Mother Knew Best (26 page)

Sometimes Chas's younger brother would be home when I visited his mother. I liked that, for he was great fun, a real character. He called his mum, ‘Old Lady' or ‘Missus'. There were, of course, no bathrooms in the little Poplar houses and Philip would stand by the kitchen sink stripped to the waist, but before commencing his ablutions he would don a hat, a straw boater in summer and a bowler-hat in winter. At one time he worked on the grocery counter of a large store. He was especially kind to old ladies and loved to make them laugh. If they were not sure which fish paste to choose he would suggest the latest which had just arrived, ‘Winkle and Whale'. If they wanted something special he would say, ‘Oh, just a moment, madam, I'll go down in my private lift to the basement.' He would then press an invisible push-button on his side of the counter, bend his knees and slowly ‘descend', then after a little while ‘up' he would rise with the required article which had been just under the counter.

‘Coo,' remarked my elegant sister Amy when Mother told her of my less than ecstatic acceptance of married life, ‘I wish I had my first married months over again, I had a fine time.' She would, of course; that went without saying. Her self-contained second-floor flat was, thanks to her adoring husband James, newly decorated, her furniture and equipment the best obtainable. It all looked so new and shining Amy never thought any housework need be done. She would rise after James had left for the office and have a leisurely style breakfast while reading the paper, clad in her honeymoon negligee. Then she would bath and make herself all elegant in one of her honeymoon suits and visit friends, go shopping, have a late lunch, then saunter home to get the evening meal. She was brought up sharply from this life of luxury by the woman in the flat below, a fanatically house-proud creature. She was probably jealous of Amy's way of life and one day stopped her and enquired, ‘Don't you ever do any housework?' Amy said to me, really it hadn't occurred to her, but from then on, to give her her due, she changed her ways.

Although Amy and I were often, as Mother said, ‘at logger-heads' with one another, yet we were never bored in each other's company, which was a compliment to me in one way, for Amy could not bear to be bored and would not suffer fools gladly. She often said she had to be dominant because she was the middle one of the family and therefore the only one without status. Since I was the ninth child out of ten I couldn't think what status I possessed but I envied her the doing of things ‘her way' and was always mystified that the men in her life came back for more, never leaving her, as I felt they would be justified in doing by her treatment of them. James played football for a Millwall team and also the Stepney Templars before they were married. Amy used to watch but was never one hundred per cent pleased by spectatorship.

One Saturday the team travelled to Orpington in Kent for a match. Amy said they played the inmates of a mental-home! She was bored to tears and after the match Jim said, to placate her, ‘Let's take a walk round the lovely Kent countryside.' Amy, knowing this would lead to courtship love-making, was too bored and now too bad-tempered for this, and while Jim was in the dressing-room changing she made her way to the station and returned home to Poplar. Dusk was falling when an agitated James arrived at our house in Grove Villas. He had been searching worriedly for Amy and was nearly frantic. He went up the main steps of the house and knocked. Amy appeared from the basement, and Jim, in his frantic state of mind and the gathering darkness, mistook her for my youngest sister Marjorie. ‘Is Amy home yet, Marjorie?' he enquired. ‘No,' said Amy in Marjorie's voice. ‘Oh, God,' said a nearly crazy Jim, and tore off, much to Amy's satisfaction. I told Mother, who was in the scullery, and I was dispatched immediately after Jim. ‘Poor chap,' said Mother. When they met it was Jim who was profuse with apologies. Small wonder that I envied my Jezebel of a sister.

Life, therefore, could not be peaceful with Amy, and one Christmas through her ‘equality' with men something terrible happened in our house. My mother had been busy all day with the Christmas preparations. She was tired out and Amy was assisting her. I was in the corner of the kitchen, my head stuck in a book. My father was very late home and Mother, having cooked his tea, sirloin steak, had placed it in the oven beside the kitchen fire. Finally a tottery father appeared having celebrated the holy eve with his men friends. He sat down to this dried up looking steak, took one mouthful and throwing it on the fire said, ‘What do you mean, Mother, by offering me tough steak, I could sole my bloody boots with it.'

