by Annie Murray
The school offered what seemed to her a feast of classes: lectures on the work of the silversmith and the goldsmith; classes on smithing, on niello and damascening, raising and chasing, repoussé, enamelling . . . Precious gems, which had rather passed out of fashion when the old Queen settled into mourning her husband and gave up all personal adornment, were now back in vogue and there were classes on gem mounting and setting.
But there were the other classes she had to do, which had resulted in some of those stormy arrivals home, in door slamming and sulks.
‘Why do I have to learn to draw animals?’ she had demanded furiously. ‘I want to make bowls and teapots and . . . silver things, but not animals, or people! And the goat did its business on the floor!’
Philip and Margaret had laughed helplessly at this outburst.
‘You just make the most of it, Daisy,’ Pa said. He had never had the benefit of such a training. ‘The more things you can learn the better.’
‘But why do I have to do all these things?’ Daisy groaned.
‘It’ll be to improve your eye,’ he said. ‘The way your hand and eye work together. Just take my word for it.’
Thanks to the former head of the school, Robert Catterson-Smith, who had introduced all sorts of initiatives to fuse together the technical and artistic, life drawing was indeed from life. As well as human portraits, which Daisy taken against from a young age – I can’t draw stupid fingers and noses, why do I have to? – now there was also an Animal Room.
Daisy found herself having to draw all manner of things she had never suspected would be part of her training: dogs, cats, rabbits, a fish, the goat. All, as Mrs Flett said, ‘Large as Life and Twice as Natural.’ Whatever that was supposed to mean.
For similar reasons (fingers, noses and so on) she had set her face against clay modelling until she discovered that she was really good at it. Her hands seemed in harmony with the material and, to her delight, objects appeared at her touch. Drawing stuffed birds and flowers was more successful too: ‘At least they keep still – and they don’t have . . .’
‘You must have learned to draw fingers by now?’ Margaret had said absent-mindedly, running her eyes down the accounts in the office as Daisy chattered to her. After a moment she looked up. ‘You really do complain a lot, miss. I should have loved to have your training.’
For a moment, Ma punctured Daisy’s self-absorption. Her stepmother had fallen in love with the crafts and skills she saw when she came to live in the Jewellery Quarter, and Pa taught her things when there was time, but it was not often. Daisy knew, guiltily for a moment, how lucky she was.
Before too long, she won one of the local prizes, the Messenger Prize – five whole pounds! – for, of all things, a life drawing, accompanied by a study of a head in profile, and at this point her complaints almost ceased.
As she worked her way round the different rooms and classes of the school and concentrated more and more on her real love, working with silver, she was in heaven. She worked and studied and did well in the examinations. She loved attention from her teachers and won more awards.
Each year, those who had won local prizes could be entered for a national one. All the work was sent down to South Kensington and Daisy began to appear as a runner-up. Finally, by the summer of 1913, she was rising high at the end of her studies. And to cap it all, she was First Prizewinner of a major national award for a silver teapot she had made, wrought in simple, elegant lines.
She knew she was good – and that she had made her pa prouder than he could ever say.
And now she was a fully fledged teacher at the school alongside the people who had taught her – and Mr Carson, who she had known all her life. Mr Carson even remembered her mother! She really was feeling very pleased with herself.
Two
Two households sat side by side: twenty-four and twenty-six Chain Street, in the busy and prosperous Jewellery Quarter, barely a mile to the north-west of the heart of Birmingham. The area, roughly shaped like a triangle, was a teeming warren of activity extending away from the spire and graceful Georgian architecture of St Paul’s church. All around it were streets of terraces crammed full of living quarters and workshops. In some, six or eight different businesses shared one building, each with just one room: jewellers, gem setters, smiths and enamellers, die makers and engravers. And in addition one could find a whole range of specialities, from the making of glass eyes to that of sports trophies; from spectacles to the ornate silver chalices, pyxes and candlesticks gracing the dark interiors of churches.
