Mother Knew Best (25 page)

Chas went to the bathroom while I put on my beautiful wedding nightie and I was sitting up in bed when he returned with a look of pain on his weary face. Struggling with this tyre it had shot behind the bath and he had spent ages on his hands and knees looking for it. When finally it was on successfully he cried out in agony because he felt he was being strangled. I thought this was a strange word to choose, but he got into bed and I put my arms round him. He looked worn out and closed his eyes. Before he fell asleep he looked round the poky room and said sadly, ‘It is a pity, I was looking forward to these two weeks just to be able to get some good nights' sleep.' I lay awake and wondered how many bridegrooms had looked forward to their honeymoon for the sake of a good night's rest. Then I became all maternal and thought about the long hours he worked. He really hadn't the physique for it, and he had taken the wretched job so that we could save up and get married. I made up my mind to give him a happy fortnight. After all, we had years and years in front of us. Then the moths began to arrive, great furry flapping creatures, and it seemed almost dawn before an unsatisfied, but saintly, bride gained repose.

Suddenly we were awakened by shouts and screaming and strange language. The bishop in the next room suffered from nightmares. According to the proprietress he had suffered mightily in the jungle as a missionary. The next day we were passing through the gardens when the bishop's umbrella caught fire. He had gone to sleep using it as a parasol, still smoking his pipe. I would have let it burn as retaliation for my sleepless night but my husband, always a boy scout, put the flames out. Much giggling took place for the rest of the time among all those holy black-coated workers.

We were getting a little more bored each day until we met the two young men. Charming creatures they were, very fond of one another, and we arranged to play tennis with them. My husband brightened up for he was bored with nothing to do, and we played some jolly matches with them. My husband would not let any ball escape him and straining to reach a high ball behind him he overbalanced, slid on his racquet, sprained his ankle and gashed his hand on the gravelled court. He possessed one of those faces which register pain so acutely it is frightening to see. The two young men made their adieus, they had to catch a coach, I must take my husband to the doctor immediately, they advised. I tied his brown shoes together and slung them round my neck. I took his jacket, racquet, balls under my arm, and placing his arm round my shoulder we began our tortured journey back to the hotel. His groans and our slow progress made us a spectacle for the onlookers and, becoming acutely embarrassed at his face, and annoyed at the circumstances in which I found myself, I said ‘What on earth did you want to try to reach such an impossible ball for?' Sensing my feeling he became rather insulting, or so I thought, about my tennis capabilities, and I said ‘Well, surely there's no need to make the fuss you are making?' He stopped dead in the street and began to shout about my callousness and lack of feeling and as we had an audience I apologised. I didn't mean my apology but it was the only way to get him to resume our uneven pace, for he was tall, I was short and loaded. We were all in white and I felt we looked like two ghostly survivors from a safari. I only needed a jar of tiddlers to match his slung shoes round my neck.

When I helped him into the dining-room that evening, he winced and groaned until he found a comfortable place for his sprained foot. His hand was bandaged and the ogling clergymen must have thought it was Passion Sunday. They were probably pleased they were married to the Virgin Mary. ‘Such a pity to meet with an accident on one's honeymoon,' one said to me. I would liked to have said, ‘Yes, a trifle restricting,' but I knew my place.

I went to see my dear mother on my return. She said I didn't appear to have enjoyed my honeymoon. I said, ‘Well, not really,' and she said, confidentially, ‘I could have told you it was overrated.' Her first and last mention of such a subject to me.

On that visit I accompanied her to the Mothers' Union. True I wasn't a mother, but I was her married daughter. The woman in charge was a large county type out of the top drawer, very interested and helpful to the mothers of the poor. She had one of those high-faluting voices which the music hall comics like to imitate. Each member was given a copy of the Union, and each time this good lady brought out the required number of copies she was a few short. She fetched more copies and before she commenced her lecture she said, ‘Well, have you all had it?' and I whispered to Mother as I looked at the poor toothless grannies and tired worn out mums, ‘Not recently,' and the little granny next to me heard and it was difficult to stop her cackling. Mother looked very disapproving but there was a twinkle in her eye. I was a married woman now. To mention it as ‘it' was not too wicked provided I still whispered.

