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| All things bright and beautiful |
Back we go down memory lane...
Dramatis Personae:
Our parents, who got married soon after the war and had two children: Emma and me (Lucy). We moved into a big (inconvenient, cold) house in the country (Linchmere) while my father struggled as a barrister. They counted the pennies.
But they had plans for us. We were going to become well-behaved, compliant children. They proceeded on the “children live with nanny on a separate floor” principle. They didn’t want to live WITH us. P’s family were high establishment, but Mum’s family had lived in a series of insanitary cottages and done a moonlight flit when the rent came due. I can’t imagine her really caring about having perfect little upper middle class children. But she seemed to mind the most.
The dining room, with huge mahogany table, was just inside the front door – it was actually the back door, leading straight into a gents’ loo. When we all ate in there, P used to tell us fascinating facts from the New Scientist, or tell funny stories from the war. Barman: “Can’t make up your mind? How about a nice Harpic and custard, sir?” Then P earned a lot of money from a case and his career took off. They could make the layout changes they’d been dreaming of. The kitchen became the dining room, the previous dining room became his office. And Nanny left.
But once in the old dining room I was eating a boiled egg and the yolk ran down the outside of the shell. I couldn’t eat it, but P insisted. Mum joined in and it became a screaming row between them. “She’s MY CHILD!” After that my eggs were hard-boiled. (Principle: Children must eat what’s put before them. And eat up everything on their plate. It doesn't just induce obedience, it avoids wasting money.)
Also “Don’t saw, cut!” when trying to cut up cold mutton that Emma said was like boiled lino. When I had to cut my birthday cake Mum would put her large hands over mine and cut it for me – hurting my hands in the process. (In the 60s we got serrated steak knives. Surely the only way is to saw?)
We had a lovely dining room now and a new blond wood table, even a breakfast bar by the window. But no more science facts, no more funny stories. Instead, constant yelling about table manners. "Lean over your plate and the food won't go down your front!" Well, nobody told me. P to M: “Show them how you do it.” She licked her lips instead of using a napkin. She was already drunk – at lunch time. Did he think she spent all day teaching us table manners? (She had “help” – why was she still “tired”?)
As I’ve said, they had a plan for when the servants left – we would be the servants. But they never told us what to do, or showed us how. P would just shout “Jump up! Jump up! Help your mother!” Every day. She didn’t want help, she wanted to go into the kitchen and drink. Again, did he think she was managing us when he wasn’t there?
I realised at the time that they were trying to live as if they had servants when they only had a cleaning lady. I realised at the time that children’s teeth weren’t strong enough to chew boiled mutton – or hands strong enough to cut it. (And it was the dentist, not they, who told me: "If you brush your teeth you won't get fillings.")
I was quite small, about 7, when they decided I would empty the bins as my “chore”. They cornered me next to the Welsh dresser and presented me with the wicker wastepaper basket from the sitting room and told me to empty it. Shouting. I did and said nothing. Eventually I put out a foot and pushed it over. They ran round in circles screaming “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” I exaggerate, but not very much.
The basket was almost my height. I’d have had to pick it up with my arms round it. Put it down, open the kitchen door (or did we still have a bead curtain?). Put it down, open the back door. Put it down, take the lid off the dustbin. Pick it up, empty it into the dustbin. Impossible. And I didn’t know that you emptied bins into the dustbin. I didn’t think about it.
Reading their minds, they thought this was "disobedience". P had commanded the “men” in the war. Why didn't I follow orders, like a squaddie? He told me once that I was “perverse”. Me: “I don’t know what perverse MEANS!” Actually I’d worked it out from the context. Bin-emptying was never mentioned again.
One day as usual I knocked something over at lunch – a glass of water. “Go into the kitchen and get a cloth to mop it up.” I came back with the floor cloth. Yell, yell, yell. Scream, scream, scream. I’d never noticed what kind of cloth you mopped up a spill with, or where I could find one.
They turned a back room into a playroom for us and all our toys were put there. If we wandered into the living room it was: “You’ve got a playroom now. This is OUR playroom.”
There was some special chocolate in a blue and gold wrapper. We all had a square, and the remainder was put in the “sweet cupboard”. We were given one sweet after lunch, to train us not to have a “sweet tooth”. Of course I took the rest and ate it all. I screwed up the paper and stuffed into the corner of the downstairs loo. “Did you take the chocolate in the gold paper?” “No.” To me, that paper was blue. I honestly thought they were talking about a different piece of chocolate.
Screaming rows from downstairs after we’d gone to bed. Now they had a child that LIED! The atmosphere went on for three days. Eventually my older sister asked me in a calm voice, “Did you take the chocolate that was in the cupboard?” Me: “Yes.” They probably gave me a telling off. Did they ask me why I’d “lied”?
