Jacky Daydream Read online

  He returned home at half past six, listened to The Archers on the radio, ate his supper and fell asleep in the armchair, pale hands folded over his waistcoat as if guarding his watch. He gave me a sixpence occasionally or offered me a boiled sweet but that was the extent of our relationship. I don’t think I ever sat on his lap. I remember once combing his hair playing hairdressers when I was older, but this was unsatisfactory too, as he had very little hair to comb.

  He seemed to have very little of anything, including personality, a nine-to-five man who did nothing with his life – yet he had fought in the reeking muddy trenches in the First World War until he was shot and sent home, badly wounded. Maybe he was happy to embrace a totally peaceful, boring, suburban life – no mud, no bullets, no swearing soldiers, just his little hedge-trimmed semi and his wife, and Phil and Grace Archer and old Walter Gabriel on the radio.

  My grandma seemed settled too, perhaps because she’d had such a rackety-packety childhood. I loved curling up by her chair as she sewed, getting her to tell me stories about when-she-was-a-little-girl. These weren’t silly Diddle-Diddle-Dumpling See-Saw-Marjorie-Daw stories that didn’t make sense, like the rhymes in the Margaret Tarrant book. These were gritty tales of an unwanted, unloved child sent from pillar to post – the sort of stories I’d write myself many years later.

  My grandma’s mother died of cancer when she was only twenty-seven. Ga, Hilda Ellen, was seven, and her brother Leslie was five. Her father, Papa, was a Jack-the-lad businessman, a fierce, feisty little man up to all sorts of schemes. He palmed his children off on different relatives and got on with his life without them. Leslie was packed off to an uncle, and as far as I know, was never reunited with his sister.

  Hilda Ellen was sent to two maiden aunts who were very strict, but they taught her to sew beautifully. She loved dolls. She didn’t have a proper big china doll – no one wanted to waste any money on giving her presents – but she scavenged for coppers and sometimes dared save her Sunday school donation, and bought tiny china dolls from the local toyshop. You could get one the size of your thumb for a halfpenny but her hair was only painted in a blob on her head. Penny dolls were the size of your finger and had real silky long hair you could arrange with a miniature brush.

  All the dolls were stark naked apart from painted socks and shoes. Hilda Ellen raided her aunts’ workbox and made them tiny clothes. At first they were just hastily stitched wrap-around dresses and cloaks, but soon she had the skill to make each doll a set of underwear, even ruffled drawers, and over these they wore embroidered dresses and pinafores and coats with hoods to keep their weeny china ears warm.

  The dolls were a demanding bunch and wished for more and more outfits. Hilda Ellen got bolder in her search for material. When the dolls wanted to go to a ball, she crawled to the back of the older auntie’s wardrobe and cut a great square out of the back of an old blue silk evening frock. The auntie caught Hilda Ellen twirling her dolls down the staircase, looking like a dancing troupe in their blue silk finery. She recognized the material. She wouldn’t have worn that evening frock in a month of Sundays but she was still appalled. Hilda Ellen was sent packing.

  Papa had taken up with a new lady by this time and didn’t want a daughter getting in the way. Hilda Ellen was sent to relatives who ran a pub in Portsmouth. It was a rough pub, always heaving with sailors, not really a suitable home for a delicate little girl, but Hilda Ellen loved it there.

  ‘I didn’t have to stay in my room. Well, I didn’t have a room. I just had a cot and shared with the bar girls. But every evening I helped in the pub, collecting up the glasses. My uncle would often sit me on the counter and get me to sing a song for all the sailors.’

  She was given so many pennies she had a whole drawerful of tiny dolls, and she bought her own scraps of silk and velvet and brocade from the remnant stall at the Saturday market.

  Then she was given her own big doll! The hairdressing salon along the road had a china doll in the window with very long golden curls of real hair. She sat there to advertise the hairdressing expertise of Mr Bryan, the owner. Hilda Ellen snipped her own hair every now and then, but she often paused outside the salon window, gazing at the beautiful china doll in her cream silk dress, her golden curls hanging right down to her jointed hips.

  Mr Bryan didn’t have many clients. He was near retiring age. At Christmas he decided to call it a day and close the business. He donated his doll with the long hair to a local charity which was giving a party for all the poor children of Portsmouth. They tied it to the top of the Christmas tree, like a giant fairy.

  Hilda Ellen was at the party. She craned her neck, peering up at the wondrous doll. The Mayor of Portsmouth came in dressed as Father Christmas, his gold chain gleaming under his false beard. He started handing out presents from the tree to every child in the room. Hilda Ellen’s heart thumped under her muslin bodice.

  Maybe Mr Bryan had seen her peering wistfully in his window and murmured a word in the Mayor’s ear. Maybe the Mayor truly was Father Christmas. Whatever . . . Hilda Ellen was called out, a young lad was sent scampering up a ladder to the top of the tree, and the beautiful doll was put in Hilda Ellen’s arms. She clasped her tight, burying her face in that soft golden hair, quivering with happiness.

  She called the doll Mabel and loved her passionately. She made her an entire trousseau of elaborate clothes: a sailor suit with a pleated skirt, a velvet dress with tiny pearl buttons and a crochet collar, a winter coat edged in fur, with a fur-trimmed bonnet and a little fur muff to match.

  Hilda Ellen was blissfully happy. She wanted to live in Portsmouth for ever but Papa’s lady was now his new wife, with a child on the way. When the baby was born, Papa decided they’d save on a nursemaid and bring Hilda Ellen back to make herself useful. She was old enough, wasn’t she – ten or eleven at least?

  It was a great pity they’d all forgotten exactly how old she was, even Hilda Ellen herself. She’d had a lot of changes of school but she was bright and loved working hard. She shone especially in needlework classes and art, but she was good at all the academic subjects too. Her teachers thought she was definite scholarship material. She sat the exam without a hint of nerves and passed with flying colours, all set to go to a posh girls’ high school, her sights fixed on getting into art school later.

  There was just the formality of sending in her birth certificate. When Papa eventually found it at the back of a desk drawer, they had a shock. Hilda Ellen had somehow mislaid a year of her life. She was eleven going on twelve. So that was it. She was too old for the scholarship.

  It sounds crazy now. I’m sure someone would ensure that this bright, hard-working girl still got a scholarship somehow. Maybe if her father had pushed harder, they’d have made an exception. But people just shrugged their shoulders and said sorry. Hilda Ellen went and lay on her bed, head in her pillow. I don’t know whether she wept. I never saw her cry, not even when she was an old lady in terrible pain. She wasn’t one to make a fuss, she just got on with things.

  She stayed with Papa and her stepmother. She didn’t think much of her. She didn’t think much of baby Jack either, or his little sister Barbara, who arrived a year or so later. She bathed them and fed them and sang them to sleep every evening while her stepmother cosied up to Papa. Hilda Ellen had to share the nursery with her half-siblings, but she kept Mabel sitting on a high shelf out of harm’s way.

  She attended the local elementary school until she was thirteen, but then she had to leave to earn her living. She certainly wasn’t going to be a full-time nursery maid. She thought she’d found the ideal job. On a material hunt to the Bon Marché department store in south London she saw they were advertising for attractive young girls to work the newly installed elevators. They were very proud of these beautiful brass lifts, considered very glamorous and state-of-the-art for Edwardian times. They’d already employed a little dark girl and kitted her out in a crimson uniform, to be a special lift girl. Hilda Ellen was little and very fair. The Bo