The Fisherman's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  ‘Mum …’ Annie appealed to her.

  ‘Your Dad’s only trying to protect you from things you don’t know about.’

  Annie’s hazel eyes flashed in anger. ‘How am I ever going to find any young man if you and Dad start vetting him the moment I meet him and telling me I know nothing about the world? It’s … it’s silly.’

  She saw her mother eye her father, who shrugged. It seemed to make up Mum’s mind. ‘Well, experience do make us older. And we don’t want to get heavy-handed. But if things don’t go right, it’s your funeral.’

  ‘Yes,’ Annie said succinctly and stuck her fork into her crisp rasher of bacon with such force that it shattered all over her plate and beyond it on to the tablecloth, making her even more annoyed with them but more with herself for allowing them to rattle her. They’d soon change their tune when they saw Alex next week.

  Danny threw her a broad grin across the table. ‘So what’s this fella’s other name, then?’

  ‘Willoughby,’ Annie supplied waspishly. ‘Alexander Willoughby.’

  Danny went ‘Mmm!’ and Josie tittered, repeating it clownishly while Connie enlarged her eyes and pursed her lips towards her mother at the grandiose sound of the name. Pam, however, scowled.

  ‘I don’t know how everyone can take it so easily. Picking up with a chap none of us know. And not one of you turning a hair. If it was me come home with someone like that, Dad would find something to pick at about him.’

  ‘If you’re talking about that Bryant bugger, you can leave the table!’

  Pam shot up from her chair, the back scraping against the fender around the fireplace. ‘I go out with who I like.’

  ‘Not that one you don’t.’ His knife and fork gripped in his fists, a sliver of fried egg white trembling on the prongs of the fork, he glared up at her. ‘Any bloke than a sprig off that bloody family. I’d sooner see you dead an’ buried than …’

  ‘Dan!’ Peggy’s voice rose full of horror.

  Realising what he’d said, he looked down, his jaw set, his gaze concentrated on his plate. But Pam had already given a stifled hiccup of sob and fled the room, leaving her mother to hurry after her.

  The rest of them sat unmoving, each gazing down at the food before them. Danny cleared his throat carefully, but his father had gone back to eating, a stolid sort of devouring of food which they all knew he could not be tasting, each imagining it to be as sawdust in his mouth.

  Chapter Seven

  She had never seen anything like it. Nor had Winnie, the way she squealed and waved the tiny flag on its stick which she had bought from a man with a great handful of them. A penny Union Jack; a coloured waver that was already coming away from its cardboard holder with being frantically waved at the procession; a lolly in a blue and white chequered triangular wrapper bought from a ice cream vendor pedalling a tricycle with a blue and white ice box on the front; a bag of toffees each had brought from home, plus sandwiches: the girls had their hands full, but they waved their flags and wavers without managing to drop anything. In this crowd, anything dropped would be trodden underfoot and lost.

  They were too excited to worry about that too much. This was a day never to be forgotten. Cold and sunny, London smelled of chimney smoke, pronounced in the noses of visitors who seldom if ever came to the capital. The brass bands passed, the music deafening Josie’s ears, the big drum as it went by seeming to be pounding inside her chest so that she thought it might stop her heart; the drummer leaned back against the drum’s weight on his front as he marched, rhythmically swinging the large-knobbed sticks against the taut skin … boom-boom-boom-boom. Horses, not a bit disturbed by the noise, moved past, harnesses jingling. Beautiful shiny-coated horses, the riders’ breastplates and helmets and swords glinting in cold November sunshine. Then came the gold coach bearing the new Lord Mayor of London towards Mansion House.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Josie yelled her thoughts to Winnie as it all went by, but every word was lost in the renewed fervour of cheering that rose from the crowds around her.

  She and Winnie had got here early, had been waiting for hours. Even so, others had got here even earlier and it had been a hard job finding a place at the barriers that lined the route. They’d never have found one but for Arthur; being tall and skinny, he had been able to shoulder his way through the growing throng to find a place at the front for them, giving back as good as he got from those he edged aside.

