Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (23 page)

When they left Tower Cressy that afternoon, Annie was clutching an eight-month-old baby wrapped in a shawl, and Willie, a set of instructions, details of the baby's feed. Until I saw that simple handwritten sheet, I had no idea a list could make your heart ache.

M
Y MOTHER WAS BATHED IN A BLUE ENAMEL BATH THE
chemist's son had outgrown, but her rattle was brand-new and at last Annie could stitch daisies on to the bodice of a dress: eight ivory-coloured threads radiating from each silk knot.

On fine days, Cora's pram stood in the old bakehouse yard, its front wheels and hood visible beyond the door leading into the cake shop. ‘If you'll excuse me a moment,' Annie tells her customers, the minute Cora cries, ‘I must just attend to my baby.' She has waited thirteen and a half years to say those words.

One day she was Mrs Thompson, with no children; the next she was a mother pushing a pram. There was little chance of Annie pretending to be Cora's birth mother to her near neighbours, though stranger things happened all the time. My family all knew women who introduced new babies, although their daughters had been the ones gaining weight. Mystery babies were not unusual. People shrugged their shoulders and got on with their own lives.

Everyone at the Mill was delighted and when they'd finished holding Cora aloft for the camera and posterity, and toasting her
future in glasses of warm beer, Dick chucked the little duckie under her chin and Eva blew her enormous bubbles that quivered before they burst and disappeared.

On Sunday mornings, Annie pushed the pram up to Wheel-don Mill as proudly as Boadicea driving her chariot. Long after Cora was too old for her pram, the pram accompanied them, enabling Annie to wheel her back at night. It was a considerable walk for a woman with a baby, and parts of it quite deserted after ten, but that didn't trouble Annie. She passed the time by describing the stars to her daughter: Orion's Belt, the Plough, Cassiopeia.

Eva jiggled Cora on her knee and did not mind when she bit into her raspberry-coloured beads when teething. She even forgave Cora the loss of her front teeth. It was an accident, of course, the act of a baby flinging out an arm while holding a glass feeding bottle, but the bottle caught Eva squarely on the mouth and broke her teeth. ‘Those two have got to come out,' the dentist said (no string and door slamming for Eva), ‘so why not remove the lot of them, and save yourself trouble and expense later?'

People did that all the time; some poor devils had the cost of the extraction presented as a birthday gift. In the days before complex dentistry, replacing your own teeth with dentures was thought to be doing yourself a favour. So Eva did the sensible thing. She spent a hideous morning at the dentist and returned home with a vastly swollen face and a jaw that felt it had gone ten rounds in a boxing ring. Her own teeth were exchanged for a set of gleaming ceramic ‘pots' which loomed in her mouth, overcrowding it. She persevered for a while and each set of dentures was an improvement on the last, but Eva hated the wretched things and hardly wore them.

She managed the adjustment remarkably quickly and her mouth did not turn down in a permanent sag. The oddities became the occasions Eva wore her teeth, not the days she ignored them. Though she grieved for their loss, there was nothing she could do. Teeth were one of the things Eva learned to go without.

My mum's adoption was formalised in 1931. The court officials told Annie and Willie she was the first child to be legally adopted in Chesterfield since the Adoption Act had come into force in 1927. The officials offered their warm congratulations and my grandma's answering smile burnished that January day. Annie and Willie were thrilled and proud, and all those others words used to describe new parents that don't come close to conveying the immensity of
their feelings, but pride notwithstanding, the adoption itself was not something they intended to dwell on. They were a family now and that was all that mattered. It was nobody's business but theirs.

Annie was now the mother she had always hoped to be, but mothering at thirty-seven (which was older then, than now) came as a considerable shock. In the inter-war years, childcare guru Truby King reigned supreme in instructing middle-class mothers how to care for their babies. Tower Cressy prescribed the four-hourly feeds that were fashionable then but, unlike other Truby King novitiates, Annie had no nursemaid or nanny. She also had a cake shop to run. Childcare gurus and middle-class adoption associations did not consider the practicalities of life for a working mother. In the one photograph that exists of my grandma with her young baby, she looks completely done in.

Half-day closing was perfect for catching the latest release at the
Lyceum or catching up with sleep – Annie and Cora, both. My mum slept through umpteen films cuddled close to Annie and, until an usherette complained, amused herself as a toddler by pounding up and down the aisle while Annie sat engrossed in the main feature.

