Alongside a
new life in England, my education at The Crescent Road Infants School
continues. It is still 1972 and Mama, Papa, Sis and I have now been living in
the town of Brentwood for the past year (see post Girl With Television). During the school day I hungrily devour my reading books one
after the other, and along with it
the fascinating adventures of the two main characters, Janet and John in
this strange new language called English. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that children could do
such marvellous things such as go to a zoo, or even bake a cake. I also
never knew that an oven was for baking, my Spanish grandma uses hers for
storing pots and pans and this is exactly what Mama also does at our new home in
51 Crescent Road. Even though I like my reading classes, I must admit that the
school moments that really captivate me are those that rotate around food; one
of them is the afternoon story time and the other is called lunch.
In the afternoons, we have this marvellous drink called ice cold-milk from adorable miniature glass bottles, and
I have never had such a thing in my life. Back in Tenerife we generally
drank goats milk which was never deliciously chilled in this way. The machine they use to chill the milk is called a fridge,
and this is also something I have never seen before back on my island.
We children eagerly take it in turns to distribute the milk bottles out
between everyone
in the class, after which we sit quietly at our desks
and sip our
drink from long straws as Mrs Jones reads out the newest instalment of
the afternoon story, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.
England definitely has some good sides to it, I think to myself as I sip and listen. It may
not have the beaches of Tenerife, but I could definitely get used to this wonderful
drink every afternoon, and whenever I am afforded the slightest
opportunity I make sure to help myself to two.
The Headmistress, Mrs
Chapman often supervises us at lunch time in the school cafeteria and
this for me is another strange experience all together. English food is
like nothing I have ever seen before; it's made up of different
components on the plate and separated by multiple invisible barriers. In
Spain, we normally have it all mixed up together. Today we have sausages,
runny potatoes called mash, peas and nothing else. All of this is then drowned on the plate in a tasteless brown liquid called gravy. Mrs Chapman tells us
that we must all eat our food like fine ladies and gentlemen, slowly and elegantly with our knives and forks in hands at all times. No
shovelling of peas into the mouth is allowed. Rather they must be must
be piled delicately onto the back of the fork and then inserted into your mouth
that way. But the problem is that you cannot pile more than about five
peas onto the back of your fork at any one time before they start dribbling off, so it takes me an
absolute eternity to eat the pile of peas on my plate. I would really
want to shovel them onto the fork as we would do in Spain and then pop
the whole thing into my mouth, but I dare not even contemplate the thought, Mrs
Chapman does not look like she would tolerate pea shovellers lightly.
I
have also never eaten with a knife in my hands at all times as Mrs
Chapman equally demands. Back home in Tenerife we cut up the tricky bits
with a
knife, let it drop on the table and then forget about it as we
shovelled the food into our mouths with the fork. I dare not tell Mrs
Chapman this either, I have a feeling that she would be appalled. It's
no wonder that the English school children around me are generally thin.
By the time they have manoeuvred the pile of peas onto the back of
their fork to delicately transfer to their mouths, the bell indicating
that lunch break is over has rung, and they can forget about the rest of
the food on their plate. When I am home after school, Mama asks me what
I had for lunch today, and I reply that runny
potato, sausages and forty-seven peas. Mama
and I cannot understand why anyone would want to load peas delicately
onto the back of a fork when the other side of the fork does a more
efficient job, nor why anyone would want to take a perfectly good
potato,
smash it to bits and then put it on a plate. We have teeth for that, so
why do they bother? Sometimes it feels that we will never understand
these English and their strange ways.
One
a weekend day when I have no school, Papa sometimes takes me with him to work on
the pig farm. The owner, William has two children called Stephen and
Jane.
Stephen is a lot older than me, but Jane is just two years older. I
still
do not speak too much English but that does not deter Jane and I from
playing together on the farm and we roam within the confines of the farm
perimeter, just as I had done on the chicken farm with the daughter of
Papa's supervisor (see post Watching The English Part III).
We peek into the area where the adorable piglets live along with their
siblings and cannot in our wildest dreams imagine that they will
eventually end up on our breakfast plates as bacon. Jane and I always
make sure to return back to the house for The Tea Break, this
is when both our Papa's sit down with the other farm workers and have
their sacred morning break (see post Watching The English Part I And II). We children do
not get to drink tea, but we get something equally wonderful and that is
juice and
biscuits.
