A Soldier's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  ‘Oww…oww…Howw – noww – browwn – coww. Whom – loom – bloom. Repeat after me, “Ai have every hope of having a happy afternoo-oon.”’

  By the end of her hour Cissy’s lips ached, but Madam Noreah was well satisfied.

  ‘Very good. Excellent. Parfait, my dear, parfait.’

  But what good did it do? Who…no, on whom was she to practise her excellent vowels? On Eddie? He’d only look stunned, as always. Edward Bennett lived a few streets from her. Shy, but down-to-earth, he saw himself as her boyfriend, and often took her to the pictures where he would hold her hand as they watched the flickering silent screen, forgetting to laugh at Charlie Chaplin or Fatty Arbuckle for gazing at her the whole time. She’d feel his eyes on her all the while she was laughing, almost spoiling her enjoyment of the slapstick.

  Not that she didn’t like Eddie. Just twenty-one, he was quite tall when he didn’t stoop, good-looking, though he would more likely think he was being mocked should anyone say so. Cissy had to admit he had a natural grace and could have had all the girls flocking around him. But he was so sure he was the ugliest man alive. He’d told Cissy as much, confiding in her as one he could trust.

  ‘No one’s interested in a chap what’s got mousy ’air all over the place,’ he said once. In truth the colour was more gold than mousy, but he couldn’t see it, nor that it waved gently. ‘And piggy eyes,’ he’d said on another occasion, totally unaware that those soft-brown orbs of his were his very asset. If only he’d acknowledge himself as halfway good-looking, Cissy thought, as she followed Madam Noreah’s aitches, he would be a wow with girls instead of backing away from the first hint of admiration, shy to a point of idiocy.

  He was different with her, at ease with himself. They had grown up together, played in the street and gone to the same school, and somehow she had allowed it to go on until, too late, it was becoming accepted by everyone that they would team up together as the saying went, even though she now cherished her dream of one day escaping all this.

  He’d call round, welcomed in by Mum, who made him at home in the certainty that one day he’d marry her daughter. Dad approved of him – a lighterman like himself, made a Freeman two months back.

  ‘Nice ter know you’ll wed to one of us,’ he had said, proud Cissy was continuing the family tradition. He too assumed that they would finally pair up.

  Cissy thought otherwise, though she kept that to herself. She liked Eddie well enough, in a way she loved him. There was no doubt that he was in love with her. But she could not let herself love him back in the right way, because that way her dream would go pop, be lost for ever. She would be turned into a housewife, a drudge, a mother, all her ambitions would go out of the window.

  ‘One last time,’ Madam Noreah was saying. ‘Repeat after me…’

  The lesson coming to an end, Cissy went to perch on the edge of a bucket-seated velveteen armchair, aware of the stain in the centre – a faint ring of something nasty, probably an ancient accident by some cat or other – to wait for Daisy to go through her paces.

  At the piano Madam Noreah said, ‘I think in this instance we shall begin in the key of A, Miss Evans,’ and as Daisy took a stance, the appropriate chord chimed out from the ringing piano.

  Daisy filled her lungs, unmoved by the smell of cats – she was accustomed to smells, her house always smelled of cabbage water – and emitted the purest opening, ‘oo, oh, aw, ah, ay, ee,’, filling the shabby room with magic. Cissy felt a shiver of envy thrill through her as she sat listening to the clear crystal notes overcoming the dubious tone of the piano. Proceeding from the key of A to the key of B and thence to top C, Daisy could make the very air sing. It was an hour of rapture, finalised by the sweetest rendering of ‘Kiss Me Again’ from the operetta Mlle Modiste.

  ‘Another Saturday morning lesson over,’ said Daisy. The summer was now long past and Cissy took great gulps of smoke-laden London fog, even that was fresher than the odour of cats. ‘Another sixpence down the drain.’

  ‘Surely you think it worth it?’ Cissy said, the diction she’d been working on so hard, lingering. A few hours with her family would of course, blunt it, though she’d be annoyed with herself hearing it happen; but it was embarrassing to sustain when friends and family, whose speech never rose above the gutter, were forever having a dig at her. Easier to forgo all she had learned for the while. She could always put the polish back on when the need arose – which was usually up West.

