Family Britain, 1951-1957 (38 page)

He was always very friendly to his many women customers, too friendly some husbands thought. But the shop was extremely popular, not just because of the man himself but because of the strap. If money ran out during the week, which it often did, Mom could send me down to Gerry’s with a note asking that it be put on the bill. Gerry would note it down in his little black book for payment on the following Friday.

To anybody who did not pay on the due day, Gerry Marshall’s friendly manner would vanish instantly and you would be likely to find your name and address and the amount owed on a post card on his front window. This usually did the trick, and there were few cards that stayed up for long.

There was another advantage to Mom shopping at Gerry’s. Sometimes when she had paid off a strap bill on a Friday, and all the other bills, she would find herself short of cash to last through the coming week. Gerry Marshall would lend Mom £3 or even £4 in cash until the next pay day. Dad did not know about this and would have gone up the wall if he had; I was under threat of death never to mention it in front of him. As you can appreciate, it was near impossible for Mom and lots of the other women ever to clear their bills with Gerry, and of course, this is what he wanted. He never added anything to the strap bill or charged interest on the loans, but when I brought Mom a sheet of notepaper with the list of items she had bought over the week, she would sit down and check carefully through it.

‘That Gerry Marshall’s a crafty bugger,’ she would say running her finger down the list for the third time. ‘I never ’ad two lots of bacon did I? An’ I never ’ad no biscuits this week, I know that fer a fuckin’ fact.’

But she always paid up despite her misgivings about the bill, for to fall out with Gerry would mean no more strap and no more cash loans . . .

If there was an element of trust, of mutual interdependence between shopkeeper and customer, in Gerry Marshall’s approach, that seems to have been less the case with Lorna Sage’s elderly relatives who ran a small general shop, Hereford Stores, in Tonypandy. ‘It was the sort of shop that had almost as many customers when it was closed as when it was open,’ she remembered. ‘Feckless, improvident types rattled at the door at all hours wanting a few fags or half a loaf. And, of course, in search of that increasingly rare commodity that was turning out to be Katie and Stan’s special stock-in-trade: tick.’ One day Stan took young Lorna on a tour of his booty. Piled up high in his loft were handlebars, wheels and seats from dismembered bicycles, wheels from prams, sometimes even whole prams, and sacks full of ivory piano keys. ‘His plan had been to confiscate people’s most vital possessions – their mobility and their music – as pledges against bad debts. They were never redeemed. Yet Stan didn’t mind, didn’t mind at all. In fact, he was as excited and pleased as if he’d invented his own currency and was a secret millionaire in it . . .’
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Shops were not only for shopping. ‘Every day the husband meets his workmates in the factory and the canteen, and there has his social contact and his conversation,’ noted the authors of a 1953 report on Southampton’s housing estates, arguing that the New Towns had got it wrong by being unduly restrictive about shops in residential neighbourhoods. ‘For the woman whose workplace is the home, the counterpart is often the shop; and one has only to “listen in” at a “dispersed” shop to realise the intimate personal knowledge of family affairs which is shown, and the range of topics, from dress materials to local happenings, which are discussed. This adds to life something of the zest of a small community . . .’ Zest perhaps, but in shops and elsewhere the all-consuming staple of female conversation was almost invariably gossip. ‘The balconies for the tenement women were equivalent to the streets of the terraced house dwellers,’ recalled Jennifer Worth about her Poplar days. ‘So close was the living space, that I doubt if anyone could get away with anything without all the neighbours knowing. The outside world held very little interest for the East Enders, and so other people’s business was the primary topic of conversation – for most it was the only interest, the only amusement or diversion.’ Or take this reminiscence of 1940s street life in working-class Bristol:

Monday was a real old gossip day. With so many women wielding a brush or going great guns with a polishing duster, they could pass the time of day to the neighbour over the way, or with the metal polish tins still in their hands, they would linger in little knots to discuss any recent happening in the street. Net curtains twitched as their owners peeped to see who was talking to who, and the whole street became like an Indian settlement, with gossip like smoke signals drifting in all directions.

