Daisy's Wars

by Meg Henderson

‘I was going to say that now I really do look like a streetwalker,’ Daisy said quietly.

  Mrs Johnstone exchanged a look with the hairdresser. ‘What can you do?’ she asked, shaking her head with a smile. ‘Can you tell her we haven’t ruined her forever?’

  The hairdresser held a mirror this way and that for Daisy’s approval. ‘We’ve just lifted the colour, Daisy,’ she wheedled. ‘It’s not as if you had jet-black hair and we dyed it blonde.’

  As she headed home that evening, having parted with Daisy in all her newly golden glory, Joan Johnstone, despite her earlier confidence, wondered if she had done the right thing. Daisy was eighteen years old, a woman in the eyes of many, but a child to her parents, she had no doubt, for all her bravado. Perhaps she should have asked them before pushing their daughter into dying her hair? They would have said no, of course, she knew this for a fact. The fact being that she had grown up with parents just like them, who ruled her every moment and tried to do the same with her thoughts, even to the extent of trying to arrange her marriage to a ‘suitable’ man, which meant someone Irish. Marrying ‘out’ was regarded almost as something to be ashamed of; they preferred to stay in their little communities, marrying only their ‘own kind’ and grumbling about how they were kept in ghettos. Like Daisy she had wanted more out of life than living up, or down, to someone else’s label, having her future mapped out for her. She had told herself that when she had children of her own she would help them reach for the stars rather than accept what was considered to be their lot. It hadn’t happened, though.

  Out of spite and defiance she had married George Johnstone, a draughtsman at the Vickers-Armstrong engineering works, a man unconnected with the Irish Geordie community, and she had married badly. Not that George was a bad man or she a bad wife, and they still liked each other, even though they weren’t suited. But the love of her life he wasn’t, nor was she the love of his. They had a nice Victorian terraced house in Holly Avenue in the Jesmond area, to the north of the city, with enough bedrooms to house the children that would come in time. They’d had more than enough money and a bright future ahead. However, less than a year into their marriage, when they should have still been basking in that honeymoon glow, they’d run out of things to say to each other. It was as simple as that. It was a great disappointment to them both, but they had rubbed along quietly enough these fifteen years or so, both of them giving the other room in a partnership that existed in name only. They had an understanding, an unspoken but nonetheless still firm understanding, that neither would embarrass the other, that whatever arrangements they made would be discreet.

  And George, decent man that he was, had abided by that, carrying on his liaisons with her tacit approval, and never letting her find out officially. Joan, for her part, would have done the same – if she had been interested in seeing other men, that was, which she wasn’t. There was nothing like having sex with someone you’d once thought you loved but now knew you didn’t for putting you off the whole notion. She’d thought about it over the years and knew that even if she ever found a man she did love – that elusive love of her life – she would’ve run off with him without a second thought, abandoning all security and propriety. However, she could never abandon George, he really didn’t deserve that, so seeing other men was a risk she had decided not to take. To the outside world she and George looked like a well-set-up, happily married if childless couple, for which she was always blamed, as women always were.

  Joan was now a career woman and career women were disapproved of. Her job in Fenwicks took the place of children. She knew that was what others said, and it was true, but only because there would be no children. It was a deep regret in her life, and sometimes she felt guilty that George would never have any either – she felt absolutely sure of that – but then she came to the conclusion that the arrangement must have suited them both or they would have found ways out. Divorce wasn’t for people like them anyway, that was for Hollywood stars, and neither of them could have handled the stigma if they’d parted. Joan especially did not want her family to ever have a whiff that she had made a mistake. She acknowledged that to herself, but it was not the one they would see of marrying, ‘out’. She had made the mistake of not knowing the man she had married, and she was hardly alone there. It even happened to those who married ‘in’, not that her family would ever have admitted that.