  ‘I’m thinking of giving up singing lessons,’ Daisy announced out of the blue, as they boarded the tram home.

  Forgetting to hand her fare to the ticket conductor, leaving him hovering impatiently, Cissy stared amazed at her.

  ‘You can’t! You have such a beautiful voice. Whatever put an idea into your head of giving it up?’

  Beside her, the ticket conductor coughed. Cissy came to herself. ‘Oh, sorry, two threepennies please.’

  The tickets in hand, Daisy giving up her threepence, Cissy turned back to her. ‘You can’t mean it. Why?’

  ‘All that practice,’ Daisy explained, gazing out of the window onto the Commercial Road where they had got on. ‘It’s not doing my figure any good. All that deep breathing. I’m developing a chest and I can’t let that happen.’

  Cissy knew what she meant as Daisy glanced down at her bosom still flat beneath the loose V-necked georgette jumper bought second-hand down Petticoat Lane. The fashion these last few years dictated that the perfect figure was the perfectly straight figure, the tiniest of curves in those vital statistics of 30-30-30 considered fat. And now even Cissy thought she could see a bulge on that stick-thin shape despite the flattening brassiere. But to give up with such a lovely voice – to sacrifice it to fashion.

  ‘You don’t really mean it, do you?’

  Daisy shrugged and looked back out of the window of the noisy, juddering tram. ‘I could carry on, I suppose, but I shall be careful doing the exercises she sets me. Fancy ending up like her!’

  ‘That won’t happen,’ Cissy said, horrified by the mere thought of it. ‘Not with all the dancing when we go up West.’

  Tonight, though, they wouldn’t be going up West. Daisy’s parents had relations coming and Daisy was expected to stay at home and be sociable. Not brave enough to venture alone into the West End, Cissy too would stay in, content herself doing a bit more to the jumper she was trying to knit and hope Eddie might call, offering to take her to the pictures. Better than nothing.

  As if by some sixth sense that was exactly what he did. Soon after tea, came a rap on the doorknocker. Mum went to answer it, the next thing was Eddie’s tall stooping figure at the front room door where the family had settled for the evening to listen to Dad’s gramophone records. The grin on Eddie’s narrow handsome face was full of hope.

  ‘Thought you might like to go to the flicks, Cissy,’ he ventured.

  ‘Sit down, Eddie, dear,’ invited Mrs Farmer. ‘Fancy a cuppa tea, luv? The pot’s still ’ot. We’ve only just this minute ’ad ours.’

  ‘Very nice of you, Mrs Farmer,’ said Eddie, and sat up to receive his cup, then turned back to Cissy. ‘Fancy goin’ then?’

  The way he spoke made her cringe. It was a problem she faced when with him – whether to keep up her cultured speech or moderate it so as not to sound out of place or show him up. It was a dilemma that followed her now whatever she did around here.

  She teetered on the point of refusing his offer, but anything was better than sitting at home, Dad putting on one gramophone record after another, most of them comedy ones which got everyone giggling; Mum and Dad taking up the armchairs, May and Sidney sprawling across the settee – Harry gone to bed at his age – leaving her hardly any room to sit at ease. Cissy made a quick decision.

  ‘What film had you in mind?’

  He grimaced into his cup, his next words an obvious almost painful effort to improve himself, which showed he could when he wanted to.

  ‘Whatever you fancy.’

  There was no
t much she fancied this Saturday. There was a Buster Keaton film on at the local. She certainly needed a bit of a laugh to offset the disappointment of not going up West.

  Eddie nodded readily. The Keaton film, Our Hospitality, wouldn’t have been his first choice, she knew that, but so eager was he to take her out that he’d have suffered four hours of opera for it. And anyway, the big picture The Covered Wagon, was one he had said he’d missed last year in the West End. Now showing locally, this was his chance to see it and he was all for that, she could see by the way he leapt up, handing his empty cup back to her mother.

  He stood waiting while she went to put on a dab of face powder and apply a coat of deep pink lipstick before coming back into the room, coat and handbag at the ready, her stiff brown cloche hat hiding shingled fair hair and eyebrows plucked to a thin pencil line. Her mother eyed her with some disapproval as well as anxiety.