Mother would probably have poured oil on troubled waters, but Amy, knowing how Mother had worked to the point of exhaustion for us all, said to my father, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Dad, coming home and complaining when Mother has been slaving away for you all day.' Whether it was the word ‘you', whether it was a daughter's criticism, whether in his befuddled mind he couldn't face the fact that what Amy had said was true, I don't know, but he got up from the table and approaching Amy in a menacing manner, he hissed, ‘You cheeky little cat,' at the same time stretching out his hands as though to place them round her neck. Mother all this time was standing by the floured pastry-board smiling gently in an embarrassed way. Amy, now Sarah Bernhardt in her glory, threw up her head and seemed to place her neck into Father's outstretched hands. ‘Go on then,' she said in deep dramatic tones. ‘Murder me, murder me.' My father suddenly lowered his hands and said disgustedly, ‘Pff, you silly little cake.' As he lowered his hands, Amy, reluctant to abandon the dramatic scene, pushed her face forward and my father's thumb caught her eye. Mother now advanced round the table and said, ‘Walter, I am ashamed of you, your own daughter. How can I live with a man like that?' Again my father's befuddled pride rose strong in him. ‘If you wish to go, then go,' he shouted at my mother. She had done it now, the ball was in her court, for the sake of
her
pride she
had
to go (and of course she didn't want to). ‘Come, Marjorie,' she said, and she, Amy and Marjorie swept from the room.

Still paralysed in my chair by the fire I heard the upstairs front door close. My mother and sisters had not glanced at me, no invitation had been forthcoming to join them and I was left with this strange father. I could have gone with them without an invitation I knew, but to do so I would have had to pass my father and I was too frightened to do that. He turned to me and gazing hard at me said, ‘And what do
you
intend to do, Dolly?' Discretion being the better part of valour (I was glad Amy couldn't hear me), I said, ‘I'll stay with you, Dad,' feeling all the time a cowardly hypocrite. My declaration of loyal daughterly love did not seem to make him weep with fatherly tenderness or remorse, or perhaps it was because of my promise to stay that he said, ‘Well, I'm now going out to
drown
myself!' He left by the basement door. Before I could collect my thoughts the door opened again, ‘In drink,' added my father and slammed the door.

I was now alone in the house. There was no one to help me. None of my brothers and sisters was at home. David was at sea as also were Cecil and Charlie. Winifred was in Australia and Agnes, Arthur and Leonard were all married and away. I felt very lonely and very frightened. Suddenly to add to my fears I thought about the oncoming night. Suppose my father did not come back (suddenly I wished that he would), and a burglar broke in. Just as I was torturing myself with awful thoughts the kitchen door began to open slowly. ‘Oh, dear,' I thought, a burglar must have been lying in wait. Perhaps he had followed my tottery father home and heard all that went on. Suddenly round the door came three faces, Mother's, Marjorie's and Amy's. All beaming, except that Amy's eye was very inflamed, all happy again. There was a knock on the door. It was Amy's James. Sarah Bernhardt once more, Amy flung herself into Jim's arms. This unusually warm welcome seemed to please him mightily. ‘Oh, Jim,' she said, ‘my father has tried to murder me,' copious sobs from Amy. Jim, pleased for any excuse to be close to his darling, hugged her tight. Glancing at us three and seeing our happy smiles he knew that all was well really.

My mother seemed to have enjoyed the evening in some strange fashion and slept in our room that night to let my father think she had gone. The next morning Christmas dinner was well on the way when a father with a hangover appeared downstairs. We all assumed that the demon drink would have given him an attack of amnesia, or at least remorse, but when he saw my mother wearing a paper hat and happily preparing the meal he said, ‘I understood you had left me.' ‘Well,' said my mother sheepishly, ‘I've come back.' With a hint of dignity my father said, ‘I'll allow it this time, but on any future occasion if you decide to leave let it be understood I shall expect you to be gone for good.'

I was glad Amy wasn't there for she would not like to have seen my father the moral victor. When at family gatherings over the years Amy says, ‘Do you remember that Christmas when Dad tried to murder me?' the whole family, the rest of them having heard
our
story, clamp down on Amy. To make matters worse for her, James always had a soft spot for and admired my father greatly, so short of being a corpse Amy has not a leg to stand on. 

