A Wriggling Tickling Tummy Fish

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are northwest of Lettice’s flat, in the working-class London suburb of Harlesden where Edith, Lettice’s maid, is paying an unexpected call on her beloved parents whilst her mistress is away visiting her own parents in Wiltshire. Edith’s father, George, works at the McVitie and Price biscuit factory in Harlesden and has just recently been promoted to Line Manager, and her mother, Ada, takes in laundry at home. They live in a small, two storey brick terrace house which opens out directly onto the street, and is far removed from the grandeur of Lettice’s Mayfair flat, but has always been a cosy and welcoming home for Edith. Usually even before she walks through the glossy black painted front door, Edith can smell the familiar scent of a mixture of Lifebuoy Soap, Borax and Robin’s Starch, which means her mother is washing the laundry of others wealthier than she in the terrace’s kitchen at the rear of the house. Yet with her father’s promotion, Edith’s mother is only laundering a few days a week now, and today, rather than soap and starch, the delicious scent of freshly baked bread greets her.

 

“Mum!” Edith calls out cheerily as she opens the unlocked front door and walks in. “Mum, it’s me!” She takes a deep breath and inhales the aroma of a loaf in the kitchen range’s bread oven. “Something smells good.”

 

“Edith! It isn’t Wednesday! I wasn’t expecting you today!” Ada gasps in delighted surprise, glancing up from her work on the kitchen table to the door leading from the hallway into the kitchen. “What a lovely surprise!”

 

Edith walks across the flagstone floor of the kitchen and embraces her mother. “Hullo Mum.” Ada opens her arms and embraces her daughter as lovingly as she can, anxious not to get flour on Edith’s smart three-quarter length black coat - a second-hand remodel that Edith did after acquiring it from a stall in Petticoat Lane*.

 

“Watch my floury hands, Edith love,” Ada exclaims before placing a kiss on her daughter’s cheek. “I don’t want to ruin your fancy coat with white finger marks. Pop the kettle on the hob and pull up a chair. Keep me company whilst I finish this,” She indicates to a half shaped loaf on a baking tray before her. “And tell me how it is that you can visit me on a Friday that isn’t your day off. What’s Miss Chetwynd up to now, that she’s not at home? Gone back to stay with her friends in Cornwall, has she?”

 

“Not this time, Mum.” Edith takes the kettle from the range over to the small plumbed enamelled sink standing on bricks in the corner of the kitchen and fills it with water. “She’s gone home to her parent’s house in Wiltshire for a big ball, being held for her. So, I thought I’d take advantage of a few light days and slip in unannounced to see you.” She takes the tarnished old kettle and hangs it over the range’s fire to boil. “I hope you don’t mind, Mum.”

 

“Mind?” Ada scoffs as she starts fussing with the cups and the flour cannister on the table in front of her. “Why would I mind my only daughter coming to visit?” She pauses and watches her daughter walk towards the back door and contemplates a difference in her: an imperceptible bounce in her step to most, but quite obvious from a mother’s keen observations of her child. She ponders as she restores the cork stopper to a jar of salt. “A fancy ball, in her honour! Well, isn’t Miss Chetwynd the lucky one!”

 

“You’d think so,” Edith replies. “But apparently it’s her parents’ idea to help her find a suitable husband. Being the independent woman that she is, Miss Lettice is none too happy about it.”

 

“But she’s going?”

 

“Yes, but only out of a sense of duty or obligation, I think. It’s a fancy dress too, and she is going as Cinderella.” Edith removes her purple rose and black feather decorated straw hat and shirks off her coat to reveal a rather simple but pretty plum coloured serge dress with a white lace collar.

 

“Well, thinking of Cinderella, look at you, my darling girl.” The older woman says with pride in her voice. “I recognise that lace. Wasn’t it off that old tea gown Mrs. Beech gave me for rags that I cut off for you, because you took a fancy to it?”

 

“It is, Mum!” Edith smiles as she hangs her coat and hat up on a couple of spare hooks by the back door.

