A Spoonful of Sugar Page 2

  Goodness only knows what pain my mother suffered giving birth. Not that she would have discussed it with us or anyone else. What went on in her bedroom remained strictly between herself and the maternity nurse, with Father banished downstairs to avoid the gruesome reality and us children packed off to stay with a relative.

  Back in those days, women were confined to bed for at least ten days after giving birth. This was known as the lying-in period. I still find it hard to believe that some women are now discharged from hospital just forty-eight hours after giving birth. Don’t they deserve more time to rest?

  After ten days’ bed rest and recuperation for Mother, we were finally allowed to come home.

  The door to my parents’ bedroom swung open as I pushed it, and my excitement bubbled over. “Where’s the baby?” I gasped in a fever pitch of emotion.

  An angry face loomed into view: Nurse Evans, the maternity nurse. She was a short, dumpy woman in her fifties, wearing an apron and hat, and radiating disapproval. “Hush, child,” she hissed. “You’ll wake him up.”

  But her words were lost on me.

  Because there, nestled in his wicker Moses basket, lined in mauve cotton and organza with delicate mauve bows, was quite simply the most exquisite thing I had ever set eyes on.

  “Oh,” I breathed in wide-eyed wonder.

  “She is a he,” said my mother, smiling, when she spotted my face. “Meet your baby brother, David.”

  The world turns on tiny things. It’s not so much the outstanding events that have influenced my life. It may sound absurd but, though hearing we were at war with Germany, witnessing the devastation of the blitz, and the jubilant crowds on VE-day were all moments I shall never forget, the most life-altering of all was when I set eyes on baby David.

  I swear my heart skipped a minute’s worth of beats.

  My other brothers’ births simply hadn’t made the same impact on me because I had been too young to remember them or to help out. But now I was old enough to see clearly what a miracle I was witnessing.

  Dressed in a white cotton gown, David was just a tiny little scrap of a thing, no bigger than a porcelain doll.

  Any lingering disappointment I may have had over not having a baby sister melted away when he snuffled and sleepily opened his eyes. The little creature fixed his dark blue eyes on mine and I was done for, hook, line, and sinker.

  “Can I hold him?” I asked, utterly mesmerized.

  A thunderous voice piped up from the corner of the bedroom.

  “No! He’s not to be woken,” Nurse Evans muttered through thin lips.

  But even a cranky old nurse couldn’t stem the unspeakable joy that flooded through me. Was it his delicate fair lashes that swept over creamy cheeks, the little murmurs and sighs he made when he slept?

  Or was it the way his tiny fingers curled round mine and the beautiful musky smell that filled my nostrils when I kissed his soft, downy hair?

  No, the thing I loved most about David, and every baby I cared for after him, was his heartbreaking innocence and vulnerability.

  Adults are complicated, contrary beings, capable of hurting or betraying you. But babies are simple, sweet, and full of love.

  Many great things were invented, created, or begun in 1930, the year David was born: helicopters, FM radio broadcasting, the jet engine, and construction on the Empire State Building, to name but a few; but to my mind the greatest creation ever was my baby brother.

  That “baby” may now be eighty-three but we still share a bond that I know was created in those precious early days.

  From that moment on, I cared for David as if my life depended on it. My mother had only to issue a simple request and I was there. Nothing was too much trouble.

  I fed him his bottles, helped bathe him, changed his cloth nappies, sterilized his glass feeding bottles, and spent hours singing him lullabies.

  When he cut his first tooth, I helped ease the pain of teething by giving him an ivory ring to chew on or dashing to the shops to buy him Allenburys rusks. When he was ready to be weaned, it was usually me gently feeding him gruel, or porridge, as we call it now.

  Most of all, I loved gently picking him up out of his warm, cozy nest to feed him his evening bottle. He was so sweet and drowsy that his little rosebud lips would begin sucking before the bottle was anywhere near them. Then, like a little lamb, he would hungrily latch on and suckle. I witnessed a small miracle every evening at 6:00 PM.

