Tales of a Tiller Girl

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘I want to stay with Mummy.’

I kicked and screamed and made such a fuss it took three nurses to cart me off. My little body shook with sobs as they held me down on a table while the doctor poured peroxide in my poorly ear. It burned and stung, and I was petrified.

‘We have to be cruel to be kind,’ he told me. ‘This will hopefully kill the infection.’

There was no such thing as antibiotics then. Afterwards my ear was padded up with a big gauze dressing that had to be changed every week.

I was in such a state when they took me back to Mum, who looked really worried.

‘It’s all right, Rene,’ she said, giving me a cuddle. ‘You can come home with me now. It’s all over.’

‘Oh, thank goodness,’ I sighed.

I was exhausted but it was such a relief that they weren’t keeping me in. I had to go back every week for months so they could put more peroxide in my ear and I was in constant pain. Eventually it seemed to work and thankfully they managed to save my hearing, although I’ve still got scar tissue in my ear now.

As soon as I was better, Mum started working again. I was a bit older now, and she needed to try to earn some money to help support us. She would spend hours every day practising her violin, and then go to the theatre and perform in the orchestra at night when I was in bed. While she practised I would be left to my own devices to amuse myself, which wasn’t hard thanks to my vivid imagination.

One day I took myself off to Clapham Common and lay on my front with my nose in the long grass. I watched ants and ladybirds crawl around and worms slither in the soil, but I wasn’t there to look for wildlife.

‘Come out,’ I whispered. ‘I know you’re in there somewhere.’

I was there to find the fairies. I stayed like that for hours with my head buried in the grass, just watching and waiting for my favourite creatures to make an appearance. I believed that they were real and I could see them in my head. I knew that all fairies danced, they lived in flowers and they had very long, floaty wings like butterflies or moths. I used to spend hours lying there on the common waiting for them. I never told anyone, though, as I was frightened that they’d make fun of me.

Even now, at the ripe old age of eighty-four, if anyone asks what my religion is I tell them this: ‘I believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden!’

It often gets me a few funny looks. But I find it quite sad today that children don’t have vivid imaginations any more; they’re told so much.

I always say to my granddaughter Billie, ‘How do you know that I’m not a fairy?’

So she checked my back and found two little nobbles.

‘That’s where your wings will grow, Grandma,’ she told me.

Now, whenever I see her she checks my back to see if my wings have sprouted yet!

I suppose in a way I was a very lonely child as I was left on my own to get on with everything. Nobody asked me what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, or thought up things to entertain me, so I had to make my own fun. In one sense it worked in my favour because I didn’t have to ask – Mummy, can I do this? I just went and did it. Although Raymond still lived with us, by now he had got a job as an apprentice for a company in central London that manufactured Bakelite, so he was out at work all day.

I knew my mother loved me and she was very affectionate, but all she lived for was her music. Looking back, I’d say she was very unsociable and introverted; she didn’t have friends and never went out. She would practise all day long and go out to work at the theatre at night. She never did anything but play the violin, and spent so many hours practising that I’d get fed up.

‘Mummy, I’m bored,’ I told her one afternoon.

‘Rene, only boring people get bored,’ she said.

So I decided to take myself off on an adventure. I walked down to Clapham and caught the No. 49 bus to the West End. I had a terrific sense of freedom that sadly children don’t have these days. Children were very free and I was always either on Clapham Common or Wandsworth Common, playing with friends, or on a Routemaster going somewhere exciting. I paid my tuppence ha’penny (two and a half old pennies) to the conductor and headed into town.

I sat on the top deck and looked out of the window as we went past Battersea Park and down the King’s Road. I got off at High Street Kensington and from there headed to Regent Street. I must have walked miles but I knew exactly where I was going – to my favourite place in the whole world, Hamley’s toy store. I wandered from floor to floor gazing in awe at the giant teddy bears, the life-size dolls, sailboats and pedal cars. Things I knew that my mother could never afford.

Afterwards I walked down Oxford Street to Selfridges. I loved the sense of grandeur as I saw the doorman in his top hat.

