When Toys Became Politically Incorrect

   Toys were simply toys when I was a child and there were few to be found in wartime in the shops of Gravesend. That’s not to say they were totally absent of course and older boys being always drawn to catapults invariably made their own.   This fascination for weaponry had for many of them grown out of years of practice constructing bows and arrows, some of which were very effective. Many clever mothers could make Red Indian headdresses out of chicken feathers and were definitely expected to especially around Christmas time.   The less creative boys carried out in depth searches of local bomb-sites and gutters for odd lengths of wood or metal to rapidly convert into rifles and six-shooters.  Therefore the ongoing sagas of violence between various indigenous American tribes and the newcomers keen to destroy them were never in serious danger of disappearing.

   Knitting mothers turned their hands to teddy bears and there were many and varied patterns they could follow if necessary.   The particularly adventurous also produced elephants and monkeys and the unimaginative simply made snakes.     Sewing mothers trawled the haberdashery counters at Woolworths where from time to time forlorn little heaps of moulded and starched linen faces lay begging to be made into proper dolls and rescued from what looked like a serial killer’s fantasy world.   And, dare I say it, the now much maligned Gollywog was still regularly produced in the homes of Northfleet and Gravesend if the desired scraps of suitable colours could be found on the wool counter.  

   Back then we were as one totally unaware that Gollywogs should never have been permitted in any shape or form in the first place and that might have been because we did not actually see them as representing those we now call People of Colour.   Nobody bothered to kindly explain the history and provenance of these dolls to us as they might today.   If they had there is some doubt as to whether anyone would have listened.  Those thoughtless and inherently racist WW2 knitters might in a more sophisticated age have been selected for compulsory education on Woke Parenting but back then women were also busy doing shifts in factories replacing all the men already gone to war.    Considering the circumstances no-one would have seen the idea as a productive use of time and resources. 

    A number of my aunts were working at Vickers in Crayford, doing what my mother said was dangerous work and she wouldn’t do it herself for all the tea in China but they said the pay was so good it was hard to refuse.   I was glad she stayed home because those cousins with working mothers had to spend time with Old Nan being what was called Minded.   My grandmother was not terribly fond of her grandchildren and it was best to do as requested and firmly button your lip when at her house and sit as still as possible so you didn’t get what she called a Backhander.  She didn’t ever play games with us but she did talk to us about the past and said that during the First War female factory workers were called Munitionettes and that someone called Mrs Pankhurst had persuaded them to take up the work.  Mrs Pankhurst had thrown her lot in with a man called Lloyd George and for the life of her Old Nan couldn’t understand why he would trust her because being the cow she was, she had once put a bomb under his house.    She came to the conclusion it was because he was Welsh and the Welsh were known to have no sense whatsoever.   None of us found this a particularly interesting story.

   Overall we didn’t pay a great deal of attention to our grandmother’s assessments of social situations because she was known to lag well behind the times.   For instance it was to be years before she truly trusted the use of Penicillin, as late as 1950 telling us that a tea-leaf poultice for infection of any kind was as good a remedy if not better.   But much more importantly to me back then was that she had no ability or interest as a toy maker.

   My mother on the other hand was quite good at making toys when the raw materials for doing so were available though for this reason she didn’t completely blossom in this area until the post war period when her ability to produce a range of dressing up clothes out of crepe paper and old blankets impressed the entire neighbourhood.  At around this time of her creative notoriety more toys were slowly entering the country in time to fill Christmas stockings for those lucky enough to have been born into families with money to spare.   Many of them would almost certainly find themselves on the Banned list today.   Astonishingly Christmas 1948 saw a number of mechanical smoking dogs and cats.  These caused a lot of amusement though Uncle Harold said it was a bloody waste of good smokes.  As well as not understanding that Gollywogs were disgusting back then we thought that smoking was definitely acceptable if you could afford to.   I couldn’t wait to become grown-up enough to start which my cousin June said could be fourteen.

