Читать книгу Tales of a Tiller Girl - Irene Holland - Страница 6

Through the darkness I saw them. Dancing around with their floaty wings like beautiful butterflies.

‘Fairies!’ I gasped. ‘I can see fairies!’

I felt as if I were in a dream and I had never seen anything like it in my life. I just sat there on the edge of my seat with my mouth gaping open as I watched these mystical creatures flitting around the stage.

‘Mummy, I want to be one of those,’ I whispered. ‘I want to be a fairy.’

I was four years old and my mother had taken me to see my first ever pantomime – Cinderella at the Grand Theatre, Clapham Junction. I had loved the pumpkin coach, but when the gauze curtain came down all lit up with twinkly lights and these fairies danced across the stage I was absolutely mesmerised. This was the first time I had seen anyone dance, and from then on that was it. I was hooked for the rest of my life.

‘Please can I do that, Mummy?’ I asked afterwards. ‘Can I dance like a fairy?’

‘Well, you could do ballet lessons if you wanted,’ she said.

I didn’t forget about it, and Mum kept her promise and I started going to a weekly lesson at a local ballet school in Clapham. It was in a big house, and one room had been converted into a ballet studio with huge mirrors and a barre down one side. Each lesson cost 2s. 6d. (two shillings and sixpence), and it must have been a struggle for Mum to afford it, but I loved every minute of it and I lived for that day of the week. Leotards hadn’t been invented in those days and tutus were only worn for formal occasions like shows and exams, so I wore a loose black cotton tunic that my grandmother had made me, and I had a piece of pink chiffon wound around my head and tied in a big bow at the back to keep my hair off my face.

I hung on to the ballet mistress’s every word, and I memorised each step and practised until it was perfect.

‘I’d like you to be Greek slave girls today,’ she told us one afternoon. ‘I want you to pretend that you’re holding a vase as you promenade.’

It was very sad, melancholy music, and as I paraded around the room pretending to hold a heavy Grecian urn on my shoulder I felt in my heart I really was that unhappy little slave girl. So much so, I even felt tears in my eyes as I danced.

At the end of the class, when Mum came to collect me, my ballet teacher took her to one side.

‘I think Irene has great potential,’ I heard her say. ‘She really seems to feel the music and her timing is spot on.’

That didn’t mean anything to me. All I knew was that dancing was just another way of being a fairy and I loved it. But just a few weeks after starting my lessons I suddenly got very ill. I was burning up, and all this horrible stuff was oozing out of my right ear. I was in absolute agony.

‘We’d better take you to see the doctor,’ said Mum.

I knew it had to be serious for that to happen. These were the days before the National Health Service, and a visit to the doctor’s surgery cost a lot of money.

The doctor examined me as I whimpered in pain.

‘She has an abscess of the middle ear,’ he told my mother. ‘You need to get her to hospital straight away. If it’s not treated quickly it can be highly dangerous and spread to the brain.’

By then I felt so ill I could barely walk, and Mum had to carry me to St George’s Hospital in Tooting. When we got there she passed me to a doctor.

‘Say goodbye to your mother,’ he told me.

Suddenly I was absolutely terrified. I’d never been away from Mum and I didn’t know where they were taking me or what they were going to do to me.

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘I want to stay with Mummy.’

I kicked and screamed and made such a fuss it took three nurses to cart me off. My little body shook with sobs as they held me down on a table while the doctor poured peroxide in my poorly ear. It burned and stung, and I was petrified.

‘We have to be cruel to be kind,’ he told me. ‘This will hopefully kill the infection.’

There was no such thing as antibiotics then. Afterwards my ear was padded up with a big gauze dressing that had to be changed every week.

I was in such a state when they took me back to Mum, who looked really worried.

‘It’s all right, Rene,’ she said, giving me a cuddle. ‘You can come home with me now. It’s all over.’

‘Oh, thank goodness,’ I sighed.

I was exhausted but it was such a relief that they weren’t keeping me in. I had to go back every week for months so they could put more peroxide in my ear and I was in constant pain. Eventually it seemed to work and thankfully they managed to save my hearing, although I’ve still got scar tissue in my ear now.

As soon as I was better, Mum started working again. I was a bit older now, and she needed to try to earn some money to help support us. She would spend hours every day practising her violin, and then go to the theatre and perform in the orchestra at night when I was in bed. While she practised I would be left to my own devices to amuse myself, which wasn’t hard thanks to my vivid imagination.

One day I took myself off to Clapham Common and lay on my front with my nose in the long grass. I watched ants and ladybirds crawl around and worms slither in the soil, but I wasn’t there to look for wildlife.

