Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (30 page)

Cora must have mentioned the Boot Fund Treat at school because her Junior School headmistress, Miss Holden (who was nothing like the Infants' tyrant) took Annie aside and advised her that this was not a suitable event for her daughter, and on no account should she attend another one. My mum was immensely relieved to be spared further regimented entertainment.

For some of the girls attending the
Derbyshire Times
Treat, a doll was their only Christmas gift – as in the 1900s, poor children still looked to charity for dolls. Not so, my mum. Her circumstances were a mishmash of the times: weekly cinema-going versus the Means Test, brand-new toys versus an invitation to attend the Boot Fund Treat. Cora danced at a concert intended to raise funds for the Treat she later attended (Joan Mason's School of Dancing put on the show). She was entertainer and recipient both.

The Boot Fund Treat and Means Test bore the stamp of officialdom but, for Annie and Cora, these seemed like the aberrations in their life. Family treats were provided by Betsy and Eva whose own needs were relatively few, and, if Annie had money to spare, it was spent on Cora. There were comics to read – from
Chick's Own
to
Comic Cuts
and the
Beano
– as well as Christmas books, and piano lessons along with dancing classes (Eva paid the 1/6 for Miss Alice Brocklehurst to teach Cora on her baby grand). Falling on harder times did not mean the neglect of former values. And Annie's ability to run up a dress or make one over meant that clothes could always be provided. In fact, at a time when even girls whose parents were reasonably well-off had relatively few clothes, my mum had quite a number. (I know this because, a few years later, she made a list.)

None of this would have been possible without the generosity of Betsy, Dick and Eva; and Annie, too, when she had the shillings – but their larger generosity was of spirit. Instead of the prevailing attitude, ‘You'll have what you're given,' there was choice, a concept making waves in the adult world by this time, but which was far slower to percolate down through childhood. My mum chose the pattern and colour of the jumpers Eva knitted for her birthdays, and the buttons and any detailing Annie put on her
clothes. ‘If I've got it, you can have it,' was their view. It was still present in my childhood too with Annie and Eva. And although it manifested itself in material ways, this generosity was really all about nurturing and encouragement. In all kinds of ways, small as well as large, my mum knew how much she was loved.

One of Willie's less contentious schemes was his acquisition of an ornamental clock. A cast-iron clock with a small ceramic face, it depicted a country boy in a soft hat, open shirt and knee breeches, striding with his hunting horn, his faithful hound bounding on ahead. Green grass, willowy trees, fine flowers, birds flying above in an eighteenth-century rural idyll; the grass all the greener when Willie took up oil painting and added his own small dabs of paint. The clock was said to be a copy of one owned by local industrialist Charles Paxton Markham, owner of the Staveley Coal & Iron Company, magistrate, thrice Mayor, and reader of the Riot Act. This ‘man of plain words', who ‘liked plain speaking,' as the
Derbyshire Times
reported at his death, was something of a local celebrity, and was often referred to as ‘Charlie'.

There are many stories about Charlie Markham: of how he drove his car – a yellow Rolls-Royce – into the closed gates of his home, Ringwood Hall, when his (second) wife refused to get out to open them; and of how he bought his mistress a fur coat, on condition – so the story circulated within Chesterfield's public houses – that she wear nothing beneath it. (Though how the taprooms knew what Charles Markham told his mistress is anybody's guess.) This great industrialist asked that, when he died, ‘the fumes and smoke of the Devonshire Works would blow over his remains'. As in life, so in death, Charles Paxton Markham got his wish. When he died in 1926, he was buried in Staveley
Cemetery, a few miles from my great-grandma's shop. His clock outlived him. Willie's replica stood on the hearth in the second bedroom for many years, contributing its own small detail to the Markham legend. A drinking pal of Willie's had supposedly copied the original for himself. ‘Would you do one for me?' Willie asked. ‘
I
won't tell, if you don't.' (And nor did he.)

One dark night, when Annie and Cora returned to Racecourse Road after an evening dance class, it was obvious someone had been in the living room. The house was silent but the table and chairs had been moved and, when they called upstairs, no answer came from Willie. They were only just starting to absorb this when Mrs Blake, their neighbour, shouted through the door and came into the house without knocking. Willie had been taken to hospital and the furniture moved by the men who stretchered him away. He had groped his way downstairs and knocked on the party wall to alert their adjoining neighbour to run to the pub and phone for an ambulance. Willie was diagnosed with a perforated duodenal ulcer.

The hospital was a vile place with miles of dark-green walls and intimidating smells. It took several minutes for Annie and Cora to reach Willie's ward via identical duplicating corridors. Two rows of men with putty-coloured faces and crumpled pyjamas looked up when they entered the room.

They heard Willie before they saw him; caught his unmistakeable laughter, saw smiling faces in the adjacent beds. He was entertaining his fellow captives with a funny story. They were in need of humour there: all conversation was interrupted by men coughing and hacking into sputum dishes. Nurses patrolling the ward handed out fresh ones as if distributing sweets.

My mum danced around the table when Willie came home, and told him everything that had happened to her that day, conjuring up and embellishing all the minutiae of school to entertain him. Even as she was doing this, Cora knew that her excitement, though every bit of it was real, was also a performance designed to show Willie how much she had missed him and how pleased she was he was home.

