Dolly's Mixture (2 page)

Of course I wanted rationing to end. Here we were in 1953 and, although rationing was not so severe and not too worrying, we still had ration books. Each generation likes to impress on a succeeding one its memories of deprivation. I would say to my children, ‘I had no toys when I was a child.' I don't know that they were duly impressed, indeed my son William was highly amused one day when daughter Susan said sadly to him, ‘I was
seven
before I even
saw
a banana.' Although we chatted and joked in the food queues there was, nevertheless, the wary look around, the hawk-like watching of one's own interests. Once I was in a very long queue at the fishmonger's. The fish had not yet arrived from the market. Suddenly the woman in front of me asked, ‘What fish is expected?' ‘Hake,' I replied. ‘Oh dear,' she said miserably, ‘That's no good to me for I can only cook cod.'

When I remember rationing I remember the worst period, the smallest amounts, the two ounces of butter, the four ounces of margarine or cooking fat, etc., whereas in actual fact it fluctuated. A friend of mine made her pastry with liquid paraffin instead of fat. Unfortunately she told her family how clever she had been and it was a running battle for her to get them to eat her vegetable pies, and a running battle when they did. In one shop a mother gave the cheese ration to a small child in a push-chair. ‘This ain't worth taking home,' she remarked. ‘Good idea,' I thought, ‘I'll do that with my Susan.' She sat in her pram, looked at the cheese, took a cautious suck, spat it out and threw the cheese into the road.

The meat position was grim. At its highest level it was one shilling and twopence per person per week and about twopence halfpenny of this had to be taken in corned beef. Of course offal was unrationed but for us, during the war, it seemed as though animals were bred with an inner vacuum. We did have clothing coupons but these were ample for my family. Clothes bore a ‘utility' label which assured us that they were to a general standard of quality and material. Naturally, luxury garments and material were out for the duration.

When we first took over our shop in 1953 washing-up liquid was unknown. We used soda for washing the crockery and soap for scrubbing floors. I had plenty of practice at this when I moved into the flat over the shop but my spring-cleaning plans went overboard, for we became busy from the day we took over from the old gentleman and, naturally, business took priority over domestic order. At that time my sister Amy worked full time in a chemist's shop and, having two days' leave due, came to help us. Proficient at shop work, she assisted Chas while I completed forty-eight hours' emergency operations on our living quarters, resenting Amy's remark to Chas, ‘If I know Dolly, she'll do it all in twenty-four hours.' Knowing I was worried about serving in a shop, Amy said, ‘Well, Dolly, I do appreciate that grocery work will be very hard, skinning cheeses, boning bacon [I felt like Jack the Ripper when Chas inspected the first side of bacon I ever boned], cleaning the bacon machine [I was glad when I tremblingly did this that I was not a naturist], but at least you will not be asked for intimate articles or for some strange commodity of which you have never heard.' Amy had worked at her chemist's shop for some years and, it being an exceptionally busy one in a large, working-class area, she was a great help and stay to the harassed manager, indeed the backbone of the staff, for though different young lady assistants were employed from time to time, Amy was older and constant. At one time when the manager was to be away he reassured the visiting temporary manager with the words, ‘Don't worry, Amy will be here and she is a veritable tower of strength.' This amused both Amy and the temporary manager, for she was tiny and he was immensely tall. His name was Mr Pickup and Amy said he could appropriately reach goods from the highest shelves for her.

Amy kept us amused at the comical happenings at her chemist's. One day a customer asked one of the young lady assistants for a ‘dutch cap'. ‘Did you want it for doing your housework in, dear?' enquired the bright young thing. Amy was amazed to discover that I was as ignorant of the use of this foreign garment or article of apparel as her young colleague. Many lady customers requiring intimate articles would wait for Amy to serve them. Sometimes they needed the professional advice of the older woman! Two young women waited a long time to talk to Amy on one occasion and at last, in a discreet corner of the shop, one young lady whispered conspiratorially to Amy, ‘Can you help my friend in a confidential way?' ‘I shall be only too happy to advise you,' replied Amy, years of medical experience behind her. ‘Well, my friend is troubled with hot breasts.' This passionate condition was a new one to Doctor Amy and she retired to the dispensing room to seek higher advice from the manager. He was just emerging from the large refrigerator and listened seriously to Amy's unusual problem – well, the customer's really. With a dead-pan face he said to Amy, ‘I have two ice-cold hands at the moment if I can help the young lady out of her trouble!' At least
our
customer's requests were likely to be of a less embarrassing nature!

