Misadventures (2 page)

B
oth sets of my father's grandparents tasted wealth. His paternal grandfather owned an inn, which provided a good living for many years, until he became an alcoholic. He eventually lost the business through his drunkenness and became bankrupt.

My father's maternal grandfather was a ladies' hairdresser. He owned a salon and had a horse-drawn carriage to take him to the houses of rich clients. He too was quite successful but there was a fire in the salon and it burnt to the ground. As the property was not insured he also became bankrupt.

My father was one of nine children, but three of them died in infancy from childhood illnesses.

My grandmother told my mother her doctor used to criticise her husband for giving her too many children. The doctor told him, ‘You are
not giving your wife time to recover before you start another pregnancy.' This didn't deter my grandfather, who continued getting his wife pregnant. My grandmother also said she would jump down the entire staircase in her house in the early stages of pregnancy in the hope of losing her unborn child.

My mother's grandparents were a mixture of nationalities. Her maternal grandmother was a Jewess married to an Irishman. Her paternal grandmother was a Dutch woman married to an Englishman, providing the family with an English surname. Neither set of her grandparents had money.

My mother was one of eight children, but my grandmother experienced several miscarriages.

My grandfather was a seaman, leaving his wife to cope alone with the upbringing of their children during his lengthy absences. He died when my mother was thirteen, with a brother and sister younger than herself. My grandmother collected a large sum of insurance money upon his death and placed a deposit on a family-sized house in Barkingside. Her two eldest married daughters moved in with their husbands, helping her to pay the mortgage. Unfortunately my aunts eventually
vacated their mother's home for rented properties, which meant my grandmother was unable to pay the mortgage with herself and three children to support. She lost the house. In later years it would have been a good investment for all the family.

M
y fondest memory of childhood is when my mother and I used to visit her two sisters in Barkingside on a hot summer's day. Both aunts lived in separate farm bungalows on the edge of a huge cornfield.

I can remember getting off the train at Fairlop Station and walking the ten-minute journey along Forest Road to my aunts' homes. My mother and I would pass the farm cottages where my Uncle Jim used to live, then the piggery with the pigs grunting away behind the long hedgerow of blackberry bushes. The crickets would be singing in the grass and only the occasional car would pass us.

Once at the bungalows one of my aunts would supply a glass of orange juice and I would wander into the back gardens and look across the golden carpet of the cornfield.

Sadly my aunts are now dead. Their homes have been sold to outsiders and are lost to the family forever.

T
hroughout my childhood my parents supplied me with a variety of pets. First of all they bought me two-dozen goldfish and put them in the tub of an old boiler we kept in our back garden. Unfortunately it didn't have any type of window so my fish could only see the sky and spent their time swimming in the dark. I fed them daily and in the summer months all was well. During the winter, ice formed in a thick layer over the water. My father knocked a hole through it enabling me to put food in, but after a few days of swimming in freezing water I found all my fish dead, floating underneath the ice. This did not deter my parents. Instead they bought me four goldfish in a small bowl and placed it in our lounge. Once again I fed my fish daily, but sadly they grew tired of their confined living quarters which forced them to swim continuously around in circles and they would jump out of the bowl, landing on the lino. When I saw them do this I would quickly pick them up and return them, but unfortunately one by one they tried to escape whilst I was at
school and unable to ‘rescue' them.

After the deaths of my fish my parents bought me a tortoise and housed him in our garden shed. I fed him a variety of salad and would allow him to go for walks along our pathway. As winter approached my father explained that tortoises hibernate during the cold weather. He made a nest using straw and an old shoe box and put my pet in it, piercing the lid several times so that it could breathe. He placed the box in a dark corner of our shed and told me not to touch it until the end of March when my reptile would wake up. I looked at my tortoise in the spring but he was quite obviously dead.

My parents allowed me to have a kitten from the litter produced by my friend Susan's cat. My kitten was a Tom and I called him ‘Lucky'. Unfortunately my mother had little idea how to take care of a pet and she fed him Kit-e-Kat twice daily (in those days it was only the one flavour) and would only vary his diet once a week when she would boil him some fish. Lucky must have found it extremely boring eating the same food six days a week and when he reached adulthood he was quick to move in with one of our neighbours, a Mrs Needler, who lived four doors away from us. She would leave a variety of food out for Lucky to eat and Lucky found her diet much more interesting than ours. I was very upset at the loss of my cat. My mother went to see Mrs Needler and had a flaming row with
her for enticing Lucky from me. Her final words to Mrs Needler were, ‘Now that you have taken our cat from us you can keep him,' which was not the result I had been hoping for.

On my fourteenth birthday my father bought me two lovebirds. They were beautiful birds but they were too frightened to leave their cage to fly around our lounge so they spent their lives sitting on their perch. They were certainly male and female. Each evening at dinner time they would make love and my father, hearing a tapping sound, would look up from his newspaper, fold it, and whack the top of the cage with it, which frightened the birds and stopped them mating.

One hot summer's day my mother put the bird cage in our outhouse attached to the kitchen before she went to work, but she didn't open any windows. On my return from school I discovered both lovebirds dead, lying on their backs at the bottom of the cage, having suffocated in the intense heat created by the hot sun shining through the closed outhouse windows.

During my mid-teens I lost interest in having pets and my parents didn't buy me any more.