  That little boy flooded my heart with love every time he nestled into my chest and fell asleep on me; and when I gently put him on my shoulder to wind him and he gave a soft milky burp, it did so make me chuckle.

  Those days exist in my memory as a warm and rosy glow. Little did I know it then, but they sparked a lifelong love for children.

  Every day was filled with magic and promise.…

  If home is where the heart is, then at the heart of my home were my parents. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more devoted couple than Doris and Arnold Ashford. I often wonder what the secret to their success was, but all I know is that in forty-five years of marriage they could hardly bear to leave each other’s side.

  My mother was a gentle soul, a quiet, loving woman devoted to her husband and six children. Women had only won the right to vote in 1928, seven years after my birth, and traditional attitudes toward women still prevailed. Married women were not expected to work. It never occurred to any of us that Mother should leave the home and actually get a job—nor to my mother either, I suspect.

  She was never happier than on the Saturday afternoons we spent sitting round a crackling coal fire in the sitting room, with Henry Hall’s BBC Dance Orchestra playing on the gramophone accompanied by the clicking of her knitting needles.

  My mother had six children pretty much one after the other, so she seemed to me to be constantly either pregnant or nursing a baby. But every so often my father would insist on sweeping my mother to her feet so they could dance round the sitting room.

  “Dance, Bobby?” he’d inquire, gathering her in his arms.

  I often wondered why he called her Bobby. It was only years later I discovered that Mother had contracted Spanish flu before she had us children and was really rather ill. The flu hit England in 1918, just after the end of World War One. It was a worldwide pandemic and fifty million people died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.

  Poor Mother was so ill all her hair fell out, and after that it never grew past her shoulders so she always wore it in a bob, hence the nickname. I thank goodness she was strong enough to survive. She was one of the lucky ones.

  Maybe this made Father love and cherish my mother all the more. Their eyes would lock and they would smile tenderly at each other, a secret little smile of understanding that left me breathless with wonder.

  It saddens me a little to think that I never found that love for myself, but I don’t dwell on it. I prefer to think instead that the love they gave to me enriched my whole life. Besides, I was too busy with my babies.

  Doris and Arnold were so potty about each other they insisted on having every Sunday afternoon by themselves, with us children packed off to the garden. We knew better than to try to disturb them. I wasn’t short of playmates, though. Besides me there were my elder sister by thirteen months, Kathleen, and my four younger brothers: Michael, Basil, Christopher, and baby David.

  The whole essence of my childhood and, in my opinion, the key to any happy childhood is simplicity.

  BECAUSE MY DAYS WEREN’T FILLED WITH television, computer games, and constant activities, my siblings and I learned to use our imaginations. Sometimes children need to be bored in order to stimulate themselves. Except with five siblings for company, life was anything but boring.

  Michael was the musical one, always tinkering around on an instrument. His hard work paid off, as in later life he became a stage manager for the musical Oliver!

  Poor Christopher and Kathleen always suffered with their health, so they seemed to
spend a lot more time inside, with Mother fussing over them. I did so feel for my siblings. They were wrapped in cotton wool and had cod-liver oil rubbed on their chests daily by Mother. It seemed like a simply horrible thing to be so weak. I was so robust and untroubled by illness; and looking back, I’m sure I took my good health for granted.

  That left me, Basil, and, as soon as he could run, David to charge around the garden with. I begged my only sister to join us in our adventures, but she always had her head stuck in a book.

  “Oh, do come outside,” I urged one day. “We’ve got a wizard game of hide-and-seek going on.”

  Kathleen stared at me from over the top of What Katie Did Next. “Can’t you see I’m busy reading?” she said with a sniff.

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and grinned, galloping out the door and down the stairs. I couldn’t for the life of me see what was more fun than hide-and-seek. Books were dull. The real adventures were to be found outside in the fresh air.

  Try as I might I just never could apply the same tight restrictions and self-control that Kathleen governed her life with.

