Yes, Mama

by Helen Forrester

  As Sarah Webb and Alicia walked down to the new little brick building, Sarah’s double chins wobbled excitedly as she told Alicia, ‘Mr Andrew Carnegie himself has condescended to come to open it – you know, he has provided the money for it. It’s a real chance to see a great man.’

  Thankful to be out in the fresh air on a brisk October morning with leaves whirling in the gutters, Alicia cheerfully agreed.

  ‘Once you join the library, you’ll be able to borrow books ad lib – anybody can.’

  ‘Could Polly? She loves to read.’

  ‘Indeed, yes. She will be made welcome. It is meant to bring books within the purview of the poorest.’

  ‘Mama says it’s vulgar to belong to a free library, that one might catch diseases from the books.’

  ‘Well, I’m not vulgar,’ puffed the older woman firmly. ‘I shall be happy to borrow books from this library; it’ll save me having to go to town to get them from Lee’s private library.’

  They found a good position across the road from the new building and watched a constable keeping people back from the entrance. The wind was quite cold, and barefoot children ran in and out amongst the adults, to keep themselves warm.

  One little tike with sores on his head thrust his hand out in front of Alicia, and asked hopefully, ‘Gi’ us a penny, Miss.’

  Alicia looked down at the wizened, worldly-wise face and replied truthfully, ‘I don’t have any money with me.’ She flushed slightly, feeling humiliated in front of Sarah, who produced a coin from her old-fashioned, black velvet bag.

  It was some time since she had had any spending money of her own. From childhood, her mother had each Saturday given her a silver threepenny piece. Lately, she had not done so, and Alicia was worried that, from the current month’s housekeeping, she had had to spend twopence on hairpins and then enter it in the account book; she feared greatly what Humphrey would say about it. As he had done with Mrs Tibbs, he queried almost every item.

  ‘Naughty little thing,’ Sarah said, with a chuckle, as the child slipped away.

  After the ceremony, they strolled back to Sarah’s house, where they were to have a cup of tea before Alicia went home. Sarah said gaily, ‘You’ll be able to tell your friends that you saw Andrew Carnegie, and even tell your grandchildren.’

  Remembering that she had friends in Polly and Fanny, she was able to agree with Sarah, though some of her pleasure in the pleasant morning went at the thought that it would be a miracle if she ever had children, never mind grandchildren. There did not seem to be much future, beyond dancing attendance on her parents.

  Once the library was running, she and Polly often sat up late in the nursery, sharing a candle – Humphrey was fussy about the number of candles consumed in the house – in order to read a stream of novels Polly borrowed.

  Both of them dreamed of a great aristocrat who would ride into their lives and whisk them off to a gorgeous manor house. It was a delicious indulgence, but both of them knew that dreams were ephemeral.

  The hard work which had been Polly’s lot had taken her earlier prettiness. She was quite heavily lined and, when she was tired, her pale lips drooped and her eyes had a look of sad disillusionment.

  Despite her love of Edward, she had in earlier years sometimes picked up a likely young man lounging round the waterfront, hoping to make a marriage which would release her from the bonds of domestic service. There was, however, in Liverpool South, a great shortage of men of her own age group, and, as she often said to Fanny, ‘With no work, a wife’s a luxury to a man – they can’t afford to marry.’

  She was thankful for the small store of golden sovereigns given to her by Edward and for the silver shillings from her wages which she had added to them; they would cushion her old age.

  During the same month that Alexander Carnegie visited Liverpool, Sir Wilfred Laurier, the Premier of Canada, came to open the new Produce Exchange. When Polly read about it in the newspaper, her face lit up, and she ran up to the nursery, where Alicia was sponging and pressing her mother’s winter dresses. ‘Would he have news of our Billy?’ she asked breathlessly.

  Alicia laid her iron on a trivet and pushed it over the fire to heat again. Though she wanted to smile, she replied gravely, ‘I don’t think so, Polly. He comes from Ottawa in Ontario – and Billy’s in a provincial district – Alberta – and it’s a long way off – thousands of miles.’

