When I enrolled for the pre-diploma course at Falmouth School of Art I hadn’t realised that we were to be guinea pigs for a new, degree-equivalent qualification called the Diploma in Art and Design which was to replace the former National Diploma in Design. This meant that in addition to the wide range of subjects we would be tackling we were expected to devote some time to the study of those which were not connected with art and, as with other degree courses, we’d be required to produce a thesis in our final year. The most important aspect of every art student’s curriculum is life drawing. I had never before seen a naked person so when, on the occasion of my very first lesson, I walked into the studio and saw the unclothed model I couldn’t stop myself from blushing. However, as soon as I began to concentrate on drawing her I ceased to think of her as a body and saw instead a complex arrangement of shape, form, texture and perspective. After that, I was never again embarrassed by nudity.
As well as life drawing, we were given the opportunity to experiment with a number of different media. We learned how to do silk-screen printing and how to make etchings from metal plates and to print the finished work on Japanese paper; we studied typography and calligraphy and various aspects of design, including Paisley patterns and tartans; we did action painting, abstract painting and still life painting; we made use of the extensive and rather lovely grounds for the drawing of plants and trees; we studied sculpture and were given a project to produce an abstract sculpture using plaster of Paris but since, in Cornwall, the influence of Barbara Hepworth was so strong, it was difficult for us to come up with something original. We were also required to have a sound knowledge of the history of art and a good deal of our time was devoted to its study. Fashion design was optional but I’d always wanted to have the opportunity to find out more about it even though I didn’t intend to take it up as a career, unlike the other students in that particular class. I loved not only the drawing and design aspect but also the handling of different fabrics, the art of pattern making and, of course, the construction of garments. I was so keen that I even signed on for an evening course in tailoring, a skill which was to prove immensely useful in later life. When my designs were displayed in the cabinet outside the art school I felt very proud.
Because it was a brand new pre-diploma course there were frequent changes to the syllabus which caused some discontent among the tutors and the students. It was unsettling and we really did feel that we were being used as guinea pigs. Also, I had the impression that one or two of the tutors were more interested in pursuing their own work than in teaching us. On the other hand, our drawing tutor was a very accomplished and distinguished artist and the good grounding he gave us was to prove a great asset when I went on to Hornsey.
I made friends with two other students who came from St. Ives: Martin was a good-natured, easy-going boy who recklessy blued the whole of his grant money on the first day of every term but was so optimistic about everything that nothing ever seemed to worry him. Vicky was a clever girl who had a flair for design and typography. I always turned to her for advice because she was mature for her age and so much more worldly-wise than I was. I was pleased when, the following year, both Martin and Vicky joined me at Hornsey to do graphic design. Also in our group was the boy from the Saturday morning classes on whom I’d had the crush. I disliked him when I discovered how conceited he was and couldn’t imagine what I’d ever seen in him; he wasn’t even particularly nice looking. He was so self-assured that he behaved before the tutors as though he was their equal and I considered that this was very disrespectful. He annoyed me by telling me in front of all the other students:
‘You’re innocent from the top of your head to the tips of your toes!’
‘But not in between!’ retorted Vicky.
Falmouth, like Brixham, used to be a fascinating town with its old buildings, streets, quays, docks and harbour. Nowadays, many of its most interesting and appealing features have disappeared and most of my old haunts have either been lost or manicured beyond recognition. As art students, we found plenty of material for subjects to draw or paint and I used to spend hours sitting on Customs House Quay sketching the fishing boats which, when I was a girl, were the beautiful, old, wooden ones. I loved it best on summer evenings when it came alive; the local boys used to show off by making perilous dives from the jetty into the murky water far below; holidaymakers wondered about eating fish and chips; men tinkered with their boats. Sometimes, there was an old fairground organ on display which played favourite melodies to which one particular, eccentric, elderly woman regularly used to perform ballet exercises using the railings alongside the quay as a barre, to the bemusement of passers-by. As with all towns, Falmouth has expanded with the passing of the years and the high-banked lanes where I picked primroses as a child were flattened to provide land for housing estates. The avenue of elms through which I used to walk to Swanpool and where I was once attacked by a beligerent tawny owl is now bereft of trees due to Dutch elm disease. The High School closed with the advent of comprehensive education but the main building is still there and once, not long after I’d obtained my teaching qualifications, I returned there to give adult evening classes run by Cornwall County Council.
It’s often puzzled me why people refer to the sixties as the permissive years. When the fifties ended, public morals were as outraged by certain issues, such as illegitimacy, homosexuality and divorce as they always had been and these attitudes remained unchanged for some considerable time. During the entire five years of my career as a student I never knew a single person who used drugs and avoided the company of the rather unsavoury set, to whom my mother referred as ‘mumpers’, who were the pioneers of the drug culture. Sexual freedom didn’t exist until towards the latter half of the decade, when the contraceptive pill became available and, until then, fear of pregnancy was the most powerful deterrent. I think young people today would be incredulous if they knew of the stigma attatched to unmarried motherhood which existed in those ‘permissive’ times. If a girl became pregnant, more often than not she would be sent away to one of the grim institutions known as ‘mother and baby homes’. Most of these were run by the Church of England and inmates were required to do housework and attend chapel daily. Six weeks after birth, their babies would be taken away and offered for adoption. Their families would explain their absence by telling friends and neighbours that they’d gone away to work, to visit relations or to have medical treatment.
Although we were on the brink of a fashion revolution, meanwhile we still dressed as our parents did although, as art students, we were a little more adventurous than most young people. The Army and Navy stores in Falmouth once had a consignment of sweaters knitted from a coarse wool, stiff with lanolin, in horizontal stripes of black and red and because they were so long, we girls were able to wear them as dresses. With the addition of a wide belt and black stockings we were able to achieve our own version of the ‘beatnik’ look and thought we were being terribly outrageous when we strutted around Falmouth thus attired. My mother was as disparaging as ever and told me I looked like a demented wasp. A few years later, when the miniskirt made its appearance, the brevity of my dress was the talk of Falmouth when I returned home from London for the holidays.
I went to the cinema with some of the other students to see The Sandpiper, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; it was the first film with an adult theme that I’d seen and so I thought I was being terribly daring. We rather admired the arty set as they were portrayed in the film and I expect we would have liked to emulate their liberal, Bohemian way of life. For my part, I desperately wanted to look like Elizabeth Taylor and tried to copy her hairstyle and make-up because one or two people had told me that I resembled her.
In 1962, the very great concern of many people was the threat of nuclear war. In October of that year the threat almost became a reality when the ongoing Cold War between the United States and what was then called the Soviet Union came terrifyingly close to escalating into nuclear conflict owing to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It lasted for thirteen days and we students were so worried that one boy even tried to dig a fallout shelter in his parents’ front garden. I have a vivid recollection of sitting on a bench with Jenny discussing the situation. She told me that her parents were going to emigrate to Australia in the event of war and this shocked and depressed me more than anything. When the crisis was over, nuclear disarmament was the main topic of conversation and we were actually given a talk by the wife of Bertrand Russell, the famous pacifist, who exchanged telegrams with Nikita Khruschev, the Russian Premier, at the height of the crisis.
But even the threat of extermination couldn’t quell our youthful exuberance and determination to extract every shred of enjoyment out of our lives. We were aware that, as art students, we had a certain mystique and showed off accordingly. One day, when we were on the beach looking for interesting pieces of driftwood to draw, we got into conversation with a man who was intrigued by our activities. When we explained that we were students from Falmouth School of Art, he asked who paid for our education fees.
‘You do!’ we replied, cheerfully.
Student grants were very generous in the sixties and, since in Cornwall further education was the exception rather than the norm, there was plenty of money available. Even though I was living at home, the grant I received was handsome; unfortunately, I had to hand over most of it to my mother for my keep.
Eventually, the time came for us to make up our minds to which art colleges we intended to apply in order to continue our training. On the advice of our tutors, I chose the London College of Printing and Hornsey College of Art because they both had outstanding graphic design facilities and my interviews were arranged so that I had one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. I’d been a conscientious student so my portfolio was full; the importance of keeping a sketchbook had been stressed upon us but when I came to prepare for my interviews I found that most of my sketches had been done on loose pieces of paper which I hastily had to assemble and staple together at the last minute. It was at times like these that I realised just how untidy and disorganised I was.
When I’d applied to the colleges of my choice I felt confident that I’d get a place at least one of them; when I boarded the train at Truro on the day before my interviews were to take place, however, that confidence had waned considerably. What if I didn’t get in at either? It was a situation to ghastly to contemplate. But at Paddington, as I stepped off the train, I breathed in the familiar London smells, heard the distant roar of the city, felt the throb of life all around me and my confidence returned; I knew that nothing would come between me and London now. In a few months, I would be returning as a student.
Harry knew the streets of London as well as a cabbie and I marvelled at the ease with which he negotiated the busy, complicated traffic systems as he drove me to my first interview at the London College of Printing. I was in awe of the large building with its labyrinthine corridors full of hurrying people and it seemed a far cry from the intimate atmosphere of Falmouth School of Art. But the Principal saw that I was nervous and put me at my ease. After looking through my portfolio, he told me that he’d be pleased to offer me a place; however, he spoke disparagingly of the standard of teaching at Falmouth and said I would have to un-learn everything I’d been taught there. It would have been better, he said, if I could have done my pre-diploma year in London. These comments didn’t go down well when I reported them on my return home.
Hornsey College of Art was completely different. The main building, where the interviews were held, was situated in a rather pleasant, peaceful location with trees and green spaces and the atmosphere, as I stepped through the entrance, was friendly and more relaxed than that of the other college where everyone had seemed so busy and preoccupied. Here, the pace of life was more like that to which I was accustomed and the Principal, too, seemed very laid-back and friendly. He told me that he was satisfied with my portfolio and offered me a place in the graphic design department which, he said, was situated not in the main building but in another part of North London. There were also studios in nearby Alexandra Palace. Although I’d already decided that I preferred Hornsey, I consulted the Principal at Falmouth School of Art to ask his advice. He suggested that as my work was very illustrative I might consider specialising in that particular branch of graphic design at a later date, in which case Hornsey would be the better choice. So therefore, when the two letters arrived to confer the offers of the respective places, I declined one and accepted the other: Hornsey it was to be.
Now that the stress and uncertainty regarding my future was over, I settled down again to enjoy my last weeks at Falmouth. The fashion tutor said I had a real flair for the subject and that it was a pity that I hadn’t considered it as a career. I pondered over her words and began to worry that perhaps, after all, I’d made the wrong choice in opting for graphic design. She told me that it wasn’t too late to change my mind because there were still places at Ravensbourne College of Art, in Kent, which had a big fashion department. Feeling reckless, I applied for an interview; after all, it had been my tutors who’d advised me to specialise in graphic design. In my heart, secretly, I wanted to be a dress designer.
I awoke on the morning before I was to travel to Kent for my interview feeling very strange. My head throbbed, I felt nauseous and there was a persistent, stabbing pain in my side. As the morning wore on I became so ill that my mother had to telephone the doctor who examined me and called for an ambulance which took me to the City hospital in Truro. Later that day, I had an emergency operation to remove my appendix. By the time I was better, it was too late to apply for any other college place and so I had to accept the fact that I wasn’t, after all, destined to become a dress designer.
I suffered another mishap shortly after recovering from my operation. One morning, as I was with a group of students on the way from one studio to another, I stumbled on a step and the abrupt, awkward movement I made to grasp the handrail to stop myself from falling fractured a bone in my foot. The boy behind me asked me if I was all right but when I told him I’d broken my foot he laughed and said I couldn’t have because I hadn’t even fallen over. I hopped to the secretary’s office to ask her to telephone my father but when I explained my predicament she regarded me without sympathy.
‘What do you mean, you’ve broken your foot?’ she demanded. She was a bossy old thing who treated the students like children so that nobody liked her very much.
‘I stumbled on the steps outside.’
‘But you can’t break a foot just by stumbling. It’s probably just bruised. Go and sit down for a bit till it feels better,’ she said, dismissing me. I had to argue for some minutes before I could persuade her to summon my father. Later that afternoon, when my leg was encased in plaster from my foot to my knee, I made a point of parading it in front of her.
Throughout my childhood, I’d learned how to cope with all the fractures I’d suffered; since there was nothing to be done about it, I just had to get on with my life and it never occurred to me, until the schools’ doctor brought up the subject, that the condition which afflicted me might affect my career. After I’d been at Hornsey for a year or so, the college nominated me for an award which, if I was successful, would allow me to go to Paris to study art for a year. I couldn’t believe in my good fortune and went about in a daze. Paris! Could it really be happening to me? During the Easter holidays I returned to Falmouth and one afternoon, foolishly, I accepted my sister’s invitation to ride her pony. Disaster resulted and I fractured by back which meant that I wasn’t able to return to Hornsey for weeks by which time it was too late for my nomination to go forward. Had I not suffered from brittle bones what a different course my life might have taken!
My friend, Jean, dropped in one afternoon while I was at home. I hadn’t seen her since I’d left the High School so I was delighted. She told me that the main purpose of her visit was to ask my advice and I was astonished because she’d always been so self-assured that I couldn’t imagine her needing to seek advice from anyone, least of all me. She was thinking about getting engaged, she said, and she realised that although she was very young she thought herself mature for her age. This was indeed true: Jean had always behaved with far more maturity than the rest of us. Nevertheless, the thought of her, of all people, contemplating such a thing as marriage was quite shocking. She was an exceptionally clever girl with a brilliant career ahead of her and it was unthinkable that she should give it up for the sake of a mere man. I had no idea who he was but, at that moment, I felt a deep resentment for him. He couldn’t really love her or he wouldn’t expect her to make such a sacrifice. But I couldn’t tell Jean this, of course; besides, I think she’d come to me for reassurance, not advice. I never found out what happened regarding her romance because I lost touch with her when I went to London. However, it must have turned out all right in the end because she did go on to have a great career.
My last days at Falmouth School of Art were drawing to a close and my mother was nagging me again about getting a holiday job. Certainly, I needed the money: there were many things I had to buy for before going to London in the autumn and my clothes situation was desperate. I was very pleased, therefore, when a couple of girls from the art school asked me if I’d be interested in joining them by working as a waitress in a popular restaurant in the main street of Falmouth. I accepted, gratefully; I’d dreaded the thought of another washing up job and although waitressing was no doubt hard work, at least there’d be tips on top of the wages.The restaurant was owned and run by two men and when one of the girls asked me if I thought they were homosexuals, I didn’t know how to reply because my rudimentary sex education hadn’t included any other aspect of human sexuality other than the kind which existed in marriage and I had only the vaguest notion, like so many of my friends at that time, that such things happened.
A few weeks later, I went to Plymouth to buy fabrics so that I could run up a new wardrobe. I’d acquired some flair owing to the fashion classes I’d attended and I realised that the way I dressed was dull and unimaginative, largely due to the influence of my mother who’d always dictated what I should wear. As I climbed on to the train at Truro, I told myself that the next train I boarded would be the one taking me to London. London! Every time I thought of it, my stomach fluttered. My mother had insisted that I lodge with Ethel while I was at college and since the age of consent was, in those days, twenty-one, I had no choice but to agree; however, as soon as I came of age, I had every intention of seeking my own bedsit. There seemed to be no shortage of accommodation because when I’d attended my interview at Hornsey, I’d noticed all the advertisements for lodgings in the windows of newsagents and other shops and although most of them stipulated ‘no blacks’ or ‘no Irish’ I hadn’t seen many which said ‘no students.’ Meanwhile, I was fond of Ethel and grateful to her for agreeing to put me up.
September was drawing ever closer and because I’d been so eager to begin my new life in the Big World, I’d forgotten about the parting. The fact that I was leaving my family bothered me not the slightest: I’d miss our cats and our dog, Laddie, far more than I’d miss them. No, it was the thought of leaving my friends which saddened me most. I’d taken their presence in my life for granted but now that I was saying my farewells to them, I realised how much they meant to me. Then, of course, there was Falmouth, my home town. Although I’d never admitted it, I was deeply attatched to the place in which I’d done most of my growing up. I’d miss the beaches, the harbour, the town with all its funny, old-fashioned shops, the surrouding countryside and all my favourite haunts. Would I return, I wondered? Of course, I’d be coming home for the holidays but what would happen when my years at college were over and I had to pursue my career?
My last days at home were spent preparing myself for London. I had to sort through all my belongings to decide which of them I was going to take with me but there was nothing to which I had any particular sentimental attatchment. I was embarking upon a new life and therefore I wanted all my things to be new. The college had sent me a list of materials I’d need to purchase but since two of these - a drawing board and a portfolio - were very large I decided to get these in London. On my last day I went for a walk so that I could say goodbye to Falmouth and, to my astonishment, my mother asked if she could accompany me. During the walk she lectured me about the dangers of living in London and the inevitable temptations that would come my way, by which I assumed she meant boys. She was concerned that Kenneth, the indomitable, might attempt to pursue me there but I assured her that I had no intention of allowing him to interfere with my life. She insisted on coming with me to London to see me settled in at Ethel’s and to help me with my luggage; I was not overjoyed at the prospect but not even she could quell my excitement.
As the train slid out of Truro Station, I had my last glimpse of the cathedral; the sight of the three, tall spires as the train slid around the bend in the viaduct would be the first thing to greet me when I returned for the Christmas vacation. How distant that time seemed! Still, I felt no regret, no hint of impending homesickness. Between Exeter and Taunton our train suffered a derailment. It was nothing serious but it meant that we had to be bussed to the nearest station to wait for a replacement train to take us on to London. The accident had been no-one’s fault but my mother was determined to find someone to blame. After we’d waited on the station for some considerable time, a railway official informed the passengers that another train had been commissioned but we’d have to wait for it to be cleaned. A few moments later, to my acute embarrassment, my mother marched up to the harrassed official to inform him that she’d been nominated by the other passengers as their spokesperson and that they didn’t care about the train being dirty: they just wanted to get on with their journey.
We were very late by the time we reached Paddington, where Harry and Ethel had been waiting for us. The next day, my mother and Ethel came with me to help me with my purchases. How wonderful were the vast art suppliers in London after the poky shops of Falmouth! Such a bewildering array of papers, paints and other materials! I couldn’t help recalling those years, long ago, when I’d been so desperate for something to draw on that I’d torn the end papers out of books. My mother returned to Cornwall the following day and Ethel came with me to see her off. She kissed Ethel on the cheek and, for a moment, I thought she might do the same to me but, with no display of emotion at all, she told me to behave myself and boarded the train. Equally emotionless, I watched her wave to us as the train began to slide out of the station; at last, she disappeared from view.
