Mothers and Daughters (2 page)

‘No, he wandered off down the pub as usual. Come on, Neville, or you’ll see the palm of my hand!’

‘There’s no need for that … come and join the party,’ Auntie Su invited her with a sweep of her arm. Big mistake.

‘No thank you. I know when I’m not welcome,’ Ivy huffed, looking pointedly at Maria and Sylvio. ‘Didn’t take you long to get yer feet under the table, did it?’ she said to Sylvio.

‘None of that. Remember where you are … in a public place. I think you’ve had a few too many sherries. I’ll come and keep you company, if you like,’ Gran offered.

‘I prefer my own company, thank you,’ Ivy replied. ‘Neville, are you coming or do I have to drag you back?’

‘I want to play with my sisters,’ he shouted, shaking his black curls and folding his arms across his chest in defiance.

‘Don’t you go calling them girls sisters! You’re a
proper
Winstanley. Them’s just chancers, interlopers and their mothers … war widows! My aunt Fanny!’

‘Ivy!’ Granny Esme’s voice rose. ‘That’s
enough
.’

‘I don’t know why you take their side over me every time. They stole our inheritance. Mark my words, you’ll rue the day!’ And off Ivy wobbled, her high heels clickety-clacking on the pavement as she made her way back to their semi in Richman Crescent.

‘What was all that about?’ whispered Joy to Neville. Then they all smiled. The B.F.O. had reared up again. It was an eternal mystery to the three children.

‘Inside,’ Granny ordered, scooping her family up like a flock of unruly sheep. ‘Floor show is over, ladies and gentlemen. I think we’ll go and watch a bit more TV.’ When Grandma barked, everyone jumped. This time no one else was invited inside.

Connie winked at Neville. He’d called them his sisters and that was good.

Connie wakes from her reverie. Perhaps she will show
those snapshots from the family album back at the villa.
Everyone who mattered then is in there, she muses,
checking the Arrivals screen for what must be the
hundredth time
.

Looking back, to her the colours of her childhood
blend with the patterned Axminster rug where they lay
absorbed in comics, watching firelight and shoes, the
grey ballet blankets where Rosa, Joy and she stretched
out growing limbs and caught splinters from the dancing
studio’s wooden floor. School was somewhere you sat
cross-legged with scabby knees, absorbing knowledge
like a sponge, she smiled
.

The real-life dramas, past and present, unfolding in
the Waverley wafted over their heads but they felt the
draughts of them now and then. She can never recall
a time when Joy and Neville weren’t always by her side
.
They bartered allegiances like the swapping of stamps
and picture cards, argued over Monopoly on wet Sunday
afternoons when the TV was forbidden, aware that in
the kitchen their mothers were hatching plans, golden
schemes to give them the best education and the chance
to fulfil their own dreams. What mother doesn’t want
her child to have more than she ever had?

The two girls clung together as they walked up the long stone driveway to the Girls’ Division of Grimbleton School, looking towards the red brick castle with turrets and crenellated rooftops set high on the hill overlooking the town. The building was surrounded by parkland and tennis courts with grassy sports pitches and a hedge separating them from the Boys’ Division next door.

Connie thought it was just like the thorny hedge in
The Sleeping Beauty
, separating one world from the other. She felt very small besides the big prefects in smart grey skirts and red jumpers covered in badges, who ushered them towards the quadrangle and the examination rooms ahead.

Every ten and eleven-year-old was gathered on either side of the hedge to sit ‘The Scholarship’, the big one. This was to be the most important day of her life so far.

Auntie Su had insisted they came in school gymslips and shirt and tie, with hair tied in pigtails. ‘It is important to make a good impression. It will help you concentrate,’ she had argued.

Rosa had been allowed to wear her tartan trews and a sweater, with her hair done up in a ponytail. She was going for a place at Our Lady of Sorrows Convent. Connie and Joy were separated from Rosa by their surname initials, and Neville was going for the Boys’ Division next door.

There were clusters of anxious mothers waiting at the gateway, hoping that their darlings would past muster on the day, but the three girls had come on the bus with a gaggle of entrants from St Saviour’s Primary School.

Mama was on duty in the hospital but had left her a little sacred picture of St John of Patmos for luck. She had gone into Manchester to buy a special tama to pin to the icon of the saint in the church. Dr Friedmann had given Connie a new pen to write with. Auntie Susan was doing breakfasts and insisted they had porridge and eggs to help them concentrate. Now Connie felt sick and kept swallowing with nerves.

For nearly a year they had all been sent to Miss Scorah’s at the end of the road for extra coaching in arithmetic and spatial intelligence tests. She was a retired teacher who liked to shout mental arithmetic and tables at them and gave lessons in her front room
for half a crown each. They had to leave the half-crown under the bell on the mantelpiece because Miss Scorah didn’t like taking money from children.

Neville called her a witch – he had twice as many lessons. Miss Scorah was kind if you tried, but threw the books across the room if you were careless.

