Mother Knew Best (6 page)

Mo Finer, the Jewish dentist, had a surgery in East India Dock Road. He was a large brutal-looking man with a red face and thick lips. He always appeared to be eating and wiping his mouth on a grubby white overall. He pulled teeth free if the victim was willing to sit in the window for a public extraction, a novel if noisy way of advertising. If you were a coward then you would have to pay to have your tooth removed behind closed doors. So one had a choice, unless of course you were a penniless coward, then you were in for a bad time, for I believe Mo removed teeth free without anaesthetics of any kind. My brothers said Mo could pull a man across the road by his teeth, he was so strong. As he pulled teeth he would throw them out into the road. We never went to Mo Finer. When I became of school age I had my teeth removed by the clinic and I thought it was heavenly. Under gas I really did see the rabbit running round and round as the dentist had promised I would, and I just longed to have gas again. The dentist said I was his best patient and the first one ever to rush into the surgery and jump eagerly into the swivel-chair.

The public baths and wash-houses backed on to our house and from the wash-house came an everlasting hot, soapy, steamy aroma. The door of the wash-house was always open and in the dark interior one could catch a glimpse of red wet-faced women in sacking aprons and men's boots doing their weekly wash, or a daily wash if they took in washing for a few shillings. The clothes would dry in a very hot open oven suspended on iron rails on metal wheels. The noise of these metal wheels was deafening and the women would have to shout all day to be heard above the noise. Inside the wash-house they looked like Amazons with their sleeves rolled up above their soapy elbows, but when they came out and packed their prams with sacking-covered washing they looked old. With rusty black hats, or a man's cap fixed flat with a large bead-ended hat-pin on top of their scragged hair, they seemed very small and bent. They would have to hold the large bundle of washing with one hand and push the go-cart with the other. Their ankles seemed to be bent over and their shoes never looked as though they belonged to them.

When we were too old for Mother to bathe us in the little tin bath, we would join the older ones every Friday and go to the public baths. We would have to go early for a large crowd collected in the waiting-room when the young people came home from work. It was impossible for a girl to pop into the baths before a dance, etc. for sometimes it was necessary to wait over two hours for one's bath. We always took a book to read, and always saw the local brides there the night before their wedding. I never had a satisfactory bath there for I was always nervous of authority, and as I could never be sure whether the water was the right heat when I tried it with my hands at the attendant's request, I had a bath either too cold or too hot and often came home looking like a lobster. I could never pluck up courage, as the others did, to call out, ‘More hot, or cold, in number... please,' even though the baths rang with the sound of such requests. When the attendant said, ‘Hurry along in number... please,' I thought how brave the girl in that numbered bath was, to have to be asked to hurry. I wished I could just lie in the warm water with no one outside waiting for the bath. One Friday evening I was at the baths with Winifred when a neighbour's daughter came out. She was an anaemic copy of Mary Pickford, very thin, with bent ankles on high-heeled patent shoes. She wore a moth-eaten fur and said to Winnie, ‘Oh I feel a ton lighter now,' and Winnie remarked to me she wasn't surprised for that was the young lady's yearly visit. Poor frail little thing, she just wanted to look like a film star, and she was so thin I should think it would have been dangerous for her to visit the baths each week.

Next to the baths was the blacksmiths and I used to love to watch him shoe the horses. He was only a little man but he had huge forearms. I wondered why the horses didn't cry out in pain when he put the hot sizzling shoe on the hoof. Mother said she always knew when I had watched the horses being shod for I smelt of stables. The gutters in my childhood were always filled with chaff from the horses' nose-bags.

We went to the ‘pictures' on Saturday mornings. The Picture Palace was like a huge garage with dirty red doors opposite Mrs Crutchington's shop and it cost a ha'penny. It was called the Star Picture Palace and we would all cheer when the pictures finally started for the screen was a long time flickering and shaking and tearing itself in two with brief glimpses of the previous week's serial before it settled down, and whenever it broke down during the performance, which was often, we would all boo loudly. A lady played the piano, sad music, frightening music, and happy music according to how the film was progressing and what was taking place. Because we had so few ‘arrants' to do, we were nearly always the first ones there and so sat in the front row where the cowboys were nine feet tall, the horses hunched up in the middle and the heroine had a ‘Dish ran away with the spoon' face.

