However small my wardrobe I always had a party frock. It was an indispensable item, as all the girls in my street had a birthday party every year, and you had to go in a frock. Our everyday clothes were made of cotton and wool, but the party frocks were gloriously synthetic, with net petticoats under the skirt.

The first one I remember was 100% nylon, royal blue, with white lace trimmings. I wore it when I took part in the Sunday School procession as a ‘Flower Girl’. You could choose any flower you wanted and that your parents could get hold of. I chose my favourite – sweet peas. The grown ups seemed a bit surprised by this choice, but my Uncle Bill over the road grew them on his allotment so it was OK. My mother made me a posy to carry and struggled to thread the delicate flowers through my wispy hair. My friend Janet had made the more conventional choice of pink roses to match her party dress. The roses looked lovely against her brown curls, and remained fresh throughout the proceedings. Sweet peas of course were much less resilient. By the time my picture was taken after the procession, both I and the flowers had begun to wilt.

After that I got a pale pink party dress with bows on the waist at the front. I was photographed in it in a ballet pose, albeit a slightly droopy one – in Grade One Ballet I only got 8 out of 12 for ‘arms’, and my ‘adage’ was considered a little unsteady. Despite this poor report, ballet classes on Saturday mornings at Miss Groom’s Dancing School saved me from the emotional desert of Saturdays without my mother. Saturday was definitely the new Monday, as my mother left the house early to go and work in a dress shop in town, Barnett’s. She had worked there before marrying, and they let her go back part-time. It had probably paid for my party dress and even the ballet lessons, but I would rather have had my mother at home. My Dad did a valiant job of looking after me, but looking after a child in those days just meant dragging her along with you while you did what you had to do. So on Saturday mornings we trailed round wood yards while my father had indecipherable conversations with the proprietors. ‘I need a bit of fourbifour. And if you’ve still got that twobitwo I bought last week I’ll have another piece of that as well’. I just hung around, waiting for it to be time to go home for our dinner. It was always the same menu: ‘Do you want cheese on toast or egg and tomato chopped up in a cup?’ ‘Egg and tomato please Dad’.

Ballet was a definite improvement on the wood yards, especially as every year we did a Christmas show at the Grand Theatre. This was as close as I ever got to following in Aunty Rose’s footsteps. One year we had to make big green cardboard shamrocks to accompany ‘When Irish eyes are smiling’, moving them across our faces as we sang to reveal our big smiles. I took to heart the ballet examiner’s comment that I needed to practice more. I would put on my ballet shoes and the pink party dress and pretend to be dancing Swan Lake round the living room. My parents referred to me as ‘Fairy Flatfoot’, but I was not deterred. And the dress was resilient too, being pure nylon. I wore it for several years, until it was far too short.

Then I had a lucky break: Uncle Bill’s beautiful sister Jenny was getting married and she asked me to be her bridesmaid. I was in heaven. Of course I had to have a new dress, made specially. There were several fittings at the dressmaker’s as everything had to be perfect. The dress was a delicate pale blue, with tiny flowers decorating the top layer of nylon. I wore new white shoes and socks, and on the day of the wedding my hair was put up in a bun, with a headdress of tiny rosebuds. Jenny gave me a gold necklace to wear as well, and I could not believe that I got a present as well as being a bridesmaid. There were three other bridesmaids – Jenny’s elder sister Helen, a dark-haired girl called Susie who was a bit older than me, and a tiny girl whose name I can’t remember. Susie and I had the same style dress, while the little one just wore a white party dress and Helen was in pink satin. Helen’s dress was designed to be useful after the wedding for parties and dances, but she was very shy, and didn’t go out much. During the wedding preparations I got to know Susie a bit. She lived on a small-holding, and knew how to ride ponies. In the books I was reading the heroines all had ponies and were always going to gymkhanas, so I was very impressed by Susie. On the day of the wedding we walked down the aisle together and I imagined that we would spend the rest of the day talking and playing. The reception was in the Church Hall, and there was a meal. After that I looked round for Susie but I could not find her anywhere. Several hours later she reappeared – she had been to the airport to see the bride and groom off on their honeymoon. I had never been to an airport so I was bitterly disappointed to have missed that, and Susie. I wondered how it had happened. Perhaps despite the dresses Susie and I were not so alike after all, and perhaps she had just wanted to get away from her annoying acolyte.

A year later I wore the bridesmaid dress to my tenth birthday party with one of Aunty Maud’s cardigans on top – white this time. This was an altogether happier occasion. Wine and cheese parties were all the rage, so my Dad decided it would be a wine and pop party. All the bottles of pop were lined up on a table outside, and my Dad pinned a notice on the fence with a list of all the different types – dandelion and burdock, cherryade, orangeade and lemon. I think there was only one type of cheese – cheddar – but we did have it on sticks, with pineapple, as well as in slices, with cream crackers. And of course there was jelly, and cake. After we’d eaten, my Dad organised games – we threw table tennis balls into jars to win sweets, and he even made a treasure hunt for us in the garden, with real buried treasure, a jar of sweets. My little cousin Stella was a bit young for all this and kept getting in the way, but my Dad was very patient. In the photograph I am looking at Stella with a bemused smile, while my other cousin Karen is still looking a bit cross.

As they left to go home my friends asked me if they could borrow my Dad for their parties. On that day, in my bridesmaid dress and cardigan, I was definitely the luckiest girl in the world.

