Although it was a mournful day when we left the fine house to return to 3 Pownall Terrace, yet there was a sense of relief in getting back to our own freedom; after all, as guests we were living under a certain tension, and, as Mother said, guests were like cakes: if kept too long they became stale and unpalatable. Thus the silken threads of a brief and luxurious episode snapped, and we fell again into our accustomed impecunious ways.
four
1899 was an epoch of whiskers: bewhiskered kings, statesmen, soldiers and sailors, Krugers, Salisburys, Kitcheners, Kaisers and cricketers – incredible years of pomp and absurdity, of extreme wealth and poverty, of inane political bigotry of both cartoon and press. But England was to absorb many shocks and indignations. A few Boer farmers in the African Transvaal were warring unfairly, shooting our red-coated soldiers, excellent targets, from behind boulders and rocks. Then the War Office saw the light, and our red coats were quickly changed to khaki. If the Boers wanted it that way, they could have it.
I was vaguely aware of war through patriotic songs, vaudeville sketches and cigarette pictures of the generals. The enemy, of course, were unmitigated villains. One heard dolorous news about the Boers surrounding Ladysmith and England went mad with hysterical joy at the relief of Mafeking. Then at last we won – we muddled through. All this I heard from everyone but Mother. She never mentioned the war. She had her own battle to fight.
Sydney was now fourteen and had left school and got a job at the Strand Post Office as a telegraph boy. With Sydney’s wages and Mother’s earnings at her sewing machine, our economy was almost feasible – although Mother’s contribution was a modest one. She worked for a sweat-shop doing piece-work, sewing blouses for one and sixpence a dozen. Even though the patterns were delivered already cut out, it took twelve hours to make a dozen blouses. Mother’s record was fifty-four blouses in a week, which amounted to six shillings and ninepence.
Often at night I would lie awake in our garret watching her bent over her sewing machine, her head haloed against the light of the oil-lamp, her face in soft shadow, her lips faintly parted with strain as she guided the rapidly running seams through her machine, until the drone of it would send me off to sleep again. When she worked late this way, it was usually to meet a monetary deadline. There was always the problem of instalment payments.
And now a crisis had arisen. Sydney needed a new suit of clothes. He had worn his telegraph uniform every day in the week, including Sundays, until his friends began to joke about it. So for a couple of week-ends he stayed home until Mother was able to buy him a blue serge suit. In some way she managed to scrape together eighteen shillings. This created an insolvency in our economy, so that Mother was obliged to pawn the suit every Monday after Sydney went back to work in his telegraph uniform. She got seven shillings for the suit, redeeming it every Saturday for Sydney to wear over the week-end. This weekly custom became an habitual ceremony for over a year until the suit became threadbare. Then came a shock!
Monday morning, as usual, Mother went to the pawnshop. The man hesitated. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Chaplin, but we can’t lend you seven shillings any longer.’
Mother was astonished. ‘But why?’ she asked.
‘It’s too much of a risk; the trousers are threadbare. Look,’ he said, putting his hand in the seat of them, ‘you can see right through them.’
‘But they’ll be redeemed next Saturday,’ said Mother.
The pawnbroker shook his head. ‘The best I can do is three shillings for the coat and waistcoat.’
Mother rarely wept, but it was such a drastic blow that she came home in tears. She depended on that seven shillings to carry us through the week.
Meanwhile my own vestments were, to say the least, in disrepair. What was left of my Eight Lancashire Lads’ outfit was a motley sight. There were patches everywhere, on the elbows, trousers, shoes and stockings. And in this condition I ran smack into my nice little boy friend from Stockwell. What he was doing in Kennington I did not know and was too embarrassed to find out. He greeted me friendlily enough, but I could see him eyeing my deplorable appearance. To offset my embarrassment I assumed a dégagé manner and in my best, cultured voice told him that I was wearing my old clothes because I had just come from a beastly carpentry lesson.
But the explanation had little interest for him. He began to look crestfallen and to cast his eyes aside to hide his embarrassment. He inquired after Mother.
I answered briskly that she was away in the country and turned the attention on him: ‘Are you living in the same place?’
‘Yes,’ he answered, surveying me as though I had committed some cardinal sin.
‘Well, I’ll run along,’ I said abruptly.
He faintly smiled. ‘Good-bye,’ he said, and we parted, he walking off sedately in one direction and I, furious and ashamed, running helter-skelter in the opposite one.
*
Mother had a saying: ‘You can always stoop and pick up nothing.’ But she herself did not adhere to this adage, and my sense of propriety was often outraged. One day, returning from Brompton Hospital, Mother stopped to upbraid some boys tormenting a derelict woman who was grotesquely ragged and dirty. She had a cropped head, unusual in those days, and the boys were laughing and pushing each other towards her, as if to touch her would contaminate them. The pathetic woman stood like a stag at bay until Mother interfered. Then a look of recognition came over the woman’s face. ‘Lil,’ she said, feebly, referring to Mother’s stage name, ‘don’t you