‘Good morning, Miss,’ he said, and I giggled as he held open the door for me.

In 1938 no one batted an eyelid to see an eight-year-old wandering round the West End on her own, but if it happened today I’d probably get taken into care by Social Services! There were plenty of other children doing the same thing, and often you’d see gangs of youngsters from the East End going up West to pick pockets.

I loved Selfridges and I knew all the departments like the back of my hand. I’d go straight up to the first floor to look at all the fancy ball gowns. I’d walk along the rails, touching the brightly coloured taffeta dresses and admiring the intricate beading. Sometimes I’d get the lift up to the roof, where I’d watch fashionable ladies and gents going for a promenade around the manicured gardens. There was even a café up there and a women’s gun club.

Afterwards I’d saunter along Oxford Street to Hyde Park, where I’d sit by the Serpentine and watch the birds and climb a few trees. Once, I was walking along a secluded path when I noticed a man coming towards me in a mackintosh. Call it a sixth sense, but I could tell straight away that something wasn’t right about him. He looked a bit scruffy and his clothes were all grubby. As he got closer he suddenly held his mac open, and I realised that he had his flies undone and his bits and pieces were hanging out for all and sundry to see!

‘Eurgh, put it away!’ I laughed.

But he just closed his coat, walked past and didn’t say a word.

I wasn’t scared or frightened, I just thought it was hysterically funny. If that was the way that he got his kicks then good luck to him, I thought. Then I caught the No. 49 home, my stomach rumbling with hunger at the thought of a boiled egg for tea.

In a way, even though I was still only eight I was a pretty savvy and streetwise child. Flashers were very common in those days and most of them seemed harmless to my friends and me. I coped with it better than my poor mother. I remember her coming home one night after work absolutely furious.

‘Oh my goodness, Rene,’ she said dramatically. ‘Something dreadful has just happened. I don’t believe it.’

‘What is it, Mum?’ I asked.

She explained how she had been on the Northern line and she’d been in the carriage on her own when a man had got on.

‘I’d just got up as mine was the next stop when he undid his trousers and exposed himself to me.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked her.

‘Well, I marched over to him and said: “How dare you do that to me, you disgusting little man.” I was so angry, do you know what I did, Rene?’

‘No, Mum.’

‘I was so cross, I got my violin case and I slammed it down really hard on his you-know-what. Hopefully that will teach him not to do that in a hurry again.’

My mum was a tiny woman, and she looked very prim with her two long plaits that she tied up on the top of her head. I bet he hadn’t been expecting her reaction.

‘Is your violin all right, Mum?’ I asked with a smirk.

Things were still very strained between Mum and her family, and as I got older I became more aware of the tensions. One day I went to visit my Aunty Vi, who lived in Hendon, north London. My mother never came with me, and I liked going because I could play with my cousin Shirley, who was four years older than me.

‘Violet’s a terrible snob,’ my mother warned me as she walked with me to the Tube station. ‘Just ignore anything she says to you.’

It wasn’t long before Aunty Vi started bragging about my cousin Shirley and how well she was doing at school.

‘She’s so bright there’s no doubt she’ll go to university one day,’ she said.

‘Will I go to university too?’ I asked.

Aunty Vi just laughed.

‘I doubt that very much, dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re clever enough for university. You’ll have probably left long before it’s time to do matriculation.’

Matriculation was the exam that you took in high school to determine whether you were clever enough to go on to further education.

‘Well, I don’t need to go to university,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to be a ballet dancer.’

‘A ballet dancer?’ said Aunty Vi, aghast. ‘You’ll never make a dancer, Rene. You’re not pretty enough and I seriously doubt that you’ve got the talent, either.’

Hearing that sort of criticism at such a young age from someone should have been a crushing blow. But I’d heard it all before, so I just let it wash over me and refused to get angry about it.

It was always the same criticisms that I’d hear time and time again whenever I went over there – I wasn’t clever enough, pretty enough, slim enough, rich enough. I got so used to it I didn’t even bother answering her back. It didn’t matter to me that I was constantly criticised and put down. I didn’t really care what my aunties and uncles thought. In a way it made me even more determined.

