During the war all available metal was melted down to make armaments. So - no biscuit tins, Mecchano sets or paint tins - I mean artist's paints, of course. Those were the only sort I was concerned with at age three and three quarters, when I started school. (Children who had lost a parent were allowed to begin early, despite the schools being very overcrowded.) Artistic talent ran in the family and my mother encouraged me to draw and paint from an early age. Paints were available only as loose little cuboids, bought by the half dozen and screwed into brown paper bags. My mother would wet one side of them and stick them round the rim of an old plate, which could then be used as a palette. And that was the cause of my blotting my copy-book on my very first day.
I loved school straight off - all these children to play and have fun with, run round the playground with at break, instead of just boring old Auntie Kate. And I made friends with a girl called Evelyn, even younger than me, whose mother had died when she was a baby, and who is still my best friend. But some things confused me. My mother had said I might be allowed to do some painting, so when the teacher, Miss Jones, a lady with a black moustache, put a little pile of brightly coloured cuboid shapes on the table in front of me I thought, 'Goody! Paints!' They were a lot bigger than the ones I was used to - all the better to paint great pictures with! But, though I waited, and waited, the teacher didn't bring me any paper, paint-brush or water. Each child had been given something different to play with, and nobody else had been given paints. There was a shoelace on our table, which didn't seem to belong to any of our activities. Tired of waiting, I wet my finger on my tongue and rubbed my fingertip on one of the paints to see what the colour looked like on my hand. Disappointingly, no colour came off. A roar from overhead:
'How dare you spit on my beads!' was accompanied by Miss Jones picking up my hand and giving it a sharp slap. Then she went away again. I stared at my table companions, mystified and rather upset. Beads? Square beads? What was I supposed to do with them?
'Thread them on this shoelace,' advised the oldest girl at the table.
'But they haven't got any holes in!'
'Oh, yes they have.' She turned one of them to show two holes on the narrow sides, where you wouldn't think of looking. Then she tied a knot at one end of the shoelace and expertly threaded three of the cuboid beads onto it. She had done this before! Following her lead, I quickly threaded all the remaining pieces of coloured wood and was rewarded with a 'Good girl, Anita! That's right,' as Miss Jones hurried past again. So I was back in favour. But I thought painting would have been a lot more fun. And I'd never seen anyone wear such a strange necklace as the one with big square beads on a shoelace.
Auntie Kate fetched me home for lunch then took me back. By this time it was raining so we couldn't go out to play. Every now and then Miss Jones would tell a child to go to the 'office'. Although she spoke in Welsh she said this word in English, instead of using the Welsh word 'swyddfa'. When she said this to me I went outside as the others had done and wondered where to go. I couldn't see anywhere that looked remotely like an office in our school yard. So I skipped around happily in the drizzle. Soon Miss Jones came out looking cross, grabbed my arm and took me in again, scolding me for running around in the rain. Then she asked an older girl to take me to the 'office', which turned out to be the outside toilet! We called it the 'lavatory' in our house, but I'd never heard anyone call it an 'office'.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Yes, we have no bananas...
Miss Griffiths, who taught us five year olds at Troedyrallt School in Pwllheli, burst into the classroom one morning in a great state of excitement.
'Guess what? A train full of bananas has come into Pwllheli this morning. Enough to give every single child in the town a banana each. And all your mothers have to take their ration books to the greengrocers' to prove how many children they've got so they can get a banana for all of you. All your mothers are queuing up right now and they'll be queuing all morning. Those of you who go home for lunch will find a banana waiting. But if you have school dinners you'll have to wait until you go home at the end of the day.'
We all gasped. Our eyes turned to the bowl of wax faux fruit adorning the window sill, where an improbably yellow banana jostled with two suspiciously florid apples. We all knew what bananas looked like, but none of us had ever tasted one.
I put my hand up. 'Please Miss Griffiths, my mother won't be in the queue. She's teaching at Porthmadog so I won't have a banana.'
'Nonsense!' she replied. 'Your Auntie Kate will be there in the queue.'
