Yes, Mama

by Helen Forrester

  As she became more and more irrational, Elizabeth acquired a stubborn fixation which made it almost impossible to persuade her to do something quite normal, like taking a bath. She became terrified of her own reflection in a mirror and, to avoid this happening, some mirrors were removed while the others were draped over.

  Dr Willis insisted that, no matter how difficult Elizabeth was, Alicia must continue to go out at least once a week and leave her mother with the maids. ‘You must maintain your own health,’ he warned her. ‘Where would Mrs Woodman be without you?’

  Though in earlier days Elizabeth had had a friendly relationship with Polly, she seemed now to tolerate Fanny better, perhaps because the younger maid made less fuss over her and retained the formal status of servant with her, something to which Elizabeth had been accustomed all her life. Fanny never argued with Elizabeth, but simply used the standard phrases of a servant, however inappropriate, to beguile her to the bathroom or to eat.

  Supported by Uncle Harold’s interest and her spirits raised by the improvements to the house, Alicia was able to cope better with Elizabeth. The three women took it in turns to watch the benighted invalid, so that no one was herself nearly driven mad by Elizabeth’s insane questions and illogical behaviour. And there was always the freedom of Friday afternoon to look forward to.

  In the back of Alicia’s mind, however, lurked fear of the future. What would happen to Polly and herself when her mother died? The best she could hope for would be that either Charles or Florence and Clarence would give her a home; an extra pair of female hands was always welcome in either kitchen or nursery, particularly when there was no obligation to pay their owner anything. One of them might also give Polly and Fanny jobs, since they were well-trained servants.

  As she considered such a gloomy outlook, a slow, burning revolt against her own probable fate grew in her. It would be better to try for a post as governess or lady’s companion, where at least she would be paid, and she began quietly to prepare for this and to save all that she could from the salary so kindly contrived for her from Humphrey’s Estate. Polly was getting old, she worried, and she hoped that she might be able to help her financially, if necessary.

  Late at night, she would sometimes leave her sleeping mother and run upstairs to practise on the grand piano in the huge, unused drawing-room. So that she could teach music, she put together a series of children’s pieces and made notes on how she would introduce a child to it. She also spent time during her mother’s afternoon naps studying from her old school text-books and putting together short lessons on a variety of subjects. When engaged in replying to Elizabeth’s aimless and persistently repeated questions, she did some pieces of fine needlework to show a prospective employer or did pencil sketches, which she could show at the same time, to indicate that she could teach these ladies’ accomplishments.

  One Friday afternoon, she went to the Windsor Street library and borrowed two travel books and one on the care of pets, with an eye to having background knowledge for a post as Companion. Later on, she read a number of books on etiquette, for the same purpose. She became known to the librarians and began to regard them as her friends.

  Christmas brought several letters. Charles wrote that, because of his family’s being in mourning, he and Veronica had decided to be married quietly in Cambridge during the Christmas holidays. He realized, he said, that Alicia must look after Mama and would not be able to attend. Alicia presumed that Florence or Clarence had explained to him why she had been cut out of his father’s Will and she smiled sardonically. Veronica’s parents did not send her a formal invitation, so she blinked back her tears of disappointment and threw his letter into the fire.

  There was a joyful letter from Billy to say that he had taken up a quarter-section of land in Alberta, a whole one hundred and sixty acres, he exulted, and he was clearing it while he worked part-time at the stable; he did not mention the excruciating, back-breaking work this entailed, but instead said that the land was the beginning of a real hope that he could bring Polly to Canada and have a place for her to live. It might take a few years yet, but he would do it.

  Such a pang went through Alicia as she read this that she felt it difficult to say, with conviction, to Polly that it would be wonderful for her to go. How could she endure being separated from Polly? She would be totally alone.

  As Polly read the letter again, she pursed her lips and said, ‘Why don’t he get married?’ The idea that Billy might actually fulfil his long-ago promise made her suddenly nervous; she was not sure she wanted to meet a collection of Chinese, Red Indians and Frenchies.

