Hannah Massey

by Catherine Cookson

  Karen. She hadn’t thought much of Karen. If she was to stay home there would always be Karen. Karen and she had never hit it off. Barny had often referred to Karen as a little bitch, and that’s what she was, a little bitch.

  It was difficult to realise that she herself was Karen’s aunt because there was only two years between them.

  Ever since she was a child Rosie had heard of Moira—her sister Moira. Beautiful, vivacious, fascinating Moira, who had been her mother’s first child, and who, at the age of twenty-four, had died giving birth to Karen.

  Even when they were children together Rosie knew that Karen resented her and the affection displayed towards her by the men of the family. So the dislike between them grew, and there was no-one Rosie knew happier than Karen when she had left home for a position—a grand position, in her mother’s words—in London. In the attic again she unlocked the case, and lifting out the wrapped bricks she went to the far corner of the room, and sliding back a piece of loose floorboard that gave access to a junction box she pushed the bricks far back between the beams. They had served their purpose; they had taken the emptiness from the case.

  Now she tried on the suit. The skirt proved to be a little large but the rest fitted her as if it had been made for her.

  Before going downstairs she locked the case, but stood hesitating with the key in her hand, then dropped it into a china trinket bowl. Her mother was not likely to go rummaging around until tomorrow, by which time she would have given her a reason why the case was empty.

  On her way downstairs she went into the bathroom again and brushed her hair with one of the men’s brushes, taking it upwards and back from her brow; then bit on her lips and pinched her cheeks. And when she entered the living room her father and mother turned and gazed at her in open-mouthed admiration.

  ‘Aw, that’s more like my Rosie.’ Hannah came towards her, pride wreathing her face. ‘That’s new, isn’t it?’ She touched the short coat. ‘By, it’s a smart set; I bet it knocked you back something.’ She poked her head towards Broderick. ‘Look at it, Brod.’

  ‘Aye, it’s real bonny. But it’s the bonny lass that’s in it that makes it out, isn’t it?…I tell you what.’ He sounded excited. ‘We’re not goin’ to waste you on these four walls the night. You’ll come along to the club with us. Just let me get meself changed and we’ll all go and make a night of it.’

  ‘Aye, that’s the ticket,’ cried Hannah. ‘The very thing.’

  As they looked at Rosie for approval the smile left their faces and Hannah said, ‘You don’t want to go, lass?’

  ‘Not tonight, Ma; that’s if you don’t mind. I think I’ll get to bed early. I…I still feel a bit shaky from the flu, and the journey was tiring.’

  ‘Aye. Yes, of course.’ Hannah nodded understandingly. Then almost dreamily she pushed her hand backwards towards her husband, saying, ‘You away to the club on your own; I’m going to have a natter with me girl.’

  ‘No, no, Ma, you go on. You always go on a Friday night.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going the night and that’s flat. Now that’s…Yet’—she held out her arms in a wide dramatic gesture—‘it’s a shame to waste you, it is that, and you so bonny. Doesn’t she get bonnier, Brod? Doesn’t your daughter get bonnier with every year that’s on her?’

  ‘Aye indeed; but I’ll like her better when she gets a bit more fat on her. I likes ’em plump.’ He slapped at Hannah’s buttocks.

  As they laughed loudly Rosie smiled, and the front doorbell rang and Hannah cried, ‘That’ll be Karen.’ She nodded towards Rosie. ‘She’s doing a late turn at the exchange. I’ll go and open it. She’s been coming the front way ’cos it’s shorter.’

  Rosie heard her mother’s voice from the hallway extra loud and hearty, saying, ‘I’ve a surprise for you. You’ll never guess. Who do you think’s come?’ The next minute Karen was standing in the doorway.

  ‘Hello, Karen.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Hello. What’s brought you?’

  ‘What’s brought her?’ Hannah’s voice was high. ‘Doesn’t matter what’s brought her; here’s one that’s mighty glad to see her.’ Her voice dropped now to a soothing tone. ‘She’s had the flu, she’s come to convalesce.’