 

“Another Petticoat Lane second-hand clothes stall, remodel you’re wearing, is it?”

 

“Not this time, Mum. I made this myself from scratch with a dress pattern from Fashion for All**,” Edith replies proudly, giving a little twirl that sends her calf length skirt flaring out prettily. “You taught me well. I wore it out for the first time on Sunday.”

 

Ada looks at her daughter’s face, noticing a slight cheekiness to her smile and a sparkle in her eyes as she idly spins with her mind elsewhere than Ada’s kitchen, and she begins to ponder the difference in her.

 

“What are you looking at, Mum?” Edith asks, stopping her turn and catching her mother’s particularly observant gaze.

 

Realising that she has been caught out staring harder than perhaps she should, Ada coughs and quickly covers up her contemplation with bluster. “Well, I’m looking at you, you ninny.” She glances away. “Who else would I be looking at, since you’re the only one parading around my kitchen like you were in one of those fashion magazines you like so much.” Ada’s pride swells as she returns to the task at hand on the table and begins shaping some dough into a loaf shape. “You look very pretty, Edith love. Your Dad and I are so proud of you, you know.”

 

“Thanks Mum. I know you are. Here. Why are you baking bread, Mum?” Edith asks her mother, slipping into her usual perch at the worn kitchen table on the old ladderback chair. “You always get bread from Mr. Rawlinson’s.”

 

“Oh! Well, now I’m only laundering three days a week, what with your Dad being a Line Manager now and all,” the older woman explains as she takes up her knife and scores the top of the freeform loaf with crosshatches. “I’ve got some extra time on my hands, and I’d thought I’d take up baking bread again.” She slaps Edith’s curious hands away as she gently starts to move the blue and white gingham cloth off the top of the large white porcelain bowl before her. “Shoo, my girl! Don’t touch that! It’s proving***!” She returns to scoring the loaf before her. “Harlesden wasn’t always the London suburb that it is today. My Mum, your Granny, used to bake bread for the workers on the farm she lived and worked on, one of the last in the district, and she taught me how to bake bread. I thought I’d bake some as a treat for your Dad and your Aunt Maude.”

 

“I am glad you’ve been able to give up some of your laundering, Mum.” Edith smiles over at Ada. “Now you can do some of the things you want to do for a change.”

 

“Oh, thinking of laundering, Mrs. Hounslow was over here yesterday, and she gave me one of her cast off ladies’ magazines. She’d seen a picture of your Miss Chetwynd looking lovely at Princess Mary’s Wedding**** so she circled it and thought to bring it over when she was bringing me a few extra delicates to wash for her.” She turns towards the great dark Welsh dresser that it seems the kitchen has been built around. “I’ve got it here somewhere.”

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith sighs. “I do wish you’d given nasty old Widow Hounslow up when you stopped some of your laundering.”

 

Ada turns back and brushes a stray strand of mousey brown hair fallen loose from her bun and guides it around the back of her ear. “I can’t do that, Edith! Her sixpences kept food…”

 

“I know. I know!” Edith stops her mother, raising her hands. “Her sixpences kept us fed many a day.” She looks up at Ada’s careworn face looking back at her, again a scrutiny in her features as she looks back at Edith. “But you have to admit, Mum, she asks a lot of you and has made you work for every sixpence she’s ever begrudgingly given you.”

 

“We should all work hard for the sixpences others pay us, my girl.”

 

“I know Mum, and I do.” she replies exasperatedly. “I just wish you didn’t have to work so hard for Mrs. Hounslow’s sixpences. You should have dropped old Widow Hounslow and kept that nice Mrs. Young. She was never late paying you.”

 

“Oh, now Mrs. Young’s daughter is out of nappies, she doesn’t need me laundering for her anymore, Edith love. I’m sure she only kept me on out of kindness. Anyway, I know your opinion about Mrs. Hounslow.”

 

“And we all know yours, Mum.” Edith starts drawing with her finger idly on the worn surface of the table.