Marjorie was the most terrible person to accompany to the pictures. Even when she was older she didn't improve much. We all left the world mentally, but she left it physically as well in a sense. When the heroine was tied to the railway line, and tried to fight her captors, Marjorie would fight in her seat. When the poor mother was pleading with the wicked landlord for her starving children, Marjorie was on her knees pleading too. Her screams of terror when the heroine was about to be tortured seemed louder to me than the frightening music being played by the lady pianist and I would thump Marjorie to bring her back to the world. All in vain, she never felt or heard me, and I ceased going to the pictures on Saturdays long before Marjorie did, for she could wait patiently until the next episode of an exciting serial. Rather than wait and wonder, I decided not to go. I hated serials, I just had to see a complete picture, and most of the films shown to the children had been cut and made into serials, for by chopping the films into little bits they would last the Picture Palace for weeks and weeks. I always thought it had been raining on the screen and it wasn't until years later I realised it was the poor quality of the film. The black streaks moved everlastingly up and down.

Saturday was disinfectant day, too. The ‘disinfecting' the children called the white cloudy liquid which was supplied free by the council provided the requisite number of bottles was taken each Saturday morning. We had to be very careful not to spill any for my brother Cecil had warned us, when passing the job over to Marjorie and me, that it ‘rots your boots,' and being clever I knew that once it had rotted my boots then it would start on my feet. Father used the disinfectant for cleaning the drains which he did with great vigour as though he was attacking the devil. All the time he would talk about the ignorant people who turned up their noses because they thought free disinfectant was charity and if they took advantage of it people would think they were accepting charity and were also dirty. Disinfectant from the borough was for the dirty poor most people thought, but I knew we were sensible for Father said it was lovely stuff. I have seen him pour it over a cut finger and it would heal in no time. Mother said some women put it in their wash to make their clothes look white, but Mother said hers were white through proper washing. We all have our standards.

High Street, Poplar, on a Saturday morning was a human ant colony, a never-ending stream of children hurrying along, or having a rest, with clinking bottles. Well, we hurried one way when the bottles were empty, on the way back we carried the bags in different positions to relieve the strain on our arms.

The disinfectant depot was not the ‘dust instructor.' The dust instructor was where the dustmen took the rubbish; it was really the dust destructor, but everybody called it instructor. The disinfectant depot was past the Nautical College, a beautiful white building, in the High Street. We turned into a steep cobble-stoned yard where all the children had to start running—it was well known that no one could walk down that slope. We had all tried. In winter it was extremely treacherous and we were thankful it was on the way in when we were carrying empty bottles for if we had slipped on the way out we might have been rotted all over. Sitting in the depot at an enormous dark green carboy was a man with a grey cap, a silent man who never spoke, but just held out his hands for our empty bottles. We always said ‘Thank you,' for Mother reminded us every Saturday about doing this. The large cork of his carboy was pure white and spongy where the disinfectant had touched it. That was proof Cecil spoke the truth.

The workhouse was attached to the depot and across the yard we could see little men in coarse grey suits and caps going to and fro through barred windows and yellow-faced vacant-looking old women staring at us. I knew the workhouse was a sad place because my brother David would recite a poem about Christmas Day in ‘
IT
.' I always took this poem very seriously.

One Saturday morning on the way back from the Depot we rested outside Coldstreamer's, the grubby little general shop with stairs up to the glass door which was plastered with advertisements for Mazawattee tea and Edwards' ‘dessicated.'

I was very fond of the Mazawattee tea advertisement for my maternal grandmother had won ten shillings per week for life for submitting a winning couplet to them. Ten shillings per week for life in 1900 was a fortune. Mother never shopped at Coldstreamer's, secretly thinking it a gossip shop where lots of women collected. Mother never gossiped or said anything unkind about anyone. Mrs Coldstreamer had a lemon-shaped face, lemon-coloured hair and she possessed a lemon-coloured cat, a huge beast. In the dark little window were displayed black bowls filled with butter beans, rice, sugar, etc. all very dusty and ancient-looking.