I wasn't convinced. My Great Aunt Kate had to queue up every morning for bread and meat. Standing for a long time time made her legs swell and she grumbled bitterly about this. I didn't think she'd be willing to queue all morning for one banana just for me. I'd be the only child in town never to know the taste of a banana.
But when I got home at midday there she was collapsed in the old wooden chair by the kitchen range, where the fire burned merrily, as always. Her worst leg, propped up on another chair, was twice its usual size. Smiling proudly, she nodded at the table laid for lunch. In its centre, on a plate, lay the BANANA in all its golden-yellow glory.
Forgetting to say thank you, I was going to grab it there and then. 'Wait!' said Lydia Kate sternly. 'That's your pudding. You have to eat your lunch first.' I have no recollection of the first course but I'm sure I wolfed it down pretty quickly, eyeing the coveted fruit all the while. At last came the supreme moment. About to bite into the exquisitely coloured flesh (yellow being my favourite colour), I was again foiled by Auntie Kate who said it must be peeled first. To my chagrin she stripped off the thick yellow cover like peeling a leather glove from a pale finger. I stared. The poor, denuded banana was white.
White as the inside of an apple, or mashed potato, boring things I ate every day. Also it had little black specks on the end. So I took a knife, sliced off the end and threw it in the fire. To my annoyance the newly revealed piece also had little black specks in. I cut off another thick slice and threw it away.
'What are you doing, you silly girl?'
'It's got black spots on!'
'Those are the seeds. They're supposed to be there. They're inside every banana and they go all the way through the middle.'
I didn't believe her. Not until I'd sliced off and discarded another 3 chunks despite her protests. Then, seized by an awful doubt, I cut a bit off the opposite end. Sure enough, there were the little black seeds in the centre.
'I would have eaten those bits you threw away,' she moaned. 'What a waste. What a wicked waste. You naughty, ungrateful girl!'
Subdued, I ate the remainder. A pleasant enough taste, but far, far short of the anticipated ambrosia. And when my mother came home that evening she was assailed by heart-rending wails about queuing up all morning for a banana only to have me throw away nearly half of it. My mother decreed that the next time I was allocated a banana I should give it to Auntie Kate. I nodded meekly. Bananas were over-rated anyway.
'Guess what? A train full of bananas has come into Pwllheli this morning. Enough to give every single child in the town a banana each. And all your mothers have to take their ration books to the greengrocers' to prove how many children they've got so they can get a banana for all of you. All your mothers are queuing up right now and they'll be queuing all morning. Those of you who go home for lunch will find a banana waiting. But if you have school dinners you'll have to wait until you go home at the end of the day.'
We all gasped. Our eyes turned to the bowl of wax faux fruit adorning the window sill, where an improbably yellow banana jostled with two suspiciously florid apples. We all knew what bananas looked like, but none of us had ever tasted one.
I put my hand up. 'Please Miss Griffiths, my mother won't be in the queue. She's teaching at Porthmadog so I won't have a banana.'
'Nonsense!' she replied. 'Your Auntie Kate will be there in the queue.'
I wasn't convinced. My Great Aunt Kate had to queue up every morning for bread and meat. Standing for a long time time made her legs swell and she grumbled bitterly about this. I didn't think she'd be willing to queue all morning for one banana just for me. I'd be the only child in town never to know the taste of a banana.
But when I got home at midday there she was collapsed in the old wooden chair by the kitchen range, where the fire burned merrily, as always. Her worst leg, propped up on another chair, was twice its usual size. Smiling proudly, she nodded at the table laid for lunch. In its centre, on a plate, lay the BANANA in all its golden-yellow glory.
Forgetting to say thank you, I was going to grab it there and then. 'Wait!' said Lydia Kate sternly. 'That's your pudding. You have to eat your lunch first.' I have no recollection of the first course but I'm sure I wolfed it down pretty quickly, eyeing the coveted fruit all the while. At last came the supreme moment. About to bite into the exquisitely coloured flesh (yellow being my favourite colour), I was again foiled by Auntie Kate who said it must be peeled first. To my chagrin she stripped off the thick yellow cover like peeling a leather glove from a pale finger. I stared. The poor, denuded banana was white.
