Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (38 page)

Dancing on stage was a tremendous thrill, but my mum also organised her own shows, each one a little more ambitious than the last. Annie's kitchen provided rehearsal space, Grace Blake and Janey Davis perching on the mangle while Janey's sister Mabel practised her solo. Local children paid a ha'penny to watch the result. Concerts performed with friends from the dancing school enjoyed a little more finesse and commanded a higher ticket price. For a penny, neighbours saw Cora and Daphne Edwards dance in Marlene Hill's backyard, dressed in the outfits they'd worn on stage.

‘I want 'er,' one hulking lad shouted from the audience, pointing at Cora, ‘Er in t'middle, 'er in t' pink,' and started clambering over the other kids to reach her. The dancers paused mid-step but Reg was evidently in earnest. Daphne and Cora flung their clothes into their suitcase and ran, with Reg and a group of younger boys in pursuit. They were saved by hopping on to the Whittington Moor bus.

The girls were given the opportunity to perform at a bigger venue the next time round, and raised ten shillings for Mrs Churchill's fund by dancing in the backyard of the Railway Inn. Clementine Churchill wrote to thank Cora and her friends for assisting ‘the Brave Russians in their terrible struggle' (a steno-graphed letter, but a signed letter nonetheless). There were larger, formal fund-raisers too, via the Iliffe School of Dancing. The war enabled Miss Iliffe's pupils to dance on every stage in Chesterfield – the Regal, the Odeon, the Victoria, the Corporation Theatre, Hippodrome, Lyceum and Market Hall – the last under the auspices of white-haired ‘Auntie Minnie' who organised shows for
the servicemen stationed nearby. After the dancers had taken their bows, hundreds of male voices raised the rafters and the hairs on the back of the neck with ‘Let the Great Big World Keep Turning'.

The best shows, though, were the ones at the Regal which ran for several nights, replacing the B-movie and preceding the main feature: a hour or so of ballet, high kicks and acrobatic poses, and then
Lassie Come Home
. Some rehearsals began after the cinema closed for the evening. It was nearing midnight by the time the dancers reached their homes; another long walk for Annie and Cora through Chesterfield's empty streets. Almost everyone else was a-bed, but all around them blazed the bright, bright light of double summertime.

Nightly shows, greasepaint; stage lights, sequins and taffeta: it was just like being a real dancer, especially when Warner Brothers sent the Regal a congratulatory telegram – ‘Chesterfield should be proud of its amateur talent' – when Miss Iliffe's school staged its own performance of
Hollywood Canteen
. But the best write-up belonged to a different show altogether and came courtesy of the
Derbyshire Times
:

‘Visitors to Chesterfield on Saturday afternoon would view with some amazement the monster queues outside the Regal Cinema. That for the better-class seats stretched from the entrance, down Cavendish Street, round the corner into Saltergate, and up as far as Elder Way. The queue for the cheaper seats was as long. They waited from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., not to see Clark Gable, Garbo,
Gone with the Wind
or
Mrs. Miniver
, but the purely local talent appearing in the
Salute the Soldier
stage show.'

They were waiting to see my mum – and all the other dancers who performed that night in 1944. Annie and Eva were among them, settling into their gold plush seats with a cone of caramels
between them. Dick and Betsy were too elderly to attend, but would hear all about it later, back at the shop. And here comes Cora now, tap dancing across the stage in a whirl of pendulum wings and triple-time-steps, arms outstretched and smiling, cuffing the boards with her silver shoes.

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF
21 A
UGUST
1944,
A DOODLEBUG HIT
Tower Cressy. Glass shattered in the windows of its capacious nurseries; flames shimmied up the metal fretwork of the NCAA's sun balconies. Those extravagant towers were reduced to desiccated dust. A second blast underlined the dereliction one week later. On 27 August, shortly after 7 a.m., smoke rose once again from Tower Cressy.

The hostel was unoccupied at the time. The NCAA's Sloane Square offices remained open throughout the war, but the Association moved to Wokingham for the duration and was without a children's hostel for some years (its Sydenham branch being commandeered by the fire department).

I think of how easily paper catches fire, and see flames lick the edges of pages containing irreplaceable details: the stories of all those women who gave up their babies for adoption, my mum's birth mother included. But this may be pure fantasy. My mother was told that the NCAA hostel was bombed during the war, the implication being that papers were destroyed along with it, but this
was probably an assumption on someone's part, many years after the event. You do not plan to evacuate a building and leave all paperwork behind. Whatever the facts of the matter, details of my mum's brief sojourn with the NCAA no longer exist.

