Polly (7 page)

I can’t remember much about the holiday. Its most lasting legacy came from having porridge for breakfast every day – I have disliked porridge ever since. Apart from that, I think that most days we used to play games in the grounds. But one day we were going into the town to look at the shops and maybe buy presents for our families. As it happened, every lunchtime from school I used
to go and get half a pint of beer for an old lady who lived up the street and she would give me sixpence a week. She had fallen behind with my ‘pay’ and eventually one of her daughters gave me a postal order for 2
s
6
d
just before the holiday so I was really rich. But before I could get any presents I had to cash this postal order, and the matron decided I should go to town with her for the purpose. All the other kids wanted to come with us, but matron refused. That morning we got up and had breakfast as usual but we had to wash ‘especially clean’ and were then lined up to walk into town. Except the matron called me to one side and told me to wait. I kicked up one hell of a fuss, but she wouldn’t change her mind, and I had to stand there as all the others trailed off in a long crocodile towards the town.

I was decidedly upset and decidedly suspicious. Then things got worse, because matron told me to go and put on my Sunday best. Well, Sunday best was exactly that; you did not dare to wear it at any other time, Mum would have killed you! So again I kicked up merry hell and said how you could not wear Sunday best on any other day, Mum would get ever so cross, it wasn’t right and all the rest, but it didn’t help. In the end I had to go off to get changed into my best mauve and white! I was a reasonably pretty child and in good clothes must have looked quite presentable.

When I got back downstairs to the hall matron was already there, dressed up to the nines with a very impressive hat on the top. I was getting more and more worried by the minute – after all, I hadn’t wanted to leave my Mum in the first place and now we were getting all dressed up on the wrong day.

‘Come on then Mary,’ she said, ‘we are going into town.’ That was exactly what we did, following the steps all the others had taken half an hour earlier. Goodness knows what was wrong with the woman, I guess these days she would be sent for counselling, but everywhere we went she introduced me as her daughter. Whether it was just her fantasy, or whether she had had a husband and daughter who had died, or whatever was going on, I just do not know. I am sure none of the people we met were at all fooled: you couldn’t keep secrets in little places like that. As far as I was concerned, though, it was terribly worrying because I was not her daughter and I didn’t want to be her daughter. My Mum was back home, and that was where I wanted to be.

Of course, by then the other kids had seen us and were tagging along to see what was going on. That gave me some comfort, so I tried to keep them with us. We went into all sorts of shops, some of which we kids would never have gone into on our own. The other kids thought it was marvellous that I was going in and started asking me to buy things. Since I wanted to keep them with
us I obliged with whatever they wanted – including loads of bananas which most of the kids had never tasted before. I spent pretty well all my money in the process, but it was worth it. I think matron was showing me off around the town and giving everybody the story about me being her daughter. It was a tremendous relief to get back to the house and be able to dress in my ordinary clothes and start playing with everybody else again.

Back at school we had to write an essay, well in those days we called it a ‘composition’, about the holiday. You can guess that the idea terrified me and I couldn’t possibly tell the truth about it and how I had felt. I couldn’t think what to say. However, all the grown-ups had gone on and on about what a wonderful opportunity it was, how beautiful it was in the country, the trees and the walks, all the fun and games we would enjoy with each other as children, how dedicated the staff were and how good the food was and so on, so I decided that the best thing was to repeat it all. That is what I did, working in everything that ‘they’ had said and not revealing any of my own feelings and terrors. The big surprise was many weeks later when I was called to the governess’ room to be told that I had won the essay prize for my age group. The school was very proud of me and greatly honoured by the prize, so they wanted me to go up to the Mansion House in London to receive my prize, and would my parents be able to take me up there on the appointed Saturday? Honestly, I had been doing my best to forget about the whole thing; I had hated the holiday and believed that I had come within a hair’s breadth of never going home ever again. Suddenly it had come back to haunt me. So I looked very sad and told the governess that my parents couldn’t possibly take me to collect the prize. She tut-tutted and said she quite understood, though really she didn’t have the faintest idea. Another narrow escape, or so I thought.

Two days later she sent for me again. This time she told me that the school was so honoured, and they so wanted me not to be disappointed, that Miss Davidson would give up her Saturday afternoon to take me to the prize-giving. There was no way out of this so I finally gave in and accepted the inevitable. She gave me a letter for my parents explaining the arrangements and that Miss Davidson would meet me at the tram stop in the High Road at whatever time it was. Mind you, when it came to it Mum and Dad were ever so proud of me and when I got home I had a terrible job explaining to them why a teacher had to take me and they couldn’t go! Really, telling lies is not worth the hassle, you have to be so quick-witted and have such a good memory about what you have already said, and even then each lie just gets you into more complications.

Come the fateful Saturday I got all dressed up in my Sunday best, in fact Mum bought me a new Sunday dress. It was bottle green, I remember. I got dressed up in that, shoes and stockings, and my best hat. Mum was so proud of me I had to be dragged in next door to show off to Mrs Nicholson, and then I sat watching the clock waiting for the dreaded time to come round. Dad worked on Saturday mornings and always stopped in the pub for a couple of drinks with his mates on the way home. Just before I was due to go out he came in, drunk as usual. He looked at me approvingly and said how nice I looked, but then said he wasn’t so sure about the arrangements. He had stopped in at the Greengate pub as usual when Miss Davidson had come in so he had got talking to her. He was shocked, he said, by her language and the way she swore – her being an educated lady, too. Even worse was the way she drank, not beer but shorts. She could put down the whisky faster than he was drinking his beer. He had to admit that she had drunk him under the table, and there were not many men who could do that let alone a Miss Schoolteacher. My eyes were popping out of my head and I was ashamed, scared, humiliated, and shocked, all at the same time.

