Private - Keep Out!

by Gwen Grant

  By the time she’s put some ointment on what hair I’ve got left, I’m feeling terrible and I start coughing and sneezing and she says, ‘You’re not getting a cold now, are you?’ and I get put to bed and I feel rotten.

  When our Lucy comes to bed, she says, ‘I hear you’ve been in the wars,’ and I say, ‘Yes,’ and she says, ‘Who was it?’ and I said, ‘She doesn’t go to our school,’ and our Lucy says, ‘If you see her again when I’m with you, you tell me.’ Then our Rose comes in and she says, ‘You look better with thin hair anyway,’ and I say, ‘Oh, thank you very much, I am sure.’ Our Lucy says, ‘Anyway, our Mam’s buying you a new frock tomorrow, isn’t she? That’ll cheer you up.’ I think, oh brother! More trouble, because every time me and our Mam go to get me a new frock, I end up getting sent to bed. Still, because of my sore head, I get to have the feather pillow and even though it’s like lying on thin air because all the feathers fly away when you put your head on it, it’s a lot better than the hairy one that prickles your cheek.

  10

  ‘Why is it wrong to hate our Rose?’

  When I got down this morning, our Mam says, ‘We’re going to buy you a new frock today because we’re going to your Aunt’s for tea on Sunday and you can’t go in that one you’ve got on.’ I says, ‘Oh! Good,’ and our Mam says, ‘What’s the matter with you? Is that cold still bothering you?’ and I say, ‘No, Mam. It’s gone,’ and she says, ‘Well, you don’t sound very keen,’ and I think it’s going to be just the same as always and I sneak three of the comics upstairs and put them under my pillow to read when I get sent to bed.

  Our Lucy comes in then and she starts telling our Mam all about this picture she saw last night and it’s really terrible. ‘And he kissed her and she kissed him and they kissed each other, kiss, kiss, kiss,’ and I think, ugh! What a rotten old conversation, so I fall down on the floor in a big heap and our Mam jumps up and says, ‘Whatever’s wrong with you?’ and our Lucy says, ‘She only does that when she wants some attention, horrible little thing,’ so then our Mam rattles me and they go on talking about kiss, kiss, kiss all the time.

  I got really fed up, so I stood with my arms up in the air and started going round and round and our Lucy suddenly goes, ‘Oh! You frightened me. What are you doing?’ and our Mam says, ‘For goodness sake, what are you doing now?’ I say, ‘I’m pretending to be a lighthouse,’ and our Mam says, ‘A lighthouse?’ and our Lucy moans, ‘Some lighthouse.’ Our Mam says, ‘How are you supposed to be a lighthouse?’ and I say, ‘My smile,’ and she says, ‘Your what?’ and I say, ‘My smile. Look, I’m beaming,’ and I start smiling with all my teeth again and our Lucy stares at me and says, ‘I don’t believe it.’ Our Joe comes in then and he looks at me and says, ‘What’s so funny?’ and so our Mam tells him I’m pretending to be a lighthouse. Our Joe says, ‘She’ll never be able to do that,’ and I say, ‘Why not, clever clogs?’ and he says ‘Because you’re not bright enough,’ and then he falls about laughing and so do our Mam and our Lucy.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ is all I say.

  Anyway, me and our Mam get up town and we go into this shop and I see this beautiful bright pink and black striped frock and I say to our Mam, ‘Oh, that’s lovely.’ Just like that, and she went ‘Ugh!’ I thought, oh, very nice, so I didn’t say anything else. Then she turned round and said, ‘You might try and show a bit of interest seeing as how it’s for you anyway,’ and so then, I have to say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ when this woman in the shop brings out this frock which would make a cat sick and they don’t even have to wear them.

  I scowled at this woman in the shop and she smiled back. ‘I don’t like that,’ I says in the end and this woman stops smiling before you can say ‘Jack Robinson,’ and starts calling our Mam ‘Madam’ and our Mam starts getting all red and mad like she always does, and we have to come out of the shop so she can tell me off.

  I said to her, ‘If you’d let me have that pink and black striped one, we could go home,’ and she says, ‘You’ll have that pink and black striped one over my dead body,’ and I sigh and she says, ‘And stop that everlasting sighing,’ and I think, one sigh, and she’s going mad.

