Jacky Daydream (7 page)

Which of my books features an entire collection of treasured dolls?

 

It’s
Lizzie Zipmouth
.

Dolls! Old china dolls in cream frocks and pinafores and little button boots, soft plush dolls with rosy cheeks and curls, baby dolls in long white christening robes, lady dolls with tiny umbrellas and high heels, a Japanese doll in a kimono with a weeny fan, dolls in school uniform and swimming costumes and party frocks, great dolls as big as me sitting in real wicker chairs, middle-sized dolls in row after row on shelves, and tiny dolls no bigger than my thumb standing in their own green painted garden beside a doll’s house.

I once had a very touching letter from a little girl of about nine. She loved playing with Barbies but a friend had come to tea and thought her a terrible baby because she still played with dolls. She told everyone at school and now my poor girl was getting horribly teased. I wrote back to tell her that I’d played with dolls right throughout my childhood and that I still had several sitting on my windowsills or lolling on spare sofas.

I put lots of dolls in my books, especially in
Lizzie Zipmouth
, where Lizzie and her scary step-great-gran bond over their love of dolls. It’s a bonding thing in my family too. Ga loved dolls, Biddy loved dolls – in fact she’s got a collection that outnumbers
Great-Gran’s
. Hundreds of little glass eyes stare at you when you go into her spare room! I’ve got all kinds of dolls in my house too, and so has my daughter Emma.

9

Lewisham

WE MOVED WHEN
I was nearly four. Jean, one of Biddy’s friends, had a brother who rented a small flat in a three-storey house in Lewisham. He was ready to move on now, so Biddy and Harry took his two rooms.

I’m sure they were glad to get their own place. I wasn’t as keen. I missed Ga and our daily routines and my treats terribly. It wasn’t as if I had a place of
my
own. I still had to share their bedroom. I had my small bed and a rug where I was allowed to line up my dolls, and that was it.

We learned pretty quickly why Jean’s brother was so keen to move on. A demented man called Stanley lived on the ground floor. He screamed abuse at his cowed wife. He screamed abuse at us too, and at poor Miss Parker, the retired lady who lived on the top floor. He crouched in his flat, ears cocked, and the moment he heard you coming down the garden path he’d be at his window, purple in the face, screeching.

‘Hurry up the steps because of Stanley,’ my mum would say when we came back from shopping trips.
She
didn’t need to tell me twice. I charged up in my Clarks sandals, tripping in my haste.

We couldn’t escape him even when we were upstairs in our flat. Stanley would start slamming his own door violently. Not once or twice. Over and over again for a good fifteen minutes, while the whole house shook. Harry was out at work at the Treasury from Monday to Friday. Biddy and I were stuck at home. We went out as much as possible, taking the tram as far as we could afford.

I looked young for my age so Biddy sat me on her lap and pretended I was under three so she didn’t have to pay the fare. She let me take a book with me if it was a long journey. I now owned the Margaret Tarrant storybook as well as the nursery rhymes. Margaret Tarrant was very popular in those days and Ga sent me Margaret Tarrant animal postcards every week. I also had
Pookie
, a story about a white rabbit with wings, but all these books were too big and cumbersome to take out. I took a Shelf Animal book instead. They were the same size and format as Beatrix Potter, twee tales about toy animals – Stripy the Zebra, Getup the Giraffe, Woeful the Monkey, Gumpa the Bear and a small, fluffy, teddy-type creature called Little Mut.

I begged Biddy and Harry to read them to me at bed time. Now on the tram I murmured my own versions of the stories as I flipped the pages, looking
at
the brightly coloured pictures. It looked for all the world as if I was reading. Passengers gazed at me in awe and complimented my mother on my precocity. Biddy smirked, pleased she could take pride in me at last. I usually made her cringe in public. I was still immaculately turned out but I had developed a ferociously needy thumb-sucking habit. I didn’t just suck my thumb, I frequently hid my nose in a pocket handkerchief, rubbing the soft cotton with my finger.

‘Take that thumb out of your mouth and put that hankie in your pocket! You look tuppence short of a shilling,’ Biddy said, again and again.

Sometimes she’d jerk my thumb out impatiently but I stubbornly stuck it straight back. I was missing Ga. Maybe Biddy was too. We were certainly both missing Kingston.

We went up onto Blackheath once, but it seemed too bare and wide and empty compared with the oak woods and red deer of Richmond Park, or the gentle meadows of Home Park, with its flocks of sheep and speckled fallow deer. We went to the Lewisham shops but they weren’t a patch on Kingston. There wasn’t even one market, whereas we had
three
in Kingston: a big fruit and vegetable market, a little apple and flower market, and on Mondays a huge bustling free-for-all market with ducks and chickens and rabbits, bolts of material, socks and knickers, kiddies’ clothes, glittery
jewellery
, toys, kitchenware and general junk.

