Waiting For Tomorrow

Waiting for Tomorrow

by

Hannah Brown..

Copywright 2014. Pauline Maguire.

Smashwords Edition.

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Camden Town, London 1975

I gaze down out of my second floor bed-sit window at the parked cars just off Camden High Street. I boil the water for tea and set out some biscuits. Then I light a cigarette and go back to kneeling up on my bed, arms on the window sill, tapping out ash through the slightly opened sash window as I wait for Alison to arrive. Alison is my kind stranger, the fifty year old woman who rescued me from the floor of the Waterloo Arms where I had all but collapsed. She’s coming to take me to a meeting. I’ve been to about five so far.I sit there scared to death, but listening and taking everything in, like a child at story time, as all these different people tell their various tales of lives wrecked on the perilous seas of booze, rescued in the nick of time, learning how to stay sober, a day at a time. I’m not really one for joining organisations but I have to admit, the first time Alison brought me, I was struck by the words of an ancient Scotsman who proclaimed that Nobody comes into these rooms by accident. This somehow embedded itself in my consciousness and I’ve kept on coming. I do feel better already. I notice things, like a child again: bird song, buds on trees, book shop windows: they call it the honeymoon period.

At the meetings people stand up and share their experiences. I can’t do that, not yet. I haven’t the confidence. I never had confidence. When I was a child, Little Brenda Wilson I was always told that confidence was the essential quality that I lacked. They were always telling me that, my parents. I’m two hundred miles away from them now. I haven’t got a telephone at the moment so I communicate with them only through weekly letters.I don’t tell them too much.They wouldn’t like to think of their daughter having a drink problem: alkies to them are people who gabble incomprehensibly to themselves in the street or guzzle gin secretly out of tea cups. My parents know how to drink properly, like ladies and gentlemen –no bottles of sherry in the afternoon for them.Alison understands: it's as good as having a shrink talking to her. I feel she really wants to know about me and how I got my life into such a mess. She told me in the beginning of how she had nearly ruined her own life, almost losing her career in a publishing company. As I wait for her to come, I realise I am beginning to see that little Brenda Wilson very clearly now. I can look at the details of her life and see the signs almost from the beginning. But I can only watch her, with her long dark curly hair,three years old knowing there is nothing I can do to stop her from turning into me.

Chapter One: Bradwood, Cheshire: May 1947

So there she is then, little Brenda Wilson, sitting at a dustbin, lunching off watery boiled potatoes on a saucer in the kitchen, with her blue-gre teddy bear on her lap and her mother at the cooker.There she is in the brand new empty house that she and mummy and daddy are going to live in now.They had said goodbye to Nanna that morning when the man had come with the van and carried all their clothes and her toys and some bits of furniture into it and she had sat on her mother’s knee at the front next to the driver. She is excited that she will have her own bedroom here. She has already taken Bruin the bear to see it: his deep brown glass eyes staring unseeingly as she gallops giddily through all the rooms, with the light streaming in through the bare casement windows, revealing from all angles, unfamiliar terrain – a row of houses like this one at the front and what appears to be a jungle at the back with grass grown high everywhere after the April showers and late spring sun.She hugs the bear: she is just as much in the dark as he is really,doing as she is told by mummy and daddy who know everything. Unbeknownst to herself, dear little Brenda Wilson, she already contains three years worth of their ideas and opinions as, day by day, they continue their inexorable trickle into her psyche, shaping her mind throughout the long dream- like trance of her childhood, like an intravenous drip. She touches the place on Bruin’s tummy where some cocoa had been spilt weeks ago.There is still a stain, even though Bruin has been washed and hung out on Nanna’s washing line to dry.

