Banned From The Library ....

It’s more than likely that I’ve written about this unhappy episode previously because even after all this time, reaching back into the dim past it emerges readily as a rather nasty skirmish and one you would not be liable to forget easily.  To make matters worse we had certainly not behaved as badly before and we were more than old enough to know better.   We definitely didn’t intend to become banned from the library for six weeks and to be honest it came as rather a shock.  

It wasn’t like us at all.  On the whole Molly and I were dependably well behaved children because, as my mother was fond of pointing out, we knew Right from Wrong.  Our behaviour that day was most decidedly Wrong.  On the other hand there was definitely something energising about engaging in belligerent and confronting conduct that emulates those classmates – usually boys – whose day to day behaviour was reliably abysmal thus regularly earning them admiration and respect from the rest of us.   I knew that the only reason I was known as Good was because I was frightened of what would happen if I wasn’t.   I suppose I was rather easily intimidated but I don’t think that applied to Molly and I never thought of her in that way.  Being a Leader rather than a Follower she had something of a reputation to keep up which at times must have been tiresome.   I was generally a Follower wishing I had enough spirit to become a Leader.

Northfleet Library was situated at that time in a rather impressive Victorian house at number one London Road.   The Children’s Library was in the old kitchen quarters and closed at five o’clock in winter and somewhat later in summer and it was then that the Children’s Librarian locked up and either went home or simply went upstairs to work for another hour or two in the Adult Library.   The Children’s Librarians back then were Miss Ivy Semark who was liked by everyone and Miss Doreen with the forgotten surname who didn’t like children at all and was universally disliked.   The Head Librarian was Miss Webster who rarely if ever appeared downstairs among the junior shelves and if she ever glanced at us at all it was always with icy disapproval.  

The library had become very important to Molly and me and contemplating life without it would have ensured a certain degree of horror.  But of course we didn’t contemplate life without it and because it was a mere ten minute walk from York Road we visited it after school twice weekly.   In those less enlightened days we were called Junior Borrowers were only allowed to take out one fiction book at each visit bolstered by two non-fiction.   This did not seem quite fair to us at the time because we had little desire to know more about physics, aeronautics or how to play Chess and in fact little on the copious non-fiction shelves attracted us unless it was authored by Enid Blyton.    That was not quite as unlikely as it sounds because she was in the habit of writing liberally on Nature Study and from time to time retold tales from both the Old and New Testaments.

Miss Blyton remained our author of choice over a number of years and if we were unable to briskly denude Northfleet Junior Library of every available as yet unread title at each visit we turned our attention to Pamela Brown, Lorna Hill, Monica Edwards or Noel Streatfield.   Failing that reliably popular bunch of children’s writers we might occasionally dip into Richmal Crompton or Malcolm Saville.   We did not venture towards Tolkien and had no real desire to widen our horizons too drastically so when Miss Ivy Semark after attending a Saturday Seminar in Maidstone enthusiastically suggested to us that we might really enjoy Eve Garnett’s Family From One End Street we were quite shocked because we definitely did not want to read anything that reminded us too much of our own monotonous and needy working class lives.   Looking back it seems astonishing how easily we accepted those tales of middle class children some equipped with Nannies and Cooks and holidays in Cornwall who were nothing like us at all, how effortlessly we accepted the values that lay between the pages.

You would quite rightly consider that being as emotionally dependent upon the Northfleet Junior Library as we clearly were, we would have had more sense than to misbehave so significantly, but we were clearly not imbued with a great deal of common sense.   On that particular Friday afternoon we for some reason or other decided to make the life of Miss Doreen of the forgotten surname as difficult as possible as we ran in and out of the old kitchen and scullery, up and around the area, laughing hysterically and ensuring that she found it impossible to lock up.   Eventually, tiring of the game and becoming excitedly exhausted we headed for home congratulating each other on how surprised she had been and saying things like:   I bet she didn’t expect that! – and:  She’ll have to think twice when she next sees us!  

We did have just a sneaking moment of doubt a few days later when we went together to return The Swish of the Curtain and Ballet Shoes together with The Life of Mozart and The Bumper Blyton Woodland Book.   We entered the Junior Library as quietly as possible and might even have bid Miss Ivy Semark a good afternoon because we were very glad to note that it was not her colleague at the desk.     For an agonising moment or two she said nothing before looking directly at us and asking us to follow her up to Miss Webster’s office.  We did so, after exchanging horrified glances.   

Miss Webster’s office was just like that of Miss Dennis at Colyer Road Girls’ School – that’s what Molly told me as we walked home twenty minutes later in a very subdued silence.  She was in her first year at Colyer Road and had already been hauled before the headmistress for what was called a Uniform Breach which meant you were wearing something forbidden.   Molly said that in her case it had been the wrong colour gym slip and that it wasn’t her fault because her mother had simply made a mistake and the navy blue one was to be returned to the Uniform Shop and exchanged for forest green.   Miss Dennis had been reasonably kind at that stage apparently but her kindness dwindled when the exchange did not happen quite as rapidly as she had expected.   I was not familiar with headmistresses and their offices because I was still in my last year at St Botolph’s where the headmaster was the greatly dreaded Mr Cooke and only badly behaved boys ever got sent to report themselves to him where, no matter what misdemeanours had occurred they were routinely screamed at and caned.   The entire female population of the school was far too terrified of Mr Cooke to risk any hint of conduct he would not completely approve of.   In fact he terrified Pearl Banfield so much that she routinely took Friday afternoons off because that’s when he was most likely to take us for Arithmetic which he called Mathematics.    

Although Miss Webster was not likely to emulate any of Mr Cooke’s unpleasant traits she did demonstrate something of the manner and bearing of a Headmistress and it was this that made us shrivel before her that particular afternoon and wish we could disappear into the swirls of the faded Axminster we stared down into.   She told us that our behaviour had been disgraceful, contemptible, shocking and she was still debating as to whether it should be reported to our schools at which point I began to cry, desperately wondering if Mr Cooke ever caned girls.   However, after due consideration of the fact that it was to her knowledge our first transgression, she was prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt and a second chance.   We were instead going to be banned from the library – for six weeks! When you are ten years old six weeks is a very long time indeed.   When you are a book lover and you have few books available at home it looms before you as endless.   Back then schools were not in the habit of allowing pupils to borrow reading matter and we did not have the kind of parents who would agree to add something suitable to the weekly shopping list.   Molly’s mother did buy comics for her and her brother George each week – Beano, Dandy and Film Fun but mine maintained that she totally disapproved of comics.   I was never sure if she was not just exhibiting a meanness of spirit.

