Friends for Life

Chapter 4

Arrivals

At the age of five I began attending the local school, Sherbrooke Road Junior. It was little wonder I didn’t warm to the place. From the very beginning, it had painful connotations for me.

I had been looking forward to starting school for one reason: my cousin Les was due to start at the same time.

I had come to know and love Les when my mother returned to work. Mum’s absence meant I spent most of my time at Nan Whitton’s flat in Alistree Road. For the first time I got to know her niece Joan and her son Les, who lived on the second floor of the same block.

Les was two months younger than me. His father, Uncle Alex, was an ex-Army man and very strict and austere. We weren’t allowed to play together often, but when we did we really got on like a house on fire. He was as close as I had to a brother and I treated him with all the affection I would have shown a brother.

I can remember that in the run-up to my first term, Les and I had heard a lot of talk about us starting school. We both fully expected not just to be in the same school but in the same class.

On the first morning of term we discovered our parents had made other plans. I was being walked to school by Nan Whitton while Les was being taken by his mother, Aunt Joan. I have a memory of the two of us skipping along, tugging excitedly at the adults’ arms, hardly able to contain our excitement at getting to the school gates. Our mood changed when we reached a zebra crossing on Munster Road.

‘Say goodbye to your cousin Les,’ my nan said to me.

‘Why?’ I replied, baffled.

‘He’s going to a different school to you,’ she explained.

I was devastated, as he was. We both started crying. As he headed off in one direction and I went in another, we were both tugging again, but for different reasons. I can still see Les looking back at me, tears in his eyes.

It was only in the ensuing years that I learned what had happened. Les’s father Alex had very clear ideas about what he expected for his son. From the beginning the family had plans for him. He was to study hard and go to university. He was to get a profession and get on in the world.

When he and I had reached school age, it had apparently been decided that it was ‘for the best’ if we were separated. Basically I was considered a ‘bad influence’ by Uncle Alex and Aunt Joan. Apart from anything else, I was a girl, and the family’s expectations for me were zero. This could only mean that I would be a distraction for Les. So while he was put down for the better school in the area at Munster Road, I was to be sent to Sherbrooke Road.

My early memories of Sherbrooke Road school are dominated by that moment. All I can remember feeling is a mixture of anger and confusion. I felt as if Les had been taken away from me.

I fitted into my class well enough. The teacher, a Welsh lady called Miss Davies, took a bit of a shine to me and treated me well. But, if I’m honest, my heart wasn’t really in it. I made few friends, probably because I was afraid of losing them like I’d lost Les. I settled into the routine of being an average student in an average school. I began fulfilling my family’s expectations of me by achieving precisely nothing.

As I set off on what was to be an unhappy school life, the one consolation was that my parents’ resistance to my having a pet had finally begun to crumble. My father in particular sensed my desperation. I think he knew I needed something living and breathing to take care of and to keep me company at the same time. So it was that he and my mother agreed to get me my first pet, a hamster, which I called Bimbo. His brief stay with us set the precedent for what was to become a depressingly familiar pattern over the following years.

Mum had only agreed to the hamster on strict conditions. She really objected to the mess, so it was Dad’s job to clear up. It was soon clear that Mum’s requirements were more important than mine. My parents hadn’t thought that hamsters are nocturnal creatures. So Bimbo would sleep all day then come out to play when I went to bed. I barely saw him. At the time, of course, I wondered whether this was deliberate but there was no point in my complaining. ‘You’ve got a pet, what’s the matter with you?’ I’d be told in no uncertain terms.

As it turned out, it didn’t really matter. One evening my mother decided she should get to know Bimbo a little better. I have no idea why she did this. She hadn’t shown much interest in him until now. And she approached the cage with gritted teeth.

Animals sense things and Bimbo, it seems, sensed my mother’s disdain. So he nipped her on the finger. I can still remember the yell. Before I knew it, Bimbo had been banished to school. My father had a word with the headmistress and so Bimbo became the school’s hamster.

