Yes, Mama

by Helen Forrester

  Safe in the nursery with Polly, for many years Alicia understood little of the bitterness which lay between her mother and Humphrey Woodman. She learned early, however, from Polly that Papa was to be feared and that she should keep out of his way. As soon as the child could talk Polly taught her that the pretty lady who lived downstairs was to be obeyed without question, no matter how unhappy her decisions made little girls and nannies. Nannies said, ‘Yes, Ma’am, of course, Ma’am.’ Little girls said, ‘Yes, Mama,’ she instructed.

  Alicia’s first day at Miss Schreiber’s Preparatory School approached and Polly was again worried.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to look for another place,’ she sighed to Fanny. ‘It’ll fairly kill me to leave little Allie – she’s my baby more’n anybody else’s.’ She glanced across to where Alicia was kneeling on a chair at the table. She was quarrelling with Florence’s elder son, Frank. They were playing Snakes and Ladders and she was protesting to the boy that he must slide down every snake on which his counter landed. He retorted that if he wanted to he could slide down only every other one. A fight threatened, and Polly got up to settle the squabble.

  ‘Now, you play nicely, Master Frank, or I’ll send you home.’

  Frank looked at her mutinously, picked up the board and tipped the counters off it, then slid down from his chair to go to the rocking-horse. Still watching Polly, he climbed on to it and began to rock as hard as he could. ‘Cheat!’ shouted Alicia, and, aggrieved, went to sit on Polly’s lap.

  ‘You could wait at table.’ Fanny grinned wryly at Polly. ‘The Missus says I’m even worse’n Rosie was.’

  ‘I don’t know how neither.’

  ‘Ask the Missus to train you. You and her is as thick as thieves – she’ll jump at the idea. Now the Master is wantin’ to have more dinner parties, she’ll need a proper parlourmaid.’

  ‘’Ow d’you know he wants more people in?’

  Fanny looked wise, ‘I ’ear it all.’

  When Master Charles came home for the summer holidays, soon after Alicia’s fifth birthday, he found his old friend, Polly, waiting at table. For the first time, Alicia was allowed to have lunch with him and with his mother in the dining-room. He noticed, uneasily, that Elizabeth was most impatient with the little girl, as the child floundered over the various knives and forks. He teased her gently that she would soon be a grown-up young lady and the threatening tears turned to a shy giggle.

  ‘I’m going to school soon,’ she confided proudly, and wondered if she dare ask for another spoonful of strawberry jelly. She looked up at Polly, hovering over her mother, water-jug in hand, and decided not to. She had long since joined the silent conspiracy of servants in the kitchen; she knew that after the meal she could go down to the basement to ask Mrs Tibbs for a bit more and would be given it gladly.

  After this first venture at lunch in the dining-room, she asked Polly, ‘Why are you dressed up differently in the dining-room?’

  ‘’Cos as well as lookin’ after you, you cheeky little bugger, I got to be the parlourmaid in a parlourmaid’s uniform.’

  Miss Schreiber, at the preparatory school, was horrified when, one morning in September, Alicia called a teasing boy a cheeky little bugger. For the first time in her life, the child received a sound slap. She learned quickly that there was more than one English language.

  Alicia tended to be secretive and very quiet when in her mother’s company. Miss Schreiber’s complaint forced Elizabeth to pay more attention to her daughter’s language, and this made Alicia more than usually tongue-tied. Only in the kitchen, where she was treated with easy affection, was she able to express herself freely.

  She also tended to be struck dumb in her sister’s home, where she was taken by her mother to play with her nephew, Frank. Frank now had a small brother and a baby sister.

  ‘They’re no good to play with yet,’ he told her, in reference to his siblings. ‘He wets his trousers and she only sleeps – do you know, she hasn’t got any teeth?’

  The latter interesting fact stirred Alicia out of her usual wordlessness. ‘Perhaps she’s lost them,’ she suggested. ‘Aunt Clara lost hers once – we found them in her dressing-table drawer.’

  For months after that, Frank checked his teeth from time to time, to make sure that they were still firmly fixed in his mouth.

  Alicia was always thankful, after these visits, to be returned to the safety of the kitchen in Upper Canning Street; Frank tended to push her about and she did not enjoy it.

