Climbing the Stairs (14 page)

That then was Albert’s life as a milkman. It was a full life and he enjoyed his work. I think that’s what’s the matter today with men. Everything is a production-line job with
nothing to relieve the mundane. It’s no fun. So the only reason they work is for money and when the money isn’t right they strike for more. But when you like what you do and take an
interest and a pride in it money isn’t so important – you’re happy – so you’re contented. Albert was contented and so was I. It was a very good start to our
marriage.

14

O
F ALL THE
places that we lived in in London Chelsea was the best. Of course it was very different then to what it is now.

The King’s Road was a busy one, but none of the people using it looked like they do now – there was none of this Carnaby Street atmosphere. Maybe by the standards of those days the
people seemed eccentric – well, the artists did – but there was nothing like the queer collection of bits and pieces that you see strutting up and down encumbering the road.

Some of the artists were indistinguishable from anybody else. Some of them walked around in velvet jackets with flowing ties and beards and perhaps long hair, but at the same time most of them
were serious artists. And you felt that their clothes were a necessary corollary to their way of earning a living. They didn’t obtrude as though they were some sort of freak society as they
seem to now. Most artists have been priced right out of Chelsea now that it has become a popular neighbourhood.

Of course even in those days you’d get the show-offs. Some of them came into our local pub – especially the less serious artists. They’d come in with their clothes and hands
all painty and they’d lounge about at the bar talking about perspectives, high-faluting stuff like that. The Chelsea trippers as we used to call the people who came into Chelsea as voyeurs
used to buy their drinks under the mistaken impression that they were hobnobbing with some future Turner or Landseer. We used to laugh to watch them being conned.

You could see them lapping it all up. I think they were titillated by the thought that they were mixing with the loose-livers. No doubt some of them were. There’s been loose living from
time immemorial, hasn’t there? But people that are living loose don’t go around shouting it from the house tops. It was a fallacy to think that those indulging had it written all over
their faces. Many a person who looked the epitome of respectability might have been living the most lurid life.

The artists had their models and they used to come into the pub with them, but whether they were living in immorality you couldn’t tell – and you couldn’t ask them, could
you?

The people there seemed to go with the surroundings. Of all the boroughs I’ve lived in, Chelsea was the only one that seemed to have a communal society. Everybody seemed to mix easily. The
business people, the shopkeepers, the artists, and just ordinary working-class people like us – you didn’t feel a class difference somehow. You were some sort of whole.

The nearest we got to any kind of intimacy with an artist was with our landlord and landlady who lived above us. But he wasn’t a real artist, he was a sort of amateur dauber. He worked in
an office all day and only painted in his leisure time.

Mr West was his name. He was a very short man, and like a lot of very short men he was pompous and wanted to throw his weight around. A lot of short men feel that you’re going to overlook
them or that you think they’re not real men. For instance, he’d been married eight years and they’d only got one child although they really wanted more and Mr West used to
consider that this was some kind of reflection on his virility. It wasn’t true really because I’ve known quite a few extremely insignificant men with huge families. I think their wives
sort of carry them forward, if you know what I mean.

Anyway this Mr West used to paint his wife in the nude. He painted her naked body and then he’d put different heads on it. He wanted me to sit for him in the nude, too. He promised
he’d put a different head on me, too, so that nobody would actually know it was me. That’s what he said – there may have been a more obvious reason of course. But Albert
wouldn’t let me. He wouldn’t have minded me sitting for the head and putting it on some nude figure, but for me to be the nude figure, he just wouldn’t stand for all that. I
didn’t really mind. I didn’t particularly want to do it. Personally I think any female looks better with some clothes on. Mrs West certainly looked better with hers on. Very few females
really look at their best without.

Today nobody takes any notice of nudity – not only in paintings but in real life. But even then to paint nudes was considered a very sort of way-out thing to do. No doubt that was the
reason Mr West did it. He wanted to prove something. Real artists don’t have to bother whether they look Bohemian or not but Mr West wanted to look like a Bohemian because he wasn’t a
real artist.

One of the next-door neighbours Albert and I had was a Russian, Boris Borovsky – I forget how it was spelt but that was his name. His wife was English – her name was Stella and a
very nice person she was too.

Boris used to wear one of those Cossack hats all the time so that everyone could see he had affiliations with Russia and in the privacy of his own home he used to wear his shirt outside his
trousers. He said all the Kulaks did that. I didn’t even know what a Kulak was – and I don’t now. He was always talking about what a wonderful place Russia was since the
Revolution and I couldn’t help wondering sometimes why, if it was that good, he didn’t go back, but I reckon he knew where he was best off.

I don’t know what sort of work he used to do – accounting I think it was. It was something whereby he had to work a lot on his own, so when he came home he was very glad of an
audience. He’d talk about the heroism of the Russian workers. He was a great one for the Russian workers. Then he’d say, ‘Look at the sailors on the
Potemkin
.’
I’d never heard of the
Potemkin
– I didn’t even know what it was. It was a long time before I realized it was a battleship. Apparently they had a mutiny on board.

He used to compare the sailors on the
Potemkin
with our sailors that mutinied under Captain Bligh. He said that there was all the difference in the world because the sailors that mutinied
on the
Bounty
only mutinied to better themselves, whereas the sailors that mutinied on the
Potemkin
mutinied to better the lot of the workers in all Russia. I hadn’t got the
courage to tell him that I didn’t know anything about the country, that my knowledge of Russia could have been written on the back of a halfpenny stamp. I knew they’d had a Revolution
and that they weren’t much good in the First World War, that they’d departed from the battlefield with great speed, and that was about all. But when he used to talk like this he used to
talk to
me
personally. I thought it was wonderful that someone should talk to me like this and tell me these things. I thought that I was really seeing life on a grand scale.