‘I will be a ballet dancer one day,’ I told my cousin Shirley. ‘Just you wait and see.’

I never told Mum what Aunty Violet had said, though. I knew she would be furious and I didn’t want to make the rift between her and her sisters any bigger.

Sometimes it was just as bad at home. I was always very loyal to my mother, and I hated it when my grandparents would criticise her to my face.

One day my grandfather was grumbling about her and saying how she never had enough money. Anyone could say what they liked about me, but when it came to my mother it was a completely different matter. I had a sparky temper and if someone pushed the wrong buttons then I wasn’t frightened of speaking my mind.

‘Don’t you dare run Mummy down like that, Papa,’ I told him.

‘I don’t know why you always stick up for your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s a failure and she should have never married that father of yours.’

‘She’s doing the best she can,’ I shouted.

My grandfather had a typical Victorian attitude to children – he thought they should be seen and not heard – and he was furious that I’d answered him back.

‘Don’t speak to me like that, young lady,’ he bellowed. ‘I’m going to lock you in your room and see if that teaches you a lesson.’

But when he tried to grab hold of me I went berserk. I lashed out at him, kicking and screaming.

‘I won’t have you behave like this, Rene,’ he yelled. ‘You’re a silly little girl who’s never going to make anything of your life, just like your mother.’

‘Yes, I will,’ I yelled. ‘I’m going to be a dancer.’

‘A dancer?’ he scoffed. ‘I doubt that very much.’

When Mum got home and I told her what had happened she didn’t seem surprised. She knew what her father was like.

‘I think it’s time that we tried to find somewhere else to live,’ she told me. ‘We need our own space.’

I knew that she found it a strain living with her parents and a few weeks later we moved out. Mum had found a job as a carer for an old spinster called Miss Higgins, who was paralysed from the chest down after contracting polio as a child and was completely bed-bound. We’d save money on rent because we’d be living with the old lady in her 1920s semi-detached house in Norbury. She had the downstairs, and Raymond, Mum and I had the upstairs. Miss Higgins was obviously wealthy, as the house was nicely decorated and pristine, but it was clear from the start that Mum hated every minute of it.

‘Oh, that woman,’ she said. ‘She just treats me like a dogsbody. It’s no wonder that she never has any visitors.’

She’d gone through several carers before Mum, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Miss Higgins wasn’t very pleasant, and Mum was at her beck and call day and night. She had to give her a bed bath, make her meals, and do her shopping and the cleaning.

Mum had just sat down one night when we heard the familiar tinkle of the bell that Miss Higgins rang when she needed something.

‘Give me strength,’ Mum sighed through gritted teeth. ‘That woman will be the death of me.’

I went down with her.

‘Can the child come and sit with me for a while?’ she said as she saw me lurking in the doorway.

‘I suppose so,’ said Mum. ‘Rene, come and talk to Miss Higgins.’

‘Do I have to?’ I sighed, but just one look at Mum’s stern face and I didn’t dare say another word.

I sat and stared at Miss Higgins. She always looked very straight-laced and she never, ever smiled. She had long white hair, and a white frilly nightie with a high collar and a knitted bed jacket on. Her bed was white, too, and she was half propped up with a pile of pillows. She was a bit like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, a strange ghostly figure all in white. I wasn’t frightened of her, I just thought she was the most peculiar woman that I’d ever seen.

She stared at me with a very disapproving look on her face.

‘Talk to me child,’ she said. ‘Do you like arithmetic?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, what do you like doing then?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘Rene, don’t be so rude and answer Miss Higgins,’ Mum told me.

‘I like w-w-riting stories,’ I stammered. ‘And d-d-drawing.’

You see, that was the real reason why I didn’t want to chat to her. I didn’t want this strange old woman to know that I had a terrible stammer as I was really embarrassed about it.

My brother Raymond had developed a very bad stammer after our father had died, and when I turned four I had started stammering too.

‘Are you sure you’re not just copying your brother?’ Mum had asked.

