weirdmonger
THE LAST BALCONY (www.nemonymous.com)
Almond Cottage
Almond Cottage
posted Wednesday, 2 June 2004
Lyons Corner Houses in those days were of their own age: civilised affairs, with a small orchestra playing a Viennese waltz to the accompaniment of the clinking cups and saucers. Waiters and primly pinafored waitresses weaved in and out of the tea tables, bearing tiered trays of cream cones, battenburgs, apple doughnuts, macaroons, coconut pyramids, jam sponges, angel cakes. Steaming urns of aromatic tea from the Far East, having been left to infuse for the statutory four minutes, were served to the Grannies with their charges, who tried to keep the conversation as seemingly effervescent as their memories. The teapots, still dressed in their cosies, were lifted and the spouts lowered into the fragile china cups. Little oval sieves bore the strain of the leaves, the clear brown liquid gurgling upon the milk and the sugar spoons stirring round and round in time to the palm court melodies—and Alice smiled at her grandson, hinting that the memory of this very occasion would stay with him forever.
The boy, true, ought to recall such excursions to the afternoon tea dance—but Alice had deeper memories of yet another age, another world almost, when she lived at...
"Almond Cottage it was, my dear Clive, a place where they kept little girls like me and made us wind thirty denier cotton on to the reels by hand for the London drapery trade—and, on Sundays, as a treat, they gave us watered lemonade and broken biscuits and hard scones with currants that looked like dead flies—there were none of these custard slices and fresh double clotted Devon cream pastries for the likes of us then..."
"Did they have Christmases then, Nanna?"
"Yes, I had several Christmases at Almond Cottage ... I was given a rosy shiny pippin apple and a bit of coal in my stocking ... the only real happy time was waking up to those on Christmas morning ... memories that stick to the mind ... me and my chum ... Beatie Bilborough was her name, dead now some years, I suppose. Well, we used to sleep in the same room ... she was orphaned off to a Jewish family in Kidwelly ... I stayed at Almond Cottage till the war began..."
"What war?"
"The one that changed lives, Clive. Many of the girls were seconded to khaki work and making bandos for hats ... sweaty labour, they call it now, my dear..."
"Where were your mummy and daddy?"
"I didn't really know. The war changed everything ... news of them rarely got through to Almond Cottage ... I remember my father used to roll Havana tobacco into cigars ... my mother seemed to do nothing but have babies, very few of whom survived beyond a week or so ... good job too or they would all have ended up at Almond Cottage."
"When did you leave it?"
"I ran away! It's a long story, really. They found some traces of cotton on a tree below my bedroom window. I'm sure Beatie dropped it there, to save herself a reel of work. But I got the blame, being a Londoner. A common Londoner they called me ... and I swore back at them. And they said only Londoners swear. And they got all the other girls to stand round me in a circle and chant: 'She's a cheat, she's a cheat, she's a lying swearing cheat...' I ran away, but I did not know where my mother was and they'd already told me that my father was in a dark box under the ground..."
The orchestra was now striking up a lively quickstep. Beyond this civilised choreography of a more sedate age, there emerged—in a future mind not unlike his own—a whirling wonderland where wartime shrapnel broke into the sparks and splinters of a disorderly imagination: techno-jiving and jamming, those gut-wrenching extreme noise thrash terrors blowing up in his face like burst ambitions...
But the boy—the one who I remember was once myself—took his Nanna's hand and escorted her on to the dance floor, whereupon she humoured him into believing that he was leading her into something better, and he knew he was the apple of her eye.
As the story goes, she died a year later. The year after that the Corner Houses in London were closed down, too ... and much later they were replaced by louder venues.
I find it hard even to remember what Alice looked like outside of photographs.
But Clive—whom I then was—asked one further question of her, as they took a clumsy path across the polished floor: "How long for one cotton reel, was it, Nanna?"
"We could not go to bed until we had ravelled reels from a hundred spools full. And for every thousand spools, we got one old penny towards our keep."
Whilst watched by those elegant partakers of a traditional English teatime, sitting at the crisp linen-draped tables in a revery of ginger biscuits dipping in and out of piping hot tea, Alice and the shiny pippin-faced boy called Clive danced round and round, wound round and round, for what has since become a relative eternity of years.
