A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Inventing My Childhood

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Inventing my Childhood

Mary Wood

Author of The Magic of Writing Things Down

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Inventing My Childhood

Copyright © 2012 by Mary Wood

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-9121-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-9122-7 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-9123-4 (dj)

iUniverse rev. date: 4/06/2012

Contents

1. Magic

2. Royalty

3. School

4. Christmas

5. Religion

6. Name

7. Gravity

8. Bride

9. Vanity

10. Games

11. Charity

12. Nativity

13. Goostibs

14. Melodrama

15. Move

16. Proposal

17. The Academy

18. Boys

19. Date

20. History Repeats

21. Hair

22. Threes

23. Wings

About the Author

For Gillykins

I would like to thank Joan Hall Hovey for feedback and encouragement during the process of writing this book. I would also like to thank Francene Cosman for valuable help in editing my manuscript.

Some names have been changed to protect the author

1. Magic

From an early age, I always fancied myself as a trailblazer and wanted to defy the odds by becoming the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Climbing was a passion of mine though I mainly learned the skill by scaling the household furniture and ascending trees.

I’m an early Baby Boomer who was born in 1946 and that will probably be my only claim to a pioneering feat. Not that I had any say about my appearance into the world, of course. I was the predictable result of a post-war frolic when Dad returned from serving Great Britain overseas with the Royal Air Force. Actually he had a rather enjoyable war, if there is such a thing, spending most of his time in the Bahamas servicing aircraft at a training base on one of the islands.

The fact that I was conceived in the first place never ceases to amaze me. My parents were so devout; I wonder they didn’t consider the reproductive function a sin. As members of the local Baptist church, it seemed the pleasures of the flesh; indeed, any pleasure was fraught with the possibility of a hot appointment in hell. Life was to be endured not enjoyed. And so far, that was how it had been though I was going to be the trailblazer who tipped that idea on its head.

My parents, Freddie and Lily Dobbs grew up in close proximity to each other in the London borough of Lambeth. But by the time I came along they lived in a two-bedroom council flat in the suburbs of the capital city. The Purcell Estate contained over twenty blocks of dirty brick buildings built with three or four floor levels. Each block contained six or eight flats of low income housing with basic amenities. There was only one sink and that was situated in the kitchen and although there was a tub in the bathroom, along with the toilet pan, there was no hot water on tap.

If you wanted to have a bath you had to fill the copper boiler in the kitchen with cold water and wait while it took hours to heat up from the burning gas jets positioned underneath. Then the water had to be pumped into the bathroom. Our pump had seized so I rarely had a bath just a strip wash at the kitchen sink which suited me just fine.

The flats had small concrete balconies leading off the kitchen but these were never used as a place to sit in sunny weather. Since the bunker in the hall didn’t hold much coal, spare coal for the living room fire was stored out here. One of my favorite past-times that did not endear me to my mother, was sneaking out onto the balcony to have a game. I would pretend I was climbing the Himalayas by scrambling over the piles of coal. The wash-tub that Mum needed to scrub my filthy laundry hung on a hook by the balcony door.

There was a huge housing shortage in London after the Second World War. So, although my parents had to share their bedroom with their offspring, they were grateful to have a roof over their heads. And at least we didn’t have to share a bed as many of our overcrowded neighbors did, sleeping top to toe. Fortunately, there was enough space in the main bedroom for a double bed, the bed-chair that I slept in and my younger brother, Jimmy’s crib.

There was a second bedroom in the flat and the third and most influential grown-up in my life occupied this room for we lived with Granny Bean, my mother’s mother. In May 1941, Granny lived with Grandpa Bean and my mum, an only child, in a small house near Waterloo Station. At the height of the Blitz, as Londoner’s refer to the intense German bombing raids of the time, an explosive destined for the railway line hit the house next door to theirs. These were row houses so my family’s home collapsed as well as the bomb target.

Fortunately my mother and grandparents were down an air raid shelter at the time and after a spell in a government rest center, they were offered the flat on the Purcell estate. Dad, when he wasn’t capering around the Bahamas lived there too. I never knew Grandpa Bean for he died two months after I was born. I may have been wrong but I always felt that Granny considered it was my fault that he was no longer with us. She was very fond of saying, ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But He doesn’t always give value for the taking.’ I thought she was referring to my untimely entry into the Dobbs family. She believed I was the devil incarnate, an opinion she expressed often with religious fervor.

