Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (35 page)

January 1940 was the coldest month Derbyshire experienced for a century; temperatures remained below freezing for weeks. The whole country was muffled by snow, besieged by ice and frozen pipes as much as wartime. And, just as it had during a similarly significant point in my mum's life, the River Thames froze over.

At Racecourse Road, an elderly neighbour died and on the day of his funeral, as was the custom then, Cora joined her parents and other neighbours in standing at their gates to watch the coffin leave for the church. The hearse passed by and, as they were turning away, Willie said, ‘I shall be next.' A moment's silence followed this announcement before Mrs Blake managed to quip about her own aching bones, to which Willie joked that, when her time came, the wash-tub and peggy-legs would have to be buried with her.

The January day that Willie died was bitterly cold; the roadside snow was thick and deep. It was 23 January, his forty-seventh birthday. It was also a Tuesday, Annie's washday. The kitchen and living room were a fug of blazing fire and steaming clothes, their heat all the more pronounced because of the desperate chill outside and the icy rooms upstairs.

Cora had a cold and was kept from school that afternoon. (She must have been unwell because Annie was a tyrant about illness. If you could stand up, you went off to do your duty.) Willie was in bed, where he remained all day, which was unusual. Upstairs, there was silence; downstairs, the afternoon passed in a blur of washday steam and shifting coals.

Darkness descended. The electric light was on, and my mum was sitting at the table, painting in a colouring book. In the way that memory fixes details, she remembers she was wearing a red Scotch kilt. Annie was preparing stew and dumplings, and when she went upstairs to see Willie, he said, ‘Leave Cora and look after me.' Another rare occurrence – he rarely asked Annie for attention. My mum knew that if her dad asked, he must need Annie's help.

Late evening came on quickly, the heat and the stuffiness of the laundry combining with the stuffiness inside Cora's head. She had fallen asleep on the sofa (still downstairs, still not put to bed) but woke to the sound of Willie moaning. The sitting room was full of people. Eva was there; and Jim and Edith, both standing with their coats on, Jim's hands shoved into his pockets; Bernard and Ida were also present, every one of them summoned to the house by neighbours.

The hall door opened; Willie's doctor appeared and, shortly after that, an ambulance. Willie was carried downstairs on a stretcher, waving his arms and shouting, ‘They've taken my arms.
Give me my arms.' That was the last time my mum saw him alive. He died shortly before midnight.

Heavy snow continued falling throughout that week; roads were piled high and crusted with it; temperatures remained exceedingly low. On the day of the funeral Cora came downstairs to be greeted by a strong, pleasant smell. Ahead of her, at the far side of the room and leaning against the wall, was the lid of Willie's coffin. It was a bitterly cold day but, of course, there was no heat in the room. The unusual heady scent issued from the coffin wood.

My mum has written an account of her father's death, and so the words that follow are hers: ‘I saw the coffin near the front window, and there inside was my darling Daddy. His body was covered in a gorgeous white satin shroud covered with beads or pearls. He looked so beautiful. I remember being struck by seeing him in something so regal.

‘My Auntie (Eva) was there and she said something, very gently, like, “Isn't he lovely. Look at his lovely hair,” and she put her fingers into the dark golden curls and carefully curled them round and
they just fell back on to his forehead. She said, “Give him a kiss. He would want you to give him a kiss.” I don't know if I was lifted up to kiss him but I kissed him on his lips – more than icy cold and I can still feel it. I have always been thankful that I saw him and that I kissed him. I knew his ending, and I knew then that he did not mean to leave me.'

Annie was getting dressed upstairs; by the early afternoon they were on their way to church. Jim and Edith were Mayor and Mayoress that year and so Annie and Cora travelled in the mayoral car, a Rolls-Royce, complete with uniformed chauffeur wearing a peak cap and gaiters. Willie would have been delighted. As the hearse passed through Whittington Moor, all the men on the street stood straighter and removed their hats.

Christ Church stands some distance from the road and its churchyard was deep in snow. The mayoral chauffeur carried my mum all the way down the sloping path and into the church. The coffin bearers were friends of Willie's: members of the Caged Bird Society and local shopkeepers, including the owner of ‘Herrings' chip shop and confectioner, Mr Wardle. It seems ironic that a man whose health was so poor was laid to rest by some of those who'd sold him fish and chips and fags, but that's how it was.

Two jet-black clips bit into the lapels of Annie's mourning jacket as she welcomed friends and family back to the house; Mrs Blake had stoked the fire while they were at the service. ‘I'll pay for this,' Jim said, gesturing towards the funeral tea, ‘and all the rest of it,' and my grandma was grateful, of course Annie was, though she wished Jim had waited until the two of them were alone before speaking.

The smell of the coffin wood permeated the house for several
days; my mum's grief lasted years. After her father's death, it seemed that even the electric light in the living room grew dimmer, although Annie insisted she had not changed the bulb. For Cora, nothing blazed fully without Willie.

