Too Many Mothers

Roberta Taylor

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781843543015
• eBook ISBN: 9781848872561
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

'I was born in a sideboard.' So begins Roberta Taylor's bittersweet memoir of her early years, a book that proves beyond doubt that real life is stranger than any soap opera. It's Boxing Day, 1956 in East London, and it's freezing, inside and out. Roberta, aged eight, sits in the kitchen in her overcoat, determined to make herself invisible, watching the shenanigans of the grown-ups. Her granny, Mary, reigns over the house with an iron will and an eye to the main chance. Roberta's cousin is on her hands and knees at the parlour grate, trying to retrieve grandad's dentures from the coals, dragging her coat in the dust. It's too cold to hang it up by the front door. Besides, Granny Mary makes no exceptions when it comes to the occasional light thieving. Aunt Doll learns that the hard way. Not even a padlock kept Mary from stealing Doll's wedding presents, although nobody can understand how she got the back off the wardrobe without Doll noticing. Too Many Mothers is a portrait of an embattled extended family at war with itself and the outside world. From petty crime to pet monkeys, tender romance to shameless emotional blackmail, illegitimacy, adoption and even murder, Roberta Taylor has written a kaleidoscopic and unforgettable memoir of her family and her early life.

Contents

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER ONE: Mary

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER TWO: Mary

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER THREE: Mary

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER FOUR: Mary

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER FIVE: Mary

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER SIX: Mary

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER SEVEN: Flo

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER EIGHT: Doll

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER NINE: Vi

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER TEN: Win

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Robert

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER TWELVE: Carol

Boxing Day 1956

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: George

EPILOGUE: Roberta

Boxing Day 1956

Mary eased her heavy legs out of bed and sat up. The room was like an icebox. Her feet fumbled around in the dark and found the torch. It was five o’clock in the morning and she had a hectic day ahead of her. The corpse that had been lying next to her gave off a fart which blew Bob into a more comfortable position. His gaping, gummy mouth closed with a damp smack. She shone the torch over the bed and grabbed one of the overcoats that masqueraded as blankets, shivered herself into it, and stared at him in the brutal pencil of light.

‘His face has eaten him,’ she thought, and remembered the different face and body she had married all those years ago.

CHAPTER ONE

Mary

Mary Roberts, née Burke, started smoking when she was nine years old, had her arms tattooed by the age of fifteen, and married my grandfather, Robert Victor Roberts, at eighteen. She shuffled the facts of her life to suit her intentions. She swore that she was born on 8 August 1900 to an Irish tinker family. Her birthday was always celebrated on the eighth of August, even though her birth certificate insists that she poked her nose into the world on 13 May 1900. Like a brass band on a Sunday morning the speed and energy of the cockney accent cooked very nicely thank you with the southern Irish tones and vernacular of her parents. The scenic route of her life would not have much to do with geography; she lived and died in the East End of London.

Mary sauntered away from her family home, away from the slums of Poplar, without so much as a by-your-leave, in February 1918, and walked four grim miles east to Bob Roberts’s mother’s house in West Ham. She was pregnant. How and where Mary met Bob had never cropped up. He came from a better class of cockney, apparently. Perhaps they washed more often, had antimacassars, books, and sat at the table to eat. Mary’s children were in no doubt that it was the Roberts side that was the civilized side.

Would he marry her? Of course he would. She was gorgeous. Pale skin, green eyes, a mass of complicated red hair, and a cheeky little figure with a temperament to match. A Shetland pony in human form.

They whispered their dilemma in the privacy of Clara Roberts’s front parlour.

He couldn’t marry her right at that moment, he had to return to sea in two days’ time. She hadn’t reckoned on his going away so soon, and neither had he, but there was a war on and the Merchant Navy had an important job to do.

If Bob and his brother William managed to survive, they would be away until Christmas at least.

‘In this situation, it’s all hands on deck,’ he tried to explain to her.

All she owned she stood up in. She didn’t look that much different from most poor girls of the time, but for her hair, her swagger, and the minx-eyed look she’d give instead of a straight answer. Leaving her, Bob braced himself and walked to the scullery.

His mother and brother took the news better than they might have done in peacetime. Clara had bigger things to fret about now. Her boys were going away and she couldn’t guarantee she would ever see them again.

Today was Mary’s first meeting with Clara and William, and her first meeting with the inside of their house. She had sidled past a couple of times last year, out of curiosity, when she had been waiting to meet Bob at the street corner.