The red bobble jumper was another favourite. Like the cardigans, I wore it with my black and white kilt. It had white daisies embroidered round the neck, which was, of course, tied with two bobbles. In those days bobbles – on jumpers, on hats, on scarves – were all the rage, so my jumper was fashionable as well as cute.

It was a present from my Uncle Colin, not a real uncle, but a ‘friend’ of my grandmother’s. He was a regular visitor to our house, and quite often gave me presents, but I can still hear my mother’s anxious voice – ‘Don’t mention Uncle Colin in front of your grandpa’. So my lips were sealed. Uncle Colin had an aura of money about him. He bought the presents in an expensive children’s clothes shop in town called ‘Lindy Lou’. When I was very small I was often called Lindy Lou or Looby Lou after the song ‘Here we go Looby Loo, here we go Looby Light’ regularly sung on my favourite television programme, Andy Pandy. So for a long time I thought the shop was there specially for me. My mother loved to dress me in the things Uncle Colin bought from that shop. She would explain to her admiring friends ‘It’s from Lindy Lou’, but she didn’t explain about Uncle Colin.

My mother and I went to Uncle Colin’s house occasionally with my grandmother. The house was unlike ours and the other houses I knew – much grander, Edwardian, with heavy dark furniture softened by pale lavender brocade cushions. It had something of the mausoleum about it, as if the house, like Colin, was still grieving for his dead wife. The garden was a tangle of old roses and brambles, and I spent happy hours there searching for the secret door that would open on to another world. Around this time I was very taken by a story about some fairies losing the key to fairyland. The beautiful creatures pined and languished until some children found the key – a snowdrop – and rescued them. Colin’s garden became the scene for my re-enactment of this story. On every rose petal, every dewy spider’s web I imagined one of the fairies finding a temporary resting place, while like the children in the story I searched for the key and the door that would save them.

While I was saving the fairies, my grandmother was saving Colin, whose only solace apart from her was his black poodle Phil. I did think it was a bit funny that Colin seemed to have quite long conversations with his dog, but who was I to talk, with all those fairies dancing in my head? And it never struck me that there was anything odd about Colin’s place in our lives. Because of Colin I had something lovely to wear for the school photograph. With the photograph in mind my mother permed my straight hair, and for once the result was worth the hours of suffering. With the curls and the red bobble jumper I felt confident enough to muster a half smile for the camera.

 

 

 

Nana on the beach with Colin’s dog Phil. I am just visible in the distance, paddling, wearing a frilly costume and bow in hair.

My grandmother was a pioneer of holidays in Spain. In the early 60s she went there for one week every year with her sister Eva and her brother Alfie, never my grandfather. Occasionally Alfie’s Brighton friends Jack and Rafe would join the party. Jack and Rafe were hairdressers; they had taught Alfie a few tricks of the trade that he liked to try out on his sisters. He would dye their hair jet black and perm it in preparation for the Spanish holidays. My mother and I went to Alfie’s on the hairdressing days, as he liked to have an assistant. I would play in the back yard while my Nana and Aunty Eva were in the kitchen laughing and joking and smoking, with Alfie dousing their heads with chemicals and my mother trying in vain to tidy up the mess. The house was a small Victorian terraced place that had not changed much since my great grandmother lived there. I remember small dark rooms crowded with furniture and heavily curtained. But the kitchen was in an extension at the back, and full of light. When I came in from playing I would sit in the sun-warmed room with all the chaos of the perming around me and the strong smell of perming solution in my nostrils. I was later to be subjected to the torture of the home perm and its unpredictable results myself, so that smell is as reminiscent of childhood to me as the madeleines were for Proust.

 In Spain Nana, Eva and Alfie would sit in the sun all day, occasionally going for a paddle to cool off, and in the evenings they drank and caroused till the early hours. They did not visit the Alhambra or the Sagrada Familia, but we would usually get a postcard with a bullfighter or flamenco dancer embroidered on it in brightly coloured silks and a few words scrawled on the back: ‘Very hot here, having a lovely time. Love and kisses Nana’. Nana had to write her sister’s cards for her too because Eva had never learnt to read and write. When Nana came back I would get a present – a flamenco dancer doll one year, an earthy-smelling leather bag the next, and best of all, my Spanish blouse.

 The blouse was white with puff sleeves and neck gathered by red ribbons. Dancers in costumes from different regions of Spain were embroidered across the front. When I first got the blouse it was a bit big, so I kept it in a drawer and occasionally took it out to look at the dancers and imagine the foreign climes they inhabited.

None of my friends’ nanas went to Spain, or to the pub on their own, but for me all of this was just a normal part of being a nana. She was not the Mary Berry kind of grandmother who cooked delicious meals for the family and baked cakes. Her only culinary speciality was rock cakes that she could make very quickly by throwing the ingredients into a basin, whizzing them round with a wooden spoon and slapping blobs of the mixture on to a baking tray. They were not bad at all if you could get them fresh, before they had been in the tin for too long.

Nana liked to smoke, and drink and get dressed up, and was always looking forward to the next holiday or day out. The first time I went to France, in 1968, I took the Spanish blouse, and perhaps something of Nana’s adventurous spirit.

 

Audio version of ‘The Spanish Blouse’ read by voice artist Tanya Rich; www.tanyarich.co.uk