Friday 17 February 2017

The Tatie Girls

I wonder what happened to the other Tatie girls.

We met at infants school, it was a stupid, cruel name given to us by someone’s older sister. There were 5 of us, one was a boy and only 2 of us actually went tatie picking.

Tatie pickers were the lowest of the low in village hierarchy, it was hard backbreaking work, usually done even in the 50’s by the village poor and gangs of itinerant workers.

We were all outcasts, ignored by the other kids, bullied when on our own but not when we were in a group. There was me, Jeanie, Kevin, Angela Green and Ana.

All avoided or bullied for different reasons, me because I was dirty and unkempt, my mother had a career, was snob, and no intention of doing boring things like cooking and cleaning. She and was unpopular with the other mothers, she never tried to hide her contempt for them.

Jeanie was epileptic, she was avoided as some people thought it might be catching.

Kevin was also dirty and unkempt, he was like a wild animal jumping on desks, peeing on the nature table, kicking out at teachers, his mother was ‘no better than she ought to be’.

Angela’s real name was Angelina Verdi, she was clean but all her clothes were worn and dated. Her dad had been an Italian POW, put to work in the fields, he’d married a local girl and anglicised his name.

Ana, there were rumours that her dad had served time in prison for unnamed crimes. Later conversations with my mother revealed that Ana’s father was a German Jew who fled to England and was interned during the war.

Angela and I were the only two who went tatie picking, she with her mother and father and older brothers, there were 14 mouths to feed in their family, an unusually big family by 50’s standards, though when my father was a boy there were many families of that size around.

I went tatie picking with my granny, my mother hated me going to the tatie fields but as she and my father were both out at work granny provided child care, so when granny went tatie picking, so did I.

We left the area when I was eight years old, following my mother’s peripatetic wanderings from one end of the country to the other, I changed schools every couple of years. But my years as one of the Tatie girls stood me in good stead.

I was never going to fit in with the in crowd, I was/am short and fat, I never had the right clothes or listened to the right music. To be honest I didn’t really know what ‘the right clothes or right music’ were.

Within a few weeks of starting at a new school I would have mastered the local accent and worked out who the other outcasts were and made friends with some of them.



4 comments:

  1. That's a rather sad tale; but not one that you should be ashamed of. Some of the strongest people are those who were picked on at school. Either they were too brainy, or their parents weren't as well-off as others, or they had ginger hair. Nothing is beyond the bounds of school bullies, probably because they don't understand what an effect it has on their target.

    Tatie picking sounds good to me, and presumably brought in some welcome extra cash.

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  2. People can be such nasty idiots! Hugs for those young people who were outcasts for no good reason all those years ago. I hope they all went on to have happy lives!

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  3. I've not visited your blog before so am glad to counterpoise the description of your childhood friends (really interesting) with your profile - married a few years, still in love, still happy still skint.

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  4. Such harsh beginnings, who knew what a lovely life you would eventually have, filled with the comforts you could only long for back then. This post reminds me of Janis Ian, who wrote her award winning song At Seventeen about her own struggles in youthful years. She went on to own a music recording company,literature publishing house and start a charity that has given $900,000 in scholarships away. One must wonder how happy and successful the cruel children that once made fun of the less fortunate among them are today.

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