Dolly's War (8 page)

It is always difficult to be in the minority of one. Later on when this lady behaved so malignantly to me when I was alone, any reports on her behaviour to Chas or my family were taken as strange imaginings and a peculiarity of my condition. ‘Oh, you're not used to living with strangers,' my family would say. ‘Just do all you can to please Mrs...' From Chas it would be, ‘You do let your imagination run riot with you,' and he would add, ‘I find her exceptionally charming and helpful.' I was so afraid of this woman in the lonely evenings when Chas was out canvassing I used to imagine that she wanted me gone in some way, thus leaving Chas as a lodger in her house in her sole charge. She did such odd things, which in my condition, took on a sinister aspect. My sitting-room, at the back of the house on the ground floor, had curtains which didn't quite meet and this witch of a woman would stand outside in the garden and peer through the chinks at me. She once had a strange old man with her and I dashed to the window and held the curtains tight across the gap, my heart pounding, my stomach turning over. One evening I smelt gas and went into the kitchen which was next door to my sitting-room. All the taps on the gas stove were turned on and as I turned them off and opened the window I heard an upstairs door close quietly.

The next day, when Amy was visiting me (she had a council-house near by) and my tormentor was unaware of her presence, she burst into my sitting-room, red and shouting, ‘Oh, you stupid woman, you left the gas-taps on last evening, do you want to kill me in my bed?' Then seeing Amy she apologised for being irritable but explained the thought of gas worried her and she would get the gas men in. Perhaps she had been hasty, perhaps there was some fault with the stove. Then she approached me, put her arms round my shoulders and remarked that she was so impatient she couldn't wait until ‘our lovely baby' was born. She was sure she would take over from me for she adored babies so. Amy glared at her and remarked to me when the landlady had made her exit, ‘Don't let her talk to you like that, Dolly,' but even Amy thought the woman kind at heart and just worried about a gas escape. She added, ‘You are a bit absent-minded, Dolly.' At this I burst into tears and Amy, fury subsiding, put her arms round me (she had a bit of a job for I was enormous and she tiny) and said, ‘There, there, Dolly, you'll be fine when your baby is here.'

I became mortally afraid to stay alone in the house with my landlady in the winter evenings and as soon as Chas had gone I left too, spending the evenings wandering around the cold dark roads. One winter's night with the snow thick on the ground, I needed a lavatory urgently. I crept on to a building-site, feeling like the naughty cat of my young sister's childhood, and just as I was in the act of crouching, out from the watchman's hut tore an Alsatian dog. I must have been the fastest pregnant harrier ever and gasping for breath arrived back trembling on the front doorstep of ‘our' house, aching all over. The key would not unlock the door. The landlady must have put the bolt on yet she knew I was out. I waited in agony for the ‘man from the Pru'. He was cross to find me out in such conditions, mine and the weather, but his key turned like magic.

I began to experience such physical irritation as I had never known before, and one day, in desperation, while my landlady was out, I threw myself into a boiling bath, and with a coarse brush and strong carbolic soap I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. It was sheer heaven – until an hour later when my flesh began to swell and swell and swell and from tummy to knees I was like a skinned balloon. When poor Chas arrived home he almost burst into tears at my inflated state and he helped me so tenderly down the road to see the doctor who lived on the corner. What a sight we were, me so enormous, shuffling with legs a yard apart, poor Chas so slim and worried-looking. The ladies in that road never spoke or even nodded to me, but one lady, peering from behind her stiff starched lace curtains, was so curious as to our strange progress down the road that she actually opened her window and called out, ‘Was it an accident?' Game to the last I answered brightly, ‘Oh no, we wanted this baby.' Slam went the window. ‘Why do you say such things?' said Chas to me gently but reproachfully.

The old doctor rubbed his head when he sighted my self-inflicted injuries and announced that in all his medical experience he'd never come across such a case. He diagnosed baby was blocking something. I'd eaten too many sweets because I had given up smoking and now he wondered if I hadn't chosen the bigger of two evils, the sweets, of course, not the baby. However he was very kind and said I was fortunate to be living with that charming Mrs... You too, I thought, yet I knew I was right in my fear of the dear woman.