New age philosophy suggests that thoughts materialize. If so, I like to think that this belief was partly responsible for the mayhem and destruction that the devil and boredom between them helped me to create. When not praying for my salvation, Granny constantly reminded me that I should act like my namesake, the mother of Jesus. Unfortunately my sins included a lack of grace and decorum that Granny considered were the very least of holy Mary’s virtues.

Many children only have to contend with two adults in their lives but I had to cope with three. This was a strange triangle. At five foot six inches, Mum and Dad were the same height. But that’s as far as any equality in their relationship went. Mum’s word was law and, being outnumbered by strong females, Dad tended to stay calmly in the background. He may have had a deeper philosophy but to my child’s mind his motto appeared to be: anything for a quiet life.

If it hadn’t been for his beautiful singing voice, I could persuade myself that he was hardly around at all during my childhood. Many mornings I awoke to the sound of him singing while shaving at the kitchen sink. It was always the same tune, Wher’er You Walk from Handel’s opera Semele. I never tired of hearing it for his rich tenor tones emanated through the flat to brighten up the day; a day in a life that was mapped out for him by circumstances and never seemed to vary. From Monday to Friday and on Saturday morning, he went to work without comment. Between you and me, I think he was glad to escape the confines of the flat with its woman’s woes.

On Saturday afternoons, Mum insisted he take his children on an outing. Usually it was to a park in the vicinity but sometimes we hopped on the 137 bus and went to Crystal Palace. Initiated by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, the palace had been a large building of iron and glass, originally erected in London’s Hyde Park in1851 for the Great Exhibition. In 1854, it was dismantled and rebuilt on Sydenham Hill one of the highest points of the capital city that had the added bonus of splendid views.

Crystal Palace burned down in 1936 leaving a large area of parkland that was dotted with sculptures of dinosaurs and other extinct animals. These were created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a contemporary of Charles Darwin. Crystal Palace was an exciting and scary place in which children could let their imaginations run wild.

On special occasions, we might catch the train to Battersea and go to the Festival Gardens on the banks of the river Thames where there was a funfair. With enough money for one ride, I always chose go on the roller-coaster known as the Big Dipper and leave my stomach behind on the sensational down dives that followed the slow climbs.

Often in the summer months, Dad would take us to cricket when he played for the church team. So his Saturdays, like the rest of the week, were taken care of. On Sundays, there were various church services, prayer meetings and Bible studies to occupy the whole day. There was a predictable and, in my view, a monotonous life stretching ahead of him. I never knew whether he was happy with the arrangement or not.

However, I envied my dad the freedom to leave home every day. On schooldays I was able to escape of course, though it was to another kind of confinement in a classroom. But now it was the Easter holiday where I was confronted with two whole weeks of boredom. By Wednesday of the first week, I had eaten my chocolate egg and was fed up with being told to sit quietly and read. The author, Enid Blyton, was at the height of her popularity as this was before her books were banned by the BBC for lacking literary value. But I loved her stories and most of her characters. I was six years old and anxious for an adventure like Mr Pink-Whistle. He was the star of the book that I was reading.

In fact, I wished I was Mr Pink-Whistle because he could make himself invisible. I would follow his example and make myself disappear. I would go and join the children playing in the concrete circle at the top of the long, narrow drive between the blocks of flats that we called the banjo. Abandoning the book, I watched them from the living room window on the second floor as they sent colored tops on spindly tips twirling in unison around the circle. I recognized most of the children from school. They called excitedly to each other as they waited to discover which top would spin for the longest time.

Anxious to join them, I’d asked Mum many times if I could go out to play. Unfortunately the answer was always ‘No.’ Most of the parents of most of the children on the estate never set foot near a church and so they were considered heathens. Both Mum and Granny said I would be corrupted by these idolatrous half-pints and become no better than I should be; whatever that might mean.

But strategy is everything and I decided to make a nuisance of myself so I would be allowed out. I started my campaign in the bathroom situated across the hall from the living room. I heard Granny saying prayers in her bedroom at the same moment I noticed her false teeth on the window ledge of the smallest room in the house.

I picked them up, clicking the hinged top and bottom molars together like castanets until I had a better idea. I decided to hide them in Dad’s open topped, low-sided wooden toolbox that lived underneath the four legged bath. Well, he did talk about the jaws on his wrench and I wondered how he would react to this new implement in the box. Ha-ha, that was a good joke, I thought but it didn’t amuse me for long.