  The only one who’d turned up at their wedding had been Joan’s younger sister, Myra, who now lived along the road from the Sheridans in Guildford Place, with her handsome, adoring Irish husband and their four children. So Joan had children near her life, if not in it. She had never hinted to Myra that her own marriage had been a mistake. If Myra had been taken hostage by the rest of the family they’d have got it out of her by some means or other and Joan didn’t want to put her in that position.

  So she had settled into the routine of attentive wife just as George had settled into his role, and they would sit quietly most evenings, sometimes reading, listening to the radio and playing Scrabble, before settling down for the night in their twin beds in the same bedroom, good pals but never lovers.

  So why had she taken this young girl under her wing, Joan wondered. Was it for Daisy’s sake or for her own? The daughter she would never have? Daisy reminded Joan of herself, of course, that need to stretch and grow, but where Joan had been quietly determined Daisy was more of a firebrand. There was potential there, she thought, for the girl to self-destruct, and that would be a shame. She was an exceptionally bright and pretty girl who would be a beautiful woman, but she wasn’t handling it well, she was fighting it, and in some ways she was incredibly innocent.

  The situation with the sister, for instance, Joan thought, shaking her head and laughing to herself. What a complete nonsense! Little Kay had been well-known in her day, but her day was long gone and she was just a girl working in a rope-works now. Yet Daisy thought it was perfectly acceptable that she should do all the work in the house, plus caring for an invalid mother, so that one day Little Kay would be transformed into Big Kay: Big Kay with soft hands! Well, if Joan had helped to put a spanner in those works with this day’s events it would be all to the good, and the scene Daisy was sure to face at home would do her good, too, in the long run. It would help open her eyes if nothing else.

  So there they were, Joan and Daisy, a childless mother helping a child who hadn’t known what it was to have a mother, who had, in fact, become mother to her mother.

  She would have done the same for her own daughter, had she had one, Joan Johnstone decided. She would have helped her own daughter to reach new heights, so she would go on helping Daisy, but she still didn’t envy the girl walking alone into the lion’s den in Guildford Place that night.

  As Daisy walked home, deep in her own thoughts, she knew they would be waiting for her with their recriminations, the family she had left in the lurch just so that she could be transformed into this streetwalker. And they were, the entire family, meaning Dessie as well. As she walked in there was an audible ‘Oh!’ as her newly golden tresses registered, but her father’s rage had been too pent-up and ready to go and at first he didn’t notice. In fact his face was so red that Daisy felt she might be doing him a favour by finally giving him something to aim at. He opened his mouth to unleash his fury, then he stopped, his diatribe thrown off course by suddenly registering the hair, so that he opened and shut his mouth several times before he could utter a word.

  ‘So!’ he shouted, and standing in front of him Daisy almost laughed because it was so obviously not what he had intended to say.

  ‘It’s come to this, has it?’ Michael demanded.

  Daisy closed her eyes tightly and lowered her head, trying not to laugh, whether from fear or amusement or a mixture of both, she didn’t know, though her father assumed it was from shame.

  ‘Well may you hang your head, madam!’ Michael shouted, marching about the room, picking up his tobacco pouch and putting it down again. ‘So this is why you left your famil
y to starve!’ he yelled theatrically. ‘So that you could be made to look even more like the brazen hussy you are!’

  ‘Oh Da,’ she said quietly, ‘I’m sure Kay could be trusted to heat up a stew.’

  ‘Kay has never had to do such a thing,’ Michael threw back at her. ‘She didn’t even know how to turn the gas on!’

  The newly gilded Daisy was finding it harder and harder with each passing moment not to laugh out loud, and the thought of Kay struggling to light the gas made her cover her face with her hands.

  ‘Well may you hide your face in shame!’ Michael shouted. ‘What people must think of you, walking into a respectable home with that head of evil hair, as if it hasn’t been bad enough these years with you and your woman’s bits provoking decent men to carnal thoughts!’