I’m not sure if I ever revealed to my parents that I had been banned from the library but probably I didn’t because I would always rather avoid any kind of confrontation that might involve a degree of honesty.   It’s more than possible that neither of them noticed I had largely given up reading for six weeks.   It was the Eleven Plus year so I might conceivably have announced that I was going to concentrate on passing the exam.  I was well aware that this would appeal to my father who was extremely keen that I should attend the grammar school if at all possible.    He would have been delighted to think I intended to focus on gaining entry to it to the exclusion of even Enid Blyton.   Later that year we heard that to my surprise – and certainly to his, that I had failed.    Molly said I should be grateful because there was an awful lot of homework involved in attending the grammar school and those who were unlucky enough to find themselves there definitely had far less time for reading.

The Spread of Invasive Ideas

 

Carmela is thinking of closing down her Facebook account – well that’s what she says at least.  You can’t always believe it when people say things like that can you although you might also think it might be a good idea.  

It had been a long time since the four of us met `in the flesh’ so to speak – Carmela, Judith, Marilyn and me and Zoom is never quite the same.  It’s largely because of Judith that we try to spend at least a proportion of our time discussing topics that are what she terms `meaningful’.   She used to like lengthy debate about private education years ago when she was still sure her children would benefit from it.  In more recent years she has concluded that one of them at least would have fallen through the cracks no matter where he went and she’s more than glad she abandoned the nonsensical idea of home schooling that at one stage she toyed with simply because I was dedicated to it myself at the time.

We were at The Paddington again, largely because a lot of places are not reliably open in January when, Covid or no Covid not to mention most unlikely shark warnings, Aucklanders seem forced to the beach to partake in mediocre takeaways regardless of evening humidity and a distinct lack of facilities for washing greasy fingers.   Judith observed that we could mock if we wanted to but there had been definite warnings of sharks at Muriwai and that caused Marilyn to point out that Muriwai was quite a distance from Judges Bay and even further from Mission Bay which seemed to be the January picnic place of choice when striking out from Parnell. 

The possible closure of Carmela’s Facebook account is mostly because of an unpleasant argument she recently found herself embroiled in with someone who seemed determined to tear her and her ideas, good or bad, apart.   Judith thought that withdrawing from the Facebook platform altogether was rather overdramatic and that there were always going to be those who lurked behind keyboards with nothing better to do than attack others in order to demonstrate their own virtue.   She reminded us of the discussion we had months ago about Witch Finders and said we should bear in mind that had Facebook been available in the seventeenth century it would have made Matthew Hopkins’ work a great deal easier.  In fact, she said, he would have barely needed to move around the country at all, merely wait in his office for Teams of Trusty Trolls to reveal the miscreants to him!  

I ventured, once we’d decided to share pizzas, that we didn’t need to go back in time as far as Matthew Hopkins and that two of the four of us were old enough to half remember the Reds under Beds hysteria of the 1950s though at the time we were unlikely to have had much comprehension of the ensuing alarm that was caused.  The exaggerated obsessive fear of the presence and harmful influence of Communist sympathisers gaining a foothold in society convinced a great many Americans that they would certainly be Better Dead than Red.   The entire terror was largely the brainchild of Senator Joseph McCarthy who seemed to be able to easily persuade his fellow countrymen that the Reds would force the population to watch endless Russian propaganda movies and ensure that restaurants be made to remove hamburgers and steaks from their menus and replace them with black bread, potato soup and stuffed cabbage. 

Rather worse than menu changes were the accusations against government officials and a number of notable authors and actors that they were secret Communist sympathisers which ensured they were humiliated, blacklisted and lost jobs.   Carmela nodded sagely and said if that was even half accurate JK Rowling and Laurence Fox would certainly recognise the syndrome. On the other hand the future of performance Shakespeare had been enhanced by Sam Wanamaker’s decision to abandon the United States and flee to the UK and proved to be a blessing for the British once he immersed himself in the rebuilding of the Globe Theatre.    Marilyn was entirely unaware that Wanamaker had ever been a Communist in the first place and even if he had been, was it really of such major significance she wanted to know?    Had he really been so terribly dangerous?   Was he not simply perhaps caught up in the mania of a 1950s witch hunt?  Carmela told me later that she only knew herself because she watched his daughter Zoe’s journey tracing family history on one of those late night Sky channels via Who Do You Think You Are.

We were about to order a second bottle of House Chardonnay because the pizzas had barely been touched with all the talk of Reds and we therefore set about the important business of eating.    After a few minutes Judith asked how it was we ever got caught up in these ideas in the first place because looking back with a certain degree of logic, it would appear that with the best will in the world the dogma that supported the stance of the day against both witch hunts and  Communism seemed fragile and flimsy from where we stood now.   

Marilyn agreed and pointed out that we are these days far too sensible to see burning witches as anything other than the persecution of women of a certain age who lived alone and were fond of cats though you had to also take into consideration the herbal remedies for everyday ailments they were keen on.   Far more of us would put our faith in modern medicine these days.    However, examining the hysteria in retrospect was in many ways embarrassing and maybe the basis of it all had been that they could not control their vicious tongues and all that was needed was some counselling.   However, at the time she had to agree that it would not have been prudent to be too critical about duckings and burnings and possibly better by far to largely ignore the end results of the syndrome and advise going in for a dog rather than a cat when a household pet was being considered.   It was never terribly wise to express undue public criticism with regard to the manias that spread through society from time to time.

Wanamaker and his like, she felt, should have thought carefully before renewing membership of the Communist Party although on the face of it what were those much dreaded Reds actually guilty of as a group?   Sharing possessions too freely?   Too much enthusiasm for Collective farms?  Being supportive to each other regarding wage rises?  It was hard to see the inherent day to day dangers of throwing your lot in with them.

Even so, Carmela reminded us, it wouldn’t have been entirely straightforward to avoid what my mother always called `being tarred with the same brush’ no matter how diligently you kept your head down and avoided anything to do with spies – she for one certainly wouldn’t have felt it safe naming her only daughter Lara back then.   