The granny's giggling seemed to excite and bring to life the mothers sitting near us and they edged closer so as to be included in the fun. My mother, because she
was
my mother, knew that all I needed, with my sense of the ridiculous, was a foil or stooge to turn the meeting into Bedlam, and because she was fearful our laughter would get out of hand during the lady visitor's talk, she poured calm upon the chaos by asking if anyone knew what the talk would be about that afternoon. ‘The beauty of Woochechersheer,' said one mother.

The very way she pronounced Worcestershire brought instantly and vividly to my mind the frightened little blond boy of my childhood gazing at the broken bottle with the brown river of sauce oozing from it, and the same boy running in terror after the coal cart carrying the injured child. In a blinding flash of memory I knew—it was uncanny how I was so sure—that I had married that boy. It seemed those pictures had been in my mind all my life yet I had never realised before it was Chas. Although it was difficult to equate him with the heroes in Elinor Glyn's popular novels, I was sure our meeting and marriage had been pre-destined and I was anxious to rush home and tell him the exciting news. Perhaps we would have a rich life together. I would go to work the very next day and save up all my money so that he could leave the slavery of his job.

I could hardly contain myself whilst waiting to tell him all my lovely plans for the future and I sat at the sitting-room window in the dark waiting his return. The clock on the mantel-shelf ticked loudly. Midnight passed and still no Charles. Finally, at two a.m., when I was dizzy gazing at the stars, I saw him turn into the road. He had worked later than usual, had missed the train and had walked some of the way. I sat in silence while he ate his supper for my mother always said, ‘Let a man eat his meal first before you talk to him after a hard day.' While he was in the bathroom I went to bed and put on my honeymoon nightie. I could hear his noisy ablutions; he was like a drowning man when he rinsed his face, for he took in great gasping breaths as he splashed water over it—so much water that it ran down his elbows in rivers, and he seemed to scrub up like a surgeon.

He never glanced at me as he got into bed and switched off the light. ‘Say Worcestershire,' I said to him, taking his hand. He flung my hand aside and shouted, ‘Now look here, I've had a real sod of a day, I've just got to get some sleep, save your stupid games for some other time.' I should have taken his advice but I was so anxious to know if my intuition was right that I babbled on about the boy in Chrisp Street and the boy on the coal-cart. He didn't seem a bit thrilled to know he
was
the boy I had always remembered but just remarked that it was typical of me to remind him of the saddest day of his life when his brother was injured in the raid and his school-friends were killed. Thinking to cheer him up, I said didn't he think it was strange we had met at all, that I was able to join his tennis club when I couldn't play tennis. He switched on the bedside light (such a luxury we had thought). In its pink glow with my lovely nightie on I knew with my smile of love I must look a picture of blushing willingness. He raised himself on one elbow and leaned over me, ready, I thought, to take me in his arms and say passionately, ‘Darling you are right, it was
meant
to be.' Suddenly and belligerently he said, as though he was speaking to an idiot, ‘As secretary of that club I knew we were short of funds, I let you join only because we needed the money.' And he turned his back on me and put out the light.

Dorothy Scannell was born in the East End of London in 1911, one of ten children. At the age of 63, when she was already a grandmother, she wrote her first book
Mother Knew Best,
an evocative and entertaining memoir of her working-class childhood in east London between World Wars One and Two. The book's success prompted two further memoirs,
Dolly's War
and
Dolly's Mixture
, as well as a series of novels.

After marrying Chas, Dorothy had two children and two grand-children. She died, aged 96, in 2008.

Dolly's War

Dolly's Mixture

On a narrow wooden armchair-bed was lying our hostess. Her nightdress was up round her neck. The organist, on his knees, in the nude, was deep in prayer, his face bent in reverence over his bride's prostrate form.

Ever so slowly the organist raised his horrified eyes to ours. My sister, extremely slow to take in the delicacy of any situation, murmured, half to herself, ‘That's funny, I could have sworn he was clean-shaven.'

