Rainbow Pixie Bonnets .....

 Some people knit to reduce stress.   I know that to be true because I was one of them before my problem of painful wrists became so great that I had to give it up.   There were few things I looked forward to more than sinking before a batch of TV soaps with a half-completed garment in a moderately complicated pattern each evening leaving others to stack the dishwasher.   For years it seemed to me to be quite the best part of the day; well, allowing for exaggeration of course.

I didn’t mind too much what it was I was currently creating just as long as it was complex enough to require a modicum of attention whilst I followed the latest frolics and capers of those peopling Coronation Street at the time.   Sadly none of my children appreciated the sweaters I keenly offered to make them and I had wisely learned to make adequate enquiries before embarking upon a surprise project.   They would agree, however, to the very occasional scarf.   Throughout their university years I made a great many scarves though sadly many of them were promptly lost by the recipients and rarely found again. Suffice to say I was eventually reduced to knitting squares for blankets, enhanced by the practice of ever more convoluted stitch patterns.   Well that’s what happens if you have no grandchildren.  We ended up with a large number of blankets and would doubtless have even more if the arthritis had not put a stop to it.

Giving up knitting completely was more depressing than you might imagine especially since I had, over the years, amassed a great deal of knitting paraphernalia - a range of needles, both steel and bone together with up-to-the-minute stitch holders and a pile of attention-grabbing patterns.  Coronation Street was never the same thereafter.   My hands itched to be occupied but the resulting agony simply wasn’t worth any attempt and although I was repeatedly advised that a cortisone injection, though definitely itself not without pain, may well do the trick, being of a cowardly nature it was always put on the nearest back burner.

It was around this time of craftwork withdrawal pains that I at long last began to see how it was that my mother had taken so tirelessly to knitting.   She freely admitted to having been what she called a Worryguts all her life and she had long come to the conclusion that was the reason behind her habit of nail biting.   By the time skeins of wool were readily available in the shops of Gravesend once again after several years’ absence her pastime of choice was regularly creating what she called Jerseys primarily for me and once my brother was born, a variety of babywear in the pale colours of the time.   My father elected not to be dressed by her and looked nervous each time she mentioned the subject.   Even when I was still a young child I seemed to realise that her work lacked a certain finesse.  She was able to completely overlook the minutia of dropped stitches and the transposition of plain and purl rows.   To her these were minor matters amounting to pointless trivia.   Furthermore, upon completion each garment was assembled more and more carelessly and with ever bigger stitching.  She appeared to become increasingly impatient the closer she came to the ultimate conclusion of the latest undertaking .  

This undue haste was alarming to watch and the resulting garments became even more distressing to wear.   I began to dread the start of each new item even when it involved a more exciting than usual trip to the market to allow me to choose the yarn.   In fact I didn’t hesitate to choose the newly launched Rainbow yarn, bursting as it was with a startling array of tints and hues simply because I thought she might refuse and for some reason the purchase could be delayed for a while.   To my astonishment she immediately agreed to my choice and my heart sank because I was beginning to feel more and more ashamed of the lack of skill and general sloppiness of her handiwork.   Later, overhearing her tell my Aunt Mag that her Jean had chosen some lovely colourful yarn for her new jersey and it was as clear as daylight she should always be allowed to do the choosing, I felt embarrassed by my own priggishness and lack of family loyalty.   

Her progress with any new project was invariably rapid but she was more keen than usual to make a start with the Rainbow yarn.  By the time I got home from school next day the skeins had already been rolled into balls with the help of an upturned kitchen chair and I was not called upon to hold them aloft until my arms ached.      

It seemed no time at all until my class teacher Mrs Allen commented on the newly completed and vibrantly colourful garment I was wearing for the very first time and wanted to know who had made it for me.   Ever conscious of the slapdash nature of the work, I put on my sweetest voice and breathlessly told her that mostly it was made by my mother but I had helped out and I was responsible for the sewing together of it in its entirety.   After all, surely a child of only eight would be expected to make mistakes.  She nodded knowingly and said that she rather thought I might have done some of the work but overall I had done a commendable job - although the stitching could have been neater.  It must feel good, she added, to be wearing something I had helped to make myself.   I nodded with false enthusiasm.

