Jacky Daydream (10 page)

I had my own proper big bed, brand new, but I had to make do with my parents’ old brown eiderdown. It had a gold-thread pattern and it felt silky to the touch, but it was a hideous colour. I had a brown ottoman too, an ugly piece of furniture from Ga’s junk room, hard as a rock to sit on, but the seat lifted up like a lid and I could store all my drawings and paper dolls and notebooks inside, plus all my ‘sets’. I had a doctors and nurses set, a red plastic case containing various odd instruments and a toy thermometer and stethoscope. I also had a nurse’s apron and cap marked with a red cross. I was therefore the doctor
and
the nurse, so all my dolls got first-class medical attention when they were poorly.

My toys all seemed career-orientated. I also had a bus conductor’s set with a dinky little ticket holder and a machine to punch the ticket; a small grocery shop with tiny jars of real sweets and little cardboard boxes labelled Daz and Omo and Persil; and a post office set with a rubber stamp and pretend postage. I politely played with these a few times, but if I wanted to play buses or shops, I found it easier
imagining
it. These little props always reminded me that I was simply playing a game. Still, they were useful when the little girl next door, Suzanne, came in to play with me. It gave us
something
to
do
together. I liked playing with Sue but if I was truthful, I preferred playing by myself.

I had a second-hand chest of drawers. The drawers all stuck so you had to jiggle them around and tug hard at the handles. Once I pulled a handle right off and got severely told off. It might be an old junk-shop piece of furniture but it was all we had.

I kept jumpers and cardigans in one drawer. Biddy hadn’t inherited Ga’s sewing skills but she liked to knit. She made me jumper after jumper, using her favourite ‘rabbit-ears’ stitch. Biddy said they looked ‘jazzy’, and used very bright contrasting colours. They were tight and itchy, and although they were beautifully knitted, Biddy never quite mastered the knack of stitching the sleeves onto the main garment. I always had odd puckers on my shoulders. Sometimes the sleeves were so tight I held my arms out awkwardly to ease the tension. We didn’t wear uniform at Latchmere, my new school. I wished we did.

I kept my Viyella nighties and my vests and knickers and socks and pocket handkerchiefs in the bottom drawer, all jumbled together. Biddy wanted to keep them neatly separate, using the two half drawers at the top, but I wanted these for my special things.

I kept tiny books in the right-hand drawer. I had the little illustrated prayer book that had once been
Biddy’s
. Ga gave it to me one day. I was surprised. My dad had once been a choirboy – I’d even seen a photo of him in a long gown with a white collar, standing with his brother Roy – but to the best of my knowledge Biddy had only set foot in a church twice: once when she was married and once when I was christened.

It was a beautiful pearly white book and I longed to show it off at school. It had my mum’s name neatly written in the front –
Biddy Clibbens
– but in the back I found a pencilled parody of the Lord’s Prayer. It was just a silly schoolgirl version, not really blasphemous, changing ‘daily bread’ to ‘daily bath’ and that sort of thing, but I got terribly worried. We had a fierce scripture teacher at school, who scrubbed our mouths out with carbolic soap if we said rude words and rapped us on the knuckles if we printed God or Jesus without capital letters. I was sure she’d think my mother would burn to a crisp in Hell if she saw her schoolgirl prank. Biddy found me agonizing over her naughty rhyme.

‘You silly little prig!’ she said, laughing at me, but she got an eraser and rubbed vigorously until there wasn’t a trace of it left, simply to stop me worrying.

I worried a great deal. Biddy didn’t seem to worry at all. She’d been bright at school and at eleven had passed her exams to go to the girls’
grammar
school. Ga was so pleased. She’d lost her chance of a proper education but now her daughter could benefit. Biddy had other ideas though. She didn’t take lessons very seriously and got distracted by boys. She was happy to leave school at sixteen.

For various reasons
I
left school at sixteen too. Poor Ga. I wish she could have stayed alive to watch her great-granddaughter Emma grow up – at last a bright, focused child who worked diligently, came top in all her exams and is now a senior academic at Cambridge.
And
she can sew!

I kept Biddy’s prayer book – without the Lord’s Prayer – with my Mary Mouse series and a whole flock of Flower Fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker. I loved these little books and spent hours poring over the carefully painted pictures, making up stories about all the fairies, gently stroking their long shiny hair, sometimes tickling their bare toes. I never bothered reading the odd little rhymes on the facing pages but I learned all the flower names. The sweet-pea picture of the big sister fairy tenderly adjusting the pink bonnet on her little baby sister was my all-time favourite.

I had two storybooks by Cecily Mary Barker too, stories that I loved, more stirring than the Faraway Tree books, more accessible than
David Copperfield. The Lord of the Rushie River
was about a sad little ill-treated child called Susan,
desperate
for her sailor father to come home. She’s carried away by her friend the swan, and of course she’s reunited with her father at the end of the story. She’s worried about her ragged clothes but the swan snatches her a beautiful rainbow-embroidered dress.

