Dear Elizabeth, but I know you like to be called Lisa, or Liz by your family,
Looking back at you now I see a gawky, fairly tall child known by your two brothers as Skinny Liz and you are not comfortable in your skin. Your brothers and your parents are your world. You knew your father had retired from RAF Service life in the Middle East and India and that he had trained from school leaving age as an aircraft engineer and pilot. He had achieved a rank during the WW2 that the family were proud of. Your parents bought your own home outright, as buying with a ‘mortgage’ was unthinkable to them who, as a matter of pride, always managed within their means. It was an unmodernised Edwardian house and the removal to the garden of a cast iron cooking range meant you could play ‘cooking’ outside, next to where coal was delivered into the back of the house for the room fires and newer Rayburn range.
You understood that sometimes your father was a little sad. It had been difficult to find the right job post war and he had had a lot of illness from living in India. Every penny counted but there were no real threats to a secure home life. Clothes were hand made or passed down from the wider family, rarely shop bought.
You heard a lot about your mother’s big family from a rural area and had plenty of cousins who visited in the holidays. Your parents had photos which told stories of how they lived in India and this was very interesting. Your mother had travelled to India with a family as their ‘Children’s Nurse’. She had left school at 14 years of age, because she felt she had go to work and earn money to support the family in the time of interwar depression. Later, she had taken up training in child care and secured work with wealthy families in London.
I know that mostly you felt bored. At school, expectations were low and you didn’t get on well with groups. It was not known that you were partially deaf. Now I can see that you needed to break out of the dullness of childhood in any way you could, through reading, music, doing art and making friends. You needed to learn to speak up for yourself and fight your corner, to be assertive and tell yourself that every little achievement counts. Only occasionally did you get praise. I can see that the family had higher expectations for the boys, especially the eldest who was scolded for not doing homework. After a stable start came four house moves and changes of school meaning lack of continuity in education and social activities.
What you didn’t know is that life can be shaped by your choices, where there is the chance to make choices. You needed encouragement to say this is not what I want but this is what I like. It has taken me many years to know what I like and express that feeling. This type of reflectiveness comes as you mature but children can be helped to look at the bigger picture and be given choices.
On leaving school my mother said to me that some girls work in a shop or the Bank before getting married, which will you do? I was so shocked. The girl in the bank sat behind a grill and had loud make up and painted fingernails. She didn’t smile. The shop my mother had in mind was a shoe shop but I had an intense dislike of my brother’s smelly socks, so working with feet was a definite no. As for marriage?!! I only knew a few boys from Church and we kept a distance from each other. Any friends of my brother’s were just pests and to be avoided too. Although there is more equal expectation for girls and women today it has been hard won and is still not always the case.
I will tell you how I left school with not many good exam results and an anger that I had achieved so little when others around me had done better. I took matters into my own hands and went out to work and re- sat my exams independently with tuition that I paid for. I was successful and later paid my way through higher education, even to achieving the highest academic qualifications in mid-life and what I found to be the best job of all.
I was fortunate in finding a mentor in my teens who gave me encouragement and wrote me references. She was a family friend who, looking in from outside, saw the inequality of female gender in a largely male environment. But the more independent I became the more criticism arose. I just had to leave the family to become the person I wanted to be. I took up nursing, mainly as it provided accommodation in London, although nursing was the one occupation I had said as a child did not interest me. I played to my strengths in succeeding and moved on into public health which matched my interest in social science and the lot of women and children in society. Over years, through a supportive husband and seeking opportunities, I nurtured my inclinations through study and changing jobs, as well as bringing up my own children. I hope I gave them a more equal chance in life than I can see that you had. For me, in retirement is the time to fill in the gaps of art, music and subjects that interest me.
Your friend,
Lisa.