 It was then I began to realise that I should pay serious attention to diverting my mother from knitting to some other less troubling pastime.     For a while I managed to steer her away from child size garments via toy size ones by complaining that neither my doll nor my teddy bear had anything decent to wear.  To my satisfaction she immediately obliged by making a start on a whole new wardrobe for each of them, telling me this was an excellent way of using up wool scraps.   Although the resultant apparel was quicker to appear than I had anticipated, I found little to fault it and in any case I was old enough to realise that neither toy was going to be too distressed if the stitching could have been improved.   I then persuaded my younger cousins Ann and Little Violet to demand clothing for their dolls.   Ann, who had inherited hers from her older sister along with a dolls’ pram with proper springs, said it had never had clothes and was quite accustomed to managing without them and declined.  Later I wondered if, though only five, she was already aware of the downside side of her aunt’s work.  Little Violet on the other hand showed an immediate interest which was probably because she reacted warmly on every occasion anyone paid her attention.   My aunts all said this was because she was a poor motherless little soul and my own mother agreed, adding that the dear little mite didn’t ask for much in life.   I privately thought that living as she did with our fearsome grandmother asking for anything would have been a fruitless exercise.  

The reason behind Little Violet’s interest was because her father, on one of his rare flying visits, had very recently turned up at the house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford, armed with a Walking-Talking Shirley Temple doll. It was not a new doll but one that had been grown out of and cast aside by his very new and far too-young-for-him wife who had never met Little Violet and was far too terrified of the thought of Old Nan to attempt to do so.    The recipient of the doll was unconcerned that it was a pre-loved Shirley Temple and simply delighted to own it because her life with our grandmother was not one in which toys of any kind played a big part.    Although Shirley Temple was already dressed in a red satin party dress it was agreed that she would greatly benefit from a mini jersey in the same rainbow wool as the one I now wore several days each week.   My mother seemed to whip one up almost overnight to the delight of her small niece and then upon a whim added a rather jaunty matching hat.   The distinctly more careful stitching on the garments made for the dolls did not escape my notice and I began to think that our York Road knitter did a much better job overall with smaller projects.   It was then that I had the brilliant idea of diverting her from jerseys into the general direction of headgear.

I suggested that as winter was approaching fast I would really like a hat of some kind to wear to school.   I had visions of a rather pretty intricate Dutch bonnet constructed from felt as worn by a number of girls attending St Botolph’s.    But sadly my hat was going to have to be of the knitted variety of course and so the dream faded fast.   What was produced in no time at all, from Rainbow yarn was what my mother called a Pixie Bonnet.     It had a pointed hood and long ties to form a bow under the chin.  She was quite delighted with it and called my father to look and he dutifully said that I definitely looked like a pixie.   Furthermore when examined closely the final stitching was moderately neat but even more importantly my mother decided overnight that headgear was her forte and I cannot remember being presented with another jersey for a number of years.

I cringed a little when I was sent to school in matching Rainbow jersey and bonnet especially when my mother commented that it was a pity I couldn’t wear the bonnet in the classroom as the outfit was so pretty.  Her views were definitely not those expressed by my classroom colleagues.  Barbara Scutts, in a new Dutch felt creation to welcome in a new winter was the first to observe that we must have a big store of that Rainbow wool at our house.   When she overheard me telling Beryl Stuart who had voiced half- hearted approval of the matching items that the hat was a pixie bonnet she chortled loudly and said I looked more like a goblin in it to her.   Jennifer Berryman appraised me quietly for a moment or two and then said in her opinion I looked more like her grandma’s garden gnome.   By the time Billy Elliot heralded the opinion of the male members of the class with some comment concerning the characters from Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs I had firmly resolved that the hat would have to go.   On the way home I unhesitatingly tossed it over a garden fence in Springhead Road and then ran as fast as I could to the corner of York Road before nonchalantly slowing down for the last thirty seconds of the journey.  

