A Family Affair (2 page)

‘What did you want to put coal on the fire for anyway?' she asked crossly. ‘There was no need.'

Glad's chins wobbled even more aggressively and she folded her arms across the wrap-around overall she wore to cover her working dress.

‘I'll put coal on the fire if I want to! It's come to something if I can't put coal on the fire in my own house!'

That was the crux of it, of course. ‘My own house.' The all-too-familiar feeling of being trapped began to bubble up inside Carrie, worse even than the frustration of the scorched clothes. The clothes could eventually be replaced – at a price. There would be no more Woodbines or beer for Joe for a bit, no new stockings for herself, and certainly not the jumper she'd seen in Hooper's window and hoped to save up for.

What wouldn't change was the situation. Unless they could get one of the new council houses that were being put up. They'd had their name down on the list for years, and Carrie lived in hope that it would come to the top when the new development at Westbury Hill got underway. Work had started on it, she knew. She and Joe had walked up and looked at the foundations, great concrete scars on what had once been fields and farmland. But they weren't the only ones on the list by a long chalk, and a lot of other families were worse off than they were, living in rat-infested houses that had been condemned, where the walls ran with water and there were no indoor toilet facilities. In moments of depression like this one Carrie couldn't imagine how they could ever be lucky enough to be allocated one of the new houses. At least Glad's house had four bedrooms, even if two of them were very small. With their family grown up, she and Walt, Joe's father, would rattle around like peas on a rump of beef, and Carrie couldn't see how they could be treated as a special case. The council wouldn't care that she and Joe had their three-quarter-size bed squashed into the little front bedroom that had only ever been meant to take a single, or that Jenny had to share with Heather, who was now twenty-three and ought to have a room of her own. They certainly weren't going to take into account the fact that Carrie spent most of her life feeling like a lodger or a skivvy or both, with no real rights, a daughter-in-law taken on sufferance, supposed to be grateful to Joe's mother and father for putting a roof over their heads.

‘I know it's your home,' she said now. ‘I know that. There's no need to rub it in.'

‘Yes. Well.' Glad was blustering now, still annoyed at being blamed for the catastrophe but wishing she hadn't defended herself in quite those terms. ‘Let's have a look, see what the damage is.' She pulled the remaining clothes off the horse, examining them. ‘Oh, it's not so bad. It could have been worse.'

Glad's apparent belittling of the damage infuriated Carrie again.

‘It needn't have happened at all!' she snapped. ‘We can't afford to lose stuff like this. We're not made of money, even if you are. You ought to have been more careful.'

‘Don't you speak to me like that!' Glad retaliated. ‘And don't you tell me what to do, either. I'm old enough to be your mother, just you remember that, and treat me with a bit more respect.'

And so it had gone on, both of them saying things that would have been better left unsaid and which neither of them really meant.

If we didn't have to be under one another's feet we'd get on all right, Carrie thought now, jamming the thick wedge of greying curly hair under her white uniform cap.

In the beginning, when she'd first met Joe, a handsome rating, and he had brought her home to Hillsbridge to introduce her to Gladys and Walt, she had thought how lucky he was to have such nice parents. Her own mother could be a bit of a shrew and she had never known her father, who had run off with a younger and prettier woman when Carrie was just a baby. By contrast, Glad had seemed warm and welcoming, a plump and comfortable woman who quickly put the nervous Carrie at her ease, and Walt was everything she might have hoped her own father would be. He was an engine driver by profession, a quiet, serene man who liked his pipe and his
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, voted Liberal rather than Labour as most people in Hillsbridge did, and hated rows, drunken behaviour and having to leave his home for any reason whatever – even refusing to join Glad and his children on holiday at Weston-super-Mare or Seaton. From the moment she met him, Carrie adored Walt.