‘Connie Winstanley! You can do better than this drivel. I think you were watching television while you did this work,’ she screamed, her grey eyes hard as playground ice, and she was right. ‘I am not going to waste your mother’s precious money on such rubbish! Go home and come next week with a clean page and no scribblings. I expect only the best from my best pupils.’

She’d run home crying with shame. That was when she realised that much was expected of her, not only by her mother and Auntie Lee and Grandma, but by the School, which liked to get as many of the top class past the scholarship and brag about it in the papers.

Her teacher, Mr Pedley, didn’t hold with extra coaching. He said it was unfair but with fifty-five children to teach, the clever ones were put to the front and caned more often if they didn’t come up to scratch. That was his way of making them work. Connie was taking her scholarship a year early as a try-out.

Auntie Su said it was everyone for themselves these days and they must take their chance. Granny Esme
had said she would buy their uniforms if they passed. They all went to visit her on the bus. Her bungalow was almost in the country and looked down on the town with its forest of smoking chimneys. Sometimes she made them a picnic and took them for a walk into the woods, showing them bluebells and mushrooms and trees. They ate ginger parkin and Lucozade, and raced back down to the house for sugary tea in china cups with flowers on them.

Connie loved Granny Esme’s sitting room, with its rows of china plates in the cabinet and pictures of all the relatives on the piano, especially the one of her daddy, Freddie, in his army uniform. He looked so handsome.

‘I’m expecting great things of you two,’ Granny would say. ‘It’ll give me great satisfaction to take you down to Grundy’s outfitters and kit you out in those red-trimmed felt hats and striped blazers. You must keep up the tradition even though you are girls. It is no excuse – the Winstanleys expect,’ she smiled.

Joy bowed her head. She was not confident of passing anything. Then she looked at the photo of Freddie on the mantelpiece with envy. ‘Did my daddy, Cedric, go to the grammar school like Connie’s?’ she asked.

‘I’m sure he did, dear, and so did Uncle Levi. Not that you’d notice it now,’ Gran sighed, and looked at him as a young soldier in a cap.

Why would no one tell them more about Cedric, the cousin from London who died before Joy was born? There were no pictures. All his family were killed in the Blitz.

Connie knew all about the Blitz because she could see the broken houses from the bus when they went shopping to Manchester and visited the Greek church. Mama wasn’t much better. She said nothing about Crete and Greece and how she had met Connie’s daddy. It was if their history was all wrapped in a parcel with a label: ‘Do not open or else …’ It wasn’t fair. She had no medals or souvenirs like some of the children in her class whose daddies were killed in the war.

Then there was the business of her name. Why was she called Connie when her mother called her Dina? When she asked, all she got was a shrug. ‘It is my special name for you. You were named for your grandma, Constance Esme. It is an honour to carry her name. It is tradition.’

All she knew was she looked just like Daddy Freddie. She could see that by the photograph. She had the sandy curls and fair looks.

She often wondered about how her mama and daddy had come to have her. It was something to do with Daddy putting seeds in Mummy’s tummy so they grew like tomatoes in the glass shed. Joy said they grew into fat bulbs but Rosa said her mummy grew her brother, Salvatore, and sister, Serafina in her
tummy until it was a balloon which burst one night while she was asleep.

The Santinis had lived at the Waverley for a while and it had been fun. Then they went to live over Uncle Sylvio’s new hairdressing salon and there was a big fight with the Santinis, which no one was allowed to talk about. That was another B.F.O.

When Auntie Ria and Mama and Auntie Su got together there was always noise and bottles of wine and laughing. Sometimes Dr Friedmann joined them and Auntie Diana who worked in London, and her friend Pam from the hospital. Connie acknowledged she may not have many relatives but she had plenty of aunties and uncles now.

Every week the girls met at the dancing class and went for ices afterwards, and Rosa gave them a blow-by-blow account of which stars came into the salon for a shampoo and set. She was going to appear in the next pantomime at the King’s Theatre, but Mama said they were not allowed to audition for the kiddy chorus because they needed all their sleep for the scholarship. Connie was sick of the scholarship.

Now it was Saturday morning, and instead of being in the studio doing tap-dancing she had to put on her gymslip and go and sit three tests. The thought of sitting at a desk all morning was a bore. Saturday mornings were for tap-dancing and sitting on the upstairs of the bus, spending her pocket money in the market stalls on gobstoppers and kayli and
Spanish liquorish and a copy of
Schoolfriend
to swap with Joy when it was finished. She liked browsing through the button stall and the rows of shiny sequins, choosing a packet of stamps from the stamp shop for her collection. Sixpence didn’t go very far. It burned a hole in her pocket and she never managed to save it up.

She looked up at the tall windows and the arched doorways. It was all very grand and scary but did she really want to take a bus everyday across town and be stared at in her stripy uniform? What if she got lost and missed her lessons?

‘You will sit next to me?’ whispered Joy. ‘I’m scared.’

