Polly

by Jeff Smith

  One day the mother came round to see Mum to ask whether she could give the latest leaver, a daughter, a home. She was ever so worried because this daughter was partially crippled and her mother couldn’t see how she could possibly manage. The daughter had fallen off a roundabout in the park when she was a child and had broken her leg. The medical services weren’t so good in those days and she had ended up with one leg shorter than the other. That still didn’t alter her father’s rules – she was fifteen and had to stand on her own (crippled) feet. Anyway there were six of us kids, as well as Mum and Dad, in our three-bedroom house so it was out of the question for her to come to us. In desperation she went to live with her boyfriend’s family and, sure enough, a few months later they had to get married.

  Several years later when I was expecting my first boy, I was at the hospital maternity clinic waiting to be examined. Suddenly this voice boomed out from the nurse on duty, ‘Oh no, not you again, you have not paid for the last two yet!’ In those days you had to pay to go to hospital, and that included having babies, but I suppose this woman was just too poor. Of course, we all peered round the end of the waiting room to see what was going on and there was the crippled girl, a lot older by then of course. I do not know what she did in the end but she was never at the clinic again when I was there. I suppose she must have managed somehow.

  She had quite a large family in the end, and they all made something of themselves. I cannot remember what they did, but they all got good jobs and made good money, which is pretty remarkable when you think what an unpromising start in life they all had. That said, the eldest child was a daughter, who made a speciality of going out with other women’s husbands! She was totally unashamed about it, and if any of the wives ever objected she told them in no uncertain terms that they ought to be grateful. Firstly, they knew where their husbands were and secondly she was clean and so they would not come to any harm! They could, she always maintained, do a lot worse on both counts.

  12

  The Goose

  (1921)

  Mum had a lot of faults, but you couldn’t fault her cooking. She really was an excellent cook, even if everybody else had to run round after her doing all the odd jobs: washing up, fetching and carrying and so on. She had a real instinct for food, and could usually make a good job of something even if she had never cooked it before. Mind you, when the food was cooked she really couldn’t serve it up sensibly and you got the most odd portions. If she shared out a pie the first couple of slices would be enormous and then they would get smaller and smaller until the last person got what was left!

  About the only exception to her ‘instinct for food’ was Weetabix. We usually had a cooked meal for breakfast – eggs, bacon, a kipper, even a piece of steak sometimes. I suppose we ate very well really. Against that, she would never serve up cereals. In her book ‘oats were for horses!’ Anyway, when this wonderful new cereal came out and everybody was talking about it she decided to give it a try. It never occurred to her to read the instructions and instead she set about it the same way as porridge – after all, that was how you cooked cereals. First she put a pint of milk on to boil and to it added the whole box of Weetabix. Needless to say, the liquid was almost instantly soaked up, so she had to add more, and more, and then put it in a bigger saucepan, and so on until she had an enormous saucepan of bubbling brown porridge. By then she had rumbled that something had gone wrong, but that didn’t deter her. Above all she wouldn’t allow any waste, so we kids had to eat the lot. But we never had it again – and all she ever said about it was ‘new fangled bloody cereals’.

  One Christmas a customer at the market gave Dad a goose as a present. We always used to have chicken at Christmas, you never saw turkey then. But this Christmas Dad proudly announced that he had a goose and that would be our dinner – Mum did her nut, she didn’t know how to cook the thing so ‘what’s the bloody point of that?’ she asked. Nothing would deter Dad, though.

  The goose, when it arrived, looked like the largest goose in the world, not that we had any idea how big a goose should be. Mum took one look at it and started up all over again – it was too big to fit in the oven, it was too big to fit in the dustbin, it was even too big to bury in our backyard (our backyard was no bigger than a postage stamp!), she didn’t know what to do with it, it was a silly idea, Dad could cook the bloody thing himself, and on and on and on. Dad did the only sensible thing and went off to the pub leaving Mum and us children to set about the goose. It barely fitted in the roasting tray, in fact it sat on the tray rather than in it. Having no idea what goose was like she decided to play safe, so first she liberally spread it with cooking fat, just in case it went dry, and then added some fat bacon to help keep it moist.

  Now, the back room downstairs was our kitchen, living and dining room, the whole lot. Really we lived in that room. The cooking was done on the kitchener, a sort of range, which heated the room too. When the goose was ready she took it over to the oven but there was no way it could possibly fit in. Mind you, she tried. Put it this way and that, pulled it, pushed it, swore at it but nothing worked. We were getting desperate but it didn’t worry Mum.

  At the back of the kitchen was a little scullery and this had a gas oven. I don’t think it had ever been used before but this was its moment. Mind you, the first thing Mum did was to send me out to clean it. It was thick with rust and dirt and I spent ages scraping and scrubbing. Eventually it was alright, or at least all the loose rust and dirt had been removed though it still looked pretty unsavoury. Even so, the goose still didn’t fit. Then Mum came up with her master-stroke. In the roof of the oven was a small hook. Goodness knows what it was supposed to be used for, but Mum used some string to tie the goose up with its backside in the air and hung it from the hook. No roasting dish or anything like that, just the goose hanging up with its neck on the floor of the oven and its backside pressed against the hook, held in place by string. She lit the gas and we all retreated back to the kitchen.