The shop gave me something I had wanted all the years of my life and had never had: a best friend. In my youth every one of my sisters had had one bosom companion with whom she spent most of her time and exchanged confidences. Our family album was full of snaps of them. Marjorie and Nelson (no, not the Admiral, some girls had unusual nicknames in those days) on the battlements at Hastings. Amy and her friend Edie with two boys at Brighton, boys from another part of the country, boys Mother would definitely not see and would definitely not approve of if she did.

I listened to the stories of my sister Agnes's friend Alice's lovely family, who also lived at Poplar. Agnes seemed to spend her time there ‘laughing fit to kill'. One day Alice's father came home to inform the family, very sadly, that a mate at work had cut his throat. The father was terribly upset at the death of his mate. ‘Fred's cut his throat,' he said desperately to his wife. She, busy in the kitchen preparing the meal, said casually, ‘Has he cut it much?' as one would say, ‘Is it raining?' In a spurt of fury at what he thought was a wife's callousness he yelled, ‘He's only cut his bloody head off!'

These best friends all had confidences to impart; I always felt out in the cold. But as Mother always said, ‘It'll happen when you least expect it.' I certainly wasn't expecting to make a woman friend at my time of life and in my present circumstances. I had a husband, two children and a sixteen-hour-plus working day; I would have said I had no thinking time, let alone friendship time. But there it was and, positions reversed, it was the same for my friend. Ade was a working mum with a husband and three sons. Her real name was Adeline. She used to say she was born while her father was on a ‘beano' from his factory. Beanos for the working men were extremely jolly, if beery, times, for the charabancs were loaded with crates of the men's favourite tipple. They seemed to alternate their time between visiting public houses and lavatories on the way to and from their destination, which seemed to be the least important aspect of the trip. The rest of the time they spent singing all the old and favourite songs of the music-hall days. Ade said her father, so she was told, rolled home singing ‘Sweet Adeline', hence her name.

She was about twelve years older than I was, a plumpish, rosy-cheeked Cockney gal with bright, reddish hair, smartly dressed in what my sister Amy would say was ‘a common style'. In fact Amy despaired of me and the company I kept. I suppose, chameleon-like, I merged with my environment. Indeed, Amy reported to me that a friend of hers, meeting my family and me after a number of years, was surprised to hear how common were the tones of our voices, but of course Amy and family were now natives of suburbia. I didn't think she was any different and I didn't think I was and so I was a little hurt to be designated ‘common, with a common friend'. My father said, ‘Common? What's common, Dolly? Don't worry, gel, that means there's a lot of us about.'

Ade definitely did not think me common; to her I was on the ‘posh' side, but ‘luvly' with it. She was good for my ego even though I laughed at her compliments. She thought I was very clever to know so many words but I think she thought me a bit of an innocent. For my part I did not think her vulger in her amusing remarks. She was just honest in thought, word and deed.

I didn't delve into my friend's private life, although she would have told me all if she felt I wanted to know. She had a deep, sergeant-major's voice and an extremely quick wit. She was generous to a fault and I often wondered if that was the reason for the husband she possessed. If I'd never got to know Ade I would have thought it one of life's mysteries. I don't suppose anyone else thought about her domestic set-up, for, although she was politely on good terms with her neighbours, she was not Ade to them, but Mrs —, a double-barrelled name, an unusual name, difficult for us commoners to pronounce correctly, a trap for the lower classes, just as such names as St John, Farquharson and Majoribanks are. Ade herself would have pronounced her surname incorrectly if she hadn't been married to it. We were once looking at a catalogue of plants and shrubs when she decided she'd have a Cotton Easter for her garden and was amused, and proud of me, when I said it was known as a co-to-ne-aster. Naturally, big-headed Dolly pronounced Ade's married name correctly the first time.