‘Come out,’ I whispered. ‘I know you’re in there somewhere.’

I was there to find the fairies. I stayed like that for hours with my head buried in the grass, just watching and waiting for my favourite creatures to make an appearance. I believed that they were real and I could see them in my head. I knew that all fairies danced, they lived in flowers and they had very long, floaty wings like butterflies or moths. I used to spend hours lying there on the common waiting for them. I never told anyone, though, as I was frightened that they’d make fun of me.

Even now, at the ripe old age of eighty-four, if anyone asks what my religion is I tell them this: ‘I believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden!’

It often gets me a few funny looks. But I find it quite sad today that children don’t have vivid imaginations any more; they’re told so much.

I always say to my granddaughter Billie, ‘How do you know that I’m not a fairy?’

So she checked my back and found two little nobbles.

‘That’s where your wings will grow, Grandma,’ she told me.

Now, whenever I see her she checks my back to see if my wings have sprouted yet!

I suppose in a way I was a very lonely child as I was left on my own to get on with everything. Nobody asked me what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, or thought up things to entertain me, so I had to make my own fun. In one sense it worked in my favour because I didn’t have to ask – Mummy, can I do this? I just went and did it. Although Raymond still lived with us, by now he had got a job as an apprentice for a company in central London that manufactured Bakelite, so he was out at work all day.

I knew my mother loved me and she was very affectionate, but all she lived for was her music. Looking back, I’d say she was very unsociable and introverted; she didn’t have friends and never went out. She would practise all day long and go out to work at the theatre at night. She never did anything but play the violin, and spent so many hours practising that I’d get fed up.

‘Mummy, I’m bored,’ I told her one afternoon.

‘Rene, only boring people get bored,’ she said.

So I decided to take myself off on an adventure. I walked down to Clapham and caught the No. 49 bus to the West End. I had a terrific sense of freedom that sadly children don’t have these days. Children were very free and I was always either on Clapham Common or Wandsworth Common, playing with friends, or on a Routemaster going somewhere exciting. I paid my tuppence ha’penny (two and a half old pennies) to the conductor and headed into town.

I sat on the top deck and looked out of the window as we went past Battersea Park and down the King’s Road. I got off at High Street Kensington and from there headed to Regent Street. I must have walked miles but I knew exactly where I was going – to my favourite place in the whole world, Hamley’s toy store. I wandered from floor to floor gazing in awe at the giant teddy bears, the life-size dolls, sailboats and pedal cars. Things I knew that my mother could never afford.

Afterwards I walked down Oxford Street to Selfridges. I loved the sense of grandeur as I saw the doorman in his top hat.

‘Good morning, Miss,’ he said, and I giggled as he held open the door for me.

In 1938 no one batted an eyelid to see an eight-year-old wandering round the West End on her own, but if it happened today I’d probably get taken into care by Social Services! There were plenty of other children doing the same thing, and often you’d see gangs of youngsters from the East End going up West to pick pockets.

I loved Selfridges and I knew all the departments like the back of my hand. I’d go straight up to the first floor to look at all the fancy ball gowns. I’d walk along the rails, touching the brightly coloured taffeta dresses and admiring the intricate beading. Sometimes I’d get the lift up to the roof, where I’d watch fashionable ladies and gents going for a promenade around the manicured gardens. There was even a café up there and a women’s gun club.

Afterwards I’d saunter along Oxford Street to Hyde Park, where I’d sit by the Serpentine and watch the birds and climb a few trees. Once, I was walking along a secluded path when I noticed a man coming towards me in a mackintosh. Call it a sixth sense, but I could tell straight away that something wasn’t right about him. He looked a bit scruffy and his clothes were all grubby. As he got closer he suddenly held his mac open, and I realised that he had his flies undone and his bits and pieces were hanging out for all and sundry to see!

‘Eurgh, put it away!’ I laughed.

But he just closed his coat, walked past and didn’t say a word.

I wasn’t scared or frightened, I just thought it was hysterically funny. If that was the way that he got his kicks then good luck to him, I thought. Then I caught the No. 49 home, my stomach rumbling with hunger at the thought of a boiled egg for tea.

In a way, even though I was still only eight I was a pretty savvy and streetwise child. Flashers were very common in those days and most of them seemed harmless to my friends and me. I coped with it better than my poor mother. I remember her coming home one night after work absolutely furious.

‘Oh my goodness, Rene,’ she said dramatically. ‘Something dreadful has just happened. I don’t believe it.’

‘What is it, Mum?’ I asked.

She explained how she had been on the Northern line and she’d been in the carriage on her own when a man had got on.