Strangely its absence was not noticed for a day or two and it took a particularly cold and frosty morning to urge my mother to search for it among the coats and scarves at the bottom of the stairs, growing more and more exasperated when it wasn’t found.   It was a crying shame she said because it looked so lovely with the jersey and it was a great pity I couldn’t be trusted to take more care of my clothes.   It wasn’t too long, however, before a replacement was provided, and I was told I was very lucky as there had been barely enough wool left and in fact the ties had of necessity been dispensed with and replaced with a button under the chin.  

It was several weeks before the alarming afternoon of the replacement yarn supply.   I arrived home from school to find my mother red cheeked and excited saying she had only just that minute got home herself from Gravesend and that earlier in the day she’d heard from Mary Newberry that they had a further batch of Rainbow yarn at the stall in the market so she’d raced hell for leather over there to make sure she got some.  My heart sank and I felt prickling at the back of my eyes when I contemplated the number of pixie bonnets that might come forth from the skeins she triumphantly scattered on the kitchen table. To ensure a bonnetless few days the button-under-the-chin version would have to be lost as soon as possible, which of course it was.

In effect its replacement took less than a week to emerge and when it did it was with an even more pronounced point of the hood and even longer ties for beneath the chin.   My poor mother was enormously pleased with it, so much so that I was instructed to wear it the very next day which I did with a very heavy heart.

The onslaught of scorn and derision concerning which particular kind of mythical character from a Blytonesque world of enchantment I was now emulating was something I of course expected but I didn’t imagine it to cause quite as much amusement as it did.  I was somewhat surprised when imps, brownies and leprechauns were added to the list of faery folk rumoured to be populating our kitchen fireside and my frantically knitting mother’s imagination.    Billy Elliot who was much better read than the rest of us even suggested we might be housing a Hobbit but none of us really understood what that actually was. The end result of all this was that the replacement Rainbow pixie bonnet did not last into a second wearing but instead was discarded over the wall of yet a further Springhead Road garden.   When its absence was noticed a more in-depth enquiry was launched than that which had followed the previous disappearances.   After all did I really imagine that my mother had nothing to do except create pixie bonnets for me?

A pleasing interval of ten days or so followed before the next piece of headgear appeared at the end of my bed like an unwelcome Christmas gift.   To add insult to injury it came with a large safety pin with which it could be pinned to my jersey to avoid any chance of it falling off into the gutters of Springhead Road or The Hill as I wended my way to school.   I pointed out that it would be impossible for me to manage the unpinning once I arrived at school and I was advised that I should ask my teacher for help, the implication being that I was by now much too irresponsible to be treated like a normal eight-year-old.   The thought of asking Mrs Allen for help with something as mundane as a hat having reached the great age of eight and a half was horrifying.   It certainly prevented me from discarding Rainbow bonnet number four for the time being.

The teasing and name calling regarding wayside faery folk that would be more at home within the pages of an encyclopaedia of mythology continued, however because that was the way of children of the time.  This was especially so when the victim was likely to be reduced to tears which of course I was.   Complaining to anyone seen to be in authority would have been unacceptable and largely ineffective and so it was not at any stage considered.     My feelings of fury, however, became ever more acute – with the persecutors themselves, with the blissfully unaware Mrs Allen and most of all with my mother and her habit of high-speed knitting.  

The problem needed a more advanced and cutting-edge solution so having investigated just how many skeins of Rainbow yarn actually remained in the bag at the bottom of the kitchen cupboard I decided they should be the first to go before I tackled the problem of the surviving bonnet itself.    I was far too frightened to discard the yarn in the dustbin; in those days the contents of bins would seem quite foreign to us now.  Rainbow yarn would draw unwelcome attention immediately and the dustmen themselves, though my mother always claimed they were dozy buggers, might even retrieve it and return it to the household.   Instead I waited until a shopping trip to the Co-op was taken together with my small brother in his pushchair.  I then took the opportunity of running as fast as possible to the nearby railway bridge just before the four pm express to London was due to thunder through.   Cautiously climbing onto the bridge wall and being as careful as possible I hurled the hated yarn with all my strength into the path of the engine, all three skeins of it.   To my great satisfaction it was carried atop of the enormous machine immediately in the direction of the city.  

