Mother Knew Best (2 page)

He could not bear waste, and when fire broke out in the rum quay at the West India Docks he went about for weeks like a broken man, shocked and horrified at the enormous catastrophe, almost snarling at us when we complained of the awful smell. The fire burnt for days, windows melted on houses some way from the docks and people came for miles around to view the fire; they seemed intoxicated by the fumes. Had any of the tourists seen my father they would have thought he had lost his nearest and dearest in the fire. Well, I suppose he had, for he had three sailor sons who received rum rations.

Father would say, ‘Don't envy the rich man his wonderful food, for the rich man would envy the poor man's appetite.' The rich man couldn't enjoy his valuable possessions for they had to be locked away for fear of burglars. We need have no fear of burglars, we just had to place all twelve pairs of scuffed boots by the front door and a burglar would know he was wasting his time by entering.

Poor Father, we never listened to him. He often left the house saying, ‘They are just like their mother, you can't talk to them.' I think we had closed minds, yet we all knew that our parents loved each other, possibly we didn't know it but were jealous of this love they bore for each other. We all wanted to be first and only in their eyes, and were always guiltily pleased when another member of the family was reprimanded.

My father was fanatical about the noise of cisterns, spending hours of his leisure time standing on the lavatory seat adjusting the ball-cock and valve (the cistern arrangements we refined ones called it), and listening when any member of the family left the lavatory, when out he would rush again. Mother said, ‘He is a plumber and should know there is no such thing as a silent cistern.' I am sure with any encouragement my father could have invented one, but we were all so rough, he thought, in pulling chains. When we turned off any taps he would say, ‘Don't forget, just finger and thumb, finger and thumb!'

According to the rest of the family and also public opinion, my father was a very handsome man, but I never thought so. I didn't like his waxed moustache; it would get wet when he drank his tea and he would suck it in before he wiped it on his handkerchief. He was very proud of his feet which were small and slender. He never had a corn or a callous or a misshapen toe or joint even after all the marching he had done in France and he would say that it was very important that we should always look after our feet. ‘Never,' he would say, ‘never wear second-hand shoes, ever.' I thought secondhand shoes would give one the fever by the way he said ‘second-hand.' I thought of the boys I'd seen with no shoes at all and I wondered if we had been poor and I had no boots would I then be brave enough to wear a gift of second-hand boots.

My father was born Walter Chegwidden, in Crantock, a fishing village near Newquay in Cornwall where his grandfather kept a fleet of pleasure-steamers. The Chegwiddens lie in the church-yard and in the village stocks is a plaque to say that the last occupant was there for a record time because of the testimony of one Richard Chegwidden, who was my great uncle Cap'n Dick. He was the Captain who took Edward VII on a celebrated voyage so I knew he must be a first-class captain to be entrusted with the life of a king. Perhaps, after all, he wasn't a sneak and the man pilloried in the stocks was a real criminal.

I never felt my father had that sad feeling of nostalgic yearning for his birthplace as my mother did when telling of her lovely countryside. For one thing his father had despatched him to sea before the mast when he was very young and he said it was the worst period of his life. The harsh treatment meted out to the crew, the rancid food, the scurvy, all served to alienate him, and his father, untrue to type, left Crantock, and settled in Kent, where he founded a builder's business, training my father and each of his brothers in different aspects of the building trade. But when grandfather died my father was unable to control his brothers and it was difficult to get the rich customers to pay their bills. One couldn't be tough with the upper classes, and finally the failure of the business through bad debts caused long months of unemployment. Work was hard to get and there was no dole at that time; the end of the line was the Workhouse.

