Joining the Dots: A Woman In Her Time - Juliet Gardiner

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      So on the morning of the day she had hoped would never come, Sheila Tofield packed a small case and caught two buses to Huddersfield. ‘I was setting out on a journey I didn’t want to make, to a town I didn’t want to go to, where I’d do something I didn’t want to do.’

      It was not until the more permissive 1960s that the stigma of illegitimacy began to ebb, and a decisive moment came in 1975 when transparency triumphed. Legislation made it possible for an adoptee to obtain a copy of his or her full birth certificate from the General Register Office; this gave the name and address of the birth mother, and her occupation at the time of her child’s birth, but in the case of unmarried parents, not of the father unless he chose to be named.

      I have never tried to track down my birth mother, though over the years I have gleaned from an aunt who thought I deserved some (but not much) information about my identity the fact that she was Italian – probably from northern Italy. Whether she was a student over here when war broke out and elected to stay, or was interned in 1940 after the fall of France when Mussolini joined the Axis powers (unlikely but not impossible), or whether she was of Italian extraction but her family had lived in Britain for at least a generation, I don’t know.

      When I was a young child I think I was wise enough to realise that this glamorous, brilliant mother I had conjured up was most likely to be an illusion. After all, my friends’ and neighbours’ mothers were much like my own, with their greying, tightly permed hair, felt hats, slightly shabby clothes and sensible shoes. (Clothes only ceased to be rationed in 1949 and the wartime ‘make do and mend’ ethos was still prevalent among British women.)

      As I grew up, I felt I had no need for another mother, since the one I had already had proved less than satisfactory in my view. Soon I had a husband and children of my own and I could not imagine where a spare additional mother would fit into the family structure. Later still I realised that I didn’t want to learn that my mother had been felled by a fearsome hereditary disease that I was likely to develop, or that she was still alive and had some form of senile dementia that would leave me, despite her abrogation of me, somehow bound to take responsibility for her.

      So for these semi-rational reasons, which no doubt hide a deeper, more profound anxiety, I have never tried to find my mother. I was (and still am) more interested in finding out who my father was, but that would be a much harder task since his name does not appear on my birth certificate. Maybe I will someday follow that path to discovery, if time is allowed to me, if only for my children and grandchildren’s sake. They have the right not to have a central branch of their already woefully sparse family tree amputated.

      Chapter Three

       An Education (of Sorts)

      My first memory of my education is a Freudian one. I was standing next to a little boy on my first day at what was grandly called ‘nursery school’ but was a corner of the dining room in a neighbour’s house. There was a toy cash register, some Meccano, a doll’s pram accommodating a doll and a dog-eared teddy bear with a tea towel as a coverlet, and a sandpit in the garden, covered by a tarpaulin which was rolled back in the summer to allow ‘messy play’ with buckets and spades and child-sized watering cans. Perhaps there was a roll of blue sugar paper and wax crayons or poster paints to make pictures with, and blunt scissors and squares of coloured sticky paper too, but I don’t remember.

      What I do remember was the willy this little boy fished out of his shorts and directed at the lavatory (or toilet as I was instructed to call it) as a stream of wee arced precisely where it was intended to go. I felt sheer, gut-wrenching penis envy – the functionality, the utility, a body part with the same straightforward application as a garden hose, no more lifting up skirts, pulling down knickers, balancing precariously on cold porcelain rims. I wanted what he had and carefully checked and rechecked my anatomy to see if somewhere I too had such a tap. I had no idea if this was a usual male adjunct, or if this particular child had been singularly blessed – or maybe adapted? And as far as I remember, I never asked, just coveted.

      I One Potato, Two Potatoes . . .

      The postwar government had other educational priorities so, largely for financial reasons but also in the belief that very young children were best at home with their mothers, it discouraged local authorities from investing in pre-school education when so many resources were needed for the provision of secondary schooling following the 1944 Education Act. Indeed, as late as the 1960s, the percentage of children attending nursery schools had barely increased since the 1930s, and where this was provided it was usually as a result of local authority subsidies for underprivileged areas. My nursery was a private one, paid for weekly, I imagine, with a charge that included a mid-morning beaker of milk and a biscuit. It would be pressure from married women wanting to go back to work in the 1960s and 70s that finally led the government to develop systematic pre-school provision for the children of any parent who wanted to make use of it.

      Since I was an only child with no cohabiting playmates, I was fortunate to be able to spend time with a handful of other children of my age, learning to share, make friends, play with bricks, sing ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ and ‘Ten Green Bottles’, and to write my name in higgledy-piggledy capitals.

      After a year or so at nursery it was time to go to ‘proper school’, so I was sent to George Street primary, a former board school, just down the hill from where we lived. It was a grim place with high windows so children could not be distracted by what was going on outside. The lavatories were in the far corner of the yard. They were fitted with doors that didn’t close properly so you somehow had to stretch one leg from where you were sitting to keep the door shut while naughty boys tried to get in. There was an asphalt playground back and front with an inevitable tendency to graze knees, yet with no play equipment; games at playtime consisted of chalking hopscotch squares on the ground or playing fives with pebbles. The girls walked round and round the playground, arms intertwined, or skipped, tucking their dresses into their knickers and chanting ‘One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four’ as they jumped over the turning rope held by two friends.

      As I grew older I considered the home counties a dull and unenviable place to grow up. It had no distinctive regional culture, traditions or dialect. It was neither urban nor rural, but a commuter land full of dormitory towns where people came home and tended their gardens or did a little light woodwork in their refuge shed after the train had dropped them off from London at about six o’clock. My father worked locally and so walked home for dinner (lunch) and then came home to high tea, which I remember as a meal of ham, hard-boiled eggs, lettuce and a lot of beetroot, though the repast must have varied sometimes.

      You could plot the days of the week by the meals we ate: roast meat on Sunday, the remains of the joint on Monday, shepherd’s pie on Tuesday, with the last stringy remains of Sunday’s meal minced, macaroni cheese on Wednesday, liver and onions (ugh) on Thursday, fish on Friday. Puddings were things like plum pies, treacle tart, suet pudding and Bird’s Instant Whip, which my mother claimed was ‘home made’ as she added milk to the strawberry, banana or caramel packet powder.

      Hemel Hempstead, where I grew up, was a smallish Hertfordshire market town and did not become suburbanised in the first wave of suburb-building. Mostly the town was not part of the 1930s growth of home ownership away from the crowded and fetid capital. No ring roads emanated from its core, though it was obviously ripe for change, given the postwar planning movement to settle families around the circumference of London and other overcrowded industrial towns and cities, but it would always lack any distinction as far as I was concerned.

      This perception was confirmed when I read Iona and Peter Opie’s collection of the rhymes children chanted as they skipped, published in 1959 when my skipping days were not long past, and noted fascinating topical, regional and local references. In Lancashire the Opies heard girls chime, to the tune of ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, a rhyme about a GP in Lancaster who had been hanged in 1936 for the murder of his wife and the girl who looked after the children:

      Red stains on the carpet, red stains

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