Despite my immediate gratification the problem of the remaining bonnet and its hated safety pin endured of course and although I realised once it did a disappearing act an enquiry akin to the Holy Inquisition would be launched, my desire to rid myself of it was so great I was unable to allow too much time to elapse before it followed its predecessors into the front gardens of Springhead Road.   

The ensuing investigation was like a mini nuclear blast.   My mother found it very hard to believe that she had been mistaken as to the skeins of Rainbow wool remaining at the bottom of the cupboard and was reluctant to believe that my toddler brother had somehow or other disposed of them.   Furthermore my ongoing carelessness with clothing was astonishing.  She’d a good mind to beat me senseless.   I should just wait for my father to get home because he was bound to beat me – mark her words and no mistake.   I was quite unable to be trusted. 

In the end nobody beat me.   My joyous punishment was to be that she would never, ever waste her time making hats of any description for me again – never! Not even if I went down on bended knee!

A Mortifying Moment

 

There was definitely a shortage of elastic after the war although according to most of the women in the local community the situation had eased a little.   Elastic is not something that most five-year-olds give much attention to and I did not differ from others in this respect.   In fact I had not given it a moment’s consideration until the humiliating incident in my first week of school.  It might even have been my second week of school because by the time it happened I had quite given up crying bitterly for my mother and was beginning to enjoy the novelty of playing with the lumps of modelling clay known as plasticene, an activity that was entirely new to me.  The plasticene itself had no doubt started life in an array of bright colours but over time had deteriorated to a grey sludge-brown and my mother suspected it harboured both TB and scabies and furthermore had been handled since the year dot by hordes of children and you never knew where their fingers had been.   This was not a favourable summing up of the activity but nevertheless as it was not available in any shape or form at our house I was delighted to play with it.  

In those days at St Botolph’s Primary School we sat in double desks with lids that opened to reveal storage spaces for books, pencils and the afore-described lumps of modelling clay that we usually used immediately after the dinner break.   Each afternoon Miss Honour our glamorous young teacher with long blonde hair and red finger nails, instructed us to retrieve our balls of plasticene and carefully make for her what our mothers had given us for our dinner.    I set to with enthusiasm, making a range of cuisine items that may or may not have been on the dinner menu that week at 28 York Road.   Georgie Freeman my desk mate and younger brother of my best friend Molly from 31 York Road produced obscure grey blobs that he told me and also Miss Honour were shredded wheat with milk.   I reflected with a certain degree of envy that such exciting dinners would never be allowed at number 28.   My ever-critical mother, on the other hand was less than complimentary and said it was a crying shame and that her sister Mag was much the same, dishing up bread and milk day after day never mind that those boys of hers were all but fully grown.   I was of course equally envious of my cousins and their daily doses of bread and milk, most especially when made with delicious condensed milk from a tin rather than the boring variety we had in bottles.

 At the time of my mortifying moment concerning elastic we had not yet got to the modelling clay stage of the day so it must have been late morning.   I am reasonably clear about this time frame because I had first become aware of the problem during morning playtime, therefore electing not to take part in Molly’s skipping game even though she was playing with a rope that had proper wooden handles and belonged to her older sister.   To my horror, after paying my usual visit to the girls’ lavatories whether-or-not-I-needed-to-go as instructed by my mother, I was quite unable to make my pink winceyette knickers stay up around my waist.   I spent several minutes frantically attempting to force them to remain in place before abandoning the task and heading speedily towards the relative safety of the wooden bench bestowed upon the school by a previous headmaster.    Barbara Scutts who was already emerging as a bossy and opinionated student immediately told me that the bench was for the use of teachers only and I was going to be in Big Trouble if I did not vacate it but I ignored her and before she could berate me further the end of playtime bell sounded and I was able to escape back to the infants’ classroom desperately trying to keep my wayward undergarment in place.   It was not easy!