First published 'Momentum' 1990
posted Wednesday, 2 June 2004
Lyons Corner Houses in those days were of their own age: civilised affairs, with a small orchestra playing a Viennese waltz to the accompaniment of the clinking cups and saucers. Waiters and primly pinafored waitresses weaved in and out of the tea tables, bearing tiered trays of cream cones, battenburgs, apple doughnuts, macaroons, coconut pyramids, jam sponges, angel cakes. Steaming urns of aromatic tea from the Far East, having been left to infuse for the statutory four minutes, were served to the Grannies with their charges, who tried to keep the conversation as seemingly effervescent as their memories. The teapots, still dressed in their cosies, were lifted and the spouts lowered into the fragile china cups. Little oval sieves bore the strain of the leaves, the clear brown liquid gurgling upon the milk and the sugar spoons stirring round and round in time to the palm court melodies—and Alice smiled at her grandson, hinting that the memory of this very occasion would stay with him forever.
The boy, true, ought to recall such excursions to the afternoon tea dance—but Alice had deeper memories of yet another age, another world almost, when she lived at...
"Almond Cottage it was, my dear Clive, a place where they kept little girls like me and made us wind thirty denier cotton on to the reels by hand for the London drapery trade—and, on Sundays, as a treat, they gave us watered lemonade and broken biscuits and hard scones with currants that looked like dead flies—there were none of these custard slices and fresh double clotted Devon cream pastries for the likes of us then..."
"Did they have Christmases then, Nanna?"
"Yes, I had several Christmases at Almond Cottage ... I was given a rosy shiny pippin apple and a bit of coal in my stocking ... the only real happy time was waking up to those on Christmas morning ... memories that stick to the mind ... me and my chum ... Beatie Bilborough was her name, dead now some years, I suppose. Well, we used to sleep in the same room ... she was orphaned off to a Jewish family in Kidwelly ... I stayed at Almond Cottage till the war began..."
"What war?"
"The one that changed lives, Clive. Many of the girls were seconded to khaki work and making bandos for hats ... sweaty labour, they call it now, my dear..."
"Where were your mummy and daddy?"
"I didn't really know. The war changed everything ... news of them rarely got through to Almond Cottage ... I remember my father used to roll Havana tobacco into cigars ... my mother seemed to do nothing but have babies, very few of whom survived beyond a week or so ... good job too or they would all have ended up at Almond Cottage."
"When did you leave it?"
"I ran away! It's a long story, really. They found some traces of cotton on a tree below my bedroom window. I'm sure Beatie dropped it there, to save herself a reel of work. But I got the blame, being a Londoner. A common Londoner they called me ... and I swore back at them. And they said only Londoners swear. And they got all the other girls to stand round me in a circle and chant: 'She's a cheat, she's a cheat, she's a lying swearing cheat...' I ran away, but I did not know where my mother was and they'd already told me that my father was in a dark box under the ground..."
The orchestra was now striking up a lively quickstep. Beyond this civilised choreography of a more sedate age, there emerged—in a future mind not unlike his own—a whirling wonderland where wartime shrapnel broke into the sparks and splinters of a disorderly imagination: techno-jiving and jamming, those gut-wrenching extreme noise thrash terrors blowing up in his face like burst ambitions...
But the boy—the one who I remember was once myself—took his Nanna's hand and escorted her on to the dance floor, whereupon she humoured him into believing that he was leading her into something better, and he knew he was the apple of her eye.
As the story goes, she died a year later. The year after that the Corner Houses in London were closed down, too ... and much later they were replaced by louder venues.
I find it hard even to remember what Alice looked like outside of photographs.
But Clive—whom I then was—asked one further question of her, as they took a clumsy path across the polished floor: "How long for one cotton reel, was it, Nanna?"
"We could not go to bed until we had ravelled reels from a hundred spools full. And for every thousand spools, we got one old penny towards our keep."
Whilst watched by those elegant partakers of a traditional English teatime, sitting at the crisp linen-draped tables in a revery of ginger biscuits dipping in and out of piping hot tea, Alice and the shiny pippin-faced boy called Clive danced round and round, wound round and round, for what has since become a relative eternity of years.
First published 'Momentum' 1990
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