As I looked at the tools I wondered if they would flush. Placing a spanner, a pair of pliers and a hammer in the toilet bowl, I climbed onto the rim of the pan and pulled hard on the chain hanging from the tank. The toilet flushed. The tools did not. After waiting for the cistern to refill, I swung on the chain again and watched the water cascade into the pan for a second time, but the tools stayed exactly where they were.

Bored, once more, I went into the bedroom that Jimmy and I shared with our parents. I decided to have a bounce on Mum and Dad’s bed. It was exhilarating flying up in the air and trying to head butt the light socket hanging from the ceiling. When I had a good rhythm going, I decided I would try a somersault. Unfortunately, I misjudged my landing and my feet kicked a pile of library books beside the bed. There was a terrific crash as they fell to the floor.

Mum came in to see what the noise was about just as more thumping echoed around the room. Not exactly the sword of Damocles, this came from beneath though with similar results. It was Mrs Arbuthnot in the flat below, banging her broom handle on the ceiling. She did this occasionally, whenever there were loud noises above her head. After I saw the film, The Wizard of Oz, I christened her the Wicked Witch because she seemed rather attached to that broomstick.

Mum pulled me off the bed and slapped me on the top of my bare legs. It stung but I pretended I didn’t care. Granny, prayers finished, also came into the room and said, ‘There are tools in the lavatory pan and I can’t find my false teeth.’

Mum, who was picking up books from the linoleum covered floor, turned and gave me one of her looks. ‘Where are they?’ she demanded.

I went back into the bathroom and rescued the teeth. Handing them to her, she asked, ‘Why did you put tools down the toilet?’

‘To see if they would flush.’

‘It’s a good job they didn’t,’ Granny said, ‘or we’d be in all sorts of trouble with the council and Mrs Arbuthnot, no doubt, since the pipes go down through her flat. You know Lily that child is an instrument of the devil and needs her backside leathering.’ As there was no sink in the bathroom, Granny flounced out with her teeth and could be heard at the kitchen sink washing off grime from the tool box.

A bottom leathering was exactly what I received and it was painful to sit on the dining chair where Mum had insisted I stay for the next hour as punishment. However, I hardly dared breathe, because Mum and Granny were in the kitchen talking about what was to be done with me.

I listened intently to the conversation. While I loved my family, I had a desperate need to get out from under them. And it looked like I may have finally found a means of fleeing their clutches. Apparently, Mum and Granny now thought it unlikely I would be corrupted by my playground peers, quite the opposite in fact. They agreed that if I’m confined to the flat, I will more than likely wreck it and drive them to an early grave. So for the sake of their sanity and Mrs Arbuthnot’s dented ceiling, I will be allowed out to play when I have finished this latest punishment.

Sometime later, I was relieved to escape from the stuffy atmosphere of the flat where black flat-irons were heating in the open flames of the stove. When they were hot enough, a mammoth ironing session would begin. Once outside in the fresh air, I took off my socks and shoes. I loved walking about in bare feet even on the concrete. All the blocks of flats had small grassy areas in front of them. These had originally been surrounded by metal railings but they had been taken away and melted down to make ammunition for the Second World War so there was no barrier around the grass.

I was sliding, flat footed, on the grass, feeling the blades tickle as they slithered between my toes when I met Reggie Pinkstead for the first time.

‘You wanna watch it,’ a voice said. ‘If Gutsache catches you, he’ll smack you round the head.’

I looked up to see a boy about my age who I recognized from school. ‘Gutsache?’

‘Yeh, Mr Guster, the caretaker. We’re not allowed to play on the grass and he can be real mean.’

‘Oh.’ I stepped from the grass and onto the concrete of the Banjo.

‘I’m Reggie by the way,’ the boy said. He jangled the contents of his trouser pockets with his hidden hands. I liked his curly blonde hair and blue eyes.

‘I’m Mary,’ I said.

‘Wanna play marbles?’

‘Sure,’ I replied.

I followed him through the arched walkway between the ground floor flats and out into the concrete backyard. Reggie settled himself by the large drain cover outside the Wicked Witch’s windows and emptied his pockets. He had handfuls of marbles in all sizes. They were made of clear glass and had red, blue, green or yellow twists in the center. He motioned me to sit on the ground beside him.

‘I don’t have any marbles,’ I said.

‘No matter, I’ll lend you some and if you beat me, you can keep them.’

Well, although I didn’t know what I was doing, I managed to knock his marbles off the drain cover several times and collected a few for myself. Reggie was good natured about this and didn’t complain about giving away so much of his treasure.