‘Did you say you were my dad?’ I sort of asked.

‘Of course,’ he replied and went off on an even more lurid account of Miss Davidson and her drinking. Mum didn’t seem at all worried and suddenly said it was time to go, and packed me off on my way.

I couldn’t understand why Mum was so relaxed about it all and so I walked up to the High Road going slower and slower, wondering whether I could run away somewhere. When I reached the end of the road there was Miss Davidson standing at the tram stop and waving to me, so there was nothing more to be done. We waited for the tram in silence and when it came we went upstairs. I was absolutely terrified about what had happened and what Miss would say, but she seemed to ignore everything that had gone before. When she spoke I carefully tried to smell her breath but couldn’t pick up any hint of alcohol, which just proved to me that all Dad had said about her being a hardened drinker must be true. How else could she cover up so well?

We got to the Mansion House and I was led off with the prize-winners while Miss went off to the audience seats. I don’t recall much about the actual prize-giving, or the rest of the day. My prize was a picture of a dog – or it might have been a puppy. Mum was ever so proud of it that she had it framed (without glass!) and it went on display on the mantelpiece. It stayed there until I got married and moved out. At first I just wanted to forget the whole affair but it wasn’t possible with the picture stuck there in front of me. After a while
I began to like the picture and, I suppose, feel a bit proud of myself. We kept it right until we were bombed out. When the salvage workers were struggling to see what they could save I told them not to bother with the picture; after all, there were much more pressing issues. Looking back, I think it would have been nice to have salvaged it, but it is too late now.

After the war, a long time after the war, I had a sudden rush of revelation. The pub at the tram stop was what we used to call a beer pub. It just had a couple of pumps of beer on draught and a couple of types of bottled beer and that was it – it never sold spirits. No wonder Mum was so relaxed about Dad’s lurid tale of Miss Davidson’s drinking.

I
n the early 1950s I got an early morning job cleaning the offices of a factory up near Bow. Somehow I seemed to meet all sorts in that job and some of them were really odd. They would tell you stories that just didn't and couldn't make sense – it used to leave me dumbstruck that they expected you to believe them, but I listened anyway. If nothing else, it helped the job go along. I do remember the story of one young woman though – it still makes me shudder to think about the Depression and what happened to people.

This young woman came to work as a cleaner for a while. She was ever so nice, quiet and easy going, and never had a cross word for anyone. Until, that is, one morning when three or four of us were working at one end of the Drawing Office and she was at the other. One of the women with us put on a disapproving face, gestured down to the other end and said that ‘she got sent for again last night' and went on to tell us, in a stage whisper, about ‘her mother, always drunk,' and how she would ‘have to keep going down the pub to collect her.' She was just getting into her stride when the young woman reacted. She came storming down from the other end of the office, her lips pulled in so tight that it looked as though if her mouth opened there would be an explosion. She fixed us all in one stare that had us rooted to the spot. Finally she spoke, ‘My mum's welcome to get drunk any time she wants to. And they can send for me to collect her any time of the day or night. And she'll
have a home wherever I am for as long as she needs it or wants it.' And then she told us her story.

Her mum had got married just after the First World War and soon had two daughters – this woman was the older of them – followed a few years later by a son. It wasn't easy, well life wasn't easy for anyone then, but they managed and were getting along as well as anybody else around Stratford. They were living in two rooms at the time, nothing like luxury but at least it was home. Then the husband died. Within a week or so the tiny savings were gone, the rent wasn't paid, and they were simply thrown out onto the streets. That was it, a young woman with two daughters aged about six or seven and a baby son, with nowhere to live. Their only possessions were a couple of bits of clothes apiece and the bucket, scrubbing brush, soap, stone and apron that her mum had salvaged from their home.

Luckily it was summer, so they walked over to Victoria Park and just used to wander around there. The two girls would look after the baby in one of the shelters that dotted the park and their mum would go off round the streets, knocking on doors to get work scrubbing steps and the like. With the couple of coppers she made from this she would buy food and return to the shelter in the park to spend the night with the kids. That was how they lived for the rest of the summer. It couldn't last, though, and as the year wore on it got colder and colder until eventually the winter meant that they just had to find some proper shelter.

Well, her mother had a brother who lived over in Poplar so she and the kids walked over there. There was nothing he could do. If he had taken them in he would have been in trouble with the landlord and soon been on the streets himself. Maybe he didn't want to do anything, I don't know. Anyway, the best he could, or maybe would, do was to let the family sleep in his hall. They couldn't come in until it was getting dark and would bed down straight away on the floor. The brother would lend them a blanket but that wasn't much between the four of them, and with no heating it was bitterly cold. Then next morning, almost as soon as it was light, they would have to go out again and spend the day on the streets. As before, they would find whatever shelter they could and the girls would look after the baby while their mum did whatever work she could find.

It couldn't last. The end came when they woke up one morning and found that the little boy had died of cold during the night. Of course, then the story came out and there was a dreadful scandal – it was a pity nobody thought of that when the family had been thrown out onto the streets in the first place.
Anyway, the mum was forced into the workhouse and the two girls put into a home.