by Gwen Grant
It didn’t half hurt, the slap, but I think I’ll turn into a tree before I cry in front of Miss Brown, so I walk ever so slowly out of the room and open the stairs door and go upstairs. When I get to the top though I creep back down and sit behind the door and listen.
Miss Brown’s saying, ‘It’s a shame we can’t get on because she’s a good dancer,’ and our Mam’s saying, ‘Yes, well, it’s just one of those things. She won’t be coming any more, of course,’ and then Miss Brown goes, ‘Oh’ – cough, cough. ‘Oh, I do hope this won’t put you off Peter and I getting engaged, Mrs Hall,’ and our Mam says she doesn’t really think it’s a very good idea but then, there are two years and if anybody changes their mind, well, they can, can’t they, and no harm done. Miss Brown goes, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and she says, ‘If we did get married, though, I would have liked … your daughter … to have been a bridesmaid at the wedding,’ and I think, I’ll be a bridesmaid over my dead body, and then I hear our Dad coming in.
Anyway, I got a real telling off from our Dad and our Mam and me had this talk about Manners Maketh Man. I didn’t do much talking. Our Mam did it all and she said if ever I was so rude to someone older than me again, then she’d threat, threat, threat, and not only that but she’d warn, warn, warn, until in the end, I decided never to speak again just to be on the safe side.
I know one thing, though. I hate Miss Brown.
Our Pete kept saying that I should say I was sorry to her and he kept on and on about it but our Mam said, ‘No good will come of madam here and Ruby meeting again. Not for a while anyway.’ But our Pete kept going on about it until last night when he brought Miss Brown round to the house and she sat there and I sat there and our Mam says to me, ‘Do you want to apologise to Miss Brown for being so rude, now you’ve had time to think about it?’ and I shook my head. So our Mam said, ‘Perhaps you’d better go and think about it some more upstairs,’ and Miss Brown stared at the mantelpiece with her lips all tight across her face. I says to our Mam, ‘But she was ever so rude to me as well, Mam,’ but our Mam just waved in the air at me and so I went.
When I got upstairs though, I thought, I’m not having this, so I crept back down and got some bread and lard out of the pantry and wrapped it up in a paper bag and filled a pop bottle full of water and then I went back upstairs and took one of our Dad’s hankies and put my bread and lard in that. Then I put in all these pages I’ve written on and a pencil, and then I put in a candle, and three pennies I had that Old Flo gave me for going right to the top of the town for her yesterday. She wanted some fish and I had to queue for about nineteen hours to get it for her and when I got back she gave me the three pennies. ‘You’re a good lass,’ she said and all I’m glad is that there’s somebody who likes me.
Then I dropped out of our bedroom window and I started walking. It was freezing cold and it was ever so dark and as soon as I got out of the streets, I was scared to death. I walked and walked and walked and it started snowing and I thought, oh, thanks very much. That’s all I need.
When I couldn’t walk any farther, I went and laid down in the bottom of a hedge because it was a bit warmer there and I thought, what I need here is a few leaves, but there weren’t any. I should have run away in the summer. It would have been a lot better to run away in the summer and I thought, I wish I’d waited.
Then I was going to light the candle but I couldn’t see where I’d put our Dad’s hankie because it was that dark, so I had to crawl out of the hedge to find it and when I found it, I hadn’t got a match to light it with anyway so I was as bad burnt as scalded, as our Mam says, though why, I don’t know. It wasn’t very nice there and I didn’t stop long. I thought, I don’t reckon much to this, and I got out from the hedge and started to walk back home.
The sky was as black as anything and I looked at the stars and I thought, I hope they’re stuck on all right, because the last thing I wanted was a star falling on my head. Anyway, I only saw one star fall and I walked with my head back so I could keep an eye on where it had gone after that. I wanted to make sure it didn’t turn round in the sky and come and get me.
