Living on the Rainbow's Edge.

Introduction.

This story has been sitting up and begging to be written for a number of years now. All that held me back was exposing my siblings to ridicule and embarrassment. Like the coward I have always been, I took the easy way out; I would alter the names and just enough of the circumstances so that we could be any number of families. The timing was right, the many families in our position were battling to keep their heads above water in the slump that followed the 2nd World War.
Many more erudite writers than myself have documented this era, but what was it exactly like to live in such times? Probably much the same as many families living on the pittance they receive nowadays, either from benefit hand-outs, or just struggling to make ends meet.

My story is not just about poverty or the effects it had on my family, although it did shape the dynamics of the family in later years. It’s more about attitudes. Hopes, dreams and expectations ground into the dust of sheer drudgery. These were the things that drove a wedge through my family and left me an outcast between two different points of view. I read a lot; I can get through four books in one week. There is still money to be made from the tales of people who remember hardship and living with an empty belly.
There is a certain satisfaction from reading about the ragged girl who went on to build an empire. “Bullshit!” For every one person who made it good, there were hundreds who never knew any better or moved on to greater things.

I wasn’t aware of being poor or coming from a humble background, to me we were all the same. Yes, there were a few families with more than us, but they were in the minority and didn’t count, they were just luckier than us. As for that tired old line of seeing rich houses and well-off children, we never even got as far as that. They lived in one world and never should the twain meet, at least not until Grammar school, but I’m jumping ahead of myself.

It was the unlikely marriage of my parents that set us apart from our peer group and as I continue this I hope that all will be made clear. I am looking at this in retrospect, of course, what young child can ever see the shifting patterns of their life? If we were cleaner and better mannered than our contemporaries, it didn’t show for many years and by then I and my siblings were aware of a large gulf between our parents. The effects were both positive and negative at the same time, for who can perch forever on the edge of a rainbow and not see the shifting colours?

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Chapter 1.

Sunday lunch was the smell of overcooked cabbage and Billy Cotton’s band show on the radio. It permeated the walls of our tiny rented house and seeped out into the drab streets, trailing the sense of apathy behind it. Puffy clouds of cooking fires leaked into the grey skies of a raw February day, sending small children with chilblains on their hands and feet to huddle round a meagre fire. Mothers in drab worn-out clothes pushed them out of the way as pots boiled and bubbled on old black ranges centred around the listless fires.
Several children huddled together in worn blankets around an empty fire grate waiting for their parents to come home from the social club, which had been built for the newly formed steelworkers. Men who sweated all day, six days a week on twelve hour shifts wanted a few pints with their wives before facing the same old meal of boiled cabbage and bacon. They would slump in their shapeless jumpers on an equally shapeless sofa while the women bent to light the greasy range in preparation for a late meal.
It was different in our house, with mother basting a fatty shoulder of lamb as my elder sister, Nicola, peeled mounds of potatoes and I helped to stir the lumpy mass of cabbage. With six hungry bellies to fill a ballast of potatoes went a long way.
I was daydreaming as usual when mum clipped me round the ear,
‘Take it off the boil Liz, you’re wasting half of it.’
I couldn’t see much to waste, not with a dash of bicarbonate of soda making it mushy, but dad wouldn’t eat it any other way.

We gathered around the kitchen table like vultures stalking a dying man in the desert. It was never a sense of family unity that made us eat that way, rather that it was easier and less cramped than using the “best room”. I watched avidly as mum carved the skinny, fatty joint. The leaner pieces went to dad and my elder brother Ted, as working men they got the lion’s share. It didn’t bother me that much, fat was tasty and filling, but I knew that both Nicola and my little sister Sandra hated it.
Mum never ate much, I remember wondering at the time how she still managed to get so fat, but that problem was resolved in a few months time. My greedy eyes were fixed on the remaining plates, with luck I would get to eat the scraps left over. ‘Skinny Liz’ my family called me, however much I managed to scavenge I never put on an ounce in weight, but who did in those days? I would gladly have picked the remaining meat off the bone, but it was destined to become tomorrow’s watery stew.
Meals were always the same, day in, day out, I could tell the day of the week by the meals we ate. Sunday was either a shoulder of lamb or if money was tighter than usual it would be a joint of boiling bacon. Either way it had to last at least three days. The shoulder of lamb was carved carefully so that enough was left for the Monday dinner. That consisted of a few slices of cold, greasy meat with mashed potatoes and a tin of peas. Tuesday was a weak stew made up of the lamb bones with root vegetables and some pearl barley to pad it out. Wednesday I would go to the shops with my mother and my little sister in our old pram. She could walk but the journey was too long, about a mile away to buy a tin of corned beef and some fish for Friday. I liked the shop as it stocked a lot of goods and was the cheapest around our neighbourhood. Sometimes you could get a knuckle of bacon really cheap and that would make a filing stew. Most times though mum would buy the tin of corned beef and some fresh fish for Friday. It was here we bought the pearl barley and anything else that could flavour a stew.
Wednesday we ate a single slice of corned beef with the ubiquitous potatoes and carrots, most from our garden depending on the season.
Thursday we ate scraps or a vegetable stew. Friday was our treat with fish in parley sauce and potatoes with margarine. Saturday was a bit of bacon with tinned tomatoes mopped up with bread.
Mum made the bread on Sunday and again on Wednesday. I loved the smell of it as it came out piping hot from the oven. Bread was the staple part of our diet along with beef dripping which we bought at the “John Bull” store. Breakfast was porridge made with part milk and water. Supper was bread and beef dripping. I can still remember after all those years the taste of it and how it filled us up.