All of us agreed that the obsessions that develop every now and again within society grow from strength to strength with a speed that is astonishing to behold.   After all, who would have thought a a decade ago that the mere mention of the Toy that Dare Not Speak its Name would cause such a toxic Facebook attack for Carmela so rapidly, simply because she mentioned her fondness for knitting versions of it for the local Church fete?   And who would have possibly believed back when we were all busy burning our bras that Germaine Greer, then the heroine of the moment for so many of us who had actually bothered to read The Female Eunuch, could possibly fall from grace?   How on earth did that happen?  Regardless of how or why, Carmela is of the opinion that it’s better to be safe than sorry in early 2022 and simply not mention her at all – airbrush her from memory in fact.     Judith wanted to know if that attitude wasn’t quite gutless and we all rather shiftily agreed that it was.  Nevertheless, for peace of mind it was probably better to go in for a modicum of gutlessness rather than fan the flames of incitement for no good reason because it was clear that there were plenty of horrifyingly Woke Warriors for Justice poised ready to cast huge stones. 

The pizzas had been largely demolished when Judith tentatively mentioned the Nazi regime and how the general population of the 1930s seemed to be oblivious as to what might or might not be happening to their Jewish neighbours.  How many of those ordinary citizens were as committed to the activities of Kristallnacht as we are now led to believe?  It’s certainly a stretch of the imagination to accept that they were universally dedicated to acres of broken glass.   Judith felt that it was more likely that the majority of Ordinary People might simply have felt it was easier to pretend not to notice what was happening even though the wholesale aggression towards those on the wrong side of the event was not deserved.  Anyway who in their right mind would have been all that keen on stepping forward to remonstrate with the glass breakers?   After all few of us could be relied upon these days to firmly state our innermost thoughts on incendiary topics such as transgender sportswomen – and we had just airbrushed Germaine from memory with admirable alacrity!

Jinxing by Gin

          The childhood of my mother and her siblings was blighted by alcohol, primarily gin and draught beer or that was what I was told.   It wouldn’t have been a particularly joyful childhood in any case as there were too many of the little Constants and never enough money but there is no doubt that the copious consumption of alcohol by their parents made the situation a great deal worse than it might otherwise have been.   Presumably, despite the original Gin Craze being well and truly over, it was still cheap enough or palatable enough to be downed on a regular basis by the working classes and my grandmother was drawn to it like a bee to honey until the day she died.  My grandfather favoured beer when offered a choice but was not against a glass or two of gin if it was more available.

          Originally gin was sold in earthenware crocks but then a heart shaped green glass bottle was developed and not long afterwards improvements in glass technology allowed the production of clear bottles that showed with no doubt at all the purity of the liquid within.  By the time Margaret Rearden married Edgar Constant in the first years of the new century the clear glass bottle was everywhere and the young bride took to it with real enthusiasm.   To be fair to them both, it is said that they usually did not drink midweek there being field work of various kinds to be done if they were lucky and other less appealing work if they were not, so their lengthy Public House visits usually took place on Saturday evenings and when baby Margaret was born, they could take her with them.  Children were not banished from licensed premises until 1908 so nobody minded and should little ones start to cry they could easily be comforted with a spoon dipped in gin and sugar.   That was the splendid thing about gin, it had a multitude of uses and throughout her life Maggie was to lean upon it to assist in solving her domestic and emotional problems.  

          Edgar and Maggie as I have said, had a great many children and it has been variously reported that there were twelve, thirteen, fifteen and even more.  The total is destined to remain for ever debateable as a number of the births remained unregistered for various reasons that sound remarkably foolish to us today.  This is because as a family we have gone up in the world and the present generation has never been faced with the struggles and troubles that so beset Edgar and Maggie.  That first decade or two of the twentieth century could be a traumatic time for both children and adults if they were unfortunate enough to be placed at the very bottom of the social heap as the Constants definitely were.  Bad housing, extreme poverty and lack of healthcare meant that many youngsters were extremely unhealthy and it was expected and accepted that they would experience serious illness in early childhood.  At the turn of the century the worst infant mortality figure ever was recorded with 165 in every 1000 babies dying before their first birthday.   This compares with about 5 per 1000 today.   To drive home the point, the infant mortality figures were almost twice as high among the working classes as the middle and upper classes.    According to my brother who over some years carried out a great deal of family research, one of the unregistered Constant infants was upon his death taken by Edgar in a cardboard box to Dartford Cemetery where a helpful gravedigger ensured he went into a common grave.   Later my grandmother was sometimes heard to comment on this unhappy incident and express her distress at not ever knowing the child’s final resting place. 

          It was a not terribly well-kept family secret that before the first World War two of the babies had died as a direct result of their parents’ involvement with alcohol.   The period between the deaths has never been made clear, in fact a great many of the details remain obscure except that one of them was called Arthur and it is likely that he was the one in the cardboard box.   It was the first of these deaths that is said to have so traumatised my grandfather that he gave up drinking to excess until all his children were grown with families of their own.   The details of the death of Baby Arthur are sketchy but it seemed to involve him being overlain and hence smothered in the bed of his inebriated parents.   In itself this was not an altogether unusual event.

          What was perhaps pertinent was that although Edgar was able to curb his drinking over the years, it was quite beyond Maggie who now, looking back through the intervening decades with the benefit of hindsight seems to have been unfortunate enough to have had an addictive nature.  But then it is only in more recent times that we have really begun to understand the nature of addiction and accept the fact that there is said to be a gene that might very well pre-dispose some of us towards an inability to control certain behaviours.  

          The little Constants oblivious and generally accepting of the difficulties of their childhood loved their parents dearly and the girls in particular vied for the love and attention of their diffident mother long after they had left childhood behind them.  And as they grew a few of this next generation were to experience similar difficulties with alcohol, in particular Young Edgar who eventually became the only living son of the family.   My own memories of him are chiefly when he was hovering on middle age, a cheerful, red faced individual emerging unsteadily from the public bar of The Jolly Farmers on Saturday nights to distribute crisps and lemonade to the group of hopeful nephews and nieces outside.   Uncle Edgar was invariably jovial and jaunty, an optimist who would give his last ten pence away and this made him always popular with the younger members of the family.   And he could generally be relied upon to be the very last to leave the pub each weekend, singing his way along Iron Mill Lane in regular disturbance of the neighbours.   But back then of course displays of intoxication were common and rarely triggered comment or complaint in the local community.

