Dolly's Mixture (6 page)

Amy came, complete with magnificent wimple, and also a frock she'd made for Susan. This frock was a work of art, the embroidery exquisite. Ade, who understood needlework, was so impressed that Amy immediately took her to her heart and we had an afternoon and evening of rollicking fun. Amy made and embroidered a Hungarian blouse for Ade and this was ever Ade's most precious possession.

Amy let her hair down and while I was getting tea I could hear her telling Ade of her ‘adventures' at our eldest niece's wedding. It was a truly beautiful choral wedding, with an extra-special rendering of the hymns and psalms by the bridegroom's family who came from Wales, that land of music and song. My family, the Cheggies, were there too, of course; even if not at full strength, we made up quite a contingent with our many offspring. Amy and I always became merry on quite a small amount of alcohol, but Chas was working that day so I was responsible for my children and I was forced to recognise my limitations. Amy's family, on the other hand, were grown up and, in any case, her teetotaller husband James, was there to take charge of things in an emergency -not that Amy expected to imbibe overmuch. Both Amy and James had signed the pledge when they were young and belonged to a church but, unlike James who was unbending and would never break an undertaking, Amy had convinced herself that her youth and noble intentions had been taken advantage of and that she had signed under duress.

Suffice it to say that, by the time we had left the reception, James was on the silent side, Amy uninhibited and extremely jocular. On such a sweltering hot day Amy asked the chauffeur of our hired conveyance – it was a landau – if we could have the top down. He joined in the fun and we progressed in a ‘driving down the course' manner. We were all dressed in the right garb for this Ascot excursion: Mother wore grey, Amy lemon, David's wife Lydia was in powder-blue, Dolly in pale green, and David my brother, always an immaculate chappie, in pin-striped trousers with appropriate jacket. To all passers-by Amy extended the royal acknowledgement, the ‘bending of the elbow'. They stood and stared in amazement. Four handsome young men in a car going our way, dressed for dining at some exclusive rendezvous, kept pace with us for much of the time, thoroughly enjoying their repartee with Amy, now on top of her form. If her James had not already been dumbstruck I would have said he grew more ominously silent as we bowled along.

By the time we reached my house at Forest Gate we were all laughing (except Jimmy, naturally) and Mother suggested Amy sponge her face and take some strong tea before going home. Hardly a wise suggestion, as it turned out. Amy, loath to go home to ‘life ordinaire' again so soon, wanting this ecstatic reunion with the Cheggies to continue, entered the house with alacrity and promptly fell up the stairs. We Cheggies talked eagerly about the wedding, but when it dawned on Amy that her spouse was not entering into the spirit of the occasion she fixed him with a stern and awful stare and, to his horror and ours, began a recital of her beloved's shortcomings, commencing from years back. Some of the accusations, I felt, were a bit on the intimate side. Her recital was distinct, eloquent and organised. She could have been doing Portia's speech – without the mercy, of course.

I would have been profuse with apologies to a dear husband had I been the merry wife, but Amy has always believed that the best way to defend is to attack, and attack she did. She was deaf to Mother's entreaties to ‘Drink your tea, Amy, do drink it while it's hot,' and her indignant words swept on and on. When Amy paused for breath James rose with dignity and said, ‘I will leave you with your mother until you come to your senses, then perhaps you will return home.' This would have worried me but Amy called out gaily, ‘Coward,' to Jim's retreating back. She wasn't a bit worried about being left but just annoyed that she had been stemmed in the flow of her Shakespearean diatribe.

James must have thought I was a steadying influence on Amy, for on the occasion of a luncheon on board a posh passenger liner he invited me along, no doubt to keep her in hand. Because it was a business affair and not a Cheggie one, Amy and I behaved with dignity and decorum until at the end of the meal, when Amy lit a cigarette. One important lady guest leant over and said to Amy in haughty tones, ‘Are you smoking? I have suffered virus pneumonia.' ‘Irish pneumonia!' cried a surprised Amy, mishearing the lady (it might have been due to the luncheon wine) and always interested to learn. ‘I have never heard of that strain of pneumonia, have you, Dolly?' ‘Oh, yes, Amy,' I said. ‘It's a national illness, like German measles, and Asian 'flu.' Then, the wine taking effect, I said, ‘Then there are the venerable diseases and saints disorders.' The haughty lady turned to the guest at her side and whispered something, whereupon this gentleman gazed at us sternly, but there was a twinkle in his eye.

