Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (17 page)

My great-grandfather's big-house jaunts continued well into my mother's childhood (death duties carried on climbing and, by 1934, had reached 50 per cent). At one such sale, he found a musical box, a relic of some child's nursery, with a sentimental watercolour decorating its lid and a halting rendition of ‘Pussy
Cat, Pussy Cat…' in its windings. From then on, it played its plaintive tune for my mum and, later, me.

Country-house sales were as much a sign of the times as the advertise ments being produced for products sold by the corner shop – ‘A word to the wise coquette and cocktail drinker: drink Enos Fruit Salts'; ‘Icilma Face Cream (essential for the female pillion rider)' – and the felt cloche hats, like tight spring buds, that were beginning to decorate Whit Walks. With the end of the war and, gradually, rationing, the new decade offered a sense of possibility even industrial unrest could not diminish. But the past refused to be erased entirely. Jimmy Frith still trembled with shell-shock and was jolted by sudden bangs; a motorcycle or car backfiring were enough to set him off, while Ethel's brother, Clem, was left literally propping up his jaw. Each day was a reminder of the injuries you could sustain and have to live with, though God knows how some people did. Not everyone succeeded: one Staveley man killed
his mother and injured his brother and wife, before turning his war-issue gun on himself. Newspaper reports like this one were grist to the 1920s, when nearly every out-of-work serviceman had a row of medals on his chest and every door-to-door salesman with a suitcase full of brushes seemed to be missing a limb.

When Willie finally returned, in the early 1920s, he and Annie took themselves off to Sheffield, where Willie found himself a job
in a city bakery. It was the furthest my grandma had been from Chesterfield and the longest time she had spent away from the family, but it gave her and Willie the chance to get to know one another again, and less self-consciously than if they'd remained at the shop. Perhaps this was the reason Willie did not immediately start working again for his brother Jim. Maybe he and Annie wanted some time to themselves.

Willie had gone off to war as C. W. Thompson. He had too much gumption (and too long a memory of schoolyard ribbing) to enter the army with his correct initials. While in Sheffield, he was William C. Thompson and sometimes reverted to plain W.C. He and Annie had two or three addresses during their short stay; each new street came with a small adjustment to his name. Willie was still working out who he wanted to be.

That first summer was as hot as Hades. A home from home, after the Middle East, someone said. All people wanted to hear from Willie were exotic details like those described on the bangle he'd brought back for Annie: a Mesopotamian circle of elephants, crocodiles and palm trees.

Though he and Annie had been married six years, they'd spent so much time apart and in such different circumstances, they might as well have been married six weeks. They were still tentative with one another, circling each other, discovering themselves all over again. Willie's corn-coloured curls were just as angelic as they'd always been and his eyes just as blue, but his face looked different somehow, though no less handsome for that. Annie liked to watch him smoke. She was fascinated by Willie's hands and the long, fine fingers he kept spotlessly clean because of the bakery. She loved the way he smoked, seeming to inhale a sense of himself with each fresh drag of tobacco.

They were only perching in Sheffield, marking time in rented rooms. They knew they'd be back in Chesterfield before long and so did not try to put down roots. The best thing about the city was its theatres: Variety shows at the Empire, and plays and musicals at the Lyceum, where they saw
The Maid of the Mountains
twice in one week so that Willie could learn the best songs. Years before, he had copied his favourite lyrics into an exercise book; he was too old for that lark now, but he still wanted to sing all the tunes. They were frequent visitors to the Star Picture House on Ecclesall Road where they saw ‘the Kid' lean against street corners in his oversize cap and trews and held their breath as Pearl White managed to free herself from the railway line as an express train hurtled towards her.

Sometimes, at a loose end on a weekday afternoon – my grandma knew no one else in Sheffield and couldn't teach with the marriage bar resurrected – Annie took herself back to the Picture House and slipped into a seat in the semi-darkness. All around her, women like Annie were sitting in their own private worlds being charmed by Ramon Navarro or appalled when Lillian Gish was cast into the snow, a fallen woman. Annie saw
The Kid
a second time and marvelled at Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan all over again, but her heart snagged on the mother's note: ‘please love and care for this orphan child.'

Coming out of the cinema with Willie one evening, Annie had her arm through his and was thinking how good it was to have him home, and to be a married woman out with her husband. They paused at the window of a department store and joined another young couple peering at the display. Absorbed by the china tea sets, Annie followed the curve of the glass round the corner of the street until tea sets gave way to jardinières, but when
she turned to ask Willie his opinion, he'd disappeared. He was already halfway up the street, looking for all the world as if he were out by himself, with no one else's views to consider. Feeling awkward and a bit of a fool at being left stranded like that, and in front of the other couple, Annie fussed with her coat and hurried to catch him up. She was perfectly capable of walking by herself or of running after Willie, but that was not how things were done. Not back then. It was one of those incidents that should have been entirely insignificant but which, in time, came to suggest something else.

