The Fisherman's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  It was a joy to see his expression clear, become full of hope. Yet he looked sad. ‘I shall be leaving in two weeks,’ he repeated, this time a strong connotation that he assumed she found him acceptable but that he might have left it too late for anything between them to develop.

  ‘You could perhaps leave me a forwarding address.’ She couldn’t believe she was saying this. Something inside her was crying out, ‘Don’t let him go!’

  ‘May I?’ It was wonderful to see the light come into his dark eyes.

  ‘If you want to.’

  She was flirting. Again. It had been so long since she had flirted with anyone. A fleeting memory came to her of the day she had given Ben an invitation with her eyes as he’d looked over at her in that dancehall in Southend where he had gone with his mates on a day trip. She had been with a couple of friends from work. Her heart had suddenly raced at the sight of him, had raced even faster as he’d come over. He had been so good-looking, so …

  Hurriedly she pushed the memories out of her head, concentrated on Ian Lindsay’s nicely cultured voice, so different to Ben’s London one. Dear, dear Ben – you must go – you must leave – forgive me for feeling like a young girl again …

  ‘Then I shall write. Constance, I will give you my address.’ He was fiddling in his breast pocket, dragging out a short pencil and a small black notebook. ‘This will do.’ Furiously he wrote, tore out the small ruled sheet. ‘Could I call on you next Sunday afternoon? We have a christening, and then I’ll be free until evening service. May I call?’

  From the back room where Dad lay, came the bellow: ‘What the bloody hell’s going on out there? Peggy, get me out of this bloody bed. How can I sleep with all that bloody row going on?’

  Connie felt her cheeks grow hot. But Ian Lindsay was smiling. A man of the church he certainly was. A man knowledegable about people in general he also was. He shook his head at her glowing cheeks. ‘May I call?’ he repeated.

  All Connie could do was nod wordlessly. He moved back from the doorstep. ‘Tell your father I came to say that he has been mentioned in our prayers for the well-being of all our parishioners, and I pray he may one day be back on his feet.’

  His quiet manner put Connie at her ease. She laughed. ‘Oh, I can see him doing just that one day. He’s the most determined, stubborn man I know. He’s already talking of getting those calliper things. It could be quite possible, though he’ll never walk properly, to swing his weight between crutches with them on. Oh yes, he does mean to be back on his feet again – to the bane of us all at times.’

  He smiled and nodded. ‘And I will see you next week, Constance.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, sobering, and as he moved off down the road, carefully closed the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Pam had been expecting it. Now it had arrived. As she opened her door to the knock, seeing her landlady standing there, her face grim, she already knew what she was going to say.

  ‘I have come up to see if you have the rent on you, Mrs Bryant.’

  ‘Can you give me another day or two? My George has gone out looking for a job. I’m sure he’ll get something today.’

  Mrs Carper’s expression remained unmoved. ‘You said that last week, and the week before. Your rent is three weeks overdue. If you don’t pay this week it will be four.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, Mrs Carper. But it will be paid.’

  ‘Last week I told you that if nothing was paid by this week I should have to ask you to find other accommodation.’

  Pam clutched Beth to her a little more firmly. ‘I did give you a bit last week on account.’

  Her mother had been by and hearing her plight had left two florins by the loaf on the table before leaving. She had grabbed the money up, rushed out and down the stairs with it and catching Mum up at the front door, embarrassed, tried to press it back into her hand. There had been a short amicable squabble, which Pam had lost through her mother’s downright refusal to take it back. In tears, Pam had retained the two-shilling pieces, hidden in her fist like two stolen jewels, her hand slowly warming them, out of sight to diminish the humiliation of acceptance.

  ‘A bit.’ Mrs Carper’s handsome face came close to twisting into a disparaging sneer. ‘A drop in the ocean compared with what you owe me. You must understand, Mrs Bryant, I can’t go on like this. I could let out this room several times over, and I’m not getting a penny while you can’t find the wherewithal to pay me. I’m sorry, Mrs Bryant, I know you’ve got a kiddie and a husband out of work, but I can’t afford to run my business like it was a charity. I have to live as well.’