This only served to make my sense of loss even worse, of course. It wasn’t just that I could see him in his cage every day at school. Every weekend and holiday a child had a turn in taking him home. Every child, that was, except me. I wasn’t allowed to take him home.

It is only now, looking back on that time, that I realize just how desperate and pathetic my desire for company must have looked to other people. Soon after Bimbo’s departure I headed off, in cahoots with a friend of mine called Eric, to the graveyard at the local Catholic church, St Thomas’s across Escort Road. Armed with a bucket, Eric and I snuck around the gravestones scraping off snails and had soon collected hundreds.

I took them home. I hadn’t thought about where I was going to keep them, I had only thought to myself that I had some pets. I seem to remember I had even started giving each of them names. My hopes were soon dashed, though. I got to the front door and my mother opened it. She just screamed.

She went absolutely mad. ‘Get rid of them, don’t you dare bring them into my home!’ On reflection, slimy snails are not the most natural domestic pets, but that’s how desperate I was.

So I had to take them back to the churchyard. I can remember tipping the bucket and the snails just sticking there. They wouldn’t budge. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me: ‘Can I help you?’ It was the priest. I was ever so scared. ‘I think we can help them on their way,’ he said and he took me and the bucket over to a tap where we poured some water in. He was ever so gentle and kind. And he tipped them out into the grass.

‘One day you’ll have a pet of your own,’ he said.

‘One day I’ll have hundreds,’ I said with a trembling lip.

Perhaps inspired by the snails, my father’s next gift to me was two tadpoles, Alfie and Georgie, as I had soon christened them. Again my mother had accepted this under extreme duress. She let me use one of her best fruit bowls, a boat-shaped glass affair, as Alfie and Georgie’s home. I can still see the constant pained expression she wore whenever she passed anywhere near them. It was saying: ‘Do I have to have this in my living room?’

She must have been quietly delighted that their stay was so brief. Once more, things hadn’t been very well thought out. Georgie died just as he was metamorphosing into a frog. His tail had begun to shrink, some rear legs had grown and a set of front legs had begun to develop too. Then Alfie died at the same stage. We didn’t realize they needed a pond. It had been another disaster and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Especially when I found out my dad had flushed them down the toilet.

When my father suggested a budgie, I thought my wait for a proper companion was finally over. The green hen bird he brought home, Bobo, quickly reduced my mother to a state of nervous agitation, however. Bobo wasn’t the friendliest of creatures, it turned out. Every night she’d be allowed out to fly around for a while, with my mother following her around sweeping up wherever the bird had been. She was petrified of Bobo defecating on her best china, I think.

Their relationship was clearly doomed. And it came to a head one evening, in unforgettable circumstances.

I can still see the scene. Dad was in the kitchen and Mum was in the living room in front of the mirror getting herself ready to go out, which was a regular sight. She was putting on her make-up and Bobo – out of his cage for his evening exercise – was sitting on top of the mirror. To this day I don’t know why, but all of a sudden Bobo flew down and got hold of my mother’s lip.

Pandemonium broke out. My mother screamed in agony then started leaping and running around the room with Bobo swinging and flapping as she clung on to her lip. Blood gushed and furniture was sent crashing over. My father came flying into the room shouting. ‘Stand still, Nona!’ Eventually he prised the bird free, leaving my mother sobbing uncontrollably. Luckily the damage was only cosmetic, although – naturally – my mother failed to appreciate that.

Throughout it all I sat there, consumed by what I knew would be the inevitable consequence of what was occurring. I kept thinking: ‘Bye bye, Bobo.’

Bobo went next door to the neighbours, who had their own budgie, Pippa. When they bred I persuaded my dad to let me have one of the babies, a tiny lump of fluffy blue.

It took some doing, I can tell you. My mother, of course, was adamant that it would have to have a cage large enough to exercise in and could never be left free to fly around and wreak the kind of mayhem poor Bobo had inflicted. We agreed.

But as it turned out, Bluey, as the new arrival was christened, turned into my mother’s personal favourite.