   In fact smoking was so acceptable that the toy cigarette had become much sought after and the most popular variety were those made of sugar that could be eaten before they were confiscated by the classroom teacher.   If you could acquire a discarded Wills Woodbines or Players Weights packet to contain them then all the better.   Over several years they were definitely much in vogue and when Jean Taylor and her best friend Wendy Selves somehow came by some that actually, in a truly magical manner, produced realistic smoke we were all most impressed even though they could not under any circumstances be eaten.  Keith Dyke tried to do so and was sick.  Molly from No 31 told me on the way home from school that although the smoke producing ones were interesting she would still rather have the edible variety any day of the week and I agreed with her.  

   As the war years receded factories got back into the business of producing toys once more and home made bows and arrows were among the first iconic items to be discarded for commercially produced ones.   This trend continued and toy guns for homicidally inclined young boys became many and varied.   My brother was particularly fond of those that could be loaded with reams of caps that were as noisy as possible and he happily roamed the neighbourhood with his friend of the moment, Hedley Davis, annihilating both the armed and the unarmed.  By this stage he was also the owner of various cowboy and Indian outfits courtesy of our mother which he generously shared to maintain his popularity.   Nobody expressed the slightest concern that this form of play, bent as it was largely on human destruction, was in any way undesirable.      

   In fact it was to be many years before some parents began to doubt the wisdom of it and misgivings wriggled their way into the minds of those who Meant Well.   The first time I stumbled across such reservations was at a Playgroup Mothers coffee meeting in Ladbroke Grove, West London.  It was 1970 and the end of Ladbroke Grove closest to the station had already become fashionable with the young and upwardly mobile.  The mothers were generally of the stay at home rather than go to work variety and the children all had fashionable names like Polly and Fanny or Samuel and Hugo.   One ultra-earnest young woman in a Barbour jacket who had furnished every room of her home from Habitat was gravely advising the group that she and her husband had quite decided that Oliver would not under any circumstances ever be allowed war toys and in fact at the age of four he had never expressed any desire to play with guns.   There did not seem to be overall sympathy for the stance as far as I can recall and toy guns were still one of the gifts of choice to hand out to all boys under ten. In fact it was rumoured that young Oliver was known for extreme violence towards other gun owners in his fervent desire to possess one.

  Change was definitely in the offing.  For two decades girls had been able to choose to own black, brown or white dolls and did so, and by 1970 Chinese and Minstrel make up sets were very popular.   It’s hard to imagine what might happen in toy shop aisles if such items made their way onto the shelves today.   It simply did not occur to well meaning aunts and grandmothers that a time would come when such toys would be fit only for the funeral pyre.   That doesn’t mean of course that these odd notions were totally dismissed and in fact at times they provoked a certain amount of animated debate but they were still seen as largely the province of Vegans and the those who supported the abolition of the prison system.   In fact there was more general approval for activists on the Circle Line who were at that time inclined to throw paint onto women unwise enough to wear furs.   

    A decade later when I had children with a joint obsession for Playmobil kits, a pirate ship sent from a relative in Germany complete with shackled slave did not cause any comment in New Zealand apart from envy from those with similarly addicted offspring.  We were in fact then a woefully un-Woke nation where war toys were still very much in vogue despite being harder to find in London.    By the late eighties those who lusted after Barbie could avail themselves of the Spanish Bullfighting version and did so for a number of years.   My daughter who as a general rule maintained that she hated Barbie at one stage in fact expressed an interest in one although she did so in a low voice.

   In the interim however the unhappy and bewildered Gollywog had reached the bottom of the Politically Incorrect Plaything heap and had even been removed from Robertson’s Jams.    He and his like had been whisked with enormous efficiency from the shelves of all Decent toyshops and even the Church Fete hand knitted variety was likely to find itself seized and destroyed and then adversely commented upon in local newspapers.  It was hard to believe that things could get worse but inevitably they did - so much so that in thoroughly modern 2021 sensible people look askance if the G word is mentioned at all and those who want to maintain their place on the Playcentre Parents’ Committee might even pretend not to hear you should it trip from your tongue. 