Dolly Scannell, the author of East End classic memoir
Mother Knew Best
, has now established her home front, wife to the embattled Chas, and proud keeper of her own house. Life is still full of small but piquant joys, sorrows and bizarre happenstances – like Dolly's need to take her household rubbish back to her mother for fear of her new landlord. Before long she's a mum as well, but then comes the war and her cheerful wit and unquenchable spirit are needed more than ever.

Gas masks, ration books, GI's (over-sexed, etc), a chaotic Jewish wedding, husband Chas in the Army, while Dolly takes on his insurance selling door-to-door, encounters a murderous landlady and spends time evacuated from her beloved London to Wales and Suffolk – before being restored to her beloved and enormous family, her mother still matriach of all. A treasure, recalled and retold by the author at her inimitable best!

‘The author of
Mother Knew Best
in hilarious vein'
Yorkshire Post

‘You have to laugh with Dolly Scannell. Somehow that Cockney flow of funny tales shakes you up into laughter'
Evening Standard

‘I haven't patience with you, Dolly,' said my mother. Her patience sorely tried because, visiting her a few weeks after my marriage, I had announced that I was bored, nothing exciting or interesting seemed to be happening. She knew she would have no solution for Dolly's discontent so she issued a statement which was guaranteed to pull me together, once and for all. ‘Has you make your bed so you must lie on it.' She said this in tones of drama. ‘It's
As
you make your bed, Mum, not
H
as.' ‘Yes,' she agreed, ‘Has you make your bed.' My father looked up from his book. ‘Cheer up, Dolly,' he said. ‘The first forty years are the worst, so you've only got thirty-nine years and eleven months to go.'

I decided to bid my parents good-bye, for I was in a restless mood, and Mother, once having made her point, or having thought she had made her point with me, would soon be on the theme of ‘Think of poor... and her lot,' some other unfortunate member of the family whose present plight Mother assumed would make me feel like Lady Rothschild.

I walked along East India Dock Road to Morant Street where my husband's parents lived. Ethel, my mother-in-law, was always understanding. Any trouble of mine she would always insist was ‘that boy's fault', ‘that boy' being my dear husband, Chas. This, of course, made me feel more loving towards him – think what a perfect mother-in-law she was. She, as always, was delighted to see me. I was just in time for supper, sausages and tomatoes. She told me, in her broad Suffolk brogue, of the time she was in service. The Mistress was one day discussing the lower classes, stressing that they were, in her opinion, dirty and unhygienic. This wounded my ma-in-law's pride – ever a fastidious person – and the next morning, before taking up the breakfast sausages she licked each one all over thoroughly and watched, delightedly, while her employers ate them with relish. ‘Don't tell Charlie bor, mor,' she said. ‘He wouldn't like to know I did anything like that.' Then I told her about the aristocratic master, a man with an enormous stomach, who would send for his cook every morning to give her the day's menus as he said it was his only opportunity for intercourse with her. She roared at this although it might have made my mother ‘tut'.

In some strange way, domestic servants employed by people of high birth, considered themselves superior to domestic servants working for employers in trade and the like even though their wages were the same or lower. The wealth and possessions of the employers seemed hardly to have any connection with this domestic class-consciousness.

My mother's employers were not only high born, whereas Ma-in-law's were in trade, but they treated Mother like the ‘lady and gentleman' they were. They addressed her as ‘Leah' and even spoke of her as ‘dear Leah' when mentioning her name through a third person. They
requested
a service from her and did not demand it. Ethel's mistress called her by her surname and then, according to Ethel, pronounced it wrongly purposely to impress on Ethel, her (the mistress's) superiority of class. Ma-in-law's surname was Cadge, but in a loud voice the mistress would call ‘Cage'. She
ordered
things to be done. Ethel did not respect her employer, often engaging in little rebellious acts down in the kitchen to retain her ‘independence'. My mother was proud of her employers. Therefore it went without saying, indeed it was never said, that my mother was more ‘genteel' than Ma-in-law. Ma-in-law retained her Suffolk brogue while my mother had no trace of her Wiltshire tongue or indeed of the cockney style of speech.