Some of these older working-class women could be formidable figures. ‘No-one came or went without Ma’s observation and no-one got by Ma until she had her gossip,’ began Evelyn Haythorne’s description of ‘Old Ma Barrowcliffe’, living in a fictional but true-to-life Yorkshire pit village in the early 1950s:

Most were ready to talk, the walls were paper-thin, so they’d be daft not to, but a lot genuinely wished to share their troubles and worries. Others just passed the time of day but few willingly crossed her, for she had a great knowledge of what went off in the backs. Usually, though, she didn’t spread and one could trust Ma. If you were genuine you were all right, but she ’adn’t time for petty illnesses or for nit picking, though she had a great sympathy for real heartaches.
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In short, gossip was ubiquitous in well-established working-class neighbourhoods – and, put simply, Al Read would not have won such renown for his monologue of the nosy, talkative housewife if it had not been rooted in reality.

How benign were the effects of all this gossip? ‘An activity that in spite of its general disparagement was the channel for neighbourhood lore and wisdom, and a mechanism for enforcing mores,’ is Ravetz’s largely positive view, while Colls has no doubts:

Women were streetwise. They kept clear the channels of communication. They knew who was who and where they lived, and they drew on all this as common knowledge . . . To the men, women’s street talk was just gossip. But to those who needed information about a job, a useful contact, or local resource, or a house swap (‘key money’), women’s gossip was a standing committee on public safety. David Reeder and Richard Rodger [two urban historians] once famously referred to cities as the ‘information superhighway’ of their age. At street level, where the flow of information was heaviest, no one knew this better than the mothers. What came to be called community was simply another way of referring to their world.

In reality it was surely a more mixed picture. ‘It is not surprising that savage fighting frequently broke out in the tenements,’ notes Worth at the end of her passage about the all-consuming nature of gossip for East Enders; Geoffrey Gorer in his 1950–51
People
survey of English habits found a significant level of complaints about the gossip of neighbours and reflected that ‘the proverbial “village pump” attitude seems to bedevil the life of many’, while in his detailed Braydon Road study, Kuper tended to emphasise the negative aspects of gossip or, as it was sometimes called, canting:

The essential triviality of the content of the local gossip is a striking feature. There are very occasional references to extreme cases of immorality. Many comments relate to standards of housekeeping, ‘scruffy homes’; of child-care, ‘dragging up children’; of bearing to neighbours, ‘she thinks she’s the great I am’; and to such social problems as ‘scrounging’. Gossip acts as a restraining influence on behaviour, both directly and indirectly. The direct channel is the repetition of what was said to the person discussed. But indirectly, pressure to conform arises from fear of what neighbours will say. The Hutton family relaxes in the back garden on fine days; the daughters dress lightly, and Mrs Hutton feels sure that the ‘neighbours talk about the “nudity” of the girls’. Visibility is, in fact, so high that it is difficult to get away with only token conformity, such as a highly polished front step and a neglected interior; no one will be taken in by it.

A further function of gossip is to regulate status reputation. General mode of life, care of the children, are assessed, and families evaluated by these criteria. Possessions, the goods neighbours buy and the prices they pay, are of interest. A group of friends quarrelled on precisely this score. One circulated the story that her friend had paid only seven shillings for some garment, but gave out the price as one pound. Women may be suspected of calling in for the sole purpose of examining their neighbours’ purchases. Residents deflate the pretensions of neighbours, or assert, in a variety of ways, their own superior social position. Discussions of status are an essential part of gossip.

The residents themselves stress the hazardous aspects. There is the danger of conflict: ‘A tale’s never lost; they add a bit to it, and it goes round the neighbourhood.’ ‘It gets round what you’ve said, and that’s how the trouble starts.’

Above all, Kuper went on, ‘they emphasise the threat to privacy’ – a threat posed by even apparently harmless gossip. ‘Does it matter if her neighbours know what she bought at a shop, or whether she goes out with her husband’s brother? Yet discussion of these quite neutral topics is resented. Each person maintains a certain sphere of privacy, a private domain, wide or narrow, which is an extension of the personality and an expression of individuality. It is into this private domain that gossip intrudes.’