  About an hour or so later somebody went out into the scullery, I think they were going through into the backyard (the loo was out there) and let out the most enormous scream.

  ‘Quick, quick, the oven’s leaking! There’s water pouring all over the floor!’ We all rushed out and sure enough there was a steady stream of clear liquid dripping out of the oven door and onto the floor. Of course, it was fat. Geese are most dreadfully fatty creatures and Mum had piled goodness knows how much extra fat on top of it. We were all horror-struck, and had visions of no Christmas dinner but Mum was totally unimpressed.

  ‘Go and get some sacks from under the stairs’ she ordered. Part of Dad’s pay in the market was a free load of vegetables every week – it was called his ‘cochel’, goodness knows where the word came from – and he used a sack to bring them home. The sacks had to be returned but he used to collect half a dozen or so and then take them back in one go. Anyway, we grabbed his collection of sacks and laid them all over the scullery floor. Then we retreated again to the kitchen and got on with the rest of dinner.

  As I said earlier, Mum was a good cook and so, as usual, it was a gorgeous dinner (as long as you didn’t think of the state of the oven it was cooked in). After dinner Mum and Dad went to sleep, the other kids were sent off visiting, and I was detailed to do the washing up. When I went into the scullery the mess was awful. The fat had soaked into the sacking, people had been paddling in and out of it and then it had set solid. I was only a little kid and I had no idea what to do, so I woke up Mum. She wasn’t very happy about it but just fumed into the kitchen, picked up the sacks as they were and stuffed them into the dustbin. And that was that, except that nobody ever dared to mention goose in the house from that day forward.

  Well, that is not quite true. The postscript came some years later when I was going out with Fred. He won a goose in a raffle at work or something. One evening he came to see me, all happy and bright, told us of his fortune, and presented his winnings to Mum. Everybody in the house went silent. We all
froze in terror, and waited … Mum just smiled, said how generous he was and thanked him most extravagantly.

  13

  Working Life

  (1925–54)

  I remember starting work. I lay awake all through the night before praying. I was so scared. Of course, it was no problem and all of us had to do it, but I still remember the feeling. We left school at fourteen then so really I was only a kid at the time. We wouldn’t dream of sending kids out at that age now. Still, I suppose times change.

  My birthday came in August, which made me pretty young in my class. Because of the way the rules worked I had to go back to school after the summer holidays and I then left at the end of September. There were several of us due to leave and one morning, in assembly, it was announced that ‘All those leaving on the thirtieth of September must go to see the governess.’ We all trooped down to her room and lined up, then we were called in all together and lined up in front of her.

  ‘I have been told,’ she said ‘that Clarnico wish to take on a number of school leavers. You should all go along there and you may have time out from school for this purpose.’ Clarnico was a rather high-class sweet factory over at Hackney, about 2 miles away. It was quite a walk but I suppose we didn’t think anything about it – in those days you walked everywhere.

  Anyway, off we all went. I think I must have gone home and Mum let me put on my Sunday dress, stockings and shoes. I was walking with Jenny because we were big friends. Suddenly she stopped walking and burst into tears. When I finally got her to speak she said that she couldn’t possibly get a job if she didn’t have coloured stockings. She only had the same ‘horrible old black ones’ that all of us had! She was in such a state over it, though, that I dug out all the money I had – it was thre’pence – and she added all hers to it – another three ha’pence – and we went into the drapers and bought her a pair of coloured stockings. She put them on under the arch of Carpenters Road railway bridge – I will always remember that. Coloured stockings had only just come in and they caused a terrible stir. I can remember Dad standing at the top of our stairs screaming to my mother at the top of his voice to ‘get her in, she hasn’t got anything on.’ From the top of our stairs you could see down through the open door into the street. And there was my older sister standing in the street feeling ever so fashionable in her pink stockings.

  ‘If you want her in, you get her in,’ replied Mum, ‘and she has got stockings on.’ Dad was really scandalised though and kicked up a terrible fuss. It took ages for the atmosphere to cool down again.

  Anyway, we got down to Clarnico and went to the office. We sat there for a bit and then were shown down to the canteen. After a bit this very smart man came in and spoke to us. He was terribly smart, wearing a suit and a tie, with a real upper class accent. Goodness knows what he saw when he looked at us because we were a raggedy, untidy bunch. I can’t remember what he said, but they took us all on. That is how I got my first job. I left school on the Friday afternoon and started work the following Monday morning, for 10s a week.

