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Chapter 2: Being a Child – Early Memories of Belonging and Longing
I remember my childhood and my teenage years as being secure if not entirely happy. How I lived as a child in the 1950s would be classed as ‘deprived’ now but, of course, I never saw it like that. It was normal for us because it was what we were used to and because we never saw anything different as we never went to other people’s houses for social visits.
I was born after two boys, Daniel and John, who were four years and 14 months older than me, respectively. Brother Andrew followed 10 years after me, so I was the only girl in the family. My brothers used to bully me and so I learned to be aggressive and fight my corner. In short, I learned to be a bully myself. I was loud and argumentative and always trying, unsuccessfully, to assert my authority. They called me Miss Primrose Prim or Little Miss Prim.
I can remember well the house we lived in until I was 11 years old with its paved yard, shed and outside toilet. The shed was where the washing board and mangle were as well as the coal bunker, where the coal men tipped the coal after they had carried sacks of it on their backs from the lorry in the street. I can remember their black faces and their rolled up dark shirt sleeves and their loud and gruff voices as they shouted at each other. Their arrival was always something of an event, as was the visit of the rag ‘n’ bone man to collect old clothes. He used to leave us a pumice stone and it was my job to take a bucket to the back step, wet the pumice stone and scrub the step as white as I could get it. It made me feel grown up.
The outside toilet was small, dark and dirty, with torn up newspapers hanging on a string from a nail for wiping yourself in the dark. We all had potties (which were called ‘Jerrys’ – goodness knows why) under our beds for when you needed to pee at the night. I can’t even remember if there was a bathroom but maybe we never used it because it was so cold up there.
When you got into bed the sheet was like a layer of ice on you and your breath appeared as a cloud in front of your face.
We had huge stone bottles filled with boiling water as hot water bottles, but if you forgot it was there and stretched your foot out in bed you were in danger of breaking your toes. Or worse, the bottle fell out of bed and crashed to the floor and I would worry that it had smashed through to the kitchen.
We used to have a tin bath that came out on Friday nights for us kids to have baths in, in front of the fire – one after the other – using the same water. We had no TV but there was a radio and a treat was to listen to Tales of the Unexpected on a Thursday evening at 8:45pm with John Laurie. We were allowed to stay up late to listen to it. And, of course, life as we knew it stopped every day at 6:45pm when The Archers came on the radio (The Archers is a 15-minute serial of everyday farmers and it’s still running today, nearly 70 years later). It didn’t matter what was happening in our house – an argument, an important discussion – everything came to a halt once the music for The Archers came on. I never listened to it and still don’t.
Our kitchen was tiny and was referred to as the scullery. It had a faded cream kitchenette with two glass-doored cupboards at the top and underneath those was a drop-down panel with shelves behind it where you could butter bread when it was open. There wasn’t a fridge, so we stood the milk bottles in a sink of cold water to keep them cold. The milkman would deliver milk daily and I would regularly drink a pint straight from the bottle when I came home from school.
I would take porridge oats in a paper bag with some sugar in it to school as a snack and eat it by the spoonful.
There was no garden — just some bits of soil and stones laid out haphazardly but we did have one garden gnome providing colour with his red hat and yellow jacket amid all the greyness of the back yard.
The highlight of the week was when Mr Wallis from the corner shop at the bottom of the back street, brought up the ‘rations’. Mum would write what groceries she needed for the week in her small, lined, blue ration book, and one of us kids would run down to Mr Wallace with it. He was a tiny man — a bit like a garden gnome himself but without the colour. He had a tanned face but I don’t know where he got that in the smog and fog that regularly descended on us for most of the year. He always wore a tie and shirt under his white coat. I never saw him without that white coat. As he walked back down the yard in his polished brown shoes after delivering our rations we would rush to the window in the living room.
“Watch Mr Wallis. Watch Mr Wallis” and we would clamber up on chairs to get a better look. Mr Wallis would walk down the yard, stopping at the garden gnome and looking down at it.
“He’s stopped. He’s stopped.” We held our breaths. Then he would start to speak to the gnome, his head bobbing from side to side in animated conversation. We would watch from the window, delighted and squealing. We could never hear what he was saying of course but the garden gnome, his head on one side, looked up at him and listened intently. Such a small incident. Such enormous pleasure.
