Lizzy May – Chapter 1

No Better Than She Ought to Be

‘Cosy’ by Steve Fendt

Spring 1974

Hello, Pauly.

What a nice surprise, coming to visit your Nan. Now we live just round the corner from each other, you must drop in any time you like. You’re a big boy after all, ten years old!

Would you like something to drink? Sorry. I don’t have that fizzy pop you like. It’s bad for your teeth, anyway. No wonder you’ve got fillings. What about a nice cup of tea? I expect I might find a biscuit for you, if I look in the tin.

There now. That’s it, sit yourself down.

Here’s your tea. Do you like these Penguin biscuits?

Yes, I’m sorry about the paraffin. I keep it in the cupboard and the taste gets into everything. I don’t mind it myself. Hardly notice.

What do I need it for? For the lamps, of course.

I know, I know. I could just turn on the light, but I like the glow of an oil lamp, it’s cosy. Reminds me of Alcea, you see. Your dad says I’ll burn the place down, one of these days – but don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.

I’ve been around a lot longer than he has.

Not enough room for my things in this little flat. I appreciate the Council finding it for me of course, when I had to move, but it isn’t ideal. We must make the best of things.

Do I miss what? Elstree and Alcea? Well, yes and no.

It had a lot of memories, good and bad. Your grandfather and me, we moved out there during the War. The second one. Before your dad was born. To escape the Blitz, you see?

It was nice in the country: so peaceful, compared to London. It was isolated, though, down that long, dark road by the Reservoir. And after that business with the burglar. I gave him what for, alright, but he did give me a fright.

And then old Mrs Young died. She owned Alcea as well as her own cottage next door, you see. I was just renting, and her children needed to sell up. Then that Grover chap got his fingers in the pie, and that was the end of that. No use complaining, though. What’s done is done.

That’s right, from London. I was born in Shepherd’s Bush.

Yes, I suppose it is a funny name, when you think about it.

It’s where shepherds used to rest their animals on the way to Smithfield Market, you see. The poor old sheep, on their way to get the chop, ha! Well, when I was a little girl, the shepherds and their sheep were long gone, I can tell you.

The Green’s still there today though, a triangle of grass and trees, surrounded by lanes of traffic.

It was a busy place even then, at the western end of the Central Line, and the Bank of England at the other. Shepherd’s Bush was up and coming, as they say. There were the music halls, the Empire and the Palladium, the Lime Grove film studios – BBC now – and there was the White City stadium. They built that specially for the Olympic Games.

Not that the Olympics meant much to me. I was only a little thing, seven years old, in the summer of 1908.

My parents were too hard-up to be going out to music halls. And much too prim and proper, or Mother was, at any rate. I think Father might have liked to, given half a chance. He was a big, jolly sort of a chap.

My brother, Ernie, was eight years older than me. That’s right: just like you and little Jenny. He used to tease me something rotten, the way big brothers do. Yes, you do – don’t you tell me fibs, young man. But he stood up for me, too.

Against her.

Mother, I don’t think of her as ‘Mum’, never did call her that. Always Mother.

To be honest, and it isn’t a nice thing to say, I try not to think of her at all. She was a horrible woman. Petite and very pretty with her dark curly hair and big brown eyes, and her refined manners and way of speaking, although she was only a farm labourer’s daughter in actual fact, and no better than she ought to be.

You’d think butter wouldn’t melt, to meet her on the street, and of course the men were fond of her. Oh yes.

Behind closed doors, though. Well, she showed her true nature then, alright.

She never liked me. Never.

Father couldn’t stand up to her. A great big man, over six foot, but a gentle giant. Big men are often soft-hearted, you know. He doted on Mother. And on me, too, his little Lizzy May. Tried to make her less hard on me, but she always had her own way.

Of course, he was out working all hours.

Father was a gardener by trade, a nurseryman, but by the time I came along, he was working as a domestic coachman. Taking his wealthy employers to their important business in the City, and to their posh dinners and parties.

Horses were the main transport, you see. Can you imagine that? Horses clip-clopping up and down Elizabeth Road? And the manure! Well, you’ve been in a stable, with your riding lessons that you used to have. So you can imagine the mess and the stink of hundreds of horses. And the racket, of course: steel horseshoes and steel-rimmed wheels on the cobbles.

Cobblestones. No tarmac back then.

In Shepherd’s Bush we had the Underground, as I said, and the electric tram, but there weren’t motor cars everywhere, not like nowadays. Ordinary families like us certainly couldn’t afford one. We walked, or if it was raining and we had far to go, we caught the tram or the omnibus. Sometimes father let me ride with him on his carriage, up high next to him on the box seat behind the horses.

We lived in a little mews house, the four of us. Coningham Mews.

Ah, you don’t know what that is? It was a house with stables or a coachhouse downstairs, and accommodation for the workers upstairs. It was a cramped, smelly, noisy place to live. Those little houses are all the fashion nowadays. Now that the horses are gone, you see.

My happiest times were the holidays with my country cousins in Sheering. A tiny little village, just the other side of the Essex border from Sawbridgeworth, which wasn’t a big town itself, on the River Stort.

Still isn’t much to it, they say, though I’ve not been there for many years myself. Saw-Bridge-Worth, on the River Stort, S-T-O-R-T. Between Hertfordshire and Essex. Look it up when you get home, in Mum and Dad’s road atlas. Oh, you’ve got your own Ordnance Survey map? Very grown up!

Ruined by the M1 now, I expect.

Only an hour from home on the train, but deary me, it was another world!

Real country: not an omnibus, tram or motor car in sight. Dusty lanes, big fields full of sheep and cows – or wheat and barley. Weatherboard cottages, some of them half falling down, but families still lived in them. People were poor, you see. Much poorer than today, but they made do.

No choice. No nice, warm council houses and not much in the way of help for people down on their luck. Just the way the Tories would have it now, if they could turn back the clock. But let’s not get started on that.

I remember the hedgerows bursting with flowers and birds. The cow parsley as tall as you, and the field margins crowded with poppies and cornflowers! There were skylarks, so high in the sky they were just dots. Trying to follow them would make your eyes swim, but when you shut them against the glare, you could still hear the larks, singing away.

Like Elstree?

Not really. Elstree today would be like a busy London suburb, compared to Sheering back then. And as for Borehamwood!

The world was smaller in those days, but somehow, bigger.

So many people now, you see. So many cars, so many roads. You can travel further and faster, but you can never outrun people. Wherever you go, there are people there already. Waiting for you. Wanting something.

I used to spend every summer there after school finished, with the Sheering cousins. Mum and Dad would pack me off on the train with my little cardboard suitcase. They were happy times. Innocent. Though we got up to mischief sometimes, I can tell you!

Ah, but then everything changed, after the tragedy. And then the War came. The first one.

But those are stories for another day, I’m afraid. It’s time you were getting home, young man. Nearly time for tea, and your Mum will be wondering where you’ve got to.

I hope you don’t mind my going on. It’s nice to have someone to talk to. Nobody has time to listen, these days. Just the ghosts, they have all the time in the world.

There’s no point in telling them, though, because they were there, and they already know what happened.

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Author’s note:

Lizzy May is based on half-remembered conversations with my Nan, my father’s mother, patched with later research where the boy’s attention lapsed (as it frequently did) or the moths of time have gnawed holes in the man’s memory over the intervening half century.

Names of people have been changed to protect privacy, but the places are real and the events may have happened. For the sake of clarity, I present as a linear narrative reminiscences which were far from chronological in their telling.

The current Friday Novella, Tales from the Wood, tells Pauly’s story, which may or may not be mine.