  The girls, both ecstatic, had a full view of the passing spectacle, but he took it all in his stride. He’d seen it all before. He had, he told them, attended this annual parade from a child, with his parents when his dad was alive, and his brother and sister; they would take sandwiches and beer and flasks of lukewarm tea that tasted lovely after the parade was over and the crowds dispersed to London’s parks if it was sunny, and home if it was cold and wet. He came less often now he had grown up. ‘Well, yer see one, yer’ve seen ’em all. It don’t change, only the bloke in the coach.’

  Today he looked on his charges – two of the most prettiest (well, one at least) girls he had ever escorted anywhere – with nonchalant pride in his London glowing on his narrow face.

  ‘It must be really wonderful living in London all the time,’ Josie gasped as the cheering died away.

  ‘S’all right,’ Arthur said with that same nonchalant pride as, with the crowds miraculously thinning, they made their way from the now uncoveted vantage place at the barriers. Some were already being taken down for stacking in batches by grinning, tall-helmeted police while cloth-capped street cleaners began sweeping up horse manure as well as the litter of twenty thousand Londoners’ day out.

  ‘Where d’yer want ter go?’ Arthur asked the two girls. He still looked proud, a girl on each arm.

  Josie glanced round him at Winnie on his other side. ‘We don’t mind, do we, Win?’

  ‘I don’t know London,’ she supplied. ‘We’ll go wherever you say.’

  ‘Fancy one of the parks? It’s a bit cold but it’s dry, and they are nice, our parks.’

  ‘I’d rather see what West End London’s like,’ Josie put in quickly.

  She had been waiting for a chance like this. She felt she could never have ventured there alone – tales gleaned from this person and that of Soho, the hidden dives and the opium dens of Chinatown and all the other seamier back streets lurking just behind the bright lights of Mayfair and Piccadilly Circus making her eyes boggle.

  With her arm linked in Arthur’s she would feel safe. But she wished now that she hadn’t brought Winnie along – not that she particularly wanted him to herself, but Win would want to go one place and she another. Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

  On this occasion, however, Winnie was in full agreement. ‘Oh yes, I’d love to see all those theatres and things.’

  Arthur was looking concerned. ‘Can’t afford ter take yer into any. I ain’t got the money fer free of us, not even if we line up fer the gods. Could prob’ly take yer ter the pictures.’ But he didn’t look too keen on spending on two girls. Josie he might, but not Winnie as well – Josie was his date.

  ‘All I want to see,’ Josie said excitedly, ‘is just what it looks like up there. I want to see all the moving bright lights around Piccadilly Circus, all those electric advertisements.’

  ‘Aint you never seen em?’

  ‘No. And all the people in their lovely limousines and their furs, and men with top hats and canes and their evening dress. I want to smell what it’s like – all that expensive perfume and powder, and peep into one of those nightclub places, just to see what it would feel like if we went in, which I know we can’t – we’re not dressed for it. And watch people getting out of taxis …’

  ‘’Old on, ’old on!’ Arthur was laughing. ‘I fink I get the picture. It’s up West fer us then.’ Again his pride in his city knew no bounds. He’d show these girls from the sticks the night of their life. He would even go to three cheap seats in a moderately priced cinema to finish up w
ith – a cowboy film maybe, his favourite type of film, full of blazing guns and tough lean men, men like Tom Mix.

  Darkness, but for the blazing lights, having closed in hours ago, the time sped by until it was nearly ten o’clock. An electric sign proclaiming it drew a horrified breath from Josie.

  ‘Oh, God, look at the time, Win.’

  Winnie too looked astounded, and just as worried as Josie. Her father could belt her one when she appeared. Though Josie knew her dad would do no such thing, his displeasure would be just as painful, and Mum’s too.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ she told Arthur. ‘It’s going to take at least an hour and a half on the train if we go now. Half past eleven before we get home. Our dads will kill us.’

  Arthur, who lived just twenty minutes from this city’s heart, grinned at them, but then realising the distance they had to go, sobered quickly.