On Sundays we always had two small slices of roast beef with beetroot and two slices of bread and butter where the butter, being cold, would form lumps and tear the bread when you tried to spread it. It used to make me heave. The beef would be overcooked and sliced so thin that you could see through it if you held it up. It had no taste and was impossible to swallow. I still can’t eat roast beef, no matter how delicious I am told it is. I don’t eat it and have never bought it. Even when I’ve been persuaded to try it, it turns to sawdust in my mouth. But we had to eat our beef, our beetroot and our two slices of bread and butter before we were allowed to leave the table. And all the while Sing Something Simple would be on the radio – a choir singing various tunes of the day.
There was one Sunday when we were all sitting at the table having tea and I was wondering how I was ever going to swallow down that bread that rolled into paste balls in my mouth with lumpy butter that made me want to be sick. One of my friends from the back street, Mavis, came to call and see if I would go out and play. She stood at the back door and shouted. I don’t recall her ever coming inside and I never saw inside her or our other friend Jean’s house. Mum shouted that I could come out when I had finished my tea. I was desperate, so a plan formed in my eight-year-old brain.
I asked if I could leave the table to go to the toilet and sneaked the two pieces of bread and butter outside, where I flushed them down the toilet.
I went back to the table and after a minute asked if I could leave as I had finished. Mum checked my plate and said I could go. I was delighted with myself as I skipped out.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t checked to see whether the bread had indeed been flushed away. It wasn’t so long after that my dad called the three of us children and lined us up in front of him. He began, “Someone has tried to flush their bread down the toilet.” He paused and looked at us. My little legs could barely hold me up. I thought I would die on the spot. We looked at each other horrified and started nudging each other:
“It was you,” one of us chimed in.
“No, it wasn’t, it was you,” we shouted, elbowing each other and glaring.
Dad stood in front of us one by one, starting with Daniel the eldest, “Was it you?”
“No, Dad.”
Then to John, “Was it you?”
“No, Dad.”
Then to me, “Was it you?”
“No, Dad,” I said it in the same way as they had.
Dad stood back and said, “One of you is lying and I want whoever it is to come and tell me.” He dismissed us.
I started to panic and couldn’t stop looking at the strap, a piece of black leather which was actually a barber’s strop used for sharpening razors. It hung ominously on the wall on a nail where we could see it constantly. None of us ever got the strap actually, but its presence was felt constantly. Eventually, I went to my mother, blubbing, “It was me. It was me. I’ll get the strap.”
My mother said I had to go and tell my daddy the truth and it would be okay. My father sat me on his knee while I told him the truth in little gasps in between my tears and my constant ‘I’m sorry’. He dried my eyes and told me that I must always tell the truth no matter what – that was the most important thing – and he set me down. It seemed to me, even at the time, that the most important thing was that I had tried to flush my bread down the toilet, yet my dad had taught me a very important lesson: if you say sorry and cry, you’ll get away with things.
Had I told the truth when he asked, there’s no doubt I would have been punished.
Yet, lying then crying seemed to work as a strategy. I’m not sure that was the message he intended me to get!
We played a family game on a Sunday evening – whatever game we had received the previous Christmas. Once, my brother John pulled the chair away from me as I was about to sit down and I fell to the floor writhing and crying like my back had been broken. My father put John between his legs and beat him on the bottom until he started screaming and his legs were dancing up and down on the floor. My mother asked him to stop and I stopped crying – shocked at what I was seeing – and said that I was really okay and feeling terrible about how I had caused this beating. Daniel stormed out and into the outside toilet in protest and refused to come out. He spent a lot of time in there as he battled with my dad.
John, being only 14 months older than me, was my constant companion until I was 10, even though we quarrelled a lot. We went to the fair together and ate fried potatoes in paper cones and tried to win goldfish by knocking over tin cans. I did win one once and brought it home in a water-filled plastic bag with a string. We got another one to keep it company and a glass fishbowl for them. It was our job to change the water regularly but we were slack and so, once, when the water was green and you couldn’t even see the fish in the bowl, we changed the water and put fresh water in. The fish promptly died of shock, so we washed them down the sink. I wasn’t upset in the least.
