Unfortunately, with George’s earning power curtailed by his health, Julia had to assume the mantle of breadwinner. Well our Bossy-boots was well up to it. She had at least one spell operating a lodging house for commercial travellers and students. She kept a corner shop in an area of Hillsborough where the scarcest commodity to pass over the counter was cash money.
The shop had living accommodation at the rear and above, but there being no storage area as such, the living room was permanently crammed with ‘outers’ of soapflakes, and the like. I remember, the sill of the staircase window was the storage space for the paper sacks of powdered concentrates she used to mix up the penny ice lollipops she sold- the original nice little earner, very little. I particularly remember the super concentrated smell of pineapple, and banana.
Julia was always moving house, or so it seemed. For a long time George was a porter at the then Royal Hospital on West Street. One day, while George was at work, Julia was due to supervise the transfer of all their goods and chattels from an old home to a new one, calling to collect George at the end of his shift, during her last trip. While George was packing up after his shift, and making ready to leave, one of his workmates asked him where they were moving to.
“I don’t know ‘til Julia picks me up and takes me there”, replied George, in truth!
By my reckoning, Julia had lived in 16 properties, but there was one she never actually moved into. She bought it, started making alterations, moving fireplaces and such. Then she saw something else she preferred, so she sold the first one to buy the new choice. That’s 17. In fact there was one more. She bought a property, a white elephant, which had been on the auctioneer’s books for some time. No one wanted it so she got it at a knockdown price. Then, as she was about to leave the auction room, another property came up, which she liked very much. She bid for it, got it, put the white elephant back in the same auction, and sold it at a handsome profit, all before having paid for it!
Julia and George had two daughters- Mary, six years my senior (more a sister than a cousin) and Janet, three years my junior, and the apple of her daddy’s eye. While they had the shop, George didn’t need to go out to work; the shop occupied them both. So George, being at home, was available to take 3yr old Janet upstairs to settle her down for her afternoon nap. It was quite common for Janet to tiptoe back down after 5 minutes, to ask everyone to be quiet because daddy was asleep.
After my father was killed, it was arranged that, if anything happened to Betty, I would pass into Julia’s care. I was blissfully unaware of this, until Julia chanced to tell me, when I was in my twenties. I just smiled at her and said nothing, while silently offering up earnest hanks for my safe deliverance.
Safe deliverance had been a constant feature of my regular stays with cousin Mary- every time I went up the stairs to bed. I had to pass the ‘Bonkey’. I don’t know why I dreamed up such a name for the horrid creature, when everyone else called it the Hoover. Possibly because it ‘Hooved’ everything, and I didn’t want reminding. I had never encountered such a monster anywhere else. Even when it was silently sleeping on the bottom corner of the staircase (it had made its nest there) I had to summon up incredible reserves of courage to run past it before it could wake up, shine its one bright eye on me, roar like bagpipes driven mad by pain, and gobble me up.
Its head vaguely suggested an iron sphinx, and when it woke up and breathed in, its black belly puffed up ready to swallow anything it could reach. Its skin was like dead policemen’s trousers, and its neck was all scrawny and wrinkled. I think what really terrified me about the Bonkey was its ability to mutate from this lifeless pile of scrap metal and rags, into this mobile, staring, screaming, throbbing ‘creature’.
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| The Bonkey |
Like a dragon guarding his hoard of gold, the Bonkey in his lair, stood guard over a similar ‘golden’ treasure. Half way up the stairs was a little, low, deep silled window, and in this recess is where the treasure lay. It was a glass rose bowl. The top was the usual metal mesh, to restrain the stems, but the glass bowl was in the colour and shape of a pumpkin. This in itself was treasure enough, but at a certain time of day, the sun shone into this window from high level. Because the window was fairly small, and the ledge deep, the light fell on the bowl and little else, making the translucent orange glass glow brightly, as though lit from within, like a hallowe’en pumpkin, but a much brighter, fuller light. It was a priceless treasure of true mystery and magic. I could have just stood and looked at it for hours. The glowing orange bowl seen against the lime and lemon of the sun-dappled leaves, dancing on the tree, outside the window, was all in a world light years away from Hodgson Street.