  So, we go into the next shop and in the end, we go into every shop in the town. The trouble is our Mam wants me to wear what she thinks is nice and I think what she thinks is nice is horrible and then she gets mad at me and then I end up with something neither of us likes, and I have this time as well. This frock our Mam buys me is the worst frock I’ve ever seen in my life. Anyway, we both march home and neither of us says a word and our Mam slams the kettle on the fire when we get in and says, ‘That’s the last time, young woman, I’m ever going with you for a frock,’ and I think I’d better keep quiet and then our Lucy says, ‘I’ll take her next time, if you like, Mam,’ and I think for the very first time in the entire history of the world that it might be all right having our Lucy for a sister because at least she’d be better than our Mam when it came to buying frocks.

  I say to her, ‘Pity you couldn’t have thought of that before,’ and she says, ‘I’m glad I didn’t.’ So you see, it doesn’t pay to think nice things about people too soon. Our Mam always says, ‘A leopard never changes its spots,’ and she’s right.

  And then our Mam looks at me and says, ‘I think you’d better go to bed and calm yourself down,’ and I thought, thank goodness I put those comics under the pillow, so I trudge upstairs and get into bed and feel under the pillow and they’ve gone. Somebody’s swiped my comics. I just lie there and I think how fed up I am with everything when suddenly the door creaks open and this dirty hand appears waving these comics in the air so I get out of bed and take them and our Joe whispers, ‘I only borrowed them. I knew you’d get sent to bed so I’ve brought them back,’ and then he went downstairs and although every step on our stairs creak, I never heard a single sound. Neither did I hear the door open at the bottom either, but then, of course, our Joe is training to be a commando when he grows up so it’s only to be expected. I mean, if everybody could hear you coming, they’d shoot you, wouldn’t they?

  By the time our Mam thought I’d calmed down enough to be let up, it was nearly dinner-time and Mrs Elston from next door came round and asked me if I would just run up to the fish shop for her for some wet fish. I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Elston,’ because you haven’t got any choice. If they ask you, you have to say ‘Yes’ because if you don’t they tell your Mam and then you get into real trouble.

  When I came back, she’d been sat talking to our Mam about my new frock and she said to me, ‘I’ve got just the thing for you, young lady. You come round with me. Our Rita used to wear it when she was your age,’ and I thought about Mrs Elston’s Rita who’s quite old – she’s got a little girl of her own – and I said, ‘Oh, it’s all right, Mrs Elston, honest. I love the frock I’ve got,’ and she just smiled and said, ‘No, you come along with me.’ So I went with her. She went upstairs while I waited in the kitchen and Mr Elston was sat looking into the fire and puffing at his pipe. I thought he hadn’t seen me when all of a sudden he says, ‘Did you know my thumb comes off?’ and I says, ‘What? What?’ and he says, ‘My thumb. I can take it off,’ and I says, ‘You can’t,’ and he says, ‘I can,’ and then Mrs Elston came back downstairs. Over her arm, she had this lovely white frock and it was ever so pretty. ‘Here you are,’ she says. ‘You go home and try this on and if it fits you, you can keep it.’

  So I stood there and Mrs Elston looked at me and then at the frock and it was ever so quiet and then she says, ‘Er, have you forgotten something?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Oh,’ and then Mr Elston said, ‘She wants to see me take my thumb off.’ Mrs Elston says, ‘Oh, Alfred!’ and then Mr Elston took his thumb off and held it up in the air in his other hand and I said, ‘That’s clever,’ and when I got in, I told our Dad about it and our Dad said, ‘Look, I’ll take mine off for you as well!’ and he did.

  I says to our Mam, ‘Did you know men can take their thumbs off?’ and our Mam says, �
��What?’ and I says to her, ‘Can you take your thumb off?’ and she says, ‘No,’ and then our Dad said, ‘I’ll show you how to do it, look,’ and he did and when our Joe came in I said to him, ‘Can you take your thumb off?’ and he said, ‘You’re crackers, you are,’ and I said, ‘I can take mine off,’ and I did and he said, ‘That’s good. Now try it with your head.’

  He thinks he’s so funny.

  I said to him, ‘I bet I can stop you laughing,’ and he says, ‘You’ll have a job. Every time I look at you, you make me laugh,’ so I says to our Mam, ‘Mam, why can’t our Joe come with us to that aunt’s for tea on Sunday?’ and our Mam looked at me and she said, ‘Well, I suppose he ought to really,’ and you should have seen how fast our Joe stopped laughing then.