  ‘Perhaps he isn’t the marrying kind,’ Alicia responded lightly, as she remembered the short, inarticulate boy who had helped to weed the now totally neglected garden.

  ‘He wrote once as there was more men than women in Alberta – maybe that’s why,’ Polly suggested, on consideration.

  Alicia agreed. The talk of marriage reminded her of the other ceremonies in her Book of Common Prayer, and she asked idly, ‘Was I ever christened, Polly?’ She looked up from the tray of rice she had been cleaning, while her mother napped. They were in the new kitchenette and Polly had put down her letter, while she got out her new cookery book, How to Cook with Gas, to check the heat setting for a rice pudding. At Alicia’s question, she turned round and smiled. ‘Of course, you was, duck. The Reverend Clarence done it. Your Mam and Miss Webb stood for you – godmothers, like. Now what put that idea into your head, all of a sudden?’

  Alicia shrugged. Well, I wonder why I was never confirmed?’

  ‘Confirmed?’

  ‘Yes. You know – made a full member of the Church.’

  Polly was gingerly lighting the gas oven and her reply was a little muffled, as she leaned into it. ‘Probably nobody remembered to have you done.’ She got up from her squatting position and closed the oven door. ‘Now, Master Charles, he were done at school – I remember because your Mam gave me a parcel with a present to post to him.’

  Alicia shook the cleaned rice into a basin in order to wash it. As the last grains plopped in, she said slowly, ‘You know, Polly, it seems to me that nobody ever thought about me, except you.’

  Polly smiled. ‘Well, you always was my baby, luv.’ Then, as she shook sugar for a rice pudding on to the small, brass scales in front of her, she added, ‘Master Edward loved you like anything – remember?’

  ‘Yes, he did – and I loved him so much. How I wish he’d lived, Polly. Both our lives might’ve been different.’

  ‘Aye, they might’ve bin,’ Polly sighed. Then she reminded Alicia, ‘Your Mam cared enough to see you went to school, though. I remember she had a real set-to with the Master over it.’

  ‘Surely school is every girl’s right?’

  Polly sniffed. ‘Nobody never sent me to a proper school, except to Dame School to learn me letters. Even so, if Master Charles hadn’t taught me, I wouldn’t be able to read nor write now.’

  ‘Nowadays, you’d have been sent to the Board School.’ Alicia ran water from the tap over the rice and drained it. Polly concentrated on her recipe and did not reply to Alicia’s comment.

  ‘Polly, do you remember long ago, when we went out on New Year’s Eve to the top of Upper Parliament Street, and that horrible Ralph Fielding from down the road called me a bastard?’

  Polly glanced warily at her out of the corner of her eye, as she turned to get flour and lard out of the small pantry behind her. ‘Yes?’

  ‘When I finally found out what the word meant, it made me feel sick, Polly, and lots of things I’d never understood fell into place. I knew why the girls at school weren’t allowed to be friends with me. It seemed so terribly unfair, Polly, because it wasn’t my fault,’ she said dejectedly, as mechanically she assembled the rice pudding. ‘And then when I understood the absolute repudiation that a shilling for candles meant, I felt totally publicly humiliated. It confirmed my worst fears about Papa’s feelings for me.’

  ‘Well, I told you before
, love, that he were your Papa as far as the law were concerned.’

  ‘But not as far as his feelings were concerned. He often made my life a misery; he was quite different with Florence. Do you suppose that Charles’s in-laws or his Veronica know the story about me?’

  ‘Seeing as you wasn’t asked to their wedding and Miss Florence and the Reverend was, not to speak of Mr Harold and all his kids, they must’ve got wind of it – people would talk about the Will and ask questions – and a proper nice piece of gossip it would be. I’m sorry, pettie.’

  Alicia half-closed her eyes. She felt despised and rejected, and she wondered if the feeling would be with her all her life. Aloud, she said to Polly, ‘I’ve tried so hard, Pol, to be a good daughter.’