White as the inside of an apple, or mashed potato, boring things I ate every day. Also it had little black specks on the end. So I took a knife, sliced off the end and threw it in the fire. To my annoyance the newly revealed piece also had little black specks in. I cut off another thick slice and threw it away.
'What are you doing, you silly girl?'
'It's got black spots on!'
'Those are the seeds. They're supposed to be there. They're inside every banana and they go all the way through the middle.'
I didn't believe her. Not until I'd sliced off and discarded another 3 chunks despite her protests. Then, seized by an awful doubt, I cut a bit off the opposite end. Sure enough, there were the little black seeds in the centre.
'I would have eaten those bits you threw away,' she moaned. 'What a waste. What a wicked waste. You naughty, ungrateful girl!'
Subdued, I ate the remainder. A pleasant enough taste, but far, far short of the anticipated ambrosia. And when my mother came home that evening she was assailed by heart-rending wails about queuing up all morning for a banana only to have me throw away nearly half of it. My mother decreed that the next time I was allocated a banana I should give it to Auntie Kate. I nodded meekly. Bananas were over-rated anyway.
Monday, December 3, 2007
In my mother's shoes
Shoes
After my mother’s death we found a pair of her old shoes in the cellar; soft, chocolate-coloured suede lace-ups stretched wide and comfy as boats, great bumps hollowed out to accommodate her bunions, particularly the enormous one on the left foot where she had once, long ago in my childhood, dropped a sewing machine on her big toe joint. She hadn’t bothered with the doctor and it had presumably broken and healed crooked. Now I come to think about it, this little accident had been pre ’47 and as a war widow she would have been reluctant to incur a medical bill. It was the culmination of damage begun in her orphaned early teens when she squeezed her feet into dainty satin flapper shoes with pointed toes and Louis heels, shoes which resulted in hammer toes squashed into a point against the diagonal big toe.
Perhaps it was the advent of the NHS that resulted in an operation to her toes in an orthopaedic hospital in Liverpool when I was seven. It was too far to visit, and we relied on daily letters to keep in touch. I wrote up my little doings and she drew me a picture of herself in bed with her feet in traction, described her fellow-patients’ foibles and the strictness of the nurses. Half way through the three week absence my Great Aunt Kate who was caring for me and felt nervous about long train journeys decided to spend a chunk of her savings on a taxi all the way from Pwllheli to Liverpool, setting out at dawn in order to arrive for afternoon visiting. Four miles into the expedition (at Fourcrosses) the taxi broke down and took three hours to repair, while my initial excitement faded through impatience into boredom and finally despair. No journey since has ever seemed so long. We did eventually reach Liverpool, in the evening, long after visiting time was over. And as the sister sternly informed us, children were not allowed to visit at any time, let alone when they ought to be tucked up in bed. But my heartbroken wails combined with Auntie Kate’s indignant pleas and the taxi driver’s testimony resulted in rules being broken and we were allowed to see my mother for ten minutes, to bask in her smile and open arms, to be hugged and kissed before setting out on the long trek home.
And in the end it was all for nothing. My mother’s tendency to arthritis flared up although she was only in her twenties and attacked the traumatised joints, leaving her in worse pain than before. I hated going with her to buy shoes. She shunned the sensible, broad lace-ups and would spend hours going from shoe-shop to shoe-shop till she found a pair of smart cuban heeled court shoes she could manage to push her lumpy toes into, a sad, pretty Cinderella lumbered with the Ugly Sisters’ feet.
The arthritis must have been hereditary. When I was twelve, just after my periods began, the scaphoid bones on my feet swelled like golf balls and reddened painfully, making me cry off hockey at school and preventing my enjoying any exercise other than swimming or cycling. A fool of a consultant labelled them “congenital accessory scaphoids”, claiming the inflammation was due to their rubbing against too-tight shoes.