The Sunday School teacher once said to me, ‘those stars you see falling out of the sky are little angels come back to earth,’ and I said, ‘Gerrof,’ and she said, ‘It’s true,’ and I said, ‘Talk about lies.’ ‘I’m not telling lies,’ she said. ‘Have you seen one then?’ I asked her. ‘Have you ever seen a star fall and an angel get up out of its place?’ And she shook her head, and I said, ‘No, and you never will because when that Micky jumped off the cliff, he got a broken leg and a broken arm and he didn’t jump out of no heaven either. So, any angel that jumped out of heaven would be smashed to little bits when it landed, wouldn’t it?’ And the Sunday School teacher looked at me and said, ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ and I said, ‘You’ll be telling us next they’ve got wings and they keep them folded under their shirts and their frocks,’ and I went home because I don’t think Sunday School teachers should tell lies. It’s bad enough us doing it, without them starting as well.
Well, I was keeping an eye on that star and the next minute I find myself lying in a big heap on the pavement and everything’s going round and I think, oh heck, that star got me after all. Then I don’t remember anything else until I find myself lying in my own bed (well, my own and Lucy’s and Rose’s bed).
‘What happened?’ I says to our Mam and she says, ‘You walked into a lamp post,’ and I mutter, ‘Think that if you like but I know it was that star that got me. Some angel, landing on people’s heads and flattening them. Just wait till I see that Sunday School teacher again.’
Anyway, Miss Brown comes round the bedroom door and I says to our Mam, ‘Oh heck, Mam, I’m not going to say I’m sorry,’ and Miss Brown says, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I think I must be dying. So I shout at our Mam, ‘Here, Mam, I’m not dying, am I?’ and she says, ‘Don’t be daft. Why should you be dying?’ and I say, ‘Because Miss Brown’s said she’s sorry.’ ‘And you should do the same,’ our Mam says.
So I say, ‘I’m sorry too,’ and Miss Brown smiles and says, ‘I’ve brought you some sweets,’ and I say, ‘No thanks,’ and our Mam bashes my leg, so I have to smile and say, ‘Oh, thank you very much.’ She goes away then, thank goodness.
The only funny thing is that it’s daytime and I can’t remember the night going. Everybody keeps tiptoeing around and that nice doctor with the cool hands came to see me again this morning.
‘What are we going to do with you?’ he says and pats my head and I thought it was going to fall off because it hurts ever so much.
‘Ouch!’ I says and he says, ‘Ooops, sorry!’ and I think, oh, grown-ups, you can do nothing with them at all.
Miss Brown comes to see me about three more times and the first time she comes she says, ‘Can’t we start again? After all, if I’m going to be in the family …’ and I think, ‘Oh, not that,’ and she goes on, ‘If I’m going to be in the family, we really ought to try and get on with each other,’ so I say, ‘If you like,’ and she snaps, ‘Oh, don’t go mad, will you?’ and that was the end of being friends for that night.
I wish I could like her because our Pete hardly ever speaks to me these days. He just glares at me and keeps saying, ‘You’re just plain bad, you are,’ and I don’t say anything because after our Mam warned me about Manners Makething Man I think probably it’s better to keep quiet for a bit.
Our Mam says, ‘Why don’t you like her?’ and I says, ‘I don’t know,’ and then our Mam gets mad with me all over again.
Today though, they brought our Pete home in an ambulance and our Mam was as white as a sheet and Old Flo and Granny Bates and Mrs Elston were walking ever so quietly around the house. They sent for our Dad from work and when he got in he says, ‘Which one of them is it?’ because he didn’t know if it was our Pete in an accident at the farm or our Tone in an accident at the pit but it was our Pete. All the roads and fields and everything were covered in snow and it was icy cold and our Pete had been out
on his tractor and it had turned over and trapped him underneath it.
I got under the table with our Prince because it was terrible in our house. Our Mam wasn’t crying or anything but she couldn’t speak until our Pete was tucked up in bed and the doctor had told her that he hadn’t done anything serious, because luckily the tractor had only caught one of his legs and then our Mam went, ‘Oh!’ and fell in a big heap on the floor. Me and our Prince sat and cried together. Our Prince always cries when I do, just like I always cry when our Mam does.
