Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking. Pauline Prescott

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СКАЧАТЬ my head. Because of my dancing, I was sporty and my long legs were ideal for running and the high jump. I was always in the middle of my class academically, and only ever came top in needlework and cookery so I guess I was destined to be a housewife. It wasn’t that I was thick, I just didn’t apply myself. When I failed my eleven plus, which meant I couldn’t go to the City High School in Handbridge with my friend Joyce, I was devastated. For the first time I felt the stigma of being labelled ‘stupid’, something my brother (who’d passed his eleven plus the previous year) took great delight in rubbing in whenever he could.

      I was sent to Love Street secondary modern school instead, where my party trick was to do handstands against the wall with my skirt tucked into my knickers. I threw myself into athletics until I was made sports captain and finally felt I’d achieved something. Then, when the rest of my class voted me house captain I decided that I should try harder to live up to the little badge I proudly wore on my lapel, and – with a little application—I came second in the class that year.

      Coming home on the bus with all the posh girls from Queen’s School and City High, I was painfully aware that my differently coloured uniform defined me as ‘not one of them’, so I did all I could to blend in. I’d slip off my navy-blue blazer and try not to draw attention to myself. One day, I watched in horror as my father stepped on to the bus in his overalls, his haversack slung over his shoulder. I was sitting halfway down and shrank into my seat. Dad didn’t see me so he sat right at the back, legs apart as always, chatting and laughing with everyone around him in that real working-class Cheshire way of speaking that he had. To my eternal shame, I can remember thinking, Please, don’t embarrass me! I still hate myself for that, because the one thing I can’t stand is snobbery.

      I was thirteen years old when my father began to complain of feeling unwell. He had a bad back and other ailments and used to take all sorts of herbal remedies when the medicines the doctor prescribed didn’t work. Unusually, he took time off work but he never seemed to improve, even with bed rest. I think, like us, he assumed that an aching back was something that went with his job. After a year of pain which nothing seemed to ease, he discovered a lump on his neck. Mum, who’d taken on extra cleaning to make ends meet by then, told us a few days later that Dad would need an operation to remove it.

      ‘First of all, though,’ she said, ‘we’re going on holiday!’

      I couldn’t believe it. We were to spend a week at the Middleton Tower Holiday Camp near Morecambe, Lancashire. Dad was to be admitted for surgery soon after we got back but I didn’t worry about his operation in the slightest. All I could think about was our impending break, which was the first proper holiday we’d ever had. The camp was like nothing I had ever seen. Set in sixty acres with nine hundred chalets, its dining rooms and cafeterias could feed three thousand people. The main building, which had a theatre and a dance floor, was modelled on a Cunard cruise ship called the SS Berengaria. We were joined by my mum’s mother Ada – or ‘Nanny’ as I called her, who was a traditional cuddly grandmother from Ellesmere Port. Then there was Aunt Bessie, who brought her daughters, my cousins, Barbara, Linda and Janet. My brother Peter, who was sixteen, brought along a couple of friends.

      Even though my father wasn’t very well he still drew people to him and he and my mother were so lovely on that holiday – like newlyweds. They danced together most nights and I can remember watching them on the dance floor and feeling a little jealous. Later, my lovely dad made sure to dance just with me. Best of all, he won a bingo prize of sixty pounds which more than paid for the holiday. He was so happy.

      Soon after we came home, Dad was admitted to Chester City Hospital where he was expected to stay for two weeks. We were planning to visit him one night after school but Mum said there had been a complication and that he needed peace and quiet. ‘He’ll be home soon,’ she told us, sensing our disappointment. I couldn’t wait. The house felt so empty without his laughing presence.

      The day he was due to be discharged I hurried back from school, excitedly skipping along in front of our row of terraced houses, the gardens of which sloped to the road. As usual, the other mothers were standing by their gates or leaning across their garden fences, chatting to each other as they waited for their children to come home. But on that particular afternoon, something unusual happened. One by one, the women stopped talking, turned, and walked back up their paths without saying hello to me. I remember thinking how strange that was as I danced on by.

      Dad wasn’t waiting at our garden gate as I’d hoped he might be. Swallowing my disappointment, I ran inside and found my mother in the kitchen. ‘Is he home?’ I asked breathlessly.

      She bent down and took my hands in hers. ‘Yes, Pauline, but he’s in bed. He’s still not very well. Why don’t you go up and see if he recognizes you?’

      I ran up the stairs two at a time wondering what Mum meant. Of course Daddy would recognize me – he’d only been away two weeks. But the man lying in my parents’ bed hardly even looked like my father. The shock froze me halfway across the room.

      ‘Dad?’

      His eyes flickered open and he turned to look at me, but didn’t respond. Taking a step forward, I reached for his hand. It lay limply in mine. ‘Daddy? It’s Pauline.’

      He closed his eyes again and I stood stock still, uncertain what to do. If only he’d open them and say, ‘Hi, baby.’ He often referred to me as ‘baby’, which I loved.

      My mother came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Something happened during the operation,’ she said. Her voice was strange. ‘It’s left Daddy a bit confused.’

      He remained ‘confused’ for the rest of the day and by evening Mum was so worried that she summoned a doctor, who called an ambulance. I stood silently on the landing as two men manhandled my father past me on a stretcher.

      ‘Where are you taking me?’ Dad asked them, his eyes fearful.

      ‘To a lovely hotel, Ernie,’ one of the ambulance men replied, giving his colleague a conspiratorial wink.

      I was furious. How dare they talk to my father as if he were stupid! I wanted to push them down the stairs and out of the house.

      Visiting the hospital over the next few days wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it would be. When we got there we had to sit quietly at the side of the bed while Mum gently woke my father. Sometimes he would recognize us but often he didn’t. The doctors said he’d suffered a blood clot on the brain during the operation. Only once did he seem to know who I was. He looked at me, turned to my mum and said, ‘The baby’s too skinny. She’s doing too much dancing.’

      He never called me baby again.

      When Auntie Ivy came up from Southampton with her husband Len and daughter Anne, I knew things were serious. A week later, on 8 July 1953, my father died. We didn’t have a telephone but they somehow sent word from the hospital. He had a type of cancer known as Hodgkin’s disease, the doctors told my mother, although it didn’t really matter that it had a name. His death certificate also cited cerebral haemorrhage as a secondary cause of death.

      Dad did come home then, but in a wooden coffin that rested on trestles in the middle of the living room so that friends and family could pay their respects. I was terrified of that open box with the white gauze cloth draped loosely over my father’s frozen expression. I was only fourteen years old; I’d never seen a dead body before. The room had a sweet, sickly smell, which I suppose was to mask the formaldehyde. All I knew was that the cloying scent stuck to the back of my throat.

      For three days, people came and went. Whenever I was summoned by my mother to say hello to our guests, I would creep in and cling to СКАЧАТЬ