          For my mother the consequences of growing up alongside determined alcohol abuse served to ensure that she maintained excessive caution at all times, always claiming that she was definitely not a drinker, that she could in fact AlwaysTake It or Leave It.    And for the most part this was correct.   My own earliest memories of alcohol of any kind was on Christmas Day mornings when it was traditional that we should all, children included, drink strong tea laced with whiskey.   I have no idea where this tradition came from or when but it was something that none of us appear to have deviated from to this day.   Whatever we thought of drunkenness, alcohol went with Christmas like eggs went with bacon.    Even during the war years, a small bottle of whiskey and one of cherry brandy would be purchased a day or two before Christmas Eve by my mother for the express purpose of the upcoming celebrations.  

          When he came back from the war, my father, himself never a committed drinker, would occasionally go to The British Volunteer with old Mr Bassant next door and they would sit for an hour over Pints of Mild.   From time to time my parents went together and my mother might then have a small sherry.  Sometimes she would even ask for it to be diluted with lemonade in further indication that she was no slave to the Demon Drink.    As far as any hard and fast association with alcohol was concerned, they clearly lagged behind the curve but even so my mother lost no time at all in informing all who would listen of her sobriety adding that she had seen enough of what Drink did to families to last her a lifetime. At times like this my father might look just a little bit embarrassed and even at the age of seven or eight I could tell that he wished she would just shut up.  Many years later I realised that his discomfiture might have something to do with the fact that during his war years and exposure to significantly different attitudes to alcohol in other countries, he had become less critical than previously.

          Meanwhile infamous Uncle Mervyn, married to Aunt Rose was disapproving in the extreme which my grandmother said was because he was a Chapel goer and that anyone with any sense would steer clear of those who were Chapel and she for one could never understand what her Rose saw in him.      Her daughters were of the opinion that their sister’s devotion to him was more to do with what these days we might call a desire to be upwardly mobile because the War had been kind to Mervyn and he was definitely Going Places in the RAF.

          Whatever he did for Rose’s social ambitions, and I was in no position to judge that, he certainly, to quote Aunt Martha, - put a Right Bloody Dampener on Christmas 1953.  Later when discussing the matter it became clear that the dampener had quite a lot to do with alcohol or the lack of it.   We had been invited to spend Christmas with his family in a village called Patrington in Yorkshire where there was an RAF base at that time and where he and Rose and their three children lived in a very smart house because he was a Squadron leader.  The guests were to be my mother, my brother and myself together with Aunt Martha and her daughter Pat.   It was Pat who explained to me the significance of being a Squadron Leader and urged that I should take note of the way lower ranks saluted Uncle Mervyn as he accompanied us around the base.    

          The first surprise was the absence of cherry brandy with the Christmas Eve mince tarts, the second was the absence of whiskey for the Christmas morning tea.   I had not noticed the first omission because I was still considered too young to drink cherry brandy so I was only aware of the looks that passed between my mother and my aunt but I certainly noticed the second.  Pat told me that her mother always said that Uncle Mervyn was known for being Tight Fisted and not to forget what Old Nan said about him.  I knew very well what our grandmother was known to say but did not repeat it because it fell into the category of what was called Being Foul Mouthed and I was at 13 as yet considered too young to be Foul Mouthed.  

          That Christmas Day passed somewhat unmerrily as far as we visitors from the South were concerned, the only alcohol that appeared being small glasses of sherry in the middle of the afternoon of Christmas Day.   To add insult to injury we children were expected to go to bed by eight o’clock when it was a Constant tradition to stay up as long as you wished over Christmas and New Year no matter what your age was.  Overall it was not the joyous occasion we had expected no matter how deferential the lower ranks were to our Uncle and how much I at least secretly rather enjoyed the reflected glory.

          On the train back to Kings Cross Aunt Martha said to my mother that it was on account of the two of them being widows that we’d been invited in the first place and that Mervyn had no time at all for the men of the family considering them to be Drunken Louts.  She added that it was a good thing he was not aware how her Paddy had died or we’d never have been on their guest list at all.   Pat and I exchanged glances because we both knew that her father had been killed after consuming a great deal of red wine before falling off a balcony in Italy whilst celebrating the end of the war.   My mother sat very straight, her arms folded across the front of her new red wool, belted coat, bought especially for the occasion.   She said she’d never taken to Mervyn really and she couldn’t for the life of her see why their Rose had married him because their little Tommy had not been born for more than a year after so it wasn’t as if she’d had to.  Aunt Martha said well he probably rationed how much of his You Know What he doled out too so that didn’t surprise her at all.   Pat and I slid glances at each other and put on innocent faces pretending we had no idea at all what this comment meant. 

          Later in discussion with our grandmother that Yorkshire Christmas was discussed in some detail and so was everything they disliked about Uncle Mervyn who hopefully always remained oblivious to the distaste he generated.   Old Nan maintained that his Tight Arsed attitudes were enough to drive anyone to drink and it was his kiddies she pitied but of course none of us believed that.    Nevertheless I’ve often wondered what it was that made him quite as firmly opposed to enjoying life as he appeared to be, and every year as Christmas draws near I am reminded of that particularly bleak Yorkshire Yuletide.   I’m also reminded of those life events that have occurred at this particular time of year of course like the death of my father all those years ago.

          And strangely or perhaps not so strangely over the years I have carried on the odd tradition of whiskey in Christmas morning tea because the day would not be quite the same without it!  It appears that some customs effortlessly attach themselves and become habits and I know that my children, in various parts of the world – do exactly the same! 

The Ultimate Folly of Smoking

           I had definitely seen the act of cigarette smoking as the embodiment of all that was stylish since I had been allowed to occasionally go to early evening showings at The Wardona, Northfleet and sometimes even The Regal in Gravesend with Molly from number 31.   You have to realise that there was a great deal of smoking taking place on the Big Screen back then and not just in those films more suitable for adults although the latter were of course those we were most keen to see by claiming we were both definitely fourteen.   The only time we were challenged was by Priscilla Horsfall who was my form at Wombwell Hall even though she was more than a year older than the rest of us.  On the occasion in question she was importantly doing her first Saturday job and as Molly had in fact reached the magical age she was deemed to be a Responsible Adult and so we both gained entry anyway once a threat of calling the manager was made.  But that is of course all beside the point. 

