He returned home at half past six, listened to The Archers on the radio, ate his supper and fell asleep in the armchair, pale hands folded over his waistcoat as if guarding his watch. He gave me a sixpence occasionally or offered me a boiled sweet but that was the extent of our relationship. I don’t think I ever sat on his lap. I remember once combing his hair playing hairdressers when I was older, but this was unsatisfactory too, as he had very little hair to comb.
He seemed to have very little of anything, including personality, a nine-to-five man who did nothing with his life – yet he had fought in the reeking muddy trenches in the First World War until he was shot and sent home, badly wounded. Maybe he was happy to embrace a totally peaceful, boring, suburban life – no mud, no bullets, no swearing soldiers, just his little hedge-trimmed semi and his wife, and Phil and Grace Archer and old Walter Gabriel on the radio.
My grandma seemed settled too, perhaps because she’d had such a rackety-packety childhood. I loved curling up by her chair as she sewed, getting her to tell me stories about when-she-was-a-little-girl. These weren’t silly Diddle-Diddle-Dumpling See-Saw-Marjorie-Daw stories that didn’t make sense, like the rhymes in the Margaret Tarrant book. These were gritty tales of an unwanted, unloved child sent from pillar to post – the sort of stories I’d write myself many years later.
My grandma’s mother died of cancer when she was only twenty-seven. Ga, Hilda Ellen, was seven, and her brother Leslie was five. Her father, Papa, was a Jack-the-lad businessman, a fierce, feisty little man up to all sorts of schemes. He palmed his children off on different relatives and got on with his life without them. Leslie was packed off to an uncle, and as far as I know, was never reunited with his sister.
Hilda Ellen was sent to two maiden aunts who were very strict, but they taught her to sew beautifully. She loved dolls. She didn’t have a proper big china doll – no one wanted to waste any money on giving her presents – but she scavenged for coppers and sometimes dared save her Sunday school donation, and bought tiny china dolls from the local toyshop. You could get one the size of your thumb for a halfpenny but her hair was only painted in a blob on her head. Penny dolls were the size of your finger and had real silky long hair you could arrange with a miniature brush.
All the dolls were stark naked apart from painted socks and shoes. Hilda Ellen raided her aunts’ workbox and made them tiny clothes. At first they were just hastily stitched wrap-around dresses and cloaks, but soon she had the skill to make each doll a set of underwear, even ruffled drawers, and over these they wore embroidered dresses and pinafores and coats with hoods to keep their weeny china ears warm.
The dolls were a demanding bunch and wished for more and more outfits. Hilda Ellen got bolder in her search for material. When the dolls wanted to go to a ball, she crawled to the back of the older auntie’s wardrobe and cut a great square out of the back of an old blue silk evening frock. The auntie caught Hilda Ellen twirling her dolls down the staircase, looking like a dancing troupe in their blue silk finery. She recognized the material. She wouldn’t have worn that evening frock in a month of Sundays but she was still appalled. Hilda Ellen was sent packing.
Papa had taken up with a new lady by this time and didn’t want a daughter getting in the way. Hilda Ellen was sent to relatives who ran a pub in Portsmouth. It was a rough pub, always heaving with sailors, not really a suitable home for a delicate little girl, but Hilda Ellen loved it there.
‘I didn’t have to stay in my room. Well, I didn’t have a room. I just had a cot and shared with the bar girls. But every evening I helped in the pub, collecting up the glasses. My uncle would often sit me on the counter and get me to sing a song for all the sailors.’
She was given so many pennies she had a whole drawerful of tiny dolls, and she bought her own scraps of silk and velvet and brocade from the remnant stall at the Saturday market.
Then she was given her own big doll! The hairdressing salon along the road had a china doll in the window with very long golden curls of real hair. She sat there to advertise the hairdressing expertise of Mr Bryan, the owner. Hilda Ellen snipped her own hair every now and then, but she often paused outside the salon window, gazing at the beautiful china doll in her cream silk dress, her golden curls hanging right down to her jointed hips.