“They can’t be congenital,” my mother objected. “They’ve only just appeared. And she’s always been measured for Start-Rite shoes in the correct widths. She’s never worn anything else, except Clark’s sandals in summer.”
The swollen 'congenital' scaphoids kept me company all through my teens, whatever shoes I wore, until my first pregnancy, when they totally disappeared never to return. They didn’t prevent me, the moment I had some money of my own at sixteen, rocking and rolling in lime-green suede winkle pickers with four inch stiletto heels, though my mother begged me not to with tears in her eyes.
“I wish I’d had a mother to tell me not to wear silly shoes.”
But, like Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, whose exchange of her fish tail for a pair of exquisite legs and feet to try and capture her prince demanded the witch’s price of suffering agony with every step she took, I insisted on elevating my five feet one inch on stilettos despite the pain. I remember particularly a pair of black velvet winkle-pickers with stiletto heels and rhinestone buckles. As my bunions swelled and ached my shoes became gradually wider and lower down the years, until I finally gave up silly shoes entirely at age fifty-five. It was only then that I came to connect my stupidity with my horror, as a child, of being shown by a sailor uncle a pair of beautifully embroidered old Chinese slippers extending only three inches beyond the ankle and being told they were made for an adult lady with bound feet. The torture of her grandmother’s foot-binding was graphically described by Jung Chang in The Wild Swans, as well as the great pain of their gradual release to begin growing again after her marriage to a Manchu, who did not follow the binding tradition. Her account of the grandmother’s visit to her married daughter who lived over 300 miles away, a terrible journey by several means of primitive transport, involving many agonising miles on foot, only to be packed off home again by her new son-in-law after a stay of one week, had me in tears.
We Westerners have heard much about the infamous ‘lily walk’, the painful, tottering little steps of young women with bound feet, supposedly much admired by men in Old China. According to American psychologist Claude Steiner, destabilising clothes and footwear are part of a male plot to keep females weak and vulnerable: ‘Balance is a particularly valuable power source for women. Patriarchy discourages women from attaining a strong sense of physical balance. Women’s fashions designed to please men – tight clothes, miniskirts, high heels – interfere with physical stability.’
Yet it was apparently Chinese mothers-in-law who forbade their sons to marry girls with normal feet. And I cannot honestly say that any of the men in my life encouraged me to wear high heels and pointed toes. The opposite, in fact. In my experience men like to be accompanied by women who can stride out comfortably and keep up with their pace. I remember in Lincoln about 20 years ago going out in a group which included some German, French and Italian men. They were laughing at the local Debbies and Sharons because of their old fashioned high heels. I only ever came across one man who wanted me to wear high heels and I only went out with him once. So maybe I am simply not attracted to the kind of man who yearns for a bimbo.
After my mother’s death we found a pair of her old shoes in the cellar; soft, chocolate-coloured suede lace-ups stretched wide and comfy as boats, great bumps hollowed out to accommodate her bunions, particularly the enormous one on the left foot where she had once, long ago in my childhood, dropped a sewing machine on her big toe joint. She hadn’t bothered with the doctor and it had presumably broken and healed crooked. Now I come to think about it, this little accident had been pre ’47 and as a war widow she would have been reluctant to incur a medical bill. It was the culmination of damage begun in her orphaned early teens when she squeezed her feet into dainty satin flapper shoes with pointed toes and Louis heels, shoes which resulted in hammer toes squashed into a point against the diagonal big toe.
Perhaps it was the advent of the NHS that resulted in an operation to her toes in an orthopaedic hospital in Liverpool when I was seven. It was too far to visit, and we relied on daily letters to keep in touch. I wrote up my little doings and she drew me a picture of herself in bed with her feet in traction, described her fellow-patients’ foibles and the strictness of the nurses. Half way through the three week absence my Great Aunt Kate who was caring for me and felt nervous about long train journeys decided to spend a chunk of her savings on a taxi all the way from Pwllheli to Liverpool, setting out at dawn in order to arrive for afternoon visiting. Four miles into the expedition (at Fourcrosses) the taxi broke down and took three hours to repair, while my initial excitement faded through impatience into boredom and finally despair. No journey since has ever seemed so long. We did eventually reach Liverpool, in the evening, long after visiting time was over. And as the sister sternly informed us, children were not allowed to visit at any time, let alone when they ought to be tucked up in bed. But my heartbroken wails combined with Auntie Kate’s indignant pleas and the taxi driver’s testimony resulted in rules being broken and we were allowed to see my mother for ten minutes, to bask in her smile and open arms, to be hugged and kissed before setting out on the long trek home.