          It was hard to imagine Humphrey Bogart without a cigarette and though I can’t remember the first time I saw Casablanca and whether or not I was with a bona fide adult, I do clearly recall that when Rick Blaine first appears it is as a hand lifting a half-smoked cigarette after signing a cheque.   Not very long afterwards Paul Henreid lights up as he tells Ingrid Bergman that although he is terrified he must nevertheless attend a dangerous meeting.   What a hero!   And long before The Marlboro Man, in Stagecoach, John Wayne, one of my mother’s favourites bends forward to light a cigarette from an oil lamp impervious to coyotes howling in the background and clearly not so very far away which was a very sexy gesture.  Little wonder that so many young men rushed to emulate him.   And it wasn’t just the lads because once Anne Bancroft blew smoke into Dustin Hoffman’s eyes whilst trying to seduce him in The Graduate most of us avid cinema-goers, male and female alike were well and truly hooked.   

          I personally became nicotine smitten at the age of fifteen when I witnessed James Dean becoming a misery to himself and a burden to his parents in Rebel Without a Cause.   I was with Pearl Banfield from the top of York Road because Molly now worked at Featherstones and was often busier than previously.   Pearl was a less than satisfactory cinema companion who never took up the smoking habit and seemed unmoved by the charms of James Dean.  Although by the time East of Eden came to Gravesend I was completely beguiled by him, and he was still an enthusiastic smoker, I was not actually smoking myself simply because I lacked the necessary finances for funding the habit.   

          In defence of that younger generation of which I was a part, it perhaps hardly needs to be pointed out that everyone around us smoked and it seemed to us, always had done.   Strangely my own parents were not smokers, my mother only taking it up after my father died, astonishingly on the advice of our family doctor who said a cigarette and half a pint of Guinness on a Saturday evening would be beneficial and help to calm her nerves.   She never became as dedicated a smoker as me and remained a ten Woodbines a week woman for years, eventually giving up the habit with ease in her late sixties.  

          I had been working at Francis, Day & Hunter in Charing Cross Road for at least six months before I felt financially stable enough to even begin but it was with enormous pride that I ordered ten Du Maurier at the little kiosk on the concourse at Charing Cross Station.   I was feeling so sophisticated in fact that it was a full five minutes before I realised that I had forgotten the matches and had to rush back and purchase them, almost missing the 6.42 fast train to London Bridge, Woolwich Arsenal, Dartford and Gravesend, and whatever destinations followed which I’ve now forgotten.   I would set about practicing smoking on my way home and by the time Gravesend was reached I would undoubtedly be an expert!

          I chose an empty carriage far forward on the train because I wanted no witnesses to anything that might go amiss and have me categorised as a rank amateur.    It was a good thing I did because it took a full six or seven minutes and half the matches to get the first stylishly tipped Du Maurier lit.   But at last the job was done, it was burning nicely as were several of my fingers. I had been told that in order to get the very best out of nicotine I had to inhale the smoke, alien as that sounded and so by the time it was half burned I managed to do so with some difficulty.   That very first inhalation was unpleasant in the extreme, my initial physical reaction being first light headedness followed by extreme vertigo, followed by nausea.   Why on earth did anyone in their right mind take up smoking?    But of course I knew the answer to that question was because it was to be seen as grown up, sophisticated, a woman of the world.   However, it was a week or two, or even three, before this particular woman of the world became confident enough to display the new and admirable habit more publicly.  Even I knew that turning pale and gripping my handkerchief nervously to my lips rather spoiled the ambiance of sophistication I was working towards and definitely was not going to impress a great many people.   To create the right vibe I just had to get on top of the nausea and dizziness upon inhalation problem.   And of course with time and effort I did and within a few months you would never have known that I hadn’t been born with a cigarette in my right hand. 

          For economic reasons I had to give up du Maurier quite early in my smoking career and move on to Bachelor Cork Tipped which I was assured by magazine advertising was a great deal healthier let alone cheaper.   By the time I was seventeen I was smoking ten a day which had not initially been my intention at all.   For my mother, strangely, smoking remained a one a day, two at weekends habit.   Perhaps she had experienced the same inhalation problem as me and wisely chose not to overcome it.    All of my aunts with the exception of Rose whose husband did not allow it, smoked profusely and Old Nan, their mother had always rolled her own and continued to do so her whole life.  All newly born first and second cousins were liberally smoked over from the day of their birth and as they grew older were accustomed to running to the corner shop with instructions to buy ten Weights or ten Woodbines for any adult who was running low.

Such purchases made by eight and nine year olds were never rejected by shocked shopkeepers and as the younger members of the family grew old enough to embark upon their own smoking habit it was never suggested by those older and hopefully wiser that it might be more sensible to give it a miss.   Little Violet, being raised by Old Nan because of the death of her mother, got her first job in retail at the age of eleven, as a Saturday shop assistant for Big Elsie in the small store at the bottom of Iron Mill Lane that primarily sold sweets, tobacco and ice cream.   She proudly began to buy her own Woodbines by the age of twelve and not even her employer discouraged her.   Old Nan’s only comment revolved around her own disappointment that even having a grandchild working in the trade did not seem to afford her cheaper prices and she would have expected at least the courtesy of a substantial drop in price for her own Hearts of Oak and Rizla papers.  It only confirmed her opinion that Big Elsie was a Tight Arsed Mare if ever there was one.

Much as I deplored the money that smoking of any kind seemed to be able to scoop up I did not at this stage seriously consider giving up which was a pity because it might have then been considerably easier than it proved to be later.    It certainly had not brought the glamour into my life that it seemed to promise and I was still not getting the invitations to glitzy events that I had once hoped for.  Neither had it brought handsome young men in sheepskin coats with names like Damon or Nico into my orbit.   I longed for men knee deep in invitations to film premieres who regularly dined at The Ivy and spent summers in the South of France.  They failed to cross my path, however, and there were times when I wished I had not launched into smoking with quite as much enthusiasm.