  Polly’s face fell. ‘Aye, I suppose you’re right.’ She sighed, and turned to go downstairs again. ‘I wish he were ’ere,’ she said wistfully. ‘Our Mary and me, we miss ’im. He were such a good lad.’

  II

  Used to being part of a tight family unit, Billy did not forget his sisters and often wished they were with him as he scratched for a living in an alien world.

  When a ragged tomtit of a boy had crept out of the bush at the side of the trail leading down to the railway halt by the Metis village and had begged Ben Reilly, an elderly pedlar, to show him the way to Toronto, Ben had picked him up and put the exhausted boy on the back of one of his horses. As they proceeded along the trail, the boy had wept and told him what had happened to him on the Macdonalds’ farm.

  Ben Reilly had seen such children many times in his travels, and as he plodded through melting snow, chewing on a plug of tobacco and listening to the tale of woe, he felt that Billy might help to solve his own problems. He, therefore, set up camp for the night at a distance from the Metis village, and he and Billy shared a sparse dinner of bannock and bacon, while they got to know each other. The boy was eager to help him and obviously knew how to handle horses.

  Though Reilly came from southern Ontario, he was to Billy a bit like any Irishman on the Liverpool docks, and the man’s language was similar; he certainly had the same flow of swear words, as he built a smoky fire with damp, dead wood. ‘In a month or two, it’ll be so dry, we’ll have to watch we don’t start a forest fire,’ he asssured Billy, and Billy didn’t miss the inference that they would still be together. He wondered suddenly if the man would expect to sleep with him and he watched him warily, as Reilly took a bottle from a saddlebag and settled down by the fire to drink. He motioned to Billy to sit near him. Billy carefully left a foot between them. The bent hobgoblin of a man laughed and spat his tobacco into the fire. ‘I’m not goin’ to touch you, lad.’

  Billy smiled sheepishly, but kept his distance. ‘Do you know where Toronto is?’ he asked after a small silence.

  ‘Aye, I do. But there’s no way you can get there ’cept by ridin’ the train. It’s hundreds a miles away.’ He chewed the end of his heavy, white moustache thoughtfully. ‘Best I can do for you is to miss calling at the next village, ’cos they may remember you there, if Macdonald comes lookin’. We can go to the farms I usually do after that – they won’t know your face. You could get work on the farms, but I tell you it wouldn’t be any better than what you gone through already.’

  Expert salesman, Ben Reilly had a merry, elfin quality about him, and Billy gradually relaxed.

  According to Ben, the pickings for a travelling packman like himself were getting thinner in Ontario, as settlements grew, roads were built and shops were established. What he wanted to do, before he got too old, was to go further west. Had Billy ever heard of Calgary – or Edmonton?

  Billy had not.

  ‘You can get land for nuthin’ out there – or next to it.’

  Billy looked at him pop-eyed, his fatigue forgotten. Land for nothing? As the night wore on and the old pedlar, glad of company, began to talk out his ideas, Billy’s almost forgotten dream of a farm of his own began to revive.

  It was dead dark and the forest was full of night noises by the time Ben Reilly had worked his way round to asking Billy if he would like to go west with him and work as his assistant. ‘All I can do is feed you, till we get started. You look an honest boy. You play fair with me and I’ll play fair with you.’

  Billy agreed, and for two months they travelled Ben’s usual round. Under his tutelage, Bill
y extended his knowledge of how to bargain with both buyers and sellers, how to wheedle small animal skins out of isolated settlers in return for sewing cotton, needles, nails, nuts and bolts, screws and good knives. Fur traders in the cities were always interested in decent pelts, he told Billy.

  When the warm weather came, they stowed away on a train bound for Calgary. They were kicked off it at Winnipeg.

  Unperturbed, Ben took the opportunity to buy a number of small tins of simple remedies, like zinc ointment, which he assured Billy would sell very well in isolated places at twice the price. They then caught another train.

  Though they did their best to lose themselves in a large group of Ukrainian immigrants, an angry conductor picked them out and threatened them with delivery to the Northwest Mounted Police, if they did not pay up. While Billy tried to make himself invisible behind Ben Reilly, the pedlar resignedly slit the lining of his coat and produced the fare for both of them, swearing that they had joined the train at Regina.