  Books and study weren’t my bag, oh no. If there was a tree to be climbed, a stream to be waded through, or a field to be explored, you could bet I’d be flushed with excitement in the thick of it with my brothers. Why should boys get to have all the fun?

  While Kathleen was losing herself in literature, I was usually to be found tearing through the vegetable patch wearing a headdress, whooping at the top of my voice, and pretending to be an Indian or a cowboy. Kale, cabbages, and carrots were trampled underfoot as I ran hollering after my little brothers.

  I loved our house, but as a child the garden was one giant adventure playground, designed to feed my vivid imagination.

  The rockery in the front garden, which was usually ablaze with color, was not simply a place to cultivate alpine flowers. To me it was a mountain to be scaled, an ideal lookout for a surprise enemy attack. The kissing gate at the end of a lavender-lined path was the perfect spot to launch an ambush on an unsuspecting little brother. The rose garden in the back garden? Why, a training camp for spies, of course. And the fields, or roughs as we called them, which backed onto our house, were a wild territory to roam for hours on end, with streams to dam, blackberries to pick, and frontiers to conquer.

  My mother never worried about us when we played out there, sometimes for a whole day. In fact, she made us some cheese sandwiches and packed us off out to the roughs. Out there, we could be anyone we wanted to be—an explorer, a nurse, a train driver.…

  It’s so different for children today. I daresay most poor parents are simply too frightened to let their children out unsupervised, what with the ever-present threat of strangers. I do so feel for modern parents and the constant pressures they are under. Stranger danger simply wasn’t there in my day.

  But the delicious smell of Mother’s homemade Queens of Pudding, my favorite confection of bread crumbs baked with jam and covered with meringue, crept out from the kitchen, over the fields, and soon had us haring for home.… It’s funny how a recipe from childhood can stick in your mind so much. I still make that pudding today and enjoy every mouthful just as much as I did back then.

  I’ve always recommended that parents cook the recipes from their childhood for their own children. Dig them out and serve them up. Children get such a thrill knowing their parents ate it as a child and the parents love going on a trip down memory lane.

  Poor Mother. Six grubby children tore into the kitchen like a giant whirlwind, clutching all manner of treasures, from sheep’s wool we’d collected from the fences to acorns and sticks.

  “Eurgh!” she cried when she spotted the wool. “Dirty things full of maggots and lice.”

  I did little to trouble my mother; we left that to Basil, the naughty daredevil of the family. If there was mischief to be found, Basil would be there, in the thick of it.

  I have found there is always a spirited child in every family, keeping everyone on their toes, and that is exactly just as it should be. Wouldn’t it be dull if every child were just the same?

  It was Basil who coined the rhyme for little Bobby Penfold, the washerwoman’s son, who brought back our freshly laundered clothes each week, wheeling them up the drive in a baby’s pram:

  Washing’s in the pram,

  Baby’s in the bath,

  Bobby pushes it up the hill,

  How it makes us laugh.

  It was also Basil who wrote “bomfers” on the coal house door. Bomfers was just a silly word that made us children roar with laughter, as we imagined it to be something rather naughty. Whatever it meant, it earned Basil a clip round the ear. If you heard a distant cry of alarm from somewhere in the house, you could bet Basil had jumped out, shouted “boo,” and run away laughing.

  We once had a French au pair for a summer. I didn’t know her name; we just called her Mademoiselle. She was terribly lazy and often when she should have been tending us, she sat reading the paper.

  On one memorable occasion she was sitting by the gas fire, reading, with Basil at her feet. I looked up to see her engrossed in an article on sewing, flames licking up the bottom of the paper.

  “Fire,” I gasped.

  She looked up, startled, then …

  “Le feu, le feu!” she screamed, leaping to her feet with a red-hot copy of the Telegraph burning in her lap. Adds a new meaning to “hot off the press.”

