Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (24 page)

Willie went to work the next day and the days and months after that. For the next two or three years, he continued standing at the bakery table five and a half days a week, although scrubbing its white surface at the end of a long day no longer gave him the satisfaction of a job well done, nor did baking a wide range of bread and fancy cakes. Pummelling, kneading, pushing, turning, flouring. Kneading, pushing, lifting, turning, flouring, shoving with the heel of his hand. Four dozen rock cakes, thirty loaves, half a dozen jam sponges; four cherry Genoas, four seed cakes, one slab fruit cake, four dozen raspberry buns. All hopes of a Morris Cowley receded.

It must have been hard for my grandma, in the years before she adopted Cora, wanting a child all that time and having to answer the thoughtless questions posed by strangers who assumed all married women had children: ‘I did have a baby. She died.' Annie was pleased for other women and their good fortune and, if asked, held their new babies with a smile, though tears pricked her eyes the minute she felt the soft weight in her arms. First steps, first words, first day at school – all those non-anniversaries pierced her; she lived with the burden of that grief. So perhaps it is not surprising that when my mum joined the family, she became my grandma's child: Annie's child, not Willie's. Though there were songs and cakes indoors, and photographs in the backyard, outside
their home, Cora was entirely Annie's little girl.

Willie was not allowed to do anything for Cora, nor take responsibility for her in any way, although he'd wanted to adopt a child as much as Annie. It was the best decision he ever made, he often said so. Indeed, in later years, it was one of the few things on which he and Annie agreed. But what is harder to unravel is what came first: Annie's refusal to allow Willie to look after Cora or what she termed, ‘William's hopeless irresponsibility'.

On fine evenings, you'd hear Willie singing as he came along the road on his return from the bakehouse. Neighbours remarked on his good voice, which was just as well, given how often they heard it. Pay days were especially cheering: ‘When you're in the money, you're a brick, brick, brick…' Willie liked to stand drinks
for his friends; even friends of friends could tap Willie for a beer if he was in the right mood on pay day. ‘Oh, the world is full of honey…' Sunshine beer was his favourite: a beer and a whisky chaser.

My grandma always said that Willie's drinking stemmed from his disappointment over the bakery. That was when his liking a drink became a problem for her. My mum has no memory of ever seeing her father drunk – can only recall him ‘merry' on one occasion – but Annie's perspective was different. Part of her anxiety stemmed from childhood: she'd seen what drink could do. Most of it, however, was reducible to paper and base metal: the pounds shillings and pence required to look after a home and a small child.

One morning, Willie left for work but got no further than the Railway Tavern a few hundred yards down the road, waylaid by a friend or his niggling stomach. ‘Just a quick one, then. Why not?' It was not the first time Willie had made a detour to the pub. Someone saw him and told Annie. Her sense of frustration and fury was so immense that she asked Nancy to mind the shop and marched up to Wheeldon Mill.

Even the half-hour walk did not calm her; she was still furious when she arrived. Time and again, Betsy and Eva had been ready with advice and Annie equally ready with her answer. ‘They can all deal with the devil except them that's got him.' That usually shut them up, but, on this occasion, Willie's behaviour was so provoking, all three women decided to intervene.

Lord knows what possessed them, and how they expected Willie to react when confronted with his mother-in-law, his wife and her sister. And these women did not usually venture into pubs; the closest any of them came to stepping over the threshold was Eva
fetching the family's Sunday-lunchtime jug of beer via the side door of the Great Central Hotel. However, Annie needed Betsy's help and, if trouble presented itself, Eva was not one to run away.

To think of all the women they'd pitied over the years, watching men stumble from the taproom, having handed their wages across the bar. Now Annie was among their number. It's not the same, they told themselves, not really. Whatever it was, they were determined to put a stop to it before it happened again.

They found Willie ensconced in the snug. He was sitting with his friends, the Kiplings, a local garage owner and his wife. She had a fox fur draped about her shoulders and was nursing a glass of sherry, the men had pints of beer. I would love to have seen the looks on the drinkers' faces when those three righteous women walked in.

Mrs Kipling was the first to find her voice. And whatever she said must have been pretty strong because Eva, who was lightning fast at retaliation, picked up Mrs Kipling's sherry and drenched her (and her fox). Mr Kipling sprang to his feet and in the kerfuffle that followed, landed Betsy a black eye – intended for Eva. Then the landlord intervened and ordered Betsy, Annie and Eva from the pub. (He had more sense than to bar good customers.) All three women were shown the door for brawling and, in their embarrassment and hurry to leave, tumbled down the Tavern steps.

My poor proud grandma and poor Betsy, who had such firm views on good and bad behaviour, and had so often sympathised with women about their husbands. Now she was required to stand behind her counter with her own swollen eye and fend off neigh-bours' glances. Some of them regarded Dick with a new note of enquiry, but their curiosity was short-lived. Plenty of women walked into a door at one time or another. My great-grandma's
black eye faded, unlike the difficulties between Annie and Willie.