   Despite the general odium towards him you have to hand it to Golly because he never entirely disappears and is inclined to pop up with resolute regularity regardless of the decline in appreciation of him.  Every few months you can be sure to witness a Beautiful Media Person, fully Woke and filled with formidable venom, spitting out information that a version of this vile and racist toy has been uncovered yet again at another fund raising event.   A twenty second clip of uniformed persons oddly reminiscent of the Third Reich and intent upon ridding the area of all traces of the unfortunate toy might even flash across our screens or perhaps our imaginations.

   Either way we are assured that once again society is made a safer place for the playtime hours of the young and the Right Thinking Woke among us will breathe a joint sigh of relief.    But Wrong Thinkers like me and maybe one or two of you, who remember the Gollywog from his heyday can only extend a symbolic hand of comfort in his direction because it’s hard not to feel enormous sympathy for him.

Connie & the Ironing Incident

 

I felt compelled to buy the flat iron I stumbled across in a local Auckland junk shop twenty years ago and that compulsion was mostly because it brought back a rush of childhood memories.    Those memories centred firstly around Tuesday mornings and secondly around my cousin Connie and her school blouse.

            Tuesdays were ironing days at our house for years and that was because Mondays were wash days and usually most items were dry enough for ironing by Tuesday morning.   We had two flat irons, one substantially bigger than the other and they were heated on top of the kitchen stove in winter when there would always be a fire and on the smallest gas ring in summer when there wasn’t.  Both were on permanent loan from Little Nanny, whose real name was Great Aunt Martha Irons, and she lived near the station in Northfleet.  She was very old indeed and no longer did any ironing despite her name.   My mother said this was because Biddy, the downstairs lodger did all that was necessary in the hope that she would inherit the Singer sewing machine and the Bristol Glass and God knows what else when Little Nanny died.   I thought the other reason might be that the old lady seemed to own only two dresses, both made of black bombazine and they appeared never to be washed so unlikely to need ironing.  I didn’t mention this because I knew that Biddy was not to be trusted and out for all she could lay her hands on.

            When I was very young I quite enjoyed watching the ironing process especially when water was splashed onto garments resulting in dramatic hissing and clouds of smoke.   My mother talked a lot about the day she would be able to do the job Properly with an electric iron like the one her sister Mag owned, a Morphy Richards.   I learned that when you owned an electric model there was never any need to heat it via coals or gas because all you had to do was remove the kitchen light bulb and plug it into the vacant socket which is of course quite different from what you do these days.

            We did our ironing on the kitchen table, spread with an old blanket to save the wooden surface but Aunt Mag had recently become the owner of a new-fangled ironing board that you could fold up and place against the scullery wall once you had completed the job.   She had come a very long way from the humble flat irons that reigned supreme every Tuesday morning at our house but then I knew that she was wrapped up in herself ever since her Harold got that promotion down at Vickers.  It was to be some years before we progressed to an electric iron and that happened shortly after my father had blotted his copy book via yet another fling with a Fancy Woman. His assertions that there would be no further transgressions came with a substantial gift of repentance in the form of an electric iron – a Sunbeam which my mother maintained was a far superior brand to Morphy-Richards.   He said that the electric iron had been invented much longer ago than we might have imagined, in America in 1882 by someone called Henry Seeley but I didn’t quite believe him because it seemed unlikely that something invented so long ago would have taken quite as long to infiltrate into the riverside towns of North Kent.  He then elaborated on what the Chinese had used to do their ironing which appeared to be with shallow iron pans filled with hot coals and that also seemed improbable.   Once he progressed into sharing everything he knew about ironing days in the seventeenth century with what he said were Sadirons I was barely listening.  