Her own living arrangements had consisted of a bug-infested tenement, surrounded by thieves and vagabonds. The daffy of fourteen Burkes shared one and a half rooms, one cold tap and a black cauldron on the open fire stewing lumpish, watery broth. An iron double bed catered for her mum, dad, and the three youngest toddlers. Two large mattresses on the floor slept the nine other Burkes: girls in one, boys in the other. She had slept with somebody else’s feet in her face all her life.

Here, she was in a real house. Mary sniffed her future in the beeswax of the parlour. On the mantelshelf were two postcards with camels on them, a wooden-framed photograph of Bob and William in matching dark overcoats, a pair of pewter candlesticks, and a small metal candle-snuffer. The shelves on the wall to the left of the fireplace were home to a pink flowery tea set, the six cups, face down in their saucers to keep out the dust, separated by the round fat teapot. On the top shelf, taking pride of place, she eyed up an ancient-looking carved ornament of a withered old man.

She ran her fingers over the highly polished sideboard against the opposite wall and looked at the squat wooden clock sitting on a lace runner.

Three o’clock in the afternoon.

Thursday, 28 February 1918, she reminded herself.

Stealthily she opened the sideboard drawers. In the left-hand drawer, packed to the gunwales, lived pieces of yellowing lace and neatly folded gentlemen’s handkerchiefs. The right-hand drawer contained a pile of formal-looking documents, a pair of scissors, some buff envelopes, and half a dozen collar studs. Right at the back of the drawer she spotted something else. A roll of large white five-pound notes gripped by a rubber band.

At the sound of the Roberts family coming towards her Mary quickly re-arranged herself as a scrap of humanity that only the coldest heart could ignore. The money stayed in the drawer. Clara was first in, followed immediately by her two sons. William had his arm around his younger brother’s shoulder. It looked as if Bob had been crying.

Boxing Day 1956

‘I, Mary Burke, a very, very bad Catholic, take thee Bob Roberts, my religious Protestant ... I even married you in your Proddy church didn’t I?’

Mary left him to his slumber.

It had not been a restful night for her. She had floated between the dead and the living, in that fitful, pointless kind of sleep. Footsteps across her ceiling all night, quietening down babies and toddlers, had made her ratty.

She hadn’t dreamt of the Chinaman in donkey’s years.

Mary’s children: between 1918 and 1943 she had laid her seven eggs. She could have laid more if she’d persevered. I am the epilogue of her life. Her granddaughter.

CHAPTER TWO

Mary

Mary never went home again. And no one came looking for her.

Tea was brought in by William, Clara held her hand and lowered her into the armchair, and Bob rolled her a smoke. Clara told her what they had decided would be for the best, for all their sakes. If she agreed, of course.

She more than did.

Mary stuck to her story, that her parents had thrown her out. No, there was nothing to go back there for. It was time for the grand tour.

Between the parlour at the front and the scullery out the back was Clara’s bedroom. She would sleep here with Clara for the next two days, until the boys had gone off to sea. Mary had never seen a bed so clean, so squishy. Four large white pillows with lace edging sat like sentries on top of blankets over blankets over more blankets, topped with a shiny golden fattipuff eiderdown. There was more than enough room for the two of them; she thought of the absolute luxury of all that bed for one person. Clara hadn’t shared her bed for ten years. The polished lino had green woolly runners on either side of the bed to keep your feet warm when you got up. The room was almost identical in shape to the parlour, with an identical fireplace. In the alcove stood a wardrobe with a full-length mirror for a door. The other furniture was a small round table by the window and a straight-backed wooden chair with a rattan seat by the fireplace. The fire was neatly laid but not yet lit. She peeked out of the big square window and saw that it looked onto the backyard. The six shirts and two towels on the washing line were stiff with the cold.

Mary was delicately manoeuvred into the back room to be shown the stove, the big butler-sink with its bleached wooden draining board, and the pots and pans. Something hearty was simmering slowly in a big pot on the gas, warming the whole room. Under the window was a white enamel-topped table and four chairs; an open carton of salt sat in the middle of it. They didn’t bother to take Mary into the yard, just pointed to the privy and asked if she needed to use it. She didn’t. It was too cold to go outside unless really necessary.

The upstairs didn’t seem to match the downstairs in size. It was up here that Clara explained what was going to happen. Once the boys had left, William’s bedroom would become Mary’s scullery, and his bed would be moved down into Clara’s room. A sink and a stove would be put upstairs, and Bob’s room would become their marital bedroom. Each bedroom had a small iron fireplace, so it wouldn’t get too cold. Lugging the coal up would be a bit of a hike, but they all decided it was manageable, even for a girl.

