Below Stairs (3 page)

Then, of course, the little grocers’ shops were a great standby. They were always ready to give tick. Mother would send me along with a note saying could she have this, that, and the other on her list and she would pay at the end of the week. They would let you do it because people always paid when they could. Mostly everybody was poor and relied on getting things on tick. The shops may not have been as attractive as they are today but I’m sure the food had more flavour.

Take the baker’s shop on the corner of our road. It was the most wonderful shop to us! You see they really baked the bread there, and the glorious smell greeted us on our way to school in the morning. Even if you weren’t hungry the wonderful smell of that bread would make your mouth water. They used to do doughnuts for a halfpenny each. Not the sort of doughnuts that you find now that are a lump of dough. One bite and you haven’t found the jam; another and you’ve passed it. They were gorgeous, greasy, and golden, coated in fine sugar, and loaded with jam. The baker used to make several batches a day. On a weekend when Dad got his money, for a treat we would have some of these for tea. They beat any cakes that I’ve ever known now. And so did the bread. It wasn’t like this kind of bread you eat now that tastes like cotton-wool in your mouth, you can chew it for ever and it’s like swallowing lumps of wet dough. It was like cake. Of course by present-day standards, it wasn’t hygienic. None of it was wrapped.

When I was a girl practically every street had a pub, in fact some streets had one on each corner.

Saturday night was the main drinking night. The gaiety there had to be seen to be believed. I can well understand why. You see, employers in those days were vastly different from what they are now. Today ‘Jack’s as good as his master’, but in those days he certainly wasn’t. It was ‘Yes, sir’, ‘No, sir’ and work from morning till night. And work hard because if you didn’t there were half a dozen people queuing up to take your place. But when you got in the pub you were your own master. Yes, then a man had money in his pocket regardless of the fact that it was supposed to last him all the week. So he let go. He went in the pub and aired his opinions and there was no boss to dictate to him. He could say what he liked. Mostly the men got over there as soon as the pub opened and the women as soon as they put the kids to bed. Many women took their children with them – leaving them outside the doors.

On a Saturday night, by eight o’clock, it would be absolute bedlam inside. There’d be all the people singing and dancing. There was always music. Somebody would play a concertina; somebody a banjo. Somebody would give a turn singing. The men would be swearing at the top of their voices, and often the women as well.

And the kids outside. Some of them would be in prams; some would be playing; some would open the door and bawl,

‘Mum, aren’t you coming out? Mum, baby’s howling!’ And out would come mother. She’d either give the baby something or she’d cuff all her offspring for getting her out and back she would dart in again. Of course, when it came to closing time there was nearly always a free fight on the pavement. They just fought with their fists and shouted obscenities. There was no knocking them down and kicking them in the balls or using knives and bottles like you get now.

There used to be one man whose wife didn’t drink. When he came out of the pub, three sheets in the wind, reeling along, he’d look up at his bedroom window. If he saw a light on, he knew she’d gone to bed and he’d bawl out, ‘It’s no good you bloody well going to sleep, you old cow, because I shall need you in a minute!’

There was nothing else for working-class people but the pubs. They couldn’t afford to go to the theatres; the cinema maybe. It wasn’t that they spent such a lot. The beer was so strong then. When my Dad was in work he used to come home Saturday at dinnertime and send me around to the bottle-and-jug department to get half a pint of Burton. They used to have only this half a pint between them. But my mother said it was just like drinking wine, it was so strong and smooth that that was as much as they needed. Nowadays you can down pints of the stuff and all it does is fill you full of wind and water.

6

A
LTHOUGH WE
lived by the sea a lot of our playing was done in the streets. It is nowadays to some extent, but then we used to play proper games. The games were marvellous because not only did you have the pavement, you had the road as well. There wasn’t much traffic then.

At Easter, for example, it was street skipping. We’d get a long scaffold rope out, stretching from one side of the street to the other. The mothers would turn the rope and anyone who liked could skip in. Sometimes there would be a dozen all skipping at the same time and singing, ‘Hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns.’