‘I’d just got up as mine was the next stop when he undid his trousers and exposed himself to me.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked her.

‘Well, I marched over to him and said: “How dare you do that to me, you disgusting little man.” I was so angry, do you know what I did, Rene?’

‘No, Mum.’

‘I was so cross, I got my violin case and I slammed it down really hard on his you-know-what. Hopefully that will teach him not to do that in a hurry again.’

My mum was a tiny woman, and she looked very prim with her two long plaits that she tied up on the top of her head. I bet he hadn’t been expecting her reaction.

‘Is your violin all right, Mum?’ I asked with a smirk.

Things were still very strained between Mum and her family, and as I got older I became more aware of the tensions. One day I went to visit my Aunty Vi, who lived in Hendon, north London. My mother never came with me, and I liked going because I could play with my cousin Shirley, who was four years older than me.

‘Violet’s a terrible snob,’ my mother warned me as she walked with me to the Tube station. ‘Just ignore anything she says to you.’

It wasn’t long before Aunty Vi started bragging about my cousin Shirley and how well she was doing at school.

‘She’s so bright there’s no doubt she’ll go to university one day,’ she said.

‘Will I go to university too?’ I asked.

Aunty Vi just laughed.

‘I doubt that very much, dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re clever enough for university. You’ll have probably left long before it’s time to do matriculation.’

Matriculation was the exam that you took in high school to determine whether you were clever enough to go on to further education.

‘Well, I don’t need to go to university,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to be a ballet dancer.’

‘A ballet dancer?’ said Aunty Vi, aghast. ‘You’ll never make a dancer, Rene. You’re not pretty enough and I seriously doubt that you’ve got the talent, either.’

Hearing that sort of criticism at such a young age from someone should have been a crushing blow. But I’d heard it all before, so I just let it wash over me and refused to get angry about it.

It was always the same criticisms that I’d hear time and time again whenever I went over there – I wasn’t clever enough, pretty enough, slim enough, rich enough. I got so used to it I didn’t even bother answering her back. It didn’t matter to me that I was constantly criticised and put down. I didn’t really care what my aunties and uncles thought. In a way it made me even more determined.

‘I will be a ballet dancer one day,’ I told my cousin Shirley. ‘Just you wait and see.’

I never told Mum what Aunty Violet had said, though. I knew she would be furious and I didn’t want to make the rift between her and her sisters any bigger.

Sometimes it was just as bad at home. I was always very loyal to my mother, and I hated it when my grandparents would criticise her to my face.

One day my grandfather was grumbling about her and saying how she never had enough money. Anyone could say what they liked about me, but when it came to my mother it was a completely different matter. I had a sparky temper and if someone pushed the wrong buttons then I wasn’t frightened of speaking my mind.

‘Don’t you dare run Mummy down like that, Papa,’ I told him.

‘I don’t know why you always stick up for your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s a failure and she should have never married that father of yours.’

‘She’s doing the best she can,’ I shouted.

My grandfather had a typical Victorian attitude to children – he thought they should be seen and not heard – and he was furious that I’d answered him back.

‘Don’t speak to me like that, young lady,’ he bellowed. ‘I’m going to lock you in your room and see if that teaches you a lesson.’

But when he tried to grab hold of me I went berserk. I lashed out at him, kicking and screaming.

‘I won’t have you behave like this, Rene,’ he yelled. ‘You’re a silly little girl who’s never going to make anything of your life, just like your mother.’

‘Yes, I will,’ I yelled. ‘I’m going to be a dancer.’

‘A dancer?’ he scoffed. ‘I doubt that very much.’

When Mum got home and I told her what had happened she didn’t seem surprised. She knew what her father was like.

‘I think it’s time that we tried to find somewhere else to live,’ she told me. ‘We need our own space.’

I knew that she found it a strain living with her parents and a few weeks later we moved out. Mum had found a job as a carer for an old spinster called Miss Higgins, who was paralysed from the chest down after contracting polio as a child and was completely bed-bound. We’d save money on rent because we’d be living with the old lady in her 1920s semi-detached house in Norbury. She had the downstairs, and Raymond, Mum and I had the upstairs. Miss Higgins was obviously wealthy, as the house was nicely decorated and pristine, but it was clear from the start that Mum hated every minute of it.

‘Oh, that woman,’ she said. ‘She just treats me like a dogsbody. It’s no wonder that she never has any visitors.’

She’d gone through several carers before Mum, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Miss Higgins wasn’t very pleasant, and Mum was at her beck and call day and night. She had to give her a bed bath, make her meals, and do her shopping and the cleaning.

Mum had just sat down one night when we heard the familiar tinkle of the bell that Miss Higgins rang when she needed something.