There were jobs for each of them on their return to Chesterfield. Willie went back to Jim's bakery and Annie – the young woman who was never meant to stand behind a counter – was to manage Jim's cake shop on Whittington Moor, an arrangement which would finally mean a proper beginning to their married life: their jobs came with the house above the shop. Jim no longer lived on the doorstep, but in a seventeenth-century house, Hill House (Hell House, he called it affectionately), a mile or so away.

Living above the cake shop meant a downstairs arrangement of shop front, living room and scullery, plus two bedrooms upstairs. The front bedroom was designated for Willie's small but growing collection of budgerigars and canaries, their acid yellows, sky blues and apple greens contributing a vibrant note to the street. People out for a Sunday stroll were sometimes startled by the unexpected cadences of birdsong. The birds competed with the gramophone: Willie, his caged birds and Ivor Novello serenading sunny afternoons.

The front room was the birds' domain because my grandma preferred the back bedroom, which was quieter and a greater
distance from the road, with its six-day rattle and hum of trolley buses, wagons, carts and drays heading uphill to the Whittington collieries, trundling west towards the Sheepbridge Works, or to and from Chesterfield town centre; and the brewery men endlessly rolling barrels of beer into the Sir Colin Campbell and the Travellers' Rest across the road. And, perhaps, by occupying the smaller bedroom, Annie was less likely to think of the child who might have slept there.

Willie liked his own colourful plumage – a gold tiepin with a ruby eye for best-dress occasions, the fob on his gold watch chain polished to a sheen his old colour sergeant would be proud of. He had a gold tooth, too, visible when he threw back his head for the final bars of ‘The Desert Song'. For Christmas and birthdays, Annie contributed to the gleam, dipping into her savings to buy Willie cufflinks with their own ruby specks and a gold case that gave a satisfying retort when tamped with a cigarette: Woodbines on regular workdays, Black Cats when Willie was feeling flush. They made a dapper pair in the 1920s: Annie in tam-o'-shanter secured with a large globe pin, Willie sporting a ribboned boater.

J. W. Thompson's ‘Hygienic' Bakery was now well established. Everything at the bakehouse was spotless – the large pine table at which the two brothers worked was scrubbed until the grain showed almost as white as their uniforms. Willie was as meticulous with his bakery whites as with his Sunday clothes and neatly manicured hands. The cleanliness of the operation was one of the boasts of the business.

Now that he was back at the table where he'd learned his trade, Willie was able to reprise old favourites and secure further medals
with competition loaves and cakes with elaborate icing. Most days, however, required the usual teatime fare: Lady cake, raspberry buns, Bakewell tarts, Vienna bread, slab cake, gridle scones, Grantham gingerbread, and so on, a surprisingly large repertoire for a small provincial firm. They baked rock cakes by the thousand and everything from penny tarts and a ‘cheap sandwich' (a sponge cake with one layer of jam), to cherry Genoas priced two shillings. Jim was extremely pleased with the way things were going. There was talk of Willie becoming a partner in the firm.

Willie noted all ingredients in his bakery book, a professional tool, a list of proportions only. There are no instructions to encourage the uninitiated to beat or knead or sieve. Sometimes, in the evenings, Wilie baked at home and taught Annie some of the tricks of his trade, such as how to make vanilla slices with melting flaky pastry and perfect crème anglaise, and how to bake the
lightest savoury tarts. Occasionally, he made sweets, borrowing recipes for coconut pyramids and marzipan fruits from Annie's
Woman's Weekly
. Anyone calling at the end of a summer's day might find them relaxing in the yard, sweet smells emerging from the house, Willie changed out of his bakery whites and smoking a cigarette, Annie relaxing in a wicker chair, her legs stretched before her in stockings as pale as the water icing Willie drizzled across his fairy cakes.

I
N
1922, E
VA TURNED TWENTY-ONE
. T
HOUGH NOT CONSIDERED
pretty, she had expressive brown eyes, thick dark hair twisted into the nape of her neck and lips always twitching to smile. There was a natural mischievousness about her. Even some solemn occasions would find Eva suppressing laughter. One of her straight looks could puncture any trumped-up solemnity or inflated ego.

From her earliest days behind the counter, Eva wrote all the orders for the shop, both for customers and their own deliveries. For all Betsy's ready reckoning and organisational skills, it was impossible to run a shop without signatures. Dick still signed all legal documents but Eva working with Betsy simplified matters. In her hands, writing was much more than a necessary skill. Grocery lists acquired attractive embellishments; Eva's capital letters were a calligrapher's delight. She made great efforts with notices for the windows – Lux Soap 3d, Colman's Starch 1d – and wrote Betsy's signature on a slip of card in case Betsy needed to sign for something while Eva was away from the shop. My great-grandma kept the template in her apron pocket (and, later, her
spectacle case). The card was renewed from time to time, but the writing never changed: always the same distinctive flourishes.