Mary gave off a dazed look while all this was going on, disguising her fleetness of tongue and brain. She looked pliable. How else could an innocent, unmarried girl get pregnant? So pliable, in fact, she allowed herself to be bathed in the zinc bath which had been dragged in from the yard, and she even let Clara unpin her hair and search for nits. Clara found none. While all this female cleansing was going on, William and Bob were placed in the front parlour.

With sterilized hair and body, she was given a set of Clara’s undergarments and a long grey skirt with matching top. She was allowed to keep her own boots, for now. The women were almost the same size, except that Mary was about two inches taller. The long skirt was not as long as it should have been. She plaited her damp hair into two braids. It would dry with a pretty kink in it and by tomorrow morning appear curlier than it really was. Everything Mary had arrived in was put on the fire in the front parlour, rag by rag, and burnt. She had shed her old skin, and was preparing a new, thicker one for the future.

After supper of lamb and potato stew, she helped Clara with the washing up in the scullery while William and Bob organized the bedtime fire in Clara’s room and hot-water bottles for themselves. Bob’s hot glances pierced the back of Mary’s neck, she felt his arm brush by her breasts to get to the tap. She never looked at him, never said a word to him.

The comfort of the fire, the armchair, and the hot milk made her eyelids and head droop as she sat in the parlour with her new family. They had all been talking about what was going to happen tomorrow. She drifted in and out, thinking of those fivers in the drawer right next to her.

Bob was given permission to walk her into the bedroom, kiss her goodnight, and put her to bed. One of his mother’s nightdresses was waiting for her, laid out on the golden eiderdown. As he soaked up her lovely perfume of carbolic, Mary gave him a tired wink, a little kiss on the mouth, and sent him on his way.

Her last gasp of energy was spent taking off one set of new clothes and donning another. She took her time getting into bed. Mary wanted to luxuriate in every limb being embraced by the sharp prick of the cold linen sheets, followed by the cosy comforting weight of all those blankets. Then she conked out. She dreamt she was flying on a huge five-pound note, a magic carpet riding the breeze across the continents of the world.

The next day brought a trip to Stratford Broadway on the electric tram. William paid the fares. The Broadway was dominated by Boardman’s, the fancy outfitters: three vast floors of clothing for every occasion. Bob and William went off for a stroll round the shop, while Clara fitted Mary out with a warm grey coat, two frocks, and a pair of ladies’ buttoned boots. The frocks and coat were as shapeless as they could find, to make room for her pregnancy. Next stop was the underwear department, where two of everything was needed for Mary and, Clara said, ‘to kill two birds with one stone’, some underwear for the boys.

Wrapping up this new clobber took for ever. The old boy behind the counter meticulously cut off the individual labels, folded each garment carefully onto brown paper, and made little parcels which he tied up with string. Bob and William occupied themselves chatting to him about the state of the war, the torpedoing of a hospital ship on its way to Brest two days before, and their own imminent departure on Sunday. This was too much for Clara, so she went and sat on a chair by the entrance: the chair for weary or aged customers. Mary stood by her side, silently eyeing up the business going on at the counter. The clerk’s dandruff had showered his well-worn three-piece suit; his long fingernails were grubby from ink and string. Her first new clothes. No one’s else’s hand-me-downs any more.

Clara twittered, ‘I wish they would get a move on, I’m more than peckish now. How you doing, Mary? Starving, I’m sure. We are going to have to fatten you up, young lady.’

Mary ‘mmm’-ed in agreement, through tightly clamped lips. She was staring at the backs of the two brothers. They didn’t look like brothers. Where Bob was dark, delicately built, handsome, and open-faced, William was thick-set, taller, with light, colourless hair and dull yellowy skin. He didn’t have Bob’s aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and square lips; he was not handsome at all. William was hidden in his skin. There was no light shining from him, everything was pasted down. Bob looked like his mother. Mary decided that William must take after the dead father. She eagle-eyed the payment. The brothers shared the cost. Replicas of what she had seen in the sideboard yesterday emerged from both their pockets. They counted the money out and handed it to the scurf-laden old clerk, who placed it into a tin canister along with their bill.

She watched the tin bullet fly along wires above the counter to the payment cubicle at the end of the store. A hawk-nosed spinster with a severe middle parting tallied everything up and sent the change flying back to the clerk.

‘Slow down, Mary, no one’s going to pinch it. At least try and taste it before you swallow it.’ Bob grabbed her wrist and winked. She winked back.

Mary had almost polished off her double pie and mash, swimming in delicious green liquor, before the rest of them had even got going. Clara didn’t care for the secret ingredients of the pies and had gone for her usual, jellied eels, from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements