Secrets My Mother Kept Read Free

fortnight it would be family allowance day. Mum would call out to us, ‘Come on you two; we’ve got to go to the Post Office.’
    We would run to join her, and holding a hand each she would whisk us over the road to the shops.
    ‘If you stand and wait nicely,’ she would say, ‘we’ll go and get same bananas and some rolls from the bakers and have banana rolls for lunch.’ We would squirm with anticipation, and once the 8 shillings was collected, make our way to collect the promised feast. We didn’t usually go back to school on family allowance day. If it was hot then we would sometimes be allowed a frozen Jubbly, an icy prism of orange heaven, and very occasionally Mum would also buy us a tiny box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, with a few nestled inside.
    Some of the other children took packed lunches and others had free dinners. My older sisters had had free dinners, but when Margaret and I started at St Vincent’s, Marge had pleaded on our behalf. ‘Don’t make them have free dinners. They’re disgusting, and everyone knows you get free dinners because the teacher calls it out.’
    Mum had given in; she was always softer with Margaret and I than with the others.
    I thought the children that took packed lunches were the luckiest. They had a little box or bag and inside their mum would have packed the things that they liked: a little sandwich, a sausage roll, an apple and sometimes a slice of cake. But there were some children who just brought a plastic bread bag with the toast crusts left over from their breakfast. I didn’t envy them.
    We grew to hate school. It was an unfriendly place and most of the teachers were very strict and shouted a lot. We didn’t go to school that often. Although Mum did her best to persuade us to go, we also did our best to persuade her to let us stay at home. Usually we won.
     
    When I moved into the juniors we had a young Irish teacher who had some modern ideas. One day he brought in a tape recorder. He told us that we were going to come out to the front of the class to read our writing and he was going to record us on to the tape so that we could listen to ourselves. I felt quietly confident. I was one of the best readers in the class and even though my work was untidy I usually got at least 8/10 for my writing. I had been really careful with my writing today as I had something especially exciting to write about. I listened patiently as each child’s turn came and went. When it was my turn I carried my workbook up to the front and stood next to the teacher nervously. He pushed the button on the tape recorder and nodded at me to begin. I began to read, but unfortunately had a bad cold. I didn’t have a hanky and so tried to control the snot running down my nose by sniffing it back up every minute or so. Some of the children began to giggle but I didn’t take any notice I was concentrating so hard on reading my writing carefully. When we had all finished our recordings were played back for us to listen to. Mine sounded awful . . .
    ‘My cat Tiddy’ sniff, ‘has got 4’ sniff ‘kittens’, sniff. ‘Me and my’ sniff ‘sister look’ sniff ‘after them’ sniff. ‘We’ sniff ‘are going’ sniff ‘to keep one’ sniff ‘when it is grown’ sniff ‘up but’ sniff ‘the other one’ sniff ‘will’ sniff ‘go to a new’ sniff ‘home’ sniff. The result of my runny nose had been exaggerated by the tape resulting in an explosion of laughter from the whole class including my teacher. I wanted to disappear! It would be a very long time before I could read out loud again.
    Mum thought that children who played out in the street were ‘guttersnipes’, but she did let us walk to and from school on our own. My friends Hannah and Jane would sometimes knock for me on the way.
    There were still some old bombsites near us, and a favourite game would be clambering through them to see what we could find. Today Hannah had another idea.
    ‘Let’s play “Knock Down