Jacky Daydream (19 page)

22

The Boys and Girls Exhibition

I GOT TO
meet Pamela Brown when I was nine. They used to hold a special Boys and Girls Exhibition at Olympia and Biddy took me one Saturday. I found it a very overwhelming day. The sheer
noise
of thousands of over-excited children in a vast echoing building made my ears throb. We were pushed and pummelled as we struggled round all the stands. Biddy was a pushy woman too, and occasionally batted a child out of her way. There was a lot of argy-bargy, mostly between mothers desperate to get their own kids to the front of each queue.

I wished Biddy had left me languishing at the back of the most popular stand, George Cansdale and his animals. George Cansdale was an animal expert and had his own programme on children’s television. I wasn’t as passionately fond of animals as most children, apart from my constant yearning for a dog. I didn’t like anything creepy-crawly at all, and kept well away from anything with beaks or sharp claws.

George Cansdale had a whole enclosure of animals with him. All the children at Olympia wanted to stroke the rabbits and guinea pigs and kittens. Biddy shoved me from the back until I was practically catapulted onto George Cansdale’s lap. He nodded at me as he sank his hands deep into a strange big coffin-shaped box.

‘Hello, little girl. What’s your name?’ he said, starting to haul something heavy from the box.

‘Jacqueline, sir,’ I said.

Oh, we were so polite in the fifties. I practically bobbed a curtsey.

‘You seem a very sensible little girl, Jacqueline,’ said George Cansdale. ‘Shall we show the other children just how sensible you are?’

He was still hauling what looked like enormous skeins of khaki wool from the box. Loop after loop. Coil after coil. A snake! An enormous brown snake, with a mean head and a forked tongue flicking in and out.

There was a great gasp, a collective series of
Beano
-comic exclamations: ‘
Aah!
’ ‘
Ugh!
’ ‘
Eek!
’

I was so shocked I couldn’t even scream. I couldn’t back away because I had Biddy and hundreds of children pressing hard against me.

‘You’re not scared of snakes, are you, Jacqueline?’ said George Cansdale.

I bared my teeth in a sickly grin.

‘Shall we show the other children how sensible you are?’ he said, reaching towards me, his arms full of writhing snake.

He wound it round and round and round my neck like a loathsome live scarf.

‘There! Look how brave Jacqueline is,’ said George Cansdale.

The children oohed and aahed at me. I stood still, the head of the snake an inch away, its tongue going flicker flicker flicker in my face.

‘There! Nothing to be frightened of, is there, Jacqueline?’ said George Cansdale.

I was way past
fright
. Any second now I was going to wet myself. Mercifully, George Cansdale unwound the snake coil by coil until I was free at last. Biddy gave me a tug and tunnelled us through the crowd to the ladies’ toilets.

‘Why did you let him put that horrible slimy snake round you?’ Biddy said, dabbing anxiously at the velvet collar on my coat.

‘It wasn’t slimy, it was
warm
,’ I said, shuddering. ‘Oh, Mum, it felt
awful
.’

‘Well, you should have said something, not stood there looking gormless,’ said Biddy, but she gave me a quick hug nevertheless.

That should have been enough excitement for one day, but Biddy was determined to get her money’s worth. We went to a kind of Mind Body
Spirit
section and had our bumps read by a shy man in spectacles still wearing a shabby brown demob suit. I’m surprised Biddy went for this, because his nervous fingers probed deep into our perms as he felt for significant bumps on our heads, wrecking our hairdos. Perhaps she was at a crisis point with Uncle Ron and wanted to see what fate had in store for her.

The Bump Man seemed disconcerted by Biddy’s head.

‘You’re a real Peter Pan,’ he said.

This pleased her no end, because she thought this meant she looked young for her age – which she did. He fumbled about in her curls, pressing and prodding, as if her head was a musical instrument and might start playing a tune. He said she was very bright and very determined. Then he ran out of steam and decided to do a bit of handwriting interpretation instead, maybe to reassure her she was getting her money’s worth.

Biddy smiled happily. She always took great pride in her beautiful handwriting. The rare times she wrote a letter she always drafted it first and then copied it all out exquisitely in pen. The Bump Man admired her handwriting and said she was exceptionally neat and meticulous, which wasn’t really straining his psychic powers.

Then it was my turn. I wrote my own much
shakier
signature. We were being mucked about at school. Every year the new teacher had different ideas about handwriting. I was currently in a class where we were all forced to write in very sloping copperplate with blotchy dipping pens and brown school ink. My natural handwriting was little and stood upright, so I was struggling. The Bump Man said my personality was still forming. He felt my head too, not so nervous of me, kneading it as if it was an awkward lump of dough. He asked me various silly questions and I muttered answers in monosyllables.

‘She’s very shy,’ said the Bump Man. ‘What do you like doing best, dear?’

‘Reading,’ I whispered.

‘Mm. Yes. You’re very dreamy.’

‘You’re telling me!’ said Biddy. ‘I sometimes think she’s not all there. What do you think she’ll be when she grows up?’