‘Come on!’ said Ethel, ‘Let’s go home!’
Margaret Merry lives in Spain if you are looking to buy a property in Spain please visit http://www.cheappropertyspain.net
Tuesday 12 June 2007
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Sweet Sixteen
Despite my intention to make myself indispensable in the shop, I very quickly reverted to my old ways; in fact, my behaviour deteriorated and I became moody, rebellious and defiant.I was discontented with my life and with my looks and would spend hours in front of the bathroom mirror viciously squeezing pimples, deriving a perverse pleasure from making myself look as ugly as I could. Because my life seemed pointless, I had no enthusiasm for anything and my school work began to suffer as a result. I lost interest in all my subjects, even art: we’d been working with modelling clay which was a medium I disliked intensely and so I made no effort at all. At home, I flew into a rage if my sister interfered with any of my things and depite my mother’s nagging, my bedroom was so untidy that, regularly, she’d storm into it, hurl everything that wasn’t already there on to the floor and then sweep the whole lot on to the landing and down the stairs in a great, engulfing tidal wave of clothes, shoes, make-up, books and other paraphernalia; all I could do was to look on in a kind of awed silence. Auntie Frances remarked that I’d grown very cynical of late and that it didn’t suit me; however, the more I was criticised, the worse I became.
The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that, owing to a new form mistress, it was a very unsettling time at school not only for me, but for the whole class. She was a young woman and because she had all the zeal of a new broom, I expect it was her first teaching appointment. However, from the moment she stepped through the door, events did not augur well for a good relationship. It was a strictly observed rule of the school that pupils should rise whenever an adult entered a room so, when our new teacher appeared, we dutifully scrambled to our feet - all, except, of course, Jenny. With a stern, unsmiling expression which was no doubt meant to convey authority, the young woman regarded us; suddenly, her gaze fell upon Jenny and, eyes widening in indignation, she made a silent gesture for her to get to her feet immediately. Jenny grasped the sides of her desk with her hands and, with much clattering and scraping of chair legs, hauled herself to her feet. It was lamentable that not one of us had the courage to speak up and thus save not only Jenny from humiliation but also our new form mistress from the embarrassment of having to apologise to her in front of the whole class and I despised myself for my cowardice. It was an unpleasant incident and it seemed to me, in that moment, that the class had made an unspoken pact to be as disruptive and unco-operative as it could with this new teacher.
I’m ashamed of myself when I look back at the hard time we gave that poor woman. We disobeyed her flagrantly and the more upset she appeared, the more we tormented her. It was as though we were fired by a strange excitement, a feeling of exhilaration, at having the upper hand and it was a very good thing that, eventually, we grew tired of persecuting her and settled down again to concentrate on our impending G.C.E. examinations. I, too, pulled myself together and made a determined effort to work as hard as I could.
When Falmouth School of Art advertised Saturday morning classes for schoolchildren interested in taking up art as a career, I signed on eagerly. The teacher was a young man, full of enthusiasm for his subject, who declared that anybody could draw or paint and that one person’s efforts were no less deserving of merit than the other’s. I found this philosophy hard to understand and rather resented his opinion that the work of all of us was of equal standard when it manifestly wasn’t. After a few weeks, those who didn’t possess much ability dropped out so that only the keenest of us remained. One of these was a boy, slightly older than I was, on whom I had formed an enormous crush. In his presence I was so overcome with shyness that I could never bring myself to speak to him but one evening, as I was making my way to Gillian’s house, I bumped into him. He was wearing the uniform of an Air Training Corps. cadet and he looked so handsome that the wild confusion in which I suddenly found myself left me utterly deprived of speech and I could barely give an intelligible reply to his friendly greeting.
I assumed that he was on his way to the Drill Hall for a weekly meeting in which case, if I contrived to be in the same place at the same time on the following week, I’d bump into him again.
So, on the same day of the next week, after taking considerable care with my appearance, I sauntered, with exaggerated nonchalance, along the road where I’d previously encountered him and, sure enough, before very long he appeared. Once again, he greeted me cheerfully and, once again, I was overcome by acute shyness. This state of affairs continued for several weeks and just as I was about to give up all hope of ever getting anywhere with him, one Saturday after art class he asked me if I’d like to go to the A.T.C. party at the Drill Hall. I floated home in a daze of ecstasy, hardly able to believe that he’d actually asked me to go out with him. I was determined to look my best for the occasion so spent a long time in front of the bathroom mirror experimenting with make up. When my mother said that I’d look better without any of that muck on my face after I’d asked her for advice, I decided to consult Jenny, who was an expert on such matters. She’d once turned up to school with her auburn hair dyed a vivid shade of red after having rinsed it with the contents of a bottle of vermilion drawing ink and how she’d got away with it I never knew; school rules regarding the wearing of make-up and the colouring of hair were so rigidly enforced that Miss Jacob had, on one occasion, dismissed from the class some girls who were still wearing the barely visible vestiges of the previous evening’s lipstick.
‘What you need to do,’ said Jenny, ‘is to underplay the lips and exaggerate the eyes. Try applying a pale foundation, a pale pink lipstick and then do up the eyes with lots of smoky shadow and lashings of mascara.’
So, armed with the much appreciated advice of the connoisseur, I trotted off to Woolworths to purchase a stick of very pale foundation and a lipstick of the palest pink I could find. Hours before I was due to set off for the party I locked myself into the bathroom and set about transforming myself. With my array of cosmetics laid out before me, I proceeded to dab, smooth, paint and smudge but when, some considerable time later, I stood back to inspect my handiwork, I was dismayed: the effect was truly disastrous. The thick, chalky foundation had whitened my face so much that, together with the corpse-like effect of the lipstick and the contrast of the blackened eyes, I resembled a ghoul that had suffered a nasty shock. Frantically, I rubbed at my face with cotton wool to try to remove some of the foundation but, the more I wiped, the more it seemed to spread. In desperation, I scrubbed my skin vigorously with a face flannel only to reveal a complexion which was inflamed and blotchy as a result of so much friction. At that moment, my mother hammered on the door to tell me that I’d been in there long enough and that other people wanted to use the bathroom.
‘What am I going to do?’ I wailed.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, ‘I always had good skin when I was your age and never needed to wear all that muck on my face.’
I went into her bedroom, helped myself to a generous scoop of her Nivea cream and smeared it on to my face in the hope that, by the time I’d done my hair, my complexion would have calmed down. Unfortunately, my hair, when I’d removed the rollers, refused to do want I wanted it to and the double crown at the back of my head, no matter how much I sprayed and backcombed, remained stubbornly on end, with the scalp exposed, making me look like a moulting cockatoo. By the time I was dressed and ready to go, all my confidence had vanished and I wished that I’d never been asked to the party in the first place. When my father dropped me off at the Drill Hall he told me that he’d be back at nine-thirty on the dot to pick me up and that I’d better be ready. Full of trepidation, I went inside to find that only a few people had arrived and since I didn’t know anyone apart from the boy who’d asked me, I pretended to be interested in a pile of gramophone records on a table. Gradually, the party livened up and a few couples began to dance. My partner suggested that we joined them but I protested that I couldn’t dance and turned my attention back to the records. Not long afterwards, I was surprised to see another girl from the High School walk in. Although she was in the same year as I was, I didn’t know her very well and had hardly ever spoken to her. She was a tall girl who was so thin that she looked like a skeleton; her best feauture was her soft, brown hair which, when it was newly washed as it was on this occasion, framed her face prettily, softening the sharp, jutting angles of her bony features. Just as I was attempting to summon the courage to talk to my partner, another boy came up to me to tell me that my father had arrived to take me home. Embarrassed, I rushed outside.
‘Please let me stay a bit longer!’ I pleaded.
‘No!,’ he replied, ‘You’ve got to come right this minute.’
‘But it’s not fair!’ I wailed. ‘I’m not a child any more and no one else has left yet.’
‘Come on! ‘ insisted my father, getting annoyed.
Humiliated, I returned to fetch my coat and say goodbye to the boy who’d invited me; I couldn’t see him at first, then, to my utter dismay, I spotted him on the floor dancing with the skeletal girl from my school and they seemed to be getting on so well that I simply slunk away without a word. It served me right that he preferred someone else since I’d hardly spoken a word to him all evening. What a dead loss he must have thought me! Miserably, I went to find my father who was waiting impatiently by the car.
My pride had been so wounded that I resolved never to speak again to the boy who had deserted me for another girl but at the Saturday art class I overheard the tail end of a conversation he was having with another boy.
‘I thought she was lovely when we were snogging under a lampost,’ he was saying, ‘ but when I saw her again in broad daylight she was so bloody ugly that I nearly threw up!’
My injured feelings were greatly mollified and when I next saw my rival, I regarded her with pity.
There was no doubt in my mind that art was to be the career I wanted to pursue and I already had my future mapped out: I would leave school after I’d completed my ‘O’ levels to do a pre-diploma course at Falmouth School of Art. The art school didn’t have college status at that time and so, eventually, I would have to seek a place at one which did; that, however, was way into the future and I didn’t have to concern myself about it yet. In the meantime, in order to obtain the five necessary passes for the course, I decided to concentrate on only those subjects at which I was best.
The General Certificate of Education ‘O’ level examination was very different from today’s General Certificate of Secondary Education and when I was teaching and had my first sight of G.C.S.E. paper, I couldn’t believe how easy the questions were. Our work involved far more thorough, detailed study and required a great deal of learning by heart, especially in subjects like English Literature; for example, we had to be able to quote long passages from Shakespeare’s plays and also some of the most important sonnets, something so thoroughly done that I can quote them still even to this day. We were also studying the work of the war poets, such as Siegfreid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and because I found their verses so inspiring, I was able to memorize them easily. Gillian had fallen in love with Rupert Brooke and was outraged that the life of such a gifted, handsome young man should be so cruelly cut short. In Latin, we also had to learn long passages from Vergil’s Camilla and Homer’s Odyssey. There were certain lines from these verses which I found particularly beautiful, such as the description of Camilla, the virgin queen of the Volscians in Roman legend, so fleet of foot that she could run over a field of corn without bending a single blade. Penny and I both had romantic yearnings and it was words like these which fired our fertile imaginations.
When the visiting schools’ doctor asked me if I’d a career in mind and I told her that I planned to go to art school, she was disapproving. Because of my brittle bones, she declared, the rough and tumble of college life would be too much for me and that it would be better to opt for a more sedate profession, such as nursing. Nursing! I was aghast: it was the very last career I’d have chosen for myself. Ignoring my expression of horror, she leaned forward to carry on talking to my mother.
‘It’s such a worthwhile profession’, she enthused, ‘and employment is guaranteed, unlike art where you can never be sure of getting a job. Besides, you wouldn’t have to worry about Margaret if she was in a hospital environment, would you?’
Beaming with a smug satisfaction which made me long to kill her, she turned to me.
‘Remember, dear,’ she said, ’you can always keep up your art as a hobby. So much more enjoyable that way, don’t you think?’
I burned with resentment at her implication that art was a profession less worthy of others and was more determined than ever to abide by my original decision to go to art school. Not long afterwards, all the girls in my class were interviewed by the Headmistress to discuss what they’d be doing after the examinations. When I informed her of my intention to leave school, her reaction was similar to that of the doctor.
‘But, Margaret,’ she protested, ‘when we join the Common Market, the country will need girls like you who are good at languages. You must take your ‘A’ levels and go on to university. Besides, you can always keep your art as a hobby.’
So, then, she too thought that an artist was of no worth! But I was not going to be deterred and the more she tried to change my mind, the firmer I became in my resolve. The argument continued until, after an interview with my mother, a compromise was reached: I would not leave school that year but return in the autumn to study art at ‘A’ level and sit for the exam at the end of one year instead of the customary two. I’d also continue to attend English Literature and French ‘A’ level classes in case I had a change of heart about not wanting to go to university. No chance of that! I wasn’t happy with the arrangement but I acceded to the proposal, reluctantly, when the Principal of the art school suggested that, if Miss jacob approved, I attend classes there once or twice a week. The ‘A’ level art wasn’t a necessary qualification, he said, but it would be a feather in my cap if I did get it.
Although I’d decided to put all thoughts of boys out of my mind until I’d completed my ‘O’ levels, a major distraction was about to disrupt my life. Penny had an older brother who was a pupil at Falmouth Grammar School and, through him, she was able to meet a number of boys. I wasn’t surprised, then, when she confessed to me that she’d taken a liking to one of them. When he sent her a message to say that, by consensus of general opinion, he thought it would be a good idea if they went out together Penny was delighted and even more pleased when he sent her a hand-drawn valentine card depicting the door of a public convenience with a sign on it saying ’vacant’ which, when you pulled a tag, changed to ‘engaged.’ Kenneth, the author of the card, was obviously extremely witty but, I thought, secretly, it wasn’t a very romantic way to proposition a girl. Still, I was curious to meet him and agreed to accompany her when she told me that she was a bit nervous about going on her first date with her new boyfriend. When I saw Kenneth for the first time my initial impression was that he was wearing some kind of comic mask comprising an exaggeratedly enlarged nose attatched to a pair of heavy, black-rimmed spectacles. The mask effect was heightened by the stark contrast of the utter normality of the rest of him: he was neither too thin nor too fat, neither too tall nor too short. I tried not to let Penny see how startled I was by his bizarre appearance and I wondered what she could possibly see in him.
As we strolled around the town, I discovered that Kenneth was surprisingly easy to get along with; also, he had a good sense of humour and a keen intelligence which, I guessed, was what had attracted Penny to him. When he suddenly put his arm around her shoulder I took it as my cue to make a discreet departure. I’d been a little embarrassed about having to play gooseberry and I’d been waiting for a suitable opportunity to leave. I was just about to excuse myself when, to my astonishment, he put his other arm around me and pulled me towards him. Penny and I were both so startled by this that we threw him a simultaneous look of surprise. He, however, was oblivious and strutted along, obviously proud of the fact that he had two girls in tow. The unusual situation in which I found myself made me feel very uncomfortable and I was relieved when, at last, I was able to make my departure. The incident preyed on my mind and I was still thinking about it when I went to sleep that night; by morning, however, I’d forgotten all about it.
The following day was Sunday and that evening we were surprised by a knock on the door. My mother opened it and, a few seconds later, I looked up in astonishment to see Kenneth standing there. He asked me if I’d like to go for a walk so, assuming that he wanted to talk to me about Penny, I agreed. We strolled around the town, as we’d done on the previous evening, chatting amicably, but no mention was made of Penny. Just as I was beginning to wonder about the purpose of his invitation to escort him, he suddenly put his arm around my shoulder and drew me close. My first reaction, apart from surprise, was indignation; I’d given him no encouragement whatsoever yet he evidently assumed that I found him attractive. What an extraordinary presumption! Did he not realise that his physical appearance would repulse any girl? Because it was Sunday, the streets were quiet and, also, it was getting dark; I was glad of this because I was afraid of being seen in this situation by anyone I knew. But just as we were making our way back to Killigrew Road, I was horrified to see some girls from my class on the other side of the road. I shrank into the shadows, praying that they wouldn’t see me, but as they passed I heard one of them gasp:
‘Did you see who that was? Margaret Walker! What’s she doing with him? ‘
My heart sank because I knew now that there would be no hope of Penny not finding out about what had happened. Oh, it was so unfair! I’d done nothing to get myself into this situation yet I was sure to get the blame for it. Kenneth seemed quite unconcerned.
‘Don’t worry about it!’ he said, cheerfully.
Anxious to get home, I was relieved when, at last, we came to my back gate. I wished him goodnight but, just as I was lifting the latch, he grabbed me and planted a firm kiss on my mouth. There was now absolutely no doubt about his intentions: he fancied me and he had the audacity to assume that the attraction was mutual. If I’d not been such a coward and if I hadn’t been in awe of him because he was older than I was, I’d have told him to his face that I found him unattractive and that I considered him to be not only not good enough for me but also definitely not good enough for Penny. It would have given me the greatest satisfaction to send him packing, there and then.
‘Who on earth was that? Or should I say what was that?’ demanded my mother when I went indoors.
‘No-one to do with me,’ I replied. ‘He’s a friend of Penny’s.’
‘What’s he doing hanging around you. then?’
‘He just wanted to talk.’
At school the next day I kept my head down and avoided Penny. I strained my ears to hear any whispered conversations but nothing appeared to have been said and I felt more hopeful that my secret might not be revealed. However, that afternoon, after lunch, I saw Penny look in my direction several times and I knew that the cat was out of the bag; coward that I was, I didn’t have the courage to face her and explain what had happened. That evening, Kenneth called again but I excused myself by saying that I hadn’t finished doing my homework. The following lunch break I was sitting on top of our air raid shelter, my favourite spot for sunbathing, concentrating on my revision, when a movement startled me and I looked up to see Kenneth’s grinning face. So far, all our encounters had been evening ones and because artificial illumination is far more forgiving than the harsh light of day, I hadn’t appreciated just how wierd his appearance was and if, before, I’d found him merely unattractive now I discovered that he was repulsive to me. I studied his features with a kind of fascinated horror. His hair was lustreless and mousy with a stiff, matted look as though it hadn’t been washed for some while; the length of his sharply pointed nose was greatly accentuated by the hideous, heavy, black-framed spectacles he wore, the thick lenses of which concealed eyes which were deep-set and too close together; his skin was badly affected by acne and the inflamed, red spots which covered his chin had yellow centres which looked as thought they might erupt spontaneously and his loosened collar revealed a neck which was punctuated by a row of blackheads; his mouth was distorted by crooked teeth which had curious green stains on them. I wasn’t surprised when, later, he boasted that not only had he never had dental treatment but also that he never needed it.
‘I thought you said he was Penny’s friend,’ said my mother, accusingly, after he’d gone. ‘Don’t you dare go getting mixed up with the likes of him!’
But every day - sometimes twice a day - Kenneth continued to haunt me. One lunch hour he appeared with a glistening globule of nasal mucous suspended from his nostril and every time he drew breath or exhaled, it quivered gently like a breeze-blown leaf on a tree. He turned up again later that evening and I was astonished to see that it was still there, only dried up. I found it difficult to disguise my revulsion and I couldn’t understand how he could be so uncaring of his appearance never to look in a mirror; also, I had a growing conviction that he didn’t wash.