‘M
AYOR
'
S
B
ROTHER
D
IES
,'
THE NEWSPAPER SAID
. O
NCE AGAIN
, Willie's fate made local news, and, again, on a sorry occasion. After his death, many things remained the same, except that nothing was ever the same afterwards. It was impossible for Cora not to see how much easier life was for Annie, but she had lost her Daddy and her Pal.

There were immediate practicalities to consider; their most pressing need was money. Annie's widow's pension was ten shillings a week, with an additional five allocated for Cora. (In two years' time, when my mum started senior school, half of those five shillings would be swallowed by the cost of school dinners.) Annie was not sorry to lose her Saturday-morning humiliation at the dole office, but the money had to be made up somehow: Providenting would not be enough.

The tailoring course Annie had taken during the last war now came into its own. She decided to set up as a home dressmaker; it was an advantage to be able to tell customers she was properly trained. At the time, Annie had cursed her pricked fingers and
the evenings she was required to stay behind to unpick a wavering seam. Now, she was grateful for such rigorous teaching.

Next, Annie bought a wireless, a purchase she'd resisted while Willie was alive, insisting they would always be fighting over the programme, him wanting to switch on for music and her the story, though Annie was as keen on the old songs as he was, and Willie liked a tale of derring-do. From now on, the house was rarely silent. Breakfast was accompanied by Dr Hill on our good friend the prune; evenings hummed with orchestral sounds and cliff-hanging serials. The handle of Annie's Singer kept time with
the different theme tunes. Detective stories provided the best accompaniment: the more involved the narrative, the faster her needle sped across the seams.

Rationing complicated life for everyone, and especially for the corner shop: so many rules and regulations and so much paperwork. Quite apart from the palaver of neighbours registering with the shop and presenting their ration books, was the need to cut out coupons and return them to the Food Office. Until the system changed, and ration books were stamped, one night a week became coupon night for Eva.

Gaps started appearing on the shelves – soap and soap powders, tea and pepper; what was not rationed was scarce. As before, butter and sugar were immediate casualties; cheese and preserves soon followed. There was universal umbrage at the prospect of dried eggs. Dick's hens laid sufficient for the family, plus some for the shop, but too few to supply the whole neighbourhood. Colour began to be stripped from labels and packaging; tins looked naked without their wrappers. The newly drab shelves gave the shop its own peculiar camouflage. Things looked even drearier with the blackout blind pulled down.

Anyone wanting groceries wrapped had to supply their own paper; Charles Parks brought the Sheffield
Star
to wrap his polony; waxy sweet cones were now a thing of the past. Some hardships meant less than others: the shortage of lavatory paper was not much remarked upon, newspaper having done that job for years; an initial meat ration of 1s 10d a week seemed generous to women who had trouble affording 1s 6d.

If rationing complicated trading, the blackout regularised shop hours: everything had to be achieved before darkness descended.

These days, the only neighbours calling in the evenings were those considered friends, but that did not stop the occasional bit of business. Zoe knocked on the back door, asking for butter, just the tiniest amount, the merest smidgen – ‘I can't do without my bit of butter, Mrs Nash.' Zoe was a rare recipient of under-the-counter goods. Aside from the difficulty of seeming to favour one customer over another, Betsy was risking her licence.

Eva joined the ARP and was issued with a regulation tin hat and whistle and a rattle with which to alert neighbours in the event of a gas attack. The first-aid classes she attended were enormous fun. She and her fellow wardens – middle-aged men, mostly – took turns to bandage one another and practise shepherding imaginary crowds. Eva tested Cora on the Bones of the Body and added making splints, plus a hazy knowledge of how to stem arterial blood, to her legendary successes with pulling teeth. But
she hoped someone else would be called upon to operate the telephone in a real emergency – unused to speaking on the phone, Eva regarded it as an alien instrument.

Night after night, the streets she patrolled were silent, bar muffled jocularity and curses come chucking-out time. She learned to read the outline of Brimington by moonlight, and came to know which pavements dipped or plunged without warning and were likely to pitch her into the gutter, but it was a tiring end to a day spent handling ration books, and shaking a bit on and then a bit off the weighing scales and parrying requests for just that little bit extra of whatever was currently in stock.

The only time she blew her whistle was during practice sessions in the church hall. ‘You go on home,' Eva's fellow wardens told her after several uneventful weeks. ‘We'll do your shift. It's not right for a woman to be walking about alone after dark.'

She accomplished one heroic deed, however. Coming along the canal path one afternoon in her usual breezy style, Eva saw Nora Parks some yards up ahead, flailing in the water. Unused since the 1900s, the canal was a murky broth: you'd sooner spit in it than swim there. But old Mrs Parks was not swimming: she had slipped on the grass and tumbled in. Her saturated clothes were already spreading like a black water lily, filling with water and beginning to drag her down. Eva leapt in and saved her. My great-aunt's first-aid training came in useful after all.