Mr Bryan didn’t have many clients. He was near retiring age. At Christmas he decided to call it a day and close the business. He donated his doll with the long hair to a local charity which was giving a party for all the poor children of Portsmouth. They tied it to the top of the Christmas tree, like a giant fairy.
Hilda Ellen was at the party. She craned her neck, peering up at the wondrous doll. The Mayor of Portsmouth came in dressed as Father Christmas, his gold chain gleaming under his false beard. He started handing out presents from the tree to every child in the room. Hilda Ellen’s heart thumped under her muslin bodice.
Maybe Mr Bryan had seen her peering wistfully in his window and murmured a word in the Mayor’s ear. Maybe the Mayor truly was Father Christmas. Whatever . . . Hilda Ellen was called out, a young lad was sent scampering up a ladder to the top of the tree, and the beautiful doll was put in Hilda Ellen’s arms. She clasped her tight, burying her face in that soft golden hair, quivering with happiness.
She called the doll Mabel and loved her passionately. She made her an entire trousseau of elaborate clothes: a sailor suit with a pleated skirt, a velvet dress with tiny pearl buttons and a crochet collar, a winter coat edged in fur, with a fur-trimmed bonnet and a little fur muff to match.
Hilda Ellen was blissfully happy. She wanted to live in Portsmouth for ever but Papa’s lady was now his new wife, with a child on the way. When the baby was born, Papa decided they’d save on a nursemaid and bring Hilda Ellen back to make herself useful. She was old enough, wasn’t she – ten or eleven at least?
It was a great pity they’d all forgotten exactly how old she was, even Hilda Ellen herself. She’d had a lot of changes of school but she was bright and loved working hard. She shone especially in needlework classes and art, but she was good at all the academic subjects too. Her teachers thought she was definite scholarship material. She sat the exam without a hint of nerves and passed with flying colours, all set to go to a posh girls’ high school, her sights fixed on getting into art school later.
There was just the formality of sending in her birth certificate. When Papa eventually found it at the back of a desk drawer, they had a shock. Hilda Ellen had somehow mislaid a year of her life. She was eleven going on twelve. So that was it. She was too old for the scholarship.
It sounds crazy now. I’m sure someone would ensure that this bright, hard-working girl still got a scholarship somehow. Maybe if her father had pushed harder, they’d have made an exception. But people just shrugged their shoulders and said sorry. Hilda Ellen went and lay on her bed, head in her pillow. I don’t know whether she wept. I never saw her cry, not even when she was an old lady in terrible pain. She wasn’t one to make a fuss, she just got on with things.
She stayed with Papa and her stepmother. She didn’t think much of her. She didn’t think much of baby Jack either, or his little sister Barbara, who arrived a year or so later. She bathed them and fed them and sang them to sleep every evening while her stepmother cosied up to Papa. Hilda Ellen had to share the nursery with her half-siblings, but she kept Mabel sitting on a high shelf out of harm’s way.
She attended the local elementary school until she was thirteen, but then she had to leave to earn her living. She certainly wasn’t going to be a full-time nursery maid. She thought she’d found the ideal job. On a material hunt to the Bon Marché department store in south London she saw they were advertising for attractive young girls to work the newly installed elevators. They were very proud of these beautiful brass lifts, considered very glamorous and state-of-the-art for Edwardian times. They’d already employed a little dark girl and kitted her out in a crimson uniform, to be a special lift girl. Hilda Ellen was little and very fair. The Bo
n Marché management thought they’d found an excellent contrasting pair.
Hilda Ellen went home full of excitement but Papa was shocked at the idea. He’d not cared what she got up to during her childhood but now she was under his roof she had to behave like a lady. Ladies definitely weren’t employed as lift girls. Papa thought they were on a par with chorus girls – or worse.
There was no arguing. Hilda Ellen pressed her lips together so hard her mouth disappeared. Perhaps it made Papa think harder about his daughter and what she should do with the rest of her life. She was good at sewing. She’d made all those fancy outfits for that doll of hers, and a few natty bits and bobs for little Jack and Barbara. Perhaps she ought to be properly trained?
He apprenticed her to a milliner. Hilda Ellen stitched away, pins in her pursed mouth, plaiting straw into hats, like some poor princess in a fairy story.
