Jacky Daydream Read online

  ‘She positively gushed over you. She said she’d never seen such a clean baby, so perfectly kept, everything just so. She said I was obviously a dab hand at washing and ironing.’

  It’s interesting that the one children’s classic picture book my mother bought for me was Beatrix Potter’s Mrs Tiggywinkle. My mother didn’t like animals: ‘Too dirty, too noisy, too smelly.’ She usually turned her nose up at children’s books about animals, but though Mrs Tiggywinkle was undoubtedly a hedgehog, she was also a washerwoman, and a very good one too.

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  Which baby in one of my books is discovered without any clothes at all on the day she is born?

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  It’s April, in Dustbin Baby. She’s abandoned by her mother, thrust into a dustbin the moment she’s born.

  I cry and cry and cry until I’m as red as a raspberry, the veins standing out on my forehead, my wisps of hair damp with effort. I am damp all over because I have no nappy. I have no clothes at all and if I stop crying I will become dangerously cold.

  I’ve always wondered what it must be like not to know your own family. Imagine being told to crayon your family tree at school and not having a single name to prop on a branch. April doesn’t know who her mother is, who her father is. She doesn’t know who she is. So she sets out on her fourteenth birthday to find out.

  4

  Housewife’s Choice

  BIDDY DIDN’T JUST keep me sparkling clean. She fussed around our rented flat every day after breakfast, dusting and polishing and carpet-sweeping. She didn’t wear a turban and pinny like most women doing dusty work. She thought they looked common.

  She listened to the Light Programme on the big wooden radio, tuning in to Housewife’s Choice, singing along to its signature tune, doobi-do do doobi-do, though she couldn’t sing any song in tune, not even ‘Happy Birthday’.

  When she was done dusting, we went off to the shops together. You couldn’t do a weekly shop in those days. We didn’t have a fridge and there was so little food in the shops, you couldn’t stock up. You had to queue everywhere, and smile and simper at the butcher, hoping he might sell you an extra kidney or a rabbit for a stew. Biddy was pert and pretty so she often got a few treats. One day, when he had no lamb chops, no neck or shoulder, he offered my mum a sheep’s head.

  She went home with it wrapped in newspaper, precariously balanced on the pale green covers of my pram. She cleaned the head as best she could, holding it at arm’s length, then shoved it in the biggest saucepan she could find. She boiled it and boiled it and boiled it, then fished it out, hacked at it and served it up to Harry with a flourish when he came back from work.

  He looked at the chunks of strange stuff on his plate and asked what it was. She was silly enough to tell him. He wouldn’t eat a mouthful. I was very glad I still had milk for my meals.

  She couldn’t go back to the butcher’s for a few days as she’d had more than her fair share of meat, so she tried cutting the head up small and swooshing it around with potatoes and carrots, turning it into sheep soup.

  Harry wasn’t fooled. There was a big row. He shouted that he wasn’t ever going to eat that sort of muck. She screamed that she was doing her best – what did he expect her to do, conjure up a joint of beef out of thin air? He sulked. She wept. I curled up in my cot and sucked my thumb.

  There were a lot of days like that. But in the first photos in the big black album we are smiling smiling smiling, playing Happy Families. There are snapshots of days out on the tandem, blurred pictures of me squinting in the sunlight but still smiling. I’m in my summer woollies now, still wearing several layers, but at least my legs are bare so I can kick on my rug.

  There are professional photos of me lying on my tummy, stripped down to my knitted knickers, smiling obediently while Biddy and the photographer clapped and cavorted. There are pictures of me sitting up on the grass but I always have a little rug under me to keep me clean. There’s even a photo of me in my tiny tin bath. What a palaver it must have been to fill it up every day and then lug it to the lavatory to empty it.

  My grandma must have been stitching away as I’m always wearing natty new outfits. By the autumn I’m wearing a tailored coat with a silky lining, a neat little hood and matching buttoned leggings, with small strappy shoes even though I can’t walk properly yet.

  I had my first birthday. Biddy and Harry gave me a book – not a baby’s board book, a proper child’s history book, though it had lots of pictures. Biddy wrote in her elaborately neat handwriting: To our darling little Jacqueline on her first birthday, Love from Mummy and Daddy.

  I don’t think I ever read my first book, but when I was older, I liked to look at the pictures, especially the ones of Joan of Arc and the little Princes in the Tower. I think my grandma might have made me felt toy animals because there’s a photo of me sitting on the rug between Biddy and Harry, playing with a horse with a felt mane and a bug-eyed fawn.

  The local paper did a feature on young married couples living in Bath and Biddy and Harry were picked for it. She’s wearing a pretty wool dress embroidered with daisies and thick lisle stockings. Harry is wearing a smart suit with a waistcoat, probably his year-old wedding suit, but he’s got incongruous old-man plaid slippers on his feet. Did he have to change his shoes the minute he got inside the front door in case he brought mud in?

  We look a happy little threesome, sitting relaxed in front of the fire. We needed that fire during the winter of 1946/1947. It was so cold that all the pipes froze everywhere. The outside lavatory froze up completely. There was no water, not even cold. Harry had to go up the road with a bucket and wait shivering at the standpipe. Biddy stuck it out for a few weeks, but then she packed a big suitcase for her, a little one for me, dismantled my cot, balanced the lot on my pram, and took us to stay with my grandparents in Kingston.

  We stayed on, even when it was spring. Harry lived by himself in Bath until the summer, and then left the Admiralty and managed to get a job in the Civil Service in London, even though he’d left school at fourteen. They looked for a place to rent but half of London had been bombed. There were no flats anywhere, so Harry moved in with my grandparents too.

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  Which of my books starts with the main girl describing all the beds she’s ever slept in, including her baby cot? For a little while they live with her step-gran, though it’s a terrible squash – and my poor girl has to share a bed with this grandma.

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  It’s The Bed and Breakfast Star.

  I had to share it with her. There wasn’t room in her bedroom for my campbed, you see, and she said she wasn’t having it cluttering up her lounge. She liked it when I stopped cluttering up the place too. She was always wanting to whisk me away to bed early. I was generally still awake when she came in. I used to peep when she took her corset off.

  She wasn’t so little when those corsets were off. She took up a lot of the bed once she was in it. Sometimes I’d end up clutching the edge, hanging on for dear life. And another thing. She snored.

  I love Elsa in The Bed and Breakfast Star. She’s so kind and cheery, though she does tell really awful old jokes that make you groan! I’m not very good at making up jokes myself, so when I was writing the book, I asked all the children I met in schools and libraries if they knew any good jokes, and then I wrote them down in a little notebook, storing them up for Elsa to use. There were a lot of very funny jokes that were unfortunately far too rude to print in a book!

  There used to be several bed and breakfast hotels for the homeless in the road where I lived. I used to chat to some of the children in the sweetshop or the video shop. I knew how awful it must be to live in cramped conditions in a hotel, and many of their mums were very depressed. Still, the children themselves seemed lively and full of fun. I decided to write a book about what it’s like to be homeless, but from a child’s point of view.

  The Bed and Breakfast Star has a happy ending, with Elsa and her family living in the very posh luxury