Faded Dreams (18 page)

   ‘Oh shut you gob, Florrie, he’s harmless enough. Theatricals aren’t as reserved as us folks and that’s all there is to it.’

   Florrie, not completely satisfied with his assessment of Terry ’s intentions, made sure she was present at all their future meetings. Never again would her Joe be put in a situation where Terry Johnson and his fancy ideas could turn his head.

   Much as he loved his family Joe resented them for standing in his way. He’d turned down the chance of swapping his humdrum existence for a glamorous new life ‘on tour’ with Terry. In the split second that it had taken for him to say ‘No’ to Terry, his dream of becoming 'a
theatrical'
  had perished.

   For some time he'd remained deeply disappointed but then came the meeting with Bert and Beryl Harris. His dream hadn’t died after all, it was to be resurrected and moved forward by his eldest daughter. At long last,
one
of the Pomfrets had made it into Show Business!

*

   The school holidays began after the initial two Mondays of rehearsals which meant that Betty was able to move into the Harris’s rented bungalow on the outskirts of town.

   The Dancing Starlights, as the six girls were to be collectively known, had been chosen from dancing classes across the country. Betty and Isabel were the only Lancashire girls and at 12 the youngest; Connie, the Head Girl and not quite 16, was the eldest.

   Bert Harris was in his late forties and no more than 5 feet 2 inches. He fancied himself a bit of a dandy with his flashy suits yet his whole appearance was gaudy, his lived-in-face never quite clean of greasepaint. He was the one who put them through their paces, while Beryl, a blousy, overweight former singer with a curious habit of repeating everything she said, busied herself making their stage costumes.

   They were an odd couple in a way that Betty couldn’t properly define. Unfeeling towards each other for a start. Some folks might have thought
her
parents were an odd couple, but at least the word ‘love’ was used in their house as often as the word ‘hate’, not to mention all the other good and bad words bandied about between her mum and dad! As for the Harris’s, there didn’t seem to be anything at all to link them together as a married couple.

   It was even a relief to go home occasionally and face the latest goings-on, and at least she got well fed at home. Meals were few and far between at the Harris’s and there was never enough to go round. The only substantial meal came on Saturday evenings when Beryl sent the girls into the fields after dark to dig up two buckets of potatoes and any other crops belonging to the farmer. Somehow it didn’t seem like stealing, how else could Mrs Harris make a stew for eight of them?

    At the end of the first week Betty took Connie home for tea. Her mother opened the John West salmon that Granny Sefton had paid a fortune for to some spiv, and her father laid out fresh lettuce and tomatoes from the greenhouse and topped them with hard-boiled eggs.

    ‘Nay, don’t eat the bloody plate and all, love,’ he teased, as Connie piled more and more bread on her plate, ‘you must be ravenous, you’ve eaten more’n the lot of us put together!’

   After tea he entertained everyone with his usual jokes and games, showing off for Connie’s benefit while watching her reaction. No doubt about it, young Connie was a bonny-looking lass, just like a foal with that easy grace and them long-legs and that habit she had of tossing her head. 

   The following weekend Mrs Harris lips tightened when Betty asked if her friend could go home with her again.

   ‘Connie will not be going to your house ever again,’ she spat the words out, ‘I say she’ll not be able to go there again, not after what happened last time… I say, not after last time.’

   ‘Why? What do you mean?’

   ‘It’s to do with your father. Anyway, I went to see your mother about it after Connie complained… I say I’ve had a word with your mother about it.’   

   ‘Connie? Complained?’ Betty’s voice quivered, her face crumpled. ‘Complained about what?’

   ‘You girls are
my
responsibility and I won’t allow any of you to be eyed up and down by a married man,’ disgust spread across her face, ‘you know what I’m talking about, Betty…I say you know what I’m talking about.’

   ‘It’s not true, Mrs Harris.’ Cringing with humiliation Betty tried to defend her father. ‘Connie’s telling lies…that’s all.’