We were given money boxes – one in the shape of a postbox, one like a real cashbox. If we wanted something we couldn’t afford (like a plastic umbrella printed with ballet dancers), we were told to “save up” till we had enough. We never did any such thing. Children must learn the value of money! But we didn't.
We spent all our pocket money – pennies – on cheap sweets. Until recently I ate whole Aeros for dinner. I now have diabetes. “Proper food” was part of the programme. “You don’t need to add sugar, it’s sweet enough, it’s got sugar in it!” One day nobody stopped me when I added sugar to cereal. I ended up with an inedible bowlful of sugar. I’ve written about the meals elsewhere.
Was the Ministry of Food still giving out pamphlets about child nutrition: carbohydrates, green vegetables, protein? Rationing was in force until I was three. Mum told me much later that as a child (often fostered) she was always hungry because it was the fashion to avoid “over-feeding” children. If you asked for a snack, you got an apple.
When I was about seven, we visited a friend or relative who, we were told, lived in a flat with a glass roof. I was disappointed to find that it was a half-glass roof like a conservatory. She had provided a buffet lunch. P said to me “cut us some pieces of cheese”. There were some table knives but I couldn’t see a cheese knife. I was afraid of getting it wrong. I said “With what – shall I cut it?” Ton of bricks. Ridiculous! There are a whole heap of knives!
“Ha ha, with what shall I cut it, dear Liza, dear Liza?” They teased me about that for years, too. “And she was sitting there opposite a whole heap of knives!” But they never asked me to do things like that at home, and didn't know whether I could or not. Were they trying to pretend that we were all much more grown-up than we were?
When I went away to boarding school aged 10, Mum wrote and said she was getting me a travelling clock for my birthday, with a cartoon of a clock buying a train ticket. I wanted a Barbie. She wrote to Emma that “Lucy wants a grown-up figure doll!” More cartoons. Great scorn. The clock arrived, it was a beautiful thing and I used it for years. But what possessed her? When I came home for the holidays I was laying the table, giving myself a dessert fork and butter knife as usual. Oh no, she said, you eat with a proper knife and fork now. (She meant “adult-sized”.) That Christmas they gave me an attaché case – a miniature suitcase. I never got dolls or toys as presents again.
Does this belong here? We were encouraged to throw food wrappers and apple cores from a moving car. Later, friends were very shocked by this. It was as if the world didn’t exist, or didn’t matter. Emma said she used to look out of the car windows and ask herself: “Where’s MY place in all this?”
They tried gracious living on a too-small budget. Couldn’t afford to heat the house, which was too big anyway, so it was always freezing in the winter. Why didn’t we heat one room (apart from the kitchen), put the telly in it, and all live there? We were always being hived off into separate rooms. They were still trying to follow the “nursery wing” model. And Nanny had gone, so they were faced with us as we were, and they had to look after us.
We ate off Georgian silver but they were stingy about butter, sugar, jam, chutney. "That’s enough sugar, butter etc. You don’t need any more." We only got lemonade/orangeade at birthday parties, when other children got it at every meal. Why didn’t we sell the silver and buy lots of butter? Of course they had to pretend that it was trashy to eat butter or put sugar in your tea or be warm enough! They spent their money on drink and school fees, rather than labour-saving devices.
And there was never any briefing. No “When you’re 12 you’ll be expected to wash and iron your own clothes”. Instead they yelled at me when I didn’t. “You’re so selfish, expecting Mrs Thayer to wash your clothes!” I didn’t know she did. If I left water all over the bathroom floor, I thought it just evaporated. Like the contents of the wastepaper basket. I worked out when I was about 16 that they’d expected the schools to tell us anything we needed to know. To do the parenting.
A therapist friend pointed out: “The middle classes want their children to miss out childhood altogether.” What shocks me now is the way they treated us as the adults we would be, rather than the children we were then. They became more rational when the younger two came along. Things changed in the 60s. Other members of the New Poor gladly moved with the times, bought freezers and batch cooked. They ate in the kitchen. They drank coffee out of mugs, not bone china cups and saucers that clattered in your shaking hands. They redid their kitchens in shades of pale blue. Our family caught up slowly. Freezers, dishwashers and casseroles changed all our lives, and helped sweep away those finicky table manners that were such a wonderful excuse for prolonged screaming rows. What could they yell about now?
Postscript: At the time, these incidents came out of a clear blue sky. This is my attempt to work out what was going through their minds. And explain that nobody taught me about cause and effect.
More here about a privileged upbringing, and links to the rest.
