It was Little Mickey’s birthday and usually his mother, ‘Sad’ Ellen, would have bought him an apple turnover from the luxury tea-room at the bottom of Dale Street.
The high-class cake shop was on the ground floor of the last block of flats for the Russell Trust estate in Chelsea.
Mickey had his face pressed against the glass of Crème de la Crème for that was the name of the finest and most expensive tea-room in Chelsea.
His nose was now only an inch away from the golden flaky puff pastry stuffed with warm cinnamon apple cubes in a syrupy caramel sauce and double cream.
Apart from the mouth-watering displays of cakes and pastries, half of Crème de la Crème was a sit-down tea-room for posh people and those who could afford a High Tea purportedly better than Fortnum and Mason’s.
Mickey’s mother ‘Sad’ Ellen was so-called because her husband Big Larry and Mickey’s dad had been killed in 1945.
He was a soldier in the British Army and his parachute hadn’t opened when crossing the Rhine and since then she had never got over it.
Larry was called ‘Big Larry’ because like his only son, he was, to put it mildly, not very tall.
He’d always wanted to be a jockey, but that ended with a back injury when falling off a horse called Calamity during the 3.30 at Goodwood.
He did ‘The Knowledge’, drove a London black cab, but then World War Two happened.
‘Little Mickey’ was always told they would start calling him ‘Big Mickey’ when he was 18 and it was clear he would not be gaining any more inches. This is what had happened to his dad Larry.
It was 1955 and his birthday today. He was ten years old and not an inch over four feet and six inches.
For the last ten years his mum had been trying to drown her sorrows in bottles of what she called ‘Happy Pop’.
When her son was able to run on his own she had sent him out to get her ‘Happy Pop’ in quantities she could neither afford nor would do any good for her.
‘Sad’ Ellen worked the haberdashery counter at Thwaites – the department store which dominated Chelsea’s most famous square.
Its Art Deco huge black and grey glass frontage carried the reflection of the underground station, war memorial and theatre.
When Ellen had an excess of her ‘Happy Pop’ she just giggled sadly and usually fell over. Friends would help her back from the ‘Duke of Wellington’ and put her to bed in the only bedroom.
Mickey slept in the tiny living room and would hear his mother’s friends whisper lamentations: ‘Poor boy…Isn’t there an uncle in Liverpool who could look after him?… She should be in hospital…’
Little Mickey had never been to Liverpool. In any case everyone in the playground hated Liverpool because they beat Chelsea in the FA cup semi-final.
Liverpool was not where Mickey wanted to be looked after.
He wanted his mum to stop drinking ‘Happy Pop’ and be the real mum he seemed to remember she was when he was younger.
She made people laugh. When walking past Crème de la Crème on her way home from Thwaites her friend Marilyn working in the greengrocers next door would shout ‘Going for your high tea Ellen?’ and laugh out loud when Ellen said: ‘Na! I’m off for my low tea at the Wellington.’
Low tea in the Wellington would carry on until closing time at eleven.
In recent weeks Ellen had not been going to work.
Thwaites didn’t want her anymore.
They asked her to leave after she staggered into a spectacular window display designed by Luigi – the award-winning window dresser brought over specially from Paris.
Ellen not only staggered in, but knocked over an expensive arrangement of pink porcelain, plaster flamingo and vermilion chiffon. She also lost her balance and rolled over hundreds of pounds’ worth of high fashion.
Chiffon was encrusted with shattered shards of pink porcelain and dismembered flamingo.
It was not the right time for Ellen to be giggling.
She was now staying in bed and sending Mickey out for more of the ‘Happy Pop.’ Of course, everyone loved Ellen thereabouts.
Frank the manager at Threshers Off Licence knew he was not helping when he packed her bottle into a plastic bag camouflaged with lemonade and cheese and onion crisps for Mickey.
But Frank’s heart was so kind his nickname was ‘Frank Softie.’ Frank could never say no. That was his other nickname – ‘Never say no Frankie.’
While those who loved her would give her credit, the superintendent of the Russell Trust estate was not so forgiving.
Russell Trust flats were what you would now call social housing – little apartments for working class people where the bath was under the kitchen sideboard and an early Edwardian architect had conjured a cunning plan to create the greatest number of homes in the smallest floor space imaginable over six storeys.
Mickey knew there was trouble when the estate superintendent came round with his secretary – who just happened to be his wife. They were a prosperously shaped couple living in the superintendent’s house situated bang in the middle of the estate with a huge garden surrounded by a high wall.
There was a rent office plonked next to it with a high fence even shielding the ten-yard walk from home to work. And all the residential blocks in Russell Trust flats were built so that none of the flats had windows overlooking the superintendent’s house and garden.