Joy was always worrying about lessons and about being clever enough to pass. She never missed her homework or her music practice, and Auntie Su fussed over her in a way Connie’s own mother never did. Auntie Su was always in the kitchen at home while Mama was on shift or out at night school to improve her English.

Since Mama worked full time there was not a lot of time for them to be alone together except when they went to church in Manchester. Then she used to chatter in Greek. They sat together on the bus and Connie felt close to her mother and longed to ask about her homeland. She understood a little of the language but her mother always talked to her in English now as if she were ashamed of her own country.

One thing was certain: they were all expecting her to do well, but when she saw the hundreds of girls all walking so confidently into the school, all competing for a few places, it seemed hopeless. She and Joy didn’t stand a chance of being among the chosen few, Connie reckoned.

‘Come on, Joy, let’s just enjoy ourselves and walk around as if we own the place. It doesn’t matter if we don’t get in. There are plenty of other good schools to go at,’ she laughed.

‘But Mummy says this is the best in the district. Everyone wants to come here. The girls go to university and become famous,’ Joy replied, clutching her arm.

‘I don’t care. Miss Scorah said you can only do your best,’ Connie offered, trying to be brave. ‘We must leave the rest to Providence.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Don’t ask me, something to do with church, I suppose. You go to church more than me,’ she replied, already bored with all the fuss. ‘Let’s get this over with and then we can look forward to the Christmas charity dancing display.’

Dr Friedmann suggested it might help to read all the books on the reading list. She had cried at the first bit of
Jane Eyre
, and loved
Susannah of the
Mounties
and
Wind in the Willows
, but she could not make head nor tail of
Through the Looking-Glass
. It had given her nightmares.

She liked Dr Friedmann, though. He was kind and
explained things. He had a sad crumpled face and since he had stopped smoking he was always eating sweets, which he kept unwrapped in his pocket. Whenever he dished her one, it was covered in fluff. She had to rinse it under the tap. Now he went round telling Maria and Sylvio and Uncle Levi not to smoke, but no one listened to him.

Connie knew he was very clever. The books in his room were piled high everywhere and he helped her with her homework whenever she asked. It was Dr Friedmann who explained about the ballet music being called classical, and he knew all the tunes that she practised her exercises to at the home-made barre in the hallway while he played on the piano. Sometimes he would play Chopin on his gramophone and cry into his hanky when he thought she wasn’t looking. Classical seemed to make him sad but he played it just the same.

Joy preferred to knit blankets for her dollies and embroider tea cloths for Christmas presents. She liked watching television, saying the doctor in their house didn’t look like any of the doctors in
Doctor in the
House
.

Mama nursed old ladies in the hospital, and sometimes they had to go and dance and sing for them on the ward. The old ladies cried out and dribbled a lot and slept in cots with bars on the side, which frightened her. The hospital itself scared her with its silent squeaky corridors and horrible smells.
She would never want to be a nurse, or do breakfasts and sewing like Auntie Su, so she must crack on and sit the tests.

She wanted to be more like Auntie Lee. Sometimes on Saturday afternoon, Auntie Lee shut up the travel shop and took them to the football match at Brogden Park to watch the Grasshoppers, standing under the sheltered end in the wind, shouting and cheering them on. They had fish and chips on the way home and that was the best bit, sniffing the salt and vinegar, the hot fat and warm bodies. They walked uphill with hot chips held on the edge of their teeth and the journey always went quicker.

Auntie Lee passed for the grammar school but left at sixteen to work for the Tax Office and the market stall, and then she went travelling abroad, which Connie thought was incredibly glamorous.

Now she and Joy were sitting side by side as rivals, Connie supposed. Both of them knew this was the moment when their whole future would be decided. She knew what it meant to fail the eleven-plus.

She would have to go to Broad Lane secondary Modern where the rough boys from the council estate, with shaven heads, went. Rosa would have to go to St Vincent’s RC and leave at fifteen to work in Woolies or the Co-Op.

Mr Pedley kept drumming into them the importance of passing; this was the one chance to show your metal. But she didn’t have any iron or silver or gold in her to show. Now they were sitting waiting to turn over the page and a stern lady in a black gown was pacing up and down making sure they couldn’t copy from each other.

‘CONSTANCE ELLEN WINSTANLEY’ was typed on the paper in front of her and suddenly it was all very real and very frightening.

She put her Timex wristwatch on the desk to keep an eye on the time as they had practised with Miss Scorah. She had them all in for practice runs. ‘Read the questions three times and answer only the question,’ she had instructed.

‘Turn your papers over and begin,’ ordered the teacher now. This was the composition paper and she had to fill the pages with her own story.

That last was the one she fancied doing and she knew just what she was going to say.

‘Wasn’t that hard?’ sighed Joy, who was chewing on her pencil after the final arithmetic exam was over,
while her mother was fussing over them in Santini’s, where they’d gone with Rosa.