by Marie Joseph
‘Clara Haydock!’
She whipped round to see Miss Holroyd, the teacher who had played the piano for morning assembly, standing behind her. Smiling, Clara held up her slate, anticipating the praise she felt was her due.
‘Who taught you your letters, Clara?’ Miss Holroyd’s eyes behind the steel rims of her round spectacles were not quite true. Clara decided to look at the one on the right and let the other go its own wandering way.
‘Me dadda, Miss.’
‘Using your wrong hand?’
Clara blinked and glanced at the slate pencil held firmly in her left hand. Honest bewilderment clouded her green eyes. When the pencil was snatched from her and thrust into her right hand the bewilderment changed to dismay.
Miss Holroyd had been teaching for forty years. Her principles were deeply rooted in Victorianism, and as a strict disciplinarian she firmly believed that a child who wrote left-handed was as maimed as if it were mentally backward. It was a disobedience to the laws of her unforgiving God, and she would fail in her duty if the habit was not stamped out at once.
‘From now on you write properly,’ she said. ‘With your right hand.’ Her voice rose. ‘And if I ever catch you with your pencil in the wrong hand again I’ll send you to Miss Barlow. Do you heed what I say, Clara Haydock?’
In that moment the bright promise of the morning disappeared. As Clara struggled, the letters she knew by heart came out back to front, every single belly pointing the wrong way. She spat and erased, spat again and sighed. Her mind went blank, and during the following lesson in simple arithmetic her brain seemed to have atrophied.
Once, unable to believe what was happening, she surreptitiously transferred her slate pencil to her left hand, only to feel the weight of Miss Holroyd’s ruler smash down on her knuckles, sending a shock of pain waves running up her arm.
When playtime came she was thoroughly demoralized. On that first day of term the ten minutes was extended to twenty to allow the four teachers to check the new pages in their registers with the headmistress’s record. Clara made straight for the lavatories marked GIRLS, following a couple of bigger girls from the second class who walked with heads close together and arms around each other’s waists. In spite of the feeling low down in her stomach that told her a visit was a dire necessity, she backed out in disgust, the smell of stale urine almost bouncing at her from the grimy stone wall.
The children were racing round the playground, chanting and skipping as if the two early lessons had merely interrupted their play. Clara saw Nellie Parkinson engrossed in a game of mothers and fathers, crouched down bandy-legged, holding a bigger girl’s hand pretending to be a baby learning to walk. Contempt flared Clara’s nostrils.
Over in the far corner of the playground the West boys squatted on their haunches in a serious contest of marbles. The familiar sight of Alec’s ragged behind with the tail of a grimy shirt poking through a jagged hole lifted her spirits and sent her running towards them with the confidence of a homing pigeon.
At first Clara imagined the big girl with greasy black hair hanging in sausage ringlets was about to ask her to join in a game. Pulled up short by an outstretched skinny arm, she smiled, thinking she had found a friend.
‘Show-off!’ the girl said, pushing her face close. ‘Bloody show-off!’
‘Show-off yer bleedin’ self,’ said Clara at once.
When her arm was gripped and she was marched over to the far wall Clara twisted round, her small face set in a silent scream for help. Not for nothing would she let them see how frightened she was, but she willed just one of the West boys to look up and see her plight. Even Walter, the crybaby of the family, would have done, but he had abandoned the game of marbles and was hanging upside down on the school gates, his eyes like Chinese slits in his thin face.
The wall was soot-ingrained, cold and hard to Clara’s back. She was being held there, arms pinioned to her sides by a semicircle of grinning girls, laughing and yelling, finding her funny, as if there was something wrong with her face.
‘Sing for us, Clara Cluck-cluck. Go on. Open your gob wide and sing for us!’ A girl with sores round her mouth shot out a hand and took a piece of Clara’s cheek in a ferocious nip. ‘Miss Barlow would’ve ’ad yer forrit if the bleedin’ minister ’adn’t stuck up for yer. Soppy show-off!’