So why do I remember food more than anything else in those early years? In a large family food was the main thing as it became a ritual to our family life. I remember rice puddings and blackberry jam, mainly because we all went out to pick blackberries in late August and sometimes in September. We had a small house with a tiny garden but mum made every inch count. She grew peas and kidney beans along with carrots and onions.
I remember the days when we picked the peas, our mouths watering with the smell. We had a neighbour who was lucky to have an apple tree so we bargained to make apple pies and blackberries in late summer. Our kidney beans were the pride of the street when greens were so hard to come by. Cabbage was cheap but so boring and I remember mum trading beans for other food like potatoes and occasionally a tiny scrap of meat.
Stale bread was used with raisons to make bread pudding and to this day I still love the taste of bread pudding. Rice pudding with a dollop of blackberry jam was a Sunday evening treat. I still love shelling peas with their lovely aroma reminding me of days gone by. One thing my mother grew without thought for food was a rose. From early May into November they would blossom in profusion. From deep red to pink, white to yellow they would spill over the vegetable beds and perfume the air with a sweet longing I can never truly describe.
It was if she needed that one touch of sweetness to carry on going through the years of hardship and loneliness, for I know now, much too late that her bluff exterior held a heart full of the joy of life and nature.

I wonder now, many years since she passed away, whether she had any pleasure out of life in those days. I remember her laughing and sometimes singing when she went about her daily chores. In the still small hours of night when I miss both her and my father I wonder what their lives would have been like if they had married people nearer to their own expectations?
I would not have been born, of course, and neither would my siblings have entered this world except by different circumstances. It’s a sobering thought, but yet I wonder whether we would have risen so far in life without my mother’s courage and my father’s hard work?
They were chalk and cheese though. Marriage was a bitter disappointment to them both, though I had to grow up a lot before I understood the nature of their incompatibility.
Sex came into the equation. It was hard not to ignore it when walls were thin and I shared a bedroom with my other two sisters. My elder brother had his own room, a tiny box-room. It was years before I found out he was my half-brother, not that it made any difference to our family life. It did explain some of my father’s jealously of my mother though
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Personally I still find it hard to comprehend. Both my parents had been married before. My mother married at the age of seventeen, just before the start of World War 2.She lost two babies during the war years. There was never enough food to go around and both babies had severe bronchitis. Her last child, my half-brother Edward (Ted), nearly died after he was born, but somehow he made it through, though he was to fight against asthma and bronchitis every winter. She became a war widow at just 22 years old, still working to keep both her child and her mother. Life wasn’t easy and the rationing following the war lasted well into the next decade.
My father also had a rough time during the war years, but his was down to much different circumstances. He married young and had two children by this marriage. He didn’t fight during the war, he was far too valuable as a heavy goods driver and mechanic. He drove tanks and other vehicles onto the ships going into the fighting. Then there were the secret missions with troop movements not even known to him until the last moments. He was never home and couldn’t have kept his wife informed of his movements. Secrecy was just as important in Britain as abroad. Like many a lonely woman, his wife turned to other men, in particular the Americans that were stationed in Britain with all the glamour of their smart uniforms, the luxuries they could spread around, and, of course, they were going into the thick of the war zones. My father felt that difference as a thorn in his side. The one thing that he was good at made him seem a coward to other men. Even those who he transported at dead of night.
By the end of the war he was disillusioned in more ways than one. His wife had been a little too friendly with the American soldiers, leaving him a victim of venereal disease. While divorce proceedings were underway he met my mother again. They had been childhood friends and both sought comfort in a relationship that was familiar.
They were married as soon as his divorce came through. Two lonely and hurt people clinging together after the ravages of war had left them both perhaps too vulnerable.
Of course I learnt more of these things later on in life. I was the second girl of my parents marriage, born in 1952 when people accepted hunger and poverty as a way of life. I had a mother and a father and if they rowed sometimes, well that was normal in the neighbourhood I was brought up in.
In the meantime I was just another kid doing her best to make what I could from life. I had an older brother and sister who looked out for me. Though I may have gone hungry now and then, I was warm, dressed in knitted jumpers and skirts cut down from adult clothing. I had my own shoes which was a luxury only a few people could afford. My younger siblings were yet to be born. I accepted my way of life as the norm. Why should I have expected anything different? Things were about to change though and not for the better.

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