Brenda’s mother, Cissie:Ooh trust her to give me an awful name like that feels it is a miracle that there is a cooked meal at all on the dustbin for her husband Stan, coming home from work at twelve o’clock and wanting his dinner on the very day that they have moved into their brand new house.I’ll never settle here in this midden: it’snearly as bad as Gorston Bank and that’s saying summat.Gorston Bank is a locality unknown to Brenda, but the name is to become very familiar,continually evoked as being close to the nadir of desirable dwelling places. Not like Chadley, the village where Cissie had spent all her life and where Brenda had been born three years earlier, securely surrounded by mother, Aunty Betty and grandmother Daisy. She did not meet her father, who was away in the RAF,until she was eighteen months old, though,from the beginning, she is made to feel proud of him, as she looks at his young happy face and carefree smile under his perky uniform cap in the photographs. That’s our billet in Ismalia,there, ooh it were hot, horrible, really.Ooh, and the flies, huge things, got everywhere.

He had brought back a doll for his daughter, rouged cheeks, floppy limbs encased in soft green leather. For Cissie there was a small silver powder compact which had her name engraved on it and an Egyptian Nile boat etched on the front. Brenda resents him when he first comes back. He picks her up, tentatively, delightedly, this lovely little girl, his little girl whom he has been waiting all those months to see. But Brenda wriggles and squirms and squeals to get away from this interloper come to disturb their cosy female world. There was her mother’s sister, Aunty Betty, a widow at twenty six.Ooh, he were lovely, Steve, very refined, from down-south, Richmond –on -Thames ,but not toffee-nosed.Steve lives on, forever young, in numerous oblong black and white photographs in which Cissie, the matron-of -honour looks particularly beautiful to Brenda; shoulder-length, crimped blonde hair in a long, organdie dress with tiny rosebuds on it, whilst Betty peeps shyly from behind Veronica Lake wings, proud of the handsome uniformed figure beside her. Only three months later, he was shot down over Germany. Believing him to be missing at first, Betty was cruelly forced to wait months for the confirmation she had dreaded.Ee it were a terrible time for your Aunty Betty. I don’t know how she ever got through it, the not knowing, the palpitations every time there were a knock at door. And to think she’s with that devil now.All that swank just because he’s got a car. Looking down his nose at us, and if it wer n’t for his mother he wunt ‘ave owt. Hush Brenda, nothing for little girls.

After Demobilisation, in addition to Daisy, Cissie, Stan, Betty and Brenda, there wasWalter, Cissie’s younger brother, who had been a milkman since the age of fourteen, joined the Marines at nineteen and was now safely back home. The house, just off Chadley High Street was a three bedroomed semi-detached, built in the early 1920’s, rented by Daisy and her husband Wilf since 1925. Wilf had fought in the First World War and had returned from France incensed by the futility of it all. He had encouraged Daisy to follow his way of thinking, and both involved themselves actively in Labour politics.Wilf spent much of the time after the war out of work and Daisy, through her various cleaning jobs was the main breadwinner. The house had a bathroom, (unlike the smaller, terraced houses at the bottom end of the street) a small garden at the front and a larger one at the back where there was also a shed containing the mangle with huge wooden rollers, and a smaller shed for coal. The rent was eight and six a week. That could have been made into a lovely house, but she doesn’t care. As long as she can go off in her finery t’ th’Oak and that flaming guild, nothing else matters. I wish it was mine, though. I’d soon make it into a little palace.

Wilf had eventually found work as a bleacher in the local dye works, labouring for twelve hours a day, six days a week, until one day, in 1937, he arrived home at seven thirty, said he didn’t feel like any tea, went upstairs, then collapsed and died from an enormous heart attack at the age of forty nine. Daisy would mention him sometimes to Brenda, calling him your grandadshowing her a photograph of him in his army uniform. He was your mammy’s daddy, Brenda. He’d have loved to see a lovely little girl like you. Breaks my heart, it does, that he never will. Thought a lot about other people he did, went out of his way to help folks even though he’d nowt much himself. You could tell how well thought of he were though by ‘t number of folks who came t’t funeral, even a big noise fromt Bleachers and Dyers Union But he wunt have liked Uncle Walt going off t’t war He said to him once, I’d sooner cut your hands off meself as ‘ave you being sent to fight, ordinary working lads like yourself, just cos it suits them. Ooh he were very bitter, but he might have changed his mind if he’d lived on and known what that Hitler devil was like.