John and I had a lot of fun together and were always finding things to amuse us. We used to visit our grandpa’s house once a week and I would have creamed mushrooms on toast for my tea, a rare treat. There was a TV programme called The Brains Trust that Grandpa always watched. It was a panel discussion with academics about the issues of the day. Of course, we didn’t understand a word of it but found Dr Jacob Bronowski – one of the panelists – hilarious. We noticed that he always managed to get some part of himself in every frame – even if it was only his tie! We would sit quietly and watch until this happened, after which we would collapse in giggles and start imitating him, much to the annoyance of Grandpa, who regularly threw us out of the front room when we started. Our grandpa caused us amusement even after he had died as the funeral attendants couldn’t get his coffin round the corner from the dining room to the hall. John and I crouched on the stairs, behind the bannister where we couldn’t be seen and laughed so much, our sleeves stuffed so deep into our mouths that we nearly choked.
Daniel, John and I used to hold concerts in the street behind our house. We stood on orange boxes for a stage and set out chairs for the neighbours who paid one penny each to see the show. My contribution was to sing ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’ by Connie Francis (a weird choice for a nine-year-old). I loved performing on our make-shift stage. It was my first taste of performing for an audience. Later, I would make a living from ‘performing’ to corporate groups and at conferences. Our ‘backstreet’ shows were an early indicator of a career choice for me.
John and I used to go to the cinema together and to the park to play. But once I had become very friendly with Jean and Mavis in the street behind our house (everyone lived in the backstreet, we never used the front door) who were older than me and told me about periods, I didn’t want anything to do with John. Daniel, who was three years older than John, didn’t want his kid brother hanging around him and so John had no one. He had a ‘wandering eye’, which meant that he couldn’t catch a ball very well, so Daniel and I would constantly throw balls to him to catch, then laugh when he couldn’t catch them. We were so mean to John.
I became a bully before I was even 11 years old.
I can find all kinds of reasons as to why this was so. For example, having older brothers bully me and needing to assert myself, not having control of my life and controlling other people (girls) to assert my power. Whatever the reason, it’s still inexcusable. There was a girl called Josephine Riley who had to walk down our backstreet after school to get to her own. Her father was a coal man and her mother had run off with someone else, so she was always ‘poor Josephine’. She was easy meat for me. I would block her path on the pavement and stare down at her (I was much bigger than her). She would cower back into the wall and when she became frightened enough, she would start to cry. Only then, I would let her go. Mission accomplished. I remember guilt being mixed in with inexplicable satisfaction though. Many years later – maybe 30 or 40 years – in one of my ‘reflect on your life’ periods, I thought about her and how terribly I had behaved towards her. I said a silent prayer and asked for her forgiveness and wished her well, wherever she was and whatever she was doing. A few days later, I was speaking to Mum on the phone.
“By the way,” Mum said, “Someone came up to me at church on Sunday and asked how you were and asked to be remembered to you. You were at school with her.”
I stopped breathing. I knew what she was going to say.
“You might not remember her, her name is Josephine Riley.”
Now I knew that somehow my apology had reached her after so many years and she had accepted it.
When I was 11 years old, we moved house, back to where my mother had been raised, so we could care for my grandfather while he was sick and dying. We had the big five now: a telephone, a fridge, an inside toilet, a television and a cellar, so the washing could be done inside. My life improved overnight. The Morrisons lived next door to us in a big house – we were at the edge of the terrace on quite a steep slope – and then there was a cobbled ginnel which was always called the ‘gable end’ and which separated our row of house from the Morrisons’. Their house took up the final stretch of slope down to the main road. I remember visiting Mrs Morrison once after church and my mother said, repeatedly, “She doesn’t want to be bothered by the likes of you.” Apparently, Mrs Morrison did want to be bothered by the likes of me. I used to go through her back door and sit with her in her little breakfast room while she talked and smoked incessantly. I loved going into that house and was friendly with all the family, who were all adults, and they all welcomed me. Mrs Morrison was a tiny woman with a long, pinched face and short, straight, brown hair. Her legs would be tightly crossed as she sat on her chair and she always wore a plaid skirt and a twin set (a round-necked jumper and a short cardigan in the same knit and colour). She chain-smoked the whole time I was there. Her first name was Jean but I never called her anything other than ‘Mrs Morrison’. She was Scottish and I loved her soft, lilting accent with its ups and downs as she told me stories of her life. She would tell me stories of her childhood and her work as the buyer at the most prestigious jewellers in Bolton and all the while, she would impart little insights and pieces of advice. Of course, I can’t remember any of them now, but I remember being impressed by how wise she seemed.