A fire was lit in the second bedroom, where Willie slept by then. (Cora had been promoted from her large cot to share a bed with Annie. ‘It's better for him here,' Annie explained, when the move took place, ‘and will ensure your dad gets sufficient rest.') It was winter and the firelight in the room was reflected in the handles on the chest of drawers, and snickers of flame were repeated in the wardrobe mirror. A bedroom fire was a rarity; its reddening glow was transforming.

Willie's brother Godfrey and his sister Gertie came to visit, bringing laughter and talk into the room, as always. For once, Willie is the centre of attention. Warmth, laughter, firelight dancing on dark wood: everything is going to be all right now, Cora is certain.

The far end of the living room, made narrow by the stairwell on the other side of the wall, was given over almost entirely to my mum. The space beneath the front window sill, crammed with Annie's Busy Lizzies and pelargoniums (I only have to rub a lemon-scented leaf and I'm back at my grandma's house), made a discrete play area. A chair and a small table at the opposite side of the room made a snug corner for Annie; Willie sprawled on the sofa to read
John Bull
and
Picture Post
.

When she was small, Cora could sit in her mam's big lap, sinking
further and further into her skirt, while she heard all about Diddums and similar characters. Lovely Annie, gentle and kind (except when it came to Willie), knew how to entertain a child. She and my mum read
Now We Are Six
and recited its verses together; Cora coloured in Ernest H. Shepard's illustrations (and those she left blank, I coloured later, when it became my turn). But my grandma was a schoolmistress too; there was always a hint of the schoolma'am about Annie. ‘Have you been a good girl, Jane?' she would ask, borrowing from A. A. Milne a question that was never only playful.

When she was able to read by herself, Cora worked her way through Enid Blyton's books as they were published,
The Wind in
the Willows
,
Anne of Green Gables
,
Little Women
,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and
Tom Sawyer
. She also read
Daddy-Long-Legs
– Annie and Willie loved Mary Pickford in the film and bought this orphan's story for my mum, who delighted in its pages without knowing she had mysteries in her own childhood too. When Chesterfield's New Children's Library opened in 1936, Cora was one of its 5,000 members. She produced labels for each shelf of Annie's bureau, their subjects enunciated as clearly as in any proper library – Drama, History, Shakespeare… Apart from her Uncle Jim's house, theirs was the only one Cora knew with books and a bookcase on view.

Further along from
Westward Ho!
and
Vanity Fair
stood Edgar Allan Poe and Edgar Wallace. Annie liked Horror but her secret vice was Crime. She no longer had time to read novels, but satisfied her longing with
Detective Weekly
. Sinister figures loomed large and terrifyingly on its front cover; Cora turned over the magazine so she could not see the nightmarish silhouettes making intimidating gestures by lamplight.

Annie's all-time favourite was Sexton Blake, the ‘Crime Expert
of World-Wide Repute'. Sexton Blake was everywhere. (‘I am Sexton Blake,' one Chesterfield drunkard insisted, before being hauled off to the cells.) On the evenings Willie disappeared for a pint at the Victoria Club, Annie settled into her chair with the latest exploits of the famous detective and his loyal side-kick, Tinker. Page-turning-page of suspense, with only the occasional illustration to relieve the tension until, ‘The wooden door flew open, and standing on the threshold was the figure of Sexton Blake.' By the time she reached the denouement, Willie was due home.

Far more intriguing (and with no immediate and satisfying conclusion) was the visit from the mystery lady who came to Racecourse Road. My mum was six years old when Annie appeared in her classroom and asked if she could remove her daughter. This was memorable in itself – teachers (and Annie) were sticklers for school rules: no one left the classroom before the afternoon bell. And this was no swan-like Annie either. She lacked her usual poise and seemed hot and flustered, as if she'd run the four hundred yards to the school.

‘Someone very special has come to see you,' she told Cora, hurrying her into her coat, ‘a lady in a chauffeur-driven car.' Cars were still rarities in Racecourse Road, let alone cars with chauffeurs. But as Cora and Annie rounded the curve and the house came into view, there was no car ahead of them. ‘He must have left the lady in the house,' Annie said. Yet, when they reached the house, there was no lady there either.

The cupboard where my mum kept her books and toys was open, with all its contents revealed as if on a stage. Her child-size desk and chair stood beside the open cupboard doors and her doll's house beside them. ‘I showed her your things,' Annie said,
‘and your photographs.' All the photographs on the piano were of Cora. ‘And she wanted to see you. But, obviously, the lady couldn't wait.'

The lady was wearing a mid-calf navy-blue costume (ladies wore ‘costumes' in those days), with a matching hat and, possibly, a short veil – at least, that's how I see her, though I've actually no idea what she wore. My grandma did not describe or explain her, and my mum was too young to ask many questions. Some time later, Cora asked Mrs Blake if she had seen the lady, but she had not, nor the car, and no other neighbour mentioned seeing a vehicle. Which was just as well. The sight of a smart woman stepping from a chauffeur-driven car could have licked like a flame round Racecourse Road, though that thought probably did not occur to their well-heeled visitor, who disappeared as quickly as she had arrived, leaving a mystery behind her.

Dorothy and Eileen were a bit older than my mum but adapted to her games with good grace, making bottles of rose-petal scent that reeked after one day and had to be poured down the sink. Occasionally, they were joined by Margaret, who was older still and rather superior. One day, she mentioned church. She was Church of England. What were they? Eileen went to the Catholic church; Dorothy attended Chapel. And Cora?