This had been Daisy’s home all her life and she knew the place and its people almost the way she did her own body. She and the other children of the quarter all played out together and she knew almost everyone by sight. Her only insight into any other life was hearing from her stepmother about her upbringing in the village outside Bristol from where she and her sister Annie had moved in 1904.
The black front doors of each of the ornate brick houses, twenty-four and twenty-six, were close together, their halls divided from each other simply by a sturdy wall. Each of the houses now had wide bay windows, their frames painted black to disguise the soot which came to rest in every crevice of the city’s brickwork, their panes the widest they could be to let in all possible light on to the jewellery maker’s trade. Number twenty-six had an entry running along its far side; each house had a yard at the back with an extra workshop, or ‘shopping’, where many of the firms’ employees sat bent over unusually shaped workbenches, cut in wave-like curves along their sides, each workstation called a ‘peg’.
Most of these employees had always been lads but now, in these early months of the war, there were fewer of them than there had been before. Autumn last year had seen the recruiting offices mobbed by crowds of young men eager to take the King’s Shilling and go to war for their country against the invading Germans. The local Territorials had all been recalled to their drill halls and other lads had come from the counties around and all across Birmingham to join up. Familiar faces had disappeared and it was hard to replace them. Some businesses in the quarter were already struggling.
Inside number twenty-six, behind the sign ‘Ebenezer Watts & Son, Goldsmiths’, ran the thriving business of Margaret’s Uncle Eb, his wife Harriet and son Georgie. Daisy was not related to Georgie by blood, but he was Margaret’s cousin and over the years, quiet, kindly Georgie had become to her like an older brother, teasing her or taking her portrait with his beloved camera. Georgie’s wife, Clara, who had once worked as a burnisher, came in to lend a hand at times, even though they had three children.
When Margaret and Annie first came to Birmingham, their uncle and aunt were still living over the shop. Now they lived in their new, spacious house in Handsworth, a mile further out of the city from Chain Street, and number twenty-six was filled to the brim with commercial creativity – from the shopping in the yard outside, to the rooms occupied by other craftsmen all contributing to the gold items pouring out of Watts’s business – gem setters, Caleb Turner the die sinker who had moved next door from number twenty-four, and Jack Sidwell’s enamelling business. Even the office could now be referred to in the plural since it had spread into two rooms.
And Margaret’s beloved Uncle Eb, a prosperously paunchy man with a walrus moustache, cheerful and kind in his ways, arrived daily from Handsworth in a horse-drawn gig, usually beaming around him as he did so like a man who couldn’t believe his luck. Aunt Hatt also could not seem to keep away for long and came breezing into both numbers twenty-four and twenty-six for chats and cups of tea and at times, general interference.
In number twenty-four, the premises of ‘Philip Tallis, Silversmith & Engraver’, this was now the sole business, because the house also needed to accommodate the growing Tallis family. Mrs Flett, who was getting on for sixty and was a widow of many years, had cooked for the family even since Florence Tallis was still alive. Though she no longer lived in the house, Joan Flett still insisted on coming in every day to cook
and help look after the children, and Margaret, who also now worked in the business, found her a godsend. Daisy could not imagine life without Mrs Flett. She was a funny old thing, gaunt and rather severe looking but kind with it. She had long been almost a part of the family.
And this, all her life, had been Daisy’s whole world.
Three
‘Coo-ee!’
Margaret was sitting in the office working away when there was a tap on the door and a smiling face appeared.
‘Hello, Auntie!’ She got to her feet, smiling. ‘Oh – don’t you look nice!’
Aunt Harriet, or Hatt as they had always known her, never failed to look nice. She set great store by her clothes and today she was dressed in a very becoming outfit: a silver-grey skirt almost to her ankles, a knee-length dress over the top in a warm cream colour, with a lacy neck and sleeves to the elbow. Her thick black coat, against the January weather, was draped over her arm.
Though she was in her sixtieth year, and very definitely more ample in size than she had once been, Harriet Watts’s hair was only a little streaked with grey and while she was growing broader in the beam, she was a fine-looking woman, still with a beautiful, dark-eyed face. A gold band shimmered at her neck and as ever, she gave the impression of being an exotic bird which had escaped from a less workaday place.