When my sister first saw Kenneth, she gaped at him in undisguised amazement.
‘He’s a queer gink!’ she declared, using a popular expression of the time to describe a weird person. She christened him with the name ‘Lesser Spotted Dunkweed’ - later abbreviated to ‘The Dunkweed’ - because, she said, he looked too peculiar to be considered human. Auntie Frances was more startled by his acne than anything else about him. To give him his due, there wasn’t a lot he could do about that, although regular washing might have helped. At that time there was no treatment for acne, other than exposure to ultra-violet radiation which, these days, would probably make dermatologists throw up their hands in horror at the very thought. My mother grew daily more anxious about my association with him.
‘People are starting to talk,’ she warned me. ‘You’ll never get a decent boyfriend if you’re seen around with someone like that. He’s uglier than a toad.’
Gillian told me that she’d been asked by another boy from the Grammar School:
‘What’s a nice girl like Margaret doing with the likes of him? ‘
I was, indeed, beginning to feel concern about the fact that Kenneth was haunting me. Besides, there was a boy I had my eye on and I knew I’d stand no chance with him while someone else was hovering in the background. There was no getting away from him: he knew my routine and my movements so well that wherever I went, he was there. Again and again, I chided myself for being such a coward that I couldn’t face up to him and I longed to make it up with Penny. One day, I accepted - with some trepidation - his invitation to go to his parents’ house for tea and was astonished to find how extremely nice - how surprisingly normal - they both were. I hadn’t known that they had a younger son whom I recognised as the rather unpleasant and furtive boy I’d often seen hanging around the street behind our house in Clare Terrace. He’d aroused the suspicions of the neighbours and they’d hinted darkly at misdeeds too shocking to mention. How unfortunate, I thought, that someone as nice as their mother should produce two such awful sons.
Kenneth’s parents were fond of motoring and at weekends they invited me along, too. I was familiar with most of the popular tourist spots of Cornwall because I’d visited them with my parents or Harry and Ethel, but now I found myself in places, as yet undiscovered, that I hadn’t realised existed. We walked over sand dunes beneath huge skies exultant with larksong to wide, deserted beaches pounded by Atlantic surf; we explored disused quarries where there were deep, mysterious pools and granite landscapes of ancient sites and standing stones. On the more gentle, southern part of the county we wandered through spring woods carpeted with bluebells and anemones or walked along the shoreline below pretty, creekside villages. I loved these outings so much that I was able to endure Kenneth simply for the privilege of being able to accompany his family. He, however, took it for granted that it was his company I preferred.
After a while, he began to find fault with me and to criticise me. For example, he told me that, in his opinion, my paintings were childish; my friend, Gillian, he said, was always beautifully dressed, implying that I wasn’t; he asked me if I was aware of the annoying habit I had of interrupting his father when he was talking. The comments stung but I was too gullible and ignorant of the ways of the opposite sex to realise that this was his way of breaking down my self-esteem in order to exert his dominance of me. Often, when I strolled through the town, I would make a detour in order to look in the window of a certain antiques shop where an unusually beautiful fan was displayed. It wasn’t very expensive and I’d told Kenneth that I was saving up to buy it. One day, however, I was dismayed to see that it had gone and when I told him how upset I was at its disappearance he confessed that he’d bought it himself in order to prevent me from doing so because, he said, it was too good for me and that if I owned it I’d only break it, as I did with all my possessions.
The impending G.C.E. examinations provided me with a good excuse not to see Kenneth and, furthermore, my mother forbade him from coming to the house. At last, I was able to devote all my concentration to my revision so that when the time came for us to sit for our exams, I was quietly confident. My sister had not fared so well with the eleven-plus and on the day she received notification that she hadn’t passed, she was afraid to come home after school. When it began to grow dark our mother was so concerned that she decided to notify the police; at that moment, however, Jean appeared and, silently and shamefacedly, handed her the slip of paper informing our parents that she’d failed. I’d expected my sister to suffer the full force of our mother’s wrath but, to my surprise, although disappointment was written all over her face, she said not a word. Because Jean had failed her eleven-plus, I took it for granted that the promised pony wouldn’t be forthcoming and was therefore greatly surprised, and not a little indignant when, some time later, our mother took out a loan so that she could purchase a pony. I thought it most unjust that I should have received nothing, not even the piano lessons I longed for, for passing my eleven-plus whereas my sister, who had failed, was being rewarded with a pony. I brooded for some while until it dawned on me, after hearing our mother boasting to a customer, that the pony was simply a means by which she could elevate her status and I had to concede that the phrase ‘my daughter’s piano lessons’ sounded far less impressive than ‘my daughter’s pony.’
Every summer, my mother nagged me to get a holiday job and this time there was no getting away from it. I dragged myself, reluctantly, to what was then referred to as the Labour Exchange where I found that the only temporary employment available was washing up in hotels and other boarding establishments. It was hard, physical work and I hated it. I strained my back, which had always been weak, lifting heavy trays of cutlery and had to consult our doctor who prescribed a foul-smelling, mustard-based liniment which was to be applied to the affected part. The warming effect of the mustard was pleasant but the smell was so appalling that it made me retch and so I decided I’d rather put up with the backache. In due course, the ‘O’ level results arrived and I was gratified and relieved to discover that I’d got distinctions in languages and art and that there was now nothing to stop me from becoming an art student.
It was strange returning to school as a sixth-former, one of that élite band of whom I’d always been so much in awe. I felt as though I were an imposter, belonging neither to the High School nor Falmouth School of Art and although I was supposed to attend French and English Literature classes, I had no intention of devoting my time to either of these subjects because I wanted to concentrate on my art in order to make the year pass as quickly as possible. I didn’t like the unsettling sensation of being in a state of limbo, neither here nor there. From the ‘A’ level syllabus I chose those subjects at which I was best, such as plant drawing, imaginative composition, calligraphy and so on: I also decided to make a marionette, the given theme of which was ‘Fire’. I spent a long time poring through books for inspiration and sketching ideas
for my puppet. The most important part of a marionette is, obviously, the head; it has to be able to convey some sort of expression so I modelled the features of mine to be powerful, imperious and rather severe. When I painted the finished, papier måché head, I paid particular attention to the eyes, which I wanted to blaze, and it was while I was applying the finishing touches that it occurred me that my puppet’s features bore a striking similarity to those of Miss Jacob. Perhaps, subconsciously, she had been my inspiration. For my puppet’s head-dress and flowing robes I’d collected a selection of pieces of transparent fabrics in appropriate, fiery colours and to achieve a realistic effect of fire I was going to cut out flame-like shapes from sheets of red and orange acetate. With so much time to devote to my efforts, I was confident that I’d achieve a good pass in the final exam.
When I went for my first lesson at the art school I had the idea that I’d be joining the other students; instead, I was shown into a small side room by a rather impatient tutor who gave me a perfunctory demonstration on how to draw from life using negative as well as positive shapes. He then disappeared and I was left alone for the next couple of hours. My mother had acquired a second-hand duffle coat which, she assured me, was what every art student wore. It had about as much fashion appeal as a horse blanket and I hated it. When I went into the cloakroom to retrieve it after my lesson, I overheard two girls talking about it.
‘Who on earth wears a duffle coat these days?’ asked one.
‘I certainly don’t know anyone who does,’ replied the other.
I stuffed the detested coat into my bag, resolving never to wear it again. Outside the main building, on the wall by the pavement, was a display cabinet featuring the work of some of the fashion students. I found their drawings even more interesting than the work of the other students on display inside and wondered, wistfully, if the day would come when my own drawings would be exhibited.
Kenneth had left the Grammar School to begin a course at a college in Coventry but if I’d imagined that, at last, I was going to be free of him I was mistaken: he hitchhiked home on the Friday evening and was on my doorstep the next morning. This routine continued well into the winter months and even when the country was brought to a standstill by a bout of severe weather, somehow he managed to make his way back to Falmouth. Lately, I’d noticed that he seemed to be paying a great deal of attention to Jean and this disturbed me greatly because I knew that if my mother had the slightest suspicion that he was taking an unnatural interest in her, all hell would be let loose and she would make the most dreadful accusations. These concerns prompted me to sever the relationship as quickly as possible so, one Saturday afternoon as Kenneth and I were sitting on a pavement bench, I took the bull by the horns and told him that I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. I was totally unprepared for his reaction. He said nothing then, suddenly, he threw his head on to my lap and with great, choking sobs began to weep. I was horrified. I’d never imagined that he was capable of making such an exhibition of himself. When a passing motorist pulled up to ask if anything was the matter and I had to reassure him that everything was all right, I could have died of shame and embarrassment. I feared that, at any moment, someone might walk past us and so, in desperation, I told Kenneth that I hadn’t really meant what I’d said. Instantly, he stopped howling, stood up and carried on in his usual, cheerful manner as though nothing had happened.
The incident had embarrassed me so much that the following Saturday morning when he knocked on our door I told him I didn’t want to see him, turned my back on him and went upstairs to my room, shutting the door behind me. At this, he promptly sat down on our stairs and began to weep and my mother, who was doing the housework at the time, was obliged to vacuum around him.
‘For goodness’ sake get rid of that bloody boy!’ she hissed from the landing and so, once again, I had no alternative but to tell Kenneth that I hadn’t meant what I’d said.
This state of affairs could have gone on indefinitely had his college work not begun to suffer as a result of his weekend trips from Coventry to Falmouth, forcing his parents to forbid him from coming home. Even so, I was not to be free of him and soon found myself receiving letters. Lately, I’d discovered that my mother had been intercepting and opening all my correspondence and although I was beside myself with fury and outrage, I didn’t have the courage to confront her about it. There was a prurient side to Kenneth’s nature and I was terrified that she might get hold of one of his letters. One day, my worst fears were realised when I spotted an envelope with his handwriting on it protruding from the pocket of her apron. Panic stricken, I ran to Jean to beg her to try to retrieve it while I set up a distraction. The ploy worked, thanks to my sister’s nimble fingers, and it was just as well that the operation was successful because the contents of the letter, had she read them, would have enraged her to the point of apoplexy.
In the spring, Ethel invited me to spend a few days in London with her and Harry and I was so excited at the prospect that I could hardly contain myself. When I boarded the Paddington train at Truro I was wearing the smart new coat, made from a soft wool in a flattering shade of red, that I’d been given for Christmas. It was a far cry from the school uniform that I’d been forced to wear on my last, unaccompanied railway journey and I felt very grown-up and sophisticated. The train was quite crowded but when we reached Plymouth all the other passengers in my compartment disembarked. While we were waiting for the dining carriages to be attatched, I was reminded of a family journey by rail from London to Falmouth made some years ago when Jean and I had been little girls. In the days of steam, the big locomotives pulling the trains from Paddington to Penzance were replaced with smaller ones when the dining cars were detatched at Plymouth. The operation took about twenty minutes and so passsengers often used to take advantage of the wait by getting out to stretch their legs. On this occasion, our parents went off to get a cup of tea leaving us alone in the compartment but with the assurance that they’d be back long before the train was ready to leave the station. However, during the process of exchanging engines, the carriages started to move and Jean and I were convinced that the train was going and we’d been abandoned to some unknown fate. We stared at each other in horror, not knowing what to do. Jean burst into tears and my panic was so great that I overcame my fear of adults to call out of the window to ask a passer-by if the train was leaving.
My reminiscences were interrupted when a noisy group of servicemen entered my compartment followed, a few moments later, by a man in a business suit who sat down next to me. We left Plymouth and some time later, as we were speeding towards Taunton, he stood up to reach for his briefcase in the overhead compartment. I assumed he was getting ready to disembark at the next station but, after removing a magazine, he replaced the briefcase and sat down again. For half an hour or so it remained unopened on his lap then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him remove a pen from his pocket. A few minutes later, I became aware that it had gone very quiet in our compartment and, glancing sideways, I saw that the man had opened his magazine, which featured explicit photographs of naked women, and was meticulously circling their nipples with a red, ball-point pen as he turned each page.
‘Are you going all the way to Paddington?’ he suddenly asked, startling me so much that I jumped. I nodded and turned away, hastily. A few seconds later, he began to shift about and I realised that he was edging his way towards me; the next moment, I felt his hand brush against my thigh. At this, one of the servicemen sitting opposite me stood up, crossed over and, with great deliberation, sat down between me and the man. I smiled at him with gratitude and when we reached Paddington, he and his companions escorted me from the train, to the astonishment of Ethel who was waiting to meet me. What had occurred was to be by no means my only unpleasant railway encounter: during my student years I travelled a great deal by train and I discovered that it is a form of transport which has an irresistible attraction for men with unusual sexual tendencies. Fortunately, I learned how to deal with them.
Harry was the caretaker of the large block of flats where he and Ethel lived in a pleasant part of Islington, not far from Sadler’s Wells Theatre. They were Londoners born and bred and were very proud of their city. They showed me to all the famous places - the Tower of London, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace and so on and Ethel took me to Madame Tussaud’s and, best of all, the London Planetarium which thrilled me beyond words. One evening, as a surprise, we went to Covent Garden to see a gala ballet performance and I couldn’t believe that I was actually seeing, with my very own eyes, famous dancers whom I’d only ever seen before on television or in photographs. The gala included as its highlight a performance by a legendary dancer called Antonio who gave a wonderfully exciting display of a fusion of ballet and flamenco to the music of Ravel’s Bolero . I was so thrilled by everything that I’d seen in London that, when I returned home, I thought Falmouth the dullest place in the world.
One day, at school, the fire alarm sounded and in accordance with the drill which had been practised several times, all the girls filed out in an orderly manner. On these occasions I always stayed behind to give Jenny a hand and so we were accustomed to being the last ones to leave the building. This time, however, as we stepped outside we were greatly surprised to see a fire appliance parked there. We asked the firemen if the school was on fire but they laughed and told us that they were there as part of the drill. Some of the men were young and very handsome and we spent several enjoyable minutes chatting and flirting with them. A day or so later a girl came into the art room where I was working to tell me that Miss Jacob wanted to see me in her study. Quaking in my shoes, wondering what it was that I’d done, I knocked on her door, timidly. To my infinite relief she was smiling when I entered. She told me that the firemen who’d attended the drill had been very impressed because I’d stayed behind to help my friend, not knowing whether or not there was a fire, and that I’d been commended for bravery by the Fire Service. I could barely suppress a smile because no one knew better than I what a coward I was! I was flattered by the praise but, at the same time, slightly offended: fire or no fire, did they really believe I’d have left my friend to fend for herself?
Towards the end of my last term at the High School we had an open day to which parents, families and friends of the pupils were invited. My mother insisted on being shown around the school, even though she’d inspected it thoroughly on several previous occasions, and I had no choice but to trail around after her feeling very self-conscious and embarrassed by the fact that she was wearing what she referred to as her ‘costume’, even though it was a warm, summer’s day, with the rubber girdle underneath. As we came out of the main building into the sunshine I saw Jenny sitting on a low wall surrounded by a large group of girls from our class. She was laughing and chatting happily and didn’t notice us as we passed or hear my mother call out ‘Hello Jenny!’
On the way home, my mother was very quiet and from her grim, tight-lipped expression I could tell that some kind of trouble was brewing. I never fully understood what happened afterwards because I wasn’t told but I believe my mother wrote Jenny a letter expressing her disgust that she’d been deliberately ignored by her at the open day. But I knew perfectly well that it hadn’t been the fact that she thought she’d been snubbed which prompted her to remonstrate in this manner: she’d been motivated by sheer jealousy. The huge popularity which Jenny enjoyed, plus her irrepressible happiness, her vitality and exuberant good nature had been plain to see and my mother hadn’t liked it. My father was appalled by what she’d done and for the first time that I could recall, he confronted her.
‘That poor, crippled girl! ‘ he said. ‘That poor, courageous, crippled girl! How could you?’
This time, my mother evidently realised she’d gone too far because she wrote another letter to Jenny to apologise. Her suspicious, jealous nature invariably led to some kind of unpleasantness, usually in the form of unfounded accusations. For example, she was in the habit of hiding money in food packets, such as custard powder, which she’d then replace on the shelf. When the contents of the packets were used up, she’d throw them away, together with the money, and later, when she found that the hidden notes had disappeared, she’d accuse someone - usually a particular friend of my sister who happened to live in a council house and couldn’t, therefore, be considered trustworthy - of having stolen it. It was a wonder that Jean and I had any friends at all.
At the end of term assembly on my last day at the High School most of the girls who were leaving cried. I regarded them somewhat contemptuously, feeling quite unmoved by the occasion. It wasn’t until some time later that I realised just how much my life had been influenced by the happy years I’d spent there: the school had been the one, cohesive force in my childhood, giving me not only the privilege of a first class education but also the security and stability I’d never had at home. Now that I was no longer part of that sheltered and untroubled environment, I suddenly felt afraid.
Margaret Merry lives in Spain if you are looking to buy a property in Spain please visit http://www.cheappropertyspain.net
The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that, owing to a new form mistress, it was a very unsettling time at school not only for me, but for the whole class. She was a young woman and because she had all the zeal of a new broom, I expect it was her first teaching appointment. However, from the moment she stepped through the door, events did not augur well for a good relationship. It was a strictly observed rule of the school that pupils should rise whenever an adult entered a room so, when our new teacher appeared, we dutifully scrambled to our feet - all, except, of course, Jenny. With a stern, unsmiling expression which was no doubt meant to convey authority, the young woman regarded us; suddenly, her gaze fell upon Jenny and, eyes widening in indignation, she made a silent gesture for her to get to her feet immediately. Jenny grasped the sides of her desk with her hands and, with much clattering and scraping of chair legs, hauled herself to her feet. It was lamentable that not one of us had the courage to speak up and thus save not only Jenny from humiliation but also our new form mistress from the embarrassment of having to apologise to her in front of the whole class and I despised myself for my cowardice. It was an unpleasant incident and it seemed to me, in that moment, that the class had made an unspoken pact to be as disruptive and unco-operative as it could with this new teacher.
I’m ashamed of myself when I look back at the hard time we gave that poor woman. We disobeyed her flagrantly and the more upset she appeared, the more we tormented her. It was as though we were fired by a strange excitement, a feeling of exhilaration, at having the upper hand and it was a very good thing that, eventually, we grew tired of persecuting her and settled down again to concentrate on our impending G.C.E. examinations. I, too, pulled myself together and made a determined effort to work as hard as I could.