  ‘Here,’ he says. ‘I did you a favour with those comics,’ and I thought a bit and said, ‘Oh, all right,’ and so I never said anything else about our Joe coming with us on Sunday. After all, they only show you up, lads do.

  Our Mam says to me, ‘Try that frock on then,’ and I did and it was about three miles too long and when our Rose came in and saw it, she said, ‘I’d like that, Mam,’ and our Mam said, ‘Well, it is too big for madam here.’ I looked at all the white frills round the bottom of the frock and I said, ‘She can’t have it. It’s mine,’ and our Mam looked at me and said, ‘But you can’t wear it. It’s too big for you,’ and I said, ‘I don’t care. I don’t want our Rose to wear it either.’

  Our Mam said, ‘That’ll do,’ and she was really mad and she made me take the frock off and she gave it to our Rose. ‘You can have it,’ she said and then she said to me, ‘You should never let things stand idle,’ and I said, ‘It won’t be standing idle. I’ll look at it and then when I’m big enough, I’ll wear it.’ But our Mam said, no, our Rose had to have it and I said to our Rose, ‘I hate you, I do,’ and our Rose said, ‘Tell me something new.’ She rushed upstairs and came down with it on. It was floating all round her legs and the little puff sleeves looked lovely.

  I said to her, ‘You look horrible in it, you do,’ and our Mam said, ‘That’ll be enough out of you, madam. Our Rose looks lovely in that frock. Now just say you’re sorry to her. Being like that with your own sister! I never did.’

  It nearly killed me saying I was sorry. I thought I’d choke. Our Rose went smirk, smirk, and she said, ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ because she knows how I hate saying I’m sorry when I’m not, and she knew I wasn’t. Life’s one big lesson, if you ask me. I just wish it would teach me something nice for a change.

  Anyway, on Sunday I put on this frock our Mam bought me, which I don’t like and our Mam doesn’t like, and our Mam went, ‘Tsk, tsk!’ and sighed. We went to that aunt’s for tea and I hope I never see her again as long as I live. It was horrible. We got there and I’ve only seen her once before and she looks at us and says, ‘Tea’s on the table.’ Our Mam gets into a fluster because she hasn’t had time to pull herself together and find out where she is and we get rushed into the front room and sat down at the table and a bowl of jelly’s put in front of us before you can blink.

  ‘I don’t like jelly,’ I say to this aunt, and she looks at me and says, ‘Eat it.’ So I say again, ‘I don’t like it,’ and she says, ‘Eat it’ again. Our Mam says, ‘She never eats jelly,’ and this aunt sniffs and says, ‘Waste of good food,’ and grabs the bowl and it spills all down my new frock.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘I am sorry.’ But she doesn’t sound it and I jump up because all the sticky coloured water that’s come out of the jelly is going right through my frock and our Mam says, ‘Have you got a cloth?’ and I drop my skirt and all the jelly falls on to the carpet. You’d think I emptied our dustbin on her carpet the way she carries on. ‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘Oh dear! Oh! Screech, screech, screech.’ And she’s on her hands and knees wiping up this jelly.

  I sat down and didn’t see our Mam had moved the chair, so I sat down and there was no chair. I fell and my feet catch this Aunt in the bottom as she’s bending down, and she whips round and clouts me right across the head before I can do anything. Our Mam nearly has three fits because she’s always going on about people who hit other people on the head and how they ought to be locked up because you don’t know what damage they might do. I sit there on the floor and there’s all bells ringing in my head and I start crying and our Mam drags me to my feet and starts shouting at this aunt and finally we end up walking out of the house and marching home.

  ‘That were quick,’ our Dad says when we get in and then our Mam starts crying, so do I as well, and she tells our Dad about it all. Our Dad says, ‘I told you to keep away,’ and then I get sent out to play and our Dad makes a nice hot cup of tea and I hope I never have to see that aunt again as long as I live. So does our Mam.

  I had to have a bath before I went to bed because all my legs were sticky with that horrible jelly juice. Our Mam gets the bath out and fills the copper and before you know where you are, everybody wants a bath and people keep coming and saying, ‘I’ll have one after our Pete, Mam,’ and, ‘I’ll have one after our Lucy, Mam,’ and, ‘I’ll have one after our Rose, Mam’ and so that’s the bath out for the night, isn’t it? And I was going to sit in it and read my comics and Mam was going to make up the fire.