He was an absolute character, a real gold-plated star. He used to talk to me in the morning; he’d say: ‘Janice, come on, get up.’ He’d recite nursery rhymes but say them upside down. ‘Hickory dickory dock, up the Queen’, was one of his favourites. He would dive into the lettuce bowl. What a character he was. My mother loved him, she was absolutely besotted by him, probably because he lavished so much attention on her. He’d say, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful,’ and she loved that. Mum even deigned to let him fly around the house in the evenings.

We used to take him everywhere we went. He even came camping with us. I remember we once stayed next door to a family who had a bird called Bobby. One day the two birds were out in their cages and we heard ours talking. My mother’s face turned scarlet when she heard her bird say: ‘Bobby’s a bugger, Bluey’s beautiful.’ We all burst out laughing. That bird was the light of our lives.

The time we had with Bluey was wonderful to me. To be honest, despite all my love for animals, until then I hadn’t realized an animal could be so loving in return. And the fact that he was the first successful pet I’d had made me love him back even more.

I was about to let Bluey out of his cage one November night in 1958, when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to discover a couple standing on the landing outside. They were an odd-looking pair: she looked nervous and was quite clearly heavily pregnant, he was a cocky young man in his twenties with the biggest Teddy Boy quiff I had ever seen. Whenever I see Woody Woodpecker I remember him.

‘Is your mum in?’ he asked.

I went to the sitting room to get Mum and was surprised when she recognized the Teddy Boy.

‘Oh, hello, Ron,’ she said, seemingly quite pleased to see him.

‘Hello, this is my wife, Anne,’ he replied, gesturing to the woman.

My mother ushered them into the sitting room and I, well-trained young girl that I was, headed to the kitchen to put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

I had been there for a minute or two when my mother reappeared. We didn’t get many visitors at that time of the night. They weren’t encouraged. Yet she seemed almost excited that these strangers had turned up out of the blue. I, on the other hand, had a dozen questions flying around my head. I only got to ask one, however.

‘Who’s that?’ I said.

‘That’s your brother,’ Mum replied breezily.

I’d always dreamt of having a brother or sister. I used to look enviously at my cousins playing, fighting and doing all the normal things siblings do together. I saw that when one got told off there would be huddles and muttered secrets would be shared. They were together.

But there was no prospect of me having one. Cousin Les had been the closest I’d had to a relative of my own age, but since our separation for school I’d seen less and less of him. Whenever I asked my parents, ‘Can we have a baby?’ they replied, ‘No, we can’t afford one.’ And that was it, end of story. There was no discussion after that.

So to say the discovery that I already had a brother was a bombshell would be the understatement of the century. As my mother rushed back into the living room that night, I felt as if I’d been punched in the head.

The strange disorientation I felt was increased by the fact that my ‘brother’ seemed such an unlikely candidate to be my mother’s son. I could hear him laughing in the sitting room. He was very loud and he spoke in a strong London accent. He was the sort of person my mother would normally have crossed the road to avoid. ‘Common’ would have been the word she used, most likely.

Eventually I took the tea tray in, but I might as well have been invisible. Anne was quiet because she’d just met her in-laws. I just sat on the floor listening, trying to take in what was going on.

I don’t know whether I was pleased or hurt. In truth, I didn’t know what I felt.

He’d say things like: ‘I remember you when you were a snotty-nosed kid.’ But that didn’t add up. I had no memory of him at all. And besides, if I had a cold my family had the fastest hankies in town.

They backed him up though. They kept saying: ‘You’ve met him before, you know Ron.’ And I thought: ‘No, I haven’t. When? Where?’

There was no helping me to come to terms with the situation. There were no child psychologists around then to tell them ‘This is a traumatic occasion for a child, a major event in her life, and you should proceed this way …’ You just had to get on with it.

As I sat there listening it dawned on me that he was indeed my mother’s son. He was calling my mother Mum and my father Wal. The only thing I could focus on that night was Anne’s bump. I was thinking, young as I was, ‘Maybe there’s hope there.’ I thought, ‘I’m going to be an auntie.’ Which would possibly give me a chance to be close to another human being.