            In fact after we became an electrically ironing family I gave little thought to the process for several years, not until my cousin Connie was blown across their Waterdales kitchen and according to her, very nearly killed.   Aunt Lou said it was because she’d been ironing in bare feet on a wet floor that in itself was because all the boys had traipsed over it after school and she should have had more sense.   My mother thought it was because Lou herself had always been too bone idle to set to like any normal mother and do the family ironing herself preferably on a Tuesday morning.   If she had only got her arse into gear then her Connie would not have been put in that position in the first place and it stood to reason.   We were frequent visitors to the Waterdales cousins and I never enjoyed the visits because there seemed to be far too many sullen and aggressive boys in the family and an unbending patriarch who thought that you were a child until you got married and produced children of your own and that children should be seen and not heard especially if they were female.   His downtrodden wife seemed to have always been completely suppressed and suffered from a variety of nervous conditions such as thinking there was a golf ball in her throat obstructing her swallowing mechanism and being quite unable to breathe for long periods of time.    I was never able to ascertain what my mother gained conversationally out of drinking tea with her.

            At this stage we visited at least twice a week because there were many discussions to be had as to whether I would be allowed to join Connie at Wombwell Hall or whether it was a waste of time and money to have me go there at all.   It had apparently been a waste of time for Connie to go to the Grammar School when she passed the Eleven Plus examination because she was female and therefore unlikely to need to be educated for a career.  At least Wombwell Hall catered for the girl who was going to get married and have children.   There she could acquire all the skills needed for cooking, cleaning, sewing and perhaps even child rearing.   Connie was not generally consulted about her future and was quite sensibly affronted at the fact that her brothers had been thought worth the investment of Grammar School uniforms.  Had she been asked her opinion about the path to take at Wombwell Hall, she said, she would have chosen the Commercial Course and she urged me to do so if I wanted more from life than a Council House full of children in the Waterdales of the future.   I didn’t need a great deal of encouragement because I had already decided that somehow or other some aspect of my future would involve shorthand and typing even if only for short periods. 

When I discussed the mishap of the iron with her, Connie placed the blame firmly at the feet of her father, the formidable Uncle Walter, my father’s oldest brother, who she said was too mean to buy her more than one school blouse.   She was some weeks into her first term at Wombwell Hall and being enrolled in the domestic course cleanliness and tidiness was of prime importance.  She maintained that it was impossible to be as clean and tidy as required with only one cream cotton school blouse unless it was washed after school on a twice weekly basis.  All very well but if she was to wear it again the following day this meant ironing it whilst it was still wet regardless of the state of the kitchen floor.   That might have been perfectly safe with an old-fashioned flat iron but the plugged-into-the-light-socket electric variety was a completely different proposition and it was absolutely necessary to ensure dry floors and preferably to own rubber soled footwear.

Rather thrillingly we were present when Uncle Walter was confronted with the facts of his only daughter’s near-death experience.   Aunt Lou had already collapsed into a soggy, tearful heap when he demanded to know who was responsible but before he could begin to direct his tirade of allegations in her direction Connie herself stepped forward with very straight back and shoulders, shaking her halo of blonde hair defiantly and looking like I imagined Shaw’s teenage Saint Joan might have looked.   In astonishingly loud tones she ordered him to stop bullying her mother though I think she used the word Hounding.   She would not have been in the dangerous position of doing ironing on a wet floor she said, had he allowed the purchase of two school blouses rather than one in the first place.   In short, if he had not been so mean.  So if anyone was to blame it was him.  

I found myself holding my breath because I rather expected him to slap her face for impertinence and order her straight to bed with no tea but he didn’t.   He lowered his voice and asked how much an extra school blouse would cost.   Connie said thirty-five shillings and then pocketed the two pound notes he slid across the table.   At her request I went with her to the haberdashery shop in Perry Street that sold school blouses, white for Colyer Road and cream for Wombwell Hall and furthermore didn’t close until five thirty.  It turned out that a suitable one cost a mere twenty eight shillings and sixpence and when I asked her if her father would be pleased when she came back with so much change Connie said No because she wasn’t planning to give it to him.    My open-mouthed admiration did not go unnoticed because she added that you never knew when you might need some other item for school, like a pair of lisle stockings for instance.  She further explained that she really didn’t want to fight for everything and a girl who went to Wombwell Hall would want to be a credit to the school.

The following year when I started the Commercial course within a very short space of time I began to understand what she had meant.

S I X M O N T H S ON . . . .