Clara looked down, chewing her lips. Her cheek stung, but she wasn’t going to cry. Not for nothing was she going to cry. What was wrong with them? She sang at Sunday School and never got nipped for it. She fought back the tears pricking behind her eyes.
‘Go on. Cry. Softy baby. Cry for your mam.’ Another girl with dirt creases showing like a string of beads round her neck jumped up and down, taunting.
‘She hasn’t got a mam.’ The girl who had frogmarched Clara to the wall leered triumphantly. ‘Where’s your mam, Clara Haydock? Go on. Tell us! Where’s your mam?’
‘She’s dead.’ Clara lifted her head to stare into the hateful eyes of the girl who had spoken. ‘She died afore I was born.’
The shout of laughter startled her so much she lost control. With flailing fists and scratching fingernails, Clara went into the fray. She was trembling with fear and rage when suddenly her bladder emptied itself, running down her legs into a pool which spread into a shaming liquid island round her feet.
Her hair had come loose, her coat was hanging from her back; the elaborate bow at the front of her dress was torn half away, but none of this mattered. Clara stopped fighting to stare down at her shame.
‘She’s peed ’erself!’
‘I’ve not!’ Clara glared at the girl who had dared to suggest such a thing. Her fists were still balled, but the fight had gone out of her. Her one thought was to get home, back to the warmth and the love she had thought were hers by right.
With head down she pushed her way through the gawping ring of girls and ran straight for the school gates. The wind struck cold where her bloomers were damp, but the discomfort only added to her shame. Never, never could she live it down, and never would she try to because as far as Clara was concerned her first day at school was definitely going to be her last.
As she had bawled her way along the street on her way to school, now she bawled her way back. Women with kindly faces, swilling their flagstones, brushing the water off into the gutter, stopped to lean on their long brushes and shake their heads at her headlong flight.
‘Isn’t that Seth Haydock’s little lass?’ one asked her neighbour.
‘Spoils her something shocking.’ A bucket of soapy water was hurled fiercely from an open front door. ‘They do say …’ For a few minutes the task was forgotten as two heads got together for a satisfactory gossip.
Clara ran on. A gypsy selling pegs and brightly coloured paper flowers froze with one hand half raised to a door knocker.
‘That’s a mighty big noise for a little girl to be making.’
Her voice was kind, but Clara wailed even louder. Gypsies put curses on people. Joe West had told her that. If you didn’t put a silver threepenny bit in their hands they made terrible things happen. They stole children, and ate babies, boiling them up in black pans over their fires. Joe knew a lot about gypsies.
She had reached the top of her own street now, and there was the chapel, red-bricked and reassuring, where Jesus lived, with the entrance to the Sunday School not many doors away from the clogger’s shop. Clara’s loud sobs changed to hiccoughs as she came to the door, open to the spring morning.
Peering inside she saw three customers waiting patiently on the slippery bench. There were two old men smoking pipes, and a boy who should have been at school wiggling his stockinged feet as he waited for his clogs to be mended. Her beloved dadda was just out of her line of vision, but she could hear him hammering away and imagined him sitting on his stool, his mouth full of nails. For a full minute she held herself poised ready to rush inside, to climb on his knee and have him tell her that never again did she need to go to school.
‘It’ll be righ
t, chuck,’ he’d say, and it would be. Just because he’d said so.
But they would know. The old men smoking their pipes and the boy in his stockinged feet would listen how she’d written on her slate with the wrong hand, sung out in front of everyone, showing off like the girls in the playground had said. And worst of all, how she’d wet her bloomers, just as if she was a baby and not five years old.
Whimpering to herself, Clara ran round the back, unlatched the gate, walked quickly down the yard and let herself into the house. Here was safety. Here was the fire burning steadily behind the tall fireguard, and the pegged rug in its place in front of the steel fender. Clara knelt down on it, pressing her face against the wire mesh of the guard, closing her eyes against the comforting heat.