  Mother dashed in and put her out with a wet cloth and no harm done, but Mademoiselle pointed the finger at Basil. He could be a bit mischievous at times, but I never thought him capable of setting fire to a French au pair. She left shortly after.

  I’m glad Basil was never severely punished for his largely harmless acts. To suppress a child’s sense of mischief is to crush the joy out of his life. While caring for children I am always mindful not to be too strict and be tolerant of their short attention spans!

  Nowadays they’d label Basil and children like him as having attention deficit disorder or some such nonsense. I like to think he was just high-spirited.

  Hallcroft, our childhood home, was a beautiful idyll that Father had worked hard to create.

  Arnold Ashford was a six-foot-tall bear of a man, with a cheeky crooked grin, pointed ears, and striking blue eyes that sparkled with fun. I worshipped him. His slight stutter and lisp just endeared him to me more.

  From Monday morning to Saturday afternoon Father worked in Regent Street in London, running a business selling ladies’ and children’s knitwear to grand stores like Harrods. With six mouths to feed he was no stranger to hard work, but he earned enough to design and have built his dream home.

  Father was typical of many men of his era. During World War One he was a lieutenant in the army. He was even awarded the Military Cross for his courage and skill in leading his platoon at one of the bloodiest battles of the war, at Hill 60, or as it was nicknamed, “Hell with the lid off.”

  My father may have talked to those comrades that survived Hill 60, but he never uttered a word to me about the horrors he must have witnessed or what he did to earn his Military Cross. Part of me wishes I knew what his exact role was, but maybe he was right not to divulge it to us. He wanted to keep our childhoods as innocent as possible, hoping that we wouldn’t be touched by the horrors of war.

  Mother was certainly no shrinking violet when it came to war efforts either. Because of her love of children she had always longed to train as a Norland nanny, but in the early 1900s, child care wasn’t considered a respectable career for a young woman of the upper middle classes. There were really only two options for a woman of my mother’s social rank: teaching as a governess or nursing. Like me, my mother showed no academic prowess, so she opted to train as a nurse, which was thought less intellectually demanding.

  Before she began her training, Mother was confined by the Victorian belief that a woman should know nothing of a man but his face and clothes until marriage, so her work tending wounded soldiers must have been an eye
-opener. I read later that she would have witnessed amputations and deaths and cleaned up rivers of blood.

  Mother and Father rarely mentioned the awful things they had seen, nor would they ever dream of discussing in front of us children any problems or disagreements they may have had. In forty-five years of marriage I didn’t hear a single word uttered in anger between them. They set a marvelously good example by never, ever quarreling in front of us. They exercised extreme self-control and courtesy. You must remember—and this is something my parents knew, of course—that in little ones the imitative faculties are highly developed. A child’s character will receive lasting impressions from those with whom they interact.

  In later life, if I ever heard people in a family I worked for bickering I was horrified. Why would you fill your home with anger and subject your children to disharmony? It remains a mystery to me today.

  Maybe this is another reason I never married: how could any relationship match up to my parents’? My father’s eyes shone with love whenever he talked of my mother, and she in turn devoted her life to him and us children. This intense love just made the tragedy that occurred later all the more painful.

  Work may have claimed my father for most of the week, but come midday Saturday he was all ours. As soon as we heard his key in the lock, we ran to the door and jumped all over him like excited puppies. His smart tailored navy wool suit, tie, trilby, and briefcase would soon be discarded in favor of fawn flannels and a cotton shirt … then the fun would begin.

  “What have you brought for us, Daddy?” we cried.

  “Close your eyes and hold out your hands,” he said in a voice rich with fun and laughter.

  Eagerly, I squeezed shut my eyes and stuck out my hands.

  Just the rustling of a brown paper bag was enough to make my mouth water.

  “No peeking,” he warned. As if I’d want to spoil the magic of the moment.

  Seconds later a pear drop or some other tasty morsel was deposited in our outstretched palms. Mother was always rewarded with a bag of sugared almonds and a kiss on the cheek.