Mummy Knew

T
he lady with the long black hair was coming to visit. Nanny said it would be nice to draw her a picture so she could take it away and stick it on her wall. ‘You can show her what a clever girl you are,’ she said.

She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and I clambered up then she handed me my tin of crayons and a piece of grey cardboard from the back of a cornflakes box.

I drew a rainbow first, and Nanny suggested I draw a picture of the lady underneath it. I tried to remember what she looked like, but all I could manage was the straight curtain of black hair and a cigarette with an orange end clamped between her stick-like fingers. I didn’t know what colour to make her eyes until Nanny handed me the brown. I added loads of thick black lines for the lashes and Nanny said they looked like spider legs. I was good at those. Finally, I rummaged through my tin and found a bit of red for the mouth. Nanny laughed a little and said I’d drawn it upside down. I watched as she took the tiny stub of crayon from me and turned the lady’s mouth into a thick, upturned clown’s smile instead.

‘That’s better, pet,’ she said. ‘Let’s cheer her up a bit.’

Finally I drew a giant multicoloured flower, a few tufts of grass and a triangular yellow sun in the corner. Nanny said it was a work of art and took my hand in hers to write some words at the top in blue.

‘To Mummy Love Lisa xxx.’

Nanny put the picture in pride of place on the mantelpiece and said I could give it to Mummy when she popped in at teatime. I was so excited I actually had a mummy, like all the other children at nursery, that I didn’t want to go for my usual afternoon nap. I found my dummy and climbed onto Nanny’s lap in the rocking chair instead. She held me close against her chest and I sucked my dummy in time to the beating of her heart as she sang nursery rhymes into my hair until I grew sleepy. Back and forth she rocked me. Images of Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary and Pretty Maids All In a Row with long black hair just like Mummy’s filled my dreams.

When I woke up later that afternoon, I was in Nanny’s bed. I reached for my dummy, which lay on the pillow beside me, and popped it into my mouth. It was then I heard a low, gravelly voice. Mummy had arrived and was sitting in the front room next door.

I kicked off the covers and opened the bedroom door to see Mummy sitting on the small brown sofa with Nanny opposite in her favourite armchair. They were both sipping tea from Nanny’s best china tea-set. Mummy’s black hair was a little bit longer than I remembered it and now she had a heavy fringe, and her eyes had big black circles drawn round them. She wore an orange dress with large hooped earrings and a long string of wooden beads.

‘Here she is!’ said Nanny, turning round in her chair to look at me before heaving herself up with a ‘One, two, three…oop laa!’ to reach for the picture I’d drawn earlier. She handed it to me and nodded towards the lady: ‘Go on, give it to Mummy.’

I felt shy in front of Mummy because I’d only seen her a few times, but I was filled with pride as I walked towards her with my drawing held out in front of me. I thought she would be pleased.

‘Bleedin’ hell,’ said the lady, making me jump. ‘She’s a bit too old for a dummy, ain’t she, Mum? What is she – three? Four?’

‘Don’t you know how old your own child is, Donna?’ said Nanny sharply as she plonked herself back down into her armchair.

Mummy snorted and snatched the picture from my hands. ‘Christ! Is that meant to be me?’ I noticed her mouth was turned down unhappily, just as I’d drawn it the first time. ‘Makes me look like fucking Quasimodo.’ She put it on the coffee table beside her.

‘Mind your language,’ said Nanny under her breath, and then ‘Aren’t you going give Mummy a kiss, Lisa?’

I looked at her, unsure what to do.

She rolled her eyes and said, ‘How can she when she’s got that bloody thing in her gob? Give us it here.’ She snatched the dummy away, pointed at her cheek with a long pink fingernail and said, ‘Come on, then. I haven’t got all bleedin’ day.’

Her long nails had scratched my lip as she snatched the dummy away and I stepped towards her with tears in my eyes.
Instinctively I moved to wrap my arms around her neck, just as I did when I kissed Nanny, but Mummy pushed me away angrily and said, ‘Mind me make-up, Lisa. Jesus Christ Almighty.’

My tears spilled over then and I demanded my dummy back. I looked to Nanny for help but she was staring into her teacup and shaking her head as if I had done something wrong. I cried harder then.

‘Fucking hell, Mum,’ said Mummy. ‘I don’t know how you put up with it. Does she ever stop fucking whingeing?’

Mummy left shortly after. She didn’t say goodbye. Nanny sighed and put my drawing back on the mantelpiece. It now it had a tea ring at the end of the rainbow.

I crept over to Nanny, my eyes still red with tears. ‘Come here, pet,’ she said and we snuggled up together on the sofa. Nanny put her arms around me. ‘Don’t you worry about Mummy,’ she soothed, ‘You’ve always got me.’ I felt warm and secure and totally protected. I always did with Nanny. I had no idea that my life was about to change. It never occurred to me that we would be separated and I would never feel safe again.

N
anny and I lived in London’s New Cross, an area just south of Tower Bridge, with my aunts Jenny and Freda and my Uncle Jimmy. Freda was the oldest of Nanny’s eight children, and Jenny and Jimmy the two youngest. The family were very close, and the council flat was always filled with visiting relatives. I remember Nanny standing in the middle of the small steamy kitchen, one hand on the hip of her patterned apron, the other on her head as she said ‘We’ll have to put in for a transfer. We can’t swing a cat in here.’