If
it is rainy or cold, we play inside Jane's home and she sometimes
takes me up to her bedroom. I notice that Jane's home has things in it
that I do not have in mine; She has her own bedroom with her very own
bed, at home I share a room and a bed with Sis but I don't mind because in
the winter the house is very cold and sleeping next to Sis keeps us
both warm. She also has a wardrobe full of beautiful dresses which
captivate me. Most of my dresses are handed down by Mama and Papa's kind
friends and I am forever growing out of them so that the sleeves always
look ridiculously short. Jane also has a large pile of dolls
all called Sindy and they sit grouped in a corner of her bedroom
surrounded by a sea of Sindy accessories; Sindy clothes,
Sindy shoes, Sindy handbags and whatever else you could imagine that a Sindy doll would
need.
I just have Emilia, the doll
that Papa sacrificed all his money to buy me at the fair in Andalusia when I was three (see post Meet The Family).
Emilia also sits in a corner
of my bedroom, but unlike Jane's many Sindy dolls, she only has the
clothes she is wearing and nothing else. Also, she is alone. Jane also
has something called a carpet. Its thick and inviting and cosily covers all the
surfaces of the floor throughout the house. In our home, we have small
patches of it here and there covering the wooden floor boards and the
staircase is completely bare. Finally, I notice that Jane has an
unimaginable luxury. It's called a telephone, and this is
something that I have
never seen inside a home before. As my eight-year-old mind and eyes
slowly absorb this opulence, I gradually comprehend that we are not living
in the lap of opulent luxury, rather I begin to understand that we are
dirt poor (see post Toast And Television).
To be continued...
Next post published on 8th October: Hot Pants
Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.
It's early 1972 and Mama, Papa, Sis and I are now living in a town called
Brentwood, not far from a big city called London. Two years will
have soon elapsed since we bid farewell to our beautiful Island home of Tenerife to
begin a new life here in England (see post Toast And Television).
One of the lifelines connecting us to this new world opening out before
us is The Television. Occupying pride of place in the centre of the
living room, we
all love our black and white television set and from it learn copious amounts of English. Everyone has their list of favourite shows and for Mama it will be the soap
operas; Crossroads, Emmerdale, and Coronation street. She is already beginning to evolve her fascination for predictable
story lines along with an inability to separate fact from fiction.
Papa's own interests will lie elsewhere. His favourite program will be
called The News and when he is not working, he will religiously tune in on the hour to the news; at six o'clock, nine o'clock, ten o'clock, in fact any o'clock. If The News is on the television, then Papa will watch it.
For Sis and I, it is the children's programmes which will captivate us; Jackanory, Blue Peter, and Magpie. As Sis and I grow older, we will include Top of the Pops as
another of our must-see television programs, and along with it will
come the big names of pop music of the seventies; The Osmonds, Sweet,
Slade, Gary Glitter,
and Mud are amongst many of the names that will greet us as we sit down
together on Thursday evening. But for the moment, this is a faraway
dream for we are still aged only eight and three. For now, in the evenings we will all huddle around this wonderful transmitter of Anglo-Saxon culture and watch comedies such as Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language,
taking our cue from the taped laughter on the soundtrack and laugh when
the audience laugh. Even if we don't always understand what is said we
still laugh along with everyone else. The entertainment and English life
that emanates along with it from our television is good.
Watching
television has also taught Mama what the English feed
their offspring. The advertisements are full of jolly children munching
away at
their cereals in the morning and that's what we now get for breakfast.
Mama is
at last happy she's getting it right, our days of mistakenly eating raw
sausage on toast erroneously thinking it was pate are firmly over (see post Toast And Television).
Our absolute favourite advert is one with
cartoon cats sat round a table happily pouring cereal into their empty
bowls. There they all are chattering away with one another, clearly this
is the best cereal in the world and
there's the box right in the middle of their cartoon table. It's the
same
cereal that we have in our cupboard and it's called Shreddies. Sis and I are having breakfast when
this
cartoon advert comes on and Mama is suddenly transfixed. She takes one
look at
the advert, another at the cereal box sitting on our table and is
appalled,
'Dios mio, Good Lord not again,' Mama says to herself with a weary sigh, 'Now I've given the girls cat food!' And just as with the toast and paté,
our cereal unexpectedly disappears never to be seen again.