Then, in 1914, war broke out. Papa went to buy presents for Jack and Barbara at Christmas and found there were hardly any toys in the shops. All the best dolls and toy animals were made in Germany, only we were of course at war with the Germans now. Papa was ever enterprising. Now was the perfect time to start up his own doll factory. He knew nothing about doll-making but that didn’t deter him. It should be simple enough. He just needed to take some doll to pieces to see exactly how it was made.
Hilda Ellen came home after a long stint at the milliner’s. She went upstairs to free her soft hair from its pins and brush it into a fluffy cloud round her shoulders. She looked up at the shelf to nod at Mabel and her lovely longer tresses. Mabel wasn’t there.
Mabel was dismembered in a workroom, cut up like meat on a butcher’s block. Even her beautiful blue glass eyes were poked into the hollow of her severed head.
Hilda Ellen met my grandfather, George Alfred, the next year. She was walking arm in arm with a girlfriend over Blackheath, deliberately slowing down as they went past the soldiers’ convalescent home, giggling when the poor bandaged boys lounging in deckchairs in the garden called out compliments.
George Alfred took a shine to little blonde Hilda Ellen. He asked her if she’d care to go out with him. She liked the look of this dark handsome soldier with his arm in a sling. She said yes. She’d have said yes if he’d been pug-ugly and bandaged like a mummy. She couldn’t wait to leave home.
* * *
This is a difficult question! Which of my books is dedicated to my grandma – and can you give me a reason why I chose that book in particular?
* * *
Look in the front of The Suitcase Kid. It says:
In memory of Hilda Ellen Smeed
There are several reasons why I chose this book for my grandma. It’s about Andy, who has to move backwards and forwards after her parents split up, living one week with Mum, one week with Dad, never having her own room, her own space, her own life. I thought the young Hilda Ellen had a lot in common with Andy.
I also have Andy becoming very close to an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Peters. Mrs Peters has arthritis but still manages to sew, just like my grandma. Mrs Peters gives Andy her own sewing box for Christmas.
It’s got all these little compartments stuffed with threads and needles and a silver thimble and a tape measure that snaps back into place when you touch the button. The compartment tray lifts out and at the bottom are all sorts of materials from her own scrap bag, soft silks and velvets and different cottons with tiny sprigs of flowers and minute checks and pin-head dots, all perfect for making into dresses for Radish. She’s got so many little outfits now she wants me to change her all day long so that she can show them all off.
I’ve made her a dance-frock that covers her paws, a velvet cloak lined with cotton wool fur, even a little sailor-suit with a big white collar and a white cap with special ear-holes.
7
Telling Stories
I ONCE ASKED my grandma what was the most important thing that had ever happened to her.
‘Buying our house,’ she said.
I was surprised at the time. It seemed such a sad thing to say. It was such an ordinary house too, a suburban semi – two bedrooms and a box room, with no distinguishing features. But now I can see that she didn’t necessarily mean the bricks and mortar and all the dark heavy furniture and the dull Axminster carpets. I think she meant she’d got a home at last.
She had a peaceful life living with my grandfather. I never once heard them quarrel. The very worst thing they would call each other was Fathead, and that was said in terms of mild irritation, nothing more. They weren’t a demonstrative couple at all. I didn’t ever see them kiss or cuddle or even hold hands. I knew they slept in the same bed because I was allowed to jump into it when Gongon got up to make their early morning cup of tea.
I’d cuddle up with my sleepy grandma until Gongon came back with the big wooden tray and two green china cups of tea and the biscuit tin. He’d give the tray to Ga and clamber carefully back into bed, and then we’d sit up and they’d sip their tea and we’d all nibble custard creams from the tin. They kept the same tin throughout my childhood, replenishing it from Woolworths’ loose biscuits counter every couple of weeks. It was orange and yellow and black, a sunset scene with dark silhouettes of buildings against the evening sky. Every time I go to an antique fair I look for that particular tin design. It must be out there somewhere!