Recently I happened to tell Mary of my childhood fascination with the rose bowl, thinking it to be long gone. She abruptly left the room, returning very quickly, bearing the very bowl, to ask-
“Would you like it?” So after all these years, the golden treasure is mine, and I shall guard it even more assiduously than the Bonkey did.
There was one occasion on which Julia confessed she could have cheerfully strangled me. At 4 or 5 yrs old, I was spending one of my visits with them, one winter, as I often did. Mary and I had been playing in the snow, in the back garden, just the two of us, all day. With the failing light, we had come indoors for warmth, dry feet, supper, and bed.
Over supper I started to cry, quietly at first, but gradually working myself up into a good old lather. When asked what was wrong, I didn’t make sense at first, but gradually, phrases like ‘we left him outside, we were playing with him all day, he’s all on his own, in the cold’ became intelligible. Julia asked Mary whom we had been playing with, and Mary insisted that there had been just the two of us, all day. When I was asked again, I wasn’t very informative. I just kept wailing that we’d left him all alone, in the cold, and we should have brought him inside, into the warm, instead of leaving him. It’s not fair when we’ve been playing with him all day.
They asked Mary, repeatedly, ‘Who have you been playing with?’ She was quite exasperated but unshakeable in her reply-
“No one, Mum. Honestly!” Meanwhile, I was working up a fine old paroxysm of tears and howls. Finally, on being asked again ‘Who is it?” I yelled-
“The snowman!”
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| The Snowman |
I remember another snowman, one Christmas, and this snowman was different. Very different. This snowman was a present to me from I don’t know whom. Swathed in crackly cellophane, it appeared to be mad of cotton wool. It had a cylindrical body, with black felt for hands and feet, buttons and mouth, felt carrot nose, hat, scarf- all that, with a cotton wool ball head, 15-18” overall height.
Betty was very enthusiastic, when she delivered this home, saying things like ‘Oh, you’ll enjoy this at Christmas! You just wait! These are good! I’ve seen one before!’ All I could see was that someone had sent me a snowman which didn’t appear to do anything, and wasn’t available until Christmas, which in itself was understandable, but I couldn’t see how this enthusiasm for a very frail, static, un-playable-with doll for a boy, could be justified. So I bided my time, or to be more truthful, I had no choice but to wait and see.
Sure enough, sometime over Christmas, when all the family were together, Betty produced the snowman. Instead of giving it to me when I held out my hands for it, she just ignored me and said she would show us what to do. So after removing all the cellophane, squinting at a label on his back, then ferreting about up his bum, she produced a booklet of numbered tickets which she proceeded to hand out to all and sundry, which nicely disposed of all the tickets. Then she pulled the snowman’s head right off, to reveal that not only was the body hollow, but that said hollow was full of small, wrapped parcels, each bearing a number. Then Betty began lifting out parcels, one by one, calling out its number, then the party with that numbered ticket claimed their prize!
My prize proved to be a yellow/brown plastic brooch in the shape of a bow-legged cowboy! So- I had started off with a mysterious snowman, as a personal gift to me alone, and ended up with an item not only irrelevant to my existence, but entirely and embarrassingly worthless and tasteless, by anyone’s reckoning. By this, I learned that not all surprises are pleasant, not even at Christmas.
Of course, the greater lesson didn’t reveal itself to me until a good few years later; that whereas I was focused solely on receiving what I considered mine, Betty’s only thought was that everybody should enjoy themselves, no matter where the input came from. I’m sorry if I fell short of her expectations (I’ve tried to catch up, since) but, fair’s fair Mom; at 4 yrs old, it was a bit previous.