I am now at Crescent Road Infants School and my teacher is a nice lady called Mrs Jones who is about
Mama's age. Mrs Jones is friendly and always smiling, not so the Headmistress. Mrs Chapman
is a stricter-looking older lady and we children are slightly in awe of her. Serious looking,
she is always immaculately turned out with skirt suits and freshly
coiffured
silver hair. All this is topped off with reading glasses dangling from
her neck around a silver chain.
I am already eight and should really be at the nearby Junction Road
Junior School with children of my own age, but I have been kept back a
year at the Crescent Road Infant School and I guess it is because my
English is still not at the level of other eight-year-olds. My new
school is just on the other side of the road from our home at 51
Crescent Road, and if Mama
looks out of her bedroom window from the upstairs floor she can see me
at break time in the school playground. She says that it makes her feel
content to see me playing happily with school friends just as I used to
do so with my cousins in Tenerife. The playground is simply a
large playing field next to the school building and dotted with a clump
of trees in the far corner. One them is a majestic oak and especially
enticing for climbing; many times I
scale this tree and sit on its low gnarled branches, sometimes falling
off and gently thudding onto the green carpet
of grass below me. After dusting myself off I simply climb back on.
Mama often watches my antics from her bedroom window and once I am home
from school she tells me to be careful, I am precious to her.
My new
English name is now Marie, Maria del Carmen has
long ago vanished (see post A Girl Named Marie), and combined with my Spanish surnames I am now known as Marie
Garrido Sanz. But this is soon
shortened to Marie Sanz; the English do
not seem to comprehend that a person can have two surnames instead of one and
they simply skip the first one and use the one at the end. Big mistake, the end
name is the Mama's surname, but the first one is the Papa's surname and the one
that predominates. Sanz is then mis-spelt and I then become known as Marie Sang. Now, I don't
really care about not having Papa's surname, nor about the misspelling, all
truth be told I am ecstatic that at last I now have a completely
English-sounding name. Armed with this fabulous new name and a bit of luck, no
one will notice that I am not originally from here. My ecstasy is however short
lived, because I soon take a school letter home with the name Marie Sang written on it
and when Papa sees it he becomes incensed.
The following
morning Papa accompanies me to school, marches straight into the class
room alongside me and in his best broken English
politely but firmly informs Mrs. Jones that he is Garrido and so are his
daughters; change the name back and change it now, he tells her. Now, Papa
is an imposing man that you do not want to mess around with and
Mrs Jones quickly realises this, so in an instant Papa's surname is
restored and I now become Marie Garrido. Oh
well, at least I was English for a few days, I think to myself
accepting with resignation this newest and final version of my name; Along with Papa's conversation with Mrs. Jones, the little Spanish girl named Maria del Carmen Garrido Sanz
finally and irrevocably vanishes. Consigned to a past life that cannot
be reconciled with this present one, she is now replaced by Marie Garrido, the name which will identify me for the rest of my time in England.
51 Crescent Road is lovely and cool in the summer, but summer soon gives way to autumn and this in turn gives way to the chill of the English winter. Our
new home does not have central heating, and on particularly cold days
Sis and I awake to a thin layer of frost covering the inside pane of the
bedroom window. On weekend mornings when there is no school, we run to Mama's bed and the three
of us snuggle in together. I notice that Mama has a huge unwieldly scar
extending from her back and winding its way across to her stomach
in a snake-like line. When I ask Mama where it came from she
becomes serious and tells me that its nothing, covers herself up and
immediately changes the topic of conversation. I am only a young child,
but I comprehend that this huge line across Mama's back is no small
thing. It will still take another thirty-six years before the cause of
this scarring is revealed, and when we are made aware of its origins,
the resulting shockwaves will unleash an emotional tsunami of epic
proportions.
To be continued.........
Next post published on Sunday, 24th September: Peas And Poverty
Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.