Cissie and Stan married in 1939 in late September, and after a brief honeymoon in Morecambe,returned to live with Daisy, Betty and Walt. Now they were all together again, albeit changed irrevocably by the events of the war.

Before Brenda was born, Cissie had been made the manageress of the steam laundry where she had been working since she was fourteen. She would tell Brenda proudly of this time "I had five girls under me.There was Joyce Hogg’s mother from’t quorp, Elsie and Gladys Lomax, Olive Lowe, and that Connie Mathers from over ‘t road."For a while, she had been other than a daughter, wife or mother. But now Stan was home, her nightly prayers having been answered, Cissie was quite prepared to devote herself entirely to him and Brenda. After all, he had bravely done his duty, been sent to those dirty, dangerous places and had survived, not like poor Betty’s husband. Stan is well aware of having done the right thing: No devil’ll call me yellow, not like that beggar Fox over the road, and that bigheaded Dawson, he’s another, bragging all over the Golden Lion how they got out of it, boasting how well they’d done whilst the rest of us were out there risking our lives.and knowing this gave a necessary boost to his self-esteem, now that he was back, and had no home except with his in-laws.

Happy though Stan was to be back, it was not exactly a return to the bliss of the few months he and Cissie had enjoyed together before the war. At least they’d had their own room then. Now there was a cot in it as well, the inhabitant of which seemed to wake up at unearthly hours even at weekends, demanding attention from its mother, attention that Stan might have dreamt would more properly be lavished upon himself after all those nights spent in far flung lonely billets thinking longingly of his new wife at home. Occasional slammed doors and angry whisperings remain lodged at the very bottom of Brenda’s rememberings.

Little by little they all begin to settle down and take up their lives again – Stan is back at the Engineering plant where he had worked before the war. Brenda and he are soon great friends: Stan takes time to talk to her and to read her stories in funny voices as well as making up some of his own, mostly about the tripehound, a girl known as Little May and the archvillainess, Dirty Daisy. Daisy was the name chosen long ago by his mother-in-law in preference to her given one of Maud. Now she is known as Daisy Bailey to everyone. Stan, partly because he knows that by merely uttering the phrase dirty Daisy, he will provoke Cissie into paroxysms of shushing in case her mother should hear, delights in his invention of this heinous character, promising further instalmentsfor Brenda’s amusement at every bed time.The stories serve to express his feelings about his mother-in-law in law in general, though specifically,her lack of interest in housework (the fact that she services two or three rather grander establishments each week,for all of two shillings an hour does not seem to count) and his disapproval of her having an active political interest in the Labour Party, which was anathema to him: Ruin the country those beggars will, kow-towing to the Russians all of a piece: that’s what it’ll be. They’re not statesmen, not like Churchill.

Benda is delighted by Stan’s stories and demands endless repetitions. Cissie is relieved they now get on so well and calls her a proper daddy’s girl. as Brenda listens to tales of dirty egg-white and orrible Iraq, places which had nevertheless impressed Stan by their magnificence, particularly Egypt as he describes to her how he had swum in the River Nile, seen crocodiles and camels,visited the mighty pyramids and was gazed upon by the enigmatic, all-knowing sphinx. Stan also liked to say he could speak some Arabic, showing off, trotting out his R.A.F. slang such as "see ya bahdin and bint, impressing Brenda who thinks it another wonderful example of the talents of her clever daddy.

Betty, working at Simone Modes in Stockport, was slowly beginning to recover from the loss of her husband – she had now been a widow longer than she had been a wife. Alf Minshull had been in the same class as Betty at school. He had always been attracted to her, and, initially, rejected by her. After having heard of her bereavement, he approached her one day with expressions of condolence, thus rekindling their friendship. Walt is back at the dairy, out in the cold dawn before anyone else stirs. Cissie stays at home with Brenda and Betty has to share a room with her mother.