  Polly smiled wryly at her. ‘You’ve bin more than good, chook.’

  III

  In the Spring of 1908, Charles and Veronica rented a newly-built house not far from Seacombe Ferry, on the other side of the River Mersey from Liverpool, from which Charles could commute easily to the University every day. Upper Canning Street, also, was not very far from the University and Charles dropped in occasionally to see his mother, though Veronica declared that was too far for her to visit. Charles’s visits were short because Elizabeth no longer knew him with any certainty and he did not seem to have much to say to Alicia. Her absence from his wedding was never mentioned.

  Florence also called from time to time. In an absent-minded way, she was gushily polite to Alicia but, as with her brother, any sense of ease there had been between them was gone. She, also, did not stay long.

  ‘I bet Clarence has told her to have as little to do with me as possible,’ Alicia thought shrewdly, well aware of her brother-in-law’s ambitions. Her manner towards Florence became stiff and cold.

  Viewing her small savings nestling in an old tea caddy, there were days when Alicia felt like taking flight; the money would last her for a little while. Yet, now she knew about Andrew Crossing, she felt an enormous pity for her mother who had, in some way, become locked into a marriage which did not suit her. Pity, a sense of duty and a fear of censure, if she left, kept her by her mother’s bedside. She could almost hear the acidulous voices if she deserted a sick parent, ‘You can expect wicked, outrageous behaviour from a bastard – nothing good in them.’

  It became impossible to leave Elizabeth alone for a second, even if she were sleeping – she might wake up. She would wander all over the house, absently turning on all the gas lights without lighting them or aimlessly tearing up books and papers when she came across them. She occasionally smashed crockery by throwing it on to the floor and there was always the fear that she would fall downstairs or, as she once did, get into the bath and turn the taps on until she was soaked and the bath flooded. She was still physically quite strong and it was easier to follow her round the house than to try to persuade her back into her room.

  ‘She’s like a clock without a pendulum,’ Polly once remarked in despair, as she sorted a pile of stinking bedding and clothing, the result of Elizabeth’s incontinence. ‘And yet she looks that well you’d never believe it.’

  IV

  Next door, Colonel Milfort quietly died of cancer and his heart-broken friend sold the house to a well-to-do grocer with a large family, who referred to Elizabeth as that madwoman next door. He forbade his wife to have anything to do with a family with the stigma of lunacy about them. This did not stop his children, when they met Alicia in the street, pointing at her and sniggering and, sometimes, calling ‘Loony, loony,’ after her. She passed them each time with slow, grave dignity and finally they gave up.

  ‘District’s goin’ to pot,’ said Fanny, in disgust, when she heard the racket the children made in the next-door garden.

  The irrepressible Mrs Hunter, the Woodmans’ other neighbour, continued to be extremely kind to Alicia and the young woman often had tea with her in her opulent, overstuffed drawing-room. Alicia found it comforting to be told that she was doing a wonderful job in caring so well for her poor Mam and to be presented with vases of flowers or bunches of grapes for the invalid. She became very fond of the stout lady.

  Quite frequently, on her day off, Alicia would go down to tree-lined Rosebery Street to see her godmother, Sarah Webb, who was housebound by acute arthritis. ‘It’s just old age, my dear,’ she would tell Alicia, as the girl put into her tortured hands bunches of roses or daffodils culled from the Woodmans’ wild garden.

  Alicia wept bitterly when, in January 1911, the old lady caught influenza and slipped out of life, a wise, erudite woman who had taught Alicia far more than the girl realized.

  Alicia felt that her own life was slipping away without any of the normal consolations that made human existence worthwhile. Sarah Webb had done her best to contribute a lot of small happinesses to her goddaughter’s lot and, without her, Alicia felt a terrible mental loneliness which even Polly could not fill.