  ‘Just another week,’ Pam heard herself plead, hating the sound of degradation. ‘I know George will get some work. Then we’ll be able to pay you in full. If you can wait just one more week. Please.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bryant.’ The woman was backing away, concluding the interview. ‘I can’t risk it. I am going to have to ask you to leave. If you cannot come up with at least the three weeks’ rent you already owe by this weekend, you must go on Monday. I give you the weekend to pack up.’

  ‘But where are we going to go?’ The woman seemed to be receding even further away, melting into the dimness of the landing as if in a nightmare. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sounded as if she could visualise the plight stretching before her lodger. ‘But I think I’m being generous giving you the two days. I’d be within my rights to ask you to leave today, me getting nothing from you, but I wouldn’t do that. Not to someone with a kiddie. So it’s understood, Mrs Bryant, you must settle up, or you must find other accommodation in two days.’

  The final words dropped, weighty as an object flung down a precipice. There was no retrieving them. Her mind and body utterly numbed, Pam held Beth to her, the child unruffled, wide-eyed and pleasurably distracted by what was going on around her, and watched Mrs Carper go back down the stairs to her own ground-floor quarters.

  When George returned home, it was on him that Pam vented all her pent-up fear in an explosion of rage.

  ‘I suppose you’ve not found any work. Out all day and nothing I suppose. I suppose you’ve been sitting on your backside in the library with the rest of the down-and-outs, or hanging around on street corners with ’em waiting for work to come to you.’

  It was cruel. It was unfair. She saw him sink down on the rickety fireside chair, his body bent forward, his hands limp between his knees. A thousand words cramming her brain to berate him with, and she could only fall silent, seeing him hunched forward in the chair, all the stuffing knocked out of him, too tired in mind and body even to retaliate.

  She knew he hadn’t been hanging around any street corner or in the local library. Friday – he’d been trudging all the way into Southend for what was laughingly termed public assistance, the dole. It was there on the table, eight paltry shillings with which to buy a week’s food for himself, his wife and his child. The weekly rent for this place in which they lived took seven shillings of it, leaving them a shilling to get by on. No unemployment insurance for George, who hadn’t been in work for any long enough stretch to draw it. Government handouts allowed for no extras, certainly not for rent it seemed. Last week George had told her that the chap in front of him in the queue had been turned away because he’d been carrying that morning’s newspaper under his arm, told that if he could afford newspapers he most likely had enough to live on and obviously didn’t warrant dole money. That was how it was. Cold charity.

  Pam found her voice, this time as spiritless as he looked.

  ‘We’re being slung out,’ she said softly. ‘Evicted. Mrs Carper came up this morning when I was feeding Beth and told us, no more rent, no more roof over our heads. She’s given us two days to get out. We got two days to find …’

  It was impossible to say any more. Pam bent her head where she stood and began to cry silently, her shoulders shuddering.

  Without saying anything, he got up, took off the cloth cap he hadn�
��t even bothered to remove to sit down, so low-spirited was he, and put an arm quietly around her. The whole gesture was purely automatic, and equally automatically she let her face lie against the dark creased jacket that seemed to be the ubiquitous uniform of the long-term unemployed English working man.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ she at last whispered against his chest.

  He still didn’t reply and she knew he was recalling the row they’d had last week when she’d asked him if he had spoken to his father about going back with him on the boat and when he had said, ‘Not yet,’ she had turned on him calling him the most spineless twerp she’d ever met.

  The row had developed into screams of accusation and cries of protest and he had almost hit her. Almost. Drawing back his arm, he had instantly let it fall as she yelled, ‘Go one then, hit me! You can’t get a job and you want to hit me – it’s my fault you’re not working.’ But of course, the aim that had never landed had been a reflection of his frustration. She knew that, but she’d railed on, working out her own frustrations.

