Secrets My Mother Kept Read Free Page B

water to make perfume, and collecting stones and grass to make a ‘dinner’ from anything else we could find. There was one time when we took this a little too far. Mum had said we couldn’t have a bath because she couldn’t afford the gas. Bath time was usually only once a week on a Sunday and we would use each other’s water. By the time it got to our turn it was an interesting grey colour. On this day we had decided we wanted our own bath. We whispered to each other in the garden, and then proceeded to plaster our faces, arms and legs with as much mud as we could find.
    ‘Have I got much on my face?’ I asked Margaret.
    ‘No, I can’t see much,’ she lied, so I layered even more of the brown-grey mixture across my cheeks.
    Mum came out to call us in for bed and let out a screech.
    ‘You naughty girls!’ she shouted, and bent down to take the slipper off her foot. Our mum never smacked us, but in that second we saw such frustration and anger that our instincts told us to run. How well I remember diving up the stairs with Margaret a step behind me, followed closely by Mum, slipper in hand. We ran into the bathroom and slid the lock across and stood inside breathing heavily, our hearts racing.
    ‘Come out of there now, you naughty girls!’ Mum said angrily. But we stayed where we were. It seemed like an eternity until we heard her going back downstairs but in reality it probably took no more than a minute or two for her anger to subside and for her to see the funny side. We got our bath that night. Mum sometimes bought us Matey bubble bath when she had some money. We loved it and would sit in the bath for an age, playing with the suds until our fingers and toes were as wrinkled as prunes. That would only be in the summer time, because the bathroom in our house was painfully cold in the winter. Margaret and I usually had our bath together, and I can remember our sister Mary trying to persuade us to get out of the barely warm water onto the freezing floor.
    ‘If you don’t get out soon the witch will get you,’ she warned.
    ‘I don’t believe you,’ I retorted, ‘there’s no such thing as witches.’
    ‘There is!’ Mary continued, lowering her voice. ‘She lives under the bath, look you can see her peeping out now.’
    Margaret and I jumped out of the water like flying fish, to be grabbed roughly and rubbed dry by our impatient, shivering sister. For a very long time that witch haunted my bathroom visits, and having to go to the toilet with the ‘witch’ waiting to pop her head out from under the bath was terrifying.
    During the harshest winters Aunty would go the oil shop round the corner to our house and buy paraffin for the tiny stove that she would put in the bathroom to stop the pipes from freezing. The smell was acrid and permeated the whole house but it did take the chill off the air upstairs. The only room that was heated in the winter was what we called the kitchen but which in effect was our living room.
    I mentioned being different; the rooms in our house were certainly called different names from those in my friends’ houses. They had a kitchen instead of a scullery, and their living room was what we called the kitchen. When Granny and Granddad had moved to our house when it was newly built, that was indeed what the rooms were used for. The scullery had been where the laundry was done. There had been a huge copper for heating the water, a Butler sink perched on two enormous stone pillars and a mangle for squeezing the water out of the clothes before they were hung on the line to dry. The cooking was done in the kitchen on a black lead range. Although this changed over the years, the rooms retained their past names like ghosts.
    Most of the families around us were relatively poor but the homes of my friends were usually clean and tidy and most important of all they were warm. One particularly icy winter morning I went to knock for my friend Hannah who lived across the road so that we could