  Uncle Harold came periodically to check her accounts and discuss house repairs and any other small needs. It was he who first suggested a professional nurse to help Alicia with her mother. Remembering Nurse Trill, Alicia felt that such a person might only drive her mother to even greater perversity and stubbornness, so she replied uneasily that she did not think that the time had yet come for such help. ‘Fanny is better with her than any nurse would be,’ she added. ‘Between the three of us we are managing – and Dr Willis is very helpful.’

  V

  Not too long after Sarah Webb died, when Spring bulbs were beginning to flower in the Woodmans’ garden, Alicia helped Polly to peg out newly-washed sheets on the clothes-line. Both women were suddenly petrified by a great roar just above their heads. As Polly told Fanny, ‘We dropped a sheet on the lawn and ran like ’ell into the house. There were an aeroplane right over our heads – could’ve nearly touched it. We’d never seen anything like it before – scared stiff we was.’

  Upstairs, a terrified Fanny had held a panic-stricken Elizabeth firmly in her chair. ‘Thought it were an earthquake,’ she responded to Polly.

  ‘Bloody madman! Ought to be put in Bedlam,’ fumed Fanny, when, the next day they saw pictures of the plane in the newspaper. ‘Ought to make a law about them.’

  ‘Really, Fanny dear. There’s no need for bad language. Aeroplanes are a fad – young men are always trying dangerous things,’ Alicia rebuked her.

  As if to belie her words about a passing fad, the selfsame young man, Mr Henry G. Melly, flew his plane safely to Manchester and back, the following day.

  ‘He’ll fall out one of these days,’ prophesied Fanny, shaking out dried towels as if she were shaking the young man for his foolhardiness.

  In a port, the loss of men and ships at sea was common news, but, as Alicia said, ‘Nobody has to risk his neck in a noisy thing like a plane while we’ve ships and trains.’

  ‘Nor drive them motor cars,’ interjected Fanny huffily. ‘Going around as if they owned the street. I were nearly run over the other day – and the horses is frightened to death by them – rear up, they do, as soon as they hear one comin’.’

  ‘Upper Canning Street is getting quite busy, and I’m always afraid of Mama, somehow, wandering out and being killed,’ Alicia replied, giving voice to an anxiety which had been with her for some time.

  ‘Na, I bin keepin’ the door locked – and I always keep the key in me apron pocket – never put it down anywhere; so I can answer the door quick enough and yet make sure your Mam can’t pick it up,’ Fanny assured her briskly.

  VI

  It was Fanny who returned from her afternoon off, one August day, looking like a sparrow that had been mauled by a cat.

  Her best black straw hat was a tattered wreck and her greying hair hung like rat-tails down her back. She sobbed to Polly that she had been caught up in a fracas outside the Legs o’Man public house in Lime Street. Some railwaymen hanging round the station had begun to bait the constables on duty there. The police were nervous because there had been riots in the city as a result of a
railway strike.

  ‘Them buggers waded in with their truncheons and I got it. Me back hurts like hell, it does.’ Polly had never seen her friend so upset. Fanny’s face was drawn with pain, as she went on aggrievedly, ‘And I were only talkin’ to ever such a nice fella as was down there to see what was happening.’

  ‘Come on up to your bedroom,’ Polly suggested, ‘and take your frock off so I can have a look.’ But when, upstairs, she quickly commenced to unhook Fanny’s print summer dress, the woman cried out in pain.

  Polly stopped immediately. ‘Maybe you should go to the Dispensary,’ she suggested uneasily.

  ‘Not me! They might send me to the ’ospital.’

  ‘Well, look. You sit down here and I’ll go and tell Allie. She’s with her Mam. I think you’ve broken somethin’.’

  Very concerned about her old friend, Alicia sent Polly for Dr Willis. She dared not leave her mother unattended, so Fanny sat alone in her bedroom, weeping with pain.

  Dr Willis was annoyed at being asked to come to a servant at nine o’clock at night and sent his young partner, Dr Bell.

  Though glad to see him, Fanny was horrified when he calmly took out a