‘Hello sonny’ said the Superintendent who smelt of carbolic antiseptic soap. His wife gave off a terrible whiff of cheap lavender eau de toilette.
‘Is your mum at home, it’s very important.’
Mickey raised his voice and projected it upwards: ‘No!’
‘Any idea at all when she will be in, or can you take the message she’s got to come to the office and talk about the rent that needs paying.’
Superintendent’s wife muttered something about ‘No point telling the child. Leave a note or something.’
Mickey bellowed: ‘No, she’s NOT IN,’ and slammed the door.
Of course, his mother was in sleeping off a whole night of happy hours in the Wellington the previous night, but there was no way Mickey would give her away.
Some hastily scribbled message on Russell Trust headed notepaper was shoved through the letter box and dropped to the floor.
‘Sad’ Ellen’s rent arrears were now ten pounds, four shillings and sixpence.
Sixpence was the price of one apple turnover from Crème de la Crème. Every year and for as long as Little Mickey could remember his mum would buy him one for his birthday.
A Crème de la Crème apple turnover was not just any apple turnover. It was super-deluxe, and mountainous. No, it was a monster apple turnover.
For sixpence there was so much double cream on top of the bedrock of caramelised fruit, Mickey’s face would be lost in it and he would surface with crests of cream on his eyebrows and a peak resting on the tip of his nose.
On those single days in the year when they would actually enter the portals of Crème de la Crème, Ellen would love it when he naughtily pressed his nose against the cake-shop’s plate-glass window and leave a tiny little blob of snot against it. That was her kiddo’s mark on the world.
They might be poor as church mice, but just this one time in the year Little Mickey would be able to blow his nose on the shopfront of Crème de la Crème and walk away with his favourite apple turnover. This always made Ellen think there was some justice, just a little justice in the world.
But today ‘Sad’ Ellen had neither sixpence nor energy, nor even the memory that it was her little boy’s birthday.
Mickey was standing outside the famous cake shop on his own.
He still pressed his face into the window of Crème de la Crème.
This time as well as depositing his nose impression, there was a little tear left on the glass surface from his eye refracting the sunlight for a second before dark clouds turned everything rather dull.
He could not help hearing loud guffaws from a gathering of posh people inside. It looked like they were heartily stuffing themselves with sandwiches, sausage rolls, tea and coffee.
There was a rather big and loud lady alternately quacking, snorting and glocking like an overfed ravenous swan.
She had a huge bust and cavernous mouth and seemed to be inflating and deflating in a barrage balloon style purple dress with a grand, gold mounted amethyst broach crowning her front décolletage.
Mickey was sure he had seen her before. Yes, she was the spitting image of the opera singer in the Tintin picture books he loved borrowing from the library.
If she had a name he would call her after Tintin’s Bianca Castafiore otherwise known as the ‘Milanese Nightingale.’
Though this lady was no nightingale. What emanated from her cake-hole was more like the mating sound of a constipated swan or heehaws of distressed donkeys.
Mickey imagined she should be called something stupid like ‘Lady La-di-da Boomps-a-daisy.’
The La-di-da side of his name for her was obvious. ‘Boomps-a-daisy’ because Mickey fantasised about tripping her up as she left the tea room and saw her bouncing up as a balloon would do because people like that always did come up smelling of roses and in her case looking like a fat daisy.
When his mum fell down, he remembered there was no getting up.
‘Have you got Rupert’s cake ready darling?’ he heard her say and soon he was able to make out that Rupert was also ten today and getting a magnificent birthday cake courtesy of Lady La-di-da Boomps-a-daisy.
Lady La-di-da’s group all went ‘Ahhhhh!’ as Rupert’s birthday cake was brought out. It was a monstrosity of cake-dom.
Mickey estimated it was the size of a lorry wheel in light blue and white icing topped with ten sugared figures of soldiers painted in red, white and blue uniforms as though standing to attention at Chelsea Barracks to be inspected by Queen Victoria.
‘Happy Birthday Rupert’ was written in fondant. The soldiers were each holding candles to be lit and blown out.
The gaggle of posh-dom came out of Crème de la Crème oblivious to little Mickey standing there open-mouthed.
Lady La-di-da carried Rupert’s birthday surprise in a massive white cake-box tied with red ribbons.
Mickey trailed them up Dale Street.
Rupert’s cake revelation had rendered him a zombie.
He was in a state of shock and awe and saw them climbing into a Black London cab that Mickey’s dad could have been driving if he had been able to come home from Germany in the months after he was born.
Instead he had plunged hundreds of feet head first into the muddy banks of the River Rhine.