Uncle Jimmy, who was busy stuffing a cigarette paper with tobacco, said ‘That’s because it’s like Piccadilly bleedin’ Circus in here, what with all her kids in and out all the time. Bloody disgrace she is, that Donna. Always has been.’ He bent down to me and added, ‘You’re a bleedin’ nuisance, aren’t you?’ His face loomed large above mine and I immediately burst into tears.

Nanny quickly stepped forward to scoop me up in her soft comforting arms. ‘He doesn’t mean it, pet. He’s only playing with you.’

I knew that Mummy, the lady with long black hair, lived somewhere nearby with my two sisters and my brother. They
popped in and out regularly because Nanny looked after them while Mummy was at work, but I was much younger than them and they didn’t pay any attention to me. By the time I was born on Nanny’s kitchen floor in December 1966, Diane was eleven, Cheryl was nine, and my brother Davie was six. Their father had gone for a quick pint at the pub a few weeks before Davie was born and had never come back. Instead he got the boat back to Ireland and was never heard from again. After waiting years in the hope he would return, my mother was granted a divorce on the grounds of his desertion.

Six years later, at the age of thirty-four, she found herself in another unfortunate situation with my arrival on the scene. I never found out who my father was–my birth certificate lists him as ‘Unknown’–although I did once overhear Nanny and Jenny saying I came from a quick five minutes round the back of a pub rather than an actual relationship. The arrival of a fourth baby must have made life very difficult for my mother at a time when divorce itself carried a huge stigma. Now she had an illegitimate child on her hands as well. Perhaps this is why I was left in the care of Nanny. Quite simply I was an accident–unplanned and definitely unwanted.

My Durham-born Nanny, on the other hand, adored me. I was her ‘bonny lass’. Uncle Jimmy may have seen me as a bit of a nuisance, but he was largely indifferent–unless, that is, I got my toddler hands on his precious tobacco tin and emptied the contents down the loo, as was my habit for a time, and then he would get a bit cross. My aunts Jenny and Freda also made a huge fuss of me, as did my numerous other aunties
and uncles. I couldn’t have been in better hands. These early years were my best, a time when I was safe, loved and protected.

Jenny, Freda and Uncle Jimmy were out at work during the day, so it was just Nanny and me. In the mornings we’d sometimes get the bus along to Peckham High Street and do the rounds at the greengrocer’s, the butcher’s and the baker’s, or else we’d walk to the park and I’d go on the swings. But these trips became less frequent because Nanny wasn’t in the best of health. She was overweight and found it difficult to walk very far. Her thighs were covered in bulging purple veins, while her calves and ankles were swollen with open ulcers. Walking was painful, and she rocked from side to side with an exaggerated limp. It was Jenny’s job to bathe the crusty red and yellow sores with warm salty water every evening, applying cream and a stretchy bandage to the wounds.

Most of the time Nanny and I stayed at home. I would ride my red tricycle up and down on the balcony that ran the length of our block while Nanny sat in a deckchair and dozed, with a scarf covering her white curls. She gave me a little silver Noddy bell for my trike and I used to drive the neighbours crazy, ringing it continuously until someone leaned out of a window and yelled at me to ‘Pack it in!’

Another of my favourite games was ‘fly away Peter, fly away Paul’. I’d sit on Nanny’s lap as she fluttered torn strips of newspaper on her index fingers, making Peter fly away as Paul came back, over and over again, until I decided I wanted her to play ‘little piggies’ on my toes instead.

Despite Nanny’s problems with her legs, she always kept the flat spick and span. Every day she tied an apron over her clothes and pottered about dusting and polishing with an old rag. She cleaned the kitchen window with newspaper and a bottle of vinegar so the room smelled like a fish and chip shop. She liked to keep the front step polished with red lacquer but one day, after getting down on all fours, she couldn’t get up again. I had to knock on a neighbour’s door, and between him and the man who came to read the electric meter, they managed to pull Nanny back to her feet. After that she didn’t do the front step herself any more.

Every day after lunch, Nanny and I had a nap, but first we had to make sure I had a dummy and a ‘picky bit’, two items I was unable to sleep without. I liked to unpick anything woolly, and run the fibres through my fingers. After Jenny and Freda got fed up with finding several of their best jumpers ruined, Nanny had knitted me a drawer full of special multicoloured woollen squares, and these became my picky bits. She had broken my round-the-clock dummy habit with dire warnings of growing up with buck teeth, but I took to hiding dummies for safe-keeping, just in case she was ever tempted to take Uncle Jimmy’s advice and ‘chuck the filthy things away’. The problem was, I could never remember where I’d put them, so before our nap we’d have to go on a dummy hunt. Usually I’d give up after the first minute or so, full of tears and convinced we’d never find one. Nanny would continue the search accompanied by my background wailing until she finally caught a glimpse of pink plastic peeping up from the bottom of the coal bucket or somewhere obscure like
that. The only time she’d get exasperated would be when, after searching for a good ten minutes, I’d realise I’d had one in my pocket all along.