When Falmouth School of Art advertised Saturday morning classes for schoolchildren interested in taking up art as a career, I signed on eagerly. The teacher was a young man, full of enthusiasm for his subject, who declared that anybody could draw or paint and that one person’s efforts were no less deserving of merit than the other’s. I found this philosophy hard to understand and rather resented his opinion that the work of all of us was of equal standard when it manifestly wasn’t. After a few weeks, those who didn’t possess much ability dropped out so that only the keenest of us remained. One of these was a boy, slightly older than I was, on whom I had formed an enormous crush. In his presence I was so overcome with shyness that I could never bring myself to speak to him but one evening, as I was making my way to Gillian’s house, I bumped into him. He was wearing the uniform of an Air Training Corps. cadet and he looked so handsome that the wild confusion in which I suddenly found myself left me utterly deprived of speech and I could barely give an intelligible reply to his friendly greeting.
I assumed that he was on his way to the Drill Hall for a weekly meeting in which case, if I contrived to be in the same place at the same time on the following week, I’d bump into him again.
So, on the same day of the next week, after taking considerable care with my appearance, I sauntered, with exaggerated nonchalance, along the road where I’d previously encountered him and, sure enough, before very long he appeared. Once again, he greeted me cheerfully and, once again, I was overcome by acute shyness. This state of affairs continued for several weeks and just as I was about to give up all hope of ever getting anywhere with him, one Saturday after art class he asked me if I’d like to go to the A.T.C. party at the Drill Hall. I floated home in a daze of ecstasy, hardly able to believe that he’d actually asked me to go out with him. I was determined to look my best for the occasion so spent a long time in front of the bathroom mirror experimenting with make up. When my mother said that I’d look better without any of that muck on my face after I’d asked her for advice, I decided to consult Jenny, who was an expert on such matters. She’d once turned up to school with her auburn hair dyed a vivid shade of red after having rinsed it with the contents of a bottle of vermilion drawing ink and how she’d got away with it I never knew; school rules regarding the wearing of make-up and the colouring of hair were so rigidly enforced that Miss Jacob had, on one occasion, dismissed from the class some girls who were still wearing the barely visible vestiges of the previous evening’s lipstick.
‘What you need to do,’ said Jenny, ‘is to underplay the lips and exaggerate the eyes. Try applying a pale foundation, a pale pink lipstick and then do up the eyes with lots of smoky shadow and lashings of mascara.’
So, armed with the much appreciated advice of the connoisseur, I trotted off to Woolworths to purchase a stick of very pale foundation and a lipstick of the palest pink I could find. Hours before I was due to set off for the party I locked myself into the bathroom and set about transforming myself. With my array of cosmetics laid out before me, I proceeded to dab, smooth, paint and smudge but when, some considerable time later, I stood back to inspect my handiwork, I was dismayed: the effect was truly disastrous. The thick, chalky foundation had whitened my face so much that, together with the corpse-like effect of the lipstick and the contrast of the blackened eyes, I resembled a ghoul that had suffered a nasty shock. Frantically, I rubbed at my face with cotton wool to try to remove some of the foundation but, the more I wiped, the more it seemed to spread. In desperation, I scrubbed my skin vigorously with a face flannel only to reveal a complexion which was inflamed and blotchy as a result of so much friction. At that moment, my mother hammered on the door to tell me that I’d been in there long enough and that other people wanted to use the bathroom.
‘What am I going to do?’ I wailed.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, ‘I always had good skin when I was your age and never needed to wear all that muck on my face.’
I went into her bedroom, helped myself to a generous scoop of her Nivea cream and smeared it on to my face in the hope that, by the time I’d done my hair, my complexion would have calmed down. Unfortunately, my hair, when I’d removed the rollers, refused to do want I wanted it to and the double crown at the back of my head, no matter how much I sprayed and backcombed, remained stubbornly on end, with the scalp exposed, making me look like a moulting cockatoo. By the time I was dressed and ready to go, all my confidence had vanished and I wished that I’d never been asked to the party in the first place. When my father dropped me off at the Drill Hall he told me that he’d be back at nine-thirty on the dot to pick me up and that I’d better be ready. Full of trepidation, I went inside to find that only a few people had arrived and since I didn’t know anyone apart from the boy who’d asked me, I pretended to be interested in a pile of gramophone records on a table. Gradually, the party livened up and a few couples began to dance. My partner suggested that we joined them but I protested that I couldn’t dance and turned my attention back to the records. Not long afterwards, I was surprised to see another girl from the High School walk in. Although she was in the same year as I was, I didn’t know her very well and had hardly ever spoken to her. She was a tall girl who was so thin that she looked like a skeleton; her best feauture was her soft, brown hair which, when it was newly washed as it was on this occasion, framed her face prettily, softening the sharp, jutting angles of her bony features. Just as I was attempting to summon the courage to talk to my partner, another boy came up to me to tell me that my father had arrived to take me home. Embarrassed, I rushed outside.
‘Please let me stay a bit longer!’ I pleaded.
‘No!,’ he replied, ‘You’ve got to come right this minute.’
‘But it’s not fair!’ I wailed. ‘I’m not a child any more and no one else has left yet.’
‘Come on! ‘ insisted my father, getting annoyed.
Humiliated, I returned to fetch my coat and say goodbye to the boy who’d invited me; I couldn’t see him at first, then, to my utter dismay, I spotted him on the floor dancing with the skeletal girl from my school and they seemed to be getting on so well that I simply slunk away without a word. It served me right that he preferred someone else since I’d hardly spoken a word to him all evening. What a dead loss he must have thought me! Miserably, I went to find my father who was waiting impatiently by the car.
My pride had been so wounded that I resolved never to speak again to the boy who had deserted me for another girl but at the Saturday art class I overheard the tail end of a conversation he was having with another boy.
‘I thought she was lovely when we were snogging under a lampost,’ he was saying, ‘ but when I saw her again in broad daylight she was so bloody ugly that I nearly threw up!’
My injured feelings were greatly mollified and when I next saw my rival, I regarded her with pity.
There was no doubt in my mind that art was to be the career I wanted to pursue and I already had my future mapped out: I would leave school after I’d completed my ‘O’ levels to do a pre-diploma course at Falmouth School of Art. The art school didn’t have college status at that time and so, eventually, I would have to seek a place at one which did; that, however, was way into the future and I didn’t have to concern myself about it yet. In the meantime, in order to obtain the five necessary passes for the course, I decided to concentrate on only those subjects at which I was best.
The General Certificate of Education ‘O’ level examination was very different from today’s General Certificate of Secondary Education and when I was teaching and had my first sight of G.C.S.E. paper, I couldn’t believe how easy the questions were. Our work involved far more thorough, detailed study and required a great deal of learning by heart, especially in subjects like English Literature; for example, we had to be able to quote long passages from Shakespeare’s plays and also some of the most important sonnets, something so thoroughly done that I can quote them still even to this day. We were also studying the work of the war poets, such as Siegfreid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and because I found their verses so inspiring, I was able to memorize them easily. Gillian had fallen in love with Rupert Brooke and was outraged that the life of such a gifted, handsome young man should be so cruelly cut short. In Latin, we also had to learn long passages from Vergil’s Camilla and Homer’s Odyssey. There were certain lines from these verses which I found particularly beautiful, such as the description of Camilla, the virgin queen of the Volscians in Roman legend, so fleet of foot that she could run over a field of corn without bending a single blade. Penny and I both had romantic yearnings and it was words like these which fired our fertile imaginations.
When the visiting schools’ doctor asked me if I’d a career in mind and I told her that I planned to go to art school, she was disapproving. Because of my brittle bones, she declared, the rough and tumble of college life would be too much for me and that it would be better to opt for a more sedate profession, such as nursing. Nursing! I was aghast: it was the very last career I’d have chosen for myself. Ignoring my expression of horror, she leaned forward to carry on talking to my mother.
‘It’s such a worthwhile profession’, she enthused, ‘and employment is guaranteed, unlike art where you can never be sure of getting a job. Besides, you wouldn’t have to worry about Margaret if she was in a hospital environment, would you?’
Beaming with a smug satisfaction which made me long to kill her, she turned to me.
‘Remember, dear,’ she said, ’you can always keep up your art as a hobby. So much more enjoyable that way, don’t you think?’
I burned with resentment at her implication that art was a profession less worthy of others and was more determined than ever to abide by my original decision to go to art school. Not long afterwards, all the girls in my class were interviewed by the Headmistress to discuss what they’d be doing after the examinations. When I informed her of my intention to leave school, her reaction was similar to that of the doctor.
‘But, Margaret,’ she protested, ‘when we join the Common Market, the country will need girls like you who are good at languages. You must take your ‘A’ levels and go on to university. Besides, you can always keep your art as a hobby.’
So, then, she too thought that an artist was of no worth! But I was not going to be deterred and the more she tried to change my mind, the firmer I became in my resolve. The argument continued until, after an interview with my mother, a compromise was reached: I would not leave school that year but return in the autumn to study art at ‘A’ level and sit for the exam at the end of one year instead of the customary two. I’d also continue to attend English Literature and French ‘A’ level classes in case I had a change of heart about not wanting to go to university. No chance of that! I wasn’t happy with the arrangement but I acceded to the proposal, reluctantly, when the Principal of the art school suggested that, if Miss jacob approved, I attend classes there once or twice a week. The ‘A’ level art wasn’t a necessary qualification, he said, but it would be a feather in my cap if I did get it.
Although I’d decided to put all thoughts of boys out of my mind until I’d completed my ‘O’ levels, a major distraction was about to disrupt my life. Penny had an older brother who was a pupil at Falmouth Grammar School and, through him, she was able to meet a number of boys. I wasn’t surprised, then, when she confessed to me that she’d taken a liking to one of them. When he sent her a message to say that, by consensus of general opinion, he thought it would be a good idea if they went out together Penny was delighted and even more pleased when he sent her a hand-drawn valentine card depicting the door of a public convenience with a sign on it saying ’vacant’ which, when you pulled a tag, changed to ‘engaged.’ Kenneth, the author of the card, was obviously extremely witty but, I thought, secretly, it wasn’t a very romantic way to proposition a girl. Still, I was curious to meet him and agreed to accompany her when she told me that she was a bit nervous about going on her first date with her new boyfriend. When I saw Kenneth for the first time my initial impression was that he was wearing some kind of comic mask comprising an exaggeratedly enlarged nose attatched to a pair of heavy, black-rimmed spectacles. The mask effect was heightened by the stark contrast of the utter normality of the rest of him: he was neither too thin nor too fat, neither too tall nor too short. I tried not to let Penny see how startled I was by his bizarre appearance and I wondered what she could possibly see in him.
As we strolled around the town, I discovered that Kenneth was surprisingly easy to get along with; also, he had a good sense of humour and a keen intelligence which, I guessed, was what had attracted Penny to him. When he suddenly put his arm around her shoulder I took it as my cue to make a discreet departure. I’d been a little embarrassed about having to play gooseberry and I’d been waiting for a suitable opportunity to leave. I was just about to excuse myself when, to my astonishment, he put his other arm around me and pulled me towards him. Penny and I were both so startled by this that we threw him a simultaneous look of surprise. He, however, was oblivious and strutted along, obviously proud of the fact that he had two girls in tow. The unusual situation in which I found myself made me feel very uncomfortable and I was relieved when, at last, I was able to make my departure. The incident preyed on my mind and I was still thinking about it when I went to sleep that night; by morning, however, I’d forgotten all about it.
The following day was Sunday and that evening we were surprised by a knock on the door. My mother opened it and, a few seconds later, I looked up in astonishment to see Kenneth standing there. He asked me if I’d like to go for a walk so, assuming that he wanted to talk to me about Penny, I agreed. We strolled around the town, as we’d done on the previous evening, chatting amicably, but no mention was made of Penny. Just as I was beginning to wonder about the purpose of his invitation to escort him, he suddenly put his arm around my shoulder and drew me close. My first reaction, apart from surprise, was indignation; I’d given him no encouragement whatsoever yet he evidently assumed that I found him attractive. What an extraordinary presumption! Did he not realise that his physical appearance would repulse any girl? Because it was Sunday, the streets were quiet and, also, it was getting dark; I was glad of this because I was afraid of being seen in this situation by anyone I knew. But just as we were making our way back to Killigrew Road, I was horrified to see some girls from my class on the other side of the road. I shrank into the shadows, praying that they wouldn’t see me, but as they passed I heard one of them gasp:
‘Did you see who that was? Margaret Walker! What’s she doing with him? ‘
My heart sank because I knew now that there would be no hope of Penny not finding out about what had happened. Oh, it was so unfair! I’d done nothing to get myself into this situation yet I was sure to get the blame for it. Kenneth seemed quite unconcerned.
‘Don’t worry about it!’ he said, cheerfully.
Anxious to get home, I was relieved when, at last, we came to my back gate. I wished him goodnight but, just as I was lifting the latch, he grabbed me and planted a firm kiss on my mouth. There was now absolutely no doubt about his intentions: he fancied me and he had the audacity to assume that the attraction was mutual. If I’d not been such a coward and if I hadn’t been in awe of him because he was older than I was, I’d have told him to his face that I found him unattractive and that I considered him to be not only not good enough for me but also definitely not good enough for Penny. It would have given me the greatest satisfaction to send him packing, there and then.
‘Who on earth was that? Or should I say what was that?’ demanded my mother when I went indoors.
‘No-one to do with me,’ I replied. ‘He’s a friend of Penny’s.’
‘What’s he doing hanging around you. then?’
‘He just wanted to talk.’
At school the next day I kept my head down and avoided Penny. I strained my ears to hear any whispered conversations but nothing appeared to have been said and I felt more hopeful that my secret might not be revealed. However, that afternoon, after lunch, I saw Penny look in my direction several times and I knew that the cat was out of the bag; coward that I was, I didn’t have the courage to face her and explain what had happened. That evening, Kenneth called again but I excused myself by saying that I hadn’t finished doing my homework. The following lunch break I was sitting on top of our air raid shelter, my favourite spot for sunbathing, concentrating on my revision, when a movement startled me and I looked up to see Kenneth’s grinning face. So far, all our encounters had been evening ones and because artificial illumination is far more forgiving than the harsh light of day, I hadn’t appreciated just how wierd his appearance was and if, before, I’d found him merely unattractive now I discovered that he was repulsive to me. I studied his features with a kind of fascinated horror. His hair was lustreless and mousy with a stiff, matted look as though it hadn’t been washed for some while; the length of his sharply pointed nose was greatly accentuated by the hideous, heavy, black-framed spectacles he wore, the thick lenses of which concealed eyes which were deep-set and too close together; his skin was badly affected by acne and the inflamed, red spots which covered his chin had yellow centres which looked as thought they might erupt spontaneously and his loosened collar revealed a neck which was punctuated by a row of blackheads; his mouth was distorted by crooked teeth which had curious green stains on them. I wasn’t surprised when, later, he boasted that not only had he never had dental treatment but also that he never needed it.
‘I thought you said he was Penny’s friend,’ said my mother, accusingly, after he’d gone. ‘Don’t you dare go getting mixed up with the likes of him!’
But every day - sometimes twice a day - Kenneth continued to haunt me. One lunch hour he appeared with a glistening globule of nasal mucous suspended from his nostril and every time he drew breath or exhaled, it quivered gently like a breeze-blown leaf on a tree. He turned up again later that evening and I was astonished to see that it was still there, only dried up. I found it difficult to disguise my revulsion and I couldn’t understand how he could be so uncaring of his appearance never to look in a mirror; also, I had a growing conviction that he didn’t wash.
When my sister first saw Kenneth, she gaped at him in undisguised amazement.
‘He’s a queer gink!’ she declared, using a popular expression of the time to describe a weird person. She christened him with the name ‘Lesser Spotted Dunkweed’ - later abbreviated to ‘The Dunkweed’ - because, she said, he looked too peculiar to be considered human. Auntie Frances was more startled by his acne than anything else about him. To give him his due, there wasn’t a lot he could do about that, although regular washing might have helped. At that time there was no treatment for acne, other than exposure to ultra-violet radiation which, these days, would probably make dermatologists throw up their hands in horror at the very thought. My mother grew daily more anxious about my association with him.
‘People are starting to talk,’ she warned me. ‘You’ll never get a decent boyfriend if you’re seen around with someone like that. He’s uglier than a toad.’
Gillian told me that she’d been asked by another boy from the Grammar School:
‘What’s a nice girl like Margaret doing with the likes of him? ‘
I was, indeed, beginning to feel concern about the fact that Kenneth was haunting me. Besides, there was a boy I had my eye on and I knew I’d stand no chance with him while someone else was hovering in the background. There was no getting away from him: he knew my routine and my movements so well that wherever I went, he was there. Again and again, I chided myself for being such a coward that I couldn’t face up to him and I longed to make it up with Penny. One day, I accepted - with some trepidation - his invitation to go to his parents’ house for tea and was astonished to find how extremely nice - how surprisingly normal - they both were. I hadn’t known that they had a younger son whom I recognised as the rather unpleasant and furtive boy I’d often seen hanging around the street behind our house in Clare Terrace. He’d aroused the suspicions of the neighbours and they’d hinted darkly at misdeeds too shocking to mention. How unfortunate, I thought, that someone as nice as their mother should produce two such awful sons.
Kenneth’s parents were fond of motoring and at weekends they invited me along, too. I was familiar with most of the popular tourist spots of Cornwall because I’d visited them with my parents or Harry and Ethel, but now I found myself in places, as yet undiscovered, that I hadn’t realised existed. We walked over sand dunes beneath huge skies exultant with larksong to wide, deserted beaches pounded by Atlantic surf; we explored disused quarries where there were deep, mysterious pools and granite landscapes of ancient sites and standing stones. On the more gentle, southern part of the county we wandered through spring woods carpeted with bluebells and anemones or walked along the shoreline below pretty, creekside villages. I loved these outings so much that I was able to endure Kenneth simply for the privilege of being able to accompany his family. He, however, took it for granted that it was his company I preferred.