I was clearly destined to spend more time by myself so when the most alluring advertising campaign for Strand cigarettes hit the small screens of the Home Counties I certainly found it reassuring.  The ads showed a Frank Sinatra look-alike in trilby hat and trench coat wandering rain swept streets and despite his good looks and sex appeal remarkably alone.   I made serious attempts to read the novels of Camus and Sartre – not altogether successfully, and began to save for a proper trench coat.   And naturally enough I changed immediately to Strand, the cigarette that displayed for all the world to witness that existential angst was bearable; just as long as you chose Strand for your smoking pleasure.  Meanwhile Cliff Adams’ evocative Lonely Man theme reached the charts and the man in the trench coat became an immediate icon of Really Cool and the sale of similar rainy weather wear increased.  

But what should have been an all-round successful advertising campaign turned out to have a twist in its tail.   At that time smoking was most definitely considered a very sociable activity and being alone enough to have to be consoled, propped up even by a particular cigarette brand was suddenly seen as socially disastrous.   No matter what impressionable young women like me might have thought, sales somewhat astonishingly all at once evaporated and the cigarette itself was withdrawn without comment.   But somewhere along the line of progress towards commercial disaster, the ad campaign had hijacked enough aspects of existentialism to turn that corner of philosophy into a joke which festered largely unrecognised by people like me who were beginning to find coffee houses intellectually exciting if they attracted bearded young men in black polo necks clutching copies of paperbacks with titles like Sartre’s Concept of Freedom.

  The Strand advertising image had been extraordinarily powerful and had touched a raw nerve in the public psyche.    I ditched the trench coat idea and looked around for a duffel coat.  I also began to knit a black sweater and decided to take an interest in modern art.    I had already changed to menthol cigarettes because all the advertising assured me they were unbelievably healthy.

Travel and the Working Classes

 Strictly speaking it was my father and all his companions in the Eighth Army who were the first in my immediate family to experience foreign travel.   And as I grew older I learned that he went to a great many places, some of which I had never heard of and had to pretend that I had.   He seemed to enjoy Italy and North Africa above everywhere else, especially North Africa.   Nevertheless after a lot of thought I decided to draw a line under destinations to do with war and concentrate on those I was hopefully about to experience in the post-war future.  

It was annoying to discover that it was my older cousin who was going to be first in the family to leave our place of birth and strike out for foreign places.   To be fair it was simply a long weekend in Paris which later I decided didn’t really count if I didn’t want it to.  Not emerging as the first was a blow to be honest.   If she had still been married to Jack the trip would never have happened in the first place because for one thing he was much more interested in cars than travel and secondly in the drama of the marriage break up Margaret had given up the good, solid job in Dolcis and moved on to what her mother claimed was a much better one, as secretary to a man who was in the Importing/Exporting business.   I was somewhat confused as to how she could be an actual secretary since as far as I knew she was unable to type and she certainly couldn’t do shorthand but when I mentioned this Aunt Mag simply advised me to Button my Lip and added that there was nothing much to typing.   That observation didn’t please me at all because I had recently spent three years at Wombwell Hall acquiring that particular skill, but I buttoned my lip as directed because back then as a teenager, largely you did.  

My mother agreed that it was odd to be able to get a job as a secretary if you couldn’t type but on the other hand you could go to night school and learn easily enough and in fact perhaps that’s what she’d done because there were no flies on Margaret and she was a quick learner.   Anyway the job did not simply involve typing letters, she had to organise meetings and do travel bookings as well and act as receptionist in the Dartford office so she now had a weekly appointment booked at Gloriette’s in Crayford for a shampoo and set.  Aunt Mag said it was a Responsible Position and not one that every girl would be able to do.   She gave me a long, hard look as she said this which was annoying.     Margaret was living at her mother’s place at the time because Jack had refused to leave the flat in Slade Green but it was not something any of us talked openly about because back then you didn’t.  Instead we were directed to admire her new high heeled shoes and the pleated skirt that swished and swung pleasingly when she walked ensuring she looked every inch the high powered 1950s PA.  These were things it would have been impossible for her to buy all the while Jack had an interest in the spending.    On the other hand marriage break-ups were nothing to be proud of and that was a fact

The Paris trip was something that was definitely discussed in some detail and it took place at Easter that year, and was all to do with an urgent job the new boss had to carry out.   It entailed four nights in a hotel with a swimming pool and a restaurant where each female diner was given a rose.   I wondered how Margaret coped with the rose because she suffered badly from hay fever at the time and said she was adversely affected by flowers.  What’s more she certainly had never learned to swim as far as I knew so would be unable to take advantage of the swimming pool.   My mother said to Aunts Martha and Maud that if you believed the story about the urgent job that could not be done either before or after the Easter break then you’d believe anything.   She said nothing to Aunt Mag of course because although she had of late been very talkative about travel she was certainly not inviting questions on the topic.

When she returned I was more than keen for Margaret to tell me all about Paris but she seemed quite reticent to do so and her answers to my eager questions were uncharacteristically taciturn.   It was all most unsatisfactory.   It was around this time that some of her sudden reputation for international travel had to be shared with another Cousin – Aunt Martha’s June who had just married a young man whose name escapes me but who had several years’ experience in the plumbing trade.   It was at their engagement party that June announced their intention to leave Crayford for a life in South Africa which was a lot further away than Paris as most of us realised.   She made several announcements at the party, one of which was that at her upcoming wedding she did not want any of the women in the family wearing dangly plastic ear rings because in her opinion they had a common, vulgar look about them.    Being fond of plastic ear rings at the time, especially dangly ones, I recall feeling almost as offended as I felt when she did in fact leave the back bedroom in her mother’s house in Mayplace Avenue for a new life in Cape Town.   Unlike Margaret, Cousin June was more than keen to tell us all about her new life, especially about the fact that she now had a woman come in each week to do the ironing and she wrote excited letters back, mostly to Crayford but once or twice to us in Northfleet also. 

Meanwhile, yet another cousin, Connie from Waterdales, my father’s side of the family, was making preparations to join her fiancé Mick the Builder in Auckland, New Zealand and the long boat trip was going to take her to a number of places that so far both of us had only read about in books.   I had to accept the fact that I was definitely not going to be the first and that was palpable because as a group the lower classes were beginning to move out of the confines of the demographic they had always occupied.  They were studying brochures, beginning to realise that it wasn’t necessary to always spend holidays at Tankerton caravan and chalet camps or even Butlins at Skegness, and gathering the necessary courage to make applications for passports.   And getting a passport, Aunt Mag said, was not as easy as you might imagine because there were forms as long as your arm to be filled in.

