LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

the other children’s toys downstairs. I was just like the girl in the nursery rhyme: ‘When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.’

      In my defence, all I can say is that I missed my mother. Auntie Mum was sweet, soft, kind and easy-going and I adored her, but all the same I was acutely aware that my three cousins had their mother around all day to look after them and I didn’t have mine. The highlight of my day was waiting for her to come home.

      I was so possessive about her that I didn’t like her boyfriend Joe at all. He was quite rich and must have had a few contacts in the black market - not only was he a reliable source of silk stockings but we were treated to a constant supply of eggs, butter and sugar, all luxuries at the time. Something else we never went short of was smoked salmon. I even had it in the sandwiches I took to school. In the end I got so bored with smoked salmon sandwiches that I’d go round swapping them for ones made with jam.

      In many ways she had a sad time, my mother. I think Joe was really the love of her life, but although he claimed to be separated from his wife, he never committed. She was a real beauty and a lively, bright, talented woman, but she got a lot less than she deserved. She was a blonde and looked like Virginia Mayo, a Hollywood star of the Forties and Fifties. She wore her hair drawn back into a French pleat, which showed off her classic features, and she always had an air of elegance. My grandmother, Nanny Wilde, used to say she was the flower of the flock - and it was a pretty big flock. My mother was one of seven children, five of whom were girls. She wasn’t short of brains and when she was 11 she won a scholarship to high school, but she wasn’t allowed to take it up. My grandmother said it wouldn’t be fair on her sisters.

      It was Uncle Jim, my mother’s brother, who was Nanny Wilde’s favourite. He and my Aunt Glad held the European professional title for ballroom dancing. That was quite something. Jim owned a dance hall, the Princes, in Barking; coincidentally, it wasn’t far from Waverley Gardens, where Bobby grew up. Nanny Wilde ran the cafe at the back.

      In those days, the Forties and early Fifties, ballroom dancing was huge. No one had TV then, of course, so everyone made their own entertainment by going out to dances and music halls. There was no such thing as a couch potato then. When my mother was in her teens, she was a very good dancer. People reckoned she had the ability to be even better than Jim and she was selected to appear in a talent show. She would have earned 2s. 6d. a week - not a sum to be sneered at sixty years ago - but Nanny Wilde put a stop to that, too.

      Why? I can only speculate. My grandmother was an old-fashioned matriarch, a bit of a tyrant. She was a very powerful woman who ruled with an iron fist, and she was tough. She probably had to be, with seven children. She was such a strong personality that she seemed almost to obliterate my grandfather. Pop Wilde had a bowler hat and a walking stick and that’s just about all I remember of him.

      The Wilde household lived ‘round the corner’, to use East London parlance. In actual fact they were a bit further away than that, in a large detached house in Cranbrook Road, Gants Hill. It had a monkey puzzle tree in the front garden and a marvellous lilac tree in the back. But everyone you knew used to live ‘round the corner’ if they didn’t live ‘over the road’.

      There wasn’t only Nanny, Pop and the kids. Archie, the lodger, was part of the equation as well. It was rumoured that the two youngest of the Wildes - my mother and her sister, Eileen - were Archie’s, not Pop’s. It’s certainly true that Eileen didn’t look anything like Pop and if the rumours are to be believed, that might explain why Nanny was tough on my mother - she might have reminded her of her indiscretion.

      I’ve got to say that Nanny Wilde was never tough on me - it was only my mother with whom she had the difficult relationship. I’d go round there frequently and listen as she played the piano and sang. She was very family-orientated and I adored her. It was being so family-orientated that got Nanny Wilde into trouble one night at the dance hall, a night so dreadful that for years we could hardly bear to speak of it.

      The biggest dance event of the year, the Star Championships, was held up in London and Uncle Jim and Aunt Glad were favourites to win it. The whole family dressed up to the nines to go and watch. My mother even went to the furriers and borrowed two coats on approval for her and Nanny Wilde. It was all heady and exciting stuff and by the time Jim and Glad finished doing their routine, Nanny Wilde had had a few drinks. She swept up to one of the woman judges, pointed to her earrings and told her that she would look better in a different pair.

      Unfortunately, the judge had a sense of humour failure, construed the earrings remark as attempted bribery and marched off to report Nanny Wilde to the powers that be. Shortly afterwards, it was announced over the tannoy that Glad and Jim had been disqualified. Oh, the shame of it. And the fur coats had to go back the next day. It was a nightmare!

      I think what really drove a wedge between my mother and Nanny Wilde was that she, Betty, was a modern girl - ahead of her time, a bit wilful, perhaps. By the time she was 17 she was virtually living away from home, staying with the family of Gladys Mogford, her best friend. The Mogfords loved her, almost as if she was their own. And I think that in the end she decided to get married, even though she was very young, rather than go home. She just got out.

      I know she loved my father, but getting married was really an escape route from her unhappiness. The only trouble was, what she escaped into turned out to be no better than what she’d left behind. My father left her for another blonde when I was very little. After that there was Joe, with his half-truths and broken promises. When I was 12, she got married again, to a ship’s chef called Eddie, but that didn’t work out either.

      She’d had so many disappointments and frustrated ambitions that she projected her dreams onto me. She definitely believed I was destined for greater things. I was groomed and always beautifully turned out. Because she didn’t want me to be a gorblimey Cockney, I was sent to elocution lessons. I’ve no idea why my mother thought it was a good idea, but for some reason I was also packed off to fencing lessons.

      At one point I joined a dancing school, where they were about to stage a show including ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’. I was hastily given a part in it, although as I was a newcomer, the role was minuscule. Not that you would have known. Every mother was given her child’s costume to tart up and mine had at least ten times more ribbons and bows than the star’s did. In fact, compared to me, Shirley Temple herself would have found her outfit wanting.

      It all went to my head. At the end of the performance, when we all lined up to take a bow, someone with a bouquet stepped onto the stage. I might have been stuck right at the end of the line, but I knew what I was worth! I skipped forward and said, ‘Thank you.’ They had to wrest the bouquet off me. I was in floods of tears. So that was the end of my theatrical career.

      Much to my mother’s surprise, I passed the 11-plus and was offered a place at Ilford County High School, which had the reputation of being both strict and highly academic. My mother was actually so worried when she received the letter containing the Ilford High offer that she asked the Head of my primary school if she should turn it down. She really had doubts about my coping. I was bright enough, just not terribly keen on schoolwork.

      The Head assured her I’d be fine there and, as it turned out, I was. I didn’t like school very much, though, particularly grammar school. It was an alien world of Latin, French and German, indoor sandals, dresses that couldn’t be more than an inch off the floor when you knelt down, and heel grips. Heel grips were as much part of the Fifties as paper nylon petticoats and headscarves worn over hair rollers on Friday nights, and your mum made you stick them in your outdoor shoes which had been bought for you to grow into.

      I wasn’t a total failure. I was picked for the hockey team, showed willing by joining the fencing club and had a very nice English teacher called Miss Mackie, who didn’t seem much older than her pupils. Years later our daughter, Roberta, then 10, won a place at the City of London School for Girls. Bobby and I travelled up to the Barbican with her for her interview and when we were admitted into the Headmistress’s study, there was Miss Mackie! I seemed to grow younger and smaller by the second as I turned into Tina Dean from Christchurch Road with her heel grips and failure to appreciate the finer points of Shakespearean plays.

      ‘I

Скачать книгу