‘All right, Margaret, dear? Heavens, we haven’t set eyes on you all since Christmas! How are the children? They’ll be back any minute, I suppose? Philip out the back, is he? Can you spare a moment to come next door for your tea? Thought I’d pop in. Georgie’s here and it’d be nice to see you all together.’
‘Of course,’ Margaret said, giving up the attempt to answer any of the torrent of questions. She tidied her paperwork a little.
‘Won’t be long, Muriel,’ she said to Muriel Allen, a middle-aged woman who worked in the office. Miss Allen gave a stiff nod, implying that it was none of her business what her employer did.
Aunt Hatt launched herself like royalty into what had once been her own house, number twenty-six. The office staff had all changed since Margaret’s time working there, except for sweet-faced Bridget. Five years ago, Bridget had married Jack Sidwell, who still had his prosperous little enamelling business upstairs.
Margaret remembered Jack as an awkward young man who had once harboured a fancy for her sister Annie (a true exercise in futility since Annie had always declared that she would Never Marry). But Bridget, a plump-faced, bespectacled young woman, with flyaway brown hair and a kindly way with her, seemed to be doing wonders for Jack.
‘He seems almost human these days,’ Annie had remarked recently, seeing him in passing.
Jack and Bridget had two little boys, who Bridget’s mother looked after in the daytime, and Jack’s business was flourishing. It was all a happy arrangement.
‘Hello, Mrs Tallis,’ Bridget said, a smile spreading over her pink cheeks.
Margaret smiled, pleased to see her. Despite living next door, she was so busy that she seldom went into number twenty-six these days.
‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Watts?’ asked Sarah, the other girl in the office.
‘Oh, that would be nice – I’m dropping!’ Aunt Hatt said, flinging her coat over the arm of a chair and then collapsing into it, as if to illustrate the point. ‘Running about after three grandchildren will be the death of me! And I’ve got to sort out all these women and their knitting tomorrow – socks and gloves for the troops, they say, but how many people know how to turn a sock? It was all Clara’s idea, but there it is, I’m left with it and there’s the fundraiser for the poor Belgians . . .’ She held out a hand as the girl went to go to the kitchen. ‘Pop and tell Eb and Georgie I’m here, will you?’
A few moments later, Margaret heard her uncle ‘pom-pomming’ along the passage and his large, endearingly plump figure appeared in the doorway.
‘Good heavens!’ he cried, holding out his arms in mock dismay. ‘An office full of wenches!’
‘We’re not wenches, Eb,’ Aunt Hatt said crossly. ‘I’m sure Margaret doesn’t take to being called any such thing.’
But Margaret was laughing. ‘Hello, Uncle,’ she said, going to kiss him.
Georgie appeared close behind him, a slender, handsome man who looked very like his mother and was a good deal quieter than both his parents.
‘Hello, Margaret,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’ It was in fact only a couple of weeks since their lovely Christmas Day spent together at the Wattses’ spacious house in Handsworth, but it did feel a long time ago now. ‘Kids all right?’
‘Everyone’s doing well,’ she said, pleased to see him. Even though they worked next door to each other, sometimes weeks could pass with them exchanging hardly more than a brief greeting. ‘I’ll have to bring them out to Handsworth one Sunday soon. What with everything slumping, we’ll have more time on our hands.’
‘It’s terrible – terrible, all of it.’ Uncle Eb’s face fell into despondent lines. ‘Bad for business, this war, bad for everything – what do they want to go and fight over flaming Belgium for? I’ve got lads leaving left and right . . .’
‘Those lucky stars of yours are starting to take off though, Eb,’ Hatt said. ‘In fact, they might be your best line yet!’
Eb grinned. ‘Yes, we’re not doing so bad with those. You want to get Philip to come up with something like that,’ he said. ‘It was our Georgie’s idea in the first place.’
‘Like the lucky horseshoes?’ Margaret said, pressing herself back against a shelf full of ledgers to let Sarah through the door with the tea tray.