Mickey had overheard his mother being told that they needed a bomb disposal squad of Royal Engineers to dig him out as he had penetrated fifty feet underground.
Mickey felt something catch his foot. It was a tightly wrapped package in a Thwaites paper shopping bag with its distinctive light green and white stripes.
He picked it up and wandered into the nearby St Michael’s Churchyard playground. Leaning up against the Georgian gravestones lined up as a border to the playground, but out of sight under overgrown shrubbery, he picked at the rubber bands to find out what was inside.
His mother had brought home hundreds of Thwaites paper bags. They were perfect for kitchen storage, collecting stamps and when they ever had any money keeping one pound and ten-shilling bank notes safe from spillage and other hazards.
Inside Mickey was looking at bundles of five pound notes bound together with more rubber bands. He was the best in Maths at School. Miss Brindle with the pudding basin hair-cut had awarded him a packet of fruit pastilles for being the first to learn all the times tables.
Mickey would be a celebrated though embarrassed example of achievement in arithmetic. Miss Brindle would often begin the day by demanding he gave an answer to the difficult ones- ‘8 x 7?’- ‘56 Miss!’ ‘6 x8?’- ’48 miss!’ ’12 x 12?’ ‘144 Miss!’
It didn’t take him long to count to £100. There were five bundles each with the large £5 notes he had never seen before.
Rupert’s cake shock segued into £100 cash shock. One hundred pounds. He repeated the words over and over again.
They would be able to afford to put down a deposit for one of the private flats in Morehouse Street where he could have his own bedroom rather than a couch by the front door, where they would have a separate bathroom rather than a zinc tub in the kitchen.
They could go on holiday to Margate, or Ramsgate or even the Isle of Wight.
Mum’s bottles of ‘Happy Pop’ would no longer be bought on credit and Mickey could kick the superintendent of Russell Trust Flats in the shins without fear of their being given an immediate eviction notice.
He wouldn’t tell mum yet. Perhaps he would just go round paying ‘Never say No Frankie’, square off the rent arrears at the Russell Trust office and relish watching them giving all the change against a fiver from four shillings and sixpence.
He would go into Crème de la Crème and demand his own birthday cake – twice the size of Rupert’s and in blue icing, and give himself an extra year so all eleven members of Chelsea FC would be on top in the Chelsea colours each holding a candle to be lit and blown out.
In the middle would be a big chocolate shaped football and the fondant lettering on top of the cake would say ‘Happy birthday little Mickey who loves his mum – the best mum in the world.’
The following day Mickey couldn’t go to school. He hadn’t slept a wink all night. He’d looked after Ellen, got her nightly dose of ‘Happy Pop’ from also-known-as ‘Frank Softie’, but all the while he was being tortured.
The words of Miss Brindle ‘You shall not steal’- the eighth commandment reverberated and echoed louder and louder until he clasped his hands over his ears in the hope that what he heard inside his mind could be blocked from the outside.
Miss Brindle inculcated every one of the ten commandments. She was a connoisseur story-teller from the Old Testament. She often chose the X-rated tales of brutal retribution for those who betrayed the moral word of God.
Mickey remembered when the police constable’s daughter Wendy Goody was metaphorically slapped down for putting her hand up and saying ‘What about finders’ keepers Miss?’
‘Larceny!’ shouted Miss Brindle. ‘Did it belong to you?’ she demanded of Wendy.
As the girl’s lips trembled, Miss Brindle answered the question for her ‘No it did NOT!’
‘You are a thief! A thief!’ Miss Brindle raged. All of the children in the class grabbed their wrists as Miss Brindle recounted a story about convicted thieves having their hands chopped off.
Mickey remembered flicking through the copy of his mother’s bible, but not being able to find it in either the Old or New Testament.
By the afternoon of his day of truancy and growing state of terror and guilt in the St Michael’s Churchyard playground, Mickey feared transportation or even a public hanging.
Suddenly the area was flooded with police. Black Metropolitan Police Wolseley 6/90 saloons with 6 cylinder and 90 horsepower engines were screeching to a halt in Dale Street and the nearby Carlyle Avenue.
The air was filled with the shattering sound of their ringing and distinctive bells. Mickey saw police signs left, right and centre, and police officers running everywhere.
He could hear the barking of police dogs.
They had been told. They were after him. He jumped into the undergrowth and prayed to God that he could shrink like in the Tom Thumb story.
He had never wished to be any smaller than he was, but now this was the time.
It didn’t take long for a police officer to lift Mickey out of the Common laburnum. He landed on his feet in a daze and was resigned to arrest and immediate custody.