  ‘You shouldn’t pluck them eyebrows of yours like that. It ain’t nat’ral. Could ’arm your eyesight, tearing ’airs out like that. Then you go an’ paint it all in again, and then ’ide ’em. It’s daft.’

  ‘You can take some of that lipstick off too,’ Dad put in his two-pen’orth at the vividly coloured bow lips. ‘In my time, young…’

  But Cissy chose to ignore it as she swept out of the house with Eddie. If Dad knew she used deep red up West, wiping it off before reaching home, he’d have a fit.

  *

  Going to the pictures with Eddie was always a mixture of enjoyment and irritation. Relaxed with her, he was lively and could even be witty sometimes, but it was his moments of earnestness that spoiled it all.

  The programme was a popular one. They joined the queue outside and, armed with a bag of still warm fresh-roasted peanuts to while away the waiting, moved up in twos and threes, thankful the evening was dry for November. Finally entering the vast darkened cinema a few minutes into the continuous programme, they felt their way to their seats, near the back. ‘Don’t want ter muck up yer eyes,’ said Eddie, of the small square screen. ‘Can be ’armful sittin’ too close.’

  More likely so he could be cosy with her nearer the back, but she submitted to that, because it was true what he said: the flickering, stark black and white screen was hard on the eyes close to. It could give you such a headache. For another threepence they’d have gone upstairs in the circle seats, but Eddie was saving, so he’d said on more than one occasion – rather too pointedly for Cissy’s peace of mind – for the day when he’d have to provide for a wife. ‘It’s a big responsibility when you have to take care of a family, which I hope to one day, Cissy.’ A statement she chose to ignore.

  The full house was already rocking with mirth at Keaton, the air thick with cigarette smoke and it reeked of packed bodies and the perfume of disinfectant the usherettes had sprayed along the aisle. Cissy soon forgot Eddie’s apology and its connotation for not going in the circle seats, as hardly had she sat down than she too had joined in with the laughter.

  From beginning to end, Keaton’s deadpan approach to every form of adversity kept her in stitches, especially in the steam-engine scene. Yet all the time she laughed, Eddie’s gaze was riveted on her in obvious pleasure at her laughter as if he and not Keaton were responsible for her enjoyment, which had the effect of dashing her laughter.

  ‘Stop staring at me!’ she hissed angrily and went immediately back to doubling up at Keaton in a top hat footing along on a wooden bicycle without pedals, stopping at a crossroads in an embryo 1830s New York to let a cart go by. But she was still aware of Eddie’s brown-eyed gaze watching her every outburst of laughter.

  ‘Will you stop it! Watch the film, Eddie, for goodness sake!’

  She was glad when the interval brought on an entertainer doing a turn with jokes and a song or two.

  The Covered Wagon finally came on, interpreted by some dramatic piano playing, along with protests of ‘Siddown’ from an enthralled audience, to anyone daring now to fumble their way along a darkened row to go to the Ladies or Gents. Eddie’s attention was at last distracted. Except that in the love scene, his arm stole around her shoulders, drawing her to him and making them ache through having to sit awkwardly. She resisted the temptation to ask him to take his arm away. It would have hurt his feelings. Instead she tried wriggling into a more comfortable position, hoping he’d take the hint, which of course he didn’t, and gritted her teeth until it was time to leave.

  ‘I’m sorry if I upset you in there, Cissy,’ he said, as they joined the tram queue for home.

  She remembered her sharp words. ‘You didn’t upset me.’

  ‘It’s just that I love watching you.’

  ‘Don’t be soppy, Eddie.’

  Their tram drew up with a diminishing whine and a low moan. The queue moved forward, taking them with it. Eddie helped her on.

  ‘I’m not being soppy.’ He turned avidly to her after he had paid their fares. ‘Cissy, I’m in love with you.’

  She smothered a laugh. In fact she realised suddenly that she didn’t want to laugh at all. A sidelong glance at him made her heart bounce for an instant. The sight of the lean face beneath the trilby hat threatened to steal that heart away; the strong hard muscles she imagined beneath the formal buttoned jacket made her shiver and there was a tightness deep in her chest. She looked quickly away, blessing the protection of the cloche hat that hid her eyes.