After a while, he began to find fault with me and to criticise me. For example, he told me that, in his opinion, my paintings were childish; my friend, Gillian, he said, was always beautifully dressed, implying that I wasn’t; he asked me if I was aware of the annoying habit I had of interrupting his father when he was talking. The comments stung but I was too gullible and ignorant of the ways of the opposite sex to realise that this was his way of breaking down my self-esteem in order to exert his dominance of me. Often, when I strolled through the town, I would make a detour in order to look in the window of a certain antiques shop where an unusually beautiful fan was displayed. It wasn’t very expensive and I’d told Kenneth that I was saving up to buy it. One day, however, I was dismayed to see that it had gone and when I told him how upset I was at its disappearance he confessed that he’d bought it himself in order to prevent me from doing so because, he said, it was too good for me and that if I owned it I’d only break it, as I did with all my possessions.
The impending G.C.E. examinations provided me with a good excuse not to see Kenneth and, furthermore, my mother forbade him from coming to the house. At last, I was able to devote all my concentration to my revision so that when the time came for us to sit for our exams, I was quietly confident. My sister had not fared so well with the eleven-plus and on the day she received notification that she hadn’t passed, she was afraid to come home after school. When it began to grow dark our mother was so concerned that she decided to notify the police; at that moment, however, Jean appeared and, silently and shamefacedly, handed her the slip of paper informing our parents that she’d failed. I’d expected my sister to suffer the full force of our mother’s wrath but, to my surprise, although disappointment was written all over her face, she said not a word. Because Jean had failed her eleven-plus, I took it for granted that the promised pony wouldn’t be forthcoming and was therefore greatly surprised, and not a little indignant when, some time later, our mother took out a loan so that she could purchase a pony. I thought it most unjust that I should have received nothing, not even the piano lessons I longed for, for passing my eleven-plus whereas my sister, who had failed, was being rewarded with a pony. I brooded for some while until it dawned on me, after hearing our mother boasting to a customer, that the pony was simply a means by which she could elevate her status and I had to concede that the phrase ‘my daughter’s piano lessons’ sounded far less impressive than ‘my daughter’s pony.’
Every summer, my mother nagged me to get a holiday job and this time there was no getting away from it. I dragged myself, reluctantly, to what was then referred to as the Labour Exchange where I found that the only temporary employment available was washing up in hotels and other boarding establishments. It was hard, physical work and I hated it. I strained my back, which had always been weak, lifting heavy trays of cutlery and had to consult our doctor who prescribed a foul-smelling, mustard-based liniment which was to be applied to the affected part. The warming effect of the mustard was pleasant but the smell was so appalling that it made me retch and so I decided I’d rather put up with the backache. In due course, the ‘O’ level results arrived and I was gratified and relieved to discover that I’d got distinctions in languages and art and that there was now nothing to stop me from becoming an art student.
It was strange returning to school as a sixth-former, one of that élite band of whom I’d always been so much in awe. I felt as though I were an imposter, belonging neither to the High School nor Falmouth School of Art and although I was supposed to attend French and English Literature classes, I had no intention of devoting my time to either of these subjects because I wanted to concentrate on my art in order to make the year pass as quickly as possible. I didn’t like the unsettling sensation of being in a state of limbo, neither here nor there. From the ‘A’ level syllabus I chose those subjects at which I was best, such as plant drawing, imaginative composition, calligraphy and so on: I also decided to make a marionette, the given theme of which was ‘Fire’. I spent a long time poring through books for inspiration and sketching ideas
for my puppet. The most important part of a marionette is, obviously, the head; it has to be able to convey some sort of expression so I modelled the features of mine to be powerful, imperious and rather severe. When I painted the finished, papier måché head, I paid particular attention to the eyes, which I wanted to blaze, and it was while I was applying the finishing touches that it occurred me that my puppet’s features bore a striking similarity to those of Miss Jacob. Perhaps, subconsciously, she had been my inspiration. For my puppet’s head-dress and flowing robes I’d collected a selection of pieces of transparent fabrics in appropriate, fiery colours and to achieve a realistic effect of fire I was going to cut out flame-like shapes from sheets of red and orange acetate. With so much time to devote to my efforts, I was confident that I’d achieve a good pass in the final exam.
When I went for my first lesson at the art school I had the idea that I’d be joining the other students; instead, I was shown into a small side room by a rather impatient tutor who gave me a perfunctory demonstration on how to draw from life using negative as well as positive shapes. He then disappeared and I was left alone for the next couple of hours. My mother had acquired a second-hand duffle coat which, she assured me, was what every art student wore. It had about as much fashion appeal as a horse blanket and I hated it. When I went into the cloakroom to retrieve it after my lesson, I overheard two girls talking about it.
‘Who on earth wears a duffle coat these days?’ asked one.
‘I certainly don’t know anyone who does,’ replied the other.
I stuffed the detested coat into my bag, resolving never to wear it again. Outside the main building, on the wall by the pavement, was a display cabinet featuring the work of some of the fashion students. I found their drawings even more interesting than the work of the other students on display inside and wondered, wistfully, if the day would come when my own drawings would be exhibited.
Kenneth had left the Grammar School to begin a course at a college in Coventry but if I’d imagined that, at last, I was going to be free of him I was mistaken: he hitchhiked home on the Friday evening and was on my doorstep the next morning. This routine continued well into the winter months and even when the country was brought to a standstill by a bout of severe weather, somehow he managed to make his way back to Falmouth. Lately, I’d noticed that he seemed to be paying a great deal of attention to Jean and this disturbed me greatly because I knew that if my mother had the slightest suspicion that he was taking an unnatural interest in her, all hell would be let loose and she would make the most dreadful accusations. These concerns prompted me to sever the relationship as quickly as possible so, one Saturday afternoon as Kenneth and I were sitting on a pavement bench, I took the bull by the horns and told him that I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. I was totally unprepared for his reaction. He said nothing then, suddenly, he threw his head on to my lap and with great, choking sobs began to weep. I was horrified. I’d never imagined that he was capable of making such an exhibition of himself. When a passing motorist pulled up to ask if anything was the matter and I had to reassure him that everything was all right, I could have died of shame and embarrassment. I feared that, at any moment, someone might walk past us and so, in desperation, I told Kenneth that I hadn’t really meant what I’d said. Instantly, he stopped howling, stood up and carried on in his usual, cheerful manner as though nothing had happened.
The incident had embarrassed me so much that the following Saturday morning when he knocked on our door I told him I didn’t want to see him, turned my back on him and went upstairs to my room, shutting the door behind me. At this, he promptly sat down on our stairs and began to weep and my mother, who was doing the housework at the time, was obliged to vacuum around him.
‘For goodness’ sake get rid of that bloody boy!’ she hissed from the landing and so, once again, I had no alternative but to tell Kenneth that I hadn’t meant what I’d said.
This state of affairs could have gone on indefinitely had his college work not begun to suffer as a result of his weekend trips from Coventry to Falmouth, forcing his parents to forbid him from coming home. Even so, I was not to be free of him and soon found myself receiving letters. Lately, I’d discovered that my mother had been intercepting and opening all my correspondence and although I was beside myself with fury and outrage, I didn’t have the courage to confront her about it. There was a prurient side to Kenneth’s nature and I was terrified that she might get hold of one of his letters. One day, my worst fears were realised when I spotted an envelope with his handwriting on it protruding from the pocket of her apron. Panic stricken, I ran to Jean to beg her to try to retrieve it while I set up a distraction. The ploy worked, thanks to my sister’s nimble fingers, and it was just as well that the operation was successful because the contents of the letter, had she read them, would have enraged her to the point of apoplexy.
In the spring, Ethel invited me to spend a few days in London with her and Harry and I was so excited at the prospect that I could hardly contain myself. When I boarded the Paddington train at Truro I was wearing the smart new coat, made from a soft wool in a flattering shade of red, that I’d been given for Christmas. It was a far cry from the school uniform that I’d been forced to wear on my last, unaccompanied railway journey and I felt very grown-up and sophisticated. The train was quite crowded but when we reached Plymouth all the other passengers in my compartment disembarked. While we were waiting for the dining carriages to be attatched, I was reminded of a family journey by rail from London to Falmouth made some years ago when Jean and I had been little girls. In the days of steam, the big locomotives pulling the trains from Paddington to Penzance were replaced with smaller ones when the dining cars were detatched at Plymouth. The operation took about twenty minutes and so passsengers often used to take advantage of the wait by getting out to stretch their legs. On this occasion, our parents went off to get a cup of tea leaving us alone in the compartment but with the assurance that they’d be back long before the train was ready to leave the station. However, during the process of exchanging engines, the carriages started to move and Jean and I were convinced that the train was going and we’d been abandoned to some unknown fate. We stared at each other in horror, not knowing what to do. Jean burst into tears and my panic was so great that I overcame my fear of adults to call out of the window to ask a passer-by if the train was leaving.
My reminiscences were interrupted when a noisy group of servicemen entered my compartment followed, a few moments later, by a man in a business suit who sat down next to me. We left Plymouth and some time later, as we were speeding towards Taunton, he stood up to reach for his briefcase in the overhead compartment. I assumed he was getting ready to disembark at the next station but, after removing a magazine, he replaced the briefcase and sat down again. For half an hour or so it remained unopened on his lap then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him remove a pen from his pocket. A few minutes later, I became aware that it had gone very quiet in our compartment and, glancing sideways, I saw that the man had opened his magazine, which featured explicit photographs of naked women, and was meticulously circling their nipples with a red, ball-point pen as he turned each page.
‘Are you going all the way to Paddington?’ he suddenly asked, startling me so much that I jumped. I nodded and turned away, hastily. A few seconds later, he began to shift about and I realised that he was edging his way towards me; the next moment, I felt his hand brush against my thigh. At this, one of the servicemen sitting opposite me stood up, crossed over and, with great deliberation, sat down between me and the man. I smiled at him with gratitude and when we reached Paddington, he and his companions escorted me from the train, to the astonishment of Ethel who was waiting to meet me. What had occurred was to be by no means my only unpleasant railway encounter: during my student years I travelled a great deal by train and I discovered that it is a form of transport which has an irresistible attraction for men with unusual sexual tendencies. Fortunately, I learned how to deal with them.
Harry was the caretaker of the large block of flats where he and Ethel lived in a pleasant part of Islington, not far from Sadler’s Wells Theatre. They were Londoners born and bred and were very proud of their city. They showed me to all the famous places - the Tower of London, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace and so on and Ethel took me to Madame Tussaud’s and, best of all, the London Planetarium which thrilled me beyond words. One evening, as a surprise, we went to Covent Garden to see a gala ballet performance and I couldn’t believe that I was actually seeing, with my very own eyes, famous dancers whom I’d only ever seen before on television or in photographs. The gala included as its highlight a performance by a legendary dancer called Antonio who gave a wonderfully exciting display of a fusion of ballet and flamenco to the music of Ravel’s Bolero . I was so thrilled by everything that I’d seen in London that, when I returned home, I thought Falmouth the dullest place in the world.
One day, at school, the fire alarm sounded and in accordance with the drill which had been practised several times, all the girls filed out in an orderly manner. On these occasions I always stayed behind to give Jenny a hand and so we were accustomed to being the last ones to leave the building. This time, however, as we stepped outside we were greatly surprised to see a fire appliance parked there. We asked the firemen if the school was on fire but they laughed and told us that they were there as part of the drill. Some of the men were young and very handsome and we spent several enjoyable minutes chatting and flirting with them. A day or so later a girl came into the art room where I was working to tell me that Miss Jacob wanted to see me in her study. Quaking in my shoes, wondering what it was that I’d done, I knocked on her door, timidly. To my infinite relief she was smiling when I entered. She told me that the firemen who’d attended the drill had been very impressed because I’d stayed behind to help my friend, not knowing whether or not there was a fire, and that I’d been commended for bravery by the Fire Service. I could barely suppress a smile because no one knew better than I what a coward I was! I was flattered by the praise but, at the same time, slightly offended: fire or no fire, did they really believe I’d have left my friend to fend for herself?
Towards the end of my last term at the High School we had an open day to which parents, families and friends of the pupils were invited. My mother insisted on being shown around the school, even though she’d inspected it thoroughly on several previous occasions, and I had no choice but to trail around after her feeling very self-conscious and embarrassed by the fact that she was wearing what she referred to as her ‘costume’, even though it was a warm, summer’s day, with the rubber girdle underneath. As we came out of the main building into the sunshine I saw Jenny sitting on a low wall surrounded by a large group of girls from our class. She was laughing and chatting happily and didn’t notice us as we passed or hear my mother call out ‘Hello Jenny!’
On the way home, my mother was very quiet and from her grim, tight-lipped expression I could tell that some kind of trouble was brewing. I never fully understood what happened afterwards because I wasn’t told but I believe my mother wrote Jenny a letter expressing her disgust that she’d been deliberately ignored by her at the open day. But I knew perfectly well that it hadn’t been the fact that she thought she’d been snubbed which prompted her to remonstrate in this manner: she’d been motivated by sheer jealousy. The huge popularity which Jenny enjoyed, plus her irrepressible happiness, her vitality and exuberant good nature had been plain to see and my mother hadn’t liked it. My father was appalled by what she’d done and for the first time that I could recall, he confronted her.
‘That poor, crippled girl! ‘ he said. ‘That poor, courageous, crippled girl! How could you?’
This time, my mother evidently realised she’d gone too far because she wrote another letter to Jenny to apologise. Her suspicious, jealous nature invariably led to some kind of unpleasantness, usually in the form of unfounded accusations. For example, she was in the habit of hiding money in food packets, such as custard powder, which she’d then replace on the shelf. When the contents of the packets were used up, she’d throw them away, together with the money, and later, when she found that the hidden notes had disappeared, she’d accuse someone - usually a particular friend of my sister who happened to live in a council house and couldn’t, therefore, be considered trustworthy - of having stolen it. It was a wonder that Jean and I had any friends at all.
At the end of term assembly on my last day at the High School most of the girls who were leaving cried. I regarded them somewhat contemptuously, feeling quite unmoved by the occasion. It wasn’t until some time later that I realised just how much my life had been influenced by the happy years I’d spent there: the school had been the one, cohesive force in my childhood, giving me not only the privilege of a first class education but also the security and stability I’d never had at home. Now that I was no longer part of that sheltered and untroubled environment, I suddenly felt afraid.
Margaret Merry lives in Spain if you are looking to buy a property in Spain please visit http://www.cheappropertyspain.net
Wednesday 30 May 2007
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Roy the Greengrocer
Our shop was called Roy’s High Class Fruiterer and Greengrocer. My father obtained his stock not only from wholesalers but also from private growers and Jean and I often used to accompany him when he drove into the countryside to buy produce from market gardeners. In those early days, when he was fired with enthusiasm, he would even drive all the way to Penzance to meet the ferry, The Scillonian, which brought passengers and produce from the Isles of Scilly to the mainland. Sometimes, elderly gentlemen would call into the shop with vegetables of prize-winning quality they’d grown themselves and, with modest pride, offer them for sale. Occasionally, they brought flowers and I can remember once opening a box in which, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, were the most beautiful ranunculus flowers, themselves not unlike tissue paper, in an array of the loveliest rainbow colours. In Cornwall, when I was a girl, fields and fields of brightly coloured anemones were a common sight and when they were in season, our shop was full of the bunched, tightly budded flowers. They are seldom seen these days and probably never will again be grown in the same profusion because they were attacked by a devastating virus and growers replaced them with daffodils. My father sometimes acquired stock cheaply because it was not fresh and often, when a customer came into the shop asking for a lettuce, he’d say:
‘Hang on a moment - I’ve got some growing out the back so I’ll just go and cut you one.’
In the yard he had a bucket of water in which he kept a supply of none-too-fresh lettuces and, having selected one which wasn’t too far gone, he’d pull off the browning outer leaves and cut a slice from the stem. Then he’d take the lettuce to the customer and say:
‘You can always tell when a lettuce is freshly picked because the stem is nice and white, like this one.’
He had nicknames, most of which were very silly, for all his regular customers. For instance, there was Fur-Cuffs, a woman who wore a fur-trimmed coat; then there was Flop-Out, whose décolleté , however inclement the weather, displayed an ample bosom; Slimcea, whom he named after the low-calorie bread, was a woman of enormous proportions while Promiscuous had an inordinate number of children of dubious paternity. Nut-Case, an ageing widow, was in the habit of donning her best finery on fine, Sunday afternoons and, with erect back and swinging arms, would stride around Castle Drive - monkey parading, my father called it. She favoured full skirts in bold prints of loud colours and fitted, white blouses worn with a wide belt. She was very tall and with her dyed black hair, painted red lips, rouged cheeks and mannish gait she looked so much like a not-very-successful transvestite that passing motorists used to stare in astonishment. There was also The Ginger Tart, a divorceé who had once propositioned him when he’d been to her house to deliver her order of fruit and vegetables. She was wearing a loose robe which, when he stepped into the hall, she opened to reveal the fact that she was totally naked underneath.
‘What do you think of this?’ she asked him.
If my mother had ever found out about that encounter, there is no telling what might have happened.
When the shop was well-stocked it looked fresh, bright and colourful; if, however, my father was hard-up and couldn’t afford new stock it looked dingy and depressing. There was quite a lot of space to fill so he thought it would be a good opportunity to indulge one of his interests and keep tropical fish. The tanks were large but he couldn’t afford to buy all his fish at once and so Jean and I were sent every so often to buy them in twos or threes from the aquarium on Falmouth’s Customs House Quay. He wasn’t allowed to go there himself because my mother had accused him of taking too much interest in the woman - that tart with half Timothy White’s on her face - who sold the fish. When he had the cash to purchase new specimens he’d say to us:
‘Go and get us a Siamese fighting fish, will you?’ or:
‘Get us half a dozen guppies and a couple of kissing gouramis, will you?’
He was very fond of his fish and on one occasion, when he hadn’t been able to afford to pay the electricity bill and our supply was consequently disconnected, he sat huddled in a corner of the shop, head in hands and brow deeply furrowed, racking his brains to try to think of a way to fiddle the meter and restore the electricity before the water in the tanks started to cool.
‘Go away and leave me alone!’ he’d groan if anyone tried to speak to him.