And in the end it was all for nothing. My mother’s tendency to arthritis flared up although she was only in her twenties and attacked the traumatised joints, leaving her in worse pain than before. I hated going with her to buy shoes. She shunned the sensible, broad lace-ups and would spend hours going from shoe-shop to shoe-shop till she found a pair of smart cuban heeled court shoes she could manage to push her lumpy toes into, a sad, pretty Cinderella lumbered with the Ugly Sisters’ feet.
The arthritis must have been hereditary. When I was twelve, just after my periods began, the scaphoid bones on my feet swelled like golf balls and reddened painfully, making me cry off hockey at school and preventing my enjoying any exercise other than swimming or cycling. A fool of a consultant labelled them “congenital accessory scaphoids”, claiming the inflammation was due to their rubbing against too-tight shoes.
“They can’t be congenital,” my mother objected. “They’ve only just appeared. And she’s always been measured for Start-Rite shoes in the correct widths. She’s never worn anything else, except Clark’s sandals in summer.”
The swollen 'congenital' scaphoids kept me company all through my teens, whatever shoes I wore, until my first pregnancy, when they totally disappeared never to return. They didn’t prevent me, the moment I had some money of my own at sixteen, rocking and rolling in lime-green suede winkle pickers with four inch stiletto heels, though my mother begged me not to with tears in her eyes.
“I wish I’d had a mother to tell me not to wear silly shoes.”
But, like Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, whose exchange of her fish tail for a pair of exquisite legs and feet to try and capture her prince demanded the witch’s price of suffering agony with every step she took, I insisted on elevating my five feet one inch on stilettos despite the pain. I remember particularly a pair of black velvet winkle-pickers with stiletto heels and rhinestone buckles. As my bunions swelled and ached my shoes became gradually wider and lower down the years, until I finally gave up silly shoes entirely at age fifty-five. It was only then that I came to connect my stupidity with my horror, as a child, of being shown by a sailor uncle a pair of beautifully embroidered old Chinese slippers extending only three inches beyond the ankle and being told they were made for an adult lady with bound feet. The torture of her grandmother’s foot-binding was graphically described by Jung Chang in The Wild Swans, as well as the great pain of their gradual release to begin growing again after her marriage to a Manchu, who did not follow the binding tradition. Her account of the grandmother’s visit to her married daughter who lived over 300 miles away, a terrible journey by several means of primitive transport, involving many agonising miles on foot, only to be packed off home again by her new son-in-law after a stay of one week, had me in tears.
We Westerners have heard much about the infamous ‘lily walk’, the painful, tottering little steps of young women with bound feet, supposedly much admired by men in Old China. According to American psychologist Claude Steiner, destabilising clothes and footwear are part of a male plot to keep females weak and vulnerable: ‘Balance is a particularly valuable power source for women. Patriarchy discourages women from attaining a strong sense of physical balance. Women’s fashions designed to please men – tight clothes, miniskirts, high heels – interfere with physical stability.’
Yet it was apparently Chinese mothers-in-law who forbade their sons to marry girls with normal feet. And I cannot honestly say that any of the men in my life encouraged me to wear high heels and pointed toes. The opposite, in fact. In my experience men like to be accompanied by women who can stride out comfortably and keep up with their pace. I remember in Lincoln about 20 years ago going out in a group which included some German, French and Italian men. They were laughing at the local Debbies and Sharons because of their old fashioned high heels. I only ever came across one man who wanted me to wear high heels and I only went out with him once. So maybe I am simply not attracted to the kind of man who yearns for a bimbo.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
