Lizzy May – Chapter 3

When Father Papered the Parlour

‘Monarch Gramophone’ by Steve Fendt

Summer 1974

Well, now it was 1912 and big changes were afoot.

The newspapers were talking more and more about the ‘situation in Europe’ and the ‘problem with the Kaiser’. The British Empire was being challenged, you see, by those upstart Germans.

In our household, things were changing, too. Father had a new job, and we had a new home. We’d moved to Balham, south of the Thames.

Our new house was in a long, straight terrace on Cambray Road. It was a wide residential road, well lit by street lamps at night. The pretty brick houses had bay windows, tiny front gardens with rose bushes and window boxes full of flowers.

It was a big step up from the cramped little mews in Shepherd’s Bush. Our house even had a proper bathroom and a long, narrow garden out the back where we could grow vegetables.

Yes, Father’s new job. He was working for Pickfords Carriers.

They’re still in business – a big removals firm. He was a packer and porter. It was his job to go into houses where the occupants were moving, pack up all their belongings and carry them out to the van. It was hard work, but it paid quite well.

No more horse-drawn vehicles, you see.

Pickfords had moved with the times, and instead of horses, they had a fleet of posh new vans and lorries. There were still plenty of horse carts around – you’d see them on the streets – but terraces like Cambray Road weren’t built for them. There was nowhere to put stables, for one thing.

One of the houses where Father was packing up, they said they had a gramophone they didn’t have room for in their new home, and would Father like it? He said yes, of course. And would he like these records? Well, yes, please!

A gramophone? That was like a record player.

You had to wind it up to make it play, and it had a big trumpet affair to make the sound louder, not speakers like modern ones. It didn’t use electricity, you see. People didn’t have electric power in their homes; that didn’t start to happen until after the War.

Now, the problem was Mother, as it usually was.

She didn’t approve of ‘popular entertainment’. She thought it was frivolous. The only music she liked was religious music, because it was ‘morally uplifting’, and patriotic songs like ‘Rule Britannia’. Her idea of a good time was the Salvation Army band playing ‘Abide With Me’.

So, when Father brought home this gramophone, she wasn’t pleased at all. Were we going to have all sorts of common and vulgar music, and what would the neighbours think?

‘Oh, no, no,’ says Father with a straight face, and shows her a few of the discs, which have classical music on them. ‘It’s educational, Mother.’

They were made of shellac in those days, records, and very brittle and easily broken.

Mother decides that this is acceptable, and listens for a while. Then, when she’s gone out, Father winks and shows us the discs from the bottom of the pile. Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and other jolly, comic songs!

We’d just put on ‘When Father Papered the Parlour’ for about the fifth time, and the people next-door and from over the street had come round to listen, when Mother came home from her temperance meeting to find Father and me dancing around our parlour, and Ernie and the neighbours singing their lungs out.

Well!

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The only time Mother and I willingly spent together was when I used to read the newspaper to her, or poetry.

She loved poetry: Wordsworth, Keats and so on. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury was one of her favourite collections. I can still recite a lot of the verse by heart today, and surprisingly, I don’t hate it.

Now, this being-read-to was on account of her ‘bad eyes’, supposedly. She was in her forties then. Reading gave her migraines, she said. She did get migraines, it’s true. I do too, as you know, and so does your Dad. So I expect you’ve got that to look forward to.

Between you and me though, I think she just wasn’t very good at reading. She hadn’t had much education, and that was a bit of a sore point.

Perhaps that’s why she didn’t want me to have what she hadn’t had. Jealousy.

I was eleven at this time, nearly twelve, and that was the end of compulsory schooling in England in those days. So the question was, what was Lizzy May going to do next?

There wasn’t much that girls and women were allowed to do. Particularly working-class women. There was domestic service, manual work like cleaning and laundry, the shop floor in a textile factory, some low-level clerical work, or working as a shopgirl.

If you had a secondary school education, you could become a teacher or a nurse. Women, a very few upper-class women, could go on to university, but they weren’t even allowed to get degrees, not after they’d completed all the same courses as the men!

Why was it like that?

They didn’t think women were capable of anything more challenging. That was the excuse, at any rate. I think it was more about keeping women in their place: at home, looking after the men and having babies. When they got married, women had to give up their job, especially any kind of government work. So that they weren’t ‘taking a job away from a man’!

You see, the expectation was that a young woman would find a suitable man, wait for him to ask to marry her, then ‘settle down’ and start a family. At school, we girls had to learn needlework, cookery and so on. Home Economics it was called, but basically it was learning to be a housewife.

The worst thing – or one of them, at any rate – that could happen to a young woman was to be ‘left on the shelf’. That is, nobody wanted to marry you, so you were left in the shop like, I don’t know, an ugly, badly-made shirt that didn’t fit any man, or a loaf of bread that’d gone stale and nobody wanted. Then you’d become a spinster and eventually an ‘old maid’.

The only life for you then was to look after your parents in their old age, as an unpaid servant. Or rely on charity, such as it was.

Well, Mother had me down as ‘old maid’ material alright. ‘A big, surly lump like you won’t find a man,’ she once told me. Can you imagine saying that about your own daughter? To her face?

I was very good at schoolwork – in everything except Home Economics – and my teacher came to my parents and suggested that I should apply for a scholarship to the local grammar school.

It was perfectly possible. They had to offer a third of the places, I think it was, as free scholarships. I was the best in my class, better than any of the boys, and I would have got in. Easily.

But Mother didn’t see the point in educating a mere girl. And Father was too weak to stick up for me. He admitted it, later. Said he was sorry, but it was far too late then, of course.

I’d been following the Suffragette movement, and reading their pamphlets, and it was clear to me that the times were changing.

It was equally clear that, come what may, I was going to get away from that horrible, horrible woman. As soon as I got the chance, I would cut her out of my life and never speak to her again.

And that’s what happened in the end, though it took a World War.

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Coming up:

This Friday in Tales from the Wood: Pauly and Dad go fishing, and discuss the importance of not pissing teachers off, even when they deserve it. (Paid subscriptions.)

Next Tuesday in Lizzy May: the Great War brings sweeping change to Britain, women’s roles in society and the Batt household.