Mother Knew Best

‘Cheer up,' said Mother. ‘Don't make your unhappy life miserable.'

Before Jennifer Worth and other East End memoirists, there was Dorothy ‘Dolly' Scannell.

In the East End of Dolly's childhood, people met poverty and hardship with unfailing optimism and humour. Dolly grew up with nine brothers and sisters, her father – a plumber earning £2 a week and a man who believed that ‘all aristocratic men were disease-ridden and possessed bald-headed wives because of the rich food and wine they consumed' – and of course Mother, who cared for her large brood with rare wisdom, laughter, and unbounded love.

The menagerie also occasionally included members of the animal kingdom, but no mere cats and dogs – instead there were chinchillas, cannibalistic chickens, a ferocious eel kept in a pail of water, and even, eventually, the pride of mother's wardrobe, a kangaroo-fur coat.

With the sure touch of a natural story-teller, who combines a perfect memory with a true writer's gift, Dolly vividly recreates her childhood world: the streets in which she played – and the playground where she was rescued from a child molester; the local shops and the adulterated goods sold within; the new house that her father was going to pay for with his ever-madder schemes to make a fortune, such as a revolutionary kind of truss.

‘A proper treat, I can tell you, bright as Pearlie buttons, colourful as a street market'
Evening Standard

To Anne and Matthew Early

 

‘Strong stomachs and weak noses are what your East End teacher needs, never mind brains,' said my father in 1918. I glared at him, thinking he was ‘common' to say my friends and I were smelly. Everybody was always going on about being clean. ‘It costs nothing to be clean,' our teachers said, and to me it went without saying that if something ‘they' were always on about cost nothing, then everybody would have it.

‘Cleanliness is next to godliness,' my mother always said when she bathed us on Friday evenings in the little bath before the fire in the kitchen, yet the very next morning she would say, ‘You won't want much of a wash today, you had a bath yesterday.' And on a winter's day she would say, ‘Don't wet your face, just wipe it, going out into the cold, because of the chaps.'

My father would always shout one of his remarks when I was thinking nice thoughts. I felt he didn't like the lovely Poplar people. ‘What about the Lascars then?' he'd say. Apparently these thin brown-skinned men who roamed the High Street carried little tin cans of water around with them. My father said proudly, ‘They wash down below every time they go to the lavatory, it's their religion.' I thought it was a funny religion, for ‘down below' was bottoms, and they didn't get dirty, for they were covered with bloomers or trousers; so how could the dirt get there? Suppose one of the Lascars made a mistake one day and washed his down below before washing his face. Mother always said on bath nights, ‘I must wash your face first.' I would hate to walk about with a can of water all my life, it would get rusty, and the water would get muddy. Suppose our family were Lascars, that would mean twelve cans of water. There was nowhere in our little kitchen to put twelve cans of water, and what a terrible thing if they all got mixed up. Ugh, fancy washing your face in someone else's can if they'd washed their bottom in it first. Anyway my brothers all kicked tin cans about in the street, so we couldn't keep twelve cans.

My father was always going on about smells. ‘Watch your drains,' he would shout. I always made a detour away from any drain, or held my breath, so that I would not get the fever and be taken away in a scarlet blanket. I thought this blanket was red so that people would know you were dangerous, like a leper, and the fever was named after the blanket, scarlet fever, but we all called it
THE FEVER
in horrified whispers. There was even a hospital, a terrible place, called the Fever Hospital, where you were taken and not allowed home until all your skin had come off.

Once I had shingles all round my neck, except for a little space, and my brother Cecil, two years older than me, said that when my shingles met I would die. Everybody dies when shingles meet. Mother put some white rag round my neck and I went out to play. When we heard that Johnny Duggan was being taken away with the fever we all went to watch. The red blanket covering Johnny had missed his big toe which looked enormous: his nail wanted cutting and the edge of it was all black. My brother David, two years older than Cecil, gave me a push while I was watching the fever boy and I fell on the red blanket. Johnny's toenail, the black part, caught a shingle on my neck and broke it and made it wet and sore. ‘You won't have to wait for the shingles to meet now,' said David cheerfully. ‘You'll have the fever instead.' I ran home crying to mother because I didn't want the fever, and I still might die with meeting shingles, and Mother put some ‘brassic' powder on my neck. I didn't get the fever. No one did in our house.

My father always seemed to spoil my pleasure with one of his common remarks. When my younger sister Marjorie was old enough to be my friend one of our favourite adventure places was Harrow Lane Station, down a steep slope off the High Street. We would chase down the cobble-stoned slope up the iron stairs to the wooden footbridge and feel all lovely and swaying as we peeped through the chinks in the wooden slats of the bridge at the trains passing beneath. When a train drew into the station then the exciting part would begin, for when the train began to start again it would get up loads of lovely steam which would shroud our part of the bridge. We would get into the steam and let it envelop us all over our legs and over our faces and then we would dash to the other side to catch the last of the steam before the train got up speed. We didn't know that Father had seen us in our Turkish bath one day and when we arrived home he shouted, ‘That steam from the engines down Harrow Lane is no good for young girls. Your mother should keep you away, the firemen piddle on the coal because they can't get out of the cab. It's piddled steam, firemen's piddled steam you've been playing in.' Although he had spoilt our lovely game for ever I had to laugh at Marjorie's refined disgust at Father using the word, ‘piddle.' ‘Fancy a father saying such a word to his daughters,' she said.