 

It’s now six months since he died and long enough for me to have largely come to terms with losing him – except that I haven’t.   I still wake up crying some mornings and I still walk around the house in conversation with him.   Although I have dutifully joined groups I am nowhere close to building that promised New Life. 

I constantly have to remind myself that I am not in a unique situation and that half of humankind experiences this emptiness and sorrow at some stage in their lives.  It doesn’t help much though and there are times when the separation feels limitless and the silence is intolerable.  

I frequently think back to the days before he became ill, those I call the Good Old Days, the time we thought would last for ever.   The problem with those days is that it’s impossible to appreciate their worth whilst you are living them.   I have begun to try to determine which of the forty-eight years we spent together were really the best ones.   Was it when the children were still small, in our bush paradise in Kohimarama when Patrick was a junior school boy and the younger two pre-schoolers.   Or was it when they were all slightly older and making plans for the future.

It was impossible not to develop a huge respect for Hank Harris.   He was a staunch and loving father yet he steadfastly refrained from interfering in his children’s lives and allowed them to do the things they most desired to do and carve their own paths.   He was an exceptional husband.  He believed in me and loved me unreservedly and never having experienced such unconditional devotion before in my life it was intoxicating.   And he loved Patrick, already four years old when they met, and he accepted his eccentricities.  Having been firmly rejected by his own father Patrick was ecstatic to be blessed with a replacement and returned his love with an enthusiasm that failed to wane with the passing years.

Hank was an extraordinarily good and decent human being who saw the best in everyone and marrying him was the single best decision of my life.   The years we had together were good years, the marriage was a happy one.    Naturally enough there were times when we fought, sometimes bitterly but we were able always to forgive and to forget with astonishing ease.   Gordie was completely aware that words hurled around in anger did not carry much meaning and he seemed simply unable to bear grudges and carry grievances around with him.   

Those terrible months when he was so ill were eased for him by his positive attitude to life and his dogged belief in modern medicine.   For me the increasing and insidious horror of that time was alleviated by the ongoing help of Sinead and Patrick who together went above and beyond filial obligation to give the kind of unwavering support that comes out of love and not duty.

And on good days we were together able to do some of those things that he enjoyed most and that made his spirits soar.   We dressed up in our finery and lunched out expensively at Cibo, just a short walk away.   We went together down to The Paddington for celebratory drinks and sometimes availed ourselves of their Sunday Roast!   And we sat in the midweek cathedral-like splendour of the Saatchi & Saatchi building for morning coffee.   Then those good days were suffused with hope and became firmly etched in memory and are now referred back to again and again.   They are perhaps almost in danger of becoming a part of the Good Old Days!  

Fantasy Places

 As far back as I can remember I had daydreams of fantasy worlds.   Even as a pre-schooler whilst listening to wartime broadcasting with my mother, still at the stage where I thought little people lived inside what we called The Wireless, I believed they went about the prime purpose of their lives after the programme finished and wondered what it would be like to join them.   Their names still linger within the furthest corners of memory, Alvar Lidell and John Snagge undoubtedly classy and elegant.  They presented important items of news and were given greatest attention by most of the adults in families like ours.  I had them going home to tiny houses very similar to those on The Overcliff at Gravesend.   Lord Haw Haw who I later learned was really called William Joyce who we hated and so jeered back at him whenever we heard his voice was forced by me to live rough under the railway bridge at Waterdales.   And Wilfred Pickles who wasn’t in any way stylish or grand but down to earth and with a funny accent that we certainly did not ridicule him for because he was largely one of us.  I gave him a cosy weatherboard cottage near the Three Daws.  

It was years before I abandoned the idea of these extraordinarily tiny people having lives on a different stratosphere and despite their size differential,  bearing strong similarities to Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput, a literary fantasy I encountered years later via Mr Will Clarke our inspirational teacher at St Botolph’s School.   Though certainly on a grander scale than Wirelessland Swift’s precise descriptions were delightfully reassuring that such places truly existed.   Why should Planet Earth be the only cosmos in any case?   Horses a mere four inches high, ridden by six inch tall Lilliputians many living and working in a beautifully described capital city called Mildendo seemed completely rational.  What could be more realistic, more believable?   Such details and a great love for Mr Clarke forced me to read on despite the fact that I found large tracts of the book incomprehensible and eventually put it aside for a future year.  

