Twelve Childhood.
I was born in 1949, conceived to celebrate the beginning of the NHS or
the end of the war - my father’s return from the forgotten war in Burma.
Eager to be born, I arrived early. My mother had to run down the
hospital corridor to reach the delivery room. I was undersized and
was kept in hospital to gain weight and was given sunray treatment to
be rid of jaudice. My mother was unable breast feed me because of an
abcess.
My earliest memory that can be dated is 1953, the Coronation party
above the Co-op. Unhappily I remember only two unpleasant things.
Because I had a sister, Anne, 9 years older, we had to share one
orange juice with two straws. Because I was too small, although I had
confidently taken a seat, I was told I was not allowed to join in musical
chairs as it was a rough game.for big children.
I also remember my father bought me a green and cream toy wooden
sweeping brush when I was ill, probably one of my bouts of bronchitis,
not helped by a cold damp house. Also I was not allowed out to play in
the snow whereas my sister was out there with her friends.
One day in summer I was holding a cup of tea and looking at someone
and spilt the tea all down my dress. I felt very humiliated and had to go
in to change.
Our house had an outside toilet and when it rained loose bricks in the
yard sent dirty water shooting up your legs. Big spiders lived in the
newspaper round the door and would suddenly drop out onto the wall
and scare me. We had a tin bath, brought up from the cellar on Fridays
for baths in the kitchen. I’d get dry by the living room fire. Dad was out
late collecting insurance money before people spent it.
Every Saturday we went to Nana’s, my mother’s mother’s, by bus, two
buses, past fields with sheep in them. I knew my Uncle Norman, on my
father’s side was in the prison we passed. No one ever spoke of him but
I knew he was a thief. Mother’s brothers were one nice, the quiet one
called Don, who took a photo of me and I had to sit very still for ages
while he took it, wearing my best taffeta dress with pink smocking on
turquise, the musical brother who came round to play Mozart’s clarinet
concerto, Mum being the orchestra on the piano, while I played with my
toy cars quietly behind the sofa.
One of the Uncles was rarely seen, smoked and wore a cravat and
admitted to liking to cry in the cinema. His wife had run off with the
landlord of The White Hart and he was sad they had no children. He
was a painter and decorator like his Dad had been and heroically a
volunteer fireman.They’d lived in the Millhouse and had a gramaphone
and long playing records and my mother said to me when we left who
could possibly want records that played for so long? We were used to
the 78s the musical uncle played and I’d dance around the table to the
Sugar Plum Fairy.
At teatime the horrible Uncle came in, the one I was afraid of, who tried
to grab me as I went past. He\d sit near the door and I’d delay going to
the toilet until he moved. He’d demand I kiss him goodbye and I always
refused. I only kissed Nana, unwillingly, when Dad arrived to rescue us
and take us home in the car. No one stopped the horrible Uncle, Ralph,
from tormenting me. All I wanted was to be allowed to exist unmolested
in my own space. No one told him to leave me alone. Maybe they didn’t
because of his hare lip, which was ugly, sewn up to leave an odd bubble
on his lip. They were all sorry for him, especially my mother, who
remembered him as a child when his cleft palette meant he couldn’t eat
properly and he came back from errands to the shops in tears because
they could not understand what he said. Why they couldn’t write a list for
him I can’t imagine. He grew up noisy, opinionated, dominating the
household and stayed home for ever to look after his mother until she
died. He was a gardener with a red neck and earth stained hands, but
good at cooking and could ice a cake with pretty little pink rosettes of
icing and silver balls.
The house was more solid and bigger than ours although disparaged as
it was a council house. The council kept it in good repair and it had a
bathroom, but my parents said it was terrible that they couldn’t as
tenants choose the colour of their own front door.The front room, never
used, was like a museum with a big wooden table, a curly orange dish of
carnival glass, a wooden cigarette box, a white glass vase with a grey
picture of somewhere on it and there was a huge print of the painting of
a child, ‘ Bubbles’ on the wall. The other room had a sideboard with
handles that I could stand up, photos of Mum and Dad at their wedding,
Mum holding a huge bush of roses and lily of the valley with ferns falling
down her carefully arranged folds of wedding gown. There was an
unframed photo of Uncle Don as a sweet Christopher Robin sort of child
with a coat with velvet bits on the collar. There was a big Newlyn
painting, a print of a sad woman looking out to sea holding a letter and
we presumed her lover had drowned. There was a photo of my sister
very plump and stolid and unkindly called ‘pudding’ by the horrid
one.There was a box of buttons to play with, a t.v. years before we had
one and a Goblin vaccuum cleaner.