 

“Alright my girl!” Ada says, flattening her palms before her on the table applying her weight to her locked arms as she leans forward and looks her daughter in the eye. “There’s a wriggling, tickling tummy fish in you, just desperate to get out.”

 

“A what, Mum?” the young girl laughs.

 

Shaking her head, Ada says, “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten wriggling, tickling tummy fish, Edith!” When her daughter returns a perplexed look of confusion, the older woman continues, “It’s what we used to call secrets when you were little. You know, wriggling fish trying to escape, just like wriggling secrets wanting to be told?” Looking at her daughter again with incredulity she adds, “I can’t believe you don’t remember wriggling, tickling tummy fish!”

 

“I vaguely do, Mum.” Edith admits, although more to please her mother than in truth.

 

“Well then?” Ada demands. “Spit it out! You’ve been dying to tell me something ever since you arrived.” She pulls herself upright again and rubs her lower back with a groan. “I can tell. There is something,” She contemplates her daughter again with her thumb and index finger of her right hand worrying her chin. “Something, different about you. Something, bonny and gay. You didn’t come all this way just to visit me when you were here two days ago. What’s happened?”

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith exclaims with a joyful giggle. “Such wonderful news! Frank Leadbetter has asked me to walk out with him!”

 

“Frank Leadbetter?” Ada queries with a questioning look.

 

“I’ve told you about Frank before, Mum. He’s Mr. Willison the Mayfair grocers’ delivery man.”

 

“Oh Edith, love!” Ada hurriedly wipes her hands on the red and white gingham tea towel hanging from the rail of the range to rid them of flour. She rushes over and envelops her daughter as she rises from the ladderback chair in an all-encompassing embrace of unbridled delight.

 

“He’s took me to see Wanetta Ward’s new moving picture, ‘After the Ball is Over’, at the Premier in East Ham***** last Sunday, and we agreed to go out again this Sunday. He’s taking me to Regent’s Park.”

 

“Oh, my darling girl, that’s such exciting news! What a wonderful wriggling, tickling tummy fish! No wonder you wanted to get it out! Now, go grab us some cups and bring over the biscuit tin. Your Dad will be home for lunch soon. He’ll be just as glad to hear this news as I am.” Ada sighs with delight, pleased to know the cause of the change in her daughter. “Now let me fill Brown Betty****** and then you must tell me everything: every little detail mind! Don’t leave anything out!”

 

*Petticoat Lane Market is a fashion and clothing market in Spitalfields, London. It consists of two adjacent street markets. Wentworth Street Market and Middlesex Street Market. Originally populated by Huguenots fleeing persecution in France, Spitalfields became a center for weaving, embroidery and dying. From 1882, a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in eastern Europe settled in the area and Spitalfields then became the true heart of the clothing manufacturing district of London. 'The Lane' was always renowned for the 'patter' and showmanship of the market traders. It was also known for being a haven for the unsavoury characters of London’s underworld and was rife with prostitutes during the late Victorian era. Unpopular with the authorities, as it was largely unregulated and in some sense illegal, as recently as the 1930s, police cars and fire engines were driven down ‘The Lane’, with alarm bells ringing, to disrupt the market.

 

**Fashion for All was one of the many women’s magazines that were published in the exuberant inter-war years which were aimed at young girls who were looking to better their chances of finding a husband through beauty and fashion. As most working-class girls could only imagine buying fashionable frocks from high street shops, there was a great appetite for dressmaking patterns so they could dress fashionably at a fraction of the cost, by making their own dresses using skills they learned at home.

 

***In cooking, proofing (also called proving) is a step in the preparation of yeast bread and other baked goods in which the dough is allowed to rest and rise a final time before baking. During this rest period, yeast ferments the dough and produces gases, thereby leavening the dough.

 

****Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood (1897 – 1965), was the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. She was the sister of Kings Edward VIII and George VI, and aunt of Queen Elizabeth II. She married Viscount Lascelles on the 28th of February 1922 in a ceremony held at Westminster Abbey. The bride was only 24 years old, whilst the groom was 39. There is much conjecture that the marriage was an unhappy one, but their children dispute this and say it was a very happy marriage based upon mutual respect. The wedding was filmed by Pathé News and was the first royal wedding to be featured in fashion magazines, including Vogue.

