Mary, Quite Contrary: a Second World War girlhood and what happened next

By Mary Essinger

Written with charm and humour, Mary Essinger’s page-turning memoir takes the reader on a highly entertaining journey from her pre-war life of spirited poverty in a Leicestershire village to a career as a lecturer in Spoken English, novelist and stand-up comedian. With a sharp eye for tragedy and a warm appreciation for joy, Mary recounts her wartime life and subsequent life as a dress designer in the economic boom conditions of the 1950s and falling in love with a German Jewish refugee who clicked his heels when he met her family. It’s all here, in Mary, Quite Contrary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783018833

Book preview

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MARY, QUITE CONTRARY

a Second World War girlhood and what happened next

Mary Essinger

Mary, Quite Contrary

Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2016

2nd Edition published 2022

Tel: [phone]

www.theconradpress.com

[e-mail]

ISBN 978-1-839784-49-1

Copyright © Mary Essinger, 2016

All rights reserved.

Typesetting by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk

The book cover and The Conrad Press logo were designed by Maria Priestley.

For Theodore

By the same author

Wounded Bird of Paradise

How to be a Merry Widow (as Mary Rogers)

Foreword

I’ll keep this foreword quite short; my mother talks about herself so wonderfully in her memoir that I don’t want to be a distraction to what she says. But as The Conrad Press is now publishing a new and revised edition of this book, I think a brief foreword by me, her son and her publisher, is appropriate.

My mother Mary was born on 27 December 1931 and died on 20 April 2020. For the last few years of her life, she had been suffering from vascular dementia and had coped surprisingly well with this condition while living in assisted housing at Hendon Grange off the London Road in Leicester. Indeed, she coped so well, we didn’t quite realise how much it was affecting her.

But in July 2019, I brought her down to Canterbury where, for a short period, she lived in assisted accommodation. However, it was quite clear after only a few days that she could not cope there. And so I arranged for her to live in the Old Farmhouse care home on Hollow Lane in Canterbury, where she was very well looked after for the rest of her life.

Unfortunately, when she passed away, I could not see her to say goodbye because she had Covid. At that time there was a serious Covid epidemic and I had not yet been vaccinated. But I did say farewell to her a day or so before her death on Whatsapp, although I’m not sure how much she understood what was going on.

She was a remarkable woman, a very good and loving mother who took my younger brother Rupert and myself into the countryside on a regular basis so we were not cooped up in the house for too long. And with my father, Ted Essinger, (23 May 1922 – 5 August 2005) they had a long and enduring marriage.

They were not perfectly matched; my mother was highly extrovert and liked to go out to the theatre and socialise. My father, while sociable enough, was less extrovert than Mum, and he was quite happy when he wasn’t working to be at home, building his collections of stamps, coins and postcards. Mum sometimes referred to herself as Widow Twankey when she went off to some social event by herself, that Dad did not want to attend.

Another great thing Mum did was that she always explained what words meant when Rupert and I were growing up and reading books and found a word we didn’t know. And I found her inspiring. I felt that she wanted me to be a writer and that was an ambition which I cherished from a young age, although the truth of the matter was that she thought being a writer was not a particularly secure profession, which it isn’t. And she did what she could to discourage me from following that particular vocation, though I followed it anyway.

True: she once told me, in 2016 or 2017, that she thought I couldn’t write fiction, which I found very hurtful. By that time I had published my first novel, under my own name, The Mating Game, which Mum never actually read. But perhaps one looks in vain for praise from one’s family.

The last seventeen months or so of Mum’s life was made very difficult by the fact that my brother Rupert died, almost certainly by suicide, on 22 January 2019. His drowned body was found in the Grand Union Canal, about four miles from where Mum was living at Hendon Grange. Rupert had come from Seattle, where he had resumed living with wife after they had spent nearly two years living separately after she moved to Seattle which is about 1,200 miles from where Rupert lived in San Diego. But he simply wouldn’t get the message that she’d had enough of him and the marriage, and the result was disaster.

Rupert was looking after Mum for about a month, although it turned out later that one of his main reasons for coming to look after her was so he could give his wife, Christen, some ‘space’. Their attempt to mend the marriage was not prospering, and their attempt to live together was not working either, and it is clear that when Rupert was in Leicester, Christen told him she did not want to live with him anymore. This plunged him into a terrible depression from which he did not recover, even though I tried very hard to help him.

We did our best to keep the details of Rupert’s death from Mum, and in particular my suspicions that he almost certainly committed suicide. I think she probably concluded that for herself anyway. When she passed away, it was at least some consolation to know that she would no longer be tormented by thoughts of Rupert’s premature death.

But all this rather negative stuff shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that Mum was a remarkable and highly creative woman, and also a superb writer. She wasn’t really able to apply herself to her writing until later in her life because she was bringing us up and running the house. But as you’ll see from this book, she writes very well indeed, and is able to convey a great deal in a few words. I sometimes wonder what even greater heights she might have reached as a writer if she’d had the chance concertedly to apply herself to her writing earlier in her life, and with more prolonged concentration. Mum tended to write in shortish bursts, and often in Mary, Quite Contrary I want more detail of the engrossing things she’s talking about.