It was quite a revelation to find that the Bronte children, three of whom at least progressed to becoming greatly celebrated, spent a number of years weaving a comparable world of fantasy around a set of toy soldiers given to nine year old Branwell.  Sadly he, as he grew older he was mostly celebrated locally for his drunkenness and ability to cause mayhem at the village pub.   Prior to his alcohol binges, however, not only were the adventures of his soldiers, known as the Twelve Young Men, elaborate but so was the world in which they lived, Glasstown.   This world was mapped in its entirety by Branwell complete with mountain ranges, rivers and trade routes. Each of the siblings governed and ruled over one of the four kingdoms within of which the overall capital was Verdopolis.  They then went one step further into their joint flight of fancy and wrote down the adventures in miniscule and meticulous writing within the pages of tiny books, some of which can only be read comfortably with the aid of a magnifying glass.

When I discovered Mary Norton’s Carnegie Medal winner, The Borrowers, I was more than happy to set aside the latest Enid Blyton.   Her tiny people living in the walls and under the floors of possibly quite ordinary houses was a simply thrilling idea.  The fact that they seemed to depend solely on the huge human inhabitants for food, shelter and safety seemed unique to me at the time.   That if the humans decided to get a cat their environment would become so unsafe they would have to emigrate, exhilarating.   Little wonder then that these tiny folk were very wary of us.   I became an immediate fan and the travels of Gulliver were propelled even further into the future.  

Although my own painstakingly intricate imaginary worlds became ever more complex, changing imperceptibly to match my growing life experience, it did not at any stage occur to me to turn them into what we would now call hard copy.  I did keep notes at one stage as a memory aid but only because I wanted to avoid such blunders as my various mini-families giving the same names to their children.   Occasionally I made drawings of the wardrobe items of the most significant females and as the years passed I became keen on compiling plans of their country cottages and city apartments.   The cottages were always of the thatched roof variety with gardens sporting sunflowers, hollyhocks and daisies and clearly set in Southfleet or Cobham  but the apartments were more austere.  I only clearly remember one ten storey stone building overlooking a local bend in the Thames where cooking facilities were totally absent and all residents ate out at nearby five storey restaurant complexes, different cuisines featured on each floor.    Over time I realised that the buildings of my imagination had somehow or other all become life size, human style.  

As a child I was very keen to keep these constructed realms largely to myself although I did share them occasionally with Molly from No 31.   Her own alternative reality mostly featured California and Doris Day at that time, apart from a brief and terrifying invention called The Land of Scabs & Blood.   She was of a more robust emotional nature and much less fearful of inviting ridicule for this habit of venturing from the here and now whereas I continued to feel that endless invention was not something to broadcast to all and sundry.  It was to be a long time before I realised that fabricated realities become a pattern for a great many children.

My daughter without much prompting created Bearland and for several years wrote a stream of very similar stories featuring the mundane happenings of a tribe of teddy bears headed by Aunt Harriet and Uncle Henry together with their progeny and a great many first and second cousins.  Determined to learn to type, once she did so her output became astonishingly rapid though the story content did not change very much.    

The penny eventually dropped and when, decades later I devised holiday seminars for those children who didn’t mind what was essentially more school in the holidays, the Creation of Imaginary Lands became a regular feature over several years.   This seminar option was extremely popular with some who were only too anxious to reveal their ideas for others to witness via maps, models and stories.  It was astonishing to see how some children even devised complex languages with a proper grammatical structure which was certainly something that had never occurred to me at a similar age.   I was in my forties before I finally got back to the adventures of Gulliver.

Pledges Made to the Lord

 

God is definitely a useful entity no matter who he or she might be and in whatever form either or both of them might choose to reside.   Voltaire must have realised that long before the rest of us when he stated that if God didn’t already exist it would be necessary to invent Him - or these days perhaps Her as well. 

