Dolly's Mixture (25 page)

At one time when the nurses were endeavouring to get Sidney back to the door again he caught sight of Ade's smiling face and tried to make a rush to her bedside. ‘I dived underneath the bedclothes,' said Ade. ‘I didn't want to stand proxy for the lovely Lillian.'

Ade's ward, a surgical one, was always extra busy, and one Saturday the surgeons really had to work overtime, it seemed. As Submarine Sarah rose from the depths she espied another ‘operation' going through the ward. The trolley, with patient, was wheeled by the white-hatted, white-suited orderly, a nurse at the side with bottles and tubes, blue-frocked Sister bringing up the rear. ‘Cor, haven't there been a lot of weddings today. That bride doesn't look very happy, but who would with that chief bridesmaid at the back; I wouldn't fancy her for myself.'

So visiting dear Ade wasn't like any ordinary hospital visiting. She was always so bright, surely she could not be really ill? Indeed, she never mentioned what was wrong with her, except to say, ‘If you ask me, Dolly, they all seem mystified.' One day Ade, in company with other unusual cases, was taken to a teaching hospital for ‘diagnoses' by medical students during an examination. She was looking forward to it, it was a change of surroundings in one way. The patients, men and women, had a marvellous lunch, and were then delegated to separate becurtained cubicles. Here they waited throughout the afternoon, visited at intervals by the medical examiner and a collection of examinees. Ade said they were all sizes, colours and shapes. Each examinee made his own personal examination and then had discourse with the examiner.

Ade, because of her own boys, wished secretly that all would pass the examination. She said she wished she'd known what she was supposed to have been suffering from, for she would have tried to give the young men a hint. I wondered how she would do this with her fog-horn voice. Certainly with scant knowledge of medical terms she could hardly mime anything. She laughed when I said that, had she tried, she might have been the cause of a young man's failure.

Anyway, towards the end of the afternoon, after the novelty had worn off, when one Chinese examinee had asked her in a kindly fashion, ‘Have you ever been abroad?' she retorted, ‘No, and I don't know as I
need
to, now, for I've had the bleeding United Nations feeling me tits all day.' Both examiners and students collapsed in hysterics.

Ade's boys and Benny came every visiting day without fail, and we were all looking forward to the day when she would be coming home. And then it was decided she should have a small operation – well, that was what Ade told us. I saw her the afternoon before this ‘small' operation and she said to me, ‘Thanks for everything, Dolly. Will you tell my boys tomorrow night I don't want any nonsense from them, life is for living, not moaning about the past.' I didn't query her strange remark, but as I left to go she grabbed my hand and kissed me goodbye, the first time I had seen Ade emotional. ‘Well, everyone feels strange at their first operation,' I told myself, going down in the lift, but all evening and night, and the next day, Ade was ‘with me'.

When I arrived at the hospital on the evening after Ade's operation, the curtains were drawn round her bed. ‘I'll come back tomorrow,' I said to the Sister, who was standing at the table inside the ward. ‘No, don't leave,' said Sister. ‘Just pop in and kiss her hallo, she'd like that, but don't stay more than a moment.' Sister drew back the curtains for me, came in, went over to look at Ade, who, I was sure, was asleep. Benny and Ade's boys were standing round the bed, but a little way from it. I thought they looked utterly lost. It was so quiet. Sister beckoned me forward and then she went out. I kissed Ade on the forehead. She looked suddenly small and very pale, but she opened her eyes, smiled and said, ‘Oh, Dolly.' Then she saw the boys and said, ‘Boys.' As they came to the bed I turned to leave and I heard Ade's further whisper – at last I knew she
could
whisper – ‘And Benny boy, too.' I saw Ben join Ade's boys as I went out through the curtains. Sister was looking at her watch as I neared the exit. ‘Go into my office,' she said. ‘Nurse is bringing tea.' Then I saw Sister go back to Ade's bed.

