Secrets My Mother Kept (2 page)

As Pat carried me, I wriggled in her arms. I could walk perfectly well; I wasn’t a baby!  The building we approached was tall, grey and forbidding. I decided to hang on to Pat after all. As we entered through the big doors there was a man who talked to us and then sent us towards the stone stairs. Pat carried me up them and I wondered where we were going. We had to wait with a lot of other people for the bell to ring so Pat took me over to the window to look out. I saw Margaret waiting outside with my other sister Josie; suddenly she looked up from my sister’s arms with such a sad look on her face. I felt very important to be the one who was allowed inside.

The bell rang and we moved through the big swing doors. There were chairs and little tables, all empty and waiting. The doors at the other end of the big room opened and the ladies came in.

‘There’s Mummy,’ whispered Pat, and walked over to the lady.

She kissed me on the cheek and gave me a sweetie. ‘Hello darling,’ she cooed, as Pat handed her an envelope. A tall man came over. He had a funny hat and he took the envelope from the Mummy lady, opened it, looked at it and then gave it back. She and Pat talked while I looked around at the other ladies and their visitors. Then the Mummy lady stroked my face and suggested, ‘Why don’t you run and say hello? They might have something nice for you,’ and being a compliant child I slipped off Pat’s lap and did as I was told.

‘’Ello sweetheart,’ one lady said. She looked quite scary and big, with red raw hands and face, but she gave me a sweet so I took it and hurried on. Most of them were sitting at their own little tables, but others were dressed all the same in jackets with shiny buttons on them, and stood around the walls of the room watching everyone like nosey birds. Some of the ladies gave me a sweet, others just patted my head and some spoke to me, but I didn’t go near the standing-up ones. I carried on without uttering a sound, just walked solemnly round to each in turn, round the big room with its shiny floor and cream painted walls and its unfamiliar smell.

Years later, Aunty used to stir her tea, look at the bubbles and say, ‘Secrets and lies go to the sides and money stays in the middle,’ and she would look slyly over at my mum, who would pretend she hadn’t heard.

Our council house had been new when my grandparents had moved there in 1926. Granddad died before I was born and Granny died when I was three, so I don’t really remember either of them. I grew up in that house with my mum, two brothers and six sisters and Mum’s older sister Edie, or ‘Aunty’ as we always called her. Strictly we were a family of ten children, but we never counted Sheila. Sheila was the oldest and had gone with her dad when he and Mum had split up during the war. I had never met her, and the only reason I knew she existed was because Aunty would sometimes say to my sister Pat, ‘You’re just like your sister Sheila.’ Pat never answered and would just look away.

Aunty and Mum didn’t talk to each other except through us.

Even though they were sitting in the same room as each other it’d be ‘Tell your mother I’m going out!’ or ‘Ask Aunty if she wants a cup of tea.’ The only direct communication they had was during ferocious arguments – the kind that makes your insides feel like they’re falling out. Sometimes Aunty would throw things. She was smaller than Mum, with a thick head of tight curly hair that had been black, but was increasingly grey as the years passed. She would periodically have it permed at the hairdressers round the corner, and would come home looking like a poodle. She rarely washed her hair between times, preferring to rub olive oil into her head. She said it helped with her ‘screws’ which is what she called her arthritis. Her eyes were a deeper blue than Mum’s but they still sparkled. Sometimes they sparked with mischief, as she loved to irritate people, especially Mum. We were never allowed to use bad language, even ‘bum’ was considered a swear word, but Aunty took great joy in flaunting that rule. If she was just in a playful mood she would talk about burps and farts, but when she was in a temper about something the language would get a lot more colourful!

One day we were sitting at the table and Aunty was shouting from the scullery. She came in like a whirlwind and turning towards Mum screeched, ‘I don’t care what yer bloody well say, I know what’s been going on,’ and she slung the teapot full of scalding tea on to the table where it landed, spewing out the hot liquid all over poor Mary.