Although I don’t consider I have had a particularly close relationship with religion over the years, I certainly do not dismiss the idea of the existence of a higher power.  You could say that although God is not an altogether tangible idea for me, He always lurks reassuringly in the background of my life and for me He will always be male.  OK, call me old fashioned!    When you grow up with the idea of an all-knowing, all-seeing Deity that in itself acts very much as a comfort blanket.   You are aware that as a mere human you are fallible and when faced with difficult, painful situations if a solution can be conjured up with just a modicum of faith and an old-fashioned prayer or two it’s hard not to take advantage of this generosity.    I am almost embarrassed to recall the occasions when I have frantically bargained with the edge of that comfort blanket, attempting to offer deals to the Almighty concerning how often I will attend Mass if only a seemingly insurmountable problem can be solved.  Well that’s the way things go in the dusty corners of the life of a lapsed Catholic, Faith is never entirely eclipsed by Reason.

Although absolute belief has often been somewhat lacking in my life I’ve always had a great fondness for churches, not those vast cathedrals where God is pitted in serious competition with architecture, but small intimate places where the decades of hope and prayer can almost be heard to be hovering.   How easing of mind and spirit it is to sit within holy spaces for a time whether as a Believer or a Non-Believer, and most especially in a Catholic space where a candle can be lit to send a prayer hurtling into the ether.    Perhaps that’s what Nietzsche meant when he spoke of caves in which a dead God’s shadow might for ages be evident.  

Back in 1950 God was definitely all around us and whilst my father was alive he insisted that I should go to Mass on a regular basis.   At one time he always accompanied me but in the months before his death I definitely recall him leaving me at the rather forbidding doors of The Church of Our Lady of The Assumption and saying he was off to see a man about a dog and I was to walk home alone.   I didn’t mind particularly because I was used to walking alone and when he was not present I could forgo adding to the collection plate and spend the two pennies on bubble gum instead.   The church itself was not a welcoming place in any way at all.   It had been built by someone called Giles Gilbert Scott in 1914, entirely in brown brick which I thought to be most unattractive.  It was said that during the blitz the German Air Force used the tower as a guide towards London, knowing that when they could reference it they were well on the way to their principal target.   

On those Sundays when I was abandoned at the church door My mother would invariably ask, tight-lipped, where my father was when I got back home, slightly nauseous from incense and bubblegum.  When I told her about the man and the dog she would bang saucepans on the stove and hum `We’ll Meet Again’ rather too loudly.   On those days he was always late for Sunday dinner and when he did arrive we sat in silence.   It was years later that I realised that his regular absences probably involved the Fancy Women he was unable to tear himself away from.  

I was never totally at ease in that church on The Hill and much preferred the ancient parish church around the corner, by the old village green, St Botolph’s. It dated from the 14^th century and had a splendid carved oak screen which at school we were told was the oldest in Kent.   Back then the Sunday services were well attended and the hymns regularly sung were inspiring so there were times when I switched my attendance from Giles Gilbert Scott’s monstrosity and felt guilty as a result.    This desertion of what my father rather hypocritically viewed as the One True Church would have horrified him but fortunately he was never to become aware of it.  

Despite his attempts to maintain his reputation in the eyes of God by making a great deal of fuss about where I went to Mass, strangely he made little comment on the Sunday School I attended in the afternoons in the building on Dover Road that eventually became the United Reformed Church.   It was run by a group of enthusiastic unmarried women who were intent upon bringing sunshine into the lives of underprivileged children.   Consequently it was always an hour and a half of unadulterated fun consisting of singing, dancing, clapping, listening to stories, drinking orange juice and fighting over ginger biscuits.   From time to time outings were arranged to places like Whipsnade Zoo and Southend-on-sea where the best behaved children would be conveyed in what we called charabancs and would end up not behaving very well at all and being told they were forbidden to apply next time.   