  ‘Not here, Eddie. You can’t say things like that here in a public place.’

  For a moment he was silent, chewing over the remark. Then he said slowly, quietly, ‘You’re right, I shouldn’t. Things like that should be kept private.’ But it spoiled any further conversation.

  They sat side by side, swaying to the jerky progress of the tram, its rattling, moaning din preventing any chance of talking, passengers having to shout over the top of it. She, with her mind going round and round, unable to cope with this new situation, and he – the good Lord alone knew what he was thinking, she contemplated dismally.

  Walking home through the quiet streets, Cissy’s thoughts were still in a whirl and she put her arm through his in an attempt to make him feel better. Each time he attempted to broach the subject again she managed somehow to parry it with some comment about the film they’d just seen.

  Reaching her doorstep, she leapt in with a quick goodnight and, before he had a chance to declare his ardour afresh, had her key ready, turning it in the lock and pushing open the door.

  ‘I’ve had a lovely evening,’ she said, from the safety of the two steps up from the street. ‘Thanks for taking me to the pictures. It was nice. See you tomorrow, perhaps.’

  ‘Cissy.’ He looked at her and in the reflection of the street lamp two doors down, she saw pleading in his eyes. Even with her being two steps above the pavement, her lesser height only brought her eyes on a level with his. ‘Cissy, what I said earlier…’

  ‘Mum and Dad are waiting up,’ she interrupted brightly, looking away. Parents, decent-living parents that was, always waited up for their unmarried daughters, unlike their sons. Woe betide the girl who didn’t come home on time. But a son out late was a man about town, given licence. Not that she didn’t respect the strict regime Dad set for her – home by eleven, not a minute later, unless given leave by special arrangement – but why should Bobby have rope and not her?

  ‘They’re probably waiting to go to bed,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll have to go in now.’

  Eddie capitulated, shoulders sagging. ‘S’pose so. See you tomorrer, then? If it’s nice, we could go down to the river for the afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, that would be nice.’

  Quickly, she moved back as he looked hopeful, half closing the door against the suggestion of his leaning forward to snatch a kiss. She had let him kiss her before on a couple of occasions, but very briefly, more to be sociable than anything, all the time hinting at the fact that she still only considered him a friend.

  Friend or not, on each occasion she had felt herself melt, and it had alarmed her. There wa
s danger in melting. It led to other things, and that led to commitment, and marriage, and getting stuck in a rut, never to get anywhere beyond summer trips to Margate for a week’s holiday, in time with two or three kids in tail. That wasn’t for her. Feel something for Eddie though she might, it wasn’t for her.

  ‘Goodnight, Eddie.’

  She shut the door forcefully and went to announce herself to Mum and Dad. Bobby, of course, wasn’t yet home, but they would go to bed now she was in, leaving him to wander home in his own time.

  Bobby boasted a string of girlfriends, with his looks he could take his pick. Not for him the nagging to settle down. When he finally married, he would still be allowed to follow his own path to success, his wife, whoever she would be, encouraging him and bathing in the life he cut out for her.

  Not so her. She would be required to follow in the shadow of her husband’s success; whatever ambitions she’d had before marriage would be sacrificed to his. It wasn’t fair. She wanted her own life, her own success. And no man was going to come between her and that – at least not for a long time.

  Make sure you’ve read all Maggie Ford’s books

  The Soldier’s Bride

  Torn between love and duty …

  Letty Bancroft longs to be married but her father has other ideas – he wants his daughter to stay at home and help run his East End shop.

  Heartbroken, Letty must remain unwed while her sweetheart goes off to fight in France. But her love affair has had consequences that will see her more determined than ever to be a soldier’s bride …

  Click here to find out more

  A Mother’s Love

  Can she escape the hardships of her past?

  Growing up in London’s tough East End, young Sara Porter has had to learn to take care of herself. Her mother resents her maternal responsibilities and has never shown her daughter the slightest bit of love.

  Starved of affection, Sara vows not to let anyone get close and focuses instead on getting out of the East End. But still she hopes that one day she’ll find a real family to call her own …