After a year of living together, Daisy was eventually petitioned by Betty and Walt to ask Cissie if she, Stan and Brenda could move out as, now that the war was over and their lives were getting back to normal, they did not want to have to bring their friends back to an overcrowded, nappie-strewn house, and besides, being without a proper home might ensure they were re-housed all the quicker. Nanna’s shame at having to ask her daughter to leave was scarcely disguised, but she nevertheless reiterated to them all the reasons that had been given.It’ll be our Betty’s doing that will. Now she’s courting that stuck-up devil, she dunt want us ‘ere, but she ant the guts to say it herself.Cissie and Stan have their pride, and quickly find themselves digs fairly close by, living in the house of a Mr. Sutton, a widower in his late sixties. Cantankerous old devil!.Takes all that money off us and expects me to shop and cook for him as well. Well,I’ll do it, but only because I have to. Brenda is there, in Mr Sutton’s house, with mother and Nanna in a gloomy kitchen, Cissie standing at a table with her hand submerged deep into the interior of an unknown creature she was told was a (dead) goose. Ee, you want to keep some of that grease for her bad chest. It’s just the thing for bronchitis observes Nanna helpfully, as she chops up an onion for the stuffing. I’m not touching flaming goose grease, we’ve got Vic. Cissie replies firmly.

In early 1948, the letter the Wilsons have been waiting for finally arrives. They are to be rehoused.They are to be given a new three-bedroomed council house. Such tidings might be expected to have brought relief and joy.For Cissie Wilson,however, it is disaster. Her worst fears have been realised.

"Flaming Bradwood! I knew it. Just where I didn’t want to go.Stuck in the middle of bloody nowhere, and I don’t care if that is swearing. All them Stockportites‘ll be there. It’s not fair. Why couldn’t they have given us one of the older council houses in Chadley? We should have got our own house when we got married, Stan. They were two a penny then, nice houses to let. We could have had our pick but no, you and your mother and father knew better. Said they didn’t know what was going to happen with the war. They could have helped us if they'd wanted to. But no! they only thought about your Fred. Now look at us. And what about her? Our Brenda, living on that awful estate with all those rough, common people? There’ll be all sorts. All that BrentonVale lot, by the viaduct where the houses were bombed not to mention them from Gorston Bank. I hope they build a police station cos, I tell you, I won’t feel safe there. And there’s no school. No shops. Think of all the bus fares.Not that there’s any buses anyroad. Well I’m not going. I’ll stay at old man Sutton’s first. And my mother! She could have done something. I asked her to ask about that little house in Hetherall Street, just behind the church that were to let, but, oh no.Too busy at that flaming guild.

She’d have done it if her little Walty had asked though. Well she wouldn’t want him to leave, of course. But it’s just like her. Only thinks of number one."

I know, it’s not what you wanted, Ciss.But give it a chance. Go and look at the house. Just think, we’ll have our own bathroom, and three bedrooms, and they’ll soon build shops and schools, they’ll have to.Go and get the key and we’ll go and have a look on Saturday.

Well. I might have known you’d think like that. You won’t have to be there all day. It’s right near your work, and of course it’s got pubs, so you’ll be all right. There’s the Windsor and that dirty Unicorn. So it’ll be fine for you. At work all day and out with your cronies every night or off to see your mum and dad and Fred while I’ll be stuck in that common hole with her all day. And all night.

It won’t be that bad Ciss.We’ll be better on our own, just the three of us. We’ll be a lot better off without other folk there all the time.

It’s all right for you to say.