My mother would say, ‘God wouldn't send a child into the world without a crust of bread,' and as she always said it wasn't the lustful man who had the children, when I was very young I assumed it was God who had sent Mother ten children. I felt that Father had some pleasure every time God decided to send another baby, but that Mother didn't, and I felt too that a man
must
have this pleasure but a mother
must not
. I knew after babies were born they belonged to the mother, and I thought mothers very lucky that the babies belonged to them and not the father, God only letting families have fathers to go out to work and get money for food. I knew God had been kind to my mother in giving her a husband who was not lustful, for if he had given her a lustful one, neither I nor my nine brothers or sisters would have been born. I had no idea what a lustful man was, but I knew from Mother's expression he wouldn't be a nice man. I got the impression that butchers were lustful men. It was something which affected their hands through handling raw meat, for my mother was whispering with some aunts one day. They were talking about a butcher they had known in Beckenham whose wife, ‘poor woman,' had to be ready for him every day when he came home to dinner. Since my mother always had my father's dinner ready for him every day and never made any fuss about it, I couldn't understand why she and my aunts were so sorry for the butcher's wife. Then she saw me listening and said, ‘Little pitchers have big ears,' and they all stopped talking and looked at me as though I had been naughty.

‘Watch your line of demarcation,' was another favourite saying of my father's, and we had no idea whatever of the meaning of this dreadful warning, although we knew it was very important. We had a vague idea of ‘Look after your corner' and ‘Take care of your clobber' and we well knew the meaning of ‘You can't beat the old Aldershot oven.' This remark we all treated with contempt, including Mother, for she knew and we knew that it was not complimenting her on her lovely cooking. It seemed he would say this about the Aldershot oven after one of our best meals, so perhaps it was a compliment in a way and a tasty repast reminded him of his outdoor cooked meals. We didn't think it was a real oven, in fact we thought he was a bit crazy when he said it. But one Christmas we had an extra large goose which Mother hung from the top of the oven on a large hook. The goose kept falling down into the tin of fat and there seemed no way of suspending it. Father said he would make an Aldershot oven out in the back yard. Mother looked disgusted and frantically began to try and find other ways and means of cooking the goose before the military building was completed.

We all trooped out into the little yard where father had assembled an odd assortment of stones and bricks. ‘Phew,' said one of the boys, ‘the cat's wee-wee'd on that one.' Father sent him indoors with a sharp rebuke that he was as obstinate as his mother, and my wicked brother went upstairs and stared viciously out of his bedroom window. Finally, after much swearing, Father lit an evil-smelling smoky fire under the bricks and we all ran coughing and spluttering and grumbling down into the scullery where Mother stood on guard with a triumphant look on her face. She had fixed the goose the other way up and it was sizzling merrily. Father was furious. He knew none of us would ever believe his Aldershot oven remark again. He himself had lost confidence in it, although he said if he'd had the proper tools and encouragement from the family, for once in his life, he could have cooked our goose as we'd never had it cooked before. He knew really it wasn't true, and as he went upstairs Mother said that when he'd made an Aldershot oven in the trenches in France and cooked ‘the boys' a stew, he was the only one that ate it then. Father heard Mother's remarks and he said the trouble was that people were so used to artificial heating they couldn't recognise good healthy natural cooking when they saw it. It was the best goose we ever had, and although we knew Father could have eaten some more, out of pride he had to refuse it when Mother offered it to him. When I came downstairs that Christmas evening I saw Father at the meat safe picking a piece of goose. When he saw me he winked at me. I didn't tell Mother.

Father had been the bravest of soldiers, cheerfully suffering all manner of deprivations in the muddy Flanders trenches, but if he ever remarked on the days of the War (and he had his fiftieth birthday at Ypres), it was with humour. He had, however, one great and lasting fear, he could not bear the slightest breeze or air to blow on him and the terror and hate of his life was a draught. He felt the family all conspired against him by purposely leaving doors open. ‘Shut that bloody door,' he seemed to be shouting non-stop in the winter, and he made Mother tut disapprovingly every time he shouted. Since the ten of us were in and out non-stop, never still, never closing the door, he was a swearing frantic man from autumn until spring and even in the summer he was still apprehensive at a cool breeze. He thought that people who lay in the sun were mad, and if we came home after a day out in the summer he would shout that we were all ‘Non compos mentis' and then reiterate his way of life: ‘I believe in moderation in all things,' he would say.

In the end, this man of inventions decided he would fit a spring to the kitchen door and for many months he seemed to be either standing on a chair or kneeling in homage at the kitchen door, getting many knocks as the family rushed in and out. The trouble was he could never get the spring to the correct springiness. Either Mother would be knocked backwards with a tray of food, or the younger ones had to call for aid to push the door open, or it would close so slowly that Father would be frustrated waiting for the final click, or it would close but not click and he would swearingly approach it and give it a mighty push. Then it would open again immediately for the unwelcome entry of another Cheggie.

Finally he put his awful glue-pot on the stove, ignoring our cries of ‘Phew, what a stink,' and fixed old pieces of material all round the doors and windows. He made papier-mâché which turned into hard cement and pushed this everywhere, much to Mother's horror. No sooner had he left the house than every window and door was thrown wide open, for Mother loved fresh air as much as Father hated it. While cleaning she would, with the air of a defiant child, pick out of the door and window-frames much of his craftsman-made cement. Things lasted for ever with Father. He had so many false uppers and soles on his slippers and so many glued sheets and papier-mâché fillings on his little shed that nothing of the original articles remained.