LOVE STORY TO MELT your heart
Christmas’s TV hit will be Snowman author RAYMOND BRIGGS’ moving tale of his parents’ marriage. Here’s his utterly enchanting preview
mY LIFE began with the shake of a duster, from an upstairs window in a Belgravia square in 1928. My mother, Ethel, was a housemaid in an upmarket house. My father, Ernest, a milkman, was cycling past.
A flicker of yellow up on his left caught his eye. He looked up and saw a pretty girl waving at him. Being a bit of a lad, he waved back, smiling. A moment later, after a swerve or two, finding his balance, he was gone.
This being the Twenties, and my mother a nice girl, Ethel was shocked by his reaction. She was pleased as well — pleased and a little bit guilty — but not guilty enough to stop her waiting the next day, window ajar, duster in hand, for him to pass again. And there he was!
This went on for a week, until eventually Ernest turned up, in his Sunday best, with starched collar, gleaming tie pin and shining hair, handed her a bunch of flowers and said: ‘This waving’s been goin’ on long enough, duck. How about coming to the pictures with me?’
Theirs was a love story that was to last 41 years until their deaths, just months apart, in 1971. Their marriage saw them through World War II, evacuation, child-rearing and rebellion, social aspirations and change.
It was a very English marriage, full of soot, grit, stoicism and endless cups of tea — extraordinary only in its ordinariness, all played out against the backdrop of the Wimbledon home of which they were so proud, and where they lived their entire married lives.
My 1998 graphic novel of their life and love, Ethel & Ernest, has been made into an animated film, with Jim Broadbent and Brenda Blethyn providing my parents’ voices.
I was first approached by director Roger Mainwood — the animator behind my earlier books, The Snowman and When The Wind Blows — about turning Ethel & Ernest into a film in 2007, and I have been actively involved as executive producer. It has been a long, and often emotional, journey for me.
I spent much of the production process in tears — when I heard their words coming to life in the recording studio, it felt like they were sitting behind me.
This Christmas, the film takes its place in the festive TV listings. I can’t help thinking what my parents would have thought of their lives sharing billing with the Queen’s Speech and a Bond film. Flummoxed, I’d say.
Yet for all their protestations, I think my parents’ lives were extraordinary, in their own ordinary way. After that first trip to see a film starring Victor McLaglen, Dad’s favourite, but whom Mum had never heard of, the next stop was a visit to Ethel’s home.
It was a very small terrace house with a beautiful front garden — a tiny two-up, twodown, in Sydenham, South London where 11, yes 11, children were born.
Ethel counted them off: ‘Bob, Beaty, Mag, Edie, me, Frank, Flo, Jessie, George, Joe and Bill.’ The older boys slept on the downstairs floor, but where they put all their bedding, I’ve never worked out. They had no bathroom, no running hot water, only one cold tap and no heating apart from the iron kitchen range.
She was entirely innocent, and knew nothing about the facts of life. When she got her first period she ran home from school sobbing with terror, thinking she was bleeding to death.
With 11 children, her parents knew plenty about the birds and the bees, why on earth didn’t they think to warn the poor little girl?
How 11 children could be conceived in one of those little bedrooms with none of the others knowing about it is almost beyond belief.
Meanwhile, whatever shame lay in Ernest’s humble upbringing in Earlsfield, in SouthWest London, he refused to share it with his new girlfriend. He couldn’t take her home, he said. It really wouldn’t be ‘her cup of tea’.
‘There are horses and carts all down the road, scrap iron, rag-and-bone men, three pubs, blokes playing cards on the pavement, horse — er — horse manure everywhere. Fights outside the pubs — women too. The coppers won’t go down there. The last one that did go, they bashed him up then sat on him and blew his whistle to fetch more coppers.’ When they decided to get married, the social
diktats of the time declared Ethel had to give up her job. Her first concern was for ‘her ladyships’, who, she said, couldn’t do a thing for themselves.
‘Don’t worry about ’em,’ Ernest declared. ‘They’ll soon get another skivvy.’
‘I was not a skivvy!’ Ethel retorted indignantly. ‘I was a lady’s maid!’
tHIS political disparity remained throughout their marriage: Dad was a staunch socialist while Mum associated herself with the aspirational middle-class. Then the great moment of buying their first house. The price was frightening — a colossal £825. Dad worked out that with his three guineas a week salary, they’d pay it off in 25 years. ‘In 1955, it’ll be ours!’ he declared.
They were astounded by the space, the front bedroom with its three windows making a bay and yet another one. Four windows in one room, which made Mum worry about the cost in curtains. And three bedrooms for two people! The luxury! Most of all they were overawed by the
bathroom. Neither had lived in a house with a bathroom before, let alone had a bath. This special regard for the bathroom lasted all their lives. I remember coming home once as a boy and almost telling Dad off about his habit of washing at the kitchen sink. Why don’t you wash in the bathroom? I asked.
‘Blimey, son, not likely. I’m filthy, look,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know but that is what the bathroom is for.’ ‘No, not in the bathroom. Not in this state.’ ‘But this is the kitchen, all the food is here, Mum is trying to cook.’ ‘No, I couldn’t, son. Not in the bathroom.’ Such awesome respect for the bathroom, that you mustn’t even enter it unless you are already clean!
After Dad had a bath, he would wrap himself in a thick brown dressing gown and hurry to his bedroom and dive into bed as if he’d had a narrow escape from hypothermia.
Years later, when my parents were staying with us in Sussex, I remember all of us sitting in the garden on a warm, sunny day and I went indoors for a quick shower. When I came out again in usual summer clothes, Dad was quite apprehensive. ‘Are you OK, son?’ He couldn’t understand why I was not wrapped up in a thick dressing gown after my ‘ordeal by bathroom’.
In 1933, Mum announced that ‘she’d been to the doctor’, meaning she was pregnant. She was overjoyed, they both were, and for her birthday, Dad gave her his usual huge bunch of flowers and an enormous birthday card with crimson, padded heart on the front, inscribed to My Dear Wife.
Ethel replied that her best present wasn’t due until the New Year. And on January 18, I