Dolly's War (2 page)

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.

Being so high up I used to feel very Swiss and would not have been surprised to hear a yodeller, although I knew the performers of such two-toned singing would not be either my landlord or his wife for they were very serious people not given to intoning of any description. They were both very tall and slim. He reminded me of Mephistopheles or Punch, for he had that kind of shaped face, rather cruel-looking, and I was pleased, on the rare occasions that I saw him that he wasn't a conversationalist. His wife, who was quite pleasant, possessed a strange gait; she seemed to fall forward as though her feet were powerless.

My unmarried friends thought me very lucky in obtaining such an attractive flat so that I could be married. Indeed I felt I was lucky too, for at that time the underlying fear of maidens was the worry of being ‘left on the shelf'. When a girl became engaged (and later married) there was really no need for two gloves, for these girls would wear a glove on the right hand only and carry the other glove, the left hand which bore the carats of the chosen being casually displayed on buses and trains.

‘Those who go a-borrowing go a-sorrowing' had so been drummed into us by our elders that Chas and I had saved hard and gone without pleasures, indeed necessities, to purchase our home for cash. We possessed a ‘walnut' bedroom suite with a ‘his' and a ‘her' wardrobe. The ‘her' was an immense bow-fronted affair smelling permanently of varnish; my clothes seemed sadly lost and dangled limp and lonely in its vast cavernous interior. The ‘his' was smaller, possessing less hanging space because it was shelved. My husband's clothes filled it to capacity so that many garments creased immediately after being carefully ironed. But it never occurred to me to let him share my enormous wasted space and it was definitely sex segregation of garments in our love-nest.

The dining-room suite of light oak had four beige leather-seated chairs and the sideboard had little squiggles on each corner (ersatz carvings really). The sideboard contained half a tea service, half a dozen cut-glass tumblers and a canteen of cutlery. This canteen, marked ‘stainless' had looked lovely when it was presented to me by the staff of the London Transport office where I worked and the Superintendent had made a pretty speech saying that my fiancé's gain was the London Transport's loss. He had waved a spoon in the air and hoped we would always have time for loving, then he did the same with a fork and a knife but I could never remember what he had said about them. Sadly, however, the cutlery soon became discoloured and began to peel. Two leather armchairs and a rug from Chiesman's of Lewisham (where the gentry used to shop according to my mother) completed our home, plus of course the imitation parquet lino and the regency striped curtains. I thought the curtains lovely, setting off the high ceilinged bay-windowed room, but Chas always detested curtains and dragged them as far back from the windows as he possibly could after I had arranged them in neat folds.

I was like a new broom in my intentions to keep our home sparkling and I worked to the point of exhaustion obtaining a bright polish on the ‘parquet' floor and furniture. It wasn't long before I became utterly bored with my luxurious home and my married-woman status. I suppose I was lonely, for our friends and relations lived ‘over the water' in Poplar and Chas, a waiter, seemed to be permanently away working and permanently tired during the short time he spent at home. I once had a daytime visitor and I was thrilled at hearing two rings on the bell that indicated it was for me. By then my brother-in-law Philip had become a salesman and because my dear ma-in-law knew I was lonely she had asked him to call on me when he was in the district. I was delighted at the thought of a social occasion.

Philip arrived in a van which coughed hot water and spluttered steam from an overheated radiator so I helped him lug pails of water up and down stairs to quench the thirst of his chariot. He then enquired for the daily paper with which he disappeared into the bathroom. I thought I would busy myself with preparing a nice meal for him and he would then report to ma-in-law what a wonderful cook I was and what a lucky fellow his brother was. He might also rave about the shine on floor and furniture. I knew that would please my husband's mother for she always kept a bandbox house and her cooking was superb. But the time went by and no Phil emerged from the bathroom. I kept creeping to the bathroom door and listening. From the sounds within he was having a bath! Finally he emerged, slipped on the floor, remarked, ‘You want to be careful, Dorothy, polished floors can be dangerous and cause nasty accidents.' He then gulped down half a cup of tea, knocked over the jug of milk, said, ‘I must dash now, I'm behind already,' and tumbled down the stairs. He shouted from the doorway, ‘The Old Lady said you were lonely so I'll pop in again when I am round this way.'

As he drove away in clouds of blue smoke from his exhaust I went slowly back to survey the chaos in bathroom and kitchen. My landlady appeared at the bottom of the stairs and gave me such an odd look that I stammered, ‘That was my brother-in-law.' ‘Oh,' she said. ‘I thought he was a strange man because his hair was soaking wet.' ‘That happened in the bathroom,' I stuttered and she returned slowly to her quarters, ready, I was sure, to report to Mephistopheles that I was not the innocent young bride I appeared to be. To make matters worse my young brother-in-law had taken my newspaper with him and I had been looking forward to the highlight of the afternoon – filling in the crossword.

But there, although on the surface I appeared lonely and my relations might have thought I needed company, actually in my own home I really only wanted and felt at ease in the presence of my Charlie, and he seemed to return only to eat and sleep briefly. He had only one day off each week and the six working days were divided into short days and long days. On the long days he would leave home before ten a.m., returning home in the early hours after midnight, and on the ‘short' days he would leave home at about noon and return again in those awful quiet, ghostly and unearthly hours when all good citizens were asleep in their beds. Sometimes he turned a short day into a long day in desperation at his life-style, thinking that the more money he could amass while he had his health and strength the better would be our future.

He never even had an afternoon off so I was quite excited when he told me one morning that he would be home at six-thirty p.m. We would have a rare evening meal together, just like other working people. There would be a good play on the radio, a lovely fire in the grate, and for once a mate not prostrate (with exhaustion). I went about the flat singing with joy. When it was shining to my satisfaction I went shopping. We would have a different meal, a celebration dinner. I bought an Ostend rabbit deciding to roast this with onions and mushrooms. I made asparagus soup with real asparagus. Chas was always talking about cranberries and I made a cranberry tart which looked just like the pictures in the magazines. I felt quite the county lady shopping at all the best shops; for once money was no object. We didn't drink wine, that was still for people from another world from us, so the ginger-beer rather let the side down I thought, but that too was from a good store and labelled ‘home made'. I bought a jar of ginger and thick clotted cream, ever Chas's weakness. The jar was so beautiful I was longing for it to be emptied.

At six o'clock all was organised. By the time he rang the doorbell at six-thirty everything would be done to a turn. So far disaster had not struck at my culinary or other preparations, although it was a near thing when I was making a final inspection of the golden brown rabbit with the delicious smell, for I had changed into a green and gold housecoat one of my brothers had brought home from the Orient. This being a bit long I had nearly tripped over and shot the rabbit up the wall when returning it to the oven after its final basting. I thought I must remember to hold up the hem when dashing down the stairs to let my darling in.

Six-thirty came and there was no sign of a returning husband. Seven o'clock, the rabbit now looked a bit dry and shrunken. By seven-fifteen my lovely feeling of excitement had gone and I knew he must have had to give up his afternoon for some reason and carry on working. I was nearly in tears when the bell rang. Warmth flooded through me again. I was always the eternal optimist. If he sat down within five minutes the meal could be salvaged.