In the shop he kept a barrel of vinegar which he used both for the pickling of onions and for selling to customers. Later, he obtained another, identical barrel but this one contained sweet sherry from which he regularly fortified himself with a surreptitious nip. He told my mother that the second barrel was full of vinegar, too, and, curiously, she believed him; in fact, I don’t think she ever discovered his secret although he lived in perpetual terror that she might unwittingly serve a customer with sherry instead of vinegar. He would sit in his corner sipping sherry and peeling shallots with the same grimy penknife he used for removing dirt from his fingernails and cutting lettuces: Roy’s pickled onions were very popular with the customers and at Christmas the shelves groaned under the weight of all the jars he had filled. Once, during a particularly acrimonious argument, my mother hurled one of the jars of onions at him; it was a particularly large jar and as it broke, onions and vinegar flew in all directions. It took many weeks for the smell to disappear. During slack periods he would sit reading from one of the volumes of the complete works of Dickens which he kept in the back of the shop and he often bemused customers by quoting passages or referring to characters from the novels. He had a subtle sense of humour but, like the literary quotations, his jokes went over the heads of most of his clientele.
Not infrequently, representatives of insurance firms or other, similar concerns would come into the shop trying to sell him policies and he always had difficulty turning them down. He was even persuaded to suscribe to a funeral expenses fund ( he called it his ‘coffin money’ ) which was collected every month by a shifty-looking old man who bore a disturbing resemblance to Fagin. He was also unable to resist buying goods, particularly watches, from itinerant traders. Indeed, word must have spread far and wide because, before very long, he was invaded on a regular basis by swarthy, mysterious-looking men speaking in rapid, unintelligible, alien tongues, selling an assortment of dubious merchandise. Whenever charity collectors ( he called them ‘tin rattlers’ ) came through the door he would groan and, if he could, make a hasty disappearance.
My mother accepted her share of the work involved in the running of the shop with very poor grace. The Cornish dislike those who boast almost as much as they dislike those who criticise and since she was in the habit of doing both, it was inevitable that she would make enemies. Once, a woman came into the shop when she was serving and asked for a turnip. When she replied that they didn’t have any, the customer could hardly believe it because in Cornwall the turnip - or, to be exact, swede - is an essential ingredient of the pasty and so to a Cornish person a greengrocer’s without turnips is as scandalous as a pub with no beer. My mother quelled the poor woman’s protests with one of her crushing retorts:
‘Where I come from,’ she said, coldly, ‘they feed them to the cattle.’
Amongst my father’s regular customers was a Cockney couple, both of whom were very much of the ‘you don’t want to do it like that!’ ilk, and since my mother disliked intensely anyone she considered a ‘know-all’, she made no pretence of concealing her contempt for them. However, being Londoners, they were impervious to her derogatory remarks and withering scorn and seemed to enjoy taunting her. The subject of shoe sizes came up one day and, staring pointedly at my mother’s feet, the woman said:
‘In my day, if you took more than a size two you were considered a clumsy cow.’
At this, my mother, who was a size five, could only seethe with tight-lipped fury.
Because the shop was ‘open all hours’ my parents took their meals in shifts. My mother would have hers first then stomp into the shop with an ungracious:
‘Do you want this or not?’
That signified that his was on the table. He suffered badly from indigestion and would often send Jean or me to the chemist’s for slippery elm or other, old-fashioned remedies: he knew he would get little sympathy from our mother so he never consulted her. It was shortly after we moved into the house in Killigrew Road that they finally stopped sharing a bed and although she blamed it on his snoring, I think the truth was that she just couldn’t stand him being near her any more. In winter, in order to warm his bed, he made himself a most bizarre and dangerous contraption. He obtained from the chemist’s a large, flat, lozenge-shaped tin that had once contained the vile-tasting Hack’s lozenges which, in those days, tended to be favoured by heavy smokers for the relief of their coughs. The tin was just wide enough to accommodate a low-watt light bulb and this homemade bed-warmer produced such a great deal of heat that every night the smell of scorching sheets would pervade the house and on several occasions the bed nearly went up in flames.
As well as mice, my sister and I had acquired a pair of rabbits. Very soon, they had babies which were so enchanting that we promptly went to buy another pair of a different variety. These, too, very soon produced young and before long we found, like the mice, that we had a great many rabbits. There were black ones, white ones, brown-eared ones and mixed ones and because we didn’t have enough hutches to contain them all, we let them loose in the garden where, as free-range rabbits, they existed very happily. Often, our father used to open the door at the back of the shop and call:
‘Come on! Come on!’
and the rabbits would come hopping down the steps into the yard for tit-bits. One day, a cutomer saw one of them actually inside the shop.
‘Mr. Walker!’ she shrieked, ‘There’s a rabbit in the shop!’
Their mating habits were nocturnal and their favoured place for this very noisy operation was in the back yard directly under the window of our father’s bedroom. Fed up with disturbed nights, he devised a means of frightening them away. Using a long piece of string, he joined together a number of empty tin cans which he hung out of the window. When he got into bed at night, he attatched the end of the string to his big toe so that when the rabbits began their mating activities all he had to do was wriggle his foot and the rattling of the cans would scare them away. When the rabbits began to make burrows in the garden and our mother found herself disappearing down holes every time she hung out the washing, she declared that enough was enough and the rabbits would have to go. Regretfully, Jean and I had no choice but to give all of them away to our friends.
After the initial burst of enthusiasm, my father lost interest in the shop and although he kept it going for a number of years, he was always in debt and bailiffs called on a regular basis. He could not afford to tax or insure his car so that when he went anywhere it had to be by way of what he called his ‘anti-fuzz route’ which included most of the back streets of Falmouth. Every Saturday, my mother did a weekly shop and he would work himself up into a state bordering on panic if the takings were down and he thought he might not be able to give her the housekeeping money. When she was ready to go out, she would fling open the door which separated the living quarters from the shop and demand:
‘I want my money!’
If he wasn’t able to give her the full amount, she would repeat:
‘I want my money! I’ve got to have my money!’
and even though he pulled open the drawers of the till to prove to her that they were empty, still she would insist:
‘! want my money!’
A bitter row would ensue but, eventually, she’d storm out of the shop with whatever he was able to give her and with dark threats as to what would happen if he didn’t come up with the rest by the time she got back.
Before my mother would venture out of the house, a complicated, almost ritualistic, procedure had to be carried out beforehand. Firstly, she would perform a ‘strip wash’ which involved removing all her upper garments and sponging herself down at the kitchen sink. Why she never used the bathroom for this operation, Jean and I could never understand and, strangely, my earliest memory of my mother is of her standing at the kitchen sink stripped to the waist. The second stage of the preparation was the putting on of her newly-acquired rubber girdle, for which she needed the assistance of Jean and me. This was not an easy undertaking because the girdle was extremely tight and the rubber inflexible. Jean would attempt to pull up one side and I the other while simultaneously pushing in bits of bulging flesh. It was very difficult to avoid laughing but we daren’t because she would take offence and say:
‘What’s so bloody funny?’
When at last, after much struggling, broken fingernails and suppressed mirth on our part, the girdle had been fitted, she would go upstairs to sit in front of the dressing table to attend to her face. This would begin with a vigorous patting of the cheeks with the palms of her hands; no doubt she’d read somewhere that doing this was good for the circulation but to us it looked painful, rather like a form of self-chastisement. Next, she would perform extraordinary contortions of the face which involved pursing the lips and stretching the chin as far forward as they would go, like some weird species of deep-sea fish filtering plankton. More face-patting followed, only this time for the application of Nivea cream and powder. Lastly, she would apply a dark red lipstick. We had come to learn that the dark red lipstick was a good sign because it meant that she was in one of her better moods; if, however, she appeared at any time wearing lipstick of a pink shade it meant that she was in a bad mood and we had all better watch out.
Jean and I had come to dread Saturday afternoons because our mother always demanded that one of us should accompany her to help with the shopping. She was so convinced that she was being overcharged that, at the supermarket checkout, queues of impatient customers would form while she insisted on going through every single item on the bill. We would have no choice but to stand and wait, cringing with embarrassment, while she argued. There were a few shops she wouldn’t go to because she’d had a row there and a few more where she was on the point of having a row and we hoped, fervently, that there wouldn’t be an eruption while we were with her. She was always on the lookout for a bargain so, when all the shopping apart from bread and cakes had been purchased, we had to hang about until almost closing time because there was a particular baker who often reduced the price of any remaining stock. She was very fond of cakes but suffered from an allergy to almond essence and this required Jean or me to act as tasters before she could eat any kind of purchased confectionery. If, by any chance, she happened to eat even the smallest morsel of anything containing that flavouring her face would immediately start to swell in a manner which was most alarming and it would remain in that state for several hours; those were the few occasions when we actually felt sorry for her.
The stress of living with my mother for all those years, financial worries and the fact that he was a heavy smoker, took their toll on my father’s health and as well as digestion problems, he also suffered from bouts of bronchitis which were so bad that he would be confined to bed for several days. My mother was not at all sympathetic and complained that not only did she have to mind the shop but also she had to keep running up and down the stairs all day after him. I felt very sorry for him at these times and I was concerned because he was obviously very ill.
‘It’s his own fault,’ my mother would say, ‘smoking that stinking shag all the time.’
He rolled his own cigarettes and ‘stinking shag’ is how she referred to the tobacco he used. Jean and I thought she had a nerve to criticise his smoking habit when she, herself, smoked just as much as he did. He was hardly ever able to relax. He was seldom allowed to go to the pub and if he did, it was usually in the company of Uncle Cliff who favoured dingy establishments in the vicinity of the docks. One of these was a hotel, overlooking the Customs House Quay, which was run by a rather dour old gentleman who had a compulsive habit of pursing his lips and pushing his chin forward in a manner similar to the curious facial contortions which our mother performed as part of her beauty routine. He had a black cat called Tinker who used to sit on the bar and to whom he was devoted; if he made conversation, it was nearly always about what tinker had been getting up to. The lavatory was situated at the end of a dark corridor and was so old that it must have been antique; it had a wide, wooden seat and a long chain which you had to pull several times to make it flush. The guest accommodation was above the bar and the clientele more often than not included adulterous couples. In those days, extra-marital affairs were considered far more scandalous than they are today and a good many boarding establishments tended to be suspicious of couples whom they suspected were not married or conducting affairs. Such was the reputation of this decidedly insalubrious place that it was not uncommon for the proprietor, while he was running the bar, to receive telephone calls from angry husbands or wives trying to locate the whereabouts of their erring spouses.
There was another equally gloomy bar in which Uncle Cliff and Auntie Frances, our parents, Jean and I once saw in the new year; apart from ourselves, the only other patrons were some foreign sailors who spent the entire evening staring, much to my discomfiture, at me. At midnight, they got up from their seats, came over to where we were sitting and each one kissed me solemnly on the cheek. I blushed so much that I think it must have taken some considerable time for my complexion to return to its normal hue. To honour the arrival of a new year, the landlord passed around plates of haggis. Jean turned pale at the sight of it but I took a cautious bite and declared that it was disgusting and smelt of old socks; our mother said, in her opinion, it was off.
The only times my father was able to relax were when my mother went out for the evening. Some time after we’d settled into the house in Killigrew Road she discovered that they held bingo sessions in he crypt of the Catholic Church just down the road and soon became addicted. This gave him the opportunity to settle down in front of the television with his sherry in the knowledge that he had at least a couple of hours respite. Jean and I were usually in our rooms and every so often we would hear him bellowing at the screen. He could not abide female singers in any shape of form and the sound of a woman’s voice in song was torture to his ears. If he was watching a programme and one happened to put in an unwonted appearance he would consider it a monstrous outrage.
‘They’ve worked one in!’ he’d wail. ‘They’ve gone and worked one in!’
On Sunday afternoons he was obliged to take our mother for a drive so that she could ‘get some air.’ She spoke as though she lived in some polluted inner city and we thought it very strange that she should consider herself deprived of ‘air’ considering that we lived in such a clean environment. We generally ended up in the car park of Castle Drive overlooking Falmouth Bay and although she said it was because she liked to look at the view, she seemed to prefer glaring at the other people sitting in their cars.
‘Some people don’t know how to park!’ she’d mouth at them.
In the evening, we were in the habit of visiting Auntie Frances and Uncle Cliff for a game of cards. Jean would sit happily drawing horses and chatting to Auntie while I joined in the rounds of whist or nap. The cards were very old and greasy from so much handling and our mother said that the reason Uncle Cliff refused to play with new ones was because he was an old cheat and that they were all marked. Nevertheless, those evenings, despite the choking atmosphere of cigarette smoke, were enjoyable and at least our father was able to forget his worries for a short while.
He had always enjoyed driving and loved cars, particularly Jaguars; his dream was to win the pools and buy an E-type. During the fifties he’d owned a number of different cars including an Armstrong Siddeley saloon which, I remember, had running boards and another, rather handsome car, a Riley, which I think it must have been quite unusual because it was frequently admired by car enthusiasts; he also became the proud owner of a racy, red, convertible Jaguar which once lost a wheel while we were driving down a hill in Falmouth and, later, another Jaguar, a big, powerful, beast of a thing in which he once touched one hundred miles per hour ( not many cars could do that in those days ). At one time, he’d belonged to the Automobile Association during the days when A.A. mechanics drove around on motor bikes, saluting members; Jean and I always felt very important when our car was acknowledged in this manner. One winter’s evening he showed off by driving on to the beach at Gunwalloe, a deserted and inhospitable place, and promptly became stuck in the sand. After several, futile attempts to reverse the car he realised that there was no alternative but to walk to the nearest farm to see if a tractor was available which would be the only means of towing the car off the beach. Outside, a fierce gale was blowing and driving rain was pelting the windscreen; worse than that, the tide was coming in, fast. Jean, our mother and I were too terrified to remain in the car watching the great, foaming waves rolling in and breaking on the beach, only a few feet from where we were sitting, so we decided it would be better to face the elements and try to seek shelter somewhere. I ran to a telephone kiosk and shut myself in there while they sought refuge in the public conveniences; apart from the church, there appeared to be no other buildings in that bleak and lonely place. After what seemed an eternity, a tractor turned up and with an expertise born of experience ( many a foolhardy motorist had got into the same predicament ) attatched a rope and towed the car away from the incoming tide in the nick of time.
My sister was fond of her father and had a much better relationship with him than I’d ever had. By now, she was a pupil at Clare Terrace School and, under the strict regime of Miss Prince and pressure from our mother to pass the eleven-plus, was suffering the same anxieties as I had. But at least, out of school hours, she had a means of escape because, to Jean, there existed on earth only one thing of importance: the horse. She lived, breathed and had her being in horses and every moment of her spare time was taken up with activities involving them. In our hall, secured to the banisters at the bottom of the stairs, the makeshift saddle she’d made and on which she would spend hours astride, became a permanent fixture. She persuaded our parents to let her have riding lessons and was promised that if she passed her scholarship they would buy her a pony of her own. Our father had a supplier, a local farmer, who owned an old dobbin and for ten shillings he’d allow Jean to ride it. I thought this was an outrageous waste of money and the farmer an old crook. Our Sunday afternoon family outings would, at Jean’s insistence, involve driving into the countryside outside Falmouth laden with bags of fruit and vegetables which were so past their freshness that there was no way they could be sold in order to feed three horses she considered were neglected. Considering the amount of time they took ambling up to the gate and the disinterest with which they regarded our offerings I didn’t think they could be as neglected as she would have had us believe. We had to park by the gate of the field in which they lived and sit patiently in the car while she called:
‘Misty! Fir-cone! Jenny!’
It seemed to me that she knew the name of every single horse within a five-mile radius of Falmouth and her obsession was beginning to get on my nerves.At weekends, I hardly saw anything of her because she was accustomed to getting up very early in the mornings in order to walk the not inconsiderable distance to the riding stables where she had her lessons. On the way, she would often stop opposite a certain house to observe the curious behaviour of a man who was in the habit of standing in an upstairs window and masturbating. One day, she was accompanied by a friend who, being considerably more enlightened than Jean, realised what was happening and promptly called the police from the nearest call-box. My sister thought it was hilarious when the policewoman who interviewed them asked:
‘Did you see his privates?’ In matters of sex, she was as ignorant as I had been at that age but through spending so much time at the stables in the company of boys as well as girls and through witnessing the frequent couplings of a variety of farm animals, she soon acquired a knowledge which was far more comprehensive than mine.
Although our next-door-neighbours were quiet, pleasant people it soon became apparent that my mother had conceived totally unwarranted feelings of jealousy towards the woman and was biding her time for the opportunity to pick a quarrel. This actually happened after Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, as they were called, built a bathroom extension in which there was a window overlooking our back yard. Since the window was of frosted glass no-one could look out of it but this mattered little to her and she railed against the couple with all the ferocity of which she was capable. She had no sense of humour whatsoever and the only things which made her laugh were other people’s misfortunes. She made up silly words to popular tunes and would expect us to laugh with her while she cackled with glee over her own wit. She made a point of looking down into next door’s garden while Mrs Thomas was hanging out her washing.
‘Don’t throw your falsies away!’ she’d sing in reference to the padded bras which our neighbour wore.
Poor Mrs. Thomas’ wardrobe suffered a good deal of criticism. It was quite undeserved because she was, in fact, a smartly dressed woman and when, one winter, she appeared in a rather nice new coat, my mother could barely contain her envy.
‘Hasn’t that woman got anything else to wear?’ she asked, after the coat had had a few airings.
Mrs. Thomas’ coat became a good distraction ploy because if, at any time, Jean and I suspected that we were about to suffer maternal ire, before she had the chance to open her mouth we’d say something like:
‘We’ve just seen Mrs. Thomas down town and guess what! She was wearing that coat again.’
It was a cunning stratagem that always worked. Our neighbour was not the only person of whom she was jealous. She made catty remarks about various customers who visited the shop and harboured dark suspicions about women to whom she thought our father was paying what she considered undue attention. Jealousy is the worst kind of emotion because it festers in the mind and eats away at the soul; gradually and irretrievably, as her obsessions became worse, it altered her appearance. Because her eyes were so often narrowed with suspicion, her brow became creased and furrowed; her compressed lips pulled down the corners of her mouth, thrusting her chin forward and causing deep scowl lines on either side of her face. It is no wonder that the very thought of our mother’s glowering countenance was enough to strike fear into our hearts.
Not only was she a very jealous woman, she was also inordinately superstitious. We were accustomed to seeing her throwing spilt salt over her shoulder, touching wood or un-crossing knives; once, we’d brought home some may blossom that we’d picked and when she screamed at us to get it out of the house, we thought she was joking and did the same thing again a few days later; this time, her reaction to what we regarded as mere playful fun was so violent that we were left dismayed and puzzled. On another occasion, I came home with a peacock feather I’d been given; it was one of the loveliest things I’d ever seen and I was very proud of it but when my mother saw it she shrieked:
‘Get it out! Get it out at once! It’s unlucky!’
