Our Betty
By Liz Smith
4/5
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Reviews for Our Betty
16 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is not so much a biography as an old lady sitting in a chair and telling one stories from her life. This works well for Liz Smith and makes for a most enjoyable read. The one reservation that I have is that, rather like that old lady, the narrative drifts off into a gentle slumber at the end.
Book preview
Our Betty - Liz Smith
Beginnings
Our house was on the edge of town. At the back, there were long gardens with grim grey houses behind. At the front it was just open countryside, a flat treeless land, mostly allotments, with the Scunthorpe steelworks in the far distance.
From my bedroom window I could see into Miss Goy’s garden. It was a big space with a sweeping wall going round the corner up into Normanby Road, which led to the steelworks. I would see Miss Goy walking slowly and drying her long, long hair, her head bent in a holy book.
She had a friend called Esme, and every Sunday they warbled hymns together at St George’s church. Miss Goy upright; Esme leaning slightly towards her, fluttering her eyelids as she sang, the lashes heavy with white face powder. I used to sit behind them and wonder at their quivering notes.
They must have loved God because they didn’t have time to turn and smile. In fact, all the years of my youth I spent over the road, Miss Goy never spoke or said hello. Though it was a good job she loved God, because she went to him very early, and Esme was left to warble alone.
Losing my mother
They said I had a wonderful time with my mother.
She had blue eyes and long golden hair, which she would dry galloping along on her pony Jack. She would tie me in the trap with a large scarf and trot out with me and make me laugh. She was stylish and loved colour and was very musical, they said.
But when I was two there was a new baby and I was sent to stay with a farmer relative. When I came back I rushed to the room to find the bed empty. They said I did not cry but stood a long time staring at the empty bed.
The baby died soon afterwards.
So it came to pass that my mother’s death in childbirth when she was twenty-three and I was two years old became the leading factor in the strangeness of my life. In an odd way it left me defenceless and I became particularly conscious of it when my father disappeared when I was seven. I lived with my grandparents.
I suppose it is an animal instinct that if there is no one standing beside you, others can push you around without fear of confrontation. This feeling seems to be found within families too, not only among strangers.
I remember going to visit my aunt with my father. I would have been around five years old. There were two girl cousins, one about my age and one a bit older. My greeting from the girls was to kick me around the ankles and crack my head against the door jamb because I could not spell Constantinople. I let out a piercing cry and a large egg shape appeared on my crown. Dad, asleep in an armchair, was furious when my cries woke him. His anger was directed against me, not the aggressors.
Ever since then I have sometimes felt the lack of someone of my own to stand by me–a brother, a sister, a strong mother, someone who is on my side. I have missed my mother all my life and have spoken out loud to her frequently as I feel she is still near to me.
Hearth and home
Gran said, ‘I can cook anything with feathers on except a shuttlecock.’ So she could. And she did. She was a brilliant cook. To come into the kitchen from the freezing cold of a winter’s day was heaven. Hot, newly baked bread filled the air with fragrance. Buns, cakes, pies, golden brown and delicious, baked in the iron oven at the side of the fire.
Often Grandad would have a glass of beer, thrust the poker into the fire, then, when it was red-hot, plunge it into the beer. It sizzled and flew, steamed and jumped. He called it mulled ale. I had some too, in my little glass. Whenever he drank I must drink with him, wherever he was I must be there.
The pantry was large and cool. On the floor stood earthenware jars of drinks: ginger beer, dandelion and burdock and lemonade all replaced each week by horse-and-cart delivery.
There was a fruit shelf; a huge dish held any fruit in season, always with a basket of apples at the side. High up on the top shelf were little jars, some with sheep’s wool to stuff in our ears when they ached in the icy wind and goose grease to rub on to shivering chests. Not that Gran trusted this completely, for I always had to wear a piece of camphor in winter, strung around my neck in a little cotton bag, like a talisman against Jack Frost.
There was also a dark room off the pantry where fish sometimes gleamed with phosphorescent light on a marble slab. If Dad had been out with his gun there would be a hare hanging in the shadows, a paper bag over its head to catch the blood, and there would be game and pigeon pies for dinner.
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Milk arrived at the back door by horse and trap. The milkman fished the required amount out of a large churn. A little bit of chat, a stroke of the horse’s nose and exchanging a few coppers made it a little occasion. It was more fun than picking up a plastic bottle from a supermarket shelf.
On washing day the kitchen was a hive of activity. Mrs Hobson came to do the wash. The boiler was stoked up with a roaring fire, the water steamed and bubbled, blue-bags were dipped into it to make the clothes whiter than white.
Huge zinc tubs were filled with soaking clothes or swished back and forth with a wooden clothes dolly, rubbed down a board for the dirty bits. Rinsed, then put through the mangle, turned by hand, and hung outside on the clothes line. God help us if it rained on Monday.
Mrs Hobson would take a mid-morning break. She would have a slab of homemade fruitcake, a piece of cheese and a glass of beer. I would keep her company with a beer in my small glass.
Ironing was done with flatirons heated on the fire. You picked one up with a cloth and spat on it to measure the heat and just kept changing one iron for another as they grew cold. What work, what hard work.
Off to the pictures
At home in Scunthorpe we had a tall, wind-up gramophone, and a piano which my mother had played very well. Once a week we went to the Palace Variety Theatre, but my real passion was the cinema, which we visited three or four times a week.