  Daisy took her hands away from her face and stared at him, horrified. All these years when she had been trying to disguise her shapely body and feeling afraid of what the next man she met might say or do, and her father had blamed her for it. She couldn’t believe it; he saw it as her fault. This was the only man in her life she had counted on, the one she’d thought was on her side, who could be trusted to defend and protect her against the world, and all the time he was disgusted by her ‘woman’s bits’. She disgusted him, it was in his eyes and in his voice; she disgusted him! She felt tears prickling at the corners of her eyes and turned and ran to the bedroom she shared with Kay, but she couldn’t hold in a deep sob as she went, provoking her father’s triumphant remark,

  ‘That’s her sorted now!’

  Up in the bedroom Daisy lay on her bed sobbing as Kay came in.

  ‘Daisy, I didn’t mind making the dinner, honestly I didn’t,’ she said in her childish voice. ‘I told Da that; I said as soon as I worked out how to light the gas it was all right, and next time I’ll know and I won’t burn so much.’

  Daisy looked up at her sister and suddenly laughed out loud, picturing the scene in her mind. ‘Oh, Kay, was it all burned?’

  ‘Not all of it,’ Kay replied solemnly, watching Daisy laugh, ‘a fair bit, but not all of it. Why are you laughing?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ Daisy said, her voice between a sigh and a sob.

  ‘And your hair is lovely, Daisy.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, I’d love to have hair that colour, I hate this red stuff.’

  ‘Well, it sent Da off the deep end,’ Daisy replied.

  ‘It wasn’t just you,’ Kay said innocently, ‘it was me too.’

  ‘Was he mad because you’d burned the stew?’

  ‘I don’t think it was that as much as me expecting.’

  Daisy sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. ‘What did you say, Kay?’

  ‘I said Da wasn’t happy that I was expecting.’

  ‘Expecting? As in expecting a baby?’ Daisy asked incredulously, and Kay nodded.

  ‘How? I mean, Christ, Kay, a baby? You? Dessie and you? Why?’

  Kay looked at Daisy with her usual blank expression. ‘He just sort of did it, said we were getting married anyway.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell him to stop?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Well, no, he would only have got annoyed with me and shouted,’ Kay explained. ‘Da says we’ll have to get married as soon as possible, but as Dessie said, we were always going to get married anyway.’

  ‘But Kay,’ Daisy said sadly, taking her sister by the shoulders, ‘do you want to get married?’

  ‘Why not?’ her sister responded dreamly.

  ‘Do you even want to have this baby? There are women who can take care of it for you. There’s Mrs Young down the road, you must’ve heard people talk about her.’

  ‘Oh, that would be a sin,’ Kay said calmly, ‘and I already have this one to confess to Father Connolly. I don’t think I could confess another, held be angry with me.’

  ‘So what? Aren’t you angry, Kay?’

  Kay wrinkled her eyes, looking up into the corner of the room as though wisdom lay there. ‘No, not really,’ she replied gently. ‘Babies are nice, aren’t they?’

  ‘But Kay, would you really want to marry Dessie if there was no baby?’

  ‘Why not?’ Kay asked again, already tired of the conversation.

  ‘But how can you be a big singing star if you have a baby to take care of?’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ she replied brightly. ‘Dessie says it doesn’t matter, I can always sing in pubs and clubs here, that’ll bring in a few bob; and Da says I can still sing in London and big places like that, and you can look after the baby for me. I mean, it would only be a very little baby and you’re looking after the house anyway, and the little baby will be in the house, won’t it? So that’s all right.’

  Daisy looked at her sister’s smiling, innocent, stupid face and had to fight the urge to slap her, but would that bring forth any sign of intelligence, she wondered? She felt that her head might explode off her shoulders at any moment, taking her gold-plated locks with it.

  It was all arranged. Kay would marry Dessie and still be a big star, and as well as everything else she was already doing, Daisy would look after her child, or children. In the eyes of her family she was Aunt Clare one generation on. What was there to say except that it was madness and she would refuse to do it. What could they do if she said that? Throw her out? How could she look after them all and care for her sister’s family if they threw her out? she wondered.