But I knew I wasn’t. I just couldn’t stop myself stammering. I was fine with my friends and family and people that I knew, but with strangers it was a different story. I would get nervous and I would hesitate and the words just wouldn’t come out, or I’d be halfway through a sentence and I couldn’t finish it without gasping for breath.

‘I can’t understand what you’re saying to me, dear,’ said Miss Higgins.

‘She just stammers a bit sometimes, that’s all,’ Mum told her.

It was so frustrating sometimes. Like the morning that there was a frantic knocking on the front door.

‘Run and get that, Rene, will you,’ said Mum.

I went downstairs and opened the door to find the coal man standing there. He was in a terrible state.

‘Me ’orse,’ he said in his broad cockney accent. ‘Me bleedin’ ’orse is dead. He had an ’art attack comin’ up the ’ill.’

I looked out and there was the coal man’s huge white horse lying in the middle of the street. Every day the horse would lumber up the hill near us pulling tonnes of coal in his cart, and then the coal man would tip it down the chute outside each house that led to the cellar so we could all light our fires and ranges.

I wanted to say how sorry I was about his horse, but no matter how hard I tried the words just wouldn’t come out.

‘I-I-I-,’ I stammered. ‘S-s-s-.’

‘I don’t understand you, love,’ he said. ‘Is yer old man in? I need some ’elp to try and drag him out of the street.’

It was so frustrating. All I could do was run upstairs to get Mum, sobbing at the thought of the coal man’s beautiful horse lying dead in our road.

There was no help for people with stammers in those days. It wasn’t something that you went to see the doctor about, and there was no such thing as a speech therapist. It was just seen as something you had to live with and hopefully grow out of, which was what Raymond had done as he’d got older.

One weekend Mum took me to the hairdressers as a treat. I had dead straight hair, and since I was little I’d always worn it in long plaits like my mother with two ribbons on the end.

‘Please can I have my hair cut?’ I’d begged her for months.

So we went to the local hairdressers and they chopped it into a bob and pinned a big orange bow on the top.

The next day Mum and I were walking back from the shops to our house and I was proudly showing off my new haircut. I was still wearing the bow that the hairdresser had pinned in it.

I was skipping along, hand in hand with Mum, when suddenly we heard a strange noise above us. I stared up into the sky to see what was making the racket.

‘Look, Mummy!’ I shouted.

There were two planes looping and rolling all over the place, and they were flying so low I could hear the machine-gun fire and see the sparks as the bullets bounced off their wings.

‘Wow!’ I gasped.

I thought it was really exciting to have this battle going on right above our heads, but Mum looked terrified. Much to my surprise, she pushed me into a hedge.

‘Get down, Rene,’ she said. ‘Don’t move.’

‘But my bow!’ I said. ‘I don’t want to squash my brand new bow.’

‘Don’t worry about your blessed bow – just stay there and don’t move,’ she hissed.

I could see the fear in her eyes as she crouched down in the dirt with me.

‘What is it, Mum?’ I asked. ‘Why are those two planes shooting at each other?’

‘It’s the war,’ she said. ‘I think it’s started.’

It was Sunday, 3 September 1939 and life as we knew it was about to change beyond all recognition because of a man called Adolf Hitler.

3

Painful Goodbyes

I watched out of the window as my mother dragged the old settee into the garden. Then she got a saw and started sawing the arms and the back off it. It was hard work but she was strong and determined, and even though it took her the best part of an hour she managed it in the end.

‘Rene, come and help me pull it into the shelter so we’ve got something to sleep on tonight,’ she yelled.

As part of the Government issue, an Anderson shelter had been built at the bottom of our garden. It was a little brick hut sunk into the ground, with a corrugated-iron roof and a door at one end.

Now the war had started, the air-raid siren would sound every evening and we’d go in there as it got dark to save us from having to get up in the middle of the night and run outside in the pitch black. It was just Mum and me, as Miss Higgins refused to leave the house.

‘I’m going nowhere,’ she told us defiantly. ‘I’ve not been out of bed for fifty-odd years, and I’m certainly not going to start now just because of the Jerries and some silly war. If the house gets bombed and goes down, then I’m going down with it.’

