shorthand and typing. If not, they had classes in something called ‘layette’. I hadn’t the faintest idea what this was—it sounded to me like the name of some French perfume—until it was explained to me that it was guidance for what to buy and make for your baby. Girls as young as fifteen years old filled exercise books with notes on essential babycare items and were instructed how to knit and sew everything from baby blankets to burp cloths.

  The boys, too, were set on diverging paths. Those who passed the Eleven-Plus would go on to a new local grammar school while those who failed might learn woodwork at a secondary modern or technical college.

  After term ended, my friends and I took a trip on the number 8 bus to the West End. With pocket money given to me by my dad, I paid for us to see Zulu, with Michael Caine, on a huge cinema screen in Piccadilly. Afterwards, we headed to Trafalgar Square where we fed the pigeons, took farewell photos of one other and tried to make sense of the message Mr Rogers had written in each of our autograph books: ‘Keep to the Coven’.

  Although we promised to stay in touch, deep down we all knew, even then, that it wasn’t going to happen. We went home on the bus together and after we
’d said our goodbyes I lingered a moment at the bus stop, knowing I’d be returning to it soon. I would be taking the number 8 out of the East End every day to my new school, while my friends remained behind. But riding with me would be my father’s expectations. Could I possibly ever live up to them?

  On the heels of my Eleven-Plus result had come news of another exam I’d sat. I had passed that one, too, and if my father was pleased as Punch that I had gained a place at a grammar school, this was the icing on the cake. I had been awarded a bursary that would fund my school uniform until the day I left. The Alleyn Award hadn’t been won for years, but I’d done it.

  When the bursary came through my mum and I travelled up to the City to buy my uniform, which could only be purchased from Gamage’s department store at 116—128 Holborn. Once known as the people’s popular emporium, Gamage’s no longer exists—it closed its doors in the 1970s—but at one time it had been among London’s best-known stores. It had sold everything from picnic baskets to magic tricks to motoring accessories, as well as boasting an international shipping service that had, in its glory days, dispatched goods ‘throughout the empire’. Much loved by small boys for its seemingly endless array of model trains, aeroplanes, bicycles and ‘scholar’s microscopes’, it had become the official supplier of uniforms to the Boy Scout movement. In 1964, it also stocked every item on the exhaustive list we had received from the Central Foundation School for Girls, or CFS, as it was known.

  In the girlswear department, a smart, well-spoken lady hurried across to attend to us. I sensed my mother’s unease. Perhaps she would have been happier if the tables had been turned and she had been serving this woman a cup of coffee in her Kardomah overall. She reacted by adopting a new voice for the afternoon, one more fitting to her new station as respected customer.