  Now the time for that was past. Now it was crisis, and what was needed was an answer to it, an answer neither of them had. So what ensued was only silent acceptance of the fate being ladled out to them.

  ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to live,’ she muttered, sniffing back the grief that had consumed her, rationality returning. ‘We’ll have to go out tomorrow morning and start looking.’

  ‘What d’you mean, gone?’ Connie stared at her mother in disbelief.

  She had come home from work a few moments ago, every evening offering up a small prayer of thanks that she still had work to come home from when so many had none. These days she did all sorts of humble tasks at Fenner’s Engineering other than the one for which she had first been employed. It was the small firm’s show of appreciation of a good worker whose once invaluable services now teetered on the edge of extinction as business dropped away. In truth it was their goodness of heart that Connie gave up her prayers of thanks for, even though her wages had been of necessity all but halved.

  ‘That’s it.’ Her mother’s voice was bleak. ‘I popped in this morning to see her and her landlady said they’d gone. They couldn’t pay their rent. I had a damned great row with her, told her she should be ashamed of herself turning them out, but that one just kept saying she had her own livelihood to think on and as Pam hadn’t paid her rent for weeks …’

  From his wheelchair, Dad broke in hoarsely. ‘Will you shut up about her! I said I won’t have her name mentioned in my house.’

  ‘You shut up too!’ she snapped at him. ‘She’s my daughter – I’ll say her name whenever I care to. I’m at my wits’ end.’ She spoke to the air now, moving back and forth between the range and the kitchen table, not really doing anything constructive, taking a stewpan off the heat and bearing it to the waiting plates only to put it back on to the range again. ‘It’s beyond me … Oh, look at me – I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  Retrieving the stewpan she began spooning out the contents on to two plates more than were needed, her mind abstracted. ‘What on earth could’ve happened to her, where’ve they gone? Why didn’t they come here? We’d have helped them if they were in that mess.’

  ‘Like bloody hell I would! I wouldn’t have that slut under my roof if she was …’

  ‘Not now, Dan!’ She turned and put back the pan, stood looking at it, her shoulders drooping. ‘I can’t understand why she never said she was getting so deep into a mess. I know she said she was behind with the rent. I know I couldn’t afford to pay it for her but I often left a couple of bob on the table to help her out.’

  ‘You never told me that. Where’d you get a couple of bob from?’

  Again she turned on him, her tone defiant, daring him to argue. ‘Out of me housekeeping money. And if you’re going to say I’m keeping everyone short, I ain’t. I know how to juggle with what we’ve got. No one’s going short. I’ve juggled with money all me life.’

  ‘Should have accrued a little nest egg by now then.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s all only ever gone on the house and for the winter when money ain’t coming in. It’s how we’ve always managed. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘I’ve sometimes left her a couple of shillings when I could spare it,’ Connie butted in, seeing another of the far too frequent arguments this past year beginning to foment. Her father glared at her.

  ‘You too? All going behind me back now I can’t do nothing. I don’t count for nothing no more in this house. Me son doing the work I should be doing, making me feel it’s my fault him and that Lily he was engaged to broke up over it. Now me own daughters go against me.’

  ‘It’s not that, Dad. I can’t see my own sister poverty-stricken.’

  It had been unexpectedly difficult to leave the couple of shillings at odd times, embarrassing to be the giver, her sister the taker, the abject way it was accepted, desperation pushing humiliation aside. She’d have liked to give her more, but that would have felt she was bordering on ostentation, and anyway, since her wages had gone down quite considerably – the price of being kept in work – she had to be practical.

  Her mother was talking almost to herself and she pushed a plate of stew towards Dad, forgetting to add the cutlery to eat it with. ‘I tried to help her, and then she goes off without even telling me. When I saw her Friday morning she never said a word. She could have said.’

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t know then,’ Connie offered. ‘Perhaps she was given quick notice.’