We’ll make the best of it, Ciss: there’s nowt we can do about it anyway. It’ll be alright. I’ll do lots of overtime. We’ll go on us holidays, and anyway, you never know, something’s bound to turn up. I’ve got a feeling, about coming up on the pools before very long. I’ve had such hard lines lately. Now I feel I’m near to getting it right. Then we’ll be back to Chadley in no time. One of those new semis, just behind the church, or in Didsbury. Maybe even Llandudno. We could get our own little business, perhaps a tobacconists. That ‘ould show em, especially that Alf Minshull, give him something to think about, and that Fox, with his big car.

There is nothing for it, then but for Cissie and Brenda to collect the keys from the council office in Chadley High Street. There was a long queue. Looks like we’ll be here all day. said Ciss resignedly. Yes, they certainly take their time. agreed the woman directly in front of them. She turned round, introducing herself to them. Maisie Burgess, probably a few years younger than Cissie, had a pleasant,unforced smile, neck-length rather fuzzy hair – a perm on it’s way out – no fringe, no make-up. She was much taller than Cissie who was just over five foot. The queue shortened sufficiently slowly for the two women to become acquainted, and to discover they were both to be re housed in Cornwall Road, next door but one to each other. Both came from Chadley although from different sides, and had not previously met. They soon voiced a mutual distaste for the Bradwood estate, both feeling that moving there indicated a step down in the world from where they should be. Maisie had brought her son, a fair-haired boy, taller than Brenda, but actually only six months older. Say hello to the little girl. said Maisie, but the boy backed away behind his mother’s back You say hello, Brenda coaxed Cissie,go on.

Come on Jeffrey, now don’t be silly. Both children remained silent. Then the dreaded, inevitable She’s a bit shy from Cissie.

Here, Jeffrey, give Brenda a sweet, said Maisie, no, don’t pick one out, offer her the bag. Brenda self-consciously takes a pink sugar jube jube from the sticky summit of assorted dolly mixtures in their white paper bag. Pink! says Jeffrey suddenly, mine’s green opening his mouth to display a garish green sweet flat on his tongue. Jeffrey! He then suddenly begins,with arms held horizontally in front of his chest, to shake both his hands very fast, at the same time pursing his lips as though preparing to whistle. Brenda thinks this is a wonderful thing to do and immediately starts to do likewise.His mother appears agitated by this, saying don’t you do that, Brenda: we’re hoping Jeffrey will grow out of it soon."

Ooh he’s alright. said Cissie. They were both alright, she decided and began to feel slightly less apprehensive about the move now that she knew there would be at least one other family ready to stand up against the dreaded forces of commonness.

Chapter Two

The benefits of living on the Bradwood estate actually outweighed the bad points for Stan. Most importantly, it was very near to his work as a labourer at Weiss Engineering, a Swiss-owned company that made flour-milling machines. Now he could come home for his dinner every day and did not have to spend time and money using buses. Weiss was situated in Grange Hill Road (alongside many other industrial work places including the Co-op dairy where Uncle Walt was based.) no more than three minutes walk from his new house on the new estate, a few streets built on former farm land between Stockport and Chadley to house the sudden growth in population after the war. Now the men are back in the work place and the women have been encouraged to see the benefits of taking up their pre-war roles in the home, to fulfil again their traditional function as wives and mothers.They’re just greedy them women who want to go out to work. Especially when they’ve got kiddies. Shunt have them if they can’t be bothered to look after them. Taking jobs off men, that’s what it is. It were different int war.

For Cissie, living in Bradwood is everything she has dreaded, though looked at objectively, even she would admit it was quite a pleasant house, roomy and clean, three bedrooms, dining room and lounge, all newly decorated Ee, you might know, flaming distemper,that’s good enough for us and a garden at the back and front. Brenda loves the unaccustomed spaciousness of it all.All those rooms just for the three of them.She is especially enchanted by the back garden, an untamed wilderness, grass growing way above her head.She and Jeffrey, with whom she very soon becomes reacquainted,run joyously through both their gardens, playing hide-and –seek and jungles. Their time in paradise will soon be curtailed however, as Stan and Maisy, who it seemed was the practical one in their family, (her husband, Herbert being a gentle, dreamy sort of man, a piano tuner from Acton originally, who spends his spare time reading books about explorers) are determined that chaos must be civilised. Gardens must be created. Good examples must be set.