My mum has few memories of this period, but she remembers her grandma's black eye; she also remembers being upstairs with Annie one day while she was cleaning. The sheets were thrown back to air, the windows were wide open, when Willie came into the room holding out a bag of sweets. He offered one to Cora. This was no four-a-penny sweet, but an expensive-looking chocolate, wrapped in foil; there were only three or four in the bag. ‘Where's mine?' Annie asked, half teasing, not really believing there was no sweet for her, but that was Willie's intention. Feeling uncomfortable and uncertain, the chocolate warming in her hand, Cora looked from her mammy to her daddy, then gave her sweet to Annie. Willie huffed and left the room. A few moments later, they heard the back door shut. For the first time, Cora realised her parents did not like one another very much.

T
HE CORNER SHOP SOON BECAME A PLACE OF ENTERTAINMENT
and temptation. Its blurry jars sprang into life, revealing Lemon Sherbet, Everlasting Strips, Swizzels and Torpedoes. Though not allowed to play there when customers were present, Cora could take one or two sweets after hours. ‘She's pinching,' Betsy would say in a singsong, playful voice, watching her from the back room.

Cora's best friend at the Mill was Georgie Stokes' sister, Katie, who was older than her but of an age to enjoy ‘looking after' Cora; my mum called her new doll, Katie, in her honour. Katie took her for walks in the Meadows where they gathered limp bunches of cornflowers, archangels and daisies, though never mother-die (cow parsley) because of the terrible warning in its name.

Though her grandma ran a real shop, Cora played ‘shop' with Katie and Enid Spencer and, occasionally, was allowed to stand behind the actual counter and serve her friends with sweets. Betsy showed her how to twist the tops of paper bags to secure them and how to take payment. If a ha'penny usually purchased four caramel chews, my mum's special reckoning made it five.

Rings became another irresistible temptation. Incongruous though it seems, along with scouring pads and borax, cattle powders and bags of flour, my great-grandma's shop sold rings. Alloyed rings with cheap glass stones, as good as Woolworth's finest: covetable rubies and sapphires, in Cora's eyes. ‘Gran-ma …' she'd ask in that pleading voice all adults recognise, hovering before their velveteen tray.

I don't know when it dawned on Eva that no matter how many young men came calling – and there was at least one more, after the first – no one would be good enough for her. Her role had been decided by Dick and Betsy. Eva would be the daughter who stayed at home. They loved her, they fussed her, and she thought the world of them, she often said so, but she was theirs and no one else's. I'm sure this was part of their wanting a little girl from the Industrial School. Betsy wanted another daughter – she had never thought she would have just the one – but she also had an eye to the future. A young lad would be up and gone the minute he found someone he was sweet on; daughters were more biddable and could be kept at home with the slenderest emotional threads.

Eva always insisted that years passed before she considered the life she might have led. At the time, she simply accepted her situation, which was not uncommon. The years between the wars were full of women like her; one in four did not marry. The 1861 census was the first to reveal a so-called ‘surplus' of women, but in the aftermath of the First World War, with women exceeding men by 1.75 million, the imbalance acquired a new pungency: all those women who could never marry the young men lying dead on Flanders Fields. Add to this calculation the nineteenth-century
codes to which their mothers subscribed (for their daughters, if not for themselves) and which demanded filial Duty, Gratitude, Submission, then how could they leave home? The fiction of the period is full of young women desperate to do just that. Novel after novel hinges on their desire to break free.

Facts and fiction, however resonant, can be held at arm's length, but Eva was my much-loved great-aunt whom, I suspect, had long since learned to ignore what she could not alter. However, I wonder how often, walking round to Newbridge Lane to visit schoolfriend Carrie and play pat-a-cake with her young son, or lift-the-latch and similar baby games with infant Sunday visitors, Eva was tempted to conjure her own home-sweet-home? She was always a helpmeet of one kind or another: a single woman, daughter,
sister, aunt and great-aunt. She was loved by my mum long before she was loved by my brother and me.

At the top of the house, up the final, twisty flight of stairs, is the attic, no longer a refuge for Annie's friend Ethel or a weekday lodging for George (nor even a suite for newly-weds, Annie and Willie), but a storeroom once again, with a warm closed-in smell, especially during summertime when the confined sacks of lentils and split peas, and the sand which Betsy dampens and scatters on the floorboards before sweeping, lend a gritty dryness to the atmosphere. The sacks give a satisfying crunch whenever Cora sits on them, but it's the bicycle and the large framed photograph she and Eva come to see.

This is the bike on which Annie cycled to school years ago, and propped up in another corner is her schoolgirl portrait, long since relegated upstairs (‘Oh, Mam, please. Take that down and put something else there.') The bicycle's chrome handles have dulled with age and it now has a tremulous bell, but the dress guards are still in place and the bike looks just as reliable as it does in the grainy photo of Annie standing with it. Cora is fascinated by this image of her mammy with her school cap and long, flowing hair.

The bicycle is taller than Cora, and much heavier too, and she cannot easily reach the handle bars or pedals, but kind, patient Eva, who was never too busy to play, and was a willing participant always, regardless of what your game interrupted, hoists Cora on to the seat and holds her until she tires. Eva stands for what must have felt like hours, singing to my mum as she rides: ‘Oh, Flo, why do you go/ Riding alone in your motor car?/ People will say you're pec-u-li-ar/ Sing-u-lar, so you are/ … There's room for two, me and you…'