Mrs Maladette

~ beetleypete

This is a true story from my childhood.

In 1960, we moved into a brand new two bedroom council-built maisonette in Bermondsey, South London. (For readers abroad, a masionette is an apartment with the bedrooms and bathroom upstairs, usually in a block of 10 or more) We were excited to have this brand new property to rent. Ours was on the first floor, which was also the top floor. There were ten maisonettes on the ground floor, ten more directly above.

Over half the tenants had children, although for some reason the council had seen fit to re-house a single woman in a two-bedroom maisonette on her own. She occupied the last maisonette at the end of our landing, and my mum told me her name was Mrs Maladette.

When I saw her, I thought she looked old and grumpy. My mum was 36 years old in 1960, (I was 8) and Mrs Maladette might have been any age between 50 and 70, for all I knew. She wore a headscarf at all times, and a large apron covering her dress. I asked my mum about her unusual name, whch sounded French although the lady was definitely English and had the same London accent as the rest of us. Mum told me she didn’t know anything about her, other than her name. She had tried to be friendly with her, but had been rebuffed.

My first real encounter with her was when I was playing on the long balcony with two smaller boys who lived downstairs. We were running up and down, probably making a lot of noise. She suddenly came out of her front door, shouting at us to “Clear off and shut up!” I told my mum later, and she said we should play on the large communal grass-covered area downstairs, and not annoy Mrs Maladette.

But that wasn’t good enough for our grumpy neighbour.

She came out again and leaned over the railings, once again yelling at us. “Shut up. Go and play in the park if you want to be noisy!”

The park was a 20-minute walk away, and not somewhere we would go on school nights, as we had to be around for dinner. The real trouble started during the school holidays. We would be out playing just after breakfast, staying outside most of the day until we had to be home for the evening meal. There were times when we would go to Southwark Park, or play for hours on the numerous bomb-sites still not cleared since WW2. But other days we would play on the grass area, either football, cricket, or mostly ‘War’. Playing ‘War’ was very noisy. With our toy weapons, we also liked to make the sounds of rifle shots, machine-gun bursts, and grenade explosions.

We were just kids enjoying ourselves, usually in a large group.

Unfortunately, Mrs Maladette rarely went out. So not long after we started playing, she would lean over and shout at us to go away and be quiet. I told my mum, who went to talk to her. She got nowhere explaining that we were children playing, and was accused of not being able to control her son and his friends. So now our parents turned against her, and she was more or less shunned by everyone in the block.

Talking with my friends, we decided to get revenge. We stopped playing, and instead concentrated on making her life a misery. This began by playing ‘Knock and run’, also known as ‘Knock-Down Ginger’. (For some reason) In a small relay team, one of us would run along the balcony to her door, knock loudly on it using her letterbox knocker, then run away downstairs and disappear on the street. After she had answered her door to find nobody there, the next one of us would run along and do the same. We could keep that up for a good hour, until she stopped bothering to answer her door at all.

As a result, she rarely answered to the door to anyone, including the Postman, Milkman, or any genuine callers.

Our next tactic was to post things through her letterbox. Random scraps of paper, old newspapers that had been thrown away, advertising leaflets, in fact anything that could fit through the letterbox, including discarded fish and chip wrappings and empty crisp packets.

By the end of that first year, she no longer shouted at us over the railings, or complained to any of the parents. In fact, I don’t even remember seeing her after that, though others had spotted her in the local corner shop. We considered it a small victory, allowed to play unmolested, and no longer subject to the bad-tempered old grump.

When I was 15 my parents gave up the maisonette, and we moved to our own house in the suburbs. I never knew what happened to Mrs Maladette after that. I was studying for exams, had my first serious girlfriend, and was thinking about when I could pass my driving test at 17. The old woman with the funny French name didn’t enter my thoughts.

Then at the age of 60 in 2012, I move to Norfolk, retire from work, and one morning in 2013 I wake up thinking about Mrs Maladette for the first time in 48 years.

And I felt sorry for her, regretting what we did as children.

61 thoughts on “Mrs Maladette”

  3. We all deal with past guilt. Memories stacked up in subconscious start coming out when your brain realises you are ready to deal with it. I think your subconscious feels you are ready to talk about it and forgive yourself. You were just a child and every child is work in progress.

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  4. And no policeman came along to give you a clip round the ear or a swipe with his rolled up cape! She was a grumpy lady. We lived above ‘a dreadful old lady’ my mother’s words, Mum and Dad rented the top larger half of a house. Before that was ‘the mad French woman’ who complained about every noise when I was a baby.