  Karen made no rejoinder to this, sympathetic or otherwise. She moved forward but not near to Rosie. She never stood near to Rosie; to do so emphasised the difference between their heights and their figures, for Karen was five foot four and tubby. If she’d had a beautiful mother there was no sign of it on her. She looked over her shoulder towards her grandmother and said, ‘I don’t want any tea, I’m going to a dance.’

  ‘You can’t dance on an empty stomach,’ said Hannah, still in a conciliatory tone.

  ‘She doesn’t dance on her stomach, she dances on her feet, eh, don’t you?’ Broderick thrust out his hand playfully towards his granddaughter’s cheek, but she ignored him and, turning slowly about, went out of the room.

  Broderick, taking his pipe now from the mantelpiece and grinding his little finger around the empty bowl, said, ‘Begod! I don’t know who that one takes after; it’s none of us, yet she was me own child’s.’

  ‘Oh it’s green she is. Always has been, you know yourself, of Rosie here. An’ the lads make more fuss of her when she’s on her own. Yet she won’t trouble you.’ Hannah looked towards Rosie. ‘She’s never in the house five minutes, in and out like a gale of wind. She’s going steady, I understand, though he’s not much to crack on by all accounts. He’s on a job on the new estate but has never reached more than fourteen a week yet. One of them that doesn’t like overtime. Still, it’s her choice.’

  Rosie had always been puzzled at her mother’s attitude towards her granddaughter. She had never bothered about finding her a job, nor had ever timed her comings and goings as she had those of herself. With regard to intelligence, or having it up top, as her mother would say, Rosie knew that Karen had much more ‘up top’ than she had. With very little trouble she had got onto the switchboard at the telephone exchange. The criterion for such a job might not be brains, but Rosie doubted whether she herself would have been able to achieve this without her mother behind her; she wouldn’t have had the nerve to canvass a councillor and to go round asking for references as Karen had done. Karen had the quality she herself lacked—initiative.

  When Broderick went upstairs to change and they were alone, Hannah beckoned Rosie with a curl of her finger as she whispered, ‘Look, I want to show you something. Come into the front room, come on.’

  Rosie followed her mother into the hall and across it, and when the lights were switched on in the front room she gazed at the new suite almost in awe before she murmured, ‘My! What made you get this, Ma?’

  ‘Well, I saw one like it in a shop in Northumberland Street in Newcastle after the war and I said to meself, “Hannah, you’ll have one like that some day,” an’ there it is. I told ’em, the lads and him, it was just over a hundred pounds, but guess what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Rosie was shaking her head.

  ‘A hundred and forty-five.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘God’s me judge.’

  ‘Oh, Ma, a hundred and forty-five!’

  ‘It’s what you call a Parker-Knoll. Look.’ She whipped off the cords that held the drop sides of the settee to the back. ‘Look, they go flat. Isn’t it magnificent?’

  ‘Beautiful, beautiful.’ Rosie’s eyes narrowed as she looked into Hannah’s beaming face, and for the first time since coming home a touch of humour came into her speech. She said seriously, ‘What do the lads wear when they come in here, Ma?’

  Hannah, smothering a gust of laughter, dug her in the ribs with her elbow. ‘That’ll be the day when I let them sit on that, or the chairs. They’ve been in once, but I had it covered over, every inch of it.’ She ran her hand along the pale green tapestry and said almost reverently, ‘There’s never a day goes past that I don’t come in and just stand and look at it…Oh begod!’
She flapped her hand at Rosie. ‘You should have been here the day it was delivered. Oo…h, the curtains! Every curtain in the street had the tremors. There they were, with their faces behind them, their eyes sticking out like pipe shanks. As for Jessie’—she thumbed in the direction of the wall—‘the green’s still sticking on her yet. Oh, she’s a bloody jealous old sod, that one.’

  Somewhere deep within Rosie there trembled a quirk of genuine laughter—no swearing in the house she had said. Oh, her ma, her ma.