‘There was money in me drawer, and now it’s gone!’ she continued, spitting the words out, while we children looked on, open-mouthed.

I wasn’t very old before I began to understand that lots of things about me were different from other girls and boys I knew.

Our mum was different from other children’s mums. She was a lot older and spoke differently. Her voice always sounded posh. She had grey hair and was overweight, and her clothes were old and poor quality. She also smoked a lot, although this was the one thing she had in common with many women at that time. She would send us across the road to the shop to get ten Olivia when she had a bit of money or five Player’s Weights when she was hard up.

Mum often had a bottle of PLJ by her bed: Pure Lemon Juice, guaranteed to make you slim. I realise now how desperate she was to recapture her youthful good looks. Though we sometimes only had boiled potatoes for dinner, or a big suet pudding with golden syrup if we were lucky, she would have her PLJ and her cigarettes.

She inhabited a fantasy world for much of the time – one where she was as young and beautiful and glamorous as any film star. The secrets and lies that dominated my childhood were the smokescreen that made her life bearable.

2

School

As we got older we all knew that there were things we were never allowed to talk about, and questions we weren’t allowed to ask. There were so many things we didn’t understand.

My younger sister Margaret was always the shy one. She was tiny with huge brown eyes like chocolate drops fringed with thick black lashes. We both had our hair cut in a pudding-basin style, although hers was black and mine was brown, and we shared the same bumpy nose. We used to whisper to each other about secret things. She would ask me, ‘Where is our dad?’

I told her he died in the war because I didn’t really know. I was the big sister and it was my job to boss her around, know all the answers and to always look after her, so I made things up.

Mum wasn’t well when I was due to start school so I had started at the nearby state primary school instead of the catholic school all my siblings had attended. At the time I didn’t question the decision, but many years later I was to discover the shocking reasons why it had been made.

From the age of six I had to move to St Vincent Roman Catholic primary school so that I could prepare for my First Holy Communion. There were two infant classes and four junior classes in our school, which was built as a long corridor with classrooms leading off. Everything seemed to be painted the same sickly green colour. There was also a hall, which was used for PE and school dinners, and an office where the headmaster sat. The playground was concrete and seemed very big and frightening. At break times there would be hundreds of children racing round, kicking footballs, playing two balls against the walls, skipping, doing handstands and headstands, shouting and running and roaring. My favourite game was Two Balls. We had special rhymes that we sang as we played: ‘One two three and a downsey, four five six and a downsey, seven eight nine and a downsey, ten and a downsey, drop the ball.’ And then the next girl would take over. And the rhyme would begin again. We would repeat this over and over replacing ‘downsey’ with ‘over’ or ‘under’ and changing the way we threw the balls to match the words. Skipping was another game I enjoyed. Two girls would hold one end each of a long rope and they would turn it, each of the other children taking turns to run in and skip. There was also French skipping which was quite complicated and involved double ropes and jumping in and out skilfully; this was far trickier and took lots of practice to become proficient.

Margaret and I didn’t usually stay for school dinners, preferring to walk the fifteen minutes home. We always hoped that Mum would let us stay off for the afternoon, and she often did. We liked to have soup for lunch – always Heinz from a tin.

Once a fortnight it would be family allowance day. Mum would call out to us, ‘Come on you two; we’ve got to go to the Post Office.’

We would run to join her, and holding a hand each she would whisk us over the road to the shops.

‘If you stand and wait nicely,’ she would say, ‘we’ll go and get same bananas and some rolls from the bakers and have banana rolls for lunch.’ We would squirm with anticipation, and once the 8 shillings was collected, make our way to collect the promised feast. We didn’t usually go back to school on family allowance day. If it was hot then we would sometimes be allowed a frozen Jubbly, an icy prism of orange heaven, and very occasionally Mum would also buy us a tiny box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, with a few nestled inside.