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    1. Back then, I think that many of those ‘mad old ladies’ were traumatised by WW2, the loss of husbands or fiances, and other horrors that they might have witnessed.
      When I was young, we were setting off bangers in the keyholes of some new street lamps, and a passing beat bobby grabbed my ear and marched me home to my mum to be told off. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  5. (1) Back when folks were watching Gilligan’s Island, some fans wanted to knock down Ginger and knock up Mary Ann.
    (2) Aimé Civiale was a 19th Century French photographer who took photos of mountains and villages in the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps. One of her photos is of a mountain, with the title of La Maladette. For the etymology, look here:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladeta
    Maybe she was from a family originating in the Pyrénées?
    (3) Or, going with the French language, maybe Maladette can be traced back to a slight corruption of “badly in debt”? (On a mal à la dette.)

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    1. I always presumed she had married someone, and taken that French name, David. The lady herself was most definitely a Londoner.
      (I never watched Gilligan’s Island. Not even sure if it was shown here.)
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    2. I have my own set of memories. I had made my grandmother miserable on occasions when she was left alone with me for a couple of hours. It feels all wrong now, but at that time, it felt like payback for her loving my brother better.

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  7. All kids play ‘Knock Down Ginger’. I remember myself and a friend doing just the same thing to an elderly woman who lived in the next road. Her daughter must have caught me at some point because she complained to my mother, who told her quite firmly that I would never have done such a thing! In later years kids have knocked on our door and run away. It was ever thus.

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      1. I was one of those awful street urchins, who played in condemned houses, on bomb sites, and generally did exactly what I wanted to. However, I was terrified of Dad’s temper, and would never be late home. I still cannot be late anywhere now, even though Dad’s been gone since 1977.

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  8. Ah! Memories, they say your life flashes before you at the time of death. But having lived beyond our ‘three score and ten’ I suppose there’s a lot of thoughts to empty out. I know random memories pop up with me first thing in the morning, are then I can’t remember much (people’s names, lost keys, day of the week etc) for the rest of the day.

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    1. Retirement seemed to empty out my head, like clearing ‘unused files’ from a computer hard drive. Those very old memories came back to me as if they had happened the day before.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  9. I have done the same thing. It was Mrs. Jarrett. We would call her on the phone around midnight during a slumber party and say, “Is this hell?”, then hang up. How terrible is that? I wonder if your Mrs. Maladette lost a husband before moving in. Perhaps she lost a son in the war and was never herself again

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  10. If we made all the apologies we owed for when we didn’t know better it would consume the last third of our lives. I’m not sure there is one for lighting a paper bag of fresh dog poo on fire on someone’s front porch and playing ring and run… and you only have to clean up one event of TP-ing to realize it’s a bad idea. Or, on your side of the pond I’ve heard it called bog roll-ing.

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      1. Jeez, I wasn’t destructively bad, but definitely had my “lucky to alive” or simple shameful moments. I think my guardian angel had a “stay out of jail” pass the first few years I could drive…

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      1. I was a ringleader myself and I have never felt uncomfortable about it because it filled a need I had to heal the negativity of being what all my classmates called, “A Different Sort, alright” and making sure my school days were as lonely as they could make them for me.

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  12. I have read about this and currently my boy is studying this in his Psych paper. Your brain does clear out stuff as you get older, particularly if there is guilt involved. Mostly we recall things but get details mixed or romanticise to make the story better for us.

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    1. I’m sure that’s the case, Gavin. In this example, I didn’t change anything to make me look better, but there may be others where I have, I’m not certain.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. Yes, a good chance something bad happened in her youth, or during the war. I never understood why she wanted to have a 2-bed maisonette. Perhaps she was waiting for someone to come home and they never returned?
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  18. yes, she probably had a story and a reason, but as children we only see things through our perspective, and not to feel guilty about. if you had the chance to meet her as an adult, and get to know her, things would have been different, I’m sure

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  19. The mind is the incredible instrument that allows us to retrieve these seemingly random bits of memories years later for whatever reason.

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  20. No excuses, and boys will be boys, so cruel when in gangs sometimes, but I bet if the lady had smiled at you now and again and baked you some cookies, you would not have acted the way you did. You tend to reap what you sew with kids.

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    1. Yes, she was the only one that was never nice to us, so the only one we victimised for a while. But now I think she must have had a sad story. Maybe the loss of a French husband during the war? Or losing a child. It was unusual for old ladies in London to be so unsociable.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  21. Hi Pete, I remember playing that same knock knock game as a kid. We also roamed in a pack. We also posted things in people’s post boxes although we did this to random people. So I guess we were worse as our victims hadn’t done anything to us.

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