  Then, through her confused thoughts came Kay’s next piece of news, delivered in her usual blank, expressionless tone. ‘As soon as we’re married Dessie and I will move in here, to our bedroom. Da says you can always sleep on the couch downstairs.’

  As Daisy drifted off to sleep that night, for what was possibly one of the last times she would ever do so in her own bed, she thought over the day’s events. All the way home she had been expecting to be denounced as a harlot by her family, and she couldn’t even get that to herself. Kay had already stolen Daisy’s thunder with her own news, so though she had indeed been denounced, it was with second-hand anger. Maybe that was why her father had accused her of deliberately provoking the male population, because he was already angry that Kay was pregnant, but still, he had said what he’d said and there was no way those words and thoughts could be taken back. She felt that they were seared across her forehead for the world to see, and even if they weren’t she knew she would carry them for the rest of her life as a shadow over her memories of her father. To think that had been in his mind all this time. She closed her eyes tightly to squeeze away the tears: she refused to cry over the slur ever again, whether he could see her tears or not.

  And Dessie would be moving into her home. He would actually become a physical member of the family. The thought made her feel sick. It seemed that for every step forward she took, someone, somewhere, had decided that she would always take two back. She thought of Mrs Armstrong who was, strictly speaking, Miss Armstrong, and went over the sad conversation in the fitting room earlier in the day. Everyone was talking about another war; the newspapers were full of it and people discussed it every day on buses, in shops and in the street. Like her nice, rich customer they talked resentfully of how they had lost an entire generation of young men in the last one – and to the same foe – and now here they were, getting ready to do it all again twenty years later.

  Daisy had felt so sad for Mrs Armstrong that she had almost cried, but now there seemed more pressing problems in her life than worldwide bloodshed.

  6

  The next day, before her debut as a model, there was little time for talking, which was a relief because she didn’t want to talk about the previous night’s events, even if she had known what to say. Her hair was soaked in diluted sugar water, combed to the side at the crown and clamped in fearsome wave-making clips, the sides and back in metal curlers. Joan Johnstone danced around the fringes of the beautifying team, making suggestions that were ignored. ‘Not too heavy with the face powder … a little less rouge, perhaps? … Are lips really
so magenta in Paris this year?’

  Daisy watched in the mirror as her eyebrows were plucked almost as thinly as Marlene Dietrich dared, then drawn in again with a special pencil before false eyelashes were applied, with only the finest Elizabeth Arden cosmetics used. Then her new hair was released from the instruments of torture she had endured since early morning and brushed, combed and teased into the latest fashion of deep waves and shoulder-length curls. It was the first time she had looked in a mirror and not even recognised her real self in there somewhere. The reflection showed a stranger, one she liked, she realised.

  Daisy then calmly went about the business of learning how to walk well enough to show off the three chosen evening dresses to Mrs Johnstone’s customers. They were all made of silk, not the new wonder material, Rayon, that everyone was talking about. Fenwicks’ ladies had their standards.

  She stepped into the first gown, a cotton cape around her shoulders to stop the make-up transferring to the high-necked silk creation with a row of tiny buttons from the bowed sash at the waist to the neck. It sported two collars, the peaks of the first hanging over the bodice, almost like a bolero, and on top of that a tiered collar of white lace. As a change to ordinary puff sleeves, where they fell from the shoulder was shirred like the fronts of babies’ romper suits, so that the gathered red silk burst forth from the tight stitching to billow out luxuriously halfway to the elbow.

  The next dress she would be wearing was pink and square-necked, the line straight across the throat decorated with flowers and embroidered panels at either side from the shoulders to the bust. It had simple puff sleeves, but the waist was highlighted again with a slim sash held in the middle by a smaller panel of the same embroidery on the bodice. The most attractive feature, though, was the fishtail detail of tiered silk from knee to ankle, which compelled any woman to walk with a deliberate sashay. The last dress was a deep peacock blue with a completely plain skirt, but above the bust it had three exaggerated wavy frills all the way across, so that they formed both bodice decoration and short sleeves.