Her husband also possessed an unusual Christian name, although Ade called him Ben, sometimes Ben Hur to me, adding, ‘He's no bleeding charioteer, Dolly. He never singed anyone's ground on two wheels.' Ade and her family were newcomers to the district, as we were, yet it was obvious she must have met Ben in another walk of life than her own. She told me she started her working life in domestic service and I was sure that was where she had met Ben, although I knew he had no visiting relatives and there were no uncles, aunts or cousins to Ade's three boys. Ben was a small, mousey-looking man with a lovely voice, a quiet, cultured voice which, in my opinion, should have belonged to a professional man. Yet he had a menial job in a warehouse, a job where he was lost to the world somehow and swallowed up by the people who worked there. He was a nonentity. They were indeed an odd couple to be man and wife. He was more like an older brother to Ade, an older brother whom Ade had promised her mother on her death bed she would ‘look after'.

Ade marshalled her Ben in her sergeant-major's voice and, as Ade was at work, he helped with the domestic chores. She'd say, ‘Come on, Ben [or boy, or Benny lad], let's be 'aving you, feller,' when she thought he was a bit slow in starting a job which needed doing. Yet I knew that without Ade as a splint Ben would have dissolved like the snowflakes children bring into the house to show their mothers.

Probably it was the one-hundred-per-cent-plus maternal feelings within Ade which kept her married to Ben. The boys, too, were protective of Ben and I felt that, having met and married Ade, he had come into safe harbour. His life may have been strange compared with the lives of other working married men, but he was content. He adored his Ade and loved the three boys. The oldest boy was also ‘different' from the other working-class lads and, although he had an exceptionally good brain, one knew that he too was going to need Ade's support in life, for he was abnormally absent-minded and impractical. Whereas Ben could live his life content under Ade's strong wings, she worried ceaselessly about Johnny, her oldest boy, feeling guilty that she had given birth to him. I often wondered at the time whether someone else was Johnny's father; perhaps someone Ade had met on holiday. She would say to me, ‘Sex, Dolly? Sex is not always true love, you know, I think it's like bread and jam, sometimes it's bread,
butter
and jam, a change from permanent bread and marge.'

Ben probably knew of what I suspected were Ade's past ‘preserve pleasures' but to him they were probably her entitlement, since he could not supply this necessary force in her life. He had his special place in her world and loved her for that. The youngest boys were twins and were self-sufficient and capable. They had been apprenticed as engineers and were now fully fledged and working, anxious that their mum should give up work; but Ade worked relentlessly on. The house she and Ben were buying was a lovely, solid place with a beautiful garden. It took a great proportion of their money but it was to be a nest-egg for Johnny, her oldest, although only Ben knew this.

Ade had worked at a rope factory at one time and the tales she told of the girls there made my hair stand on end. She thought me quite an innocent and could hardly believe that I came from her background and had been to the same type of school as she had. She loved me to be horrified, really, although I usually ended up by giggling. She had not fallen for the current craze at the rope factory, tattooing, and was always glad for the sake of her boys that she had not been a ‘silly young thing', at least in that respect. She would tell me how frightened the men in the factory were of the girls working there. In those days man was master in his own home but the rope factory girls were a different breed from the church girls I mixed with; here was I, married with a family, yet I never knew such Amazons existed.

Ade would say that when a man, not used to factory life, entered the shed full of women, the unsuspecting creature was set upon, debagged in the centre of the floor, and his nether portions were painted with blue paint. I said to Ade, in horrified tones, ‘How on earth would the poor chap get it off?' ‘That was his worry,' said Ade. ‘In any case he'd soon “wear it off”.' She was amused when I enquired whether a newly painted man might not complain to the management. Those Amazons must have been a force to contend with but, like crossing the Equator the first time, at the rope factory a man was initiated only the once.