When she heard the voice behind her she jumped as if she’d suddenly been prodded in the back, turning her tearstained face towards the boy standing in the doorway.
Joe West had been fighting. There was a blue swelling coming up just beneath his left eye, and as he jerked Clara to her feet the aggression was still with him. She could feel it coming from him as penetrating as the heat from the coal fire. His face, as he shook her none too gently, was unsmiling. At twelve years of age Joe was all legs and spindly arms, with an unruly mop of black hair which refused to lie flat at the back. He’d seen Clara run from the playground, and he’d guessed right that she was making for home, but before he fetched her back he had a score to settle with a boy who was laughing at what was going on. Thin and undernourished Joe might be, but what he lacked in stamina he made up in brute strength. Clara was only a kid, but she was as good as a sister to him, and when he’d left the playground it had resembled a battlefield, with Alec and Walter in the middle, fighting for fighting’s sake, while the girls who had started it all squealed like stuck pigs on the sidelines.
‘I’m taking you back,’ he whispered, one eye on the door leading into the shop. ‘Better me than your dad, because if he takes you it’ll be worse for you. They’ll think you’re a soppy pie-can, an’ you’re not.’
Clara’s bottom lip trembled. ‘I’m not going back, Joe. I’m not going back, never. I hate school. I’m going to stop at home with my dadda.’
‘Stop talking daft.’ Joe began to pull her towards the door, but the hard look had gone from his eyes. His obvious kindness undermined her. Fresh tears spurted from Clara’s eyes, running down her cheeks to drip from the end of her chin.
‘They’ll send the School Inspector for you,’ he told her. ‘An’ he’s a great big fella, with a konk on him as red as a beetroot. He could chew you up an’ spit you out afore breakfast, Clara Haydock. So come on … we’ll have to run like ’ell as it is.’
‘I wet meself, Joe.’ Clara looked up at him for a second, then hung her head. ‘It run down the flags and everybody saw.’
Joe shrugged his shoulders then bent down to whisper in her ear. ‘You got wet bloomers on?’
When Clara nodded, shame-faced, he startled her by giving a great leap upwards to the clothesrack suspended from the ceiling.
‘Them yours?’ he asked, pulling down a pair of navy blue knickers and thrusting them at her. ‘Get changed into them quick. An’ look sharp if we’re goin’ to get back afore the bell goes. An’ stop yelling. It’s nowt. I bet Miss Barlow’s done it many a time.’
Joe could always make her laugh, and the ruder he was, the more she laughed.
‘You’re a comic, Joe,’ Clara told him as they raced up the street hand in hand.
‘Oh aye?’ Joe yanked her along, their clogs clattering in staccato rhythm on the pavements. ‘Well, there’ll be nobody flamin’ well laughing if they’ve all gone back in.’
But they hadn’t. As they turned into the gate, the young teacher on playground duty was just coming out with the bell in her hand, holding the clapper steady until she got to the bottom of the steps.
The girl with sores round her mouth, the one who had nipped Clara, sidled up to her with an embarrassed look. ‘You can play with us this afternoon if you wants to,’ she whispered. ‘When we gets back from us dinnertime.’
Clara nodded, too shy to speak. Alec West was grinning at her, and Walter actually took her by the hand to lead her into line.
Clara trotted more or less happily after the ferret-faced Walter, her self-assurance restored by the feel of the dry bloomers, and the fact that she had found a friend. The girl with the scabs on her chin leaned closer just as the bell began to clang. ‘You’ve got nice ’air,’ she said. ‘An’ I like your frock.’ Almost overcome, Clara marched forward, but the best was yet to come.
As she followed Walter into the bottom classroom, a tall boy with hair almost as fair as her own caught up with her. His nose had been bloodied, and looked sore and tender, but he bent down and whispered in her ear.
‘I liked your singing,’ he told her. ‘I bet anything if you were a boy and came to our church you would be in the choir.’