The house, too, which now seemed so claustrophobic, had seemed spacious to the point of luxury. The kitchen was large and square with a huge stone sink, electric light and an old gas mantle, and it looked out on to a small sunny yard from which a flight of steps led up to a strip of garden almost a hundred yards long. There was a living room and also a front room with a piano which Walt had bought when he and Glad were married and which he still played sometimes on a Sunday evening whilst the others gathered round to sing Sankey hymns. A long hall, overseen by a large oak-framed print of a pencil portrait of John Bunyan led to a walk-in pantry. Most impressive of all, there was an indoor bathroom beyond the kitchen. It didn't boast a washbasin or running hot water. That had to be heated in the huge copper boiler and bailed out by means of saucepans or the dipper. But it did have a white enamel bath on legs and a flush lavatory and proper Izal toilet paper – though Walt still liked to keep a wad of torn-up pages from the
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tied on to a length of string on a nail in the wall for his own use. Altogether the house, the end one of a terrace of four, with its own roofed-over side passage and wedges of snow-on-the-mountain hanging pendulously over the wall that enclosed the back yard had seemed the height of luxury to Carrie.

Even when she had married Joe and they had moved into their own little rented terraced house in Bristol, Carrie had still liked visiting the house in Hillsbridge, where life always seemed more leisured, more sunny. Joe had left the Navy and taken a job in the docks and she had been kept busy bringing up their children. Then, when Heather was fourteen and David eight, the war had come and everything had changed. Joe had rejoined the Navy and she had been left with the children and the bombing. She had come to Hillsbridge as a refuge, but now it had become a prison. And her relationship with Glad had gradually deteriorated into a war zone of its own.

‘I'll make a start laying the tables, Ivy,' Carrie said.

She grabbed a tray of cutlery, went through the hatch into the main hall and began setting out knives, forks and spoons. The sharp rattle they made as she banged them down on to the long Formica-topped tables reflected all the frustration and despair she was feeling.

In the big square room in the main school building used by Junior Four, the last lesson before dinner was almost over. At the front of the class, Ron Heal perched his short plump frame on the edge of his table, removed his spectacles and jabbed them in the general direction of the thirty-odd pupils who sat in rows at the double desks facing him.

‘All right – who can describe a chair for me? Jimmy Tudgay.'

Jimmy, a well-built boy with a reputation for fighting, brushed a lick of hair out of his eyes and made an effort to look as if he had been listening, rather than flicking rolled-up scraps of paper at the other pupils whenever Mr Heal's back was turned.

‘Sorry, sir.'

‘A chair, Jimmy. How would you describe a chair to me if I'd never seen one?'

‘Uh – what d'you mean, sir?'

Ron Heal repeated his question with a little more asperity and Jimmy rocked his chair on to its back legs, considering.

‘Don't do that, Jimmy. You'll break the legs.'

‘Four legs,' Jimmy said, inspired.

‘And?'

‘A seat. And a back. Sir.'

‘A good start. Anything else?' Silence. ‘Anyone?'

‘Struts. To join the legs together.' That was Christopher Jenkins, the class cleverclogs.

‘Very good. Anything else?'

A longer silence. Thirty-odd faces contorted in concentration. Only Tessa Smith, known for being a little simple, stared vacantly into space. This was the first year that Tessa's knickers had not regularly festooned the guard around the evil-smelling coke-stove almost every day, a constant reminder of her continuing incontinence. Tessa was ridiculed and reviled and generally ignored, but she hardly seemed to notice.

‘Come along – come along.' Ron Heal jabbed his glasses encouragingly into the air again. ‘Let me give you a clue. How does a chair differ from, say, a settee?'

Jenny's hand shot into the air.

‘Yes, Jenny?'

‘A chair is for a single person, Mr Heal.'

Ron Heal smiled indulgently.

‘A single person, Jennifer? You mean married people can't use them?'

The titters began. First from Valerie Scott, the most popular, self-assured girl in Junior Four, then spreading into a ripple. Jenny felt the hot colour flood into her cheeks. She so desperately wanted to do well. How was it she always seemed to manage to end up as the butt of the others'laughter?

‘I meant …'

‘Mr Heal! Sir!'

‘Yes, Christopher?'

‘A chair is for just one person to sit on.'

‘Very good, Christopher. You see how important it is to choose exactly the right word for what you want to say? In your exam this will be very important.'