The local insurance office to which Charles was attached was to hold a dinner dance and the new agent must attend with his lady and meet the other agents and their wives. I had no decent dress, indeed no dress which would fit, but Chas insisted I go with him and finally I took the sleeves out of a blue winter dress and wore it as a pinafore-dress with a white blouse. I never made up, but I thought that on such an elegant occasion I really should and when I presented myself to Chas (with just a dusting of powder and a little lipstick) he was furious and thought I looked like a Jezebel. (Do they get pregnant, I wondered?) So off must come the lipstick, at least. He put my new lipstick down the lavatory and off we went, he slim and elegant in his wedding suit, me large and shiny and, because I'd had my hair cut far too short, looking like an all-in wrestler. (Years later when, a reformed Dorothy, I lived at the home of the Superintendent of the office and his wife because of war-time bombing, he told me he had never forgotten our entrance at the dinner. He thought Chas, a young slim boy, had been trapped by an enormous and elderly woman, although he said it was obvious I was very clever because I won the general knowledge and spelling game they played that night! Chas thought it would have been more diplomatic for me to have lost the game and let someone higher up the strata win. The prize was a make-up kit and ever after Chas never worried whether I made up or not, and I've never learned how to.) No one was brave enough to ask me to dance, although I would not have accepted for fear of shaking my baby about. Chas was very much in demand for he was a very good dancer and the agents' wives all looked so glamorous, beautifully gowned and ‘made up'.

I knew we just had to get away from the house in which we were living and I spent the days wandering from estate agent to estate agent. Finally, I passed an agents just opening up in Goodmayes. I was their first customer and they had one house to let. This house, an enormous one, had been converted into two flats and we secured the lower one with an enormous garden. No one ever seemed to look at the top flat and it was like living on an island. There were two huge fireplaces in the lounge, our bedroom had been the library, and my mother lent me the money to purchase sixty yards of curtaining. It was very pretty in pale green and pink stripes, but as I could only spend 4½d. per yard it was really only the quality of bandage, so that when Chas was away canvassing in the evenings I had to sit in the dark because the lounge was in front of the house and the curtains transparent. The garden was surrounded by a wall which was broken down at the end and whenever I went into the garden to hang out the clothes an enormous German dog would leap over the wall snarling at me. The house had been empty for so long he thought he owned it so Chas had to do what he could to mend the wall, for the dog's owner, also a foreign lady, simply thought it all rather amusing. At first Chas, not being a do-it-yourself man, built the wall, brick symmetrically above brick, so that it all fell down, but he managed it in the end, although we could never sit in the garden and always had one eye on the wall during brief trips, for the German hound was always trying to struggle over.

Our furniture looked like doll's toys in this lovely old house and it was difficult to keep warm unless one crouched over the fire – we couldn't afford two fires. But we were happy there; ‘An Englishman's home is his castle,' was true for us.

With the birth of my first child only weeks away I began to feel very excited, although coupled with the excitement was the fear that because of the previous restless months, fierce dogs, strange landladies and constant upheaval, my baby might have suffered, for Mother had said when hearing of my pregnancy, ‘Now, Dolly, relax and think peaceful thoughts, put a beautiful picture over your bed.' She was pleased when she knew everything for baby's needs had been procured, but some people thought it was tempting providence to buy the pram or cot beforehand.

In one way I had been deceitful where the authorities had been concerned but as I deceived them on behalf of my unborn child I stilled my conscience. I had booked in at the maternity wing of Queen Mary's hospital at Stratford when I lived at Forest Gate as it was necessary to make reservations in the very early stages of pregnancy, and it would have been too late to have booked up at a maternity hospital when we moved to Ilford.