If I refer to the ‘streptococci lady', Amy knows immediately to whom I am referring. It's a sort of code between us. We had a very smart friend who used long words to impress us, though sometimes it took a little while to puzzle out what she meant. A dear relative of hers suffered a ‘celestial' condition. We thought he had passed on but found he had a cholesterol condition of the blood: and after her first holiday abroad she informed us that she was in ‘perjury' with sunburn. Purgatory?

However, I was so grateful to Amy for the benefit of her advice as an experienced shop assistant and her reassurance that no one would be likely to ask me for something of which I had no knowledge. She was wrong. My first customer, a foreign lady speaking broken English, requested ‘pumpernickel'. Fortunately Chas returned while I was directing the lady to Amy's chemist shop. Having served abroad he was knowledgeable as to ‘black bread'.

Up with the lark were the Scannells. At this early hour Chas was at his happiest, most patient and his noisiest, whereas I was at my lowest ebb. I had to be reintroduced to the world in a gentle manner or my ominous silence turned into snappy moroseness. Only duty coaxed me to perform at all. Chas will say that, except for times of enforced separation, he has always brought his wife her first delicious cup of morning tea, and that he loves to perform this service for her. He does not add that sometimes he crashes the tray by my bedside with the words, ‘This is the
fifth
cup of tea, don't you dare let this one get cold,' and he turns on the radio, hums, coughs, crashes, talks and generally bangs about, with no consideration whatever for those still wishing to be peaceful.

He would be down in the shop just after 7 a.m. preparing for the grand opening; then, this done, he would come upstairs to breakfast and a silent wife. At 8 a.m. the shop would be open, or before eight o'clock if from within could be seen a woman without, agitatedly wanting something for breakfast for her family waiting expectantly at home. One morning at breakfast Chas asked that I should get down to the shop a bit sharpish as he had an order to deliver at 8.30 to a factory. He went off downstairs and within minutes came a dreadful screaming from him,
‘Fire! Fire! Fire!'
In my dilatory mood and dressing-gown, I opened the kitchen door, yelled in return, ‘Stop playing about, Chas,' and slammed the door with a mighty bang to confirm my non-participation in fun and games, however warm the invitation.

Chas continued to yell for me and finally, in a burst of temper, I thrust William out of the upstairs kitchen door, saying ‘You'd better get off to school, and on the way tell Dad I shall be down in ten minutes, and say, “Mum says, don't keep shouting.”' To my annoyance William returned immediately and I was about to snap, ‘Well, what is it
now
?' but he said quickly, ‘The passage is filled with smoke, mum. Dad is still screaming for you, and there's a terrible smell of burning and a crackling noise.' I dragged William down the stairs and thrust him out through the front door into the street. Then, coughing and choking, I made my way to the back room, shouting for Chas. He was beating furiously with a dark blanket at the shelves, which were red and smouldering. On the shelves the packets of tea had already burned into mounds of smelly substance. When the last flame had been beaten out, Chas turned to me. He looked like a crazy sweep. He dragged me through the passage to the garden where there appeared to be the remains of a large bonfire. He grabbed my shoulder in a furious rage and choked, ‘When I call
fire
next time, you bloody well come running.' ‘What's this then, a practice run?' I asked. I thought he would hit me. I knew I deserved it. I should have known Chas better than to assume he would play practical jokes about anything so serious. I should have known he would never cry wolf.

He had returned to the shop after breakfast to find the container into which we threw our used bags and paper blazing. His first thoughts were of me and he became frantic as the fire worsened and no Dolly appeared – indeed, did not intend to appear. He was unable to reach the phone because of the flames. He could not run next door to the butcher's to phone, for he would not leave the blaze while his obstinate Joan of Arc was upstairs. Because of me he had carried a large, blazing, cardboard container through the passage into the garden, burning his arms and hands, and had then gone back to attack the burning shelves. To look at the damage it was impossible to believe that one man could have stemmed the blaze. The shop remained closed for the day because of the thick smoke which hung like a pall everywhere.

I said to my hero, ‘What did you beat the flames out with?' ‘Anything I could find,' he said, ‘and luckily my new overcoat was still downstairs.' (I had forgotten to take this upstairs after collecting it from the tailor's the night before.) ‘Fancy using a lovely new overcoat,' I moaned. ‘What's the bleeding good of a lovely new overcoat if I'd been burned to death?' shouted an angry Chas. ‘I've often thought what silly things you say at times, but your behaviour during this crisis has been sheer stupidity and even I would not have believed you capable of such idiocy.' He never forgave me for assuming he would play a practical joke by calling ‘Fire,' and once, when guests were complimenting me on something or other, Chas said, ‘What would
you
think of a woman who, when warned of fire on the floor below her, shouts an insulting remark at the warning and slams the door to safety?' ‘Oh,' said one of the guests, ‘she was probably simple.' Chas never looked at me or gave me away. He is hoping that one day I will at last admit I can at times behave with crass stupidity. Until now I never have.