Another game was Buttons. How my mother used to dread the autumn when Button time came around! We used to draw a chalk square on the pavement by the house and shoot the buttons into it. The first person who managed to get her button into the square and knock somebody else’s out won them all. I was an absolute duffer at the game.

Then there was hopscotch time. You drew a big oblong in chalk on the pavement and squared it off, and numbered these squares from one up to twelve. Then you threw a stone first into ‘One’, then you hopped into that square, picked up the stone and bopped the way around without touching the lines. Next you threw the stone into ‘Two’ and hopped and picked up the stone in ‘Two’ and hopped all the way around again, and so on till you’d put the stone in all the squares. The moment you put the other foot down or you didn’t succeed in picking up the stone, you were out.

Marbles was the game everybody went mad about. You kicked a hole in the road about six or seven feet from the gutter. And you could then. The idea was to get the marbles into the hole – and the game developed in the same way as Buttons. Yet another game was hoops. My aunt bought me the largest hoop you could have. It had an iron guide which you hooked on to the hoop and I ran all round the roads with it. You never had to worry about traffic. No child would last very long doing that today.

Then, of course, there was top time. That was a wonderful time because these tops you just wound up with string and you could whip them from one end of the street to the other. You could paste little coloured pieces of paper on the top of them so that when you whipped, it was like a rainbow going round.

Later in the autumn, we used to go up to the Downs and get horse-chestnuts and play conkers. It didn’t cost us anything. And as soon as we lost one supply we could always get more.

I don’t want to give the impression that life was all games. There was always school and the holidays weren’t as long as they are now, but I always enjoyed going to school because I did pretty well there. I never found any of it hard except things like art, knitting, and needlework. None of those things were any good to me at all. The needlework was my biggest hate. We had to make such ugly garments; chemises and bloomers – as they were called then. Both made of calico. The chemises were wide with sort of cap sleeves and they reached down to the knees. The bloomers did up at the back with buttons and were also voluminous. Whoever bought these awful garments when they were finished I really don’t know. I should imagine they were given to the workhouse because I certainly never brought any home. There were always loads of gathers and you had to stroke the gathers. I was absolutely hopeless at it. In the first place, I could never seem to get on with the thimble. So, of course, I used to prick my finger and the garments got spotted with blobs of blood. It started out as a white garment but it was red and black by the time I’d finished. Well, can you wonder at it? There were the most primitive lavatories in the yard but there was nowhere to wash your hands. So I came in after playtime with my hands filthy to do this needlework.

Singing was hopeless too. I always remember the school concert. We had a concert once a year and, as I was always a bit of a big head, I thought that I would be able to do something. The teacher said to me, ‘You can’t sing.’ So she said, ‘I know what you can do. You can tell a funny story. I’ll write it all out for you and you learn it all off by heart.’

The funny story was about a man who went into a café and wanted a plate of boiled onions. He got so muddled with it that he asked for a plate of oiled bunions. I thought it was quite funny. So did my family. They got the joke presumably. But when it came to the concert and I got up on the platform I started saying it in a very straight way – sort of parrot fashion, and then I got my onions and bunions all the wrong way round and at the end I waited for the laugh but nobody did except the teachers. They had to laugh. It was terrible. I never felt so mortified in my life. I went as red as a beetroot, and left in a great hurry. They never got me to do anything else. They had no manners at all. They should have laughed. Especially as it was free.

But the great thing about school in those days was that we had to learn. I don’t think you can beat learning; how to read and write, and how to do arithmetic. Those are the three things that anyone who has got to work for a living needs. We were forced to learn and I think children need to be forced. I don’t believe in this business of ‘if they don’t want to do it, it won’t do them any good’. It
will
do them good. Our teacher used to come around and give us a mighty clump on the neck or box on the ears if she saw us wasting our time. Believe me, by the time we came out of school, we came out with something. We knew enough to get us through life. Not that any of us thought about what we were going to do. We all knew that when we left school we’d have to do something, but I don’t think we had any ambitions to do any particular type of work.