  Seeing her mother distracted by it all, Connie went to the kitchen door and called to Josie, languishing in her room, to come down and eat. When she came back, her mother was still with her own thoughts. ‘You’d’ve thought the woman would’ve given Pam decent time to get out. To turn her out like that, over a weekend. You can’t go looking for digs on a Sunday. Where would they have gone, and why didn’t she get in touch with us – her own flesh and blood?’ A look from her froze an angry rebuke on her husband’s lips. ‘After all I’ve tried to do, you’d think she’d ’ve got in touch with me to tell me what happened.’

  ‘Perhaps she felt ashamed, Mum. We hadn’t exactly been nice to her, until after the baby was born. I must say, we can’t talk!’

  Josie came into the kitchen, glancing from one parent to the other and, getting the message instantly, without a word sat down to the plate of stew her mother pushed in front of her.

  As Connie distributed cutlery, their mother having totally overlooked it, a thought struck her. ‘I wonder if they might have gone to her husband’s people.’ It was better to refer to George as Pam’s husband, to utter his name in this house a worse crime in her father’s eyes than the mention of Pam’s.

  He took a noisy spoonful of stew. ‘Typical, her running to that lot instead on us. We don’t count. Chance for Bryant to score one over on me again, ain’t it? Never misses a chance, him. If I had me legs, I’d be over there now throttling the bloody life out on him.’

  He was ignored as Danny was heard coming in at the back door from a day’s cockling. Mum caught up with Connie’s new thought; her expression grew less stressed, replaced by new hope that Pam and her baby might not be out wandering the streets looking for a roof over her head.

  ‘I’m going to have to go and see.’

  ‘No you won’t!’ Dan looked as though he was about to leap out of his wheelchair. ‘You go round that damned place and I’ll … I’ll …’

  ‘You’ll what, Dan? Turn me out of doors like you did Pam?’

  It still hurt to hark back to that day when she, torn between love of her daughter and bitter memories of how they had struggled after what had been done to Dan by the very family Pam was marrying into, had turned her face away from her. She had suffered over that ever since. At night while he lay snoring away downstairs she’d lie awake, darkness accentuating all that had transpired, guilt and shame driving sleep away as she went over and over the things she should have done and said that
she hadn’t and her efforts to make up for it since that never seemed enough. Now this. It almost felt as if it had been she and Dan who had reduced her daughter to this. A nice wedding, harmony in the family, surely Pam’s start in life would have been different? There had to be an end to all this anger. There was only her to end it. Losing Pam had been almost as bad as the loss of little Tony. Quickly she put that thought from her.

  ‘I am going to see if she is there, and that’s that. I’ll go round there as soon as we’ve eaten. It’ll still be light and it’s only a few minutes’ walk.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, Mum.’ Danny’s voice held the ring of the strong ready to protect the weak. ‘In case there’s any trouble.’

  ‘There won’t be any trouble,’ she said firmly as she placed Danny’s dinner in front of him, and the finality of her words silenced him, silenced them all.

  Pam had felt George’s arm grow suddenly strong about her shoulders as they stood in the humble little place they had called home. His voice too had become strong and resolute.

  ‘We’ll go to me mum and dad tomorrow. I’ve had enough of keeping up appearances, pretending we’re making ends meet. Someone’s got to help us and not with handouts every now and again. We need proper help. Me mum and dad owe us. So do yours. It’s them what’s brought us to this – them and their bloody argument what’s been going on all our lives. Let them do something for us for a change.’

  She couldn’t see her parents welcoming them, but George was certain his would. Meekly, Beth in the shabby pram, she followed him to their house off Church Hill. She felt like one of those destitute girls in a Dickens novel. Homeless, it had a dreadful ring to it, unreal, but it was happening to her.

  Wordlessly, she stood aside in the pleasant if tiny front room. Beth was deposited on the sofa, while George, for once taking charge, firmly reminded his parents of their responsibilities, so to speak. The way he spoke to them, not pleading, a totally new man to the one she knew, shocked even her, sure that their natural reaction would be to order him out of the house.