Jacky Daydream Read online

  They nearly always mention their pets before their parents and brothers and sisters, as if they’re much more important. The sad thing is, pets don’t live as long as people. I often get the most touching tear-stained letters, telling me that some beloved hamster or white rat has died.

  I decided to write a story about a girl whose old cat dies. She feels terrible and wishes she could preserve her in some way. She’s just learned about the Ancient Egyptians at school and it gives her a very very weird idea!

  8

  Shopping

  I LOVED LIVING as an extended family at Fassett Road. I liked all the little routines of my preschool life. We would walk into Kingston every day to go shopping. It was a fifteen-minute brisk trot, a twenty-five-minute stroll. Biddy stuck me in my pushchair to save time. It was a pleasant walk, across a little blue bridge over the Hog’s Mill stream, down a long quiet street of Victorian houses, some large, some small, past the big green Fairfield, past the library, until we could see the red brick of the Empire Theatre in the middle of town. (I was taken to see Babes in the Wood there when I was little and loved it, though I found it puzzling that the boy Babe was a girl and the Old Dame clearly a man.)

  Ga had already developed arthritis and could only walk slowly, so we strolled together, peering at everything along the way. We had our favourite houses. She would always pause in front of a pretty double-fronted house with four blossom trees in the garden. ‘That’s my favourite,’ she’d say, so of course it was my favourite too.

  I live in that house now. My grandma is long dead, but I’ve hung her photo on the wall – and a replacement china Mabel sits underneath.

  Shopping was very different in those days. I loved going to Sainsbury’s, but it wasn’t a big supermarket with aisles and open shelves and trolleys. The Kingston Sainsbury’s then had beautiful mosaic-tiled walls like an oriental boudoir. You queued at the butter counter and watched some white-overalled wizard take the butter and pat it into place with big wooden paddles. You couldn’t afford very much butter so you always had margarine too. They were both so hard you had to butter the end of the loaf and then slice it. There wasn’t any such thing as ready-sliced bread in packets then.

  Then you queued at the cheese counter until another white-garbed lady sliced off the exact amount of cheese for you with a wire and ticked your ration book. You queued at the bacon counter and watched the bacon boy (who always wore a pencil behind his ear) use the scary bacon slicer, cutting your four rashers of best back bacon into wavy ribbons on greaseproof paper. You could queue for a whole hour in Sainsbury’s and still come out with precious little in your string shopping bag.

  Then we’d go to John Quality’s on the corner by the market. It was another grocer’s, with big sacks of sugar and nuts and dried fruit spread out on the floor, just the right height for me. I was always a very good girl, but Gwennie sometimes darted her hand into a sack and pulled out a dried plum, just like Little Jack Horner in the nursery-rhyme book at home.

  Then we’d trail round the market, maybe queuing for plaice or cod or yellow smoked haddock from the fish stall on a Friday, spending a long time haggling at the fruit stall and the veg stall. You could get bananas and oranges now the war was over, but everything was strictly seasonal and none of us had ever even heard of exotic things like kiwi fruit or avocado pears or butternut squash. Fruit meant apples and pears, veg meant cabbage and carrots and cauliflower. The frozen pea hadn’t even been invented. We didn’t have a fridge or freezer anyway.

  The only shop I disliked was the butcher’s – it smelled of blood. The meat wasn’t cut up in neat cellophaned packets, it was festooned all over the place, great red animal corpses hung on hooks in the wall, chickens still in their feathers, rabbits strung in pairs like stiff fur stoles, their little eyes desperately sad.

  I shut my own eyes. I breathed shallowly, trying hard not to moan and make a fuss, because if I’d behaved perfectly, I might be taken to Woolworths for a treat. I loved Woolworths. It had its own distinctive smell of sweets and biscuits and scent and floor polish. (When I left home and went to live in Scotland at seventeen, I used to go into the Dundee Woolworths just to breathe in that familiar smell.)

  I liked the toy counter best. I’d circle it on tiptoe, trying to see all the penny delights: the glass marbles, the shiny red and blue and green notebooks, the spinning tops, the tin whistles, the skipping ropes with striped handles. I always knew what I wanted most. Woolworths sold tiny dolls, though sadly not the beautiful little china dolls of my grandma’s childhood. These were moulded pink plastic – little girls with pink plastic hair and pink plastic dresses, little boys with pink plastic shirts and pink plastic trousers, and lots and lots of pink plastic babies in pink plastic pants. The babies came in different sizes. You could get big penny babies alarmingly larger than their halfpenny brothers and sisters.

  I was a deeply sexist small girl. I spurned all the pink plastic boys. I bought the girls and the little babies, playing with them for hours when I got home. I sometimes made them a makeshift home of their own in a shoebox. I took them for trips to the seaside in my sandpit. Best of all, I stood on a stool at the kitchen sink and set them swimming in the washing-up basin. They dived off the taps and went boating in a plastic cup and floated with their little plastic toes in the air.

  I was very fond of the water myself. I hadn’t yet been swimming in a proper pool but we’d had several day trips to Broadstairs and Bognor and Brighton when I’d had a little paddle. Most days in the summer Ga took me for a ten-minute walk to Claremont Gardens, near Surbiton Station, where there was a paddling pool. She stripped me down to my knickers and I ran into the pool and waded happily in and out and round about.

  I wasn’t supposed to go right under and get my knickers wet, but even if I was careful, the other children often splashed and I got soaked. One time Ga thought my knickers were so sopping wet I’d be better off without them, so she pulled my dress on, whipped my knickers off, and walked home with them clutched in a soggy parcel in her hand. We encountered Mrs Wilton, her next-door neighbour, on the way home.

  ‘Look at this saucepot!’ said Ga, twitching up my dress to show my bare bottom.

  Then she waved my wet knickers in the air while she and Mrs Wilton laughed their heads off. I was mortified. I was worried Mrs Wilton might think I’d wet my knickers and then she’d tell her children, Lesley and Martin, and they’d think me a terrible baby.

  I liked the trips to the paddling pool, but the best treat of all was a walk to Peggy Brown’s cake shop in Surbiton. There’s a health food shop on the site now, but in the long-ago days of my childhood the only health supplements we had were my free orange juice for vitamin C (delicious) and cod liver oil for vitamins A and D (disgusting) and some black malty treacle in a jar that my grandpa licked off a spoon every day.

  Our concept of eating for health was a little skewed too: a fried-egg-and-bacon breakfast was considered the only decent way to start the day so long as you were lucky enough to have the right number of coupons; white bread and dripping was a nutritious savoury snack; coffee was made with boiled full-cream milk and a dash of Camp; and as long as you ate your bread and butter first then you always tucked into a cake at tea time.

  Ga made proper cooked meals every day. She rolled her own pastry and made wonderful jam with the berries from the back garden, but I can’t remember her baking cakes. On ordinary days we had pink and yellow Battenburg cake or sugary bath buns from the baker’s near Kingston market – but once a week we went to Peggy Brown’s special cake shop.

  They were fancy cakes with marzipan and butter cream and little slithers of glacé cherry or green angelica. They had exotic names: Jap cakes, coconut kisses, butterfly wings. There were tarts with three different jams – raspberry, apricot and greengage, like traffic lights. My favourites were little individual lemon tarts with a twirl of meringue on top.

  Excellent as they were, the cakes were only incidental. We went to Peggy Brown’s to look