  ‘It’s always been the same since the days we were in place together. Determined to rise she was, and I said to meself, “All right, Jessie, for every step you take I’ll take a jump,” and begod, I have.’ She nodded solemnly at Rosie. ‘With the Almighty’s help I have done just that. An’ I’ll go on doing it until the day I die…But whist a minute.’ She lifted her finger to Rosie’s face as if admonishing her for interrupting. ‘Wait till she hears me latest. I’ve got something up me sleeve.’ She stretched the cuff of her woollen cardigan without taking her eyes from Rosie. ‘An’ she won’t be the only one that’ll be knocked off their feet with surprise this time. Aw, me lass…’ With mercurial swiftness her attitude changed yet again, and her big arms dropping to her sides, she stood before her daughter as if in supplication as she went on, softly now, her words hardly above a whisper, ‘There’s a saying, and true, that frock coats are not to be found on middens. That was true years ago but more so the day, for who gives a damn for you if you’ve got the wisdom of Christ and his parables but are living in Bog’s End; who would listen to you from there, I ask you? No, you know yourself I’ve always said a man is judged by the cut of his coat an’ a woman by the front of her house.’

  As Hannah paused as if to allow her oratory effect, Rosie, shaking her head slightly, said, ‘You’re not going to move again, Ma, I thought you loved this place?’

  ‘I am, we are, and I did.’ She smiled widely now. ‘But I’m going to move, girl. At least we are. And I did love this house, but everything has its allotted time and its place…What have I been aiming for all me life since the first day I married? What’s the place that’s ever been in me mind? Think back, think back, Rosie.’ She dug her finger into Rosie’s arm. ‘What did I tell you stories about as a child? Didn’t I tell you about the fine rooms and the splendid furniture, and the luscious food that I meself cooked many a time?’

  ‘But, Ma’—Rosie’s eyes were stretching—‘you don’t mean…?’

  ‘I do, I do. Number eight itself. Number eight Brampton Hill.’ There was unmistakable reverence in her voice now.

  ‘But the money! It’d be huge. You could never…’

  ‘Hold your hand. Hold your hand.’ Hannah held her own hand up warningly. ‘They couldn’t sell it outright, they wanted too much for it. Then speculators took a hand, and God so planned it that who should be one of them but Councillor Bishop.’

  ‘You mean Mr Bishop from the church?’

  ‘Aye, Mr Bishop from the church. That was another thing I learned many years ago. The more friends you have at court the deeper will be your carpet to walk on. Well, what are they doing but turning it into flats? When I first heard this it nearly broke me up. It was for all the world as if a picture in me head had been smashed into smithereens. How, I said to meself, could I think of the old place and all its grandeur if it was in flats? And then the idea came to me, and I went along and I had a talk with Mr Bishop…I was very good to his wife during the war, you know, when things weren’t easy to come by, and he hadn’t forgotten. “Cast thy bread upon the waters.” There was never a truer sayin’. Well, as I was sayin’, I went to him and got the inside information. Four flats they’re turning it into, all with a separate entrance. And the two bottom ones have good bits of garden. It was the conservatory side I was interested in. There’s seven rooms goes with that side. He showed me the plans. There they were set out afore me eyes. The drawing room that was, together with the dining and breakfast room, they’re making into seven fine rooms, and the long conservatory thrown in. Oh, it’s a fine sight, the conservatory. And a strip of garden, he says, a hundred feet wide and twice as long. Now what do you think?’ She spread out both her hands, palm upwards, as if upon them lay the entire flat and she was offering it for her daughter’s inspection and admiration.

  But Rosie’s face was serious. Not only serious; there was pity in it too. Pity for the restless ambition that was her mother’s life force. ‘But the money, they’ll want the earth for it, and up on Brampton Hill! And then— Oh, Ma…’ She put out her hand and touched Hannah’s. ‘The lads, they’ll never, well, you know them, they’ll never fit in up there.’

  The smile seeped from Hannah’s face, and in its place came the defensive steely mask that Rosie knew well. Before the opposition to every move she had planned to a different house her mother had donned this mask, because before every move, someone, perhaps Dennis, or Michael, or even a neighbour, had dared to suggest, ‘The lads won’t fit in.’