  Chapter Seven

  I

  Several times in her life Alicia was visited in her nursery by a man so tall that it seemed to her that his head would touch the ceiling. He was very thin and stood awkwardly in the open doorway of the nursery, until he was invited in by Polly, who curtsied to him.

  He was dressed in tweeds which smelled of tobacco smoke and his black hair was cropped close to his head. He always went to stand with his back to the fire and then he would survey the room and say, in a deep friendly voice, ‘This is the only place in the world which never changes – and old Toby is still there!’ He would move over to pat the head of the rocking-horse, which Alicia loved to ride.

  At first, Alicia tended to shrink behind Polly’s skirts; her knowledge of men was limited to Humphrey, who had never been known to enter the nursery, and the Reverend Clarence, who never spoke to her. Polly hauled her out, however, and said, ‘Come on, now. You know your big brother, Master Edward. He’s come all the way from India to see yez. Come and say how-do-you-do.’

  With the offer of an ivory elephant, just the right size to hold in her hand, she was beguiled on to his knee while he talked to Polly. Polly made up a story about her furrie elephant; it was some time before Alicia realized that she meant a fairy elephant and not a fur-clad mammoth such as she had seen in a picture in one of Charles’s old books.

  Perhaps because the room was Edward’s childhood nursery and Polly was not unlike the nanny he had known long ago, his military stiffness left him. While Alicia dozed in the warmth of the fire, her head on his shoulder, he talked easily to buxom, blue-eyed Polly.

  Polly watched the yellowed, strained face and fell helplessly in love with every line of it. On other nights, while Alicia slept in the next room, she listened avidly, with her sewing needle poised above her mending, to his stories of the jungles of Burma filled with small, brown men who wore only loincloths. Glad to have a genuinely interested audience, he described the wild beauty of the Himalayas and a particularly dangerous spot called the Khyber Pass, where wicked men in turbans hid amongst the rocks and fired at British soldiers. Normally, he was a quiet, dull man, who, as a boy, had tried to live up to his father’s expectations and had failed. To escape, he had joined the army – a nondescript foot regiment – and he knew he would never be a particularly outstanding soldier either. To Polly he seemed a wonderful person, and she treated him as such.

  ‘Aye, he’s a lovely man,’ she said wistfully one day to Fanny, who, quick of eye, had noticed the blush which rose to Polly’s cheeks when Master Edward’s name was mentioned in the kitchen and had later teased her about it.

  ‘Does ’e coom to your room?’ inquired Fanny with great interest, as she quickly dusted the hallway of the top storey.

  Polly was changing into her afternoon uniform, ready to open the front door to Elizabeth’s callers, and she paused in tying her apron.

  ‘Aye,’ she whispered, ‘but don’t tell no one, Fan. He’s a really good man and I wouldn’t want ’is Mam to find out.’

  ‘Watch out you don’t get in the family way,’ Fanny warned, as she commenced to dust down the bare wooden stairs that led up to the nurseries. After a moment, she looked up again. ‘Be careful. He could tell someone. Some of ’em is real organ-grinders. When did it start?’

  Polly adjusted her frilly cap and prepared to come down the stairs. ‘He’ll never tell nobody,’ she replied firmly. Then, in answer to Fanny’s question, she went on, ‘It all coom about, the year ’e coo
m down with malaria. Remember, ’e coom home and the mistress and me ’ad to nurse ’im? He were home a long time, till ’e got over it.’ She sighed. ‘It were then when he were better and not yet called back to ’is Regiment.’ As she sidled past Fanny on the stairs, she giggled suddenly. ‘He couldn’t do it, first time – he were too weak!’

  ‘Do ’e give you anythin’ for it?’

  ‘No. I don’t want nothin’. I love ’im.’ The dark head with its frilled cap was raised proudly, as she paused, hand on banister, to look back at her fellow servant.

  Fanny opened the staircase window and leaned out to shake her duster. She laughed. ‘Aye, you’ve got it bad, you ’ave.’