   But deep down she wondered how true it was. There had been other times when she’d watched him flirt with young women, but surely not with Connie?

   She could only imagine her mother’s meeting with Beryl Harris. Her mother would have been indignant and outraged at such nonsense. Later there would have been a shouting match between her parents with her mother furiously refusing to believe her father’s denials. She was relieved she hadn’t been there to witness the scene.

   Betty’s embarrassment was such that she hardly dare speak to the other girls. With Isabel as her solitary confidante she became withdrawn, achieving peace of mind and a feeling of belonging only in the final days of rehearsals.

*

   The Dancing Starlights were on their way at last and from now on, at least in the presence of others, plain old Bert and Beryl would be referred to as the far more glamorous, Mr and Mrs Paul Tracey.

   First it was a week in Gateshead and then on to other towns Betty had never heard of. Apart from dancing in the line-up she had a solo spot  immediately after the interval. It involved her doing a hundred high kicks, the audience counting out each one, and an explosion of applause with the final roar of, ‘One… hundred!’ She had come a long way since Miss Julie’s School Of Ballet.

*

   Ellen diligently rehearsed the dance routines at home; now all she had to do was wait two more years and she would be old enough to join the troupe. Family life should have been more harmonious with Betty out of the way but her father now seemed to pick on Billy even more.

   In June, after Adolf Hitler unleashed his flying bomb on to England, another batch of London evacuees came north. With Betty now a dancing Starlight Florrie had an empty bed for one of them. By the time she got to The Town Hall most of the children had already left with their allocated foster-mothers and the remainder, huddled in small family groups, were much harder to place.

   Except for one lonely pasty-faced girl who caught Florrie's eye, and her heartstrings. The luggage-label tied to her coat identified her as Jean Grogan, age 4, from Plumstead.

   ‘I’ll have her,’ said Florrie without a moment’s hesitation.

   ‘There’s a slight complication, this child’s baby sister is recovering from a mastoid ear operation and will be discharged from a London hospital next week,’ the bossy tweed-suited woman in trilby hat explained.

   ‘ Their mother died last year.  Do you think you could you find it in your heart to give the pair of them a home? Camp beds and army blankets will be provided. The weekly board and lodging allowance for more than one evacuee is 8 shillings and 6d each. It’d be a sin to split them up after all they’ve gone through, poor little mites.’

   One look at Jean’s black-rimmed eyes staring anxiously out of her tired ashen face was enough for Florrie. She didn’t need Old Bossy Boots to talk about extra money and blankets and she didn’t even need to get Joe’s permission. When it came to taking in waifs and strays he was as soft as putty, and as soon as she told him the sorry story he’d open his heart as well as his home to them.

   Jean and two-year-old Joyce went home with her that day with an identical set of accessories. Head lice, impetigo and scabies came a week later.

   Florrie set to work on the lice with Derbac Soap and a fine-toothed comb. She painted the impetigo scabs with Gentian Violet, patterning the two small white faces with various sizes of indelible purple spots.

   The scabies spread quickly throughout the house, demanding a nightly routine of sulphur baths followed by a head-to-toe slathering in thick pungent cream.

   Every evening Joe fetched the coffin-shaped zinc bath from its hook on the backyard wall, set it in front of the kitchen fire and half-filled it with hot water and sulphur. The four children were bathed first with Joe topping up the water from the boiling kettle as they went along, then it was his turn, and finally Florrie’s.

    The ritual ended with Joe and Florrie dragging the brimming bath as far as the kitchen door and tipping its contents down the length of the yard. The baths alone were not enough to kill off the scabies, fresh bedclothes were an essential part of the treatment, which meant Florrie spending hours every day at the sink and mangle.

