Polly (20 page)

The Ks were a nice family. They had lost their first baby and now had one boy, little T. He became a hairdresser and did quite well for himself. He bought a house out in Essex somewhere and later on his parents moved out to be near him. I don't know what became of them.

At the bottom were the As on one side and the Ms on the other. The As were older than everybody else in the flats, in fact the old man took his pension not long after we moved in. They had one grown-up son who used to visit quite often and keep an eye on them. Mr A died of a heart attack some time later, but then he always looked like a heart-case; short, fat, florid and always catching his breath.

The Ms weren't a happy family. They were Catholics and went to Mass every Sunday, but everything else about them seemed to be trouble. Mr M had the most awful temper and was always going on about somebody or something, shouting his mouth off, yelling at the kids in the Square and all the rest. Really he was a nasty piece of work. They had one daughter who they held up as the example of how children should be brought up, until suddenly she had to get married. The old man was beside himself, literally threw her out on the street and refused to speak or have anything to do with her or her husband. For years she used to visit her mum only when he was out of the house. Still, she seems to have made a decent marriage, and the last I heard she too was living out in Essex somewhere and her parents had moved out to be near her. I suppose there must have been some sort of reconciliation.

The Square was meant to be a sort of general community area and all the kids used to play there. It even had a basic kids' playground with a roundabout but they soon outgrew that and played on the grassed areas. At least it kept them off the streets, but there was always somebody ready to complain about the noise, or the danger of flying balls, or that they were ruining the grass or whatever. Looking back on it we had a taste of everything around that Square: friendships and feuds, romances, marriages and marriage break-ups, births and premature death, an attempted suicide, kids going into a life of crime and kids going to university and burglaries and great generosity. All in all, though, I wasn't one tiny little bit sad when we got the opportunity to move away into rural Essex. At least, that is how we thought of Basildon in the early 1960s.

M
um’s influence was long-lasting. Her grand-daughter Ruth read English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University (1996–9). In 1998, as part of its celebration of fifty years of women receiving degrees, Cambridge University invited essays about the contribution of women to its development. This is an extract from ‘Bounteous Mothers’, Ruth’s prize-winning essay.

*  *  *

Since the history books do not offer details of the lives of any of the women who served Cambridge in previous centuries, it is necessary instead to turn to a more recent example. Such an example is as valid as an older one, because even in this century, women have contributed to the successes of their sons, brothers and husbands more often than they have had the opportunity to earn those successes themselves. The woman in this example happens to be my grandmother, although many people in Cambridge today could probably tell their own equivalent stories.

My father came up to Cambridge in 1964. His parents were as nervous for him as they were proud; being working class people born and raised in the East End of London, Cambridge University must have seemed to them like a different world. Neither of them had stayed in school past fourteen. My grandmother had actually turned down a scholarship to the local girls’ grammar school because her mother had insisted that ‘no good ever came of book-learning’. Unfamiliar as the university system was to them, they supported my father in his application,
and when they learned that he had been given a place, my grandmother used what knowledge she did have of Cambridge to give her son the best possible start at university. Having been evacuated to the village of Six Mile Bottom, near Cambridge, during the war, she had seen something of student life in the city. She had noticed that the students came up for term with their belongings packed into sturdy carriage-trunks, and so when my father took up his place at Cambridge in 1964, she used the money she had earned working as a cleaner to buy him a trunk just like those she had seen twenty years earlier.

Fred and Polly at their Golden Wedding anniversary party in 1982.

Having gained his degree from Cambridge, my father was later able to send all three of his children to university. I am the last of them, and the trunk is still in use. It carries my belongings to and from college and then sits in my room all term serving as a coffee table. As the weeks go by, it gradually disappears under a growing mountain of unwashed mugs and unfiled lecture notes, but it is always there. It is, to me, a symbol of what one woman did, not only for her son, but for subsequent generations of her family and for the university itself, simply by supporting her son’s wish to come to Cambridge.

The trunk is heavily battered now, and unlikely to survive beyond my graduation, but the legacy of my grandmother’s support certainly will. Everything that I achieve in my life thanks to my education will also be thanks, in part, to her. So, too, will be any credit that the university gains from those achievements. She, and countless others like her, are the bounteous mothers of the alma mater.

First published in 2012

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