Little Lake {Watty Awards 2011}

Litle Lake: Spring & Summer 1941

Spring 1941

It was a freak night when my mother invited me to come with her to see an acquaintance of hers house for tea after school.  I didn’t feel like being separated from my mother, since we were still enduring the Blitz, so I accepted her invitation gladly.

At school when the siren had gone we were all huddled into the large school basement and told to sit and wait, the teachers would listen to the younger pupil’s hysterical uncontrollable cries and after half an hour of so it would become unbearable for them and they would introduce the school with some hymns to sing together. Everyone would shakily start to sing lightly whilst I pushed my way through the crowds of students to a small corner where I would start to sketch something in my sketch book, something that I kept on my person at all times. I would mouth the words whilst drawing horrific images of burning buildings or speeding ambulances, the images that I knew I would see as soon as the air raid siren sounded the all clear. It wasn’t much difference at home except instead of hymns being hummed in the background my mother would instead sit and knit or play patience before getting into the bottom bunk of the Anderson Shelter and sobbing until she slept or until the all clear. I just listened.

The evening that we went to her friend’s house I couldn’t be asked to get out of my tatty school uniform, although I was polite enough to leave my sketch pad at home. My mother dressed up for the occasion in a posh blue frock and a pair of beige sandals. She considered high heels common and tart-like; my mother had very high opinions of things that I thought acceptable.

We had to walk to the friend’s house and it was a particular cold evening for an April day and my heels ached from the constant rubbing of my old black school shoes that were too small for me but irreplaceable because of the lack of clothing coupons!

Money was short in my family at that moment as my mother had refused point blank to get a job and she hadn’t realised how much she and my father had spent on the Christmas before he and my brother had left, it wasn’t even a spectacular Christmas!

As we reached the end of the relatively short walk, mother and i walked down a street of tenements and knocked on a small detached house. We were greeted by a slim fashionable young lady called Caroline. To say that she was a friend of my mother’s was saying too much, Caroline was an ex-wife of an ex-friend. He had been an adulterer and my mother was highly against adultery as it is one of her commandments in her bible, my mother had had a religious upbringing although she had never thrust it upon Arnold or me, she still kept her beliefs.

Caroline was a boisterous young woman who greeted us kindly and loudly. Caroline didn’t seem remotely affected by her divorce which had only happened a short time before we visited, she even joked about it.  

Caroline was the sort of woman that I aspired to be but my mother would deeply disapprove of, she wore high heels and make-up, she was single with no intention of finding another man and she was an independent woman. It was obvious to me that my mother disliked Caroline or at least frowned upon as she smiled and nodded at the right times whenever Caroline spoke to her but her acknowledgements were well rehearsed and disinteresting so Caroline and I spent most of the evening talking.

I liked Caroline a lot and she seem interested in me, I told her of my love for art and movies and she and I held a long debate of our favourite movie heroines, I loved Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz but she said she held no patience with her and preferred Scarlet O’Hara from Gone With The Wind but I had the opposite opinion. It was a very light and festive creative discussion but it got on my mother’s nerves as she didn’t have the slightest idea what we were talking about!