Letting Cora run wild at the cinema was all very well, but Annie needed help while she was occupied with the cake shop, and made an arrangement with a neighbour whose sixteen-year-old daughter needed work. Cora loved Nancy or, Nanny, as she called her – not to glorify her role, but because the word was easier to pronounce. On fine days, they played together in the old bake-house yard or Nancy took Cora along Whittington Moor in her pushchair, running errands for Annie and examining the shop windows along the way: Miss Greaves' dress shop, which was thought to be a cut above; milliner Miss Crookes', where Betsy and Eva bought their hats (Betsy's a sober straw, Eva's an elaborate cloche with a snazzy brim). If Cora and Nancy called at the butcher's, he broke into song to entertain them. But a verse of ‘Wheezy Anna' did not encourage Cora to eat the limp rabbits hanging by their feet, nor his pink chops and chitlings. Vans trundled past, including that for Thompson's Bakery, with Uncle Bernard at the wheel. If he saw Cora, Bernard gave a double toot, and if his wife Ida was dressing a mannequin in one of the windows of Derbyshire's outfitters across the way, she came to the door to say hello. There was a lot happening in this busy street, but there was one golden rule: ‘Do not step off the pavement.'

Indoors, Cora and Nancy practised telling the time with a large cardboard clock with yellow hands. When the shortest hand reached one, Annie shut the cake shop for an hour; when the arrow approached five, Willie was due back from the bakery.

Cora's face was full of smiles for her daddy and his Box Brownie – Cora in the yard, Cora astride a toy horse; Willie did not need a special occasion to snap his daughter. He sang her ‘Little Pal' – she is his pal, he tells her, the song was meant for her – and pulled her on to his lap for ‘Sonny Boy'. Her birthdays were celebrated with cakes demonstrating every peak and swirl of piping Willie could produce, and perfected with a kiss of cochineal.

One of my mum's earliest memories of her grandma's shop is of sitting on the doorstep with Ethel's nephew, Georgie Stokes. They're both sucking dummies and, from time to time, Georgie slugs cold tea from a medicine bottle equipped with a teat. There
is not much to see at this level except shoes, more shoes and hemlines, as customers swerve to avoid them on entering and leaving the shop. Some women stoop to say hello, but mostly she and Georgie are ignored.

Although this is the doorway through which Cora passes when she visits her grandparents and aunt, the shop itself is more or less a blur at first, a mere corridor through to the back. It is the house and the people inside who matter. Her tall grandma with her big strong hands who washes Cora's hair and won't let her venture far until it's dry, lest she catch her death; her white-haired grandad with a twinkle in his eye, who can nearly always find a marble or a toffee in his pocket and is fond of pulling everyone's leg. (‘Oh you naughty man,' says Eva, smiling and rolling her eyes.) Sometimes, Dick seems no more than a big boy himself, a playmate and prankster for Cora, but at other times he gentles the horses in the publican's field and comforts Cora when she cries at the sound of mussels squealing when they're boiled in a pan for his tea. And, of course, there is Eva, her fun-loving aunt, who serves in the shop, but is always ready to entertain her niece.

On sunny Sunday afternoons Eva and Annie crown Cora with daisy chains while Dick checks the wire on the hen houses. The entrance to the wood now has elaborate steps fashioned from living tree roots, a sturdy gate and a hawthorn hedge near the path. Teddy, the current terrier, races round and round, chasing his shadow and his tail, but the hens are used to his daft antics by now and ignore him. Dick shows Cora how to look for eggs in the long grass and which particular spots the hens favour, and at the end of their treasure hunt, laughs instead of being cross when she drops the eggs into his bucket and breaks them.

Dick has saplings to tend, green shoots to protect from rabbits
and a battle to wage against the bindweed that, given half a chance, would choke the hedgerows and the dog roses and honeysuckle climbing through them. While Dick smokes his afternoon pipe, Eva throws sticks for Teddy and Annie stretches out on the grass. At moments likes these, the wood is a quiet, secret place. Station Road is concealed by trees and all factory whistles and colliery hooters are silent. A cerulean sky frames the Crooked Spire in the distance. This family is home and complete; three generations woven together by their willingness to love and trust strangers.

My mum had not entirely forgotten her earlier life. She burst into tears whenever George Harding delivered milk to her grandma's shop. He did not even have time to unload his churns from the dray; Cora started crying as soon as she saw him. It was not kindly George who frightened her, but his misshapen hat that seemed to sprout tweed at odd angles. Other men round about wore flat caps, and Willie and his brothers, trilbys; no one else wore a hat like George Harding's, but the nurses at Tower Cressy had elaborate headdresses fashioned with stiff bows and my mum's distress was ascribed to her memory of these. Seven months old and suddenly alone; no familiar face or voice nearby, no matter how hard you seek it. Instead, women in peculiar hats that overwhelm their features are peering into your cot.

In the early 1930s, Billy Thompson, Jim's eldest son, joined the bakery. Baking was not Billy's passion, but he gave it a try for a couple of years and it was during this period that Willie realised his mistake. He had misunderstood his brother's plans for the firm. His hopes for the business, his name on the deeds: the whole thing was the worst possible mix-up. The partnership was intended
for young Billy Thompson, Jim's son, not Billy Thompson, Jim's brother (Willie was always ‘Billy' to his brothers and friends). Young Billy who cared little for the bakery and was still a child when Willie started winning bakery medals. But, of course, Jim wanted to share the business with his firstborn son. How had things become so back-to-front? How could he have been so foolish?