When I was in domestic service all the maids were interested in was the bits of scandal from upstairs. They didn’t come down and talk about culture. Nobody cared about culture then. Mind
you, while I listened I used to think that his wife must have got bored with that kind of conversation. I suppose with me you couldn’t call them conversations. I mean, they were more
monologues in as much as all my part was, ‘Oh, really! Well, fancy that! You don’t say!’ and other equally inane remarks.

Boris had also got very strong views about the place of women in the home. He thought that women’s only place was the home and that their whole purpose in life was to look after their
husbands and children. They’d got five. In fact he reckoned that half the trouble in Russia was because of the Czarina. That if the old Czar had knocked her about a bit, instead of letting
her have her own way in everything, there’d never have been all this trouble with the old mad monk Rasputin.

He said, ‘Don’t you agree?’

And I said, ‘Yes, you’re right.’

I’d never even heard of Rasputin. If he’d asked me I’d have said he was some West Indian chap. But I didn’t ask questions – just agreed. Because that way I got more
conversations. Sometimes he used to act the big man with me. ‘I’m master in my house,’ he’d say. ‘What I say goes. Stella’s mind is as my own.’ Good solid
masculine horseshit.

Little did he know that Stella had a secret life that was nothing to do with him at all.

This Stella was a good milliner and she used to make hats for quite a few of the neighbours. She could have earned very good money in a shop, but he wouldn’t let her because he
didn’t want her to be financially independent. But while he was at work she used to make hats in secret and there used to be a man call regularly. She said he came to buy the hats. Maybe he
did but he stayed a very long time doing it, and I wouldn’t have thought you had to draw the bedroom curtains to look at hats. No. It’s my opinion Stella had an interesting side to her
life if Boris had but found out. It’s just as well he didn’t know as much as he thought he did.

When I got to know her better, we were talking one day and I mentioned Russia.

She said, ‘For God’s sake don’t you start on about that bloody place.’ Then she poured out her feelings of boredom and frustration to me.

She said, ‘If you’d known Boris as long as I have you wouldn’t sit there listening open-mouthed and looking at him as though he was the Great Panjandrum himself like you do.
I’ve heard it all so many times I feel as though I’m going stark raving mad. Why doesn’t the stupid bombastic nitwit go back to the Russia he’s always talking about, where
the workers are so free and where he says they can divorce their wives so easily and where there’s free love?

‘Love,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t know what the word means. He thinks it’s that five-minute exercise I have to suffer with him once a week.

‘And the bloody farce is,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t know a thing about Russia – only what he’s read. He left there when he was three years old and yet he talks
as though he was responsible for the Revolution. I’m sick and tired of it.’

After this outburst I explained to Stella about my lust for knowledge and culture, and how although I was enjoying marriage I got a bit bored. So we thought it would be a good idea if we could
collect a few young mothers and have a kind of a club and meet once a week.

We got together about six or eight mothers and we arranged to meet in each other’s houses in turns. The idea was that whoever’s turn it was should study some political, social, or
cultural event and speak about it and then we would have a debate. In that way we thought we’d be able to give our brains a sort of turning over. We thought that we might create some kind of
miniature Fabian Society, but instead of promoting socialism alone we were going to promote culture as well. For a while everything went well and then one day someone hadn’t had the time to
prepare anything, so we hadn’t got a subject to discuss and before long this was happening with increasing regularity and the whole thing degenerated into the usual stupid women’s
chit-chat about what little Mary said, what little Johnnie did, what they’d told the teacher or what new thing they’d bought for their home. And there was nothing we could do about
it.

Looking back on it I suppose it was rubbing shoulders in the pubs with the artists and thinkers that made me feel I could change the set ways of women’s lives. I couldn’t. But
eventually I did change my own and I think it was living in Chelsea that opened my eyes to my own educational deficiencies. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

15

A
LBERT GOT CALLED
up for the Forces in 1941 – they were having anybody then, as he said.

I’ll never forget the day he went because his sister and I saw him off. She was weeping buckets of tears but I wasn’t weeping at all. Not because I wasn’t sorry to see him go
– of course I was – but one gets philosophical about these kind of things. It wasn’t as if he was going into the front line. He went into the RAF and not on flying duties –
posted to Yorkshire. I was left in London in the front line with three children.

We were living in Lewisham at the time and we had one of those shelters in the garden – Anderson shelters – corrugated-iron things. You dug them down in the garden. And we’d
had raids night after night without a break. So he was lucky – he was leaving that. Mind you, Albert never used to turn a hair. He used to sit in the shelter totting up his day’s work.
He was a marvellous person to have during a raid because he literally didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t that he was consciously being brave and heroic. It just didn’t worry him. He
thought that the probability that a bomb would fall on our particular little shelter was mathematically impossible. But I used to dread it because the railway used to run at the back of our garden
and the sparks from the trains used to shoot up in the air. Why we troubled about blackout I don’t know.

We had no end of incendiary bombs. We were supposed to rush out and throw earth all over them. But Albert would never come out because he hated talking to the neighbours. We spent hours and
hours in that shelter in the garden. I used to be afraid; I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t. I was deathly afraid, night after night, but I had the children to think about and if you
don’t show fear the children are not afraid either. So I couldn’t show fear for their sake. If it had been just me and Albert I’d probably have been a quivering wreck.

But when they called him up I didn’t really see the sense in staying in London with three young children on my own. My parents were still living in Hove and they told me they could get me
a house down there to rent since a lot of people were leaving because of what they called the hit and run raids. They weren’t really that. I mean there was nothing to hit in Hove, but the
German planes unloaded their bombs there because then they had more chance of getting back. As a matter of fact it was funny that the house we eventually lived in there got more damage than our
place in London.