Georgie smiled, moving a little sheaf of spiked orders out of the way so that he could lean up against the work table at the front of the office. The lapel pin of a lucky golden horseshoe, made by W. Stuart Turners’, had taken off like mad once the war started: ‘Send a lucky horseshoe to your boy in the trenches!’ Uncle Eb, who was always one to leap on any truly commercial idea, had gone about muttering, ‘That’s what we need – summat like that,’ for days, until Georgie said, ‘Well, what about “Thank your lucky stars”? ’
‘We reckoned one star would have to do,’ Eb said. Caleb Turner the die sinker, who now worked upstairs, had designed a beautiful star about three-quarters of an inch across, with a thin line cut just inside all the way round and echoing the shape – and the star lapel badge was born. ‘And then there’s this other model with one star and a little one attached to it – see?’ He picked up a blank that was lying on the table.
‘It’s not doing as well as the horseshoe,’ Georgie admitted. ‘They got the papers advertising it and everything – but badges and buttons are the way forward. Jack’s doing a roaring trade for the army.’ He nodded towards the ceiling, to the room where Jack Sidwell had his enamelling business.
‘He can barely keep up,’ Bridget said. ‘They’re just pouring them out. He’s hardly got time to breathe.’
Margaret stood amid the chatter, wondering whether she and Philip should not have thought of producing something similar when the war started, as trade had shrunk back so much. Daisy had been talking about the MIZPAH jewellery, even designing things, though not having been brought up in a religious household, she had to ask Margaret what the word meant.
‘It’s from a story in the Old Testament,’ Margaret explained. ‘There was a man called Jacob who wanted to get away from his father-in-law, Laban. He took all his family and animals and ran off in the night. But when the two men met to discuss the situation, they made a pile of stones – a sort of sign of agreement, a Mizpah, or the bond between them – to say that the families would now not live together. So that’s why it’s about a bond between people who are separated.’
Philip, who was of a rather purist mind when it came to commercial jewellery, had not shown any enthusiasm about this so far.
They were all drinking their tea and chatting when footsteps approached along the passage and there was a tap on the office door.
‘Who’s that then?’ Eb
peered round it, then stood in the doorway. ‘Oh ar, lad – what’re you after?’
‘Sorry, Mr Watts.’ Margaret recognized the deep, shy voice. It was Den Poole, Mary Poole’s only son. She had known Den since he was a lad of nine, when she first came to the city and he was a poor little thing, man of the house on the tragic death of his father, when they were going through terrible times. He had become very attached to Margaret and he and Daisy had been playmates for a time. Uncle Eb had promised that once Den left school, he would give him a chance in the business. Den had grown into a sturdier looking lad than they had ever expected, for such a poor little scrap as he had been. He was hard-working and had got on well, learning the trade of a metal stamper.
Margaret was about to call hello to him when, still outside the office door, he burst into speech.
‘I’ve got to talk to yer, Mr Watts. I’ve gotta do it now and I’m sorry I dain’t come around the outside . . .’ The workers did not usually come through the house, but passed along the entry at the side to reach the workshop.
‘Not to worry,’ Eb said. Margaret wondered if Den realized how many people there were in the office, listening to this conversation. ‘What’s on yer mind, lad?’
‘I’ve got to go and join up!’ The words burst out of Den like an explosion waiting to happen. ‘I’ve got to go, tomorrow, like. I’ve just got to!’
She saw Uncle Eb stand straighter, pulling his shoulders back.
‘Not you an’ all, Den? You don’t have to, you know. No one’ll think the worse of you if you stay here – there’s work to be done. We need you here!’
‘But the other lads are going. It’s the thing to do, Mr Watts – fight for your country – ain’t it? I’ve held off and held off, but now I’ve gotta do it!’
Margaret and Aunt Hatt exchanged dismayed glances. Aunt Hatt mouthed, ‘What about Mary?’ across the room. Mary Poole, Den’s mother, had never been much of a coper and life had in any case dished out to her far too much to cope with.