As he played, Reggie sang and I discovered that he loved messing around with words and that immediately endeared him to me. That day he was preoccupied with the movie High Noon and the song, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. After our game, I watched him walk away from me as he sang his own words to the song: ‘Old Gutsache is good at farting, on this school holiday...ay’. His remaining marbles jangled in his trouser pockets to the rhythm of the Frankie Laine song and his fingers pointed through the material like pretend guns. I was impressed and completely smitten.

I had many games of marbles with Reggie over the next few weeks. Becoming something of an expert, I soon cleaned him out of his whole collection. Maybe I could be a marble pioneer? Now the marbles jangled in my pockets when we played games in the yard.

Of course the dreadful day arrived when my brother, Jimmy, aged four, was allowed out to play and I was given strict instructions to look after him. The year had moved on and it was the May half-term holiday and afternoon by the time we left the flat because it had rained all morning. The pocket of my dress was bulging with marbles and I thought I would show Jimmy how to play the game as Reggie had taught me.

But first I asked him to take off his socks and shoes which he didn’t want to do. But I pushed him on his backside in the arched walkway of the porch and pulled off his shoes. He began to cry but I ignored the wailing. With socks removed, I dragged him out into the back yard but the drain had a large puddle on it from the rain.

Wonderful! Now we could have another game. Marbles jangling, I jumped barefoot into the puddle and began to splash. ‘Come on,’ I said to Jimmy, ‘it’s lovely.’

‘Doan wanna.’

‘Oh, come on,’ I called as I kicked the water in all directions. ‘It’s great.’

‘No.’

Where was the child’s sense of fun? ‘Tough,’ I said and grabbed hold of his arm and dragged him, protesting into the puddle with me. ‘You’re gonna enjoy a paddle.’

‘Doan like it.’

‘But it’s lovely.’

‘It’s cold.’ With that the crying changed to full volume.

How on earth did I get such a flake for a brother?

The next moment there was banging on a window. It was the Wicked Witch. ‘Get that child out of that puddle this minute,’ she screamed, ‘before he catches his death of cold.’

I pulled Jimmy out of the puddle. ‘Wanna go home,’ he sobbed.

We collected our shoes and socks on our way upstairs to the flat. We were followed by the Wicked Witch who took great delight in reporting my behavior to Mum. It goes without saying that I was grounded and spent the rest of the day sitting on my bed reading a book about the forthcoming Coronation. Queen Elizabeth, who succeeded to the throne after the death of her father, King George VI in 1952 was soon to be crowned in Westminster Abbey. It was going to be an important day for me because the Coronation was being celebrated on my seventh birthday.

After looking at the pictures in the book and having our evening tea, my parents left for their weekly choir practice at the church. Granny always babysat on these occasions. She ordered us both to bed in the room we shared with our parents. Although four years old, it was a good job Jimmy was so small because he still slept in a cot. There was no space in the bedroom for a third bed.

‘I don’t want a sound out of either of you,’ Granny said after she had tucked us in. ‘You’re to stay in bed and go to sleep.’

She closed our bedroom door and I waited until she was safely in her room down the hall. As soon as I heard the mumbled words, ‘Dear Lord, please help Mary be a good Christian …’ I knew the coast was clear because she spent some time on evening prayers.

As it was still light, I decided to teach Jimmy how to get around the room without touching the floor. It was unlucky to touch the floor. ‘It’s easy peasy ..’ I told him as I stood on my bed to begin the exercise. My bed was really an armchair containing a platform that was pulled out from underneath the seat to convert it to a bed. Luckily the length when it was fully opened wasn’t very long as it barely fitted in the small space behind the door.

‘Ready, steady, go!’ I yelled as I jumped from the bed-chair onto my parents’ double bed. Using the mattress as a trampoline, I bounced up and down several times before launching myself into the air to land beside a startled Jimmy in the drop-side cot. I trod on his blankets and climbed over the far end. It was an easy step onto the dressing table that was situated underneath the window. Crouching like a puma waiting to pounce, and avoiding the vanity set and other stuff on the top of the dressing table, I pushed off on the balls of my feet and leaped onto the tall-boy set at a right-angle between the dressing table and the wardrobe that was going to be my next obstacle.

Jumping up, I grabbed the top edge of the wardrobe with my fingers, and using my feet, worked my way up the side and onto the highest point of my quest. I really was conquering Everest now as I scrambled in the dust along this pinnacle to the opposite edge where I fell in a heap onto my bed-chair and was back at the start.