  Polly sighed again. ‘Aye. I wish he didn’t ’ave to go to them furrin parts. The Missis told the Master as he’s goin’ back to India soon – he’s bin in Aldershot so long, I begun to think he’d be there always. It makes me sick to me stomach to think about them blackies in their turbans, with their guns.’

  When Edward did return to India, this time to the Punjab, Alicia began to get regular letters from her brother. He would invariably end them by sending his love to her and asking her to remember him kindly to Polly, who, he trusted, was well. In neat script, seven-year-old Alicia would equally invariably reply that Polly was well and sent her best respects.

  II

  In an effort to re-establish herself, Elizabeth had, about a year after Alicia’s birth, plunged into the fashionable world of charitable undertakings. The ladies of St Margaret’s Church found her so useful, when planning church bazaars, that they began to ignore the occasional innuendo which reached their ears about their fellow parishioner.

  With one or two other ladies from the church, she became a fund-raiser for the new Royal Infirmary and for the Sheltering Home for Destitute Children in Myrtle Street. She was occasionally snubbed, but a number of the ladies appreciated her hard work and, with them, she was sometimes asked to receptions given for the many important visitors who passed through Liverpool. Humphrey soon discovered that she was acquainted with the wives of men he would like to know, and he suppressed his smouldering anger with her sufficiently to be able to address her and encourage her to ask these people to dinner.

  A handsome, well-dressed woman in her forties, forced to deny her natural sensuality, she became, as the years went on, extremely peevish with those who served her.

  ‘Forever pickin’ on yez,’ Fanny complained to Polly, while they prepared the dining-room for a formal dinner in September, 1896. She pushed a mahogany chair more exactly in position at the glittering table. Quick and impatient, she could be nearly as irritable as Elizabeth was.

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Polly, ‘and I’ll get it if I don’t hurry. Got to collect Allie from Miss Schreiber’s.’

  ‘She’s risin’ eleven now. She’s old enough to take ’erself to school and back.’

  ‘The ould fella says as she’s to be escorted. I heard ’im. Gettin’ at her, he was, pickin’ on her for nothin’. Tryin’ to make things awkward for her. She said as Allie were old enough.’

  ‘Don’t want ’er to stray like her Mam,’ opined Fanny, positioning finger bowls round the table with mathematical precision. ‘It’s herself what needs escorting. She’s still fine lookin’.’

  ‘Fanny!’

  ‘Well, she’s forever trailin’ her petticoats afore one man or another. You watch her tonight.’

  ‘Nothin’ comes of it,’ Polly responded forcefully. ‘It’s just her way – and she must be all of fifty by now – an old woman. You shouldn’t say such things – and about a good Mistress an’ all.’

  ‘Aye, she’s quite good,’ agreed Fanny reluctantly. She turned to poke up the fire. ‘How do we know what comes of it? Anyway, who’s comin’ tonight?’

  ‘A professor and his missus and two other couples. They’re all at that big meeting in St George’s Hall. A real famous doctor come to talk to ’em. Read it in the paper. Name of Lister.’ Polly surveyed the table, set with Elizabeth’s best china and Bohemian cut glass. ‘Well, that’s done, anyways.’

  ‘Better snatch a cup o’ tea while we can,’ suggested Fanny, putting down the poker on its rest in the hearth.

  ‘Not me. I must run to get Allie.’

  III

  After school, Alicia sat by the kitchen fire, watching a harassed Mrs Tibbs baste a huge joint of beef, while Fanny stirred a cauldron of soup. Polly thrust a glass of milk into the child’s hand and told her that after she had drunk it she should go into the garden and do some skipping in the fresh air.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Aye, coom on, luv. I’ll come with yez and count your peppers for a mo’. Then I got to help Cook.’

  She put her arm round Alicia and together they went out of the back door, which led into a brick-lined area, and then up well-washed stone steps to the long, narrow walled garden. A straight, paved path ran from the area to a wooden door in the high, back wall. The wind was whirling the first autumn leaves along the path and over the lawn, and the single aspen tree at the far end shivered, as if it already felt the cold of winter. Opposite the tree, on the other lawn, stood an octagonal summerhouse, where Alicia occasionally played house with a little girl called Ethel, who also attended Miss Schreiber’s school. Nearer the house, an apple tree bore a crop of cooking apples almost ready for picking.

