Jacky Daydream (15 page)

We didn’t go up to London to see the Coronation. Biddy and Harry didn’t see the point so I didn’t get to wave my little Union Jack flag. However, we did
see
the Queen getting crowned. We got our first television so we could watch, along with hundreds of thousands of families all over the country. It was the talking point everywhere – who was forking out for an eleven-inch Bush television to see the Coronation. It was the first huge national event that the population could see simultaneously. We didn’t have to rush to the cinema the next week and watch Pathé News. We could peep right inside Westminster Abbey and see the Archbishop of Canterbury place the crown on Elizabeth’s head from the comfort of our own utility armchairs.

Biddy invited Ga and Gongon. The five of us watched the Coronation, with commentary by Richard Dimbleby – brother of the lady who declared I was an ultra-clean well-kept baby. We felt he was practically our best friend. We listened to his hushed, reverent tones, describing the scene we could see for ourselves in blurred black and white miniature.

We all knew it was a momentous occasion. It was also very very very boring. After half an hour of squatting on my little leatherette pouffe I sloped off to play with my paper dolls. I was reminded that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event and I should pay attention, but Biddy’s telling-off was halfhearted. She was yawning and fidgeting herself. We weren’t especially royalist in my family, though we’d read Crawfie’s account of her life as a governess to little Lilibet and Margaret Rose, serialized in some women’s magazine. Even so, Biddy bought a tea caddy with a picture of the newly crowned Queen looking very glamorous, and when full-colour souvenir books of the Coronation appeared in Woolworths, Biddy bought one. I leafed through the pages listlessly, but I liked the new Queen’s crown and sceptre and orb – I was always a girl for flashy jewels.

We also went together to see a children’s film called
John and Julie
later that year, about a little girl who runs away to see the Queen’s Coronation. I thought the girl playing Julie was quite sweet, but not a patch on my Mandy.

Biddy kept the newspapers with the coverage of the Coronation in case they might be valuable one day. Maybe she’s still got them. I wish she’d kept all my
Girl
comics instead!

There’s certainly no mention of the Queen’s Coronation in any of my books! I don’t think there’s anything about the royal family either. So OK, who lives in the Royal Hotel?

 

It’s Elsa in
The Bed and Breakfast Star
.

We went to stay at the Royal Hotel. The Royal sounds very grand, doesn’t it? And when we got down one end of the street and got our first glimpse of the Royal right at the other end, I thought it looked very grand too. I started to get excited. I’d never stayed in a great big posh hotel before. Maybe we’d all have our own rooms with satellite telly and people would make our beds and serve us our breakfasts from silver trays. As if we were Royalty staying in the Royal.

Maybe if Elsa achieves her big ambition to be a comedian, she might
just
be asked to take part in a Royal Variety Performance in front of the Queen.

18

Papers and Comics

WE WERE A
family with a hefty newspaper bill. Biddy liked the
Daily Mail
and Harry had the
Telegraph
and the
Sporting Life
and the
Racing Post
. Harry’s biggest hobby was horse racing. He went to race meetings occasionally, and every Saturday afternoon he crouched in his armchair, fists clenched, watching the racing on our new television. He’d shout excitedly if his horse looked as if it had a chance – ‘Come on, come on!’ – jigging up and down as if he was riding the horse himself.

I don’t know how much he won or lost, he never told us. He didn’t put flamboyantly large amounts of money on any horse. Later on, when we had a telephone, I heard him place each-way bets for a few shillings, but he was a steady punter, betting every day there was a race on.

He kept every racing paper and form book and studied them religiously, jotting down numbers and marking likely names. He squashed his suits and trousers up into a tiny corner of his wardrobe so that he could store all this information inside.

He also bought a London evening paper on his
way
home from work. There were three to choose from in those days. Newspaper sellers used to shout, ‘
Star, News
and
Stan-daaaard!
’ over and over again. Harry bought the
Star
, the paper with the strip cartoon ‘Tuppenny and Squibbit’.

I had my own comics too. I started off with a twee little baby comic called
Chick’s Own
, where the hard words were hy-phe-na-ted, but soon I progressed to the much more rufty-tufty
Beano
. I liked the Bash Street Kids because the humour was imaginative and anarchic, but I’d have liked it to be a bit more girly. I read
Schoolfriend
and occasionally
Girls’ Crystal
, but they were plain black-and-white comics. The most magical comic of all was
Girl
, well worth fourpence-halfpenny out of my shilling pocket money.