  ‘We’d best start off then.’ He would have loved going to the pictures to see Tom Mix, but Josie had been so absorbed and overwhelmed by all she had seen of London’s just-awakening night life, she didn’t want to sit in any dark picture palace. And Tom Mix films were still silent ones.

  Her whole being cried to stay here, to be, if only in imagination, part of this scene, imagining herself getting out of one of those taxis, entering a nightclub on the arm of an evening-dressed escort, having her fur wrap taken from her by a cloakroom girl, producing from her gold lamé clutch bag a long ivory cigarette holder into which she would insert a fragrant pink-coloured Turkish cigarette. She yearned for that life even more and as they made their way down Piccadilly Tube Station, she promised herself that she would come back, but not to gape, to be one of those society women who tonight had moved past her without even seeing her.

  The Wall Street Crash last Autumn hadn’t touched Annie’s family business. Theirs was insignificant except to them, isolated, specialised, the trauma that had hit prominent business organisations and sent them tumbling, had passed the Bowmakers by like a puff of summer breeze, although it had shaken Alex’s father’s business a little. Fortunately his firm relied not only on America for its sources but on countries as far flung as Argentina and India – diamonds from South Africa, opals from Australia, rubies from Burma, emeralds from Columbia and India, topaz from Brazil, turquoise from Tibet.

  Nevertheless, Alex said he was struggling, the States being one of their major customers. But the world was wide and the business would survive, he told Annie. She was fascinated. But she was fascinated by all Alex told her, and he by all she told him. They were in love. Her delighted family knew all about it. His family didn’t know.

  ‘I thought you would have told them about us by now,’ she harried.

  ‘I will,’ he said, staring out over the estuary as they huddled within an otherwise deserted storm shelter against a stiff, snow-laden January wind. The water looked an angry mud-grey, its bottom churned by the white laced waves far too enormous for a mere estuary. The promenade pavement looked as though it were on the move, minute frozen pellets of snow, driven by the wind, racing across its surface in thin white clouds. But such was love that lovers would be alone together no matter what the weather, feeling nothing, or at least enduring it so long as they had each other.

  Annie studied Alex’s face. ‘When? When will you tell them?’

  Alex bit his lip, kept his eyes on the scene beyond the glass shelter, refusing to look at her. ‘Annie, my darling. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you and I, we come from different walks of life. I don’t care. I love you, Annie. And I should hope that it is no one else’s business but our own. But families are particularly protective of their children. They presume to make up their minds for them, for the sake of themselves. But it’s important to them despite what we feel and want. I want you, Annie, with all my heart. I want us to be together forever. But my family think that one day I’ll marry into a family they deem fit for me. They’ve been badgering me about it since I was twenty-one. But I never met anyone I fancied. And I didn’t intend to marry anyone just to please them.’

  Annie listened in silence. She had taken her eyes off him and she too was staring out to sea, her heart slowly plummeting. This was his way of telling her that although he loved her desperately, she’d never be acceptable to his kind of people and that their relationship might have to cease.

  ‘Then I met you, Annie,’ he continued. ‘And I knew you were the one I’d been waiting for, and nothing, no one, would ever make me stop seeing you.’

  Seeing her, that was it. One day he would marry someone of his own kind. And he was expecting to go on seeing her, for her to become his paid mistress. Good God!

  She shifted on the bench, but his arm around her tightened. ‘I know we probably have a rough time ahead of us, darling. Not from your parents but from mine. They’ll create merry hell about this, I know they will. But they won’t shift us, my darling.’ He lay his head against hers while still staring ahead. ‘I intend to marry you, no matter what they say.’

  ‘Marry?’ Annie found her voice, moved back to turn her face to him, wondering if she’d heard correctly. She wasn’t sure what to say, how to react. She had assumed, had hoped, these past months but they’d not talked purposefully of marriage. ‘Did you say marry?’

  She saw his expression full of anxiety, alarm. ‘You do want to marry me, Annie? You’ve not just been playing along, have you?’

  She too had begun to feel alarm. What if he had taken her surprised tone for what might seem a rejection and at any moment jump up and walk away? ‘I love you, Alex,’ was all she could blurt out.