Lewisham’s big shops didn’t compare either. They didn’t have a Hides, with wonderful wooden cabinets with labelled drawers, and a money machine that whizzed over your head on a track all round the ceiling like a little runaway train, and then chugged back again with your change. It didn’t have Bentalls department store, with its fancy Tudor Rose restaurant where Ga and Gongon took me once for a special treat. Bentalls had a big book department, and toys, and Royal Doulton china ladies, and every season they had a special fashion show, with real mannequins swishing up and down the catwalk. The compère told you their names – Jean and Pam and Suzie and Kay – so you felt as if they were your friends. There was always one older, slightly stouter model, and she got called Mrs Harris. I played in my head that she looked after all the other girls and cooked them their supper at night.

We arrived very late for one fashion show and were stuck right at the back, where I couldn’t see a thing. Biddy urged me to burrow forwards, though I felt too shy to barge too far. Then suddenly I was lifted up onto a lovely older girl’s lap, where I sat entranced for the rest of the show. She was very fair and very thin, with a silver bangle that slid up and down her delicate arm. She let me try it on and everyone went ‘Aaah!’ I sensed from the
way
everyone was staring that she was special.

Biddy was pink with excitement when I was returned to her.

‘Do you know who that was? Petula Clark!’

She was a very famous child actress and singer. We listened to her in
Meet the Huggetts
on the radio. She went on to be an internationally acclaimed singer in her adult life. Every time I heard her sing ‘Downtown’ I’d bore my friends, saying, ‘Guess what! I’ve sat on Petula Clark’s lap!’

Which family in one of my books lives in a rented flat above a difficult complaining old lady called Mrs Luft?

 

It’s Marigold and Star and Dolphin in
The Illustrated Mum
.

‘What a racket!’ Mrs Luft was down at the front door sorting through the post. She seemed to be addressing an invisible audience. ‘Do they have to be so noisy on the stairs? Up and down, late at night, first thing in the morning. Some people have no consideration.’

Mrs Luft is a positive saint compared with Stanley! I’m sure she feels Marigold and her girls are the worst neighbours in the world. She’d probably be right too, but I have such a soft spot for Marigold and Star and especially Dolphin.

I got the idea for
The Illustrated Mum
in New York! I was there on holiday with my daughter
Emma
. We’d had a wonderful day going round the Metropolitan Museum of Art and lots of shops, and now we were sitting down with an ice cream in Central Park, wiggling our sore feet and watching the world go by.

We watched an attractive arty-looking woman wander past. She had the most amazing unusual decorative tattoos. Two little girls were skipping along beside her, in dressing-up clothes and grown-ups’ high-heeled silver sandals.

When they were out of earshot, Emma turned to me, smiling.

‘They look like characters in one of your books!’ she said.

‘Maybe I’ll write about them one day,’ I said – and I did.

10

Holidays

WE HAD A
proper week’s holiday by the seaside the first Lewisham summer. We went to Clacton, staying in a hotel called Waverley Hall. This had been carefully chosen (after much peering through brochures) because it wasn’t licensed to sell alcohol. My parents thought people who drank so much as a pre-dinner gin and tonic were rabid alcoholics. Waverley Hall boasted many alternative entertainments: a dance held twice a week, a beetle drive and a talent competition.

We have group photos of Waverley Hall guests for year after year of Clacton holidays. When I peer at those fifties families, all the women well permed and posing earnestly for the camera, the men grinning foolishly in their open-necked sports shirts, I feel the adult me would need several stiff gins to do the hokey cokey in their company – but when I was a child, Waverley Hall seemed as glamorous as Buckingham Palace and the evening’s entertainment almost overwhelmingly exciting.

Waverley Hall was managed by a charismatic man called Will Tull who struts through my
memory
singing, ‘Let me en-ter-
tain
you!’ Every evening there he was, encouraging this stiff congregation of bank clerks and shop managers and secretaries and teachers to run novelty races and sing ‘Ten Green Bottles’ and join him in his enthusiastic rendition of ‘The Music Man’.

‘
I am the Music Man and I can p-l-a-y
,’ he’d sing.

We’d all yell, ‘
What can you play?
’

He’d sing, ‘
I play the . . . trumpet
.’

Then he’d pretend, oompah-oompah-oompah-ing, and we’d all join in too – my mother who couldn’t sing a note in tune, my father who was cripplingly shy and self-conscious in public, both oompah-ing at the tops of their voices.