It was delivered every week. I was so entranced by some of the serial stories that I could barely wait for the next episode. I didn’t really care for dark-haired schoolgirl Wendy and her blonde friend Jinx on the front cover, but I was a particular fan of Belle of the Ballet inside the comic. I talked about her enthusiastically to my teacher Mrs Symons and she gently corrected my pronunciation. Up till that moment I’d been calling her Belly of the Ballette.

The best serial was on the back page. Every week there were inspiring stories about special women, written by the Reverend Chad Varah. Sometimes these heroines were well known, like Florence
Nightingale
, the Lady with the Lamp. Sometimes they were long-ago historical figures like Princess Adelaide, a particular favourite. Sometimes they were religious, like Mary Slessor, the mill girl from Dundee who became a missionary. Sometimes they ticked every single box, like Joan of Arc. I’d seen her picture in my nursery history book but I had no idea what happened to her. The last Joan of Arc picture strip was such a shock. The illustration of Joan standing in yellow flames, clutching her wooden cross, her eyes raised piously, made me shake with a complicated mixture of excitement, horror and pity.

I started to be stirred by current sad stories in the newspapers too. On Sundays Biddy liked to take the
Mirror
and the
News of the World
so she could have a good juicy read over her fried breakfast in bed. One summer they serialized Ruth Ellis’s story while she was locked up in Holloway, the women’s prison. I read over Biddy’s shoulder. She tutted over Ruth’s blonde hair and pencilled eyebrows and dark lips. ‘She’s obviously just a good-time girl. Look at that peroxide hair! Talk about common!’

I thought she looked glamorous and Ruth had always been one of my favourite names. I loved the story of Ruth and Naomi in Scripture at school, and there was another Ruth in a current favourite book,
The Tanglewood’s Secret
by Patricia St John. It had made a big impression on me because a boy in that
book
had climbed a tree, fallen and died. It had all been very sad, and Ruth and I had been very upset. This new true story about a real Ruth was about death too. She’d shot her boyfriend. I couldn’t help sympathizing a little because it sounded as if he’d been horrible to her. But now she’d been tracked down and convicted of murder, and in a few weeks’ time she was going to be hanged.

I hadn’t really taken on board what capital punishment meant until then. It seemed a crazy idea. If society was so shocked that Ruth Ellis had killed someone, why was it right that
she
should be killed too, and in such an obscene and ritualistic way? I couldn’t believe that anyone could legally drag a healthy person from their cell, put a noose around their neck and then hang them.

I didn’t think they would ever go through with it. I thought it was just a threat to frighten her. I thought she’d get a last-minute reprieve.

She didn’t. They went ahead with the whole grisly procedure. They hanged her at nine o’clock in the morning.

One of my books has wonderful illustrations set out at the beginning of each chapter, lots of little pictures in a strip, like the most imaginative and beautiful drawn comic. Which is it?

 

It’s
Candyfloss
.

I’m so very lucky having Nick Sharratt illustrate my books. I think they’re all brilliant illustrations but maybe
Candyfloss
is my favourite. We had fun with the very last page, putting in lots of familiar faces. See how many of the children you recognize!

19

Health

I STARTED TO
brood about death after reading about Ruth Ellis. I hadn’t really had anyone close to me die. Harry’s mother had died when I was a baby. His father had died a few years later, but I hardly knew him. Maybe Ga and Gongon were next on the Grim Reaper’s list. They weren’t a robust couple. Gongon had a heart attack one Christmas when I was a child. He wasn’t rushed to hospital. He stayed upstairs in bed and everyone tiptoed round, whispering and looking worried.

He made a full recovery but he was treated like an invalid after that. He retired early from work and sat in his armchair and sucked sadly on his pipe like an ancient old man when he must only have been in his fifties.

My grandmother wasn’t in much of a position to wait on him hand and foot. Ga suffered from cripplingly painful arthritis. She changes quickly in the family photo album from a little blonde woman with a curvy figure to a fat old lady in longish skirts and granny shoes. Maybe her steroid treatments made her put on weight. She ate exactly
the
same as my grandfather and yet he was matchstick-thin.

Once a month she went up to a London hospital and tried every treatment going. She even had gold injections for a while. I hoped her teeth and fingernails might suddenly gleam gold, but there was no external evidence of this treatment whatsoever and I don’t think it helped much internally either. She was in constant severe pain. Sometimes she could hardly get out of her armchair, and her face would screw up in agony, but she never once cried.