  At Polly’s urging, Alicia did a fast pepper, her skipping rope thwacking the path quicker and quicker. Polly counted, and they both laughed when Alicia finally tripped over the rope.

  ‘Seventy-two,’ shouted Polly.

  The latch on the back gate rattled suddenly, as it was lifted. A grubby face, topped by wildly tousled hair, peered cautiously round the door. A very thin boy, about eleven years old, entered like a cat on alien ground. His breeches were in the last stages of disintegration and were topped by a ragged jacket too large for him. He wore a red kerchief round his neck and was bare-legged and barefooted. Alicia smiled at him; he was Polly’s brother who came sometimes, when he was unemployed, to beg a piece of bread from her. Though he smelled like a wet dog, Alicia accepted him as part of her small world, as she did the coalman, the milkman and the postman.

  This visit was obviously different. The boy was blubbering like a brook in spate, and when he saw Polly he ran into her arms.

  ‘Why, Billy! What’s to do?’ She hugged him to her white, starched apron.

  ‘It’s Mam,’ he told her. ‘She’s took bad – real bad. Mary’s with her and Ma Fox from upstairs. Dad says to come quick.’

  Unaware that his sister had suckled both of them and was equally loved by Alicia, he ignored the girl and clutched at Polly.

  ‘Jaysus! What happened?’

  ‘She’s bin sick of the fever for nearly a week and she don’t know none of us any more.’

  Fever was a scary threat, and Alicia interjected impulsively, ‘Polly, you must go. I’ll do my homework while you’re away.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask your Mam. We got a dinner party.’ She looked down at the mop of hair on her shoulder and gently pushed the boy away from her. ‘Don’t grieve, luv. I’ll come, somehow.’

  Billy stepped back and wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. This left a dirty smear on either cheek.

  For the first time, he seemed to realize that Alicia was there watching him, her skipping rope dangling from one hand. He stared at her for a second and then, obviously trying to re-establish his manliness after such a bout of tears, he carefully winked at her. While she giggled, he turned on his heel and trotted back down the path. The garden door banged behind him, and, as he ran, they could hear his bare feet thudding along the back alley.

  With Alicia hurrying behind her, Polly fled back to the kitchen. She was met by an anxious Fanny.

  ‘The Missus is in, and in a proper temper, askin’ why you wasn’t there to open the door for her. I told her as you was in the garden with Allie, but she’s real put out and sez you’ve not put the claret glasses on the table.’

&n
bsp; ‘Bugger her.’ Polly stripped off her kitchen apron, snatched up her frilly parlour one and whipped it round herself. The ribbons of her cap streamed behind her, as she shot upstairs, leaving a surprised Fanny facing Alicia and asking, ‘And what’s to do with her?’

  IV

  The dining-room door was ajar. Elizabeth, still in her osprey-trimmed hat, was standing in the doorway, tapping her foot fretfully.

  The moment the green baize door to the back stairs opened to reveal a breathless Polly, Elizabeth turned on her. ‘Polly, claret glasses, girl, claret glasses – and couldn’t you find a more interesting way to fold the table napkins?’

  Polly’s panic over her mother immediately gave way to her mistress’s wrath, and she responded humbly, ‘I thought it was your favourite way of havin’ the napkins, Ma’am.’

  ‘It is not. And the claret glasses?’

  Polly bobbed a little curtsey. ‘I’ll get ’em immediately, Ma’am. I wasn’t sure which wine you was having.’

  Aware that she was not being quite fair to a woman she respected, Elizabeth tried to control her irritability, and turned to pass through the hall and climb the red-carpeted staircase to her bedroom. Polly followed her anxiously to the foot of the stairs. ‘Ma’am, may I speak to you, Ma’am?’

  Her plump white hand on the carved newel post, Elizabeth turned to look down at her. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ma’am, I just had word that me Mam is very ill and is callin’ for me. Can I go to her?’

  ‘Really, Polly!’ Elizabeth burst out. ‘What has come over you? First the dinner table, and then this! How can you go anywhere when Professor Morrison is coming to dinner? Who is going to wait at table?’