admit to it. There was something terribly sad about her whenever she reminisced about her childhood. I could almost smell her thinking about missed chances. I often wondered, if she could have a second go at it, would she still have married my father? She was surely pretty enough to attract most any man. Whatever good features I had, I had inherited from her. But that was all I really wanted to take from her.
Most girls would want to be something like their mothers, but deep in my heart of hearts, I knew I didn’t. My mother was full of compromise. She lived solely to be sure my father was happy and content. I loved her, but she was too eager to think less of herself. It’s often a good thing to think about someone else before yourself, but there are parts of yourself that you must cherish and nurture if you want to be proud or simply be satisfied with life as you know it. I would never tell anyone that my mother was really unhappy. She was; she just didn’t realize it, or want to realize it.
I knew I would never be happy if I didn’t set out to see where my future was. Hopefully, it was waiting for me on a stage, behind a microphone, or in front of a television camera. When I left my house that day years later, it was as if someone who had been living inside me for all my life had finally fully emerged. It was her body now; she was taking the footsteps to the taxi, she was boarding the airplane, and she was looking out the window when the New York skyline appeared and, although no one else could see it, fireworks were exploding in the sky.
Emma Corey was coming.
Get ready, world.
This rebirth didn’t happen overnight, of course. It took me years to work myself up to the point where I could be so independent and determined. As soon as I was sixteen, there was a second big event in my life that helped me become so. My father knew who owed the bank money, and because of that knowledge, he had influence with many of the smaller businesses in Guildford. As soon as my birthday celebration was over, he informed me that he had found a nice weekend position for me at Bradford’s Department Store on High Street.
“Mr. Bradford himself has seen you walking to and from school and thinks you’re a perfect fit for his perfume counter. You can take that as a compliment,” he added. “He knows you’re still in school, of course, so you’ll work nine to five Saturday and Sunday. He’ll pay you twenty-five pounds a day at the start. In six months, if you work out, which I’m sure you will, he’ll raise it to thirty quid. That’s a tidy sum for doing nothing more than squeezing scents at women who think an aroma will overcome their ugly faces.”
“Oh, what a terrible thing to say, Arthur. Beautiful women wear perfume, too,” my mother said.
Daddy grunted, which was really all he would do when Mummy corrected him.
“What about church on Sunday?” my mother asked.
“She can go to the early service if she wants.”
My father was not really a churchgoing man, but he did attend services on Sunday occasionally, more, I thought, to chin-wag with some of the successful businessmen who did business at his bank than to pray to be forgiven for his sins. He looked at everything in life from the point of view of profit and loss, even prayer.
“When will she do her homework?” my mother asked him. “They get homework to do on weekends.”
“In the evenings. She has both free.”
“I’m singing on Fridays, Saturdays, and probably Sundays soon at the Three Bears,” I told him.
He stared as if he was trying to decide if I really was his child.
“They give me ten pounds, Daddy,” I said proudly, but mainly to measure it in the terms he would appreciate.
“Now, let’s see how good you are in math, then. Here,” he said, holding out his right hand, “is Mr. Bradford offering you twenty-five to start, and here,” he said, holding out his left hand, “is your ten pounds at the pub. How much more will you have if you work at Bradford’s and do your homework at night, forgetting about the pub?”
I looked away, and then I smiled. I held out my right hand. “Here’s my twenty-five quid at Bradford’s, and at night,”