There were three outbuildings set along the passage opposite the back door: an outside lavatory, a coal shed which you had to remember to leave unlocked on coal delivery day, else several sacks full would be dumped on the front path for Stan to shovel away, and a shed, meant for gardening tools but, for Brenda, a house,castle, school room or hiding place.Yes I know there’s nowt wrong wi’th ‘ouse, If only we could move it away from here and put it in Chadley.

The location was certainly bleak: houses constructed with a terrible uniformity set in a virtual wasteland with only a small grocers – too damn dear I’d go all the way to Chadley as pay them prices-and a pungently smelling hardware shop with its fascinating array of firelighters, coal bricks that glistened like Rowntrees black fruit pastels, side by side with mysterious coal eggs -the only shops within walking distance. All the roads had been given the names of Southern English counties – Dorset Road, Devonshire Avenue, Somerset Drive, and Cornwall Road, where Brenda and her family lived. Cissie feels herself to be a prisoner in Bradwood. It was a bus ride away from Chadley Heath where Stan’s parents lived, a long walk and a bus ride to Chadley and a longer bus ride to Stockport. Bradwood wasn’t really a settlement at all. It certainly did not contain any of the components that might enable it to call itself a village: the most it could aspire to was to describe itself as a suburb of Stockport. Officially Bradwood was classed as being part of Chadley Hill though everyone knew it wasn’t really, particularly the fortunate folk who actually did live in Chadley Hill.

Within a few months shops were built: a small parade of six, at the top of Cornwall Road. There was a fish and chip shop: Ee, not a patch on Mawsons. McDade’s, the grocers, hardly ever patronised by Brenda’s family.Look at all them kids, like little steps, five of them all under six. They’re all very clean though, and well behaved. The eldest one goes to St Gabriel’sThe main reason that they didn’t shop at McDade’s though was not through any display of overt sectarianism but because of their almost total reliance on the Quorp which seemed to supply all their earthly needs. Groceries from the travelling van every Thursday and Saturday, milk and coal which were also delivered, clothes and household goods from the big branch in Stockport. Even after death, the Co-op Funeral Service was there, offering divi as small consolation to those left behindThe divi was the whole reason for shopping at the Co-op, that and the fact that goods did not have to be paid for all at once, but could be spread out over time.Getting it off my book. was how Cissie referred to such purchases.

Carson’s the post office (the sweet shop to Brenda), and Taylor’s the greengrocers The penultimate shop was Halls, the drapers, a fascinating place, this: its dark interior festooned with tea towels, boxed handkerchiefs, embroidery silks in subtle shades Brenda had never imagined, floral print dresses, pastel cardigans, sometimes even fluffy angora ones whose soft furry texture she could not resist stroking, Chilprufe vests, flannelette night-dresses,knickers,some delicate, wispy in pastel-shaded satin next to enormous salmon coloured bloomers like Nanna wore, floral pinnies, full-length and short, and Liberty bodices, as well as the myriad cards of elastic, rick-rack, Kirby grips, buttons, hooks and eyes and safety pins.There were wools too, of every hue, some in long skeins that would have to be wound by hand, and others neatly rolled already in such satisfying diagonal patterns it seemed a pity to disturb them for the mere purpose of instructing the apprentice knitter: then, Alice bands, cotton bobbins and sanitary towels, these last hurriedly pushed into Cissies bag. It’s nothing for little girls.

The last shop in the row was Mrs Renshaws the confectioners. This was the one that Cissie used for the spam, brawn or corned beef thatStan needed for his snack, and which, often was the content of the evening meal – tea - on Thursdays when the housekeeping money was all but gone.enlivened by a dollop of H.P. sauce or mustard. If, though this happened rarely, guests were expected, then a quarter of boiled ham would be bought. Special treats for Brenda from Renshaws were little fruit pies, blackcurrant or apple with soft swirly, synthetic cream on top.

