At the Davidsons, I shared a bed with Rosalind, the daughter, who was a bit younger than me. It was a big old bed with an eiderdown on top. A few days after seeing Mum at home, I woke suddenly in the middle of the night and I swear I saw Mum standing at the foot of the bed. I wasn’t afraid; I just looked at her, wondering what she was doing there.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m an angel now but I’ll still watch out for you. I will always be with you.’
I’m not sure if the voice was out loud or in my head – Rosalind didn’t wake up – but I remember it very clearly, even today. Back then, in my nine-year-old’s head, I knew it meant that Mum was dead and had gone to Heaven. I wasn’t afraid of death because I went to Sunday school like all little children did in those days, and I believed in God and Jesus and angels in glowing white dresses with wings.
Mum’s angel didn’t have wings or a white dress. It was just her. It all seemed so normal that I just accepted it. She lingered at the foot of the bed for a while then faded away, and I lay awake, wondering when I would see her again and what would become of me now.
* This term, which sounds racist nowadays, was in common use at the time.
2
Next morning, Rosalind’s mum came into the bedroom and said, ‘You don’t need to put on your school uniform today, Cherry. Your dad’s coming to take you out for the day so wear your best clothes.’
Over breakfast, Rosalind and Donald kept staring at me in a funny way and there was none of their usual joshing. I think maybe their mum or their dad had had a word before I came downstairs, telling them to be quiet. I wondered if they knew about Mum being an angel but didn’t like to ask.
‘Would you like some jam, Cherry?’ Mr Davidson asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t feel like eating anything because my tummy was aching, but I nibbled at the edge of my toast, just the tiniest of little nibbles.
Rosalind and Donald left for school and Mrs Davidson brushed my hair for me really gently, making it all shiny and neat. When Pop arrived I put on my cherry-red Sunday-best coat instead of my school coat and followed him out to the car, his old Ford Prefect with the leather seats that I loved the smell of. We drove in silence to Gulliver’s, the florist opposite the hospital, and Pop pulled up outside, then hesitated, as if trying to work out what to say.
‘I’ve got something very sad to tell you, Cherry,’ he said at last, taking my hands in his, and I noticed that his eyes were red-rimmed. ‘Your mummy was too sick to get better and last night I’m afraid she died.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘She came to see me and told me she’s an angel.’ I didn’t feel sad at that stage because I knew she was all right – I’d seen her with my own eyes.
He looked puzzled. ‘When was that?’
‘Last night in bed.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, we need to choose some flowers for her to hold in her coffin and I thought you might like to help me choose the prettiest ones. Will you do that?’
I nodded. We got out of the car and went into the florist, exploring the rows of big flowers and little flowers, brightly coloured and pale flowers, and in the end we decided on lily-of-the-valley because they had such a nice smell and I knew Mum had liked them.
Afterwards we went straight back to the Davidsons and Pop left me there with a hug, saying that he was very busy with all the arrangements but he would see me soon. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral – children didn’t go to funerals in the early fifties. I stayed at the Davidsons until the formalities were out of the way, and all that time I didn’t shed a single tear. I was quiet but just got on with my schoolwork and playing with Donald and helping Mrs Davidson in the kitchen. It was only when Pop picked me up and brought me back to our house that I realised Mum really wasn’t there – she wasn’t in the sitting room, or in her bedroom, or in the kitchen – and I began to cry. In my nine-year-old’s mind I’d somehow thought she would be, even though I knew she was an angel now. I was all muddled up.
Pop pulled me onto his lap for a hug and said, ‘You mustn’t cry, Cherryanna. You’ve got to be a very brave girl for Daddy.’
He sounded so sad that I sniffed back my snot and wiped my tears on my sleeve, swallowing the sobs in my throat. I couldn’t bear to make Pop any sadder than he already was, so I zipped the emotions inside of me and locked them away, determined not to cry any more. The words ‘you mustn’t cry’ stuck in my head, and I thought of them if I ever felt like I was going to break down, repeating them over and over to myself. ‘You mustn’t cry, you mustn’t cry.’ Pop needed me to be strong, and that’s what I would be. I wanted to look after him and help him to cope. We would stick together, he and I, the two of us together, and we’d manage just fine.
Pop had other ideas, though. He couldn’t manage to do his job at the aerodrome and look after a nine-year-old girl at the same time, so first of all he sent me off to stay with my auntie Florrie and uncle Sid, who lived near Margate. I don’t know how long I was there but it was long enough for Auntie Florrie and me to make a knitted rabbit and stuff it full of stockings. One night I couldn’t help starting to cry in bed, no matter how hard I tried not to. When Florrie came in I didn’t want her to see I was upset so I squashed that rabbit hard against my face and told her to ‘go away’. After that I went to stay with some friends of Pop’s in Ramsgate. There was a woman living with them who had been mentally disabled since falling out of a window as a child, and she spent her days winding and unwinding cotton reels, so I used to help her.
Finally, after I don’t know how long, Pop picked me up and drove me back to the house on Heath Road in Salisbury where we had lived with Mum, and it felt terribly empty without her. We took flowers to her grave and arranged them in a little crackle-glaze vase. When I looked at the mound of earth, I never believed she was in there because I knew she was an angel in Heaven. All the same, I was very upset when frost cracked the vase one week in winter and all the water spilled out and the flowers died. It seemed important to keep it looking nice for Mum.
Pop hired a succession of housekeepers to look after us, but for some reason none of them worked out. There was a couple who came to live in for a while, and I think they did their best but they couldn’t compare with my mum. Nothing they did was right. For example, I liked to crunch on the raw stump in the middle of a cabbage – Mum had always given me that bit when she was making our tea. I told the housekeeper I liked it but she misunderstood and cooked the middle bit for me, boiling it till it was soft and mushy. I didn’t tell her what she had done wrong but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it like that. It was disgusting.
Then, on Coronation Day, 2 June 1953, there was a party in our street and everyone was getting dressed up. I had a blue-and-white-check gingham dress with a full circle skirt and red ric-rac braid round the hem that Mum had made for me before she died. I really felt the bee’s knees in that dress and decided that the patriotic colours were perfect for the party. I went to school that morning then when I got back I looked for the dress and found it had been washed but not ironed, so it was all crumpled. Our housekeeper wasn’t there; I was on my own in the house. I couldn’t face going to the party with it looking like that, so I pulled out the ironing board and climbed on a chair to plug the iron into the light socket, the way I’d seen Mum do it. When it had heated up enough, I began to iron my favourite dress, but the creases wouldn’t come out. I didn’t know that some fabrics have to be dampened before ironing. I tried for ages to make it smooth and neat but it wouldn’t work and I missed Mum more than ever. She would never have let me go out in a creased dress. With her looking after me, I was always impeccably turned out, but now there was no