  The conductor had heard the same story a hundred times before; nevertheless, he decided to accept their protestations, rather than waste more time arguing that they had got on earlier.

  With a contented grin at Billy, old Ben put his head down on his pack and slept. Billy sat squashed on a wooden seat beside two restive children in fur waistcoats.

  In Calgary, they found shelter in the straw-filled loft of a rooming house, which they shared with three young men, also new immigrants. Ben and the other men all smoked, and Billy spent a week of most uneasy nights, fearing that one or the other of them would set the straw on fire. He survived, however, and set out for the countryside with Ben, refurbished packs, and a horse of most uncertain temperament.

  Ben Reilly never spent a penny, if he could help it, and Billy learned from him to do likewise, to cadge and beguile meals and a place to sleep. Sometimes, they ate off the land, snaring rabbits, catching fish, and adding wild plants to the subsequent stew.

  After a while, they moved their base to Edmonton where the competition was less. Reilly began to feel his age as the years went by, so when Billy was seventeen he sent him north to St Albert and Lac Ste. Anne, to branch off wherever he found a settlement. Billy met housewives using many different languages and he took the trouble to learn the names of the objects in his pack in Russian, Norwegian, Dutch and Icelandic. His efforts brought friendly smiles to the faces of many lonely women.

  Though he was strictly honest with Ben Reilly, he found ways of earning a few extra dollars on the side. A housewife whose husband had a closely guarded flock of sheep – the coyotes picked them off, if they were not careful, the woman said – used to spin and knit garments for her family. He offered to sell for her on commission any extra ones she had time to make. She persuaded an Icelandic neighbour to knit as well, and Billy had no difficulty in getting rid of the warm woollens in lumber and mining camps, where he sold tobacco. Well-established settlers sometimes had feathers to spare; Billy suggested to one lady that she put hers into bags made of a gay print which he provided, and he sold them as cushions, again on commission. Ben Reilly began to pay him a better commission himself. Cents became dollars, and Billy stitched them into his jacket. He grew into a short, amiable man, who kept out of the taverns and out of trouble, as best he could in a rough frontier world.

  He did not drink or smoke, because in his opinion the cost was too great, and he had his eyes set on applying for a quarter-section of land. Though the land cost little, he knew he would need a horse and plough, seed and axes, if he was to get a good start; his wife, if he ever got one, was not going to pull the plough, as he had seen Ukrainian women do when their husbands were breaking land.

  Because he was sometimes lonely, his letters to Polly became longer and more interesting as he ruefully described his adventures on the road. In the spring, when everybody was bogged down by mud, he helped the man who owned the stable where he had first lodged in Edmonton and made a lifelong friend of him. He told of going during the winter into logging camps where no women were, to sell tobacco, cigarette papers, boots, socks and pipes. He mentioned Chinese, some of them his competitors, who had worked on the railway and had never gone home because they did not have enough money. Some of them had opened tiny cafés and he found he liked the food they served. He was used to oriental faces on the docks where he had worked as a boy, and, unlike many of their customers, he would talk with them if they knew enough English; so now he had one or two Chinese friends.

  ‘Chinese food!’ exclaimed Polly incredulously. ‘He must be starvin’ to eat that.’

  Alicia laughed – she had a pretty, tinkling laugh like her mother’s. ‘I read somewhere that the Chinese are the world’s best cooks.’

  ‘It’s a good thing Mrs Tibbs int here to hear you,’ replied Polly. ‘Pack o’ heathens. Seen ’em walkin’ round down town – come off the boats, they had. Aye, poor Billy. What he must be goin’ through!’

  But Billy was happy. He felt he was on his way to better things. Very slowly, but steadily, the dollars sewn into his jacket increased.

  Chapter Twenty

  I

  ‘Aye, ’e’s dead,’ Fanny assured Alicia lugubriously, her voice muffled. She was cleaning the flues of the kitchen range and puffs of soot flew round her, as she pulled out the long wire brush from the oven flue. ‘Colonel Milfort’s valet, next door, told me.’ She turned away to sneeze, and then glanced at Alicia sitting by the white-scrubbed table. The young woman was wrapped in a dressing-gown long since discarded by her mother; her nose and eyes were red from a heavy cold and she was shivering in the unheated kitchen.