He had been found by PC Robert Wilder who recognized him immediately: ‘It’s Ellen’s boy Mickey! What you doing in there boy? Get off home now. There’s been a robbery in the King’s Road and you don’t want to be around while we’re still looking for the robbers.’
PC 7632 Robert Wilder had known Mickey’s dad Larry. They’d joined up together. He always tried to keep an eye on Ellen and her boy and this was the perfect example of fulfilling a war-time pledge to his old friend.
The following morning Little Mickey queued up in the reception at Chelsea Police Station in Luna Place.
The desk was so high and Mickey so small, taller men just brushed past him not even noticing the shaking little figure clasping the much rubbed Thwaites parcel of cash wrapped in multiple rubber bands.
Mickey had found some more rubber bands in the Thwaites paper bag his mother used to save from those dropped by postmen on the steep stone stairs of the six storey ‘M’ block they lived in on the Russell Trust estate.
There was no interrogation. Mickey showed no indication he knew what was in the bag. He was simply reporting it as lost property handed in. Mickey did not give any false name and address. In any case PC Robert Wilder had walked past and patted him on the back accompanied by the words ‘All right Mickey lad?’
Mickey went to school. He told Miss Brindle that his mother would write a note explaining his absence the previous day.
Miss Brindle extended the arithmetic drill to divisions- ‘100 divided by five?’ ‘20 Miss!’ ‘100 divided by 2?’ ‘50 Miss!’ ‘100 divided by 15?’ ‘6 with 10 left over Miss!’
This fixation with the number 100 convinced Mickey that Miss Brindle was indeed a Witch. She knows. But how? There was always something terrifyingly supernatural about her. The children often talked of her having hidden powers. Now Mickey was convinced this was true.
When he got home the front door was slightly open. He could hear his mother’s voice and another one which was worryingly familiar.
He walked in and there was Lady La-di-da Boomps-a-daisy of all people.
Her large hand extended down to his. ‘Ah Master Michael Silver. Very pleased to make your acquaintance.’
He had never been called by his proper first name before and found himself clasping and shaking her hand.
‘My name is Dorothy Winter. I am here to thank you for finding and handing in the £100 our ladies Rotary Club group had raised for charity. I had foolishly lost it the other day and have been so worried what had happened to it. You are a hero young man.’
He had never been called a young man before. His mother asked him to go outside and play for a while. The two women needed to talk. They went into his mother’s bedroom. Mickey was beyond curious and pretended to leave by closing the front door, but then staying in the living room combined galley kitchenette.
He couldn’t make out what they were saying. At one point it sounded like his mother was getting tearful, but Dorothy Winter’s voice was much more distinctive and she was being so nice and consoling.
They were talking for a good hour and he instinctively guessed they had finished. So he quickly left, quietly pulling the door behind him.
He loitered downstairs. When Dorothy Winter reached ground level she shook his hand again ‘You are such a good young man. You deserve the very best. You really do.’
She walked off in the direction of Carlyle Avenue and he wondered if he would ever see her again.
The following morning his mother was dressed for work and had been up before him and managed to prepare his breakfast. They didn’t say anything.
She was back at the haberdashery counter of Thwaites and stopped sending him out for bottles of ‘Happy Pop.’
The Russell Trust Superintendent and his wife actually smiled and waved to Mickey when he next passed them near the estate’s rent office.
Ellen Silver stopped being ‘Sad Ellen.’ Mickey did not grow any bigger than his dad and would be called Big Mickey when he was eighteen.
Many years later he learned what he had vaguely guessed and a lot more. Dorothy Winter was indeed Lady Dorothy Winter. She had insisted on giving Mickey’s mother a reward of £10 which paid off the rent arrears.
Lady Winter had lost her husband in the last year of the war. He had been a bomber pilot. She was also very good friends with the Managing Director of Thwaites and got his mother’s job back.
And Lady Dorothy had also been drowning her sorrows when people had been partying on VE and VJ Days and she was partial to a much more expensive bottle of ‘Happy Pop’ which did not do her any good.
Mickey had overheard his mother referring to the AA in later years. He thought she was sorting out driving lessons with the Automobile Association confusing it with the headquarters of the British School of Motoring which was just up the road.
Dorothy, known to her friends as ‘Dottie’ because she always described herself as such, and Ellen looked out for each other and would often meet, privately of course, at Alcoholics Anonymous in the King’s Road.
And Mickey stopped eating apple turnovers from Crème de la Crème on his birthday when he was eighteen. The cake-shop and tea-room closed for business at around the same time.
DoubleSpeak 
[…] de la Crème was first published by DoubleSpeak Words, Images and You on 28th June […]
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