The families of the Bradwood estate did not have to rely totally on the shops for their domestic needs, for these were supplemented, every Thursday by the Co-op van, driven by cheery Joe Read. All the ladies loved his little quips (and something to keep him sweet, eh, girls.) He would return on Saturday lunchtime for his money Now, what did the old man give you last night girls? Well, just you wait till tonight, specially if County win. Shocked chuckling: Oo, he’s a cheeky beggar, but you have to laugh..

Cissie bought meat twice a week from Tony the butcher who journeyed on his bike from the shop near Grandma Wilson’s house that Stan’s family had used for years. On Tuesday Cissie would buy one large and two small lamb chops, pork sausages for Wednesday and a quarter of potted meat which Stan would sometimes have for his midday dinner. Other times Cissie would give him cooked Cheshire cheese to be eaten with toast.This meal, like kippers was something that only Stan was given.Ooh no, you’d choke our Brenda, that’s not for little girls.

When Tony came on Friday, he would bring the small skewered joint of pork, lamb or beef for Sunday and Stan’s Monday sandwiches and a half-pound of mince for Monday, which had to be cooked in advance, laid out on a plate and kept in the walk-in larder with the milk and butter.

As well as the travelling tradesmen there were other seasonal visitors who would trudge hopefully around the area. These included a very old, wispy white-haired tramp whom Cissie christened Job. She always told him to wait, and then made him sandwiches that she put in a greaseproof paper bag. There was also a Sikh who came round, perhaps twice a year. Brenda watched ,fascinated, as he opened his enormous suitcase displaying shirts, ties, blouses, scarves. Stan bought a wide grey tie once from him whilst Cissie and Brenda were out. Cissie laughed and called him a spiv. There was Mr Brunt the cobbler who had a clubfoot, encased in its shiny built-up shoe as, every Friday night, he hobbled up the path. And there were the gypsies who turned up twice a year. They were usually women, their faces orange-hued, made up like chorus girls, wearing long, brightly-coloured frilly skirts. Cissie always bought some artificial flowers off them. She told Brenda it was bad luck not to give a gypsy something, and they had had enough of that moving to Bradwood.

Most of Cornwall Road was comprised of private dwellings, built in the nineteen-twenties- on Brenda’s side of the road there were, in fact, only six council houses. The first one was tenanted by George and Marta Mason. Marta was Dutch: George had met her when he was stationed in Rotterdam. She spoke perfect English. Ooh, am not that struck on foreigners they’re not the same as us, are they?Marta smoked openly in the street, thus ensuring her inclusion in Cissie’s ever widening common category.

Brenda’s family lived in the second one, the Burgess family in the fourth one. A middle-aged couple, the Vernons; Rhona and Bill and their son Stewart, a trainee draughtsman at Weisses, engaged to be married, occupied the third one. All three worked, and Cissie’s contact with them was solely on the level of passing comments on the weather. Opposite to the Burgesses.in the Council houses was an elderly widow, Doris Newton, who seemed to spend her summer days sitting on the front step, huge legs splayed wide, under a voluminous printed cotton dress, waiting to have a gossip with anyone who passed by. Further proof that the behaviour to be encountered on the estate was not what Cissie and Maisy had been used to.

Within a short space of time, the two women, between them, had soon sorted out the names and origins of practically every family in Cornwall Road and even further into the estate. Some they knew as being old Chadley people who had gone to their schools or had been acquaintances of their various siblings.Talking to them had widened her knowledge of the rest, allowing them to categorise the inhabitants as minutely as it was possible to do in a village.They knew who were Catholics, through the schools their children attended or just by their names. At least one family were Jewish.She’s a smart looking girl, that Sandra. Goes to private school. He’s a typical Jew-boy though.

There was an old Polish woman, who Rosie Henshall from next-door-but-two said was a witch. "She said a