That said, I still think Mary, Quite Contrary, is an absolutely marvellous book; pithy, interesting and evocative. It really does take you back into the first few decades of the twentieth century, an age that in comparison to our own, is pretty much devoid of technology. This is a fact that Mum appreciated, and which she wrote about very lucidly in her preface to this book. It was a different time. Most people were relatively poor, and had very limited lives. Compared with life at that time, modern Britain must seem like a kind of Utopia.

I especially love Mum’s account of poor little Noreen (the only sentence I added in the book was the one which said that being told she had a dirty dress was probably the last thing anyone said to Noreen) and Mum’s wonderful accounts of starting work in the late 1940s and factory life in the 1950s.

It was also very pleasant for me to read this book, because it presented systematically aspects of Mum’s life that she only mentioned in passing to me and Rupert as we were growing up, and which, therefore seemed rather disjointed. But not when Mum talks about it here. I cherish all of it; particularly her accounts of growing up during World War II; her account of working in the fashion industry after the War, and of course the chapter where she meets my father who transformed her life because he came from a different culture and, as Mum puts it, was Jewish and ‘therefore a citizen of the world’.

I very much hope you enjoy this marvellous book as much as I do. I certainly regard publishing it as a huge privilege. The book was first published in 2016; this new edition contains this foreword, and is printed in the standard B-Format paperback size, and the price is now £9.99 instead of £12.99.

James Essinger April 2022

Preface

I love my computer and Google and the miracle of email. As for the idea of having a personal phone you can carry in your handbag and use to call anybody else in the world, it would have seemed like something magical to me as a child of the 1930s, when only one person in our street had a telephone at all.

Cars were hardly ever seen on the street in my village. We had a wireless but I was twenty-two years old before there was a TV in my house; Mam and Dad, like so many people, rented one for the coronation in 1953. As for computers, they weren’t introduced into schools and colleges until the 1980s.

Necessity being the mother of invention, the spur for much of this technology was the Second World War, the backdrop to my childhood in Glenfield, a small village near Leicester in the English Midlands.

Seventy years ago children could play anywhere their legs could carry them, roaming in gangs over fields, back lanes, railway lines and brooks. But many stayed within calling distance of home where they could hear their mothers standing in the street shouting, ‘Gordon, Sheila, your dinner’s ready!’

We called our mother ‘Mam’ and not ‘Mum’, because ‘Mum’ was not a good shouting word, try it.

Today’s children do not have that sense of freedom and the same opportunities for adventure we had because streets belong to cars now and cars can kill. To find somewhere to run and play and hide, a child usually needs a car to take them there.

We had no washing-machine, no fridge and no bank account or savings. Groceries bought from Walker’s corner shop in the week were paid for on Saturdays from Friday’s wage packet.

There were no carpets on the floor in our house, only lino and rugs. For hot water we had to put the kettle on except for bath night on Fridays when Mam lit the kitchen copper and pumped hot water upstairs into the bathroom. When lights suddenly went out there was a hunt in the dark for a shilling to slot into the electric meter under the stairs. The only warm room in winter was the living room called ‘The House.’

‘Where’s Gordon?’ ‘He’s in The House.’

All the family used the same towel. I don’t even remember us having toothbrushes. I do remember that after the school dentist had looked at our teeth she gave us a sweet. The school doctor weighed and measured us.

Mam and Dad, who smoked Woodbines, walked over to the pub on Saturday nights to sing with their friends and drink Indian Pale Ale. On Sundays they had a lie-in while we children enjoyed our weekly treat of a penny chocolate bar and a biscuit in bed.

We didn’t think of ourselves as poor because everybody we knew lived like that. Poor people wore ragged clothes and, unlike us, had no indoor lavatory or bathroom.

Life today, with its foreign travel and opportunities, is wonderful and beautiful. Television shows us the world. We can communicate with anyone. Would the hatred, militant nationalism and racism that led to the war I grew up in have been possible if we’d been Facebook friends with people from round the world?

Medical care is excellent. As for our standards of living today, even during recessions most people live in a way we could only have dreamed of when I was a girl.

Technology changes but people don’t. We have the same feelings and emotions. We still feel happy, sad, worried, ambitious and disappointed.

Here, in Mary, Quite Contrary, by trying to remember not only what happened when I was a girl but what it felt like, I’ve tried to recapture it.

Mary Essinger

Please note that some names have been changed.

Part One

A Second World War girlhood

I

My First Memory

Memory is picky. Why does the recollection of some episodes of life stay with us and others vanish?

My first memory is this:

Mam needed mother-of-pearl buttons and she was letting me go all the way to the sewing shop to buy them.

‘Are you sure you know where it is?’

‘I know.’

‘Will you promise to look both ways when you cross over near Bent’s grocery shop?’

‘Promise.’

‘You’re to come straight back.’

Holding the money tight in my hand I set off along Station Road to the Square then turned left into Dominion Road.

It was so exciting to be going out by myself for the first time. I could walk there or run, or even stop and look at things. I was