I think I loved her so much because she always treated me as a real person – as an adult – whereas at home I was treated very much as a child.
I got appendicitis shortly after we moved and was taken to hospital as soon as the doctor had been. My father took me in and I was promised that once I was settled in the ward he would come and see me. He never came because they never let him in. I waited all day for him. The consultant and his students came round the ward and when they got to me the consultant said, “She’s going to the theatre at 6pm,” and moved on. I was delighted. My stomach pain had gone and I was going to see something at the theatre! I waited in vain for that too. My father had warned me that they would give me a little prick to send me to sleep before the operation and he bet I couldn’t count up to 10 after it. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me about the pre-med they give you in the ward to relax you. I started counting and got to about 2000 before they came for me. Nurse Baker, who was young and smiley with brown curls peeking out of her cap, took me down to theatre and I worried all the way that they would start the operation and not realise that I wasn’t asleep, so I talked and talked and talked and talked. We had quite a wait in the prep room and I was beginning to feel a little drowsy but I kept talking to Nurse Baker until a doctor came and said, “I’m going to give you a little prick now so I want you to see if you can count to 10.” Oh, this is the prick my daddy mentioned…
When I came around from the operation my mouth was completely parched and I couldn’t swallow or speak properly. I begged for some water and was told that I could have some at midnight when the night sister came on. I lay watching the ward clock go round minute by minute. Finally, I saw the night sister who did her rounds. I asked for water.
“Certainly not,” she said sternly, “Wait until morning.”
I cried and cried.
It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last that I had been let down by adults.
I had my favourite pyjamas with me in hospital – bright pink with white flowers and a little Peter Pan collar. I had had a peek at my stomach under the bedclothes but then didn’t move the rest of the day until my father came that night. Meanwhile, the consultant came round with his entourage – unsmiling and cross looking. He was filling in his sheet on his clipboard.
“Have you had your bowels moved?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Have you had your bowels moved?” This time said louder and impatiently.
“I don’t think so. I came in to have my appendix out,” I offered weakly.
He obviously thought I was being very cheeky and he shouted at me, “Have you moved your bowels?”
“No!” I shouted, panicking now. “I haven’t touched them.”
The students with the doctor sniggered and a kind nurse lent down and explained exactly what he meant. I turned bright pink, the same colour as my pyjamas. When my mum and dad finally came to visit me that evening, I told my dad that they had left all the blood on my stomach. He asked to see so I pulled down my pyjamas and he started laughing, but not unkindly.
“That’s not blood. That’s just the pink antiseptic they put on your stomach to clean the area before they operate.”
I was so relieved. I wouldn’t die after all.
I don’t remember being that close to my mum when I was little. I have no memory of her cuddling me, except in the car when I got car sick and my father was furious at having to stop. I don’t remember her reading me stories. I don’t even remember her being there when I was ill. I only remember the old doctor who was always in a rush. He was a big man with a belly and a grey waistcoat stretched over it (he always wore a suit and tie). He had grey thinning hair and glasses and a mouth set in wobbly skin. He spoke in a blustering babbling way and you couldn’t speak to him without him interrupting and shushing you. He was always flustered with crossed brows and had no time – he barely had time to look in your mouth – then he would write a prescription and he was gone. I’m sure I was a lot sicker after he’d been!
And I remember my dad’s speciality when we were ill – egg sandwiches – made with a boiled egg, cut up in a cup, with butter, salt and pepper and then spread on white sliced bread.
The only time we got these was when we were sick – they were almost worth getting sick for. But where was my mother? Why do I have so few memories of her as a child?