Nana and my mother knitted our jumpers and even bathing suits that got
heavy with seawater and took ages to dry. Mine was red There is a
photo of me gravely blowing soap bubbles from a clay pipe.
One day my Dad had come home in a car, an Austin 7. Nana was
visiting us that day and she called out, ‘Mabel, its Frank, he’s in a car’ It
was enormously exciting. I loved it. I sat in the back looking out the back
window and telling my Dad whenever there was a car behind. Or, I sat in
the front and worked the trafficator switch so the orange lit
indicators flew up on the left or right. Sometimes they need a thump from
inside to make them work. Sometimes the car needed a push up a hill.
Dad showed me how to crank start it with your thumb not round the way
you could get it broken when the handle jumped.He told me all about the
engine, the gears, the pistons like men pedalling, the compression and
explosions.
Every Saturday there were cowboy films at Nana’s. Strong silent men to
whom women were incidental, men with guns who strode and rode and
killed but had a sense of justice and were brave. Women appeared in
bars looking exotic in tight satin bodices and with feather boas. The
man from Wells Fargo, The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, these provided my
animus figures, manhood with no communication skills used with
women beyond a quiet respect, without emotion, and no sex.
After the cowboy film on a Saturday Dad would arrive at last, and when
the man shouted ‘Wakey Wakey’ and the girls went round on display at
the London Palladium we were able to go. I’d pretend I was in a space
ship as we drove through the night. I was safe and happy to be going
home. I hated my horrible Uncle with all my heart but I couldn’t complain
or explain because they all saw how he treated me and no one spoke up
for me.
Maybe I’d marry the nice Uncle when I was older, the quiet nice musical
one who never touched me.
We hardly saw Dad’s mother, but she was beautiful, with a long string of
amber beads and tortoishell combs in her white hair. She was lively and
had big books with photos of the old queen Mary and had a hearth with
a stove and two black rings to keep kettles on. She went out to whist
drives and had falls.
Nana was ugly and red faced and was without style or ornament. She
never went out and looked like the man on the Quaker Oats packet. She
disapproved of her sister Ethel, who I liked. Ethel played the harp, wore
fur coats and had dogs and budgerigars and lodgers and no children.
Mum said I was wrong, Nana didn’t hate her sister, she loved her, of
course she did.
I read a lot, played a lot on my own, imagining I lived on a desert island.
Sometimes I played with my two cousins whose father was in prison or
the girls who visited two doors along, who showed me their little
brother’s willy one day, my first inkling of the difference.
I made friends easily with children on the beach.
Unfortunately on holiday Nana and the Horrible Uncle came with us.
Nana would come for a walk with me before breakfast. We stayed in a
hotel in Wales with high tea and a games room and all the children ran
round the top landing and down the back stairs where the maids went
and round and round. There was a gong to be bashed before meals and
they let you take a turn doing it.
At Grandma’s Dad chased me and the cousins round and round and we
shrieked and giggled and he left the mop at the corner so we thought he
was there and he came round behind us.
At Nana’s we walked over the fields with cows in and knew the names of
all the flowers and I got hayfever and hated it. We went blackberrying
and I nearly impaled myself on barbed wire trying to evade my horrible
Uncle as I ran down a path.
Nana made a whole cupboard full of jam each year. She never
remembered what food I didn’t like and thought I should be made to eat
everything but my mother disagreed and refused to make food a
torment. Nana thought I should be made to blow my nose but no one
explained to me how to do it, they just held a hankie and said blow and
nothing moved in my nose and I had to learn from reading in a book how
to do it. Nana said soap should be put up my nose to make me sneeze
but no one did this.
I was thin and energetic and not as afraid as my sister had been., who
wouldn’t speak to me when I was born if anyone was there. I think
maybe she wanted to tell me something awful that had upset her so
much and that she did tell me and that maybe she made herself fat as a
barrier against the world.