  ‘My sons will fit at Brampton Hill, Rosie, as they’ve fitted into Grosvenor Road. There’s no better dressed nor finer set-up men in this town.’

  They were staring at each other now, a veil of hostility between them. Rosie knew she had said the wrong thing, also that her mother spoke the truth, at least about one thing, for it would be hard to find better dressed men in Fellburn. But that fact would hardly count on Brampton Hill, for the lads had only to open their mouths and their measure was patent. They were working men; they would never be anything else but working men; and this woman, her mother, who would have died defending the fact that she loved her family, every single one of them, had made them working men and kept them working men.

  It dated back more than two years ago since Rosie had discovered that her mother’s thinking was slightly crooked. Her mother wanted prestige, and she went for it in the only way open to her, a bigger and better house. Truly she believed that a woman was known by her front door. That her ambition could have been achieved by the educational betterment of her sons she refused to acknowledge, and she had a reason for this particular way of thinking.

  Rosie knew it was this fanatic and fantastic ambition of her mother’s that had added just that weight to her decision to leave home in the first place. The term ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ could hardly be applied in her mother’s case, for Hannah did not desire to keep up with her neighbours but to march ahead of them, miles ahead of them. In fact, to walk in step with the Peddingtons who had lived in number eight Brampton Hill.

  As her mother had said, she had been brought up on the stories of number eight Brampton Hill. They had been her fairy tales, and they had all begun with the day her mother had first set eyes on the house. It was in 1914, when Hannah was eleven, that she had come with her mother straight from Ireland. They had only the clothes they stood up in, but her mother had got a…position. She was to be kitchen maid in the Peddingtons’ establishment and to receive the vast sum of four shillings a week, living in, of course. Her daughter, Hannah, was boarded with a distant relative in Bog’s End. Her mother paid two shillings a week for her, until, in 1915, when labour was scarce, Hannah was taken into training…in the beautiful mansion. It was on her twelfth birthday, the fifth of May.

  Hannah did well at the Peddingtons’, until she fell for a soldier and on one half-day off became pregnant by him. She was not yet sixteen at the time. The man was a distant relation of the people she had stayed with. His name was Broderick Massey; he was a Catholic and therefore an honourable man. He married Hannah, and to the present day he considered it the best day’s work he had done.

  The Peddingtons, being broad-minded and aware that they had a good loyal servant in Hannah, took her on daily after her first child was born, and she stayed in their service, on and off between giving birth to babies, until 1923 when her fifth child was born dead. This Hannah took as a personal insult, and her spirits were very low until she became pregnant again. When her next child, too, was stillborn, Hannah, who had
decided years earlier that her main job in life was to bear children, realised that if she was to carry out this purpose she must go steady. So reluctantly she was available no more to the Peddingtons. Yet at times she visited…me lady, and her old friend Jessie Mulholland, the housemaid—who was now Jessie MacFarlane—and on each visit she sorrowed at the diminishing fortunes of the house. The scanty staff and the overrun garden touched her nearly as deeply as it did the owners.

  So this was Hannah’s life story, and Rosie had been brought up on it, and although it had been presented to her almost in the form of an Arabian Nights story she had for many years assessed the tale at its true worth. Had her mother told her, two years ago, of her determination to live on any part of Brampton Hill, she would have greeted the proposal with, ‘Oh Ma, you’re mad; you’ll be a laughing stock.’ Yes, she would have dared say this, although it would have brought the house down about her ears. But now she was older, oh, more than two years older, twenty years older inside, and she had more understanding of everything and everyone. More pity for the mad things life led one to do. So she said softly, ‘You would love to live there, wouldn’t you, Ma?’

  Hannah’s face crumpled; it looked for a moment as if she was going to cry. ‘Love it?’ She shook her head. ‘Lass, I would die of happiness.’

  ‘It’ll be very difficult all round.’

  ‘Leave that to me.’ Hannah was patting Rosie’s cheek now. ‘Leave everything to me.’

  ‘What are they asking for it?’

  ‘Hold your breath. Four thousand five hundred.’