I didn't want tea, I wanted to get away, but I did as Sister had told me; obviously it was the right thing to do. Nurse poured tea as another nurse ushered into the room Ade's boys and Ben. I dared myself not to cry as I gazed at their faces, but it was no good, suddenly we were all in a bunch, all crying for a lost mother and friend. After a while I took charge. We
must
drink this tea, for Sister ordered it specially. I knew we would be unable to swallow tea at that moment, and we left the hospital in silence. The twins took my arms and we followed Benny and Johnny. Johnny had his arm round Benny's shoulders. They came to my coach stop with me, and I kissed them all goodbye. As my coach turned the corner I caught my last glimpse of them. They were walking arm in arm, Ade's four boys, and as I watched them I saw them again as they were once before, but then they were five and then they had all been laughing.

I had assumed my life in Epping would have been shared with Ade. With her passing the nine years I had known her seemed to have suddenly gone in a flash. Friendly with all people, I made no other true friend, for it is rare in life that one finds one's other self. Even with one's loved ones, husband, son and daughter, mother, father, sisters, brothers, there is always a part of oneself which is the secret place where no one else can enter. If I loved Ade, or she me, I do not know; I only know that she and I ‘knew' each other. To outsiders, my sisters, for instance, Ade and I were the most unlikely people to have become friends. Her deep, loud voice was the one thing they would have assumed would have ‘put Dolly off'. Common? Yes, I suppose it was, but I had heard it transformed into liquid gold on the night that she sang. Ade insisted she could only sing when she'd ‘had a couple'. Obviously she had never listened to herself.

But then again, perhaps she did know she possessed a rare gift. All she wanted in life was to be a mum to her boys; she would allow nothing to take her into a life apart from them or Benny. I remember calling on her one day. She was playing a record of Kathleen Ferrier singing, ‘Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring'. It was the first time I had seen Ade with moist eyes. I think we were a mutual admiration society. I admired her, and she me; we gave each other a sort for moral boost. No one had really admired either of us before. Loved us, yes, but I think we had both been ‘taken for granted'. Goodness knows what she admired me for, but I always knew why I admired her. She was down to earth, honest and fearless. Knocked down by life, she would rise again. She would come to the rescue of any defenceless creature, whatever the odds. She was broadminded, generous to a fault, and she laughed at the same things I did. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for the two of us to tell each other our most secret thoughts and dreams. Neither Ade nor I was sentimental. When we met it was just, ‘Hallo Ade,' ‘Hallo Dolly,' we never shook hands or kissed each other in greeting. When I kissed her forehead as she lay dying, even then in her eyes was that hint of laughter and the look which said, ‘What's come over you, Dolly?'

When Ade was gone, no one knew the sense of loss and utter desolation I felt for so long. I went through a period of thinking it is better to be alone in life and have no ties of family and friends, for, if there is no happiness to lose, then there is no pain at its loss. But nothing lasts for ever, and the desolation does in time give way to the warm memories. They alone remain and I actually find myself giggling at comic times I spent with Ade and I hear her mighty guffaws. I am reminded of her in the strangest ways – I was reading a book one evening and suddenly Ade was with me again.

In the book, Horatio Bottomley was calling on a well-known peer and enquired of the superior butler if ‘Lord Chol-mon-dee-ley' was in. ‘His Lordship, Lord
Chumley
, is not at home,' replied the snooty butler, stressing the superiority of his household with the correct pronunciation of his master's name. ‘In that case,' said our brave Horatio, ‘please inform Lord Chumley that Mr
Burnley
called.' Now Ade would have said ‘Cholmondeeley' and Dolly would have been the superior ‘butler'; then Ade would have countered with a comical remark to which I would have replied, ‘Oh Ade, I wish I'd said that,' and I could hear Ade saying, echoing what was once said to a famous author, ‘You will, Dolly, you will!'

I have one photo of Ade. An enlarged snapshot, really. She is sitting on the grass in Clissold Park, her arm round baby Anne who was then about a year old. Something has amused Ade and, head back, one can almost hear her laughing. Anne, in turn, has been infected by Auntie Ade's laughter and she is chuckling at Ade. This lovely snap was taken by a passing photographer for his collection, and he was so ‘taken' by it that he presented me with an enlargement.

Because of dear Ade's death the photograph is sad as well as happy and for some years it remained alone on its page in my album. I never wanted to insert any other photo on the opposite blank page until Anne was six years old and was attending a Hertfordshire council infants school. Her teacher decided that her class should attempt a scientific project. This went so well that it came to the notice of the authorities and the children were invited to the Imperial College in Kensington where the ‘Young Scientists of the Year' annual competition was being held. Obviously the children were ineligible as competitors because of their tender years, but the judges were impressed by the children's project, the weather.