I
was five years old and had just started school. I was playing happily in the sandpit building castles when another five-year-old girl emptied a fire bucket full of water over my head. The teacher in charge took me to the Headmistress' office where I was undressed and my clothes placed over a heater to dry. I was told to sit down and I sat naked on one of the wooden chairs. There was a knock at the door and, much to my embarrassment, a seven-year-old boy walked in. He looked at me in surprise and handed the Headmistress a message. As he left the room his eyes examined me from head to toe.

I fared much better at Junior School.

During the lunch hour one of the male teachers gave me some money and told me to get him a Kit Kat from the local shop. I did as he bade me but returned with a tin of Kit-e-Kat.
He insisted I exchange the cat food for his chocolate.

One of my classmates wasn't too bright either. When asked by the geography teacher, ‘How can you tell the time in the desert?' Jeanne le May's hand shot up. The teacher pointed at her and Jeanne replied, ‘By the twelve o'clock hooter.' (In those days factories would blast hooters informing their workers it was time to down tools and go for lunch.)

At the age of ten I was put in the school play as the ‘north wind'. I had to stand with my arms above my head, swaying occasionally, and I had two lines to say. My parents proudly attended the play. At the end of the evening I realised I had forgotten my lines and had said nothing throughout the entire performance.

I attended a secondary modern school for girls in the days of extended point shoes, fluorescent socks, dirndl skirts with fluffy petticoats, and Teddy Boys.

At the age of thirteen I was caught smoking in the toilets in the company of several other teenage girls during the break. We were passing the one cigarette around with each of us taking
it in turns to have a puff, when a teacher came in just as I was having my turn. She took me to the Headmistress' office. I was told my parents would be informed of my misdemeanour and I was asked who else was sharing the cigarette, but I gave no reply. After a ticking-off I returned to my class. When the other girls discovered I had not let them down I became a heroine for the remainder of the day. My parents did not receive any type of communication and the incident was soon forgotten, but it was also the end of our surreptitious smoking.

Window cleaners would occasionally work at the school. As they all seemed to be aged nineteen they were soon surrounded by teenage girl pupils chatting them up, much to their amusement.

I also remember two fifteen-year-old girls had fiancés and they married at sixteen after leaving school.

I
decided to take Rinty to the Recreation Ground as he was very keen to have a run. He raced up the road, straining at the leash, pulling me along with him, forcing me to run through the streets. I managed to steer him in the right direction and we reached the ‘Rec'. I used all of my strength to bring him to a halt on the grass. As he was so energetic I decided to let him off his lead and allow him to run around freely. He did just that. He ran all over the playing fields, around the tennis courts, straight past me and out through the ‘Rec' gates into the street. I chased after him and was just in time to see him turn the corner. I sped up the road looking for him but he was nowhere in sight. I made my
way home wondering what I was going to say to Joan's mother after losing her dog. I need not have worried. Rinty arrived home fifteen minutes ahead of me.

A few months later Joan's mother told my family not to tell Joan but Rinty had been sold to a farmer as he had become too big and boisterous to cope with. Joan was told he had run away.

M
iss Gee used to sit beside me at the piano wearing a hearing aid and it seemed to me that the only way she knew if I was playing correctly was to watch my fingers. She still managed to teach me. My favourite piece of music was ‘The Dambusters Theme'.

I didn't like the theory at all so Miss Gee used to let me get away with my lack of written homework.

During one lesson I played a piece of music badly so Miss Gee rapped my knuckles with her baton, which hurt and made me cry. After I had dried my tears she said, ‘Promise me you won't tell your parents.' I promised and kept her secret safe.

O
ne day in early summer I knocked on Brenda's street door and asked if I could take her black-and-brown mongrel, Trixie, out for a walk over the park. Brenda said I could but not to let any dogs near Trixie as she was ‘on heat'.

Trixie was full of spirit as I walked her on her lead. We were soon over the park and running across the grass, with Trixie pulling the lead at full strength. As we approached the tennis courts a huge black mongrel appeared and began to pay her a lot of attention. I tried shooing him away but he would not obey me and quickly mounted Trixie. In my horror I let the lead go and a small crowd of children gathered to watch our threesome. The park keeper came across the grass to see what all the fuss
was about and I suggested that if he had a bucket of cold water we could throw it over the dogs and possibly separate them. He ignored my request and silently watched the spectacle. Eventually the black mongrel dismounted and walked away from us. I picked up Trixie's lead and took her home.

I told Brenda what had happened and she told me not to tell her parents as she feared they might have Trixie destroyed.

Some weeks later Trixie gave birth to four black-and-brown puppies.

T
he street I lived in was very long with a hill at the top and ideal for roller-skating. Both Brenda and I were having fun skating up and down the hill and racing round the block and down the hill again. I was thoroughly enjoying myself until I turned the corner at the bottom of our road. I had skated at top speed and the pace I had set had taken me too fast around the corner. I totally lost my balance and fell. I put both hands out to save myself and landed flat out, face down on the pavement with my right hand settling in an enormous runny mound of dog mess. When I realised where my right hand had landed, all pain left me in my disgust.

I lifted my hand out of the excreta and wiped it on some tufts of grass growing along the kerb.
Despite being only nine years old I had the sense to skate home to my parents' flat and wash and scrub my hands with disinfectant in the big butler sink in my mother's kitchen, disinfecting the sink afterwards.