Anne seemed very separate, a sturdy child in national health specs, who
played hockey and wore a tomboyish rubberized green smelly jacket.
We lead separate lives. She had spent time alone at Nana’s as a child
but I wouldn’t go.
I got upset in the night until my mother heard me crying and came in and
found it was all because I couldn’t do cross stitch. I’d not been able to
see when the student teacher was showing us but I hadn’t said so.
Mother didn’t know how to do it either, but she worked it out for me
She stoppped the little girl who stole my gloves and told people it was
her birthday several times a year. But I didn’t tell anyone about the girl
at Sunday school who pinched me. I was due to go up to the next class
and would have been liberated from this nasty kid, but seeing me crying
the teacher said I needn’t go up after all if I was upset, and I couldn’t say
I was crying because of the girl pinching me. I just refused to ever go to
Sunday school again but I wouldn’t explain why. I must have thought I’d
be laughed at and they’d never stoppped my Uncle, but I knew my Dad
didn’t like him.
I’d been so fearless when I was five, singing all the verses of away in a
manger and refusing to leave the stage, taking a step backwards every
time the teacher tried to lift me down, because I didn’t like to be touched
and I knew performers walked off at the side properly and I was going to
do that.
On being taken to Santa Claus I was asked for my penny and said I
didn’t have one as I knew I had a half crown. They came out and said
‘This child has no money’ and my mother said I had and I had the
halfcrown still of course.
At the optician they asked if I knew the letters and I thought they meant
had I got prior knowledge of the test and said no and they started to get
out a chart with boats and planes on and my mother said I did know the
letters and I said of course I knew the alphabet.
I refused to wear a dress my mother bought me from a catalogue
because I didn’t like the feel of the cloth and the pattern had white in it.
I liked to draw. My mother had an abstract pattern I’d done in wax
crayon on the wall in their bedroom, which I only went into very rarely. At
night there were mysterious light patterns on the ceiling which appeared
and disappeared as cars went by, a sort of warm brown glimmering.
I wanted to ride a horse and go to ballet but I wasn’t allowed. It was
probably because of the cost but no one said that. It felt as if they
thought all these things would make me a show off.
I learnt the piano from mum and I went to singing lessons. Two children
mocked the way I really opened my mouth to sing loudly and these
same two hated me for organising a collection to buy a student teacher flowers
because they didn’t like her. The student taught us about red Indians
and I made a beaded head band. Cynthia and Julie phoned me
pretending to be from the radio and asked me to sing down the phone.
I wanted to skate and ski and have a dog but I wasn’t allowed, nor to
have roller skates or a bycycle. I believed that in heaven I would be
asked what I wanted to do and I would then go and do all these
things.
Only father’s aunt Jeanetta died. Both gradfathers were dead and
I couldn’t even remember the one who was alive when I was born.
I was never left with anyone and was kept safe and didn’t learn to tell
the time until I was nine and never went anywhere but the library on my
own. I chose books from the side labelled for boys, Biggles and William
and Jennings.
I didn’t get on all that well with my Dad. I didn’t like the way he’d seize
my hand when we crossed the road or instruct me to say thankyou when
we left some’s house when I was going to so then I wouldn’t because
he’d said it for me. He read in funny voices and missed bits out. I liked to
go and meet him when he came from work on his bycycle and to count
the money he collected and he’d help with school stuff, explain to think if
a maths answer made sense.
Very few people came to the house as my parents had no friends. Only
my mother had a nice friend Frances, with the frightening dog called
Captain and no children. We called her Auntie but we rarely saw her.
She had a lovely voice and they laughed together.
An encyclopedia salesman came but my father said it was a waste of
money and we could use the library. A man once came covered in
tattoos which I thought looked great but I gathered that mother did not.
One day I heard the word rape on the radio and I asked what it meant
and my mother would not tell me. Neither would she explain why
sometimes she could not go swimming.
We went to France on a holiday with the evening class people where my
mother learnt French. There, aged ten, I discovered delicious food, roast
chicken, peaches and black coffee, hot weather, glow worms and
crickets.
We also went to St.Ives and saw the beatniks on the wall and I wanted
to be like that, loitering by the sea, arty and free.