‘Oh, a teacher, definitely,’ he said.

I was bitterly disappointed. I so so so wanted to be a writer. If I couldn’t ever get anything published, I wanted to be a hairdresser and create beautiful long hairstyles all day. I didn’t want to be a
teacher
. In the 1950s most teachers in primary school were in their forties and fifties, even sixties. Many of the women had their grey hair scraped back in buns. They all wore sensible flat laced shoes. When they
sat
down, their long-legged pink directoire knickers showed unless they kept their knees clamped together. I didn’t want to look like a teacher.

I was glad to see the back of the Bump Man. To cheer me up Biddy took me to the Book Corner. There, sitting on a chair, was the famous children’s writer Pamela Brown. We knew it was her because she had a placard saying so right above her head. She looked incredibly smart and glamorous, the exact opposite of a frumpy teacher. She was dressed all in black, wearing a beautifully cut black tailored suit, a tiny black feathery hat on her soft curls, and high-heeled black suede shoes. She wore a string of pearls round her neck, one last elegant touch.

She was sitting bolt upright on her chair, staring straight ahead. I know now the poor woman must have been dying of embarrassment, stuck there all alone, waiting for someone,
anyone
, to approach her, but to me then she seemed like a queen on her throne. I just wanted to gaze at her reverently.

Biddy had other ideas. She prodded me in the back.

‘Go and say hello to her then!’ she said.

‘I can’t!’ I mouthed.

‘Yes you can! It’s Pamela Brown. You know, you like her books.’

Of course I knew.

‘So
tell
her you like them,’ said Biddy.

I was almost as frightened of Pamela Brown as
I
was of George Cansdale, but at least she was unlikely to produce a snake from her handbag and wrap it round my neck.

‘Hello,’ I whispered, approaching her.

‘Hello,’ said Pamela Brown.

She seemed a little at a loss for words too but she smiled at me very sweetly.

‘I like your books,’ I confided.

‘I’m so pleased,’ she said.

We smiled some more and then I backed away, both of us sighing with relief.

Who’s got a worst enemy called Moyra who had a gigantic snake called Crusher for a pet?

 

It’s Verity in
The Cat Mummy
.

Do you have any pets? My best friend Sophie has got four kittens called Sporty, Scary, Baby and Posh. My second-best friend Laura has a golden Labrador dog called Dustbin. My sort-of-boyfriend Aaron has got a dog too, a black mongrel called Liquorice Allsorts, though he gets called Licky for short. My worst enemy Moyra has got a boa constrictor snake called Crusher. Well, she says she has. I’ve never been to her house so I don’t know if she’s telling fibs.

I’ve got a very sweet-natured elderly ginger and white cat called Whisky. I wouldn’t mind a kitten and I’d love a dog – but I would
hate
to have any kind of snake as a pet!

23

More Books!

I DON’T APOLOGIZE
for another chapter about books (and it’s a long one too). This is a book
about
books. I wouldn’t be a writer now if I hadn’t been a reader.

I’ve told you about my two favourite books,
Nancy and Plum
and
Adventures with Rosalind
, but I’m afraid you can’t read them for yourself because they’re long out of print. I’ve mentioned Enid Blyton and Eve Garnett and Pamela Brown, but I think my favourite popular contemporary author was Noel Streatfeild.

Her most famous book is
Ballet Shoes
, a lovely story about three adopted sisters, Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, who attend a stage school. Pauline wants to be an actress, Petrova aches to be an airline pilot and Posy is already a brilliant ballet dancer.
I
wanted to be a ballet dancer too. I loved dancing and could pick up little routines quite quickly. I had read enough books about girls longing to be dancers to realize that I had ballet dancer’s
feet
. My second toe is longer than my big toe, which means I could go up on my points more easily, and
I
have very high arches. I was sure this was a genuine sign that I could be a Belle of the Ballet. I wanted most of all to be a writer, of course, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t be a ballet dancer too. Ann Taylor did ballet. Mandy did ballet.

‘Well,
you’re
not doing ballet,’ said Biddy. ‘I’m not tackling those costumes. It would be a bally nightmare.’ She chuckled at her own bad joke.

Biddy had done ballet herself as a small child. She was little and cute with curly hair so she’d been chosen to be in all the concerts, as a fairy, a kitten, a rabbit . . . Ga had made all her costumes.

‘We can’t ask her to make your costumes now her arthritis is so bad,’ Biddy said firmly. ‘You wouldn’t
like
ballet anyway. You wouldn’t be any good at it.
I
wasn’t.’

So I never got to try. I practised valiantly by myself for a while. I had a pair of pale pink pull-on bedroom slippers and I pretended these were proper ballet shoes. When Biddy and Harry were at work, I hummed the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’ tune and pranced up and down our flat, whirling and twirling round the table and the television, pirouetting down the hall, executing a daring leap up onto Biddy’s bed and then sweeping a deep ballerina curtsey to myself in her dressing-table mirror. Perhaps it’s just as well I didn’t have an audition.