I wasn’t allowed to hang around for long. They obviously had important things to talk about, so I was sent to bed. I lay there in my bed with the door partially open. I can remember looking at the pattern that the paraffin heater left on the ceiling.

I heard them laughing. And eventually I heard them go, full of ‘See you soon’ and ‘Pop round anytime’.

I went to school the next day telling everyone I had a brother. They did what they’d done when I said I had an uncle who worked with Buffalo Bill. They called me a liar again.

The aftershocks of that night continued for days and weeks. I couldn’t help myself asking my mother questions. Who had she been married to? Where was he now? Why had she and Ron been separated? My mother really didn’t want to discuss any of it. She’d get cross whenever I raised the subject. Divorce was not the done thing at that time and she clearly felt shame. A week or so after Ron had called round she snapped. I’d asked her another question about her divorce.

‘I don’t know why it’s only me you’re pestering with all your questions,’ she said. ‘Your father was married before too.’

This was another bolt from the blue. At least when I asked my father about it he was willing to talk to me. I sensed that he’d been expecting the question. He just sighed, shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Well, it was just one of those things love, there’s not much to say really.’

It turned out that he had married before he’d gone off to war. His wife’s name was Doris and she was a local girl. While my father was being blown to pieces in Europe, Doris did what a lot of young girls did and started becoming a little too familiar with some of the American GIs who were stationed in and around London. It had been when my dad came home for his father’s funeral that he had discovered what she was up to. As if the pain of having to come home to bury his father hadn’t been traumatic enough for him, he had walked into their home and caught her in flagrante. After the funeral he’d gone straight to the servicemen’s charity, SAAFA, and asked them to organize a divorce. It wasn’t particularly unusual for something like that to happen during the war, particularly to couples as young as my dad and Doris. They were both nineteen or so. But it still hit him hard. Looking back on it now it explained a lot about my father. It explained why he decided to stay on in Europe after the end of the war. He obviously didn’t want to come home to be reminded of his heartache. It also explained why, having been given a second chance with my mother, he was absolutely determined not to let history repeat itself. No wonder he made her the centre of his universe, no wonder he rarely took his eyes off her.

My father’s story was sad, but my mother’s turned out to be even more poignant. It was many years before I got to know the full story. There were questions I needed to ask my mother when I became a mother myself. It was then that, slowly, she revealed what had happened.

It turned out that my mum had been just sixteen when she’d had Ron. The father was a local boy of the same age, Dan Godbeer. Mum told me she had been so naive she didn’t even know she was pregnant. She didn’t know the facts of life. She got married two days before he was born. The marriage didn’t last, however. Dan went back to live with his mum and dad, my mum went back to live with her sister and her mother. Dan’s mother was a poisonous woman and was determined to keep the baby in her family. The case went to court and the judge sided with her, saying in essence that a little boy couldn’t be brought up by three women living in the poor, cramped conditions my mum and grandmother had to cope with. So Ron was taken from her.

The loss was terrible, but it was made even more painful by the fact that she would see him regularly. And when she did he was always dirty and badly dressed, sometimes in clothes that were one step removed from rags. Sometimes he was barefoot. She would spend ages making clothes for him and would then leave them in parcels on her mother-in-law’s doorstep. But the packages would be sent back to her unopened. She was rejected. When he was about seven she gave up. She said it was the war that changed it for her. She adopted the same attitude as everyone else: ‘We’re going to die, let’s make the most of the time we’ve got left.’

The story never came out in its entirety. I was given bits and pieces, which I had to put together. I eventually learned that it was my nan who reunited them. Sadly for Ron his father died when he was just nineteen. My dad took my mum to the funeral, but Ron didn’t want to know her because he felt she’d abandoned him. Ron had joined the RAF as soon as he was old enough and my nan, bless her, invited him round for tea, because he was still in touch with her. She engineered it so that my mum would be there too, locked them in a room and said: ‘Talk to each other.’