As someone who definitely considered that I ought to be at the forefront of all that was seen as in step with the times even if it was glaringly obvious that I was not, it was sobering to be so clearly lagging behind.   I wondered why it was and after consideration decided that it had something to do with not being part of a couple.   As a couple it seemed to be in many ways easier to make decisions and act upon them and most importantly to be able to finance them.   There wasn’t a great deal that could be done with a mere five pounds weekly wage as a shorthand typist when I was regularly paying both the Provident Society and the Typewriter Shop near the station on a regular basis.   This was also a time when males, even those under twenty, were still paid significantly above women.  

In fact I was not to become launched into exotic places for another two years and as I had suspected it came about when I became part of a couple though a not particularly wholesome or stable couple and a short term one of necessity.   I didn’t actually mind any of that terribly especially in retrospect because Luuk Nijhof, Radio Veronica’s Technical Director, fitted the bill well enough.   He was a rather charismatic Dutch sound engineer who later turned out to be a heating engineer and knew little about the intricacies of sound.   But this understanding and awareness came only after the money that should have been spent on a radio transmitter had been spent on living the high life in London and Amsterdam.    It’s a long and perhaps familiar story and culminated in him serving a prison sentence.  However, the short period that preceded that was filled with excitement as we hopped from one five star hotel to the next, shopped in Bond Street and most importantly filled in those forms as long as your arm that resulted in a passport.   At last I was pleasingly embarked upon foreign travel!  What more could a girl from Gravesend want?

What I did not anticipate was the change in the way all of us began to view travel ensured that even my mother became a passport holder before too long and made regular trips to Southern Spain to the rather splendid holiday home now owned by Margaret and the New Boss who had in the interim become her New Husband.   This change in his status meant that it was no longer acceptable to discuss him in derogatory terms or make reference to her previous husband who still occupied the flat in Slade Green. 

A Change in Fortune

 

            Whenever my mother wanted to listen to conversations that were going on in the house next door she put an empty teacup against the wall and then put her ear to it.   As she did this she would place her finger against her lips and shush me so that I didn’t start asking questions in what was then a piercing pre-school voice.   Surprisingly, because she did not seem to be all that troubled by such emotions as shame, she continued this practice as my brother and I grew older and when he was about six, he told me the teacups in our house were actually telephones.  He had been in school for over a year and was fully conversant with telephones, there being one of what seemed to him, ominous size in Sister Joseph’s office.  They were all without exception black in those days and it was years before there was a choice of red, blue or cream.   Our mother, possibly because confusion reigned as it often did for us, agreed with him.

            As far as her investigations were concerned, hard as she tried I’m not sure if she ever heard anything scandalous over the years of her teacup eavesdropping    When I thought about it later, I decided she would have greatly enjoyed being one of those early telephone operators, connecting all and sundry and listening in on the conversations of others on a daily basis.    It was especially easy, though at times hard on the back, to carry out teacup surveillance upon the neighbours because narrow terrace houses with slender partition walls seemed to lend themselves to the practice.   Apparently my Aunt Mag’s house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford was not nearly as rewarding when it came to keeping an ear to the wall, the walls themselves being far more solid and that, it appeared, could be a Real Bugger.           

None of us in York Road or the surrounding streets had home telephones in those first years after the war.   There were occasional exceptions of course such as the proprietors of the area’s corner shops but they were in a different category altogether.   Telephones were also absent from the more upmarket homes in Springhead Road and even Mrs Frost who gave piano lessons was without one until the mid-nineteen fifties and she might have found one useful.  The three Campbell girls, living a few houses along from her apparently ordered one when they became involved in running the Brownie Pack at St Botolph’s Church.   This wasn’t without incident and certainly caused a skirmish or two because in the first few months of ownership they were granted what was then called a Party Line which meant it had to be shared with someone else.   The Campbells who were admittedly an overdramatic trio were convinced that their calls were not private.   The sharer of their line had a habit of snooping they claimed.   A Party Line was clearly something my mother would have greeted with real enthusiasm but of course it was sadly something you could not guarantee by ordering in advance and in any case she wasn’t to know all this at the time.   

Although it seems quaintly old-fashioned looking back, it was to be some years before any one of us would consider a phone to be a necessity.  It might have been convenient to be able to ring the local Doctor to make an appointment but of course, conscious that his patient base was totally telephone-free he didn’t operate an appointments system in the first place which was sensible of him.   And on rainy days our mothers could have given Penny, Son & Parker on The Hill a call to place the weekly order if they didn’t enjoy chatting in the queue quite as much as they obviously did.   Shopping seemed to be a much more relaxed and social activity back then.

If you were desperate to make an actual telephone call to someone who had an actual telephone then there was always the phone box by the 480 bus stop opposite the Roman Catholic Church where, from memory, two pennies in the slot and a quick press of Button A would do the trick nicely.  If the person was not home or you got an Engaged signal then you simply pressed Button B and your money was returned to you.   I hasten to add that this was not an activity I participated in myself but I was aware via others that this was the process.  

The more tech-savvy among us had discovered by 1954 that it was possible to make calls from one red telephone kiosk to another and therefore lengthy conversations could take place between duos without having to meet up!   This was seen as a great step forward especially for local youth already involved in relationships with the opposite sex though it emerged early on that lengthy phone calls appealed more to females than males.

My grandmother had never used a telephone in her life and was extremely suspicious of them because having any conversation with somebody who couldn’t look you in the eye seemed all wrong to her.   How would you know who you were really talking to?   My mother and aunts were equally hostile towards the idea with the exception of Aunt Rose but she was married to Uncle Mervyn who was in the RAF and so apparently it Stood to Reason.   Anyway we all knew that since she married Mervyn my aunt was growing more like him every day and he was known for being Right Up His Own Arse.  Even my sensible cousin Margaret said they had become Cut Above the rest of us.   