To take my mind off the depressing results of the fire Ade suggested we go to a bingo session. She was collecting her weekly order from us. ‘Bingo! Surely that's a bit boring, no brain power needed there.' ‘Hark at Lady Einstein,' said Ade. ‘What do you want after a hard day in the shop, someone to set you big mathematical problems?' I had never even thought about going to this type of social affair but when Ade remarked that the top prize was one thousand pounds I began to dream of what I would do with such a sum, for I was sure I would win. Ade and Ben had been invited to an evening bingo session by their new neighbours, a middle-aged childless couple, ‘very refaned,' said Ade.

Apparently these neighbours had always been extremely lucky at this game of chance and, being such refined folks, had really fallen for Benny and his snooty way of talking. Since he was difficult to approach they were endeavouring to get to him through Ade, the ‘hail fellow, well met'. The new neighbours amused Ade, for she was sure they assumed that Benny had come down in the world through his marriage to her, the aristocratic son falling for the housemaid. They had been most impressed, when inviting Ade and Benny to the Bingo session, to discover that Benny and Johnny were going to the Proms. Benny had tried to introduce Ade to the more serious side of music but she had found it ‘bloody boring'. He had started off by taking the whole family to
La Bohème 
, but Mimi had been, according to Ade, a ‘typical scrubber' with enormous arms, so that when ‘Your tiny hand is frozen' was sung the twins were in hysterics. Ade and the twins opted out. ‘I don't mind a nice brass band,' said Ade.

‘We will pick up Mrs S. in our car,' said Ade's new lady neighbour, and at seven o'clock one winter's evening the limousine purred to a stop outside our shop. At first sight I thought it was the car/van from the gown factory down the road, for it was square, black and very high up in the air but there were bits of material hanging across the windows, so apparently it was an ordinary car. Ade was sitting in state in the back, her eyes twinkling. As though I was a younger sister, she knew in advance, somehow, my innermost thoughts. Suddenly I realised that, to anyone who liked large women, Ade would have been beautiful. Her eyes were large, a sort of greeny-hazel, her complexion fair; she had a straight nose, nicely shaped mouth, good teeth and lovely, glossy, red-chestnut hair.

Ade introduced me to Mr and Mrs —. The man possessed a military moustache and was wearing pheasant-shooting clothes; a sporty cap and muffler, Burberry and thick, brown, country brogues. His ensemble was completed by a pair of bright-yellow string gloves. Mrs was a fussy little woman in a blue Harris tweed suit, a felt hat with a coloured feather in the brim and a yellowish, grassy-looking fur round her shoulders. This was a complete animal with pointed nose and big, brown, glassy eyes, his mouth gripping one of his ‘arms'. It was flattened like a kipper and the back view was of the tiny hind legs and tail. The eyes made me shudder.

Ade was already ensconced, wrapped about the knees with a plaid travelling-rug, and the lady, the perfect hostess, greeted me with another rug over her arm for me. ‘Call us Edie and Alby,' said the lady poshly. ‘Any friend of Benny and Ade is a friend of ours.' Her voice embarrassed me; it was obvious to me she had ‘risen' from the area of my childhood, and the overlay of gentility was all so false. It couldn't be natural to her. She wrapped me about with the travelling-rug – ‘We always keep these in the car', which was, I supposed, a sort of declaration that she never needed to borrow them for their bed at night. She was, too, one of those worst offenders, the back-seat driver. Another declaration to make us think that she'd been brought up with a car in the family! Thus, with her running commentary – ‘Look to your right – a bicycle coming up on the left – oh my God, did you see that – oh what a madman, such people shouldn't be allowed on the roads – watch that dog, Alby' – we arrived at the bingo palace, Alby went to park the car while we queued; I had never seen so many people in a queue before. The building was an old cinema and finally we were seated. It was hot and smelly inside. I was unlucky that my tip-up seat was broken so that I was low to the ground. Ade seemed like a mountain next to me but there was no point in complaining about my broken seat, for all the seats were filled. I just longed for the evening to finish.