Polly Pilgrim

by Marie Joseph

  ‘Some children are more rebellious than others, Mrs . . . ?’ Polly tried to remember the woman’s name.

  ‘Pearl,’ came the unexpected reply. ‘All me mother’s family are jewels. I’ve got a sister Emerald, and another called Ruby. Pity me married name’s Higgins. It takes the sparkle out of it a bit.’

  ‘Pearl,’ Polly didn’t smile, ‘I think Mr Goldberg may have gone into danger, going over to Germany. They say it’s a new regime out there. And Jews aren’t all that popular.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Pearl almost lost her footing on the snow-covered pavement and clutched at Polly’s arm. ‘Mind if we link, Polly? That’s all I need, to break me leg as well as losing me job. Like you, I couldn’t see much wrong with Mr Goldberg.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything wrong with him.’ Polly spoke quickly. ‘It’s politics, Pearl.’

  ‘Never bother with ’em.’ Pearl glanced sideways at Polly. ‘I heard tell you’ve got a family. Who minds them for you?’

  ‘Gatty is fifteen, and Martin is eleven.’ Polly’s mind was in a turmoil. ‘I can’t bear even to think how Mr Goldberg must be feeling. Coming on top of what’s happened at the factory, I reckon his heart must be breaking.’ She stopped suddenly as Pearl withdrew her arm. ‘You turn down this street, then?’

  ‘Aye. This is where I live.’ The brown eyes were shrewd. ‘Well, at least we know where our daughters are. There’s mine now, coming back from the Co-op. She’s been buying in for me since I’ve been working. She’s a good lass.’

  ‘And so is mine.’ A twisted smile spread over Polly’s face. ‘I’m going to see her now. She works in a shoe shop in King Edward Street. And she’s a good lass, too.’

  They parted with smiles, each of them knowing it was hardly likely they would ever meet again. Pearl hurrying as quickly as she dared to take one of the heavy baskets from her daughter, and Polly trying not to think about Miriam Goldberg’s dead face as she walked into the town to call in on Gatty.

  — Ten —

  AT THE SIDE of the road, the snow was piled in mounds of dirty grey. It was so cold that Polly’s feet were no longer feet but merely inanimate objects propelling her along. She had forgotten to eat breakfast and hunger pains gnawed at her stomach. Her heart ached for Mr Goldberg in his grief, and she wondered if she would ever see him again.

  And yet, in some strange indefinable way, for all the wrong reasons, she suddenly felt that she was in control of her own destiny once again. Miriam Goldberg was dead, and death was final, but Gatty was alive. Martin was alive, and Harry was alive, and she, Polly Pilgrim, was going to grab the future by the neck and make better things happen. Robert Dennis had showed her that what she already had was good. And by heck, she was going to hang on to it and push the fear, the doubts and the terror behind her.

  The north of England wasn’t the best place to be in 1933. The town was filled with bleak faces. It had the reek of despair, but it was where she had been born; it was her town, and these were her people. They might look defeated, but Polly knew that deep in the heart of every one of them hope lived. She would be cheating on her heritage if she gave in, and the first thing she was going to do was tell Gatty to come home. Where she belonged. Where they all belonged.

  That night she would write to Harry. It would be a far different kind of letter than any she had written before. No hiding the truth, no letting him believe she was a whole person without him. She wasn’t. She might be the stronger in many ways, but he was her man. She loved him, and she was going to ask him to come home.

  ‘Thank you, Robert,’ she whispered. ‘You could have been the love of my life, but you came too late. You accepted that, and now I have to do the same.’ She walked on, hurrying as fast as she could over the slippery pavement.

  The shoe shop on the town’s main street was empty, the rows of chairs unoccupied, the shoe boxes layered on their shelves, a shoe-horn discarded on the fawn haircord carpet.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Winnie Parker came from the back, sharp-featured, red hair tortured into a curly fringe over her wide forehead. When she saw who it was, her eyes dilated and something like fear clouded her expression. ‘Oh! Mrs Pilgrim!’ She glanced over her shoulder quickly, then lowered her voice. ‘Your Gatty’s not here.’

  Polly smiled. ‘You mean she’s gone out for a minute?’ She sat down on one of the little chairs. ‘That’s okay. I’ll wait. You’re not very busy, are you? I suppose it’s the weather.’