We had persuaded my parents to move into the upstairs flat we had left at Forest Gate. This needed all our persuasion for although my mother wanted to move into the same house with Marjorie, my father at first was adamant about leaving dear old Poplar and his friends. Finally when he discovered that at the end of the road was the Clapton football-ground, he fell in with our plans. So I was able, although with such honest parents so respectful of authority I was always a little apprehensive of their acting-a-lie ability, to tutor my mother and father into confirming I was still resident there when the health visitor called to check my residence qualifications for the local hospital. I tried to dismiss my worries by thinking that my father's ‘talking with his hands' act would so mystify any health visitor she might even have felt sorry for me for having such an eccentric parent living with me, and the authorities must have assumed I was still at Forest Gate for the great day came without any prior notification that my bed had been cancelled.

It was only when the great day did arrive, and at the time I was so sure that within a few hours our family would be three in number, that I realised that I should have to journey from Goodmayes to Stratford for the happy event. Chas was late home and I knew I would begrudge him even a few minutes for food. Excitedly I told him my news. Coolly, as though he had been a top gynaecologist all his life, he listened to my ‘symptoms', then announced, ‘Yes, it is following the correct pattern but I assure you it will be many, many hours yet before things become urgent, as it is your first child.' Then, to my horror he continued, ‘I have a death claim to pay, the money is urgently needed, that's why I am late, I have been to the bank. Just rest quietly and I will be back in an hour or so and I promise you we will go immediately.' Off he went on his errand of mercy and ‘quietly' I rested all alone, knowing deep down that he was right about my symptoms, but hoping that he wasn't. Dramatically morbid I wanted him to return to find a collapsed wife, a newly born infant, a sort of ‘touch and go affair'. The fact that he hadn't stopped one moment for a meal and had nothing to eat or drink all day stemmed not my feelings that he put duty above me.

I sat in my darkening lounge. Men in other houses in that road – one or two even possessed maids – would be home from business and having dinner with their families. I was a stranger to them. How could I burst in in the middle of entree, soup, or even hors d'oeuvres and announce I was about to give birth? It just wasn't done, that sort of thing. Finally I heard the sound of running feet. A breathless Chas burst in, grabbed my little case which had been packed for weeks and we clambered on to a very shaky 86 bus to Stratford. I was sure I would be accepted as an imminent case; Chas would be remorseful and friends and relations would listen wide-eyed with many ‘Oh Dolly's' at my ‘casual' tale of near disaster. But the Sister in charge listened aloofly to my urgent story, then to my horror she did a ‘Chas' on me and to my husband's great relief she said in the tones of a very kind teacher to a fractious child, ‘My dear,
FIRST
babies take
AGES
to be born, you will be unable to get a wink of sleep here. [Sleep!] Go home and have a
LOVELY
night's rest and come and see me in the morning.' I was so desolate that she and Chas had ganged up against me. Sister patted Chas on the back with a look which said, ‘Good man.' In my panic and frustration at being sent home I almost blurted out the confidential news that I lived, ineligibly, out of the district. My mother used to say accusingly to me when I was young, ‘Good liars, Dolly, need to possess extra good memories,' and I used to feel very injured that of all her children I was singled out for this platitude.

Now that an expert had forecast my child's birth as ‘ages' away I felt somewhat guilty at my harsh thoughts about the father of my child. He was the last person to put either of us in danger. He looked pale, and exhausted. In my unthinking panic I had dragged him off without food and he'd been trudging the streets all day. If the boot had been on the other foot I would have been victorious but he tenderly took my hand. As a forgiveness present for him and to ease my guilty feelings I said to the ‘no doubt about it Sister', ‘That's just what my husband said.' ‘Good man, good man,' said a relieved Sister obviously having made up her mind I had been going to insist on ‘squatting' in the waiting-room. She and her buddy took me in charge and I was marched off to the exit.

We walked from Stratford to Forest Gate where a worried mother made us a delicious supper, gently chiding Chas, not only because of the shaky bus from Goodmayes (it seemed years ago) but because of our night hike in my condition. She gave us her bed and went off to sleep in my father's room. I heard my father say, with a squeaky giggle ‘What's this in aid of, me old gooseberry?' They had had separate rooms for years. She couldn't sleep and neither could I even though my father and Chas were sleeping peacefully. Mother kept putting her head round our bedroom door raising her eyebrows in a sort of query. At last she decided all signs pointed to Queen Mary's and at five a.m. Chas took me to meet the dawn.