            Back in the classroom it was not until we stood up to sing Run Rabbit Run that to my horror the cloud of pink descended once more to my ankles and Georgie standing beside me stopped singing immediately and observed loudly that my knickers were on the floor.   Stepping out of them I hastily raised the desk lid and placed them alongside the lump of modelling clay at which he announced to as many of the class already aware that something untoward was happening, that I had taken my knickers off.   Once the handful of pink was safely out of sight I treated him to as withering a look as I could manage whilst fighting tears and said that he was a liar and would go to hell.   Undeterred Georgie called loudly to Miss Honour, still enthusiastically engaged in playing the piano that I had taken my knickers off and put them in my desk and it was his opinion that I had piddled in them.   This of course attracted the immediate attention of at least a third of the class with Barbara Scutts leaning backwards from her place in the row ahead of us in an attempt to track the actual whereabouts of my underwear.

It took Miss Honour several minutes to stop playing, encourage us to finish the song which proved impossible, and investigate what item of clothing, if any, was actually in my desk and what state it was in.   When she finally did so, she was followed by a procession of interested onlookers, Barbara to the forefront saying my elastic was probably broken and then when she was ignored vociferously enquiring as to whether she was correct.    I visualised throwing my Uncle Harold’s darts at her, the ones I had been expressly forbidden to play with and did but he didn’t find out.  Then I wondered if she realised how deep my hatred of her had become.  

But Miss Honour after holding up the handful of pink and reassuring herself that the item of clothing was not even slightly damp, had magically produced a safety pin from somewhere on her person and regardless of the audience and my clear reluctance to co-operate, was proceeding to assist me back into the offending garment before firmly pinning it to my liberty bodice.   I was to tell my mother that the elastic needed replacing she instructed, otherwise they would keep falling down.  Barbara was making helpful comments about elastic and Georgie was grinning broadly.  Oh how I detested them both!

 I recall nodding miserably, filled with loathing for each and every one of the attentive spectators, wishing endless misfortune upon them and when we were released at dinner time it was of course the very first piece of news I imparted to my mother standing at the school gate, though barely able to speak coherently through the torrents of tears. 

Once at home and whilst I ate my sliced half a sausage with reheated vegetables from the previous day, the elastic was deftly replaced, amid observations that it was still hard to come by and I was to make sure not to treat it too roughly when pulling up and down otherwise I would find myself reduced permanently to using a pin and I wouldn’t like that at all.   I was quite certain this was correct and decided that I would henceforth as far as possible abandon the playtime visit to the girls’ lavatories whether-I-needed-to-go-or-not.   It was more than likely I would be able to manage perfectly well by employing in depth bladder control until elastic became more readily available again.

When I got back to school that afternoon to my relief the mishap was not immediately mentioned and even Barbara Scutts appeared to have forgotten about it.    We settled down to our plasticene session, and Miss Honour said that today we no longer had to make what we had eaten for dinner, we could make whatever we wanted to.   What a treat!   I set to work making my teddy bear, recently transgendered from male to female for some reason now forgotten and renamed Sugar.   

Alongside me Georgie appeared to be engaged in the creation of a very long worm and I felt with great satisfaction that my model was an enormous improvement on his.    Miss Honour walked between the desks asking us about our models.   Because I was inordinately pleased with my work, thinking it closely resembled Sugar the Bear I beamed with pride when she spoke words of approval and managed to stick my tongue out at Georgie when she turned towards him.   She asked him if he was making a snake.  He said he wasn’t and to my horror added that he was making the broken elastic from my wet knickers.   I felt strongly he should be reprimanded in some way whilst loudly protesting that my knickers had been completely dry but Miss Honour simply ignored us both and began to speak to Barbara about the puppy she was making.  Barbara importantly explained that it was her grandmother’s Scotch terrier and its name was Dougal.

Despite the fact that his sister was my best friend I found it impossible to forgive Georgie for a very long time.  

A Possible Brother

 

            I first became aware of André when he was still under a year old, in a photograph sent by my father from North Africa along with dates and dried bananas in a very fancy box with foreign writing on the sides.    The photo was not just of André but essentially of a group on a beach which later I thought looked like any old beach though I was told it was in a place called Tunisia where the beaches have to be seen to be believed.  My father was seated on the sand and above him the baby was dangled on his shoulders by a young woman, presumably its mother.   