 

*****The Premier Super Cinema in East Ham was opened on the 12th of March, 1921, replacing the 800 seat capacity 1912 Premier Electric Theatre. The new cinema could seat 2,408 patrons. The Premier Super Cinema was taken over by Provincial Cinematograph Theatres who were taken over by Gaumont British in February 1929. It was renamed the Gaumont from 21st April 1952. The Gaumont was closed by the Rank Organisation on 6th April 1963. After that it became a bingo hall and remained so until 2005. Despite attempts to have it listed as a historic building due to its relatively intact 1921 interior, the Gaumont was demolished in 2009.

 

******A Brown Betty is a type of teapot, round and with a manganese brown glaze known as Rockingham glaze. In the Victorian era, when tea was at its peak of popularity, tea brewed in the Brown Betty was considered excellent. This was attributed to the design of the pot which allowed the tea leaves more freedom to swirl around as the water was poured into the pot, releasing more flavour with less bitterness.

 

This cluttered, yet cheerful domestic scene of baking is not all it seems to be at first glance, for it is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The freeform loaf on the kitchen table, the white porcelain proofing bowl complete with rising dough, the butter wrapped in silver foil and the rolling pin – which is even half coated in flour – have been made in England by hand by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. The rather worn and beaten looking enamelled flour cannister in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green, has been aged on purpose. An artisan piece, it comes from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom, as does the glass jar of salt which is filled with real salt granules and stoppered with a real cork lid. The metal sieve comes from Doreen Jeffries’ Small Wonders Miniature Shop in the United Kingdom. The other crockery on the table comes from various online stockists of miniatures.

 

In the background you can see Ada’s dark Welsh dresser cluttered with household items. Like Ada’s table, the Windsor chair and the ladderback chair to the left of the photo, I have had the dresser since I was a child. The shelves of the dresser have different patterned crockery and silver pots on them which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. There are also some rather worn and beaten looking enamelled cannisters and a bread tin which are part of the set from which the flour cannister is from. There are also tins of various foods which would have been household staples in the 1920s when canning and preservation revolutionised domestic cookery. Amongst other foods on the dresser are a tin of Macfie’s Finest Black Treacle, two jars of P.C. Flett and Company jam, a tin of Heinz marinated apricots, and a jar of Marmite. All these items are 1:12 size artisan miniatures made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire, with great attention to detail paid to their labels and the shapes of their jars and cans.

 

Robert Andrew Macfie sugar refiner was the first person to use the term Golden Syrup in 1840, a product made by his factory, the Macfie sugar refinery, in Liverpool. He also produced black treacle.

 

P.C. Flett and Company was established in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands by Peter Copeland Flett. He had inherited a small family owned ironmongers in Albert Street Kirkwall, which he inherited from his maternal family. He had a shed in the back of the shop where he made ginger ale, lemonade, jams and preserves from local produce. By the 1920s they had an office in Liverpool, and travelling representatives selling jams and preserves around Great Britain. I am not sure when the business ceased trading.

 

The American based Heinz food processing company, famous for its Baked Beans, 57 varieties of soups and tinned spaghetti opened a factory in Harlesden in 1919, providing a great deal of employment for the locals who were not already employed at McVitie and Price.

 

Marmite is a food spread made from yeast extract which although considered remarkably English, was in fact invented by German scientist Justus von Liebig although it was originally made in the United Kingdom. It is a by-product of beer brewing and is currently produced by British company Unilever. The product is notable as a vegan source of B vitamins, including supplemental vitamin B. Marmite is a sticky, dark brown paste with a distinctive, salty, powerful flavour. This distinctive taste is represented in the marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it." Such is its prominence in British popular culture that the product's name is often used as a metaphor for something that is an acquired taste or tends to polarise opinion.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

Done