The house in Killigrew Road had a long, narrow garden and every morning she would walk up the path to the back gate, open it, peer into the lane and glare ferociously at the world in general. When she had satisfied herself that everything was as it should be, she would make her way back down the path touching, at intervals, the wooden fence which divided our garden from next door’s. After a while, it became evident that the touching of wood was not so much a habit as a compulsion which grew worse with the passing of time.
Ethel, Harry and Judy continued to holiday in Falmouth almost every summer but after we’d moved to Killigrew Road and there wasn’t room to accommodate them, they had to rent a caravan on the outskirts of the town. My mother had knitted identical, Fair Isle sweaters for my father and Harry and it amused them both to wear them simultaneously. They thought that it was hilarious when in the shop one day, clad in their sweaters, a customer remarked:
‘You can tell you two are brothers!’
No two men ever looked so unalike.
To Jean, Ethel’s visits were not welcome and mealtimes in her presence were a purgatory which she would have given anything to avoid.
‘If I were you, Ivy, I’d make her eat that,’ Ethel would remark as my sister pushed to one side most of what was on her plate.
I used to enjoy accompanying Ethel and Harry when they motored around the county visiting all the most popular places but Jean would have nothing to do with them and would escape to her riding school at the earliest opportunity.
One of my father’s suppliers lived in a manor house, on the Lizard peninsula, which had recently been converted into a country club. We accepted his invitation to visit it and so one evening, not knowing quite what to expect, we drove out there. It was a rather beautiful old building with many oak beams, latticed windows and wooden panels. In the bar, in keeping with the atmosphere of quiet dignity, the clientele conversed in low tones and was of a class which my mother considered superior and more worthy of her presence. Definitely not like the sort of low company you found in ordinary pubs and later, in the shop, she took pleasure in telling customers that she and her husband had been invited, by its owner, to a very exclusive country club. There were quite a few, similar establishments in and around Falmouth and she persuaded him that it would be good for business to be seen in such places. Jean and I enjoyed these excursions and I took pains over my appearance because there were sometimes boys of my age with whom I could flirt. On one occasion, a boy asked me if I’d like to dance and, although I would have liked to accept, I couldn’t because I’d broken a bone in my foot and my leg was encased in plaster up to the knee. The boy would not accept my refusal to dance and pulled me up from my chair; when he saw my leg, which had been out of sight under the table, he was mortified with embarrassment and, stammering apologies, scuttled off. He had seemed a nice boy and I cursed my broken foot for putting to an end what could have been an interesting encounter. Once, at another country club, I glanced up and met the eye of a boy on the other side of the room. Immediately, I looked away and pretended to be disinterested but, every so often, I gave a sly look in his direction and saw that he was still staring at me. Assuming an air of nonchalence, I got up and sauntered into the garden, knowing that he would follow me: sure enough, he did.
‘I saw you looking everywhere in the room except at me,’ he said, reproachfully. ‘I wanted to meet you because you’ve got green paint on your hand and that means you must be an interesting person.’
This was a novel approach and I was impressed. This boy had an air of maturity that I hadn’t yet come across in other boys of his age and I was deeply disappointed when he said he was holidaying in the area and he and his family were due to return home the following day. He asked me about myself and after we’d chatted for a while, he suddenly caught me by the shoulders and kissed me. Since there can be no setting more conducive to romance than a Cornish garden on a beautiful evening with the rhododendrons all in bloom and the singing of blackbirds filling the air, I was unable to resist. This was my dream of romance come true! But the next moment, it was rudely shattered with the sudden materialisation of Jean who had been sent to find out where I’d got to and to tell me to hurry up because we were about to go. I had no choice but to make my excuses and leave. It was only when we were in the car on our way home that I realised I hadn’t even asked the boy his name.
Every year, with the approach of autumn, my father would buy several boxes of small, green grapes which, said the wholesaler, were from a region of Spain called Almeria. When you bit into the firm flesh, the juice from the grapes would explode on to the tongue with a delicious burst of sweetness and I think Jean and I must have surreptitiously consumed between us as many grapes as were actually sold. Not for a moment did I ever imagine that one day I‘d come to know very well that mountainous and arid province of Spain from where those grapes came. At Christmas, the shop was filled seasonal stock and the smell of tangerines, oranges and grapefruits would reach every corner of the house. This was the one time of the year that it looked really nice; there were boxes of chestnuts, big hands of bananas suspended from butchers’ hooks, bunches of celery, sacks and sacks of Brussels sprouts, bags of mixed nuts and mountains of apples and pears. Because he had the reputation of being open all hours, customers would think nothing of knocking him up on Christmas Day for something they’d forgotton. He regularly made up a hamper containing a generous selection of fruit and vegetables on behalf of a neighbouring pub for their weekly raffle and on one occasion, a disgruntled woman came into the shop brandishing an apple; she said that it was in the hamper she’d won in the raffle and demanded a replacement because it was going rotten.
Soft fruits were widely grown locally and in summer the shop would be filled with punnets of raspberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries and, of course, strawberries. If the weather was warm the fruit deteriorated quickly and so we had to help our mother with the fiddly task of stripping the small berries from the stalks and topping and tailing the gooseberries so that they could be made into puddings or jam. She regularly cooked beetroots to sell in the shop and since we both enjoyed peeling off the skins when they had cooled we used to fight over who should have the pleasure. When apples were cheap and plentiful, we made toffee apples for the shop but, again, I think we probably ate more than we sold. In those pre - Common Market days, there were many productive orchards in Cornwall and lots of the varieties of apples which were grown then probably no longer exist today. Every one of these apples had its own, characteristic smell, taste and colour and even the names - Cornish Gillyflower, St. Edmund’s Russet, Beauty of Bath, for example - seemed to conjure up images of the kind of picturesque, rural England which those of my generation remember with nostalgia. Nowadays, the only variety of cooking apple seems to be the Bramley; in our shop there were several, such as Early Victoria, Rev. W. Wilks and Crawley Beauty. My father was a daydreamer and one of his most frequent reveries involved his being chosen to take part in a television or radio quiz programme in which one of the questions would be to name a specific number of English varieties of apple. He would also confound the other contestants by being able to name the world’s largest rodent and giving the correct answer to the question:
‘What is the square root of minus one?’
My mother was infuriated by his daydreaming and told him that he was useless and had no go in him. She railed at him continually but it had no effect other than to make him even more detached. The shop ticked over but the financial situation was not improving and I realised, for the first time, just how hard-up my family was. Guiltily, I reflected that I could have been less
unwilling when I’d been asked to lend a hand in the shop during busy periods. I was in the habit of entering the house via the shop and there had been several occasions when, as I’d barged past without even acknowledging him, he’d called out after me:
‘Make us a cup of tea, will you?’
And I’d replied:
‘Make it yourself!’
I was filled with contrition. Perhaps if I’d helped in the shop more often he’d have been able to organise himself a little better and our money troubles would not have been so serious. I knew that he had problems with the bank because he was under an obligation to pay in a certain amount each week; Jean and I usually did this for him and it was a chore we disliked very much because of the way we were treated by the supercilious bank clerk who dealt with us. He would take the cash and the paying-in book without a word and regard us, unsmilingly, over his spectacles as if we were the lowest form of life. The thought of my family being subjected to this humiliation filled me with such resentment that I resolved to turn over a new leaf and do something to try to help the business to improve. Inspired with sudden zeal to render myself useful, I decided that I would spend, in future, all my free time cleaning the shop, dressing the windows so that they always looked nice and helping to serve customers. Such was my optimism that I was certain, before very long, our troubles would be over.
Margaret Merry lives in Spain if you are looking to buy a property in Spain please visit http://www.cheappropertyspain.net
‘Hang on a moment - I’ve got some growing out the back so I’ll just go and cut you one.’
In the yard he had a bucket of water in which he kept a supply of none-too-fresh lettuces and, having selected one which wasn’t too far gone, he’d pull off the browning outer leaves and cut a slice from the stem. Then he’d take the lettuce to the customer and say:
‘You can always tell when a lettuce is freshly picked because the stem is nice and white, like this one.’
He had nicknames, most of which were very silly, for all his regular customers. For instance, there was Fur-Cuffs, a woman who wore a fur-trimmed coat; then there was Flop-Out, whose décolleté , however inclement the weather, displayed an ample bosom; Slimcea, whom he named after the low-calorie bread, was a woman of enormous proportions while Promiscuous had an inordinate number of children of dubious paternity. Nut-Case, an ageing widow, was in the habit of donning her best finery on fine, Sunday afternoons and, with erect back and swinging arms, would stride around Castle Drive - monkey parading, my father called it. She favoured full skirts in bold prints of loud colours and fitted, white blouses worn with a wide belt. She was very tall and with her dyed black hair, painted red lips, rouged cheeks and mannish gait she looked so much like a not-very-successful transvestite that passing motorists used to stare in astonishment. There was also The Ginger Tart, a divorceé who had once propositioned him when he’d been to her house to deliver her order of fruit and vegetables. She was wearing a loose robe which, when he stepped into the hall, she opened to reveal the fact that she was totally naked underneath.
‘What do you think of this?’ she asked him.
If my mother had ever found out about that encounter, there is no telling what might have happened.
When the shop was well-stocked it looked fresh, bright and colourful; if, however, my father was hard-up and couldn’t afford new stock it looked dingy and depressing. There was quite a lot of space to fill so he thought it would be a good opportunity to indulge one of his interests and keep tropical fish. The tanks were large but he couldn’t afford to buy all his fish at once and so Jean and I were sent every so often to buy them in twos or threes from the aquarium on Falmouth’s Customs House Quay. He wasn’t allowed to go there himself because my mother had accused him of taking too much interest in the woman - that tart with half Timothy White’s on her face - who sold the fish. When he had the cash to purchase new specimens he’d say to us:
‘Go and get us a Siamese fighting fish, will you?’ or:
‘Get us half a dozen guppies and a couple of kissing gouramis, will you?’
He was very fond of his fish and on one occasion, when he hadn’t been able to afford to pay the electricity bill and our supply was consequently disconnected, he sat huddled in a corner of the shop, head in hands and brow deeply furrowed, racking his brains to try to think of a way to fiddle the meter and restore the electricity before the water in the tanks started to cool.
‘Go away and leave me alone!’ he’d groan if anyone tried to speak to him.
In the shop he kept a barrel of vinegar which he used both for the pickling of onions and for selling to customers. Later, he obtained another, identical barrel but this one contained sweet sherry from which he regularly fortified himself with a surreptitious nip. He told my mother that the second barrel was full of vinegar, too, and, curiously, she believed him; in fact, I don’t think she ever discovered his secret although he lived in perpetual terror that she might unwittingly serve a customer with sherry instead of vinegar. He would sit in his corner sipping sherry and peeling shallots with the same grimy penknife he used for removing dirt from his fingernails and cutting lettuces: Roy’s pickled onions were very popular with the customers and at Christmas the shelves groaned under the weight of all the jars he had filled. Once, during a particularly acrimonious argument, my mother hurled one of the jars of onions at him; it was a particularly large jar and as it broke, onions and vinegar flew in all directions. It took many weeks for the smell to disappear. During slack periods he would sit reading from one of the volumes of the complete works of Dickens which he kept in the back of the shop and he often bemused customers by quoting passages or referring to characters from the novels. He had a subtle sense of humour but, like the literary quotations, his jokes went over the heads of most of his clientele.
Not infrequently, representatives of insurance firms or other, similar concerns would come into the shop trying to sell him policies and he always had difficulty turning them down. He was even persuaded to suscribe to a funeral expenses fund ( he called it his ‘coffin money’ ) which was collected every month by a shifty-looking old man who bore a disturbing resemblance to Fagin. He was also unable to resist buying goods, particularly watches, from itinerant traders. Indeed, word must have spread far and wide because, before very long, he was invaded on a regular basis by swarthy, mysterious-looking men speaking in rapid, unintelligible, alien tongues, selling an assortment of dubious merchandise. Whenever charity collectors ( he called them ‘tin rattlers’ ) came through the door he would groan and, if he could, make a hasty disappearance.
My mother accepted her share of the work involved in the running of the shop with very poor grace. The Cornish dislike those who boast almost as much as they dislike those who criticise and since she was in the habit of doing both, it was inevitable that she would make enemies. Once, a woman came into the shop when she was serving and asked for a turnip. When she replied that they didn’t have any, the customer could hardly believe it because in Cornwall the turnip - or, to be exact, swede - is an essential ingredient of the pasty and so to a Cornish person a greengrocer’s without turnips is as scandalous as a pub with no beer. My mother quelled the poor woman’s protests with one of her crushing retorts:
‘Where I come from,’ she said, coldly, ‘they feed them to the cattle.’
Amongst my father’s regular customers was a Cockney couple, both of whom were very much of the ‘you don’t want to do it like that!’ ilk, and since my mother disliked intensely anyone she considered a ‘know-all’, she made no pretence of concealing her contempt for them. However, being Londoners, they were impervious to her derogatory remarks and withering scorn and seemed to enjoy taunting her. The subject of shoe sizes came up one day and, staring pointedly at my mother’s feet, the woman said:
‘In my day, if you took more than a size two you were considered a clumsy cow.’
At this, my mother, who was a size five, could only seethe with tight-lipped fury.
Because the shop was ‘open all hours’ my parents took their meals in shifts. My mother would have hers first then stomp into the shop with an ungracious:
‘Do you want this or not?’
That signified that his was on the table. He suffered badly from indigestion and would often send Jean or me to the chemist’s for slippery elm or other, old-fashioned remedies: he knew he would get little sympathy from our mother so he never consulted her. It was shortly after we moved into the house in Killigrew Road that they finally stopped sharing a bed and although she blamed it on his snoring, I think the truth was that she just couldn’t stand him being near her any more. In winter, in order to warm his bed, he made himself a most bizarre and dangerous contraption. He obtained from the chemist’s a large, flat, lozenge-shaped tin that had once contained the vile-tasting Hack’s lozenges which, in those days, tended to be favoured by heavy smokers for the relief of their coughs. The tin was just wide enough to accommodate a low-watt light bulb and this homemade bed-warmer produced such a great deal of heat that every night the smell of scorching sheets would pervade the house and on several occasions the bed nearly went up in flames.
As well as mice, my sister and I had acquired a pair of rabbits. Very soon, they had babies which were so enchanting that we promptly went to buy another pair of a different variety. These, too, very soon produced young and before long we found, like the mice, that we had a great many rabbits. There were black ones, white ones, brown-eared ones and mixed ones and because we didn’t have enough hutches to contain them all, we let them loose in the garden where, as free-range rabbits, they existed very happily. Often, our father used to open the door at the back of the shop and call:
‘Come on! Come on!’
and the rabbits would come hopping down the steps into the yard for tit-bits. One day, a cutomer saw one of them actually inside the shop.
‘Mr. Walker!’ she shrieked, ‘There’s a rabbit in the shop!’
Their mating habits were nocturnal and their favoured place for this very noisy operation was in the back yard directly under the window of our father’s bedroom. Fed up with disturbed nights, he devised a means of frightening them away. Using a long piece of string, he joined together a number of empty tin cans which he hung out of the window. When he got into bed at night, he attatched the end of the string to his big toe so that when the rabbits began their mating activities all he had to do was wriggle his foot and the rattling of the cans would scare them away. When the rabbits began to make burrows in the garden and our mother found herself disappearing down holes every time she hung out the washing, she declared that enough was enough and the rabbits would have to go. Regretfully, Jean and I had no choice but to give all of them away to our friends.
After the initial burst of enthusiasm, my father lost interest in the shop and although he kept it going for a number of years, he was always in debt and bailiffs called on a regular basis. He could not afford to tax or insure his car so that when he went anywhere it had to be by way of what he called his ‘anti-fuzz route’ which included most of the back streets of Falmouth. Every Saturday, my mother did a weekly shop and he would work himself up into a state bordering on panic if the takings were down and he thought he might not be able to give her the housekeeping money. When she was ready to go out, she would fling open the door which separated the living quarters from the shop and demand:
‘I want my money!’
If he wasn’t able to give her the full amount, she would repeat:
‘I want my money! I’ve got to have my money!’
and even though he pulled open the drawers of the till to prove to her that they were empty, still she would insist:
‘! want my money!’
A bitter row would ensue but, eventually, she’d storm out of the shop with whatever he was able to give her and with dark threats as to what would happen if he didn’t come up with the rest by the time she got back.
Before my mother would venture out of the house, a complicated, almost ritualistic, procedure had to be carried out beforehand. Firstly, she would perform a ‘strip wash’ which involved removing all her upper garments and sponging herself down at the kitchen sink. Why she never used the bathroom for this operation, Jean and I could never understand and, strangely, my earliest memory of my mother is of her standing at the kitchen sink stripped to the waist. The second stage of the preparation was the putting on of her newly-acquired rubber girdle, for which she needed the assistance of Jean and me. This was not an easy undertaking because the girdle was extremely tight and the rubber inflexible. Jean would attempt to pull up one side and I the other while simultaneously pushing in bits of bulging flesh. It was very difficult to avoid laughing but we daren’t because she would take offence and say:
‘What’s so bloody funny?’
When at last, after much struggling, broken fingernails and suppressed mirth on our part, the girdle had been fitted, she would go upstairs to sit in front of the dressing table to attend to her face. This would begin with a vigorous patting of the cheeks with the palms of her hands; no doubt she’d read somewhere that doing this was good for the circulation but to us it looked painful, rather like a form of self-chastisement. Next, she would perform extraordinary contortions of the face which involved pursing the lips and stretching the chin as far forward as they would go, like some weird species of deep-sea fish filtering plankton. More face-patting followed, only this time for the application of Nivea cream and powder. Lastly, she would apply a dark red lipstick. We had come to learn that the dark red lipstick was a good sign because it meant that she was in one of her better moods; if, however, she appeared at any time wearing lipstick of a pink shade it meant that she was in a bad mood and we had all better watch out.