Some of the other children took packed lunches and others had free dinners. My older sisters had had free dinners, but when Margaret and I started at St Vincent’s, Marge had pleaded on our behalf. ‘Don’t make them have free dinners. They’re disgusting, and everyone knows you get free dinners because the teacher calls it out.’

Mum had given in; she was always softer with Margaret and I than with the others.

I thought the children that took packed lunches were the luckiest. They had a little box or bag and inside their mum would have packed the things that they liked: a little sandwich, a sausage roll, an apple and sometimes a slice of cake. But there were some children who just brought a plastic bread bag with the toast crusts left over from their breakfast. I didn’t envy them.

We grew to hate school. It was an unfriendly place and most of the teachers were very strict and shouted a lot. We didn’t go to school that often. Although Mum did her best to persuade us to go, we also did our best to persuade her to let us stay at home. Usually we won.

When I moved into the juniors we had a young Irish teacher who had some modern ideas. One day he brought in a tape recorder. He told us that we were going to come out to the front of the class to read our writing and he was going to record us on to the tape so that we could listen to ourselves. I felt quietly confident. I was one of the best readers in the class and even though my work was untidy I usually got at least 8/10 for my writing. I had been really careful with my writing today as I had something especially exciting to write about. I listened patiently as each child’s turn came and went. When it was my turn I carried my workbook up to the front and stood next to the teacher nervously. He pushed the button on the tape recorder and nodded at me to begin. I began to read, but unfortunately had a bad cold. I didn’t have a hanky and so tried to control the snot running down my nose by sniffing it back up every minute or so. Some of the children began to giggle but I didn’t take any notice I was concentrating so hard on reading my writing carefully. When we had all finished our recordings were played back for us to listen to. Mine sounded awful . . .

‘My cat Tiddy’ sniff, ‘has got 4’ sniff ‘kittens’, sniff. ‘Me and my’ sniff ‘sister look’ sniff ‘after them’ sniff. ‘We’ sniff ‘are going’ sniff ‘to keep one’ sniff ‘when it is grown’ sniff ‘up but’ sniff ‘the other one’ sniff ‘will’ sniff ‘go to a new’ sniff ‘home’ sniff. The result of my runny nose had been exaggerated by the tape resulting in an explosion of laughter from the whole class including my teacher. I wanted to disappear! It would be a very long time before I could read out loud again.

Mum thought that children who played out in the street were ‘guttersnipes’, but she did let us walk to and from school on our own. My friends Hannah and Jane would sometimes knock for me on the way.

There were still some old bombsites near us, and a favourite game would be clambering through them to see what we could find. Today Hannah had another idea.

‘Let’s play “Knock Down Ginger”.’ She turned to Jane. ‘You go and knock on the door and we’ll hide here.’

Jane did as she was told, while Hannah and I ducked down behind the fence. As soon as she had knocked, Jane flew back down the path and joined us to watch and wait. After a minute or two, a lady with a baby in her arms opened the door and peered out while we crouched down laughing our heads off. This was a game that we played often, but sometimes the person who opened the door would catch sight of us and shout out and occasionally even chase us along the road.

More scary than that was the Milk Float Game.

The horse-drawn milk floats of my sisters’ childhood had now disappeared and been replaced with electric versions. These could pick up a fair bit of speed on a straight road. We would wait for the milkman to get on board and then run behind.

‘Jump!’ we would encourage each other, and we would leap onto the back of the float and hang there for a free ride.

When I return to Dagenham now to visit my sister, who still lives in our house, I sometimes walk around the familiar streets remembering the games and the children that I played them with. I also remember the stark mixture of tension, fear, excitement and fun that was part of my childhood, and it helps me to understand and make sense of my life now – despite all the unanswered questions.

3

A New Friend

The most popular girl in my class was called Christine. She had short brown bobbed hair with a ribbon tied round it, and was always dressed in clean clothes. I was desperate for her to be my best friend.