  Alicia had come downstairs early, in hope of a cup of tea to ease her aching head, but the kitchen range had, the previous day, not been drawing properly, so the fire was not yet lit because of Fanny’s cleaning efforts. Until she had finished, there would be no means of boiling a kettle and no hot water flowing from the bathroom taps – which would make Papa furious.

  She leaned one elbow on the table and rested her head on her hand. It was nearly six o’clock, and outside the high, barred window overlooking the stone area, the February wind was howling, as it had done for the last twenty-four hours. In the kitchen, a single gaslight hanging from the high ceiling cast cold rays on grubby walls and grey stone floor.

  Dear old Mr Bittle dead? He’d been the gardener since before she was born – and next May she would be twenty. A lump rose in her throat and she wanted to cry. She took out a much-used handkerchief and blew her stuffed-up nose. In her mind’s eye, she saw the gardener’s heavy, work-hardened fingers delicately splitting a seed so that she could observe its interior under her magnifying glass. She remembered how, as a little girl, he had recruited her to help him clear cluttered corners of the garden which might harbour wicked slugs and snails, how he had scattered lime round his precious seedlings and had encouraged starlings and toads, to reduce voracious pests. ‘Natural things’ll help you in a garden, if you let them,’ he would say.

  Fanny put away her long flue brush and picked up the poker to rake out the previous day’s ashes. She said, of Mr Bittle, ‘Colonel Milfort’s man said he were found lyin’ in the street in the middle of the storm yesterday. Proper awful, poor man. The wind must’ve bin too much for him, after he left here.’

  Alicia winced. Dear humble man, out there in the cold. And nobody left in his little cottage off Crown Street to know or care that he had not returned.

  She had felt depressed throughout the winter and this news added to it. A woman who did her duty was supposed to be content, knowing that she had done it; but, increasingly, Alicia felt she wanted to run out of the front door and dance and laugh and be free, swept along by the wild wind outside, into some madcap new world. Yet, she knew, from Polly and Fanny’s stories, how cruel that outside world could be and the thought of facing it alone and penniless kept her rooted in Humphrey’s house; at least Papa was a known devil.

  After putting a new lock on his wine cellar door to protect his stock,
Humphrey had told Alicia and the servants that, on no account, were they to provide Elizabeth with alcohol. Elizabeth vented her misery on Alicia.

  Fanny, however, had had in some ways a very close affinity with Elizabeth, ever since she had found her badly beaten so many years ago. Armed with money from Elizabeth’s allowance, she would sneak out to buy the occasional bottle of port or brandy for her desperate mistress. Such occasions were the only times when Alicia had a peaceful day, as Elizabeth slept it off. With her head spinning, Alicia dreaded today; since the weather was so bad, she would not even be able to persuade her mother to take a little walk in the fresh air.

  Not that walking out with Elizabeth was exactly exciting. Accompanied occasionally by Sarah Webb, the most adventurous walk would be as far as Princes Park at the pace of elderly ladies. Alicia would dawdle along, watching enviously as working-class couples strolled past them, arm-in-arm, or cuddled close to each other on the park benches. She watched families picnicking or playing impromptu games of cricket on fine Sunday afternoons; and girls, not much younger than herself, enjoying equally impromptu games of rounders or shuttlecock and battledore. She had herself almost forgotten what it was like to play anything. In any case, her mother referred to the happy players as very vulgar. Was everything that was fun vulgar? Was she always to be an onlooker of life, never a participant? she wondered bitterly.

  Yesterday had been a rotten day, she thought mournfully, as Fanny swept up the hearth after her cleaning. Papa had, when doing the household accounts with her, seized upon the butcher’s bill and complained that it was far too high. She should, he said, scold Polly for extravagance.

  ‘The price of beef went up recently,’ Alicia had told him sullenly.

  ‘Don’t be pert, girl. Do as I say.’ He had slapped the next month’s housekeeping down in front of her, and she had picked up the precious gold coins, and whispered frightenedly, ‘Yes, Papa.’