I was impressed to learn that the children could discuss such things as the Beaufort scale, etc., and I thought how ignorant I was at my scientific age of sixty, let alone at six years of age. Even the
Times
newspaper, when reporting on the ‘Young Scientists of the Year' competition, spoke about Anne's class; Ade would have thought that tantamount to being ‘mentioned in despatches'. I was presented with a large photograph of Anne standing by the project, the centrepiece of which is a giant windmill made by the children. Anne has her hand on one of the arms of the windmill and this lovely photo I pasted on the blank page opposite the photograph of the two laughing darlings. Ade would have loved this, for across the bottom of the project, in enormous block capitals, ran the magic words of science –
WIND IS A FORCE
.

THE END

Dorothy Scannell was born in the East End of London in 1911, one of ten children. At the age of 63, when she was already a grandmother, she wrote her first book
Mother Knew Best,
an evocative and entertaining memoir of her working-class childhood in east London between World Wars One and Two. The book's success prompted two further memoirs,
Dolly's War
and
Dolly's Mixture
, as well as a series of novels.

After marrying Chas, Dorothy had two children and two grand-children. She died, aged 96, in 2008.

Mother Knew Best

Dolly's War

‘Cheer up,' said Mother. ‘Don't make your unhappy life miserable.'

Before Jennifer Worth and other East End memoirists, there was Dorothy ‘Dolly' Scannell.

In the East End of Dolly's childhood, people met poverty and hardship with unfailing optimism and humour. Dolly grew up with nine brothers and sisters, her father – a plumber earning £2 a week and a man who believed that ‘all aristocratic men were disease-ridden and possessed bald-headed wives because of the rich food and wine they consumed' – and of course Mother, who cared for her large brood with rare wisdom, laughter, and unbounded love.

The menagerie also occasionally included members of the animal kingdom, but no mere cats and dogs – instead there were chinchillas, cannibalistic chickens, a ferocious eel kept in a pail of water, and even, eventually, the pride of mother's wardrobe, a kangaroo-fur coat.

With the sure touch of a natural story-teller, who combines a perfect memory with a true writer's gift, Dolly vividly recreates her childhood world: the streets in which she played – and the playground where she was rescued from a child molester; the local shops and the adulterated goods sold within; the new house that her father was going to pay for with his ever-madder schemes to make a fortune, such as a revolutionary kind of truss.

‘A proper treat, I can tell you, bright as Pearlie buttons, colourful as a street market'
Evening Standard

‘Strong stomachs and weak noses are what your East End teacher needs, never mind brains,' said my father in 1918. I glared at him, thinking he was ‘common' to say my friends and I were smelly. Everybody was always going on about being clean. ‘It costs nothing to be clean,' our teachers said, and to me it went without saying that if something ‘they' were always on about cost nothing, then everybody would have it.

‘Cleanliness is next to godliness,' my mother always said when she bathed us on Friday evenings in the little bath before the fire in the kitchen, yet the very next morning she would say, ‘You won't want much of a wash today, you had a bath yesterday.' And on a winter's day she would say, ‘Don't wet your face, just wipe it, going out into the cold, because of the chaps.'

My father would always shout one of his remarks when I was thinking nice thoughts. I felt he didn't like the lovely Poplar people. ‘What about the Lascars then?' he'd say. Apparently these thin brown-skinned men who roamed the High Street carried little tin cans of water around with them. My father said proudly, ‘They wash down below every time they go to the lavatory, it's their religion.' I thought it was a funny religion, for ‘down below' was bottoms, and they didn't get dirty, for they were covered with bloomers or trousers; so how could the dirt get there? Suppose one of the Lascars made a mistake one day and washed his down below before washing his face. Mother always said on bath nights, ‘I must wash your face first.' I would hate to walk about with a can of water all my life, it would get rusty, and the water would get muddy. Suppose our family were Lascars, that would mean twelve cans of water. There was nowhere in our little kitchen to put twelve cans of water, and what a terrible thing if they all got mixed up. Ugh, fancy washing your face in someone else's can if they'd washed their bottom in it first. Anyway my brothers all kicked tin cans about in the street, so we couldn't keep twelve cans.