            I was possibly three or four years old at the time and aware that we had been waiting for a parcel and if I was good it would no doubt contain a doll in what I was told would be National Costume.   I had no idea what National Costume might be but the parcel I now write of clearly did not contain a doll of any description, just the strange dried fruit which once I had sampled I rapidly decided I was not keen on at all.     It was clear that the box also contained something my mother was not altogether indifferent to.   Standing by the kitchen table, the dates and bananas displayed before her in all their dehydrated splendour she had plucked the small snapshot from their midst and now held it between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand so that it caught the morning light from the kitchen window.   She was standing unnaturally straight, her left arm across her breast and she slowly shook her head back and forth murmuring something I was not completely able to understand.   It was perfectly clear that whatever message the beach photograph contained she was disturbed by it.    I was more disturbed by the missing doll, long promised but slow to arrive.

            A day or two later my Aunt Mag was invited to examine and appraise the photo over cups of tea in the front room of the house in Iron Mill Lane.   My aunt’s front room wasn’t kept for best the way ours was but occupied and used on a daily basis and my mother said this was because Mag wasn’t much cop at keeping a room special and if that house with its hallway and inside lavatory was hers she would certainly not be letting those boys come and go as they pleased, tramping over all the mats whether it was a Sunday or a birthday or not.   The trouble with Mag was she wasn’t fussy.

            No longer straight of spine my mother now sat hunched over on one of my aunt’s matching easy chairs that rocked slightly if you were heavy enough to negotiate the mechanism which I never was.   She was asking what Mag thought.  Did she think there might be something Between Them?    And did that child resemble anyone?    My aunt took the snapshot over to the bay window where you were able to get an uninterrupted view of the Three Jolly Farmers were it not for the almond tree, and held it up high.   No, she said at last, there was no resemblance whatsoever.    I wondered what it was they were so intent upon discussing and when the photo was placed on what my aunt called her coffee table though she didn’t drink coffee, I picked it up and demanded to know who the people were but they were paying no attention to me at all and my mother was saying that there were times when she felt that getting married had been the worst day’s work she ever did by a long chalk at which my aunt poured more tea and said not to talk such tommy rot.   There were some very good things about Bern.   He was a lovely chap even if he wasn’t a patch on her Harold.   He barely took a drink and didn’t smoke and didn’t use bad language.  What more did Nell want that’s what she’d like to know.   At which my mother muttered something about not being able to trust him and my aunt said well she couldn’t have everything.

            Going home on the 480 bus I learned that it was all very well for Mag to start laying down the law about who might have some good points.  Yes, all very well indeed since her Harold hadn’t been called up and she didn’t know what it was like to be all alone in the blackout never mind the blitz.   What was a woman by herself supposed to do when the warden knocked on the door late at night saying the blackout curtain had chinks in it that’s what she’d like to know?  It was all very well for them that still had men at home with all their health and strength.  Mag didn’t have the first clue as to how it was for others with their husbands miles away and having to bring up kiddies all alone.   Knowing I was one of those kiddies I sat as quietly as possible and tried to be good.  I was accustomed to these diatribes that from time to time emerged when my mother was under stress and realised that no response was expected from me.

            There was not much more comment made about André as far as I can recall for several years, not until Hitler had been well and truly defeated, my father was home again and working at the cement works in Northfleet, and my brother had been born and had already learned to crawl.   I was aware that despite my mother’s disapproval my father kept in touch with a number of the new friends he had made during World War Two, particularly a range of mysterious aunts.   I had already met Aunts Wilhelmina and Philomena and their exotic mother from Greece, who actually came to visit us unexpectedly on one occasion causing mayhem in our household.   Now he spoke frequently about yet another aunt and her mother from Tunisia on whose farm he had convalesced for months recovering from some kind of illness contracted during his time in the desert.   This was the illness that my mother later felt that by rights, once he had died, she should receive a war pension for on the basis that he would never have fallen ill in the first place had it not been for the war.  But that is not strictly part of this story.