   Florrie found Jean’s emotional outbursts and her aggression towards Billy hard to manage, whereas the baby in spite of all she had been through, what with the operation and having no parents around to comfort her, never cried or made a fuss about anything. She was a little angel who spent hours at a time quietly rocking back and forth, knocking her head rhythmically against the wall behind her. Florrie thought the habit was harmless enough even though it meant that she had an ever-increasing bald patch on the back of her head much to the amusement of the rest of the family.

   The only real problem that Florrie had with Joyce was how to fill her belly. No sooner was a meal over than she was scouring the table for any scraps of food that had abandoned their plates and gone astray. Sometimes she was under the table sucking on the dog’s bone, which Florrie had to agree was not a normal thing to do.

   And yet, smacking her didn’t make any difference and she
was
only a baby, after all. It seemed that the best way to stop her from eating when she wasn’t hungry and rocking when she wasn’t tired, was to cuddle her and sing to her leaving Billy puzzling over why he had to share his mother with this little newcomer.

   The Pomfrets were no strangers to family upsets and loved the motherless little Cockney girls as their own. It wasn’t long before they dropped into the habit of calling Florrie, ‘Mammy,’ and Joe, ‘Uncle Joe.’

    Two months went by with no news of their father until a letter arrived to say that he was coming to spend the day with his children. Thanks to Joe’s generous nature, he was still with them six weeks later, sleeping on the couch by night and loafing about being waited on hand and foot by day.

*

    Wilf Grogan was a mystery from start to finish. He wasn’t in The Forces and had no job but always had money in his pocket, not that Joe or Florrie ever saw any of it. He played on their sympathy with his hard-luck stories and they felt they had no choice but give him free board and lodging.  They couldn’t abide him, there were no two-ways about it, his air of sophistication and his posh London accent made them feel awkward and inferior, but short of chucking him out they couldn’t see how they would ever get rid of him.

    Ellen couldn’t abide him either. Wilf sent shudders through her in the way that Horrible ‘Uncle’ Eddie had.  For as long as she could remember, her father had brought home an assortment of down-and-outs for a meal, or a place to sleep for the night. They were likeable enough, all except one drunk her father took pity on who never lodged with them but was a regular scrounger at their dinner table. One Saturday afternoon when the girls were in bed with the mumps they heard  “Uncle” Eddie on the stairs.

   ‘I’ll just go up and see how the kids are. I’ll see if they want me to read them a story,’ came his slurred voice.

   The children, perfectly capable of reading their own stories, huddled deeper under their blankets listening as he groaned and swore on each step.

   ‘Watch out you don’t catch mumps off them, Eddie,’ their mother laughed.

   And then he was in their room, lifting Ellen out of her bed, sitting in front of the fire with her on his lap, breathing stale ale all over her face, secretly touching her under cover of the storybook.

   It was only when her mother shouted, ‘Eddie, have you finished up there? I’ve brewed us a pot of tea,’ that he wordlessly and carefully put her back in bed and went downstairs. Close to tears Ellen buried her scarlet face under the covers.

   ‘What’s up with
you?’
Betty sat upright.

   ‘I don’t feel so well…I feel dizzy.’

   ‘Did that Horrible Uncle Eddie
do
something?’

   ‘No, did he heck.’ She couldn’t for shame tell Betty that she’d been dirty and if their mum got to know about it she’d go mad with her.

    She shuddered at the memory and wondered, now she was a couple of years older, how her parents could have let a drunken fella like that upstairs to do what he wanted with her and frighten her half to death.T

   Yes, there was definitely something about Wilf Grogan that reminded Ellen of Horrible Uncle Eddie.

*

   Florrie straightened the mirror on the back of the kitchen door, tugged a comb through her hair and dabbed a loaded powder puff all over her face. She smeared a thin stripe of Tangee across her top lip with her little finger, clamped both lips together with a hollow smacking noise to even out the colour and gave her reflection a smile of satisfaction. There, that would do! Given time to doll herself up a bit she was still a smart-piece, bonnier than any of them lasses that hung round Joe, anyway.