I think Mum was relieved that she didn’t have to carry her out there every night, and it was fine by me as the shelter wasn’t very big and I didn’t fancy being squashed up with that strange old lady. It was dark and dank, so Mum was determined to make it as cosy as possible for us. I helped her drag the settee in there, and that night it made a comfy bed for us to lie on. Mum had got a little oil heater and a paraffin lamp, and we snuggled down under a big eiderdown.

‘You see,’ she said. ‘It’s nice and snug in here now.’

We had all sorts of woollies on, too, to keep warm – jumpers, socks and even a scarf, and a hot-water bottle each.

‘It’s lovely, Mummy,’ I told her. ‘It’s like we’re on an adventure.’

The war was all a big game to me but I could tell that Mum was scared. She was very nervous and on edge, I could sense it.

By the time the air-raid siren went off we’d already been in the shelter for hours.

‘Here we go again,’ she said, cuddling up to me.

I soon learned to recognise the different sounds of war, and lying there listening I’d hear the familiar drone of German bombers dropping their loads on London as they followed the path of the Thames. The bombs made their own distinctive noise when they fell – a sort of whistling, whooshing sound, and then there would be an ominous second of silence before impact.

Tonight the planes sounded very close and Mum jumped every time a bomb came down. The ground shook and we heard fragments of metal hitting the roofs of nearby houses as the bombs exploded.

‘Shall I have a little peep outside to see what’s going on?’ I asked.

But Mum looked horrified.

‘No, you will not, Rene,’ she told me. ‘You’re staying safely in here.’

I was disappointed, as I’d imagined the sky glowing orange and red from all the fires.

‘I hope Raymond’s all right,’ said Mum.

Instead of coming home, he often spent the night sleeping in one of the Tube stations so he could get up and go straight to work the next day. Hundreds of others did this too, and by 6 p.m. people started setting up for the night, reserving their spot. You’d see them clutching blankets and pillows, and women sat there on the platforms in curlers, putting cold cream on their faces.

It didn’t take long before I was out like a light, lulled to sleep by the sound of the gunfire and the bombs falling all around us. When we woke up in the morning it was freezing as we crawled out of the shelter and back into the house. Mum had to get breakfast for Miss Higgins, and I had to get ready to go to school.

Our area of south London had been quite badly bombed and as I walked to school I saw that one of the houses in a nearby street had been hit. There were soldiers helping to clear up the debris, and the people who lived there were sorting through the rubble, desperately trying to salvage some of their possessions.

During the war years this became a normal sight. The roads were littered with bits of barrage balloon and shrapnel – pieces of bombs and bullets. I stopped to pick up a few nice silvery bits that I knew would get some admiring glances from the other children at school.

Every child was issued with a gas mask that we had to carry around at all times. Well-to-do children kept theirs in leather or plastic boxes, but mine was in a cardboard box with a string handle so I could carry it over my shoulder. It was all a big game to us. Sometimes the air raids would be during the daytime so we’d have practice runs at school. One morning the siren went off and we all trooped down to the cellar. We sat there having an arithmetic lesson with our gas masks on. They were made of rubber, and had goggles and something that was a bit like a coffee filter at the end of the nose – I found them ever so claustrophobic. So to stop me from feeling frightened and take my mind off wearing one, I decided to make it into a bit of a joke.

‘Look, you can make rude noises,’ I said, blowing a raspberry into my mask.

Everyone laughed and thought it was hilarious, and soon every pupil in my class was doing the same thing. Unfortunately the teachers weren’t amused as we didn’t get much work done.

I can’t ever remember anyone being upset or frightened during the air raids at school. It became part of our daily lives and we just accepted that that’s what happened.

A lot of children were evacuated to the countryside, but Mum refused point blank to let me go.

‘You’re staying here with me,’ she said.

I was so grateful for that. She was all I had in the world, and while the bombs didn’t scare me, being away from her would have terrified me.

Thankfully none of our family were injured or killed, although Mum’s brother, my Uncle Harry, had a bit of a close shave. We received a letter from him one morning telling us how an incendiary bomb had landed on his doorstep, and he hadn’t realised and opened the door.