Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (37 page)

The RAD examiner lived in London and knew that bombers come back. Far better take her chances in the bombed-out capital than in the alien North of England. She was keen to take the students through their paces as quickly as was decently possible. While Annie and the other mothers attempted small talk in the changing room, Cora and her fellow examinees strove for perfect pirouettes. Outside, the city smoked.

The ballet examiner was correct. Three nights later, the bombers returned. Thousands of incendiaries raised fires across the city; factories and railway lines were bombed. More than 750 people were killed or listed as missing and around 500 seriously injured, while damage to property left 6,000 civilians homeless and
thousands unemployed. But a few days after the bombardment, the Sheffield
Star
went to press with a cartoon on its front cover and a one-word caption: ‘Defiant'.

By the time my mum was ten, dancing permeated everything. There were books to read, routines to devour on film, dances to create in the back garden. Council-house concrete made a perfect surface for tap dancing; lino provided a reasonable grip for ballet shoes. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were not the only ones who sang and danced as they walked along the street.

When war was declared, Cora's dancing certificates were put into the music case my grandma packed for emergencies. The case
held no mementoes, just certificates and vital documents, she told my mum, ‘insurance papers and things like that'. Whenever there was an air raid, one of them grabbed it en route to the shelter.

Alone in the house one afternoon (Annie was out Providenting, I expect), my mum decided to look at her dancing certificates. I can see her now, sitting on the bottom stair in the little vestibule with barely sufficient space for bags and coats; it was a good job they never used the front door (except for Willie's last journey). Cora started sifting through the documents, but, as she withdrew them, something unexpected caught her eye: a blue-grey file that begged to be opened.

This imposing file contains official-looking documents, typed questions and answers and, among the carefully printed lines, the word, ADOPTION. There is a girl's name too and a city: London. Cora feels hot and cold and absolutely nothing and everything at once but, this time, she is certain. This time, she knows she is the girl in this file.

The words bounce back at her. Their details are impossible to absorb; it is like trying to grasp something fastened under glass. She is herself and someone else as well, the girl she would have been had she not become Annie's daughter. On top of this shock, and just as intense, is the knowledge she is trespassing among Annie's private papers. She has no sense that these documents are also hers. Instead, my mum feels guilty. The papers belong to Annie and Annie does not want her to see them.

Cora loves her mam and knows Annie's love for her needs no formal documentation. She folds the right board back to the centre and the left board on top of that, and taking one final look at the stiff blue-grey cover, restores the file to the music case. Annie does not want her to know she is adopted and so Cora decides to
pretend that she does not: ‘Annie wanted me to belong entirely to her. I wanted to belong to Annie. I felt very secure and happy with Annie, although I still very much missed Willie. But Annie was my mother and she was also my friend. The present was my life and I'd get on with it. I also knew that unless Annie told me all she knew, there was no way of finding out.'

I
N THE EARLY
1940
S MY MUM WAS ALLOWED TO WALK
unaccompanied from Racecourse Road to Wheeldon Mill. She had seen The Wizard of Oz and, during summer months, often walked to her grandma's in the gingham ‘Dorothy' dress Annie made for her. The yellow-brick road Cora followed held its own perils in the form of two major junctions. The easiest place to cross Sheffield Road was by the council-cut patch of grass which afforded the clearest view. Then began the long walk up the Coal Road, past the allotments spiked with raspberry canes and pea sticks, and taking especial care at the busy spot where her grandad came to grief in the accident that partially crippled him.

The jam factory announced its presence with its usual cloying sweetness before Cora ducked under the railway bridge, the first of three, shouting loud enough to startle the echo before it could surprise her. Out once more into the air again, past the stubby row of houses near the little shop whose exterior wall shone with a sheet of dark blue tin advertising Five Boys' chocolate; trailing her palm along the dusty hawthorn bushes that lined this part of
the route, pausing to say hello to Eva's friend Mrs Healey, if she happened to be in her front garden. The houses on the left side of the street petered out here. This was the scrag end of town, with more scrubland than houses, but that did not worry Cora. She had no ruby slippers to protect her, but Betsy and Toto were waiting up ahead.

The ground beyond the second railway bridge was sharp with pottery breakages. This was one of the grey tips (shord rucks) where Pearson's Pottery dumped its apologies and failures. There was often an adult scavenging for something: a pie dish in one piece, ideally, one not so cracked as you'd notice once it was filled with stew, or whose clay protuberances would disappear beneath a pie crust. There were clay moulds, too, bulky ornaments kids presented to their mothers who thanked them for these offerings and eventually shoved them in the bin. For a child, ‘pickin on't tip' offered contemplative pleasures, an urban equivalent of shell seeking. There were never any glorious discoveries, however. Pearson's Pottery manufactured functional stoneware in brown, khaki, beige. Still, its lumps of clay were good for chalking on walls and pavements, as some at the Mill knew to their cost.

Just past Pottery Lane was the house built by George Harding, no longer a terrifying figure in a battered hat, but a friendly milk-man, who nearly always had a cheery message for Betsy and Eva. Just beyond the third and final railway bridge, near some damp, spare ground, a young woman had set up camp in a gypsy wagon. Though she used the corner shop occasionally, she was not one of the gypsies Cora knew. She thought her brave, living alone on this waste ground, an odd place for a woman by herself. On the opposite side of the road, the low baby wall, so-called because toddlers liked to run along it holding an adult's hand, revealed
how easily you could reach the River Rother. Too easily: this was where one of my mum's Wheeldon Mill playmates drowned.

