The Lost Childhoods

on 5 April 1951 my mother, barely fifteen, sat in the reception area of a large engineering company waiting to start her first day of work.  She wore clothes newly purchased for the occasion; a full skirt to show off her tiny waist, a smart blouse and a pair of court shoes.  Inside she was no doubt trembling.  The girl who was sent down to collect her and to settle her into her position as office junior was Anne who is still, in spite of living most of her adult life in Australia, one of mum’s closest friends.

Today in Switzerland it is Mother’s day.  Last night Lexi, making up for her elder offspring’s neglect of this day,  put together a tea tray using her Great Grandmother’s Meissen china.  She carefully measured out the English breakfast tea leaves and filled the kettle to just the right amount of water that she could lift over to the tray without burning herself.  I was given a handwritten menu card for my breakfast order.  At 7.30 she awoke me with the tea tray and two presents she had been excitedly almost-telling me about all week.  Yesterday she had gone into the woods with VaVa (Valentine) and picked Muguet amongst the pungent wild garlic and this too was set lovingly on the tray.  My presents were home-made perfume and a hand-painted raspberry and heart designed cork mat  “for putting hot things on” from her arts and crafts lesson at school. 

In 1951 Britain was a country on its knees, barely recovered from the second world war.  Rationing was still in effect and the school system was a shambles.  Not many stayed on after finishing their obligatory education.  The fifteen year old waiting nervously to start her first work day now has a  fifteen year old granddaughter who is hanging on to these years with a vengence, making up for her grandmother’s lost childhood, for that whole generation’s lost childhood by doing  all that this glorious age – part woman, part child - entails: frittering away hours making collages of photographs of her friends; going out with her first serious boyfriend; sleeping under mounds of clothing – her room a permanent hurricane zone; missing the train, losing important pieces of paper, falling out with friends, making up with friends, laughing hysterically, crying hysterically,  looking and acting ten years old one minute, the next eighteen; experimenting with looks and clothes; going to parties and feeling trashed the next day from dancing in shoes she could barely walk in, lack of sleep and screaming all night. 

On Mother’s day in six years time, when Lexi is fifteen she will oversleep and forget about the day devoted to the world’s unsung heros (along with teachers and nurses) and so my tea-tray days are numbered and precious.  And one day in the yet further distance she will no doubt also find herself apprehensively starting her first work day but she will have a full childhood under her belt and the order of things will have taken their natural course  before adulthood and responsibility come along to tap her on the shoulder.