  Anyway, I get in the bath and our Mam pokes the fire and it’s red hot and lovely and I sit and read my comic for a bit and then I have to get out because everybody else wants to come in.

  When it comes to emptying the bath and putting it away, I say to our lads and Lucy and Rose, ‘I’ll do your share of emptying for a penny a bucket,’ and they all moan and groan and then say, ‘Oh, all right,’ so I earn quite a bit that way until our Mam finds out what I’m charging them and says, ‘You ought to have charged them twopence, idle things,’ so I say that next time it’ll be twopence a bucket and everybody says in that case they’ll do it themselves.

  ‘Priced yourself out of the market, have you?’ our Mam asks, and she laughs. I say to her, ‘You told me to charge them twopence and now they won’t let me do any of it.’ ‘If I told you to put your hand in the fire,’ our Mam says, ‘would you do it?’ ‘’Course I wouldn’t,’ I say and she says, ‘Well then, use a bit of common sense before you do anything anybody tells you to do,’ and I nod and think, well, that’s one way of getting out of it, to make out it’s all my fault for listening to her in the first place, and I think that I’ll start deciding things for myself now, seeing as how our Mam lost me my whole entire bucket trade.

  When I was hanging the bath up on its nail in the yard, I heard all this noise in the street and our Mam says, ‘Whatever’s going on?’ and I went rushing down the passage and there, walking down the street is a sailor. Not a make believe one but a real, live sailor and he had a navy blue uniform on with bits of white stuck all over it and he looked smashing.

  Our Mam said, ‘Well, would you ever!’ and all the grown-ups in the street rushed out and they were shaking this sailor’s hand and slapping his back and everything.

  I says to our Mam, ‘Who’s that, Mam?’ and our Mam says, ‘It’s Mr Wallop,’ and I said, ‘Teeny’s Dad?’ and she says, ‘Yes. He’s been away at sea for a long, long time.’ Teeny’s Dad, I couldn’t help noticing, was pushing a bike. It was a big shiny one with a bell on it and when Teeny got hold of it, she spent the entire night ringing it until her Mam said she’d slap her legs if she didn’t stop because it was enough to give you a splitting headache, so it was.

  I can’t wait till tomorrow to see what else Mr Wallop has brought and if he’s still wearing his lovely sailor suit. I says to our Dad, ‘Why couldn’t you be a sailor?’ and he says, ‘Because I was a soldier.’ I says, ‘Soldiers don’t look as nice as sailors,’ and he said, ‘You’ll have to marry one then when you grow up,’ and that nearly made me sick.

  I said to him, ‘I’m not going to get married,’ and he said, ‘What are you going to do then? Stay at home with me and your Mam?’ and I said, ‘No. I’m going round the world.
I might even be a sailor myself,’ and our Dad said, was I sure the world was big enough for me because there were times when he doubted it.

  Roll on the morning. Teeny said her Dad was going to bring her a camel but I couldn’t see one with him tonight. Perhaps the postman will bring it in a van.

  11

  ‘Doesn’t the Killer Kid like our Tone?’

  Well, we all rushed out this morning to see if we could see the sailor again, but Teeny said he wasn’t up yet because he’d travelled all round the world yesterday so he was very tired. I said to Teeny, ‘Did he bring a camel back with him, then?’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Where is it then? Have you put it in your back yard?’ and she said, ‘No, stupid, it’s in the front room,’ and I said to her, ‘Won’t it be a bit crowded?’ and she said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Well, they look pretty big, camels, when you see their pictures in books.’ So that stupid Teeny started shouting and laughing and saying, ‘Stupid! Stupid! Skinny Lizzie thinks our Dad brought home a real live camel,’ and I said, ‘Hasn’t he?’ and she said, ‘Of course he hasn’t. What would we do with a real live camel?’ I said to her, ‘You said he was bringing a camel home, you great fat fibber,’ and she says, ‘Say that again and I’ll bash you,’ and I said, ‘You do and I’ll tell our Joe.’ She’s sweet on our Joe so I knew she wouldn’t hit me in case our Joe hated her. He does anyway but she pretends he doesn’t. ‘It’s a model,’ she says. ‘Do you want to look at it?’ and I says, ‘I’d rather look at a junk yard, thank you very much,’ although I was dying to see it. ‘Please yourself,’ Teeny said and then our Joe came out.