Lizzie Vogel 1 - Man at the Helm

25

Our mother found waking up in the morning very difficult indeed and felt sick and miserable. Especially as it was dark and cold – two of her worst things. She’d set her alarm for 7 a.m. to give her thirty minutes to wake up properly and have coffee. It wasn’t that she’d never been up at that hour, just that she’d never had to get up.

The first morning my sister and I dragged ourselves out of bed an hour early and my sister went down to our mother’s room to make sure she was up. She wasn’t, then she was. Once we’d heard her clanging about, we went down in our nighties to offer support. We’d planned to make eggy bread to give her a good breakfast but, seeing us, our mother was extremely grumpy and didn’t want our support and was actually horrible to be with, much worse than usual, which was a bad start and disappointing.

‘Who put that fucking kettle on?’ she yelled, as it started its slow, whining build-up to the boil.

‘I was going to make you a cup of coffee,’ said my sister.

‘Do it in the thing,’ our mother demanded, meaning her coffee boiler. ‘I can’t stand the powdered.’

Then before the thing had the coffee ready, our mother made herself a powdered one and my sister stomped back to bed. And our mother was cross that she’d upset my sister.

‘Jesus Christ, why do you have to bother me, even at this hour?’ she said.

‘We thought you’d like some company,’ I said.

‘When have I ever wanted company?’ she said.

So I stomped off back to bed too. And soon we heard Gloxinia’s engine revving and then trailing off as our mother drove away for her first day as a van driver at the Snowdrop Laundry.

‘She’s gone,’ I said to my sister in her bed.

We said how much we hated her and hoped she’d get the sack and so on. Then we fell asleep and then we were up again having Weetabix and, to make things worse, Jack had to have his with Blue Band and some diabetic jam I’d stolen from my father’s house because the milkman had skipped us.

When we got home from school, my sister said we should all tidy up the best we could and have everything nice for when our mother came home because she’d be shattered. We agreed and my sister started to make a macaroni cheese but found the milk never had come. So she switched to macaroni with tomatoes and cheese and Little Jack – lovely Little Jack – ran all the way to the shops on his own and bought a bottle of milk.

When we heard Gloxinia pull into the drive we all lined up, like the kids from The Sound of Music, and our mother surprised us by coming in the back door. We followed her into her bedroom.

‘How was it?’ asked Jack.

‘Unbearable,’ said our mother. She took off Mr Gummo’s shoes and flopped onto the chesterfield which was in her bedroom and had become her bed.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘It just went on and on and with endless little things you have to do,’ she said.

‘Like what?’ we wanted to know, but our mother was too tired to speak and just waved us all away and lay with her eyes closed for a while. My sister made her a cup of coffee and then she had a bath and went to bed and we didn’t see her again for the rest of the week, except for the odd moment when she came in and dished out chicken legs and tubs of coleslaw.

She’d started buying the chicken legs from supermarkets on her travels and giving them to us in a bit of kitchen paper for dinner. I quite liked them but my sister obviously didn’t, her being an ongoing vegetarian, and she thought we looked all caveman-like eating them with our hands and would have preferred we’d tackled them with cutlery, but our mother said not to make any washing up now she was working. Our ex-father’s lectures on the importance of table manners had made an impression on my sister and she’d begun to sound like him.

‘You’ll never get a promotion if you eat like monkeys,’ she told us, not that we knew what a promotion actually was, even though we’d had the same grisly warning plenty of times.

Our mother had a two-week probation period at Snowdrop Laundry, during which time she had to arrive bang on time and be shown the ropes by Miss Kellogg, the deputy. Miss Kellogg, who’d done a small part of the interview, was quite nice but very particular about every little detail and munched on porky scratchings, which was worse than our sister having to see us gnawing on chicken legs because Miss Kellogg would often get a pig’s bristle stuck between her teeth and have to pick at it with a corner of her fag packet.

After the two-week period, though, our mother was free of Miss Kellogg and the porky scratchings, and in charge of the van and the van boy – the very nice and hard-working Deano. Also, she was able to chuck Mr Gummo’s canvas shoes into the hall cupboard and switch to her own shoes. The van driver’s job entailed driving to various venues across the city and county, as previously discussed, and exchanging dirty roller towels for clean ones in the toilets and cloakrooms. The best part was the bombing around in the van with the radio on or talking about plays (which Deano could do, up to a point, having studied English Literature A level for a year) and the worst part was the actual going into the toilets. The men’s toilets especially, being the worst bit of the worst bit and a bit of a shock to our sheltered mother.

She hadn’t had much experience of men’s toilets, having attended a girls’ boarding school and then marrying and only really knowing our father and Charlie Bates, both of whom had obviously been quite fastidious in the toilet, standing or sitting, and either never dripping or splashing or, if they did, wiping it quickly up so she never saw. Now it was beginning to seem as though they weren’t the norm, and the norm being to pee all around the toilet, splashing every part of the fixings and floor while scratching the pubic area and shedding hairs. To make it worse, it didn’t look as though the splashings got wiped up very often, and they would congeal into syrupy orange droplets. Our mother’s flip-flops became untenable (her word) and she decided to go back to Mr Gummo’s Dunlops.

Once she’d got used to it and settled down in spite of the early mornings, the grumpy killjoy of a boss and all that urine, she quite enjoyed it. She seemed to have just enough fun with the van boy during the driving part to make it bearable and ditto the banter of the van drivers during the laundry-sorting part. She didn’t enjoy the three calls she had in our village but got used to them quickly enough, and Mr Terry the butcher was always very pleased to see her and I thought it funny that after rejecting him man-on-the-helm-wise on account of his blood-soaked aprons, there she was every Thursday tiptoeing across his sawdusty floor and heaving seven of them into the van plus a smeary roller and two tea towels.

No one at Snowdrop minded that she was posh, they actually liked her for it and found it charming and funny, and no one made hurtful comments about Vogel’s – what a disgrace they were going bust and so many people losing their jobs. They managed to avoid the subject by talking about other things, such as the news and funny customer stories.

She never liked the chaos when she got home, though, and still hated the kitchen. On the plus side she had neither the time nor the inclination for writing the play.