My parents had four small children then and came the day when they almost reached the end of the line, for Mother had sold all her bits of jewellery and furniture. Father was out tramping the countryside seeking any job he could get. There was no food in the house, and Mother said she just fell on her knees and prayed. To keep her children happy and their minds off food she said they could help her tidy her work-basket, which didn't need such attention for she was always a band-box person. As she opened the basket, there on top was a shining silver sixpence. She bought six halfpenny pieces of fish and two pounds of potatoes, and when Father returned tired and dejected from a fruitless search, there was an unexpected, delicious meal waiting for him. Mother just could not bear to sell his cricketing clothes for he was a fine cricketer, and she had them waiting for him as he was to play in a match at Mottingham that night. He was loath to go as he was near breaking-point, but she gently coaxed him into it. When he arrived at the Club House the Members had collected thirty shillings for him as he was so down on his luck, and a visiting player hearing that Father was a fully qualified plumber told him that Poplar Borough Council were in need of a good plumber.

Early the following morning Father set off for that unknown part of London and having obtained the job searched about to find accommodation and rented the little house, no. 3 Grove Villas. He sealed all the rooms and put sulphur candles in each one for he knew that houses in such areas were ‘buggy,' and Mother moved from her nice clean sunny house in Beckenham with its large white scrubbed kitchen, to this cellar of a place in an almost foreign land. Years later she told me that although she kept it from my Father and the children, when she first set eyes on the house and the area she really thought her heart would break.

My mother's name was Leah. She was a very pretty woman, everyone said so, with auburn curly hair which she wore in a bun on the top of her head, but the little curls would not go straight so there was always a row of tiny curls across the top of her forehead. Her eyes were grey and she had a very straight nose, and a smiling mouth. She had small hips, was high-busted, and had small slender hands and feet. She was about five feet two inches tall, yet her mother had been nearly six feet tall and her father over six feet. I always thought Mother was short because she was one of twins. Mother had ten children and was always smiling, and her twin sister Emma had no children and was very serious.

Mother was one of thirteen children and her father worked as a carter at the Hall in Dinton, Wiltshire, where my mother was born. She said her father was a handsome man with dark curly hair and they had always thought their name was Mitchard—it was so in the family bible. But when his children went to school, for which he paid 6d. per week for each of them, the village schoolmistress and some local bigwigs decided that this was too high-flown for their station in life, and that they should be called Meatyard. When I was a little girl I was very angry at this for I thought Meatyard an ugly name, but Mother said, ‘In those days, dear, we knew our place.'

I was glad when years and years later Somerset House could not trace her by the name of Meatyard when Father was applying for his pension. They wrote and asked if Mother had ever been known by any other name, and she was traced by Mitchard. Originally I think it had a ‘de' in front of it, for Grandfather was supposed to have been a descendant of the Huguenots.

Her mother was a very houseproud and stern woman, but her father was more gentle. If he held a gentleman's horse for him or helped a visitor to the Hall he would sometimes be given 6d. and he would hurry straight home with it to Grandmother. Grandfather had a bible which was very old and very beautiful, and had the Apocrypha in it, in which he would enter all the children's births. The bible was read at every meal in Mother's house when she was young.

Nevertheless she was a bit of a rebel. The children had to curtsey to the squire even though he galloped past without acknowledging them, and spattered them with mud. One day Mother resolved not to curtsey to the squire and his lady when they rode by in their carriage and pair, and she walked on without ‘bending the knee.' This act of rebellion so infuriated the squire's lady that she drove straight on to report the incident, or rather non-incident, to the village school-mistress and the rector. Mother was punished for her dreadful behaviour but, still defiant, at the next passing of the squire and his lady, she and her loyal brother made the most exaggerated of curtseys and bows, almost touching the ground with their heads. Their childish sarcasm and spirit was lost on the lady of the manor, for she appeared haughtily pleased.

One of my uncles gashed his hand very badly on a scythe. The squire sent him home to Grandmother to bind it up, so that he could return to work immediately. But it was too serious for Grandmother to attend to and she gave him money they could ill afford, and off he went to the doctor's, a five-mile walk away. The old doctor knew that his hand must be very badly gashed to need medical attention, and also knew that my uncle had walked five miles from his own village but he said, ‘Show me your money before I look at your hand.' Mother's brother, with a touch of her spirit said, ‘If thee'st woan't look first, thee'st woan't see it 't all,' and he walked the five miles home. Grandmother stayed up all night with him attending to his injured hand. He returned to work at dawn.

