was corny.
Behind the surface of my polished manners of ‘excuse me, please’, ‘I beg your pardon’ and ‘no, thank you’ to virtually everything that was offered, there was a fanciful little girl who still knew the difference between a knife scar and a razor scar and was proud of knowing how to watch out for more than just the cars. But there was no need for my acquired street instinct at Jenks and no threats or fears lined the path to my house. The 23 trolley car picked me up from the corner of Southampton Avenue to cart me home in time for The Mickey Mouse Club and Rin Tin Tin on television.
Chestnut Hill was a solid white Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. The trees grew tall. The parks were beautiful. And the sun always seemed brighter there when I got off the trolley car. It was my neighbourhood during the school day.
Mount Airy didn’t feel graced like Chestnut Hill and didn’t have the village character of Germantown. The section we lived in near Mount Pleasant Avenue was very orderly with two-storey brick houses and canopied porches that displayed small flowerbeds and trimmed dark-green hedges. The big street-cleaning truck came once a week to spray the streets down. The neighbourhood looked well-tended but nondescript with block after block of these terraced houses, rather like certain areas of north London or north Manchester.
Occasionally, a kid pedalled down the sidewalk on a glossy two-wheeler bicycle or some toothless, brown-skinned, seven-year-old cowboys would bang-bang their way around a parked car. But there was never a baseball game played in the middle of the street and no one thought that opening a fire hydrant to let the water flood the street until the fire department came was a prodigious way to while away an evening. Dogs didn’t dawdle unleased on the streets, and no fathead alley cats whined away the nights.
The number 23 trolley-car depot was a block beyond our house on the other side of the road, and when we first moved to Musgrave Street, you couldn’t help noticing the rattle of the trolley cars on the track as they passed with their pole crackling against the overhead line. But this sound merely broke the silence. It didn’t disturb the peace.
Our family nearly belonged. Pam was openly admired for her studious appearance when she rushed off early to school first thing, looking as if her mind was on algebra instead of boys. She’d be wearing her new glasses and clutching her briefcase, which was always stuffed and overflowing with books and homework. She’d started at the Philadelphia High School for Girls at 17th Street and Spring Garden, which admitted girls from throughout the city on the basis of outstanding academic achievement. Pam studied the bass violin, and on Saturday morning she and Dennis went to special art classes that were given to children selected from all over Philadelphia who had exceptional artistic talent. I was just as proud of them as Edna, Ikey and Thelma were.
Once Edna had started her new job, at a factory that made children’s dresses, I was transformed from being starched and presentable to being ‘turned out’. I’d like to claim that I wasn’t made vain, merely extra confident in a wardrobe finer than anybody else’s at school. Edna bought me each new model that came off the factory floor.
Ikey was in her element working at the local library as a librarian. She walked home through rain and snow and once through a hurricane with her arms full of books for us, which gave her a reason to write her own poems and read other people’s, and I could get a reading of ‘Invictus’, ‘Crossing the Bar’ or ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ any time I wanted. They were my favourites, though neither my mother nor I knew that ‘gaol’ was pronounced ‘jail’.
Thelma remained our sweet unselfish aunt who cared about Ikey’s children as though they were her own. She enhanced her good looks to the fullest each morning with a little help from Maybelline cake mascara, a trace of eyebrow pencil and rouge with a hint of dark-red lipstick to finish it all off. She and Ikey wore straight skirts with cinched belts and stilettos that you could hear click-click-clicking on the cobblestone street in front of our house as Thelma returned from work around 5.30 pm. It was no wonder that she and Ikey got an intolerable dose of whistles, especially during the summer months.
I was free to bang the screen door going and coming with a shout to name which neighbour I was rushing off to visit. My personality still changed between home and school. The two environments were separate but equal in my head and heart.
We were a strange family in some ways, compared to the people on television. Love was not a thing we discussed. Though we liked each other, we didn’t call each other ‘darling’ and no one asked if you’d slept well when you stumbled down to the kitchen for a bowl of hominy grits or a fried egg. Sometimes we’d have a family pow-wow and decide that new resolutions were called for to make us practise at home on each other some of the good manners we exhibited outside. We could manage to adhere to the new rules for about a week, not raising our voices to each other, or speaking an unkind word, or leaping like Tarzan from the fourth stair into the living room.
There was a collection box to hold the penalty of a penny to be paid any time you used bad language or incorrect English or spoke dialect. It was always chock-full at the end of the week and went to the person who’d made the fewest faux-pas. My grandmother never played …
There was a certain amount of democracy in our house, although hard and fast rules for the children like no cursing were never allowed to be broken. There was an assumption that we had as much right to an opinion and a vote in matters as the women. The word fair was used a lot, perhaps too much. It only confused me into thinking that life was going to be fair.
Television continued to be my teacher. Family sitcoms like Ozzic and Harriet and Father Knows Best not only kept me amused, they made me informed and aware of things that I was not exposed to through my own experience. For instance, women on the television were always crying, but I don’t remember seeing my mother or grandmother cry through my childhood. For any upsets other than physical injuries, we were invariably told to ‘save the tears’. It was almost a relief to fall down and skin a knee, because I could wail the house down without the least reproach.
One of the things that set us apart from other kids in the neighbourhood is that we weren’t beaten. Even though people didn’t yell out of the windows in Mount Airy or curse each other so that it could be heard by passers-by, we often overheard the parental threat of the strap or the belt and the screams and cries that resulted from such punishment, which my mother considered uncivilized and inhumane. We were never punished in this way and were thought lucky by kids who were. Edna would threaten us with the strap if we incensed her while my mother was out, but it fell on deaf ears, even if she stomped off as far as the back yard to pull a switch from the stinkwood tree.
We couldn’t afford holidays, but I didn’t feel that we were missing much, and at that time, family holidays weren’t considered a necessity and planned with the feverish intensity that they are today. We had the odd day trip to Atlantic City or the Catskill Mountains, which broke the monotony. That we’d been somewhere and seen something was enough when school started and we had to write about our vacation. At Christmas we got enough presents to entertain us until a birthday brought some more. Most of the family’s birthdays fell within a week of each other in the spring.
Apart from these minor deviations, we carried on like a lot of other families. We were just noisier. Mornings were absolute chaos. Any kitchen would be busy in the morning with a family of six, but when three of them are women, there’s never enough space and our kitchen wasn’t particularly large. The radio didn’t blare as loudly as my grandmother claimed it did, but Dennis refused to switch it off so that Edna could think, and she refused to stop shouting about it so Ikey could think. There was always that beat in the background, for instance Bo Diddley singing ‘Down Yonder, Down On The Farm’ on the local Melangian station until it got switched to a station with Eddie Fisher or Tony Bennet crooning something above the din of the family rushing up and down the stairs trying to make their way to their separate lives. My mother developed