Anyway, when Mrs Elston and Old Flo and Granny Bates had picked our Mam up and she’d come round, they all trooped upstairs to see our Pete and I heard the front door open and then I heard this, ‘Oh dear!’ – sob, sob, sob – and I pushed the tablecloth up and there was Miss Brown and she was crying buckets and I said to her, ‘Do you want to come under here with me?’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and she crawled under the table with me and I put my arm round her, and our Prince put his paw on her knee and we all sat and cried. Of course, our Prince doesn’t cry tears which is just as well otherwise we’d have needed a boat to get out from under there in the end.
Then our Mam comes downstairs with Old Flo and Mrs Elston and Granny Bates and I hear our Mam say, ‘Whatever’s that noise?’ and of course that noise was me and our Prince and Miss Brown, and our Mam lifted the tablecloth up and she said, ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ and held out her arms and helped Miss Brown out! I thought, oh yes, very nice, so I stayed where I was and our Mam told Granny Bates to take Miss Brown up to our Pete and to sit with them while they had a little talk.
Then our Mam got me out and I sat on her knee and she said our Pete was quite all right now and I was very glad about that.
‘Have you and Miss Brown made friends?’ she said and I said, ‘Well, I don’t like to see anybody cry, Mam,’ and our Mam said that wasn’t what she asked me so I said, ‘I suppose she’s all right,’ and our Mam said, ‘You’ll have plenty of time to get to know her better if she’s coming into the family.’ So I says to her, ‘But it won’t be long before I’m going out, will it?’ and she says, ‘Whatever do you mean?’ so I told her I was planning to probably go round the world and she said, ‘Oh, I see. In that case,’ she says, ‘you’d better get yourself off to bed. You’ll need plenty of sleep to go round the world on.’
Sometimes I think all the days are full of getting up and going to bed and nothing else.
Anyway, now I know our Pete’s O.K. I’m looking forward to the morning because our Joe’s promised to take me sledging with the snow being so deep. He has to take me because he needs me to push the sledge. I can hardly wait.
13
‘Why did the coal men swear, Mam?’
It was still snowing this morning when I got up and our Joe had already got the old sledge out. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘let’s go down the hill’, so we set off down the hill and I’m on the back because, like I said, I have to do the pushing to get it going because our Joe says I can’t steer and if I sit there and he pushes, we’ll only end up going into the wall. So, we set off and the sledge goes really fast, about a hundred miles an hour down the hill and this coal lorry pulls out across the road.
Our Joe starts shouting to me to keep my head down and I can see this lorry getting nearer and nearer and the next second, we’ve gone whizzing underneath it and out the other side and halfway up the other hill before we stop.
We’re turning the sledge round to go back down the hill when our Joe says, ‘Here, look at them two men,’ and we see it’s the coal men and they’re running up the hill towards us, and they’re shouting, ‘Little devils. Just you wait till we get our hands on you.’ (They were really shouting, little swear words, but I’d better not write them down in case our Mam ever reads this because she’ll only say, ‘There’s never no need to use bad language, no matter what,’ and if you say to her, ‘But the coal men used it, not me,’ she only says, ‘Then there’s no need for you to set a bad example by repeating it.’ So I’ll just leave it out.)
Anyway, there they were, coming up the hill like the clappers and our Joe says, ‘I think we’d better get out of here,’ and we both start running but we can’t go very fast because we have to pull the sledge as well and the biggest of the coal men catches hold of my frock and that’s it. Our Joe comes back and says to him, ‘You let go of her, she’s my sister,’ and this coal man says, ‘I don’t care if she’s your Granny,’ and he tips me up and puts me over his knee and he doesn’t half hit me. Our Joe’s dancing around and shouting, ‘I’m going to fetch our Dad to you,’ and this other coal man up-ends him and does the same to him.
This other coal man says, ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack, you little …’ – swear words – and our Joe says, ‘You wait till I tell our Dad.’ The coal man says, ‘I don’t feel like waiting. Come on, let’s go and find him,’ and he asks Joe where we live and Joe says, ‘I’m not telling you.’ So they march us and the sledge down the hill, and then they stop everybody going down the street and they say, ‘’Ere, Missis, where do these kids live?’ and of course, in the end, they get somebody who tells them. They put us on the back of the lorry and one of the coal men drives the lorry to our house and our Mam comes out and he tells her all about us.