  My first job was carrying trays of caramel up three flights of stairs. They must have been 2ft or more and weighed a ton – I could barely lift them. Goodness knows why they put me on the job because I was a skinny little thing then, there wasn’t anything of me. You wouldn’t let a kid do it these days, not any kid, but we didn’t think about it – it was a job. Still, that is what I did all day every day. Looking back I feel as though I was on that for about three years, but that doesn’t make much sense. The caramels and boxes of chocolates were for the Christmas trade, so that used to slacken off during October as the shops got their stock in. People then used to get moved over onto other things, the next big job being Easter eggs. For some reason, though, when I went over to chocolate they put me into ‘Enrobing’, that is, working the machines that coated the various centres with chocolate. It was very hot in there, I suppose the chocolate had to be kept warm while it was melted, but I enjoyed the work. I learned lots of jobs in that department. I got to be very good at marking the chocolates; making the squiggles on the tops that tell you what they are in the box. We used to have a pot of hot chocolate beside us and using either a finger or a stick had to pick up a blob of chocolate and make the design on each chocolate as it went by on the conveyor belt. It wasn’t hard work, but you had to be ever so quick. The other big job was packing. It was amazing how quick you could get at assembling a box (they came ready glued but flattened), picking out the right chocolates and putting them in the box. We used to do that from eight in the morning until five-thirty, with just an hour for lunch and no tea break or anything like that. Mind you, I was very good at it and also made some good friends. That was where I met Daisy, and we stayed the closest of friends for the rest of our lives, or rather, her life.

  One year, though, there was just not enough work and we got laid off. It was like that then, things were difficult and if there was no work you got laid off. I went down to the Labour [exchange] and they said that there were jobs up at Whitfields. That was a sweet factory just round the corner from the Greengate (a pub in the south of the borough). It was a terrible place, especially after Clarnico. I suppose Clarnico was a high-class firm making high-class chocolates, but not this place. It was dirty and tacky, and you never wanted to eat any of their sweets after you had worked there. I remember that when we arrived we had to wait in this big room and eventually a woman came out and said they wanted packers, ‘was there anybody with experience?’ she asked. Well, I had plenty of experience so I put my hand up, and so did this young woman standing beside me. As we were following the woman through the factory the other young woman asked in a whisper if I knew anything about packing.

  ‘Well, of course,’ I replied. The truth is that I didn’t have the wit to lie about such a thing.

  ‘Do you mind if I work with you then?’ she asked, ‘only I don’t know anything but I am absolutely desperate for the job so I lied.’ So she worked with me, and soon learnt. That lunchtime she asked where I was going to eat. There wasn’t much I could do really because it was far too far away for me to go home. So she invited me to go home with her for lunch, she only lived around the corner. From then on I used to go there every lunchtime.

  I didn’t work there for very long though, thank heavens. It really was a dirty place and not at all up to the standards I was used to. It seems as though things picked up and Clarnico called me back. I wasn’t sure what I should do because I had never left anywhere before, ‘they’ had always laid me off! I decided to be dreadfully secretive and just said, as officially as I could make it sound, that I wouldn’t be back tomorrow. It didn’t seem to bother them at all. I suppose workers for that sort of job were easy to come by. So I went back to Clarnico and to working with Daisy again. They put us in ‘Fancy Goods’, wrapping all sorts of speciality lines. Daisy and I made a good team, we just worked ever so well together and seemed to do even better together than either of us alone. I think it must have established a bit of a reputation for us.

  During one of the lay-off periods Fred and I got married and that was the end of work. For a start, the firm insisted that you left – somehow they were unhappy about married women, perhaps they were worried about competition from home. Then there was a sort of social argument – if you had a husband you had somebody to feed you and jobs should go to the poor devils who had to feed themselves. Nobody ever said this, but it was understood by everybody. Lastly, Fred was totally against the idea of me working; he really thought it was below his dignity for his wife to work. He never did like the idea of me working and was never a bit helpful. He wouldn’t even get his own breakfast and if he was ever in from work before me wouldn’t put things on to cook, even if I had prepared them all. Mind you, he was happy enough with the extras that the money eventually bought.

  When any young woman left Clarnico to get married she always got a £5 gratuity from the firm. I had got married during a lay-off, but Daisy said that we should go down and try it on th
em anyway. I was ever so scared but she egged me on and down we went. We went to the personnel department and they gave me a form which I filled out and gave back to them. Then they said to wait, so I waited, and suddenly there was my £5. Now £5 was real money, I had never seen that much in my life. We bought our first radio with it. That was the first ‘extra’ that we ever had and it made us ever so posh: I think we were the first people to have a radio in the whole street.

  A little while later it was coming towards the Christmas rush time and Daisy said that she thought we ought to go down and see whether Clarnico would take us on even though we were not single. I didn’t think it could possibly be worth the effort, because they just never took on married women. But Daisy kept on and on, so in the end we went down there and to my amazement they took us on. I suppose things were beginning to get a little bit better and they couldn’t just pick up youngsters as and when they wanted them. From then on I stayed full-time right up to the war. Because of our experience we went straight into ‘Fancy Goods’, packing all their special lines through the year. Really we had a wonderful time and did incredibly well out of it. We got staff discount on everything we bought and I had plenty of money in my pocket. I used to buy sweets for all the kids in the street sometimes, and always at Christmas. One Easter we did chocolate eggs with children’s names written on them, so I got them for a lot of the kids. They used to think I was marvellous and I was ever so popular – you can imagine. I got things for us as well. One year they did a Father Christmas figure whose top lifted off and inside was filled with ‘mystery gifts’ attached to trailing ribbons, blue for men and pink for women. We kept that for years – in fact I think it survived the war – and used to get it out and repack it every Christmas.