Jacky Daydream Read Online Free PDF Page B

each other was
Fathead
, and that was said in terms of mild irritation, nothing more. They weren’t a demonstrative couple at all. I didn’t ever see them kiss or cuddle or even hold hands. I knew they slept in the same bed because I was allowed to jump into it when Gongon got up to make their early morning cup of tea.
    I’d cuddle up with my sleepy grandma until Gongon came back with the big wooden tray and two green china cups of tea and the biscuit tin. He’d give the tray to Ga and clamber carefully back into bed, and then we’d sit up and they’d sip their tea and we’d all nibble custard creams from the tin. They kept the same tin throughout my childhood, replenishing it from Woolworths’ loose biscuits counter every couple of weeks. It was orange and yellow and black, a sunset scene with dark silhouettes of buildings against the evening sky. Every time I go to an antique fair I look for that particular tin design. It must be out there somewhere!
    Then my grandpa would go off to the bathroom to shave with his bristle brush and cut-throat razor, going ever so carefully
round
his trim moustache, while my grandma wriggled into her corsets. I wasn’t supposed to watch but of course I peeped at her from under the blankets. I was fascinated by this large, prawn-coloured garment, so different from my mother’s silky camiknickers and suspender belt. My mum had brassieres too, stitched into two rigid pyramids. She left one at the end of the bed each night, and when my dad was being rude, he’d poke the ends with his finger, denting them. My grandma’s corset didn’t seem to allow for two bosoms. It compressed my grandma’s chest into one large upholstered cushion.
    Ga kept her dressmaker’s dummy in the little box room with her treadle sewing machine. I’d play games with the dummy and sometimes hug her. She felt
exactly
like my grandma in her corsets.
    Cassandra and Rose in one of my favourite books,
I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith, pretend that their dressmaker’s dummy is a genteel friend called Miss Blossom. Ga’s dummy didn’t have one personality; she played multiple parts in the theatre of my imagination. One day she’d be a fairy queen, the day after she’d be a mermaid, then she’d be my sister, or a big monkey, or my very special best friend.
    I didn’t have many real friends when I was at Fassett Road, though there are photos of me playing with various children who came to tea. We are wheeling my pram, sitting on my trike, squatting in my sandpit by the French windows. I am the Persil child, smiling in my dazzling white sunsuit, my white socks, my white sandals. I got told off if I marked my socks or scuffed my shoes or spilled orange squash down my beautifully ironed dress. I didn’t have a proper bath every day. This was a once-a-week ordeal with red carbolic soap and lots of scrubbing, and if I whined when the shampoo went in my eyes, I was given a good shake. I had a daily ‘wash-down’, shivering on the bathroom mat, and my nails were cleaned and clipped until my fingers tingled.
    I was a reasonably well-behaved child, though as my mum said, I had my moments. If I was naughty , I was sent upstairs to bed. If I was being really irritating, I got smacked too. Parents smacked their children without any guilt or remorse in those days. It was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I never got really
hurt
. My mum just gave me a slap on the back of my legs or on my bottom. My grandma gave me a light tap if she caught me with a finger in a pot of her delicious home-made raspberry jam, or picking holes where her kitchen plaster was peeling. My grandpa didn’t get involved enough to smack. I asked Biddy if Harry ever smacked me. I was frequently frightened of him, right up to the day he died in his fifties, but I couldn’t remember him hitting me.
    ‘He hit you once when you were little, and it worked a treat,’ said Biddy. ‘You were standing up in your cot one evening, howling and howling,