I was sporty as a child and not particularly lady-like. My mother tried to make me into a lady and she sent me to dance classes (I guess because she was sick of me prancing about at home and getting under her feet). We learned ballet, tap and stage (free movement and mime). I wasn’t very good at it. I don’t have a natural sense of rhythm or movement. My body was more suited to using the strength of my arm in tennis or playing goal defence in the school netball team and intimidating the opposing team’s attack.
I remember those Saturday morning dance classes. They were run by a very stylish woman called Jenny Smith with short, well-cut black hair and red lipstick. She always had a black top tucked into a red billowing skirt and she wore proper tap shoes. She used to walk with a very straight back and her feet turned out. She was always very kind to me. I wanted to be like her. When I was eight or nine, I had a dance exam (what’s the preoccupation with exams for recreational subjects? We weren’t planning on joining the Royal Ballet!) I think I passed the ballet and tap part, but for the ‘stage’ part I had to do a mime. The only prop I had was a little stool. I remember that blasted mime to this day. At the very end of the mime I had to step onto the stool. Somehow my foot missed the top of the stool. Instead, I put my leg through the space in the spindles that held the stool up. Of course, I fell down and failed the exam. Jenny Smith was furious. My mother tried to comfort me but comforting me wasn’t her strong suit. I took the exam again sometime later and passed but the magic was gone. I stopped going to the lessons.
The next attempt by my mother to make me into a cultured young woman was the piano. My mother played the piano extremely well. She also had a beautiful singing voice, even into her 80s. I never inherited her voice, as much as I would have loved to (I did inherit her varicose veins though, thanks Mum!). We had a piano at home, which a blind piano tuner used to come and tune every now and again. I would watch him in fascination. My mother started to teach me and my two brothers to play the piano. Very quickly they were allowed to stop but I wasn’t. I insisted that if I was going to play the piano, I wanted a ‘proper teacher’, which, of course, my mother was. When she pointed this out, I said, “No, you’re not, you’re my mother.”
Finally, she said that if I taught myself to play ‘Für Elise’ by Beethoven I could go to piano lessons.
‘Für Elise’ isn’t an easy piece but I did it – to spite her probably – and so she fixed up for me to go to piano lessons with a teacher on the other side of town. I had to walk for forty minutes to get there through back streets and under a railway bridge. Miss Browne was very tall, thin and had a tiny whispery voice and scented hands with extremely long fingers. If you hit a note too hard you’d worry it would shatter her frame altogether. She used to wear long cardigans and skirts in browns and beiges with thick stockings and flat shoes. The smell in her house was like the smell that floated out from old Mrs Bethel’s house from the back street when we went to ask if we could have our ball back from her back yard – that permanent air freshener smell.
That didn’t last long either. I had to do theory exams as well as practical exams. I didn’t want to do exams at all. I wanted to play like Mrs Morrison’s son Andrew, who I could hear every night from my bedroom. My bedroom overlooked the back of the Morrisons’ and Andrew’s baby grand piano was in the conservatory next to the small concrete patio garden. He could play anything. You could give him a tune and he would play the tune then find all the right chords for it and play it in any style you liked – jazz, swing, folk. I wanted to play like him. Alas, I was never going to learn to do that with Miss Browne. The last piece I learned with her was Durand’s ‘First Waltz in F Minor’. And by that point, I had found tennis. I was looking forward to being a teenager.
My early years gave me a strong sense of belonging – to a house, to a location, to a school, to a church, to a family. My home gave me a safe place to live and to come back to each night. I knew how everything worked, what the rules were and what my place was – even if I rebelled against some of it. Yet those years also gave me a sense of longing: longing to be taken seriously; longing to play the piano like Andrew Morrison; longing to be seen by my mother.
This last longing would endure my whole life.
Photo
The photo is of a typical back street in Bolton in the 1950s, not dissimilar to the one I lived in.
Questions For Reflection
What feelings would describe your childhood overall? Happy? Sad? Angry? Disappointed? What specific incidents stand out in your memory? Why do you think you have remembered these?
A Blessing While You Reflect
“May you realise that the shape of your soul is unique
That you have special destiny here
That behind the facade of your life
There is something beautiful and eternal happening.”
From John O’Donohue: Benedictus