However, by the time she got married to Jack in 1955 Margaret was herself warming to the idea of becoming a home telephone user and this was because she now worked in Dolcis Shoe Shop in Dartford where, she told me, the phone at the rear of the premises never stopped ringing and it was her job to answer it.   She said that when she and Jack moved into their new flat in Slade Green, conveniently close to the station, she was definitely going to investigate what the overall telephone installation costs might be.  I worried that she was beginning to become a little too much like Rose and Mervyn and would end up a Cut Above the rest of the family but her younger sister Ann told me that was most unlikely because her Head was Screwed On.

Growing up with so little experience of what was to become an essential communication tool was not something that generally impeded progress through life for me until I started my first job at Messrs Francis, Day & Hunter in Charing Cross Road.  I discovered that operating the six-line switchboard for one hour one day a week whilst the telephonist took her lunch break was part of my job description.   At the time this was a horrifying idea and you could say that I was thrown into the Deep End of 1950s telecommunication awareness.  Nevertheless, with support from those in the typing pool with more telephone know-how, I managed to overcome what had at first seemed an impossibility, quite rapidly.  

Over the next year or two, several members of the family discussed the idea of Going on the Phone but my mother was destined not to do so until she had moved out of York Road when the homes on our side of the street were about to be demolished.   It was at that stage that my brother and his new young wife supervised her gentle entry into the ranks of those who could place orders with the local grocer or ring the New Doctor who did not like to run his operation in the same manner as his predecessor.    I was living in a London bedsitter by then with a telephone for the use of tenants by the front door, and feeling very sophisticated as you might imagine.   No-one would have ever known that this aid to communication had not always been part of my life.

It is surprising how rapidly families like ours, at one time almost resigned  to our place at the bottom of that post-war heap could adapt to a change in fortunes.   Because it wasn’t just the telephone we took to, sadly non mobile though it was to be for decades - car ownership followed hard on its heels, with Margaret’s Jack taking ownership of a second-hand red sports car in which he drove us to Herne Bay at almost thirty miles an hour most of the way!    Uncle Harold, his father-in-law, proclaimed loudly and frequently to any of us who would listen that twenty miles an hour was fast enough for anyone with any sense and that was a fact.

  My mother said that the trouble with Harold was that he’d never been Backward in Coming Forward and by rights it was nothing to do with him so he should keep his Trap Shut.   She only said that behind his back of course.    That’s always been the way in our family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Charity Begins

 

The manner in which we view those in need has changed drastically in half a century and that’s almost a matter for some rejoicing, even among those who definitely feel so-so about charity to begin with.   I should emphasise that I am among those feeling so-so, in fact very much so.  This is not because I disapprove of helping those in need but more on account of a very unpleasant experience with those dispensing measures of altruism and generosity many years ago.  

I was living in a damp Paddington basement with my three-year-old son, not one of those houses owned by the infamous Peter Rachman but one owned by a landlord in many ways similar, Herbert Mortiboy.    This was a time when pre-school education was considered to be of vital importance and keen young mothers were urged on every side to ensure that their under fives were attending the most desirable pre-schools where Early Reading Programmes abounded and they learned to tie their shoe-laces.  The awful alternative was something called Day Care run by the local council where the queues for acceptance were endless and tied shoe-laces were unheard of.  I definitely wanted the former for Patrick and the daily sessions at Aunty Moira’s Nursery School nicely coincided with my part time job.  The problem was that at the time I could not really afford the elevated fees.   You definitely paid through the nose, as my mother would say – and maybe did say - for tied shoelaces.

Someone suggested that I apply for financial help via a well-known aid agency.   The finer details of the organisation have become lost over time and all I now remember is that it was somehow connected with the Royal Engineers and had been suggested because of my father’s war service.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was not required to descend into the depths of Chatham or Maidstone or Gillingham for the required interview, but was instead directed to a rather plush office in Mayfair.   My evaluator was a ferocious woman with natural voice projection and an impressive title and I only wish I could recall her full name.  I will call her Lady Shout-a-Lot.    She was ably assisted by a non-titled minion, tall and thin and slightly stooped and very much in awe of her aristocratic colleague.

I had spent a lot of time on my letter of application.  It was typed on white quarto paper, spelled and punctuated perfectly and this Lady Shout-a-Lot now waved at me in a most threatening manner announcing - `So you own a typewriter I see.’   Her assistant clasped her hands together in horror and echoed ….. `a typewriter’.     They managed to make it sound like a serious offence which was odd. 

I was then allowed to re-iterate the reasons why I needed financial help from them over the next few months or perhaps, heaven forbid, even one year.    After listening with an air of impatience my titled interrogator said in a tone of some triumph - `And you have included a telephone number in your contact details – am I to assume that you also have a telephone?’    At this the subservient subordinate very nearly choked on her next sharp intake of breath repeating `- a telephone!’   

I nervously explained the concept of shared hallway telephones in the rooming houses that proliferated West London at that time but the blank look in their eyes convinced me that this was a notion neither of them was at all familiar with.  Perhaps they had never ventured into the dark and dingy streets of Paddington and Bayswater.

I don’t now recall the finer details of the remainder of the interview, such as it was.   I do remember, however, the next prime demand thrown in my direction by she of the cut glass accent - `Miss Hendy, explain exactly how fond you are of the child.’    This was most unexpected and met of course with an embarrassed silence whilst I fumbled nervously through the various responses I might give.    Lady Shout-a-Lot did not like silences and she impatiently repeated the sentence, reformed as a question - `Exactly how fond are you of this child?’  

It was at this juncture that I simply burst into tears and was unable to say anything further.   Meanwhile my aristocratic persecutor explained with some relish that it was all very well to sit there crying but she could hardly condone handing over any of The Organisation’s precious funds to someone who owned both a typewriter and a telephone and what’s more lived close to central London.  Neither she nor her assistant owned typewriters, nor did they live as centrally as I did.  But even more importantly I seemed incapable of making the sensible decision to give up my child to a family who would be able to give him those educational advantages I seemed to think he needed.

I can’t remember what happened next and whether I stopped crying for long enough to say something flippant or cryptic before I left.  Somehow I doubt it.  I do know that since that afternoon when I was so thoroughly reduced to tears in that Mayfair office, I have viewed all charities with great suspicion.   Recently I was cautiously pleased to be told how much they have changed in the intervening years.