    The North African aunt was called Dominique and she lived with her son André and her mother, Mrs Rampant on their family farm.  There were several brothers who helped run the farm and had been teenage boys at the time when my father had lived with them recovering from his illness.  The whole family had been distressed when the time finally came for him to leave. These were the people he longed to reconnect with and had forlorn hopes of a family holiday with them.   We would all four of us go to North Africa he said, and stay with the Rampant family and eat olives and oranges and dates and drink wine on summer evenings.   My mother had already made it perfectly clear that hell would freeze over before she would be prepared to visit a French farm in Africa of all places.  Holidays as everybody knew, cost money and spent on farms in Africa were likely to cost an arm and a leg.  And what’s more she was certain that wine would not suit her stomach.    A week in a caravan in Tankerton would be good enough for her and that was a fact and should be good enough for anyone with any sense!   There did not seem a great deal more to be said on the subject and my father tried hard not to say too much.

            Nevertheless, as time passed Aunt Dominique assiduously kept in touch sending regular letters on flimsy airmail paper with news of all the happenings on the farm.   Sometimes small, square black and white photos were enclosed, of her mother relaxing with a glass of wine on what I learned was the terrace, of her brothers hard at work, engaged in some farm activity, and of little André growing older, starting school and one of him holding aloft a certificate for excellence of achievement.  

            At the sight of the photographs my mother would grow tense and pretend that she was disinterested in looking at them, giving them just a cursory glance when they were passed across the kitchen table but later when my father had departed for his two-to-ten shift at Bevans Cement Works she would examine them closely.    Armed with tea and a Nice biscuit, the snapshots would be reclaimed from behind the mantlepiece clock and spread on the table to be minutely scrutinised.   Those depicting André might be taken to the window and held up and there were times when she rocked back and forth a little and stared into the distance.

            If my grandmother came to visit they might be laid out between the teacups so they could both pore over them and the story of my father’s desire to return to Tunisia would be told again.  Old Nan would say that she couldn’t understand that for the life of her and that Bern could be as silly as cats’ lights at times.  Everybody knew that them foreign places were not much chop at all and certainly not worth all the money spent and all the palaver in getting to them in the first place with Lord only knows how many changes of trains and boats.   You couldn’t beat a week in Ramsgate when all was said and done and oh so easily reached by a fast train from London Bridge.  Once when Aunt Dominique sent a photo of herself dressed for a party and looking glamourous Old Nan observed that if she had her way she’d clean that smarmy looking cow rotten.   And then my mother sobbed in silence for several minutes, her shoulders heaving and I asked why she was crying and was told to button my lip so I did.

      The last photograph we received of André was one of him looking older and very smart in the uniform of the school he would be starting soon and where it was hoped he would be able to learn advanced mathematics because that was his strength.   My father would have been pleased because he was undoubtedly the one who gave the photos of this strange French boy from the farm in Tunisia the most attention.   However, it was by then April 1952 and he had already been dead for a number of months and my mother had gained considerable confidence now that she had two part time cleaning jobs.  She no longer held André to the light, but simply glanced at him and said she would have to write to his grandmother to tell her the sad news.   I wondered why she would not write to Aunt Dominique instead but thought better of asking and instead held my hand out for the photo which she passed to me at once before briskly clearing the breakfast cups from the kitchen table. 

            For some inexplicable reason I took it to school with me intending to show it to the other girls whilst elaborating on tales of the farm where all manner of bizarre and mysterious fruits hung from trees all around, most already dried.  I don’t think anyone was particularly interested but because the photo was never missed I kept it and from time to time looked at it and as we both grew older, wondered what had become of André.

            I’m not sure when it was that I began to realise that there was a distinct possibility that he was our half sibling but when my brother in an attempt to get to know more about his father, embarked upon an in depth investigation of our family roots I was quite certain he would be at once intrigued.   It was startling to find that he wasn’t and his obvious disinterest was pronounced.   Although I brought up the topic on several occasions he always managed to divert the flow of conversation.  Now I wish that I had been more insistent on discussion but his indifference made it all too easy to look for the Too Hard basket, leave it for a more opportune time.   Somehow or other the collection of childhood photos of André have disappeared.  Only that first one of him as an infant remains, being dangled on my father’s shoulders on the beach in North Africa.