I had returned from my own honeymoon just a few days before my return visit to my mother and as my old friend Edna's new house at Blackheath was a short bus-ride away from our new flat at Greenwich, on the spur of the moment I had decided to pop in to see her. Edna, possibly wanting to hear all about my honeymoon, had insisted at my wedding that she and Bill, her husband, would always be delighted to see my Chas and me. She and I were friends from my church-going days and I understood her husband had been a member of a Blackheath church choir. She was a sweet, simple, sentimental sort of creature and lived in an Elinor Glyn type of fantasy world. She was an avid reader of the daily primrose thoughts of certain newspaper ladies. Half of her tripped the light fantastic amongst the fragrant printed nothings she devoured daily, the other half of her romantic self clothed in satin, lay in imaginary abandonment on a leopard-skin rug. She had confided in me, in whispered tones, details of her honeymoon, and had just reached the exciting part where she was lying virginally on the pillows, clad in an exotic peach negligee. ‘Bill came into the room,' went on Edna, eyes dreamily half-closed, re-living what had obviously been for her a heavenly experience. ‘And when he saw me in my beautiful nightdress, he fell on his knees by the side of the bed and began to pray.' I was so surprised at this religious turn of events in what had promised to be a story of purple passion, that I was about to ask, ‘What on earth could he have prayed for?' when a frantic male voice from above suddenly screamed, ‘What have you done with my bloody vest?' ‘Oh dear,' sighed Edna. ‘He's probably slinging everything all over the bedroom. Before we were married,' she continued, ‘I never dreamt Bill had this impatient streak in him.' The door of the small sitting-room burst open and a tousled red-faced man burst in, stopping short at the sight of me. ‘I might as well go and sit in the car,' he said. ‘There's more room in that.'

It wasn't difficult for me to see that Bill's reception of me was a little on the cool side and I kissed Edna good-bye, promising to come again to hear the next instalment of her night to remember when Bill was at work. Outside the house I waved to Bill who was sitting in a tiny car reading the evening paper. It was the sort of car which one could jokingly have said ‘buttoned up at the back', but it
was
a car, it
was
Bill's, he
was
buying his house, all enormous achievements. He struggled to open the door of his car and called out politely (no doubt happy that I was departing), ‘And how is dear Chas?' ‘Oh, fine, just fine,' I replied. This made him glower and he wriggled back into his limousine.

Waiting at the bus-stop I pondered on the honeymoons of us working lasses. So many of us were shy of landladies, of hotel guests, and of each other, yet the romantic lady novelists of that day led us to believe that the first coming together was an effortless heavenly union, rapture with a capital R. On cloud nine all the heroes and heroines ascended, without fail, to paradise.

My sister Amy went to a hotel where the lavatory lock was faulty and on her wedding night she was trapped for a long time. Extrovert though she was she was still too shy to bang on the door or shout, while her husband, because of his bride's enforced captivity, thus reversed the normal bride and groom procedure, and arrived first in the nuptial chamber. He was too shy himself (and anyway he was not dressed for it) to go downstairs and enquire ‘What kept you?' The second night of their honeymoon was wet and cold and they spent the evening in the lounge. James rose to go to bed but Amy missed the cue and he went up without her. ‘Oh,' said the other guests, ‘he's gone up without you tonight, my dear,' and the coy laughter made Amy so embarrassed that she sat casually in the lounge for an extra long time. Poor James must have thought he had married a bad timekeeper.

Another friend of mine who insisted that she had enjoyed a rapturous honeymoon, wept solidly through the whole of the first night. She said she had no idea why she cried but once having commenced couldn't stop and the next morning at breakfast her eyes were swollen, red and puffy and the other guests cast strange glances at her bridegroom, a charming gentle fellow. He said he felt a beast, a real Mr Hyde.

*

Our own flat comprised a large bay-windowed sitting-room, which looked out on to an attractive wide road of identical villas and a large bedroom overlooking the back garden; this garden went down in wide steppes to a valley. Just beyond the valley the electric trains whizzed by and because the sound of trains had been with me all my life it wasn't long before I felt the flat was ‘like home'. The kitchen, bay-windowed too, overlooked the back garden and on the landing midway between kitchen and sitting-room was ‘our own' bathroom and lavatory.