  Winnie seemed to be having difficulty finding her voice. Hoarse at the best of times, it now came out as a croak.

  ‘Gatty was a bit off this morning, so she’s stopped in bed. Me mam’s there, so she’s all right.’ It was transparently obvious she was hiding something. ‘Honest, Mrs Pilgrim. She’s not really ill. Like I said, just a bit off.’

  Polly was up on her feet in an instant. ‘Tell me the number of your house! I know the street, so just tell me the number.’ She was already backing towards the door, but Winnie followed, quivering, loyal, still protesting.

  ‘She’s not ill, Mrs Pilgrim!’ Then she came right out on to the pavement, actually wringing her hands. ‘There’s no need for you to go to our house. She’ll be all right by now . . . Mrs Pilgrim!’

  But Polly was on her way. She skirted the marketplace, and turned left past Yates Wine Lodge, up past the austere building of the schools’ clinic, crossed over the road by St John’s Church, and into the row of shops.

  A woman who knew her mother called out from across the street, but Polly was hearing and saying nothing. Winnie’s strange behaviour had worried her, and her one thought was to get to her child. She didn’t even notice that the house at the top end of the narrow short street was so dirty that it stood out, the only one with unmopped flagstones. When she knocked at the door she stood back for a moment, glancing up at the filthy window. She tried the door and, finding it on the latch, walked straight in.

  ‘Mrs Parker? It’s only me. Gatty’s mother. Can I come in?’

  In the back room, crouched over the fire, black hair hanging in greasy strands, face more translucent than pale, was Gatty.

  ‘Mam!’ Gatty levered herself out of the chair like an old woman. ‘Where have you come from? What are you doing here?’

  It was all too much. The unbelievable sight of Polly coming through the door in the familiar red coat was more than Gatty, in her overwrought state, could take.

  ‘Oh Mam! Mam!’ In a second she was in her mother’s arms, held tight, wailing her distress, spilling out the agony of the past weeks, clinging and weeping, sobbing as though her heart would break.

  ‘Now then.’ Firmly Polly put Gatty from her. ‘Sit down in that chair and tell me. Tell me slowly what’s wrong.’ Pretending a calm she was far from feeling, Polly unfastened the buttons of her coat. ‘Where’s Mrs Parker?’

  ‘Out at the shops.’ Gatty’s dark eyes never left her mother’s face. ‘Oh, Mam! You don’t know. You just don’t know.’

  The room smelled of yesterday’s fish and chips, and the overriding stench of neglect. There was a newspaper on the table where a cloth should be, and a jug of milk without its cover of beaded net on the dresser. The blind at the window over the slop-stone was torn and yellowed, and the wooden draining-board looked as if it hadn’t been scrubbed in years.

  All this Polly saw with one corner of her mind, but none of it mattered. What mattered was breaking down the barrier between herself and Gatty.

  ‘No. I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘I don’t know what’s bothering you, but I’m here, waiting for you to tell me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I love you very much, Gatty. Whatever it is, you can tell me.’ She held out her hands, but forced herself to stay where she was. ‘If you’ve murdered somebody, then I’ll go and help you dig a hole. If you’ve stolen money from the shop, then I’ll steal myself to put it back.’ She leaned forward. ‘Come on, love. If you can’t tell your mam, then who can you tell?’

  Tears ran down Gatty’s small face. Convulsed by so
bs, choking on the words, she told her terrible secret. Incoherent and jumbled, the story came out. ‘An’ if I’m going to have a baby, then I want to die!’ she cried. ‘But he made me, Mam. I didn’t know what he was doing. I swear I didn’t even know what he was doing!’

  ‘Oh, Gatty, Gatty.’ Polly came to kneel by her daughter’s chair. Her heart was so full she felt her hand tremble as she raised it to lift the black hair from Gatty’s swollen face. ‘You are saying you went away without telling me this? You couldn’t trust me enough to tell me?’ She turned Gatty’s face round to look into her eyes. ‘What did you think I would do? Throw you out into the snow?’

  For a while they rocked together, then getting to her feet Polly stood with her head bowed, trying to think clearly. Without any conscious motivation, her mind went back again to Robert.

  ‘Why do you use euphemisms, Polly?’ he’d said. ‘Are you so puritanical that you daren’t formulate the truth?’

  So the questions she asked Gatty were direct, and without what her mother would have called proper decency.