She is not far from the corner shop. Were it not for the rising gradient and the trees, its doorway would be visible already. Over the little railway bridge and, finally, the bridge across the canal. Betsy is looking through the sweet window. She knows to expect Cora, and waves.

George wrote to Annie. He was now a Major passing through Chesterfield. Could he call and see her?

Annie had had to pinch herself the last time she saw George. It was shortly before the war, and she and Cora and Eva were at the Lyceum, when the programme switched to the news, and there he was. Up on the screen, a participant in the unfolding drama: the will we/won't we question that hung over everyone in the late 1930s. While a plummy voice spoke in modulated tones of ongoing efforts, the grave political situation, and so on, there was George, in a pinstriped suit and bowler, being handed papers by another pinstriped suit, and preparing to leave for France

‘Well I never,' Annie said, when she finally found her voice. ‘I wondered where that fellow had got to.' The Twentieth Century Fox searchlight raked the screen and the theme music announced the main feature, but Annie remained transfixed by the thought of George and his mysterious hush-hush role. Not everything he did could be predicted.

George said nothing of his pinstriped moment when he reached Racecourse Road, and the war meant Annie could not enquire. And, anyway, there was plenty to distract them. This was his first visit to the house. George could not call while Willie was alive. I wonder what he and Annie thought when she opened the back
door to greet him? But theirs was not an evening
à deux
. Cora and Eva accompanied them to the cinema.

There was nothing like walking out with a Major. Their progress was continually interrupted by sharp salutes. This was no trip to the local Lyceum, with commissionaire Bobby Teasle issuing commands on where they all should sit, but a bus ride into town and the Chesterfield Regal. There was no munching on a wartime carrot either (ice creams being unattainable), but an extremely rare treat, also courtesy of George – a large box of Black Magic chocolates, with a scarlet tassel dangling from its lid.

They saw
Dark Victory
and watched Bette Davies smoulder and suffer. ‘There's been no one but you,' she said, a sentiment surely not lost on George. But this was one evening only and a curfewed evening, at that. No sooner had he escorted them all back to Race-course Road (more salutes on the return journey), than it was time for their farewells. George said goodnight at the gate. Brass buttons, officer's khaki, shiny leather; Annie watched him retrace his steps.

George's story did not conclude with him striding into the sunset, followed by crisp salutes. Many years later, after his wife's death, that honourable man wrote to my grandma. But they were both in their eighties and the prospect of meeting too daunting for Annie. It was all too late. My grandma never saw George again.

Once my mum was at senior school, Annie was slightly less concerned about leaving her alone for an hour while she finished Providenting. The key was slipped beneath the push-pull mower in the lavatory; a sharp twist of the knob opened the back door, and into the kitchen with its invariably dripping tap. There was always a fire – Annie returned mid-afternoon to stoke it, all it
needed was a little encouragement from the poker – but even a fire could not cheer the empty house. There were no songs, no laughter, no teasing questions about Cora's day. There was no whistling, either. When Cora was alone, the house was a small tight capsule of grief and silence.

It broke, of course, the minute Annie came bustling through the door, carrying the night air with her; ‘Put the kettle on, while I start tea. Guess who I've just seen?'; fishing for her apron in the kitchen drawer while Cora laid the table. They were companions as well as mother and daughter.

Much would have been different had my mum not been an only child. When she was small, Cora longed for a sister and used to tell new friends she'd once had a sister who died. However, unlike most only children, she was not often by herself. When at Race-course Road, she was usually with the Blakes, and even bathed there. Mrs Blake's brother was a miner and assisted her with coal, some of which she passed on to Annie. But it took a lot of coal to heat water for a bath and so sometimes Cora bathed next door, despite Mrs Blake having her own large family; their neighbour constantly helped Annie and Cora. Their kitchen windows faced each other. Each night, just before the curtains were closed, the children of each household stood in pyjamas and waved to one another, like characters in a storybook.

Cora had now progressed to the Iliffe School of Dancing. (Miss Mason had married and taken her last curtain call.) My mum's first classes with her new teacher took place on the sprung maple floor of the Odeon ballroom. She felt she was dancing on Broadway.

Marjorie Iliffe could not have been more different from Joan
Mason. Her clothes were plain, verging on drab; there was nothing fashionable about her appearance. To see Miss Iliffe in the street, you would think her anything but a dancer, but she had a string of letters after her name and her abilities as a teacher more than made up for any lack of flamboyance. Hers was a larger, more disciplined school; Miss Iliffe's girls wore uniform, sleeveless tabards (more cutting out of blackout cloth and sewing for Annie). Marjorie Iliffe inspired tremendous loyalty.

All dancing schools put on shows, but the demand was even greater during wartime. Willing mothers ran up stage clothes out of yards of American cloth for troupes rehearsed as rigorously as
soldiers on manoeuvres, and begged and borrowed props wherever they could (in Joan Mason's days, the corner shop pitched in with clay pipes and marshmallow ‘ice cream' cornets).