My Grandfather came up to the Great Exhibition of 1851 by stage coach and when old Lady Wyndham of the Hall died in London he had to bring her home by stage coach. My Mother said nobody knew she was dead, for she didn't look any different. The men had no time off from work, not even on Sundays, and Grandfather would get up at 4 a.m. to tend his cottage vegetable-plot to provide food for the family. At hay-making time all the children would help, and once Mother ‘got at' the cider and she said it made her run backwards all the way home.

When my grandfather was dying Mother was up in London and every day Grandfather asked for his ‘smiling Leah' but she couldn't go because she had five small children and was very poor. He said if she didn't come by Wednesday it would be too late, and on Wednesday he died. Mother was brokenhearted for she loved her gentle father.

Mother, like the rest of the country girls, went into domestic service at an early age. At her first place in service, the lady of the house gave her one of her cast-off dresses. It was in a fine woollen checked material with tiny buttons from neck to waist, and had a high neck with real lace round it and velvet edgings. One day the house was burgled and Mother was required to attend court as a witness. She wore this dress, her only off-duty one, and in her hair she pinned a little lace rose she had made. The next day on the front page of the local paper was a full-length portrait of Mother with a report of the case. The judge complimented Mother on her elegant appearance, saying she brought sunshine into the court, giving her evidence in a most intelligent manner, and he felt that any employer having a servant like Mother would be proud of her. The next day Mother was summoned to the mistress's room and informed that she must never wear that frock outside the house again. She was to keep it to wear only in the tiny attic which she shared with the parlour maid.

She left shortly afterwards to work for the Greens, who were very fond of her. She was an exceptionally fine needlewoman and in addition to her duties as maid, her spare moments were spent on the mistress's clothes or the beautiful linen.

She loved the children of the house and they loved her. The little boy became Lord Green, Master of the Rolls, and my Father said he wasn't surprised, for whenever he met Mother in the park when the children were with her, the little boy would give him a judge's serious questioning gaze and make my father feel guilty for speaking to my mother. No followers were allowed; it was written in the ‘domestic articles.' The same little boy knew my mother had a strong sense of humour and loved to make her laugh at the wrong times. If they had important people to dinner and she was called in to help the butler and the footman, he would try to catch her attention and do something to ‘start her off.' Mother laughed at the time they had royal V.I.P.s to dinner, and young Master Green going into the dining-room to say good night to his parents said, ‘Oh, I see you are using the best silver tonight, Papa.'

Mr Green was apparently a ‘perfect gentleman' but extremely particular and fastidious. One evening the bell rang for Mother and she climbed the many flights of stairs only to find that Mr Green thought his bathmat wasn't quite straight. Another time he rang because his hairbrush wasn't level on his dressing-table—a very fidgetty man. His young wife, however, was just the opposite, happy-go-lucky and quite unfussy. One evening when Mother had known Father for a long time she became very brave and let him in through the kitchen door when the family would be safe at dinner. In her horror she saw young Mrs Green coming down the stairs to the kitchen, and Father was hurriedly pushed behind the sink curtain. Mrs Green hoisted her skirts for Mother to unlace her corsets, and Mother's hands shook with fear.

Once when the Greens were entertaining, the servants had been working like slaves from dawn and the butler sent Mother downstairs with the key to the wine cellar with instructions what to bring up if he rang. No one ever had the key to the wine cellar except the butler, and the other servants coaxed Mother to get them a bottle of very fine old port. The others persuaded Mother to have some and in a short time she was flushed and light-headed. The bell rang and she went up to the dining-room and by some miracle performed her duties properly, but after the guests had left, old Mrs Green the Master's mother who lived with them and managed the house, rang for Mother to go to her boudoir. ‘Leah,' she said, ‘I thought you uncommonly flushed tonight at table, I am going to give you some of my homeopathic medicine in case you are sickening for something,' and Mother had to drink a large dose of an obnoxious mixture in front of Mrs Green. This amused the other servants no end.