‘You’ve bleeded on your shirt.’ Clara blinked at the whiteness of the shirt revealed at the V-neck of a clean fawn jersey. She couldn’t remember ever seeing both a shirt and a jersey worn together, not at the same time, and certainly not with a tie.
‘It’s nothing.’ With a nonchalance that had Clara round-eyed with the surprise of it, John Maynard, only son of the Reverend David, whipped out the end of his red and green striped tie and rubbed vigorously at the offending stain. ‘I’ll change when I go home at lunchtime.’
‘Ark at ’im.’ Walter shoved Clara back into line. ‘Our Joe says they talk like that where he comes from.’
‘Better than what you talk, anyroad,’ said Clara disloyally, swinging briskly into the classroom, her confidence fully restored.
‘No talking in line, Clara Haydock!’ Miss Holroyd glared at Clara through her little round spectacles.
‘Boss-eyed pie-can,’ said Walter, without moving his mouth.
Four
CLARA WAS ALMOST out of her mind with excitement. It was all there, the drama, the glamour something inside her craved. Up there on the flickering screen a film star with luscious lips and long flowing hair hung by a sheet from a burning building. Tongues of flame licked dangerously close to her swaying body.
The background music, as loud and throbbing as the action called for, was being played on an upright piano by a stout lady wearing a hat. Clenching her hands together, Clara felt it jerk her every pulse spot into active response.
Suddenly, with a crashing of thumping chords, the stout lady stopped playing and closed the piano lid. The screen went blank, leaving Clara as stunned as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown over her.
The words ‘The Perils of Pauline – To Be Continued Next Week’ meant less than nothing to her. With Walter West on one side of her and Alec West the other, their cheeks bulging with the aniseed balls bought with Clara’s Saturday penny, she had been transported out of her everyday existence into a world far beyond the confines of the little cinema at the end of a long, narrow cobbled street.
‘I know Pauline gets down safe,’ she told Seth. ‘Joe told me.’ Her face was pale, drained with emotion. ‘He let us in for nothing through the side door when nobody was looking. He works there now on a Saturday afternoon,’ she explained. ‘He let us in without paying.’
Seth gazed on his nine-year-old daughter with something approaching despair. At almost seventeen, Joe West was already a hardened opportunist, working as a bookie’s runner for most of the day, then wherever he could earn a dishonest penny for the rest. Twice he’d narrowly escaped being sent to prison as he lounged, hands in pockets, on street corners, taking his bets. The bookie he worked for had paid his fine and the very next week Joe had returned, cap pushed to the back of his head, black hair flopping over his forehead, on the lookout for potential customers.
Seth stroked his chin, wondering, not for the first time, how to say what he felt sure must be said. His religion was an intrinsic part of his life. Methodism ran in his veins. Right was right, and wrongdoing
was evil; there were no shades of grey in between. The straight path of virtue was the only way to salvation, and Clara must learn that to sneak into the cinema without paying was definitely a sin.
‘I’m going to be a film star when I grow up, Dadda.’
Clara jumped up onto the slippery bench, flung her arms wide, and began to sing:
‘Joshua, Joshua,
Nicer than lemon squash you are!
You’ll be pleased to know,
You are my best beau!’
As she sang the last few words she pointed to the red ribbon bow on top of her head, innocently misinterpreting the meaning. When Seth’s serious face widened into a reluctant smile, she took a handkerchief from the leg of her navy blue bloomers and waved it in circles above her head.
‘Goodbye-ee, goodbye-ee.
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee.
It is hard to part I know,
But I’ll be tickled to death to go!’
The provocative innocence on her young face startled Seth. ‘Joe,’ he said at once. ‘Joe taught you those words, didn’t he?’
‘He’s going to be a soldier, Dadda.’ Jumping down from the bench, Clara lifted her skirts and pushed the handkerchief back into the leg of her bloomers. ‘He’s going to tell them he’s older than what he is, an’ with him being so tall they’ll never guess.’ Her back, as she went through into the back living room, was stiff with pride. ‘Joe says when the Germans see him coming they’ll run like ’ell.’