Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [11]
I only did it the once, but I’d never felt so ashamed. The second the ice cream touched my tongue, I felt like gagging. There was no way I could enjoy that treat knowing where the money had come from. Luckily for them, my friends had no such principles.
Not appreciating our dire financial straits was one thing, but, looking back at the photos, I realized something else had passed me by: just how beautiful Mum was. Of course, I’d always thought she was, but she was my mother and we all think that about our mums when we’re small, don’t we? But she was so pretty, so slim and, I keep forgetting, so damned young; a total head-turner for sure. I can’t find a bad picture of her from that time. Real knockout stuff.
Unfortunately, looking after me full-time didn’t give her much time to go out with friends her own age. Even when Granny looked after me, our lack of income meant Mum couldn’t afford to do much anyway. That was why her parents were so delighted for her when she came to pick me up from theirs one day and announced, ‘I’ve got a job!’
I was the only one not so thrilled. Money didn’t mean anything to me, but I wasn’t the one struggling to make ends meet each week. No, the only result I could see from Mum’s news was that she would be away from me for the entire day. I’d been with her virtually every day since I was born. Apart from the odd day or weekend with Granny and Grandpa, we’d been cooped up like battery hens in a succession of tiny flats.
In short then, while Granny was cheering loudly enough to be heard in Eastbourne, I couldn’t see any good at all coming from this news. As far as I was concerned, I had a wonderful life. Mum getting a job was going to ruin everything.
Within a year, I would be proved right. But not in the way I expected.
THREE
The Eye of the Storm
With more than 3,000 employees, American Express is Brighton’s largest employer. It was just as dominant in the 1970s as well, which I suppose explains how Mum was able to get a job there with no qualifications. Every day she’d pull on a suit, walk or catch a bus down to Edward Street and disappear inside the modernistic, white, angled building that had been built for the company a decade earlier. She was a clerk, basically shuffling paper all day, but it was work. It was something that paid a wage. And it got her out of the house.
As a four-year-old you don’t want to consider that perhaps Mum would rather spend some of her time with other grownups. You think, I’ve got you, you’ve got me – brilliant!
I didn’t really know what a job was. She may as well have said, ‘I’m going to the moon.’ I had no idea what it would entail. But I soon found out: in a nutshell, it meant we would be separated.
In order to make the job work, Mum had to sort out child-care for me. That’s how I came to be enrolled in the Rainbow Nursery, where I was when Fisher-Price came to town. Looking back, I don’t know if she needed the salary before she could afford to get me in or whether it was a state-run thing. At the time, all I knew was that I was dumped there because Mum wanted to be somewhere else.
Obviously, that’s not what was happening. Things were desperate. We needed money. We were chasing pound notes around rainy car parks, for God’s sake! But I liked those things. I never appreciated how much stress the financial situation placed on Mum’s young shoulders. So for a while I resented being at Rainbow. It was fun to play with other kids, but every day Mum dropped me off and every day I thought, I wish I was staying with her.
It’s probably the only time in my life when I entertained ill thoughts about her. It really felt that she was choosing other people over me. I hated it. But then the door would close, the nursery teacher would wave a paintbrush at me and I’d be lost in the wonderful cacophony of thirty children enjoying themselves.
As a mum myself now, I know it can’t have been any easier for her to leave me than it was to be left. It’s a mother