A little grey embroidered bag was filled with fruit and nuts to eat while watching Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Tim McCoy, or whoever was showing. It must have been hell to sit near me, as I sucked oranges and cracked peanuts out of their shells, and, worst of all, because they were silent films, the dialogue had to be read aloud to me.
When The Singing Fool came out we were breathless with excitement. We charged up the cinema steps as Mr and Mrs Barley came down.
‘Watzit like, watzit like? Can you really hear it?’
‘Well, yes,’ they said. ‘You can hear it. But it’s no good, it’ll never last.’
Thank goodness it did. I grew up to go by myself and to love the music and colour of Bebe Daniels in Rio Rita and Gold Diggers of Broadway. Every Saturday matinée I was there, subsidized by the sale of flowers and mint out of the garden from a barrow, to see the candle burning through the rope that would send a huge boulder crashing on to the heroine below. Or the long-haired beauty tied to the railway tracks, as the train emerged from the tunnel and Jack the lad would rescue her just in time. Or the gallant hero falling from the high window of a burning building. But he made it, and by the next Saturday he had dropped and caught on to the windowsill of a lower window. ‘Hooray!’ we all cheered with delight.
Nora Travis took me to see the first Frankenstein. I wore my navy-blue coat with bell sleeves. But it was all too much for me and I passed out as Boris Karloff rose up from the table and gazed through the screen straight at me.
I woke in the foyer in a pale-green Lloyd Loom chair.
The Variety Theatre was fun. Most turns performed against a backdrop of a street scene with a barrow piled with fruit, lots of bananas. Acts were numbered at the side of the stage and framed by light-bulbs. Coarse comedians, magicians, glamorous singers, a line-up of lovely leg-swinging girls and, usually, an act consisting of a lady with a hard face and several excited dogs, hysterical with excitement to be let out of their cages.
Whenever there was an act with a gun, one of the lady attendants would come to Grandad and whisper in his ear, ‘There’s a gun in the next one, Mr Foster.’
He would always say, ‘Take our Betty till it’s over, then.’
The ladies had a box for their retiring room and there I sat with them in their black dresses and frilly white aprons, as a red velvet curtain cut out the sound of the action. We all ate chocolates.
Oh bliss. If only they would do that to me today. I hate explosions in theatres. If someone brings out a gun I sit screwed up and lose all the next dialogue.
Once a real play came to town. A group of strolling players brought Uncle Tom’s Cabin. There was no theatre for them so they performed in the boxing ring below the railway lines. They were a family touring from town to town taking all their props and costumes in a woven skip.
Life must have been incredibly hard for those troupers in the 1920s.
Money must have been scarce, but we sat in the best seats and paid ninepence. The acting was wild and extravagant with many dramatic arm gestures. But it was from the heart and we cried a lot. Local children with blacked-up faces played extras, touching upon another world.
Baby Vickers comes to call
My wild father, Wilfred, would suddenly appear. Sometimes he lived with us. Sometimes he didn’t. He travelled to faraway places a lot, like Leeds or Manchester. Always, he came back loaded with gifts for me. Jewellery and sweets. So I would sit in front of a roaring fire, drape myself in necklaces of crystal, diamante and pearls, and eat gargantuan amounts of toffees and chocolates.
‘Let’s go to the pictures,’ Dad would cry, throwing me up into the air, so high I thought I would never come down. I screamed. Soon I was dressed in my latest outfit, a coat of rose-coloured cloth, fur tippet and white kid boots, and off we went to the cinema, not forgetting a bag of sweets.
Baby Vickers often came to call. She was blonde and beautiful and looked so cute with her Marcel wave. Her brief little dress of pale-green stockinet overchecked with black, and the long, long legs in pale-green silk stockings, strappy pale shoes with lavatory heels.
Oh lovely smiling Baby Vickers, I thought. I want Dad to marry you. I want you for my mother.
She brought her kid in a pram. The kid stood up and strained against the reins. I took a sharp intake of breath–she was wearing an ankle-length white fur coat. I was filled with envy.
I knew they were classy because they had fresh pineapple for tea. We only had tinned.
But although Baby wanted a husband, Dad didn’t marry her. Alas, she faded out of our lives.
Sweets and dresses
My favourite shop was just over the road. It was tiny, dark, with a step worn away by generations of children’s feet and a large brass bell on a spring which seemed to go on clanging for ever when it hit the door. This would bring Miss Tallentine out from the back parlour. She sailed into the shadowy shop like a warship defying the sea, her vast, jet-covered bosom thrusting towards the sweet jars.
My demands were brief–‘A ha’peth mixed’–as I handed over my halfpenny, then flung myself towards the paraffin bin. Climbing up on a ledge to the top of the big red bin I smelled and smelled paraffin, while Miss Tallentine solemnly screwed a square of newspaper into a cone, then went down the row of sweet jars taking one out of each until I had got my halfpenny worth. Coconut ice, cinder toffee, chocolate nougat, liquorice pipes, sugar mice, banana toffee…
She also had a wonderful lavatory at the bottom of her long garden. I had been there with a young visitor, and marvelled that it had a long seat, hanging over a cesspit, with four holes. There the whole family could start the day together. Squares of newspaper hung on a nail at either end, and the little building around the cesspit was completely covered with lichen, which seemed to sweeten the whole thing. Although there was a bucket of cinders with a shovel to sprinkle on the dirtier bits.
Bee’s Ladies’ Outfitters sold exclusive gowns.