Again and again, not least in this context of a deep, if often vain, desire for privacy, one is struck by the limits of neighbourliness – indeed of mutuality – in even long-established working-class neighbourhoods. Jimmy Boyle recalled how in his street in the Gorbals ‘if someone died the neighbours would go round the houses collecting money in a bedsheet to help the family meet the costs of the burial’, and how ‘from the extreme circumstance of a death to the simple need of borrowing a cup of sugar, help was always at hand’, but Donald James Wheal remembered the still working-class part of Chelsea (before his family moved to White City) quite differently: ‘Sensing a slight, women would not speak to each other for the most trivial reasons. Feuds often developed, sadly between neighbours who needed each other. The World’s End was as riddled with them as any medieval Italian city state.’
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Contemporary evidence, whether qualitative or quantitative, is more reliable. Take for a start Kerr’s broadly positive account of ‘Ship Street’, where she depicted a world of not much neighbourliness in the sense of social intercourse – compared to constant visiting by relatives – but considerable practical neighbourliness, ‘especially in times of adversity’, and where ‘neighbours who are not on visiting terms hold keys of each other’s homes’ or even ‘accompany each other to hospital’. Yet at the same time she did not deny that in what physically was an intensely close-knit world, ‘feuds are fairly common and range from simple quarrels, which are not made up, to the most complicated vendettas which produce a series of lawsuits’ or even more primitive forms of vengeance. Mogey seemingly did not encounter feuds in St Ebbe’s, but nor did he come across much friendly neighbourliness:

I don’t believe in talking to the neighbours; you have to be careful what you say.

I never have a neighbour inside. I am one of those who keep themselves to themselves. Mind you, I’m sociable, I say ‘Good Morning’.

I’m not one for going into people’s houses unless for illness.

We don’t mix with the people round here. We’re not gossips like they are: they’re not too bad this end of the street but at the far end the people are always standing on the doorsteps gossiping.

It’s just a question of knowing people over walls and through doors.

‘Of course if anyone wants help, I help,’ one housewife added. ‘Like the man over the road when his wife was in hospital. I went over when he came back from work to ask if he had any lunch. He said not to bother.’ The evidence was also largely negative in the working-men’s clubs in Featherstone, where ‘with regard to “mutual helpfulness” the club’s achievements in this respect are not at all impressive,’ noted Dennis et al, adding that ‘there is no suggestion of “mutual helpfulness” on the basis of need’. Almost everywhere, whether in an old or a new neighbourhood, the all-important distinction – crucial in ensuring broadly amicable relations – was between ‘neighbourly’ and ‘friendly’. The former, Hodges and Smith reflected on the basis of their Sheffield study, was ‘based on willingness to give, or readiness to ask for and accept, help from others’; the latter implied ‘a close reciprocal relationship based on trust, affection and respect’. Inevitably, there were also non-neighbourly relationships between neighbours. But in any case, as Hodges and Smith added, ‘the degree of contact between neighbours is regulated by convention, and there is probably rather less permitted or desired nowadays than in the past’.

The most striking qualitative evidence was in Kuper’s Braydon Road study – the study of a development specifically built to try to encourage intimacy among its residents. The vox pop speaks cumulatively for itself:

It’s terrible, you can hear everything.

When I clean my mirror, it bangs against the wall, and she knocks back. My husband says it’s best to ignore people like that.

You can even hear them use the pot; that’s how bad it is. It’s terrible.

People can keep borrowing and not pay back, till in the end you have to refuse them and that is unpleasant.

I don’t believe in borrowing and lending.

I don’t believe in going into each other’s houses – you can keep friendly without that. Usually, they are getting to know one another’s business, and perhaps children are standing there listening: though I like to have a neighbour I can depend on, but one that doesn’t take your business out of your house, when they’ve been in your house.

One woman over the road was getting very friendly – coming over at all times of the day. My husband used to be annoyed when he came home and found that the work hadn’t been done; so was I, because I like to get things finished.