  ‘And I love you …’ The fear began to melt from his eyes, replaced by revelation. ‘Oh, my darling, I see what’s wrong. What a way to propose. I’d meant to make it an occasion, go down on bended knee and ask for your hand in marriage.’

  It sounded so comical but he meant it seriously, taking her hand in his. ‘Annie, my precious darling, I’m asking formally now. Annie, will you marry me?’

  No more fear. Her mind again serene, Annie relaxed against him. A wonderful glow began to surround her. The snow was getting heavier but she didn’t care. It was beautiful, romantic, sitting in this cold shelter safe from the biting wind outside. She felt secure, knew he would guard her from harm and the pitiless tongues of those who would have them separated.

  ‘Yes, Alex, I’ll marry you. With all my heart,’ she said.

  ‘George! I’m pregnant!’ It was far from the way an unmarried girl would usually say this to her boyfriend, nor usual for the boyfriend to stare back in pure joy.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Pam nodded eagerly. ‘I waited to be sure. This is the third month I’ve missed … you know what I mean. I didn’t want to say too much, in case it was a false alarm. But this morning I woke up queasy in my tummy. I know, George. I know. Isn’t it just wonderful? They can’t stop us now.’

  He was thoughtful. Standing with her in the icy cold park, the only place they could ever be sure of being undiscovered by any who might know them, he grew businesslike, the first flush of joy overshadowed by doubt.

  ‘We’ll have to go about this carefully. I know it’s what we’d planned, but I don’t think we should say anything to anyone just yet.’

  Pam looked astounded. ‘They can’t stop us marrying now.’

  ‘There are things like abortion.’

  ‘That’s illegal. Mum wouldn’t even consider such a thing. She loves me too much. She wouldn’t risk harming me. And she wouldn’t expect me.’

  ‘It’s your dad I’m worryin’ on. Him hating mine like he does, and mine not far short of that himself. What if yours threw you out?’

  There was a moment of dismay that Dad could do such a thing, but she laughed it off. ‘He’d never do that. But if he did, surely I’d be free to marry without having to ask his consent. It would solve all our problems.’

  George didn’t laugh. He gave her a long stare. ‘I don’t think it would. Not for you. The people you love – d’you kn
ow what it’d mean to you?’

  Pam shrugged. A flake of snow touched her face. It was coming down quite heavily and she’d not noticed when it had started. The weak sunshine through which they had walked had gone, snow clouds gathering as though from nowhere, a brief fall of large soft flakes that promised not to last before the sun struggled out again. The crisp fresh smell of the snow was in her nostrils as, her head bent, her arm through his, they wandered without any real idea or care which direction they took.

  Not knowing whether to feel despondent or cheered, they walked in silence. Finally Pam’s despondency or whatever it was began giving way to new hope as a thought that hadn’t made itself apparent until now came to her. She stopped staring at the movement of her feet and lifted her head.

  ‘George, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that us having to marry could bring our two families together?’ Enthusiasm for the idea began to mount, visions of her part in this reconciliation invading her mind.

  ‘With us married, my dad and yours would have to make it up. I bet neither of them has ever wanted to be the one to make the first move – pride and all that.’ She began to giggle. ‘There’s never been anything to get them together until now. Imagine, all those years. Before I was born. So long ago it’s almost become a myth.’ She broke out into a joyous laugh. ‘George, a myth. Oh Lord, how daft can people get? And we can be the ones to bring them together. My family and yours.’

  His arm tightened about her in a gesture of reassurance. She heard him laugh, and if it sounded a fraction cynical she didn’t notice. All she had to do was weather her parents’ wrath for a while then all would be well.

  In the pale glow of the central gas lamp, her mother held her arms up, and from her small height wrapped them about her daughter’s neck in pure joy at the news she had just been given this February evening.

  ‘Oh, Annie, Annie, dear, I am so pleased for you both!’

  Dad was shaking Alex by the hand. ‘Best bit o’ news in a long while. I know you’re goin’ter look after her, Mr Willoughby. My Annie’s a lucky gel.’