Now I have two cats and a granddaughter. Part III

By the time my grandfather wrote the words in the title of these stories to his younger daughter (my Auntie Madge) in 1935 I was already changing from a little girl into a very Serious Little Girl. I had to write letters home from school to Papa and Nanan (and Mother and Daddy at a different address) once a week. Not long before I went to Brackenhill Open Air Home School (to give it its full title just once) my father was well enough to come home. He and mother had a flat in Arundel Square in North London and Papa took me to see them there. On the way Papa talked to me about my father, explaining that he was not yet very strong and I mustn't run to him and jump into his arms when I saw him. So I didn't. I remember very little of the visit and even less of my father for another four or five years.1

I had been able to read since I was three but now I was learning to spell properly. I was also learning to argue! Papa was a compositor by trade. Compositors considered themselves the cream of the printing trade because, not only could they spell, they also read just about everything they set into print. So they were unusually well-read for working class men. As far as I was concerned, Papa knew everything. We did have our arguments, though. There was the day when we locked horns over "sternitized" milk.2

"I think you'll find that the word is "sterilized", Joy.3

"No, Papa. It's "sternitized." I saw it on the bottle."4

"Well, you know where the dictionary is: go and get it and show it to me."5

Off I went to the back parlour and got the dictionary. I looked for "sternitized". It took a very long time. Papa waited. 6

"It's funny, Papa. It isn't here."7

"Oh, it isn't? Well, suppose you look for "sterilized", just in case that's there."8

End of argument. I thought that because I had argued with him he wouldn't take me on the treat he had promised me. But he did. This particular treat meant going in the train from Walthamstow to the Liverpool Street terminal. I loved seeing all the houses from the train window; trying to see what people were doing. I did not realise for some years that the journey went through some of the worst slums in East London. It was what people were doing that interested me. Just past Bethnal Green station the train went by some big arches set in the walls of a long tunnel. There were horses in the arches and I used to look for them every time we took the journey.They were the huge shire horses which pulled the heavy tradesmen's drays. Although we no longer had horse buses and carriages,beers, coal, rag-and-bone men still used horses to pull their goods along. When we got out of the train we usually walked the whole length of it to get to the barrier. And every time we came level with the engine it let off steam. The noise was terrifying and I used to try to run past the engine before the noise came. But it made me cry with fright every time. The person we were going to meet was very important and one of Papa's oldest friends.9

I called him Uncle Arthur. He was the first Foreign Secretary in the10

first Labour Government(The Rt. Hon. Arthur Henderson)and,in 1934/5, was our Representative at the League of Nations. I just loved being with those two old gentlemen, Uncle Arthur one side of the barrier and us the other, as he and Papa talked until it was time for Uncle Arthur to take the boat train back to Geneva, or had just come back from therem and had to back home to the north of England. In those days we had to buy a platform ticket if we wanted to see another train come in or go out of a station, and platform tickets cost extra money. Henderson died of cancer in 1935. 11

Also in 1935 Papa fought his last General Election campaign, his sixth, and as usual had no expectation of winning. He was 75 and had been campaigning on his own behalf or for other candidates since 1918. He was, in fact, one of the first four paid Agents sent out from Labour Party Headquarters to speak on behalf of candidates in General and by-elections and at other meetings. Because "Labour Party" were dirty words in those years, Mother always told me that I was never to say where she worked or what Papa did. Mother was Secretary to J.S. Middleton, the Party's Assistant Secretary, until he took over as Secretary after Henderson died.Although they never talked consciously with me about politics, I obviously lived it and breathed it at home. I also spent several days of the holidays at Headquarters in Transport House,Smith Square, which is where Mother worked. Papa knew many of the Staff there and, of course, many MPs. He took me to have tea on the Terrace of the House of Commons when I was a bit older where I met some of the MPs he knew.12

I could go on and on about Papa and his political work, but that is part of a Portrait of him which I still hope to publish.But now it's time to return to the grandfather I knew and spent most of my life with out of school. He adored the woman he married in 1896 and never stopped adoring her, though quite aware that she was not perfect. In 1935 she stood as a Labour Candidate for one of the poorest wards in Walthamstow and got in. So she spent a lot of time at meetings and going round visiting her constituents, apart from being Treasurer of the local branch of the League of Nations. Every Sunday morning Papa insisted that she stay in bed until he took her breakfast up to her. He used to cut slices of bread so thin you could see through them; spread them with a little butter and marmalade;roll them up and arrange them on a plate on a tray. Then he put her china cup and saucer next to a small teapot and carefully carried them up to the front bedroom. He never missed making Sunday morning breakfast for her. 13

When she was out at an evening meeting he would watch the clock until he though she was on the way home. Then he would cut slices of bread, toast them at the end of a long fork in front of the kitchen range, butter them, cut them in quarters and pile them up on a plate in front of the fire with a basin on top to keep them moist and warm. I was allowed to stay up until she came home so that I could say goodnight to her. Even though I had to share her double featherbed, I was seldom awake when she eventually did come up to bed. 14

You could say that I was surrounded by a loving atmosphere in that home where two old people whom I loved dearly spent their years together. Papa was ten years older than Nanan and they never got to celebrating their golden wedding because he died first.15

Part IV will be brief and will be about his last years.16