Did fire obliterate my grandma's blue-grey file too? I can't think how else she destroyed it; my mum never saw it again. Thankfully, she saved the Tower Cressy brochure. My mum came upon it shortly before Annie's death, and felt it should come into her keeping. I don't know if Annie had intended to pass it on, but she was proud of ‘the posh adoption' home my mum came from. Even when Cora was small – and knew nothing of her adoption – Annie entertained her by singing, ‘I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls,' and hinted of her mysterious beginnings. (Back to those heady thoughts of Princess Alice.) ‘I think you were born in marble halls,' Annie used to tell her, though my mum took this to be one of the tall stories of childhood. My grandma kept Cora's Adoption Order, but that blue-grey file was different, I suspect, because it represented my mum's life prior to Annie and Willie. In destroying those papers, however, my grandma was merely doing what adoptive parents were actively encouraged to do in those days hemmed in by secrecy and taboo – completely eradicate the past.

My mum was sixteen when Annie finally told her she was adopted. A friend (having no idea that two little girls had already spilled the beans), advised her to do so before someone else did. Annie said relatively little, spoke of the adoption home, ‘the grandma' who was present in court, and of ‘the girl' – a nameless ‘girl' – it was made clear that my mum's birth mother was some mere chit of a lass. My grandma clearly did not want Cora to have much information. And, for an extremely long time, that is how things remained.

*

As the 1940s continued, there was more greasepaint and further dancing exams for Cora, and she even contemplated life on stage – if Ruby Keeler could tap dance her way out of the chorus line in
42nd Street
, then why not Cora too?
Rhapsody in Blue
,
Dancing Highlights
,
Night and Day
… the list of local shows continued. One year, she was a pearly queen. (Picture all the mother-of-pearl buttons passed on to me when that particular dance dress expired.)

Annie continued to encourage her, but she wanted Cora to have skills to fall back on and to delay her decision for twelve months, and so Cora exchanged her button-box typewriter for the real thing and got to grips with technical college and shorthand. A year later, she was introduced to and fell in love with office life. She had also learned, via a dancing friend, that the bright lights involved dingy digs and a rumbling stomach. She continued dancing, however, and, generously, was allowed days off for exams, but regular hours claimed Cora: from office girl to junior typist, to assistant secretary to a boss who, though not quite as legendary a figure as Charles Paxton Markham, had a reputation for hard talking nonetheless.

On her very first day in the secretarial department (£72 a year), Cora typed a letter to her granddad. Though frail by then, Dick still wanted to hear all about his ‘little duckie' and the details of her job. Collecting and delivering post, running errands; Gestetnering, typing and dictation; making tea and distributing the weekly office cakes (dry trifle-sponge-fingers seemed manna from heaven with post-war austerity hitting hard) – initially, Cora's tasks were none too demanding. Her supervisor enjoyed poetry and promoted knitting and sing-songs; when work was slack, the typists took up their needles: Knit one, purl one. Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.

In 1951, at the age of eighty-nine, Dick died. He had sold his precious wood a year earlier, thinking it time a younger man had grass to keep down and hazel to twist into fencing. The Wheeldon Mill Plantation was bought by Albert Mowbray who ran the greyhound track established in the area in the late 1930s. Mowbray lived in Thompson Street, the street named after Jim (and full of his houses). In provincial towns, connections are endless.

Dick took to his bed a few days before his death. Usually, when Dick suspected he was developing a touch of the tickatalaroo – my great-grandfather's name for any kind of 'flu or fever – he'd send Eva to the Great Central Hotel for a bottle of whisky and disappear upstairs. By the time he reappeared, the bottle would be empty and his fever fled. But, this time, it was different. Dick felt unwell, developed pneumonia and was dead within three days.

‘Mam won't last without him,' Annie said. Eva and Cora were disbelieving, but Annie's assessment was correct. After Dick's death, Betsy took to sitting in his chair, something she'd never done before and, though strong, and in good health for someone in her late eighties, seemed to diminish by the week. She died
three months later. (A relative insisted she had known there'd be a death: that morning, her tulips had drooped.)

My grandma and great-aunt asked two near neighbours they'd known for many years if they would prepare Betsy's body for burial; this was not a task they could face (or would have expected to perform) themselves. They would be glad to help, the women said.

When Annie and Eva came back upstairs, they saw their mother's body washed and laid out neatly on the bed, but her wedding ring was missing. It had gone. They guessed straightaway who had removed it, but the last thing they wanted at this grief-stricken time was a confrontation with a neighbour. They visited one of the women and explained the situation, asking if she'd call on the other and say the ring was lost, and would she please help them find it. Then the four of them went back upstairs and made a great to-do of shaking out the sheets and – would you credit it? – a rose-gold band rolled down the middle of the bed.