Jellied Eels and Zeppelins by Sue Taylor Read Free Book Online

eight shillings a week ‘til I was 21 and seven of that I had to give to Mum.
    Well, I saved up and had a coat made for my mother in Scotch herringbone tweed by the brother-in-law of one of my friends at work, who was a ladies’ tailor. If you could ‘ave seen my Mum’s face. It was the first new thing she’d had. I was then 17 or 18. I’d saved all that time for it.
    One Saturday, soon after I’d given it to her, Mum wanted to go shopping. ‘I want you to come with me,’ she said. She puts this coat on and gets up to the Blackhorse Road, to the market, and she said ‘This is what my Ethel bought me. Brand new it is!’
    Do you know? She went to a stall and she picked out a fawn-coloured hat with a bunch of cherries on it. Cost her ‘alf a crown. When she died in the bungalow next door to here, the coat was still in the cupboard - she had worn it and worn it and, each time she put it on, she’d say in a posh voice ‘My daughter had this made for me.’ She was so proud.
    I thought the world of my mother and would give her anything. I looked after her until she died in 1955. I had a job that somebody else wouldn’t have liked: washing your mother after she’d died of dropsy. Just two days before she died, I was washing her, when she said ‘There’s no one in this world, who’s got such a wonderful daughter as I have.’ I replied ‘And I’ve got the most wonderful mother in the world.’ I still always put flowers around her photograph in my front room. She died the year after my sister died from cancer. I think it was the shock of that which killed her in the end.’

Eight
Lucky Dreams and Boyfriends
    ‘I used to love dancing and, when I was 14, would go down to the church hall - us three girls used to go, Cousin Flo, Florrie and me, with the kids over the road - to the Threepenny Hop. The boy opposite, Roy, I think, used to play the trumpet or something there. We used to go and encourage him.
    I had an accordion you know. My Dad bought my sister one and my Mum had a row with him about it, ‘cos he hadn’t bought me one, so he went and got me one. He paid about £3 for it. I was about 16 or 17, I suppose. There was a special book inside that you could teach yourself from. I taught meself, ‘cos I had played the piano. I played the accordion a lot until the Second World War, when I put it away. You couldn’t play during the war, ‘cos you were always in the dugout or at work. When I sold it in the 1990’s, the keys were as white as when I first had it. I hadn’t played it for years - one of the reasons, was that our dog, Bill, didn’t like it and used to howl.
    I had piano lessons when I was a kid - my Mum paid sixpence a fortnight. Miss Peachley was my teacher. She used to rap my knuckles with a stick if I played the wrong note, wallop! I’ve still got a lot of the music that I used to play. I was eight years of age when I started. I had a few lessons and didn’t like it at first, so I gave up, but went back again later. She was a lovely teacher. I was getting on ever so well - I’d been learning for four years - when I smashed my finger at the toy maker’s and couldn’t play any more. My sister could play by ear, but I couldn’t. We had an old piano that had been given to us, but, with my bad finger, I couldn’t practise.
    When I was very young, we never had any radio or television. The first radio we ever had was a crystal set when I was about 12 or 13. My future brother-in-law made it. You used to have to fumble around with a cat’s whisker (
a fine adjustable wire in a crystal radio receiver
) to get any sound at all. You had to push the little lever in and move it about until you found a good spot on the crystal. Florrie and I used to go over to Clapton, where Alf lived then, while he was making them. We would sit up in his room and he would give me one earphone and my sister another one and say ‘Don’t bend the cat’s whisker!’ If you bent it, you lost all your sound.
    (We had