‘Give me strength,’ Mum sighed through gritted teeth. ‘That woman will be the death of me.’

I went down with her.

‘Can the child come and sit with me for a while?’ she said as she saw me lurking in the doorway.

‘I suppose so,’ said Mum. ‘Rene, come and talk to Miss Higgins.’

‘Do I have to?’ I sighed, but just one look at Mum’s stern face and I didn’t dare say another word.

I sat and stared at Miss Higgins. She always looked very straight-laced and she never, ever smiled. She had long white hair, and a white frilly nightie with a high collar and a knitted bed jacket on. Her bed was white, too, and she was half propped up with a pile of pillows. She was a bit like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, a strange ghostly figure all in white. I wasn’t frightened of her, I just thought she was the most peculiar woman that I’d ever seen.

She stared at me with a very disapproving look on her face.

‘Talk to me child,’ she said. ‘Do you like arithmetic?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, what do you like doing then?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘Rene, don’t be so rude and answer Miss Higgins,’ Mum told me.

‘I like w-w-riting stories,’ I stammered. ‘And d-d-drawing.’

You see, that was the real reason why I didn’t want to chat to her. I didn’t want this strange old woman to know that I had a terrible stammer as I was really embarrassed about it.

My brother Raymond had developed a very bad stammer after our father had died, and when I turned four I had started stammering too.

‘Are you sure you’re not just copying your brother?’ Mum had asked.

But I knew I wasn’t. I just couldn’t stop myself stammering. I was fine with my friends and family and people that I knew, but with strangers it was a different story. I would get nervous and I would hesitate and the words just wouldn’t come out, or I’d be halfway through a sentence and I couldn’t finish it without gasping for breath.

‘I can’t understand what you’re saying to me, dear,’ said Miss Higgins.

‘She just stammers a bit sometimes, that’s all,’ Mum told her.

It was so frustrating sometimes. Like the morning that there was a frantic knocking on the front door.

‘Run and get that, Rene, will you,’ said Mum.

I went downstairs and opened the door to find the coal man standing there. He was in a terrible state.

‘Me ’orse,’ he said in his broad cockney accent. ‘Me bleedin’ ’orse is dead. He had an ’art attack comin’ up the ’ill.’

I looked out and there was the coal man’s huge white horse lying in the middle of the street. Every day the horse would lumber up the hill near us pulling tonnes of coal in his cart, and then the coal man would tip it down the chute outside each house that led to the cellar so we could all light our fires and ranges.

I wanted to say how sorry I was about his horse, but no matter how hard I tried the words just wouldn’t come out.

‘I-I-I-,’ I stammered. ‘S-s-s-.’

‘I don’t understand you, love,’ he said. ‘Is yer old man in? I need some ’elp to try and drag him out of the street.’

It was so frustrating. All I could do was run upstairs to get Mum, sobbing at the thought of the coal man’s beautiful horse lying dead in our road.

There was no help for people with stammers in those days. It wasn’t something that you went to see the doctor about, and there was no such thing as a speech therapist. It was just seen as something you had to live with and hopefully grow out of, which was what Raymond had done as he’d got older.

One weekend Mum took me to the hairdressers as a treat. I had dead straight hair, and since I was little I’d always worn it in long plaits like my mother with two ribbons on the end.

‘Please can I have my hair cut?’ I’d begged her for months.

So we went to the local hairdressers and they chopped it into a bob and pinned a big orange bow on the top.

The next day Mum and I were walking back from the shops to our house and I was proudly showing off my new haircut. I was still wearing the bow that the hairdresser had pinned in it.

I was skipping along, hand in hand with Mum, when suddenly we heard a strange noise above us. I stared up into the sky to see what was making the racket.

‘Look, Mummy!’ I shouted.

There were two planes looping and rolling all over the place, and they were flying so low I could hear the machine-gun fire and see the sparks as the bullets bounced off their wings.

‘Wow!’ I gasped.

I thought it was really exciting to have this battle going on right above our heads, but Mum looked terrified. Much to my surprise, she pushed me into a hedge.

‘Get down, Rene,’ she said. ‘Don’t move.’

‘But my bow!’ I said. ‘I don’t want to squash my brand new bow.’

‘Don’t worry about your blessed bow – just stay there and don’t move,’ she hissed.

I could see the fear in her eyes as she crouched down in the dirt with me.

‘What is it, Mum?’ I asked. ‘Why are those two planes shooting at each other?’

‘It’s the war,’ she said. ‘I think it’s started.’

It was Sunday, 3 September 1939 and life as we knew it was about to change beyond all recognition because of a man called Adolf Hitler.