The invalid’s friend
I always tried to keep a bit of my reading time reserved for the Ellisdons catalogue. This was one of my great weapons in the war of attrition against boredom. I expect Mum came across an advertisement for it in a magazine. It seemed inexhaustible. Postal shopping is the invalid’s friend. Catalogues can tickle an appetite that would otherwise die. I found the notion of sending off for things miraculous. The Ellisdons catalogue turned the letter-box into a magical opening, through which any number of wonderful, tawdry things could flood in. I was only just beginning to get the hang of spelling, but SSAE, for Stamped Self-Addressed Envelope, spelt Open Sesame as far as I was concerned.
Ellisdons had some astounding things in their catalogue. A Magna No-Flint Lighter, which I wanted even at the exorbitant price of twenty-five shillings. Whoopee cushions and stink bombs, though I had enough sense to realise that a stink bomb only worked if you could run away from the stench yourself. I was much less mobile than my intended victims, and while they were busy running off I would inhale a dose which (given my apparent fragility) would probably kill me. It was probably the slogan used to advertise the stink bombs in the catalogue which made me so keen on them, with its mystical inkling of the way our everyday categories can change places under the right circumstances: ‘gives off a smell you can almost see …’
There were fire-breathing lessons also, which I actually sent off for. The trick involved a wick (with potassium nitrate) and some hay. Like most of the tricks that really attracted me, it was incredibly dangerous.
Of course there was the occasional dud. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would waste good money on a wooden paddle with THE BOARD OF EDUCATION inscribed on it. Drawn on the paddle next to that motto was a cartoon of a boy bending over to have his bottom whacked. It was crudely drawn, like something on a sea-side postcard, showing blown-out cheeks and air rasping out of the mouth. It seems strange that an implement of physical punishment could count as a novelty item in the ’fifties, however jocular the presentation. I wasn’t tempted. My pennies went towards tricks and treasures.
When I sent off for things, I wanted to use my money, not to rely on Mum’s. I knew I had some money in a Post Office account, thanks to Granny. It was a shock to learn that I couldn’t take any money out until I was seven. To me that was the same as the Post Office robbing me. They had taken my money and now they were refusing to give it back when I asked nicely.
Seven seemed an awfully far-away age, well over the horizon. The way things were going, I decided my body was going to be dead long before, and I wanted the money before then. I remember asking if I could make an early withdrawal because I was so very ill, but Mum said, sadly, no. The whole thing was definitely a swizz. The next thing I wanted to do was to make out a will, so that the Post Office could be made to cough up after my death, but I was told I wasn’t old enough to do that either. Swizzed all over again, swizzled and reswizzled. It seemed hardly possible that a boy who couldn’t go anywhere, hardly even to the other side of the bed, could be ramped and cheated by the world in so many ways.
In the Ellisdons catalogue there was also a joke camera, a Home Hypnosis Kit, a ventriloquism course, some little worms which grew in water, a See-Back-roscope which showed you things behind you, a magical flowering shell, and many sorts of indoor fireworks: fairy ferns, snakes-in-the-grass, Bengal Lights and the star turn, Mount Ætna, which spat fire and sounded almost as good as the outdoor kind.
I loved the little mummy which wouldn’t stay in its tomb (unless you knew how to tap the secret hidden magnet), and the magical fish which curled up in your hand and showed you how much life force you’d got in you. If an Ellisdons toy didn’t do anything it was no good to me, though I made an exception for the Java Shrunken Head. It didn’t do anything but hang there, but it had had no end of things done to it to make it so small, which was almost as good. It would have been a nice spooky treasure to have hanging from my ceiling in darkest Somerset.
Jiggling her big fat bum
In the end I sent off for the whoopee cushion. I couldn’t wait for it to arrive, and the postman became a figure of commanding fascination, though I’d never given him much thought before. In the end, though, it was a bit of a disappointment. It worked a treat on Mum, who hated it. In her book the only thing which might be worse than a real blow-off (the family word for fart) was an artificial one. But it didn’t whoop for the Collie Boy, who had been the prime target all along. At first I thought Mum must have tipped her off, but I suppose you don’t have a career in education without some experience of pranks. I knew she was in on the joke because she kept jiggling her big fat bum on the cushion, and nothing at all happened. Somehow she knew how to disarm it, to silence the rubber lips that gave the blow-off its rasping voice.
My next Ellisdons acquisition was a trick camera, and I certainly got her with that. I asked if I could take her picture, but the camera was really a jack-in-the-box. When I pressed the button a toy mouse flew out of the apparatus and hit her on the nose. It was marvellous! Exactly as the catalogue promised. She fell off her chair. She didn’t see that coming! I suppose it was a prank that she hadn’t come across during her time as a school-teacher. It was news to her. It came from nowhere and biffed her right on the conk!
Her own sense of fun was wholesome and even childish. I remember her giving a little cry of joy at Christmas when she saw our decorated tree. She couldn’t keep her hands off the ornaments. She blew all the little trumpets and rang all the bells, rapping every glassy bauble with her knuckles to make it sound.
Dad always said I could wrap Mum round my little finger, which was a delicious image. I pictured a mother shrunken and made pliable, a plasticine woman I could wear like a toy ring or a sticking plaster. Dad himself was less amenable, and I was exposed over long periods to two female intransigents, the two styles of sovereign will embodied by Miss Collins and Granny.
When Granny came to stay, she would sometimes sit with me while Mum went out. She would sit formally facing the bed, elegant in a way that indicated long practice, the grace whose school is time. Granny had been sitting beautifully for years, with a steely poise not always designed to relax her companions. In Bach terms she was very much a Water Violet, except perhaps for the bit about her serenity being a blessing and a balm to all those she encountered. Granny could use her serenity like a jemmy. I showed her the little fish from Ellisdons which rocked in your hand to show the life force, or else rolled over or curled up at the sides (all of which had different interpretations in the little booklet that came with the fish), but it just lay still in her palm. ‘I suppose this means I must be dead,’ she said.
Before she sat down she would inspect the seat of the chair and invariably picked up a long stray hair of Gipsy’s, which she disposed of without comment. She wouldn’t read to me or give me lessons as such, although she couldn’t help giving me a certain amount of schooling in her special subject of unarmed combat, or conversation as she called it. Sometimes she taught me tongue-twisters, and songs she called rounds. These weren’t rounds like a doctor’s rounds but special songs which you didn’t both sing together but in relays.
When Granny was coming to stay, Mum would spend hours cleaning the house from top to bottom, with murder in her heart, using the white-glove technique to find dust in out-of-the-way places. By the time her mother actually arrived she was exhausted. Granny would wake her up bright and early the next morning, fresh as a daisy and bearing a cup of tea, with the words ‘You take the upstairs and I’ll take the downstairs, and we’ll soon have everything ship-shape. I don’t know why you insist on paying that girl. She’s worse than useless.’