The Exam. The dreaded eleven-plus which they would all be taking after Christmas; the eleven-plus that would either allow them the glory of going to the Grammar School at South Compton or consign them to the Secondary Modern – thirty-odd children who had spent every term-time day together since they were five years old divided suddenly into those who succeeded and those who failed. Most of them pretended they didn't care, but they did, and their parents cared even more. It was more than an educational divide. It was seen as a social one too. Only the no-hopers, like Tessa Smith, were indifferent, knowing that nothing short of a miracle would ever transport them out of the realms of ‘the duds'.

Of all the children in Junior Four, no-one wanted to pass The Exam more desperately than Jenny. She was capable of it, she knew. Mr Heal had told her often enough. So had Heather, her older sister. Heather had failed her own eleven-plus. ‘By the skin of her teeth,' Granny Simmons said. And her schooling had been disrupted by the war. When they had moved to Hillsbridge, Heather had gone to ‘The Board School' on Conygre Hill for a year before leaving to start a job at the glove factory, but she was forever urging Jenny on with her studies.

‘You don't want to end up working on a machine all day like me,' Heather would say. ‘You can do better than that.'

‘You're all right,' Jenny would say loyally. She worshipped the sister who had already been a teenager when she was born and she hated to hear her put herself down.

‘I wasted my chances.' Heather's blue eyes, so like Jenny's own, would cloud with regret. ‘Don't you do the same.'

‘I'll try, honestly I will. But I'm really scared I'll mess up.' The thought of sitting The Exam – the all important paper that would determine her future face down on the desk in front of her; Mr Heal's voice: ‘You can turn your papers over'; the clock on the wall, its black hands moving relentlessly but imperceptibly whilst the pendulum beneath it ticked away the minutes – all started a feeling of panic in Jenny's stomach.

‘Of course you can do it!' Heather said fiercely. ‘You've got a brain, Jenny. You're a lot more clever than I ever was!'

Jenny didn't believe that. She was pretty certain Heather had a brain too. She could have done it if she'd tried. Only for some reason she hadn't tried.

‘Boys were always our Heather's downfall,' she had heard her mother say once, and she thought it might be true. As well as her lovely blue eyes, Heather had thick brown curly hair, a pretty tip-tilted nose and a wide, smiling mouth. She also had a lovely figure that had developed early, a small waist and curvy hips, shown off to perfection by the shirt-waist blouses and pencil-slim skirts she wore, and long slender legs. Boys flocked round her like wasps around a jam jar, and though none of her boyfriends seemed to last more than a few months at most, there was always a new one to bring her home from the Palais de Danse on his motorbike, the pencil-slim skirt stretched round her shapely bottom and rucked up over her slender thighs.

I don't know about the brains, but I certainly wish I
looked
more like she does! Jenny often thought.

In some ways, there
was
a likeness. ‘You can see they're sisters,' people would say, but Jenny thought they were just being kind. She and Heather had the same blue eyes, but until a year ago Jenny's had been hidden behind National Health spectacles because measles had damaged them in some inexplicable way. ‘The pupils are egg-shaped instead of round,' the specialist had said. ‘They'll sort themselves out in time.' And so they had. But not before Jenny had endured agonies of embarrassment over the horrid glasses.

Then there was her hair, not curly but almost straight, with an annoying wave across the front that often looked as if her mother had put a metal curling clip in it. She hadn't, of course, but she did insist on parting it on one side, which Jenny felt sure made her round face look even rounder and plainer than it already was, and tying a bow of ribbon in it.
White
ribbon. If it had been red or green or yellow or even sky-blue-pink, whatever that was, Jenny thought she could have borne it – but
white
! It made her feel babyish, just as the hand-knitted jumpers and pleated kilts and white knee socks made her feel babyish. Most of the others wore grey or fawn socks and red or even navy-blue hair ribbons. No wonder they laughed at her!

As for the shape of her – well, she was fat, there was no other word for it. As the youngest of the family she had always been indulged, the others saving their sweet rations and their butter rations and their sugar rations for her, and she still drank milk with her meals instead of tea like the others.