Then my grandpa would go off to the bathroom to shave with his bristle brush and cut-throat razor, going ever so carefully round his trim moustache, while my grandma wriggled into her corsets. I wasn’t supposed to watch but of course I peeped at her from under the blankets. I was fascinated by this large, prawn-coloured garment, so different from my mother’s silky camiknickers and suspender belt. My mum had brassieres too, stitched into two rigid pyramids. She left one at the end of the bed each night, and when my dad was being rude, he’d poke the ends with his finger, denting them. My grandma’s corset didn’t seem to allow for two bosoms. It compressed my grandma’s chest into one large upholstered cushion.
Ga kept her dressmaker’s dummy in the little box room with her treadle sewing machine. I’d play games with the dummy and sometimes hug her. She felt exactly like my grandma in her corsets.
Cassandra and Rose in one of my favourite books, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, pretend that their dressmaker’s dummy is a genteel friend called Miss Blossom. Ga’s dummy didn’t have one personality; she played multiple parts in the theatre of my imagination. One day she’d be a fairy queen, the day after she’d be a mermaid, then she’d be my sister, or a big monkey, or my very special best friend.
I didn’t have many real friends when I was at Fassett Road, though there are photos of me playing with various children who came to tea. We are wheeling my pram, sitting on my trike, squatting in my sandpit by the French windows. I am the Persil child, smiling in my dazzling white sunsuit, my white socks, my white sandals. I got told off if I marked my socks or scuffed my shoes or spilled orange squash down my beautifully ironed dress. I didn’t have a proper bath every day. This was a once-a-week ordeal with red carbolic soap and lots of scrubbing, and if I whined when the shampoo went in my eyes, I was given a good shake. I had a daily ‘wash-down’, shivering on the bathroom mat, and my nails were cleaned and clipped until my fingers tingled.
I was a reasonably well-behaved child, though as my mum said, I had my moments. If I was naughty, I was sent upstairs to bed. If I was being really irritating, I got smacked too. Parents smacked their children without any guilt or remorse in those days. It was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I never got really hurt. My mum just gave me a slap on the back of my legs or on my bottom. My grandma gave me a light tap if she caught me with a finger in a pot of her delicious home-made raspberry jam, or picking holes where her kitchen plaster was peeling. My grandpa didn’t get involved enough to smack. I asked Biddy if Harry ever smacked me. I was frequently frightened of him, right up to the day he died in his fifties, but I couldn’t remember him hitting me.
‘He hit you once when
you were little, and it worked a treat,’ said Biddy. ‘You were standing up in your cot one evening, howling and howling, and you simply wouldn’t be quiet. I went up to try to get you to lie down and go to sleep. So did Ga. You simply wouldn’t see reason. So Harry went up and he gave you an almighty whack and you shut up straight away.’
If I’d done something really bad, I tried to talk myself out of being blamed. I didn’t exactly fib. I simply told stories.
‘I didn’t do it,’ I’d say, wide-eyed, shaking my head. ‘Gwennie did it.’
I’d sigh and shake my head and apologize for Gwennie’s behaviour. Gwennie was one of the imaginary friends who kept me company during the day. Biddy and Ga found this mildly amusing at first but the novelty soon wore off, and I found myself being punished twice over for Gwennie’s misdemeanours.
‘You must always always always tell the truth, Jac,’ Biddy said solemnly. ‘You mustn’t ever tell fibs.’
Try telling that to a storyteller!
* * *
Which girl in one of my books always tries to tell the truth? She lives with her grandparents, just like I did when I was little.
* * *
It’s Verity in The Cat Mummy.
I try very hard to tell the truth. That’s what my name Verity means. You look it up. It’s Latin for truth.
I can be as naughty as the next person but I try not to tell lies. However . . . it was getting harder and harder with this Mabel-mummy situation.
The Cat Mummy is a very sad book (though there are lots of funny bits too). Many children write to me to tell me about their pets. They’re very special to them. They say: ‘Dear Jacqueline, I’m nine years old and I love reading your books and I’ve got a cat called Tiger and a guinea pig called Dandelion. Tiger is stripy and Dandelion loves eating dandelions. Oh, and I’ve got a mum and a dad. I’ve got a little brother too and he is a pest.’