Sadly, Jimmy didn’t think much of this enterprise and refused to move out of his crib. However hard I tried, I couldn’t persuade him to climb. He simply stood there, hung onto the cot rail for dear life and sniveled. What was I going to do about him; he was such a misery and a liability now I had to take him out to play with me. If only I could persuade him to do something other than whine.

When I tried patting the top of the dressing table to encourage him to move, I noticed a large white jar next to the hairbrush. I looked closely at the label. Van … ish … ing Cream. Vanishing Cream, it said. Now I knew what vanishing meant because I had seen a performance by David Nixon, a famous magician who made people disappear as part of his entertainment. This celebrity was a member of the Magic Circle and lived in one of the posh houses on the nearby main road. Now I was allowed out, I spent time hanging around his house in the hopes of seeing him.

I thought for a moment about the word ‘vanishing’.

I wonder?

Jimmy’s wailing was getting on my nerves. Wouldn’t it be heaven if I could make him disappear? Forever! I wouldn’t have a misery trailing behind me all the time, spoiling my fun. I picked up the jar. I had some trouble trying to open the top and had to wedge it in the top drawer of the dressing table to unscrew it. With the lid removed, I dug my fingers into the white cream and turned my attention to Jimmy. I scooped a handful onto his head, rubbing it harshly into his hair.

‘It’s cold,’ he wailed. ‘Doan like it.’

‘But it’s lovely, magic cream,’ I told him as I deposited great dollops on his head and sculpted them into peaks. ‘Look, you’ve got a meringue on your head.’

‘Doan wanna be mewang …’

‘Well, you can be something else then,’ I said, emptying the last of the jar to make a giant mountain in the middle of his scalp. I reached for a small paper Union Jack Mum had bought for the Coronation. The thin stem was wedged in the hinge of the dressing table mirror. After I had removed it, I poked it into the top of Jimmy’s sticky wig. ‘There,’ I said, ‘now you’re Mount Everest.’

‘Doan wanna be Moun’rererest,’ he cried.

Oh, why didn’t he just disappear? Perhaps I had to say some magic words. ‘Abracadabra,’ I shouted and waggled my greasy fingers in his face, ‘make Jimmy disappear …’

‘Doan like it,’ he sobbed.

‘What’s going on in here?’ a voice bellowed. I froze. Granny was at the door wondering about the commotion. I didn’t answer because experience told me I would soon feel the wrath of her hand on my backside. But a strange thing happened. She took one look at Jimmy’s creamy mountain with patriotic flag and burst out laughing.

‘You’re … a … wicked … hussy …’ she wheezed at me and collapsed in a heap on my parents’ bed. ‘Oh my …’ she giggled, ‘just … just look … at … the lad.’

You didn’t usually interrupt Granny in full flow but because of the giggling, I felt bold enough to speak. ‘That’s vanishing cream,’ I said, ‘I wanted to make him disappear because he wouldn’t stop crying.’

This made her giggle even more and she rolled about the bed muttering, ‘Oh … my,’ every now and then. When she finally managed to stand up, I saw tears rolling down her face. It was a while before she could speak. ‘Your mother,’ giggle, giggle, ‘saved up ration coupons,’ giggle, giggle, ‘for ages,’ giggle, giggle, ‘to buy that cream …’ She took a deep breath and pretended to be serious. ‘Go and get a spoon,’ she chuckled, ‘and we’ll scoop as much as we can back into the jar.’

Another glance at Jimmy, who had a long, miserable face under the flagged Everest that was slowly land-sliding onto his nose, had her convulsing with mirth. I went into the kitchen to find a spoon. Well I made the old girl laugh, I thought as she shouted after me, ‘And get some bits out the rag bag,’

When I came back, clutching the spoon, an old liberty bodice and cordless pajama bottoms, she was still full of mirth. ‘Dear, oh, dear, my sides ache,’ she tittered. Her eyes were watery and she didn’t attempt to scold me. After she had scooped most of the cream back into the jar, I handed her the rags. She cleaned Jimmy up as best she could. He was not impressed when she made him sleep on the pajama bottoms so his pillow wouldn’t get greasy from his hair.

The next day I thought there might be a new, softer Granny wrapped in the floral pinafore she wore to protect her clothes, but I was mistaken. I heard her say to Mum as she boiled saucepans of water to wash Jimmy’s hair, ‘That child,’ (I was always that child when I misbehaved). ‘Yes, that child needs firm discipline. I strongly advise you to get a cane, Lily, because you know