On this Saturday morning as we rested with our burdens, into the shop window climbed the huge lemon Tom. I could see Marjorie's indignation beginning to take on its righteous role, ‘Look at that Tom,' she said, ‘he shouldn't be near food.' Tom sniffed at every bowl in turn, then when Marjorie was worried he would lick the beans or the rice, or even the prunes, he turned to the brown sugar and to Marjorie's choking horror, he slowly lifted one leg, looked straight through the window at Marjorie and defiantly soaked the brown sugar which I noticed did not change colour. I suspected he had done that trick before, hence the sniffing. Marjorie said she must tell Mrs C. who would be so pleased to know. Whatever emotion that good lady would feel, with a shopful of customers, I knew it would not be pleasure and I tried to dissuade Marjorie by saying that there was nothing to worry about for our mother didn't buy anything there. My ‘it's all right for us,' attitude made Marjorie turn on me. ‘There's other people, you know, Dolly,' she said. She went up the steps and as the bell rang as she opened the door I thought discretion was the better part of valour and ran home to tell Mother what Marjorie was doing. When Marjorie arrived home she was seething. It seemed her reception from Mrs C. was not as she had imagined it to be, no grateful thanks, but extremely short shrift. Apparently she said to Mrs C., ‘You will be pleased with me for telling you, Mrs Coldstreamer, that your Tom cat has just wee-weed in the brown sugar in the window.' That good lady replied, ‘Well, why should it worry you, your mother will never buy it.' It was Marjorie's first lesson that virtue is not its own reward.

There was always the street to play in, lovely Bath Street, for there was nowhere to play in The Grove. On Saturday afternoons and after school we would always ask if we could go out to play. Our friends were always there before us for they took their thick slice of bread into the street to eat. Mother made us sit at the table all together to eat our tea and she sat down too at the top of the table behind her huge brown teapot. She would say, ‘Don't talk to any strange men, and come in when the church bell rings.' The church bell chimed for the hours but we knew she meant the evensong bell at 7:30 and without fail at the first evensong peal we would be away home as Mother had told us to.

We took with us pieces of rope for skipping, but sometimes one girl would have an enormous thick tarred length of rope which stretched right across the road, then it was a mass effort, boys as well. The boys looked very awkward and could not skip like the girls. ‘Allee in together girls, never mind the weather girls,' we would chant. The first one in under the heavy swinging rope had to be very durable with extra strong legs for it was some time before everybody was in and skipping, and if your legs turned weak the rope would give them a nasty bruise. The two children turning the heavy rope had to be Amazons too and woe betide them if they let the rope droop and so caused us to be out through no fault of our own.

Sometimes we would have a grotto season. Someone would build the first grotto and then on every street comer a grotto would arise. The older girls, Winifred and Amy did quite well out of their grottos, Winnie calm and business-like, Amy small and artistic. Marjorie and I were afraid to participate in our friends' grottos for Mother was against what she thought was begging. ‘Nothing but charity,' she would say, ‘Never let anyone know you are poor. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being poor, it's the pleading of poverty which is so shaming.' Winifred and Amy were more daring—how they hid their ill-gotten gains I don't know. In the end, of course, they were found out.

The grottos were a work of love and squirrel-like searching for stones, flowers, leaves, broken ornaments, texts and pictures from magazines. I once saw a little blue egg on a grotto yet the only birds I ever saw, all the time I lived in Poplar, were sparrows. Perhaps in my ignorance I thought all birds were sparrows. Winnie and Amy would place their grotto near a public house—clever Winnie, for they might catch a reeling man whose thriftiness was befuddled by an extra pint. Winnie was found out because a man gave her a lot of money for one kiss. This monstrous act was reported to Mother who promptly bankrupted the grotto business. After this, how could us younger ones start up in business? We felt the older ones had all the fun when they were young.