I had little understanding of how much the Sunday School in Dover Road had to do with God at least not the God I was familiar with.  There were a lot of Bible stories and good Catholic families did not seem to be all that conversant with the Bible so there was not a great deal of encouragement for children in particular to read it.  At least that was my understanding.  Years passed before I realised that there was in fact an acceptable RC version called the Douay-Rheims Bible which contained 73 rather than 66 books.     My time at St Botolph’s had ensured that I was to become fond of and more at ease with the King James version and viewed it in much the same way as my favourite poems.   I placed preferred verses such as `consider the lilies of the field’ or `bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you’ alongside `The Forsaken Merman’ or `The Lady of Shalott’ without too much consideration as to the possible message being conveyed.   In the everyday life that was lived completely outside of the beauty of the written word I would never for one moment have considered blessing those that cursed me.  This was possibly because I was far too influenced by the vengeful attitudes of my mother and aunts spurred on by my pitiless grandmother.    It would be rare in our family to consider forgiving your enemy.   Instead the various ways of hitting back hard enough to ensure the wrong done to you would not be repeated would be considered.

Nevertheless, despite our shortcomings we considered ourselves as staunchly devout as others.   This was despite the fact that Aunt Martha who almost always attended Sunday Mass on a regular basis after Uncle Paddy was killed, was frequently heard to say that God was definitely love, but it was best to get it in writing.    This mini homily was lifted directly from the wisdom of Gypsy Rose Lee who apparently came from a similarly pious but dysfunctional family headed by a matriarch, Rose Hovick who held astonishingly similar attitudes to Old Nan Constant.   This included a long history of forging birth certificates for each of her daughters making them older when it was necessary to evade varying state labour laws and younger for reduced or free train fares.   The girls were largely unsure in later years what their true years of birth were.   My mother and her sisters ended up in a strikingly comparable position because of my grandmother’s inability to come clean with The Authorities when it came to the birth dates of her many children.   In Old Nan’s case the reasons included the necessity to be available at all times for itinerant field work.

Surfacing from this diverse and shaky religious vortex as a young teenager in March 1954 I was more than eager to sign up for the first Billy Graham evangelistic meeting in London.   I don’t remember who suggested the trip to me but I do know that it was totally free, including the charabanc ride so my mother was more than happy for me to attend.   All I had to do was take a packed supper which I dutifully did, cheese sandwiches and an apple.

Billy Graham came to the country with much fanfare having been vaulted into the national spotlight with unprecedented publicity.   I knew little about him but I was more than eager to be Saved by making a Commitment to Christ that evening at Harringay Arena.    Beholding Billy in action, beseeching us to welcome The Lord, thumping Bibles until they fell to pieces and looking indescribably handsome as he did so, was mesmerising, hypnotic, enthralling.  And when those prepared to Commit to Christ were called to come forward I was one of the first to oblige, only too anxious to become part of Billy’s world if not the Lord’s.  On the journey home a large number of my fellow passengers congratulated me on my courage and said I would never regret the pledge I made to Christ that day.   I was already having some doubts though. 

A week or so later my mother received an important looking letter from the Crusade Team via their UK associates discussing the fact that I was a child and would need her support to progress with my Commitment.    She was quite affronted that I could what she described as `go in for such a thing’ without her approval and even more slighted when I appeared in a photograph in one of the Sunday newspapers standing alongside a group of teddy boys who all looked very dapper indeed in their drape jackets and drainpipe trousers.  They had also made a Commitment that evening and looked scarcely older than me so I couldn’t help wondering if their mothers had received similar communications.

I was to rapidly relinquish the idea of allowing Christ into my life a la Billy Graham which was a great relief to my mother who was anxious as to what her role in the idea might be.   Aunt Mag had told her it was bound to blow over given time as most of my more doolally ideas did and she would do well to remember that I was fanciful.  And Old Nan made sure that next time I was in her company in Crayford High Street she did some blatant shoplifting of haberdashery items telling me that God helps them that help themselves and adding that she didn’t hold with too much religion anyway.    I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to make of that and so I said nothing.   Billy Graham meanwhile,  exciting and handsome as he most certainly was fell into the recesses of memory.  However, over the years I have often wondered if any of that group of Teddy Boys managed to maintain the pledge made to the Lord that day at Harringay.   I suspect not.

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.