I tried to make friends with the swans on the Thames when Harry took me to feed the ducks, but their beaks seemed very forbidding and I didn’t like the way they hissed at me. They certainly didn’t look as if they’d take me for a ride on their feathery backs and find me a lovely new dress.

The second book was
Groundsel and Necklaces
, a tender little tale about a child called Jenny who ends up with 365 necklaces, one for every day of the year. I read these stories over and over again. I loved stories about sad, spirited little children going through hard times. I already knew I wanted to write that sort of story myself one day. I cared passionately about dresses and treasured my own rainbow party dress with smocking from C & A. I didn’t have any jewellery at all at that age but read the page where the necklaces are described over and over again. I never dreamed that one day I might have a
ring
for – well, not every day, but at least every week of the year.

I had my little books in the right-hand drawer. I kept my crayons and paints and pens and pencils
in
the left. I didn’t have proper
sets
, though in my teens I’d buy myself a beautiful Derwent coloured pencil every week with my pocket money until I had the entire range in every single shade. Meanwhile I kept my mix of crayons in a biscuit tin with a picture of a little girl called Janet on the top.

Janet was a very popular child model in those days, her photo in all the women’s magazines. She had wispy hair, big eyes and a soulful expression. She was wearing a seersucker frock on my tin and peering slightly cross-eyed through several branches of apple blossom. I’d have Janet on her tin beside me as I drew and crayoned, and so long as I was out of earshot of my parents, I’d chat to her companionably.

I also had a small Reeves paintbox, though I was never entirely successful when it came to watercolour painting. I could control my crayons and get the colours to stay in the lines, but the paint ran away with me. I’d try to create a fairy princess with hair as black as coal, but the black would run into her pale pink face and she’d end up looking like a coal
miner
. I’d start a beautiful mermaid with long golden curls and a shining tail but the blue sea would splash right over her and dye her hair bright green.

I kept my doll’s house and my toy farm on the
top
of my chest of drawers. I was never really a country girl and didn’t play with my farm very much. Maybe this was just as well, as the little cows and sheep and chickens and turkey were all made of lead, and I was exactly the sort of silly child who might have licked them. The farm stayed undisturbed most days, the cows not milked, the sheep not shorn, the eggs uncollected. I was busy next door, playing with my doll’s house.

It wasn’t especially elaborate, a two-up, two-down 1930s little number with a scarlet roof and green latticed windows, but it was fully furnished. I especially loved my three-piece suite in jade-green plastic. It gave me great pleasure just holding the little armchair and running my thumb up underneath, feeling the strange insides.

I had a proper family of doll’s house dolls, dear little creatures with woollen hair and tiny clothes, but they were made like pipe cleaners, and if you tried to bend them to sit on the sofa or climb up the stairs, a leg might snap off suddenly in an alarming fashion. Sometimes I just played that it was
my
house. I’d stand with the front swinging open, my face almost inside the rooms, and I’d act like Alice and shrink myself small.

I didn’t have a proper edition of
Alice in Wonderland
with the Tenniel illustrations. My
Alice
had sugar-sweet coloured pictures that didn’t
fit
the story at all. I also had an abridged
Peter Pan
with Mabel Lucie Attwell illustrations. Both stories confused me, and because I read them consecutively when I was about six, they amalgamated oddly in my head, so that Peter flew round Wonderland and Tinkerbell shook pepper at the Duchess and Alice joined up with Wendy to make a little house for the Lost Boys.

I’d have been perfectly happy left to my own devices playing alone all day in my new bedroom – but I had to go to school.

Who had a very small bedroom at her dad’s house, with a chest of drawers half painted silver?

 

It’s Floss in my book
Candyfloss
.

It was not much bigger than a cupboard. There was just room for the bed and an old chest of drawers. Dad had started to paint it with some special silver paint, but it was a very small tin and it ran out before he could cover the last drawer. He’d propped a mirror on top of the chest and I’d laid out my brush-and-comb set and my china ballet dancer and my little cherry-red vase from my dressing table at home. They didn’t make the chest look much prettier.

‘Dad’s going to finish painting the chest when he can find some more silver paint,’ I said. ‘And he’s going to put up bookshelves and we’re going to get a new duvet – midnight-blue with silver stars – and I’m going to have those luminous stars stuck on the ceiling
and
one of those glitter balls like you get at dances – and fairy lights!’

I always try hard to describe the bedrooms of all my girls. I feel so lucky that I can choose whatever style of bedroom I like now. It’s got a very big wardrobe along one wall, and when you open the doors, a little light goes on. I’ve got a pink velvet Victorian chaise longue by the window. There are specially built bookshelves, a Venetian glass dressing table and big mirrors, and a special shrine of pretty Madonnas and angels and a heart-shaped gold sacred relic with a secret message inside. My fashion mannequin Crystal stands in the corner wearing a beaded black evening frock. She has matching black velvet ribbons in her long fair hair. There’s a picture of a doll my daughter Emma drew when she was twelve on the wall. There are more dolls sitting smiling in odd corners and two droopy knitted animals, one a dog and one an elephant. They are
very
like Dimble and Ellarina in
Candyfloss
.