I had got interested in my schoolwork, but now it was goodbye to any hopes I had of catching up with my lessons so that school hours shouldn’t be such a misery to me. With so many kids at home, I felt I hadn’t a chance, and the least thing made me feel bitter and resentful. Everything was against me.
At school I could never make up for the days I had missed. When figures were on the blackboard I didn’t know whether to go upwards or downwards, or start at the pounds end or the farthings. I was usually tired and my mind used to go quite blank, as though I wasn’t seeing anything on the blackboard, and when asked a question I just became sullen. Certain teachers disliked me because I seemed dull and backward.
One teacher was always making me a laughing stock. She used to stand me up before all the class and ask me questions I couldn’t answer, so I just remained dumb, or said I had forgotten—which angered her so that she often caned me. One day, when I didn’t answer she said, ‘Come up here, Phelps,’ as she advanced towards me with her cane.
At that, rage seized me, and I picked up an inkpot. The whole room gasped, including the teacher.
Then she said, ‘How dare you, Phelps? Put that down.’
I said, ‘I’ll dare anything if you touch me with that stick again.’
She still advanced towards me with the cane, so I shied the ink bottle straight at her. The bottle didn’t hit her, but all the ink did. My goodness: what a mess, all over her dress and the room. I got caned for this—but by the headmistress herself—and I was given a letter to take home to my father.
When the twins were born I was much older; we were a large family, always quarrelling—but we always made up afterwards. We used to play rounders, skipping, and the boys used to join in the skipping. And we played hide-and-seek and touch. I was always a daredevil—with all my brothers I was up to scratch with them. All the same, I used to be scared stiff of my own shadow. In those days they used to keep the dead at home in their coffin and put them on the table in the parlour—and shut the door. My brothers knew I was scared of shadows and the dark, and I would never go into the parlour on my own. I had a feeling that there was something in that end room and that I mustn’t go in. I think it was a thing between me and my sister, little Emily, who died. I knew there was something in that room that I didn’t understand—and I used to toddle to the door and get just up to the handle, then I’d be pulled away sharply. That was a shock to me. I didn’t know what I was doing—just turning the handle—but as I opened the door it was very dark, then someone pulled me aside. From that time on I was afraid of the dark, until I was quite old—even until going up to nursing. It was only night nursing that cured me.
I left school at thirteen. When you left school you were supposed to produce your birth certificate, and the teacher said to me, ‘I haven’t got your birth certificate—I must have it.’
So I said to my mother, ‘I want my birth certificate.’
She said, ‘I’ll have to go and get it.’ Everything was always, ‘I’ll get it.’
Days and weeks went by and still she was ‘going to get it’. She never got it—so at the end of term I just left and never went back.
When I was a kid of just thirteen, my mother made me put my hair up and sent me into service. It was in Orpington, and to me it was like being on the other side of the world. I was scared of my own shadow even then. I used to write to her, ‘Please take me out of here.’ I would get up in the early hours of the morning to whitewash the steps and blacklead the kitchen ovens. It was cheap slave labour. But eventually my mother did come and bring me home—and then I started going into factories.
The Eagle Pencil factory was one of the first ones, but my mother took me away from there. Getting work for children was easy—it was the grown-ups who found it difficult. So I would join another factory making pencils or furniture. I went on to Leavis’s furniture, where I used to push heavy furniture—plane it—then go over it, fill up the cracks, and then push it on further, through all the stages of polishing. It was very hard work but I quite enjoyed it because I was making contact with other girls. Always being new at a job was hateful. I couldn’t settle down, and in between there was so much housework and looking after the children that I was glad to be off again. But all the jobs were blind alleys leading me nowhere, and when I discovered I had left school a year too soon I felt really bitter towards my parents.
I loved crochet and needlework. I used to make loads of lace and tray cloths for neighbours—they’d buy the cotton and I’d make it for a few pence. Even up until recently I was still doing cloths for people. I’ve still got some of the little bits of lace and tray cloths. I did wide lace for the church, too. I used to go to the park opposite the Prince of Wales Hospital, Tottenham, and I’d sit there with the twins and crochet, while my mother was doing her washing. I used to see the nurses come out and walk round to their home.
There was a lady in the road who used to do dressmaking, and take her stuff to the West End in London. She would employ a few girls like me and my neighbour to sew at her house. It was slave labour, really—a sweatshop. She was a very good dressmaker and she did all the D’Oyly Carte Company’s dresses—beautiful costumes—and she taught me how to do fly-running stitch. After I went into the hospital at Charing Cross as a student, I used to get theatre tickets from Theatreland, and I’d see the D’Oyly Carte and wonder if those costumes were stitched by me.
Of a Sunday, all us crowd were at home. My mother and father used to like to have a sleep after dinner—and we used to be sent off. I was a bit of a rebel—no angel—and I could fight as well as my brothers. It was nothing for me to be in a fight with one of my brothers and him getting the worst of it. Not far from us, in Broad Lane, stood the corrugated tin chapel of the Plymouth Brethren—I suppose the strictest Christian sect in England—bearing a board on which was written, ‘How shall I be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou SHALT be saved’.
I had always been sent to Sunday School, chiefly because my mother didn’t know what to do with us on Sunday afternoons after the midday meal. At Sunday School we sang hymns and learnt Bible lessons, and finally I became converted to the Plymouth Brethren. For three years I kept every rule and belief of what I was told was the only Christian religion that could help me be saved. I never went to the pictures, nor to dances, never went walking with boys, stopped swearing and even thought I ought to change my job because it was sinful to be working on stage clothes. In a way, this religion and denying myself all worldly pleasures, as even cinemas were called, was a passive rebellion against my environment, and gave me a sense of virtue and satisfaction. At home I acted superior, and was sneered at and laughed at, and was nicknamed ‘the Bible-Puncher’. Looking back, I think I must have been an awful prig, but I still have a soft spot for the Plymouth Brethren. In a poor and ignorant district like ours they did a tremendous amount of good.
Through religion I taught myself self-control, which was all to the good. I came to mix with people who spoke better English than I did, and I learnt to imitate them. I was also encouraged to better my education and go to evening classes. On the other hand, I was among a lot of pretty badly repressed women, with no outlet for their emotions, leading monotonous lives, and apt to turn queer and bitter, making me in some ways even more repressed and unnatural than I was before.
One of the teachers befriended me and took me under her wing. She used to invite me to her house after Sunday School for tea, and in the evening she would take me home. There was another one who was very motherly, and who had a daughter, and I used to try to imitate her. She went to the Tottenham High School and, me being a cockney, I used anything but the right words, so she always used to correct me. I always remember learning my first words of French with her, which were ‘Fermez la porte, s’il vous plaît’—she was just a young kid, but she taught me.
That stayed with me—and so did the Scriptures. I can still quote the Bible—but I never felt right into