Jean and I had come to dread Saturday afternoons because our mother always demanded that one of us should accompany her to help with the shopping. She was so convinced that she was being overcharged that, at the supermarket checkout, queues of impatient customers would form while she insisted on going through every single item on the bill. We would have no choice but to stand and wait, cringing with embarrassment, while she argued. There were a few shops she wouldn’t go to because she’d had a row there and a few more where she was on the point of having a row and we hoped, fervently, that there wouldn’t be an eruption while we were with her. She was always on the lookout for a bargain so, when all the shopping apart from bread and cakes had been purchased, we had to hang about until almost closing time because there was a particular baker who often reduced the price of any remaining stock. She was very fond of cakes but suffered from an allergy to almond essence and this required Jean or me to act as tasters before she could eat any kind of purchased confectionery. If, by any chance, she happened to eat even the smallest morsel of anything containing that flavouring her face would immediately start to swell in a manner which was most alarming and it would remain in that state for several hours; those were the few occasions when we actually felt sorry for her.
The stress of living with my mother for all those years, financial worries and the fact that he was a heavy smoker, took their toll on my father’s health and as well as digestion problems, he also suffered from bouts of bronchitis which were so bad that he would be confined to bed for several days. My mother was not at all sympathetic and complained that not only did she have to mind the shop but also she had to keep running up and down the stairs all day after him. I felt very sorry for him at these times and I was concerned because he was obviously very ill.
‘It’s his own fault,’ my mother would say, ‘smoking that stinking shag all the time.’
He rolled his own cigarettes and ‘stinking shag’ is how she referred to the tobacco he used. Jean and I thought she had a nerve to criticise his smoking habit when she, herself, smoked just as much as he did. He was hardly ever able to relax. He was seldom allowed to go to the pub and if he did, it was usually in the company of Uncle Cliff who favoured dingy establishments in the vicinity of the docks. One of these was a hotel, overlooking the Customs House Quay, which was run by a rather dour old gentleman who had a compulsive habit of pursing his lips and pushing his chin forward in a manner similar to the curious facial contortions which our mother performed as part of her beauty routine. He had a black cat called Tinker who used to sit on the bar and to whom he was devoted; if he made conversation, it was nearly always about what tinker had been getting up to. The lavatory was situated at the end of a dark corridor and was so old that it must have been antique; it had a wide, wooden seat and a long chain which you had to pull several times to make it flush. The guest accommodation was above the bar and the clientele more often than not included adulterous couples. In those days, extra-marital affairs were considered far more scandalous than they are today and a good many boarding establishments tended to be suspicious of couples whom they suspected were not married or conducting affairs. Such was the reputation of this decidedly insalubrious place that it was not uncommon for the proprietor, while he was running the bar, to receive telephone calls from angry husbands or wives trying to locate the whereabouts of their erring spouses.
There was another equally gloomy bar in which Uncle Cliff and Auntie Frances, our parents, Jean and I once saw in the new year; apart from ourselves, the only other patrons were some foreign sailors who spent the entire evening staring, much to my discomfiture, at me. At midnight, they got up from their seats, came over to where we were sitting and each one kissed me solemnly on the cheek. I blushed so much that I think it must have taken some considerable time for my complexion to return to its normal hue. To honour the arrival of a new year, the landlord passed around plates of haggis. Jean turned pale at the sight of it but I took a cautious bite and declared that it was disgusting and smelt of old socks; our mother said, in her opinion, it was off.
The only times my father was able to relax were when my mother went out for the evening. Some time after we’d settled into the house in Killigrew Road she discovered that they held bingo sessions in he crypt of the Catholic Church just down the road and soon became addicted. This gave him the opportunity to settle down in front of the television with his sherry in the knowledge that he had at least a couple of hours respite. Jean and I were usually in our rooms and every so often we would hear him bellowing at the screen. He could not abide female singers in any shape of form and the sound of a woman’s voice in song was torture to his ears. If he was watching a programme and one happened to put in an unwonted appearance he would consider it a monstrous outrage.
‘They’ve worked one in!’ he’d wail. ‘They’ve gone and worked one in!’
On Sunday afternoons he was obliged to take our mother for a drive so that she could ‘get some air.’ She spoke as though she lived in some polluted inner city and we thought it very strange that she should consider herself deprived of ‘air’ considering that we lived in such a clean environment. We generally ended up in the car park of Castle Drive overlooking Falmouth Bay and although she said it was because she liked to look at the view, she seemed to prefer glaring at the other people sitting in their cars.
‘Some people don’t know how to park!’ she’d mouth at them.
In the evening, we were in the habit of visiting Auntie Frances and Uncle Cliff for a game of cards. Jean would sit happily drawing horses and chatting to Auntie while I joined in the rounds of whist or nap. The cards were very old and greasy from so much handling and our mother said that the reason Uncle Cliff refused to play with new ones was because he was an old cheat and that they were all marked. Nevertheless, those evenings, despite the choking atmosphere of cigarette smoke, were enjoyable and at least our father was able to forget his worries for a short while.
He had always enjoyed driving and loved cars, particularly Jaguars; his dream was to win the pools and buy an E-type. During the fifties he’d owned a number of different cars including an Armstrong Siddeley saloon which, I remember, had running boards and another, rather handsome car, a Riley, which I think it must have been quite unusual because it was frequently admired by car enthusiasts; he also became the proud owner of a racy, red, convertible Jaguar which once lost a wheel while we were driving down a hill in Falmouth and, later, another Jaguar, a big, powerful, beast of a thing in which he once touched one hundred miles per hour ( not many cars could do that in those days ). At one time, he’d belonged to the Automobile Association during the days when A.A. mechanics drove around on motor bikes, saluting members; Jean and I always felt very important when our car was acknowledged in this manner. One winter’s evening he showed off by driving on to the beach at Gunwalloe, a deserted and inhospitable place, and promptly became stuck in the sand. After several, futile attempts to reverse the car he realised that there was no alternative but to walk to the nearest farm to see if a tractor was available which would be the only means of towing the car off the beach. Outside, a fierce gale was blowing and driving rain was pelting the windscreen; worse than that, the tide was coming in, fast. Jean, our mother and I were too terrified to remain in the car watching the great, foaming waves rolling in and breaking on the beach, only a few feet from where we were sitting, so we decided it would be better to face the elements and try to seek shelter somewhere. I ran to a telephone kiosk and shut myself in there while they sought refuge in the public conveniences; apart from the church, there appeared to be no other buildings in that bleak and lonely place. After what seemed an eternity, a tractor turned up and with an expertise born of experience ( many a foolhardy motorist had got into the same predicament ) attatched a rope and towed the car away from the incoming tide in the nick of time.
My sister was fond of her father and had a much better relationship with him than I’d ever had. By now, she was a pupil at Clare Terrace School and, under the strict regime of Miss Prince and pressure from our mother to pass the eleven-plus, was suffering the same anxieties as I had. But at least, out of school hours, she had a means of escape because, to Jean, there existed on earth only one thing of importance: the horse. She lived, breathed and had her being in horses and every moment of her spare time was taken up with activities involving them. In our hall, secured to the banisters at the bottom of the stairs, the makeshift saddle she’d made and on which she would spend hours astride, became a permanent fixture. She persuaded our parents to let her have riding lessons and was promised that if she passed her scholarship they would buy her a pony of her own. Our father had a supplier, a local farmer, who owned an old dobbin and for ten shillings he’d allow Jean to ride it. I thought this was an outrageous waste of money and the farmer an old crook. Our Sunday afternoon family outings would, at Jean’s insistence, involve driving into the countryside outside Falmouth laden with bags of fruit and vegetables which were so past their freshness that there was no way they could be sold in order to feed three horses she considered were neglected. Considering the amount of time they took ambling up to the gate and the disinterest with which they regarded our offerings I didn’t think they could be as neglected as she would have had us believe. We had to park by the gate of the field in which they lived and sit patiently in the car while she called:
‘Misty! Fir-cone! Jenny!’
It seemed to me that she knew the name of every single horse within a five-mile radius of Falmouth and her obsession was beginning to get on my nerves.At weekends, I hardly saw anything of her because she was accustomed to getting up very early in the mornings in order to walk the not inconsiderable distance to the riding stables where she had her lessons. On the way, she would often stop opposite a certain house to observe the curious behaviour of a man who was in the habit of standing in an upstairs window and masturbating. One day, she was accompanied by a friend who, being considerably more enlightened than Jean, realised what was happening and promptly called the police from the nearest call-box. My sister thought it was hilarious when the policewoman who interviewed them asked:
‘Did you see his privates?’ In matters of sex, she was as ignorant as I had been at that age but through spending so much time at the stables in the company of boys as well as girls and through witnessing the frequent couplings of a variety of farm animals, she soon acquired a knowledge which was far more comprehensive than mine.
Although our next-door-neighbours were quiet, pleasant people it soon became apparent that my mother had conceived totally unwarranted feelings of jealousy towards the woman and was biding her time for the opportunity to pick a quarrel. This actually happened after Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, as they were called, built a bathroom extension in which there was a window overlooking our back yard. Since the window was of frosted glass no-one could look out of it but this mattered little to her and she railed against the couple with all the ferocity of which she was capable. She had no sense of humour whatsoever and the only things which made her laugh were other people’s misfortunes. She made up silly words to popular tunes and would expect us to laugh with her while she cackled with glee over her own wit. She made a point of looking down into next door’s garden while Mrs Thomas was hanging out her washing.
‘Don’t throw your falsies away!’ she’d sing in reference to the padded bras which our neighbour wore.
Poor Mrs. Thomas’ wardrobe suffered a good deal of criticism. It was quite undeserved because she was, in fact, a smartly dressed woman and when, one winter, she appeared in a rather nice new coat, my mother could barely contain her envy.
‘Hasn’t that woman got anything else to wear?’ she asked, after the coat had had a few airings.
Mrs. Thomas’ coat became a good distraction ploy because if, at any time, Jean and I suspected that we were about to suffer maternal ire, before she had the chance to open her mouth we’d say something like:
‘We’ve just seen Mrs. Thomas down town and guess what! She was wearing that coat again.’
It was a cunning stratagem that always worked. Our neighbour was not the only person of whom she was jealous. She made catty remarks about various customers who visited the shop and harboured dark suspicions about women to whom she thought our father was paying what she considered undue attention. Jealousy is the worst kind of emotion because it festers in the mind and eats away at the soul; gradually and irretrievably, as her obsessions became worse, it altered her appearance. Because her eyes were so often narrowed with suspicion, her brow became creased and furrowed; her compressed lips pulled down the corners of her mouth, thrusting her chin forward and causing deep scowl lines on either side of her face. It is no wonder that the very thought of our mother’s glowering countenance was enough to strike fear into our hearts.
Not only was she a very jealous woman, she was also inordinately superstitious. We were accustomed to seeing her throwing spilt salt over her shoulder, touching wood or un-crossing knives; once, we’d brought home some may blossom that we’d picked and when she screamed at us to get it out of the house, we thought she was joking and did the same thing again a few days later; this time, her reaction to what we regarded as mere playful fun was so violent that we were left dismayed and puzzled. On another occasion, I came home with a peacock feather I’d been given; it was one of the loveliest things I’d ever seen and I was very proud of it but when my mother saw it she shrieked:
‘Get it out! Get it out at once! It’s unlucky!’
The house in Killigrew Road had a long, narrow garden and every morning she would walk up the path to the back gate, open it, peer into the lane and glare ferociously at the world in general. When she had satisfied herself that everything was as it should be, she would make her way back down the path touching, at intervals, the wooden fence which divided our garden from next door’s. After a while, it became evident that the touching of wood was not so much a habit as a compulsion which grew worse with the passing of time.
Ethel, Harry and Judy continued to holiday in Falmouth almost every summer but after we’d moved to Killigrew Road and there wasn’t room to accommodate them, they had to rent a caravan on the outskirts of the town. My mother had knitted identical, Fair Isle sweaters for my father and Harry and it amused them both to wear them simultaneously. They thought that it was hilarious when in the shop one day, clad in their sweaters, a customer remarked:
‘You can tell you two are brothers!’
No two men ever looked so unalike.
To Jean, Ethel’s visits were not welcome and mealtimes in her presence were a purgatory which she would have given anything to avoid.
‘If I were you, Ivy, I’d make her eat that,’ Ethel would remark as my sister pushed to one side most of what was on her plate.
I used to enjoy accompanying Ethel and Harry when they motored around the county visiting all the most popular places but Jean would have nothing to do with them and would escape to her riding school at the earliest opportunity.
One of my father’s suppliers lived in a manor house, on the Lizard peninsula, which had recently been converted into a country club. We accepted his invitation to visit it and so one evening, not knowing quite what to expect, we drove out there. It was a rather beautiful old building with many oak beams, latticed windows and wooden panels. In the bar, in keeping with the atmosphere of quiet dignity, the clientele conversed in low tones and was of a class which my mother considered superior and more worthy of her presence. Definitely not like the sort of low company you found in ordinary pubs and later, in the shop, she took pleasure in telling customers that she and her husband had been invited, by its owner, to a very exclusive country club. There were quite a few, similar establishments in and around Falmouth and she persuaded him that it would be good for business to be seen in such places. Jean and I enjoyed these excursions and I took pains over my appearance because there were sometimes boys of my age with whom I could flirt. On one occasion, a boy asked me if I’d like to dance and, although I would have liked to accept, I couldn’t because I’d broken a bone in my foot and my leg was encased in plaster up to the knee. The boy would not accept my refusal to dance and pulled me up from my chair; when he saw my leg, which had been out of sight under the table, he was mortified with embarrassment and, stammering apologies, scuttled off. He had seemed a nice boy and I cursed my broken foot for putting to an end what could have been an interesting encounter. Once, at another country club, I glanced up and met the eye of a boy on the other side of the room. Immediately, I looked away and pretended to be disinterested but, every so often, I gave a sly look in his direction and saw that he was still staring at me. Assuming an air of nonchalence, I got up and sauntered into the garden, knowing that he would follow me: sure enough, he did.
‘I saw you looking everywhere in the room except at me,’ he said, reproachfully. ‘I wanted to meet you because you’ve got green paint on your hand and that means you must be an interesting person.’
This was a novel approach and I was impressed. This boy had an air of maturity that I hadn’t yet come across in other boys of his age and I was deeply disappointed when he said he was holidaying in the area and he and his family were due to return home the following day. He asked me about myself and after we’d chatted for a while, he suddenly caught me by the shoulders and kissed me. Since there can be no setting more conducive to romance than a Cornish garden on a beautiful evening with the rhododendrons all in bloom and the singing of blackbirds filling the air, I was unable to resist. This was my dream of romance come true! But the next moment, it was rudely shattered with the sudden materialisation of Jean who had been sent to find out where I’d got to and to tell me to hurry up because we were about to go. I had no choice but to make my excuses and leave. It was only when we were in the car on our way home that I realised I hadn’t even asked the boy his name.
Every year, with the approach of autumn, my father would buy several boxes of small, green grapes which, said the wholesaler, were from a region of Spain called Almeria. When you bit into the firm flesh, the juice from the grapes would explode on to the tongue with a delicious burst of sweetness and I think Jean and I must have surreptitiously consumed between us as many grapes as were actually sold. Not for a moment did I ever imagine that one day I‘d come to know very well that mountainous and arid province of Spain from where those grapes came. At Christmas, the shop was filled seasonal stock and the smell of tangerines, oranges and grapefruits would reach every corner of the house. This was the one time of the year that it looked really nice; there were boxes of chestnuts, big hands of bananas suspended from butchers’ hooks, bunches of celery, sacks and sacks of Brussels sprouts, bags of mixed nuts and mountains of apples and pears. Because he had the reputation of being open all hours, customers would think nothing of knocking him up on Christmas Day for something they’d forgotton. He regularly made up a hamper containing a generous selection of fruit and vegetables on behalf of a neighbouring pub for their weekly raffle and on one occasion, a disgruntled woman came into the shop brandishing an apple; she said that it was in the hamper she’d won in the raffle and demanded a replacement because it was going rotten.
Soft fruits were widely grown locally and in summer the shop would be filled with punnets of raspberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries and, of course, strawberries. If the weather was warm the fruit deteriorated quickly and so we had to help our mother with the fiddly task of stripping the small berries from the stalks and topping and tailing the gooseberries so that they could be made into puddings or jam. She regularly cooked beetroots to sell in the shop and since we both enjoyed peeling off the skins when they had cooled we used to fight over who should have the pleasure. When apples were cheap and plentiful, we made toffee apples for the shop but, again, I think we probably ate more than we sold. In those pre - Common Market days, there were many productive orchards in Cornwall and lots of the varieties of apples which were grown then probably no longer exist today. Every one of these apples had its own, characteristic smell, taste and colour and even the names - Cornish Gillyflower, St. Edmund’s Russet, Beauty of Bath, for example - seemed to conjure up images of the kind of picturesque, rural England which those of my generation remember with nostalgia. Nowadays, the only variety of cooking apple seems to be the Bramley; in our shop there were several, such as Early Victoria, Rev. W. Wilks and Crawley Beauty. My father was a daydreamer and one of his most frequent reveries involved his being chosen to take part in a television or radio quiz programme in which one of the questions would be to name a specific number of English varieties of apple. He would also confound the other contestants by being able to name the world’s largest rodent and giving the correct answer to the question:
‘What is the square root of minus one?’
My mother was infuriated by his daydreaming and told him that he was useless and had no go in him. She railed at him continually but it had no effect other than to make him even more detached. The shop ticked over but the financial situation was not improving and I realised, for the first time, just how hard-up my family was. Guiltily, I reflected that I could have been less
unwilling when I’d been asked to lend a hand in the shop during busy periods. I was in the habit of entering the house via the shop and there had been several occasions when, as I’d barged past without even acknowledging him, he’d called out after me:
‘Make us a cup of tea, will you?’
And I’d replied:
‘Make it yourself!’
I was filled with contrition. Perhaps if I’d helped in the shop more often he’d have been able to organise himself a little better and our money troubles would not have been so serious. I knew that he had problems with the bank because he was under an obligation to pay in a certain amount each week; Jean and I usually did this for him and it was a chore we disliked very much because of the way we were treated by the supercilious bank clerk who dealt with us. He would take the cash and the paying-in book without a word and regard us, unsmilingly, over his spectacles as if we were the lowest form of life. The thought of my family being subjected to this humiliation filled me with such resentment that I resolved to turn over a new leaf and do something to try to help the business to improve. Inspired with sudden zeal to render myself useful, I decided that I would spend, in future, all my free time cleaning the shop, dressing the windows so that they always looked nice and helping to serve customers. Such was my optimism that I was certain, before very long, our troubles would be over.
Margaret Merry lives in Spain if you are looking to buy a property in Spain please visit http://www.cheappropertyspain.net
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)