7

I
WON A SCHOLARSHIP
when I was thirteen which was the age one sat for it then. You had to say on your paper what you would like to be. I said I wanted to be a teacher. My parents saw my headmistress but when they found out that I couldn’t possibly earn any money till I was eighteen and up to that time they would have to keep me, and not only keep me, but buy my books and clothes, they just couldn’t do it. You see, there were no government grants in those days.

I was allowed to leave school because I was in the top class and if I had put in another year it would have been the same work all over again.

Looking back, I wish it had been possible to have gone on with my education but at that time I didn’t mind in the least. I didn’t think my parents were hard because I knew I had to go out to work, I knew we needed the money so desperately. I had known the mortifications of poverty. I remember when I was about seven – it was early in the Great War. Dad wasn’t called up then but nobody was having anything done in the decorating line; the men had gone into the army and money was very tight indeed.

That was when the town opened the soup kitchen. It was in Sheridan Terrace, Hove. A covered stone building with two coal-burning coppers. You queued up for your helping at midday – that was the only time they served it. The soup was terrible. Thin, watery pea soup. I’m sure it was the kind of stuff they doled out to Oliver Twist. I had to go up there with a washstand jug to get it. Mum never knew what shame that washstand jug caused me. It was a white one covered in pink roses. Other children had enamel jugs which seemed to me a far more suitable thing. And to walk through the streets, carrying a large washstand jug full of pea soup pretending you hadn’t been up there and got it for nothing, that you’ve not been accepting charity, well, then you’ve got to be very clever indeed. I wouldn’t let Mother know how it made me feel because there was no one else to do it.

When my father got called up in 1916 the separation allowance was terrible. It really was. Starvation money. That’s all you could call it.

Then the coal got in short supply. You couldn’t have even half a hundredweight of coal if you had a gas stove. So I used to have to go down to the Town Hall, young as I was, to get a permit. I swore ‘black’s blue’ that we hadn’t got a gas stove, that we’d never had a gas stove, that we did all our cooking on the fire, and I never turned a hair. Can you wonder that you grow up with all your wits around you? Then when I’d got this permit, I had to go right up to the depot where the trains came in and wait there in a queue. It was winter, it was freezing cold and my stomach was empty. I pushed the coal back in an old pram and I fainted with the cold. Somebody picked me up and took me into their house. They gave me something to eat and a sixpence but I still had to push the coal back home.

With my father gone, it was a harrowing time. I remember Mother used to confide in me, the eldest girl. I remember when we hadn’t anything left to use for warmth and no money to get coal. I said to Mum, ‘Get all the wood down. Let’s have a fire with wood.’ She took every single shelf there was in the rooms and she even took the banisters from the stairs. Things like this make you hard.

I had also adopted a kind of grown-up manner with all the shops. The butcher in particular, he was a great favourite of mine. I used to go along there on a weekend and say, ‘I want the biggest joint you’ve got for a shilling.’ He used to say, ‘Well, I hope you’ve brought your own paper.’ So I would say, ‘Oh, yes, I have. I’ve brought this bus ticket to wrap it in. That’s large enough for your joints.’

Every other morning, Mum got my brother and me up at six o’clock. She gave us sixpence and a pillowcase and we went to the baker’s – Forfar’s in Church Road. They didn’t open till eight o’clock but the earlier you got there, the better bread you got. It took us about twenty minutes to walk it so we had a long wait outside.

If we were first in the queue, we used to look through the letterbox and see just what sort of bread they had. Mostly it was large flat brown loaves. We used to call them cow cakes because they resembled the cow-dung that we saw in the fields. Especially when people had trodden on it.

Sometimes we’d see a currant loaf. It was marvellous if we got a currant loaf.