Читать книгу Little Ann's Field of Buttercups - Ann Jacques - Страница 10

I was now twelve and my brother John was six. Barbara was two years old and went to the nursery school attached to John’s primary school. My school was in the opposite direction. Our new house was on a council estate and the majority of people living there were poor, including us. We had experienced the middle-class lifestyle and found it difficult to adjust. Our house had three bedrooms and one bathroom. In order to have a warm bath, the brick copper in the kitchen had to be lit and whoever was having a bath had to pump the water up to the bathtub. I have no fond memories of the place. It was very unappealing. In fact, I thought it was a dump compared to Grandma and Grandad’s.

To make things worse, I now had to do chores. After school, I had to light the fire which my mother had already laid the night before. I would then wash and dry any breakfast pots. I then peeled potatoes for dinner and put them in the saucepan ready for when Mum got home from work. Saturday mornings when Mum went into work I had clean the entire house. This task included cleaning and polishing all the floors. I had to get on my hands and knees to clean the kitchen floor. My brother never did anything to help. We fought about it all the time. It was very difficult adjusting from one lifestyle to another.

The girls’ school down the road was not as nice as I thought it would be. I felt out of place. Maybe it was the social class distinction as the other girls and their families seemed a lot poorer than us. The majority of them had nits and appeared scruffy compared to my pleated skirts and hand-knitted jumpers and cardigans. They must have thought I was a bit of a snob. Maybe if we’d worn a school uniform, there would have been less distinction between the haves and have nots. But a couple of years on the school officials made it compulsory for most senior schools to have uniform also gym uniform for sports and PT.

The lifestyle change was especially difficult for me. Before the move, I believed everyone lived like Grandma and Grandad, with lovely home-cooked meals and pudding, eating at nicely laid tables. This was what I had always known. Mum didn’t bother with setting the table nicely with serviettes and condiments. She just never had time. Once she arrived home from work, the table was just laid basically with knives and forks salt and pepper that were it. Breakfast in winter was porridge with milk and treacle. It was delicious. The warmer months called for cornflakes, sugar and milk. Weekends were different. Mum did lay a nice table whenever we had visitors, usually on weekends. It took a while but eventually I came to terms with the change. I tried to look forward to the future realising I could not change things beyond my control.

I eventually made friends with Hazel, a girl who lived nearby and was in my class at school. We became very close friends and confided in each other right through until the end of our school years. Gertrude, another friend of mine, also lived down the road. Whenever Hazel was with her boyfriend, Gertrude and I spent time together. She didn’t seem to have many friends. Gertrude and her family just did not seem to belong in our council estate. Unlike most of the families in the neighbourhood, they were very intellectual and always used proper English. Gertrude was teased all the time. Her mother had Alzheimer’s disease and sadly didn’t even know Gertrude was her daughter. Her four older sisters became like mother figures to Gertrude, keeping her out of her mother’s way to spare her any unnecessary upset.

I am sure I was Gertrude’s only friend and I enjoyed our conversations. Where my other friends talked incessantly about boys and all the usual mushy girl talk, Gertrude and I enjoyed talking about politics and other issues that were happening in the world. Her choice of music broadened my musical taste. While I was mad about Johnny Ray and Frankie Lane whose records I never stopped playing, Gertrude often played opera and classical music on her gramophone. This was a welcome change for me as I had never heard classical and opera music before. Thanks to Gertrude, I find the classics very relaxing to the mind and enjoyable.

Gertrude and I sometimes met up with a bunch of teenagers at the park about two blocks away. We would play cricket or just kick a ball around. Gertrude was a very tall and athletic girl. The others were all very sporty too, unlike me. My passions were dancing and singing but I never seemed to find anyone who liked them as much as I did.

I was thirteen when my sister Barbara and I were offered a holiday through an underprivileged children’s holiday scheme. We headed off on our own by train from Leicester to a beautiful place called Malvern Hills. We were so excited. On our arrival, we were greeted by two elderly women, dressed all in black. After a short car journey we arrived at an old dark house. We entered through a big black front door into a dark and creepy hall. The floorboards were worn and squeaked as we walked on them. In the corner of the sitting room, I noticed an old gramophone, the only luxury the house seemed to have. By the morbid look of the two elderly women, the rest of our holiday seemed very predictable. Barbara and I just looked at each other. We had no idea what to expect from these people. Would they be nice and kind, or as mean as they looked? I was immediately despondent. I simply did not like the eerie atmosphere. I felt that we would not have a good holiday at all. The trouble was that we had to stay for the whole school holiday period from the start of July till the first week in September. To us it seemed endless.

Our holiday meals were hardly substantial even for me—and I had always been a very small eater. My sister loved her food and normally ate man-sized meals, so she was absolutely starving. Barbara started crying all the time and wanted to go home.

I can’t remember how but we arranged for Hazel to come and stay with us and keep us both company. Hazel brought her two top-ten records with her (Jezebel by Frankie Lane and Cry by Johnny Ray). We sneakily used the gramophone that I had seen in the corner of the sitting room. It had a large horn shape on it similar to the logo for HMV records. We had been told not to touch the gramophone, but now that we had Hazel’s records, the temptation was just too much to resist. But we had to be very careful. I could only imagine the trouble we’d have been in if we were caught. While the two elderly women were out shopping, we would play it full blast. Hazel and I coaxed Barbara into watching the back door for when the women would return. When she saw the women approaching, she started to loudly sing Frankie Vaughn’s latest record, Behind the Green Door, to alert us. Hazel and I would be singing and dancing away to our favourite artist, swooning over the good-looking singer. Then when we heard Barbara start singing, we knew the women were coming down the street. We would come back to reality, turn the gramophone off, put everything back in its place and sit in our room like little angels. Later we would go for a walk and giggle our heads off, greatly relieved that we had not been caught.

Finally, our holiday ended. Despite the circumstances, it turned out to be a happy time. Our naughty gramophone adventures were simply harmless kid stuff that most generations of children do at some time or another. Taking risks and learning responsibility is a part of growing up healthily. Having Hazel there taught me that with a little thought you can make a bad situation better.

After our getaway, we were home again and back to boring school. This new term the teachers prepared us for our working lives. School ended for everyone at the age of fifteen unless they went on to sit for the final exam which took them on to further education. I did not have the top marks required to take that exam. The teachers took all the girls who were leaving school around to different work places in groups. We mostly went around factories observing different production jobs.

Hazel wanted to go into a hosiery factory. After visiting one she had decided to become an overlocker—the money was good. I wanted to work in an office like my mum. The trouble was that I was a bit shy and lacked confidence. I was also not quick at adding up, although I was good at English. But maths was the main requirement for any office job, unless you were trained at shorthand and typing with the ability to type a minimum of eighty words per minute. To be really honest, all I desperately wanted to do was sing, dance and entertain people. Unfortunately, there were no opportunities for this where I lived. London had the academies and stage schools, and I knew no one here who could help me or advise me.