She says, ‘I don’t think I can stand much more.’ Then our Dad comes out, and he’s been wakened up because he was in bed after being on nights, and he doesn’t look very pleased. When the coal men tell him about us, he says, ‘You did right,’ and then tells us off.
Our Joe says, ‘Aren’t you going to hit him, Dad?’ and he says, ‘The only people who’re going to get hit around here are about your size and there’s two of them.’ So, I whisper to our Joe that it’s school time and the last we see of them all, they’re all stood staring after us in the street.
‘All your fault,’ our Joe says to me and then he runs off to his mates and I have to go to school on my own.
When we came out of school at dinner-time, I asked our Mam if I could just go to the paper shop and she said, ‘Yes, but don’t be long.’
It’s coming up to Christmas, you see, and I’ve been hanging my nose over some books the paper shop’s had in for weeks and weeks now and hoping I’ll get them. Every day I go down and look in the window and every day they’re still there. I think I’d probably die if I went down and they’d gone.
There are three of them, these books. They’re all about this family of girls who’re really poor but do exciting things and everything and one of them wants to be a writer. Just like me. I told our Mam about them and she said, ‘There’s nothing new under the sun, is there?’ and I said to her, ‘Oh yes, there is. My writing won’t be like her writing and, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll buy you a lovely house in the middle of a field, just like you always wanted.’ And she said, ‘And I supppose if I buy you these books, you’ll be able to do that,’ and I tried to look really trustworthy and said, ‘Yes.’ I thought, keep it simple.
Anyway, our Mam smiled but she didn’t promise anything. When I grow up, I shall always say, ‘Yes, you can have that, that and that,’ to my kids. Well, I would have done but I’m not going to have any. And I’m not going to have any because I couldn’t stand them if they turned out like our Pete and Tone and Joe and Lucy and Rose. Ugh! Fancy having to live with them for the rest of your life.
Today was the very last day at school before the Christmas holidays and they let us out of school at half-past three this afternoon. That was good but what wasn’t good was that you had to answer a question before you could go. Nearly all the class had gone by the time I got one right and when I got out there’s our Lucy and Rose waiting for me.
‘Come on,’ they said. ‘Trust you to be last out. We’re going carol singing tonight.’
I love going carol singing more than anything else in the world. We go up to all the posh houses and sometimes they ask us in and sometimes they set the dog on us. It all depends on what they’re like. So, we rushed through tea and then we were of
f.
Our Mam said, ‘Don’t be late,’ and our Lucy and Rose said, ‘Oh no, we won’t,’ knowing very well we’d be out until they thought everyone had gone to bed.
It was thick with snow and besides that it had started snowing again as well. We walked right over to the other end of the town to the posh houses and then our Lucy and Rose pushed me in front and said, ‘Come on, we’ll start here,’ so we stood outside this house and started singing, ‘silent night, holy night,’ which was a wrong choice for a start because all of a sudden the front door of this house rocked. I thought they had a lion in there. All you could hear was these growls and barks and this great thing kept throwing itself at the door.
‘I’m frightened,’ I said and turned round and there was nobody there. Our Lucy and Rose were halfway down the street.
I thought, ‘Wait till we get home and I tell our Mam, that’s all.’ I started running down the path and the door opened and I didn’t bother stopping to open the gate, I jumped over it. It was ever such a high one as well but you’d have thought I was a deer the way I went over it.
‘They’ve set the dog on me,’ I yelled and I was crying and I couldn’t see anything. Then our Lucy and Rose suddenly appeared at the side of me and they turned round to the big house and they shouted and yelled at the man who was standing in the door. ‘Yer great bully,’ they shouted. ‘She’s only a little kid. If I were a feller,’ our Lucy shouted, ‘I’d come and bash you, you rotten old thing,’ and this man shouted, ‘Gerrof, snotty little brats! I’ll set the dog on you if you come here again.’ Our Rose said, ‘We’re going to tell our Dad of you. He’ll come and sort you out,’ and the man shouted, ‘Yes, and I’ll have the police on him and you as well if you don’t take yourselves off. Disturbing people, you nasty mucky little devils!’
