Dolly's War by Dorothy Scannell Read Free Book Online Page B

done, and when I left for the office on that fateful Thursday he was up, washed and shaved, with an excited look in his eyes and prancing almost boyishly on his feet. He seemed anxious for us to depart, me to work, Mother to the church to meet her friends and the coach. Father actually stood at the gate waving us off, a thing I had never known him do before, and the love-light shone in Mother’s eyes. ‘Not many men would be so unselfish as to wish their wives a happy day when they have to be alone all day and prepare their own meals,’ she said proudly. I was surprised at Father’s eagerness for Mother to enjoy the outing but I felt stirrings of guilt at my suspicious thoughts as I watched her greet some other poor old mums, all as excited as children. I forgot my apprehension about the week-end and also my suspicions of my father’s reformed behaviour and sat on the tram thinking only of my green silk cami-knickers and my ‘chiffon’ lisle stockings. The stockings had cost the exorbitant sum of 1s. 3d. In my mind I was Lady Dorothy.
    Eight hours later my ‘eau-de-Nil’ dreams were shattered. I arrived home to find the kitchen in a turmoil and Mother flushed and terribly worried. Father was flushed too but as excited as he had been in the morning, almost delirious, and talking in half-sentences. Mother said, ‘I’m sorry, Dolly, I’ve got them soaking in cold salt water in the kitchen sink.’ In the bowl in the sink was a sort of wadge of brown material with, here and there, a green spot, like little pieces of specked apple. I gazed at these bright green spots and the penny dropped! This brown wet mass was my society undies. Apparently Mother had arrived home soaked through because of a freak storm (comforted by the thought of a welcoming father and a singing kettle), to find the kitchen in a dreadful mess with a tottery and victorious father waving his hands round the kitchen at assorted sized bottles of strange-smelling brown liquid. Someone had given him an ancient recipe for home-made beer and Father said it was ‘true elixir’. Mother looking at the soggy brown material on the table had asked, ‘Whatever did you strain it through?’ ‘Oh,’ said Father, ‘I was lucky there, in the case on the dresser I found something that was “just the job”.’
    Of course I cried; Mother, tired out, nearly cried too and as the rest of the family appeared from work Father sunk further into disgrace. But still he had the end results of his zeal which kept him above the water-line of shame. He placed all the bottles carefully and lovingly on a shelf in the coal-cellar, the door of which led into the kitchen, although the cellar was half under the front garden. Every bottle exploded, without exception, but with true poetic justice they did not explode en masse, but one each day. Mother was terrified to go into the cellar until the last one had been blown to infinity.
    I went for my upper class week-end in my ordinary undies and distinguished myself by slipping on the highly polished parquet floor and putting my elbow through a glass pane in my hostess’s china cabinet. I felt miles removed from the elegant young men at the ball in their dinner suits (in any case they couldn’t dance nearly as well as the boys at Poplar Town Hall with their ‘coming rahnd’) and the little cardboard ‘programme’ with its tiny silver-topped pencil and tassel in which my dances were to be reserved was sparsely filled with duty invitations from my office friends’ brothers. I knew then that even my green silk cami-knickers would not have prevented me from being a foreigner in a foreign land and I made up my mind to buy my father an ounce of his favourite tobacco when I returned home. How could I blame him, he could never have seen green silk undies in his life before. His rememberings would only have been flannel or winceyette.
    My mother