  ‘Had you ever been with a boy before?’ she asked, and nodded at Gatty’s swift and shocked denial. ‘Were you torn? When you stood up did . . . ?’ Her voice never wavered, and when it was finished she pulled Gatty up into her arms.

  ‘I think you’re worrying yourself for nothing,’ she said softly. ‘But we can’t be sure. It won’t be the first time a girl’s got pregnant when she’s never done it before.’ She gave Gatty a little shake. ‘Your period’s only just due, and being late isn’t unusual for you, so go upstairs and get your things. We’re going home.’ Her brow furrowed at a sudden thought. ‘You weren’t really sick this morning? Not vomiting, or anything?’

  ‘I just didn’t want to get up.’ Gatty started to cry again. ‘It’s been so awful, Mam.’ Her face crumpled. ‘I think it was partly him being who he was.’

  Again Polly’s arms went out to her, and over Gatty’s head her expression was murderous. ‘Rotting in hell wouldn’t be bad enough for the bastard!’ she said through clenched teeth, and in spite of her distress Gatty’s head jerked up.

  ‘Mam! You swore!’

  ‘Upstairs!’ Polly turned Gatty round and gave her bottom a slap. ‘That’s nothing, love. Wait till I get going properly. I know even worse words than that, and every one of them applies. Jack Thomson got his comeuppance, and folks can stick up for him as much as they like but I don’t think he needs pitying. He’s bad, through and through, and if I got my hands on him I’d kill him slowly, and watch him die. Gladly!’ she ended fiercely.

  While Gatty was upstairs, she found a piece of paper in her handbag and wrote a brief note to Winnie’s mother. Propping it up on the mantelpiece, she shook her head at the film of dust on the chipped ornaments. Something inside her that was all her mother itched to take them. down and give them a good wash.

  Her mind was clear and cool. One part of her was convinced that Gatty’s fear was more a product of shock than anything else. But the other part told her that fear was sometimes rooted in reality, and if that were true, God help them all.

  Jack Thomson’s baby. . . . Her mind crawled with the implications. Gatty, fifteen years old, bearing the child of a man like that. . . .

  Sitting down, listening to Gatty’s footsteps above her, Polly’s face was a mask of tight control, but inside she was dying a little. Gatty, her little girl. Missing her scholarship and not caring. Treating her mother’s love of books with lofty disdain. Scorning discipline, secretive, stubborn, going her own way, and shouting defiance when questioned about her comings and goings, as if determined to be different, determined to live a life of her own.

  Gatty as a tiny child. Like quicksilver in all her movements, active from morning till night. Needing little sleep. Getting up on her own to run out of the cottage in the early mornings, nightdress trailing in the long grass. Climbing trees when her brother sat beneath them reading. Snatching his book away, and screaming at him, then appearing suddenly at the cottage door, a bunch of wild flowers in her hands. Pleased as Punch when Polly put them in jam jars on the window sill, and dashing out for more. Dandelions, bread and butter, harebells, buttercups.

  ‘Hold your chin up, Mammy. Let me see if you like butter.’

  And now. . . .

  Polly turned round as Gatty came down the stairs wearing her coat and carrying the brown cardboard case.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  They caught a tram out to the terminus, but the rest of the way they had to walk. Gatty looked frail and ill, but Polly hardened her heart.

  ‘Let’s see how quickly we can walk,’ she said. ‘Come on, love. Don’t look at me like that! What’s five miles when you say it quick? See how deep the snow is by the hedges where it’s drifted.’ She smiled without glancing at Gatty. ‘Come on. One two, one two! Remember how your dad used to urge you and Martin on when we went for walks? How he’d make you swing your arms like soldiers? And how mad at him you used to get?’ Polly knew what she was doing. To her eternal shame she knew full well what she was doing. ‘Walk, Gatty!’ Her mind was screaming silently. ‘Walk till you drop, then get up and walk again.’ On and on. Horrified at her motivation, but insisting just the same.

  Leaving the houses behind, they found the going harder down country lanes where no cars had been. Taking the case from Gatty without checking her stride, Polly stopped suddenly when Gatty stopped, to pull the woebegone little figure into her arms.

  ‘It’s going to be all right, love. Look at me! I promise. I won’t let anything bad happen. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.’

  Feeling shaken, Polly took Gatty’s arm and urged her on. Hot baths, gin, something called Penny Royal, snippets of conversations overheard from women in Mrs Bebson’s post office, whispering together over by the herbalist corner. No! The hot bath, maybe. That could do no harm. But medication, suspect medication, that wasn’t for her daughter. Enough harm had been done.

  Polly was so engrossed in her thoughts that they passed Bella’s cottage without a glance. The whale-shaped mass of Pendle Hill was majestic in its stark whiteness, but what was it after all but just a hill? Pendle would be there when they were gone, when all this trouble was no more than a few pinpricks in the continuing pattern of life.

  ‘Almost there, love. Nearly home.’

  In less than half an hour Polly had lit the fire, using two fire-lighters piled on sticks, and built a pyramid of coal until the flames roared up the chimney-back. The kettle had boiled and Gatty had drunk a pot of tea down thirstily, sitting in her father’s chair, watching Polly work. Silently watching and saying nothing.

  The zinc bath was brought in from its nail on the wall, filled to a depth of six inches then topped up from the kettle and an enormous pan, pushed almost into the heart of the fire in Polly’s determination. At last she was satisfied that the bath was ready, too hot for comfort but she knew what she was doing. ‘Oh, dear God,’ she prayed. ‘Let it work.’

  As though Gatty was a child again, Polly helped her to undress, and the sight of the tiny pink-tipped breasts made her want to weep. But there wasn’t time for weeping, or sentimentality. With sleeves rolled up and face flushed from the heat of the fire, Polly helped Gatty into the bath. More hot water ladled in. A towel to wipe the sweat from Gatty’s brow.

  ‘Sit there, darling. Be good. Just for once, don’t argue. Just sit.’

  When Gatty whimpered twenty minutes later and said she could stand it no longer, Polly helped her out, lowered a long flannel nightdress over her head and followed her upstairs.

  Blankets from Martin’s bed were carried through and piled on top of Gatty’s flower-sprigged quilt. Flushed and sleepy, Gatty lay down, her hair all rumpled and her dark eyes glazed with fatigue.

  ‘I’m so tired, Mam,’ she whispered, sighing with the relief of being in her own bed again. ‘Winnie kicked in her sleep.’ The dark eyes opened with an effort. ‘She doesn’t have a nightdress, Mam. She just sleeps in her
knickers and vest.’

  ‘But she’s your own true friend,’ Polly said. ‘You’d told Winnie, hadn’t you?’

  Polly knew by Gatty’s face that she had, and a small hurt pierced her heart as she went back downstairs.

  It was dark outside before Gatty woke up. She had slept for five hours, worn out with the terror of the last few weeks, and the long, endless nights lying beside Winnie, with blanket fluff like grey dandelion clocks on the bare floor beneath the narrow bed.

  For a while she lay still, wondering where she was. The fear hadn’t gone away, but she was warm, she was safe. She was a little girl again, and her mother was downstairs listening to the wireless. She could hear the sound of a dance band on the wireless. Henry Hall maybe, playing his signature tune, ‘Here’s to the Next Time’. Yes, that was it. And the bed was so warm. She was warmer than she’d been for ages. The sheet and the blankets smelled clean, of Acdo and the bleach her mother cheated with at times. Not fusty and sour like Winnie’s sheets. Winnie, her good true friend. Gatty snuggled her face into the pillow. There was a faint niggling, dragging pain in the small of her back, but she was so tired, so very, very tired. In another minute she was fast asleep again.

  When she stumbled down the stairs another two hours later, Polly knew at once that the nightmare was over.

  ‘Oh, Mam. . . .’ Gatty came straight into Polly’s arms, and for a minute or so they cried together.

  ‘Thank you, God. If there wasn’t anything really to thank you for, thank you just the same.’ Polly held Gatty away from her, and spoke quietly and slowly, measuring every word.

  ‘You were never what you imagined you were, love.’ There, she was doing it again. ‘You were never pregnant, love. You have to believe me. But the long walk through the snow and the hot bath just gave nature a bit of a nudge. It would have come anyway, but maybe not yet, with all that worry and guilt. And now we have to forget it. It’s our secret for ever. Yours and mine, and Winnie’s. We will never mention it any more. It was just one of the bad times that everyone has, but this one has a happy ending. You’ve to wipe it clean out of your mind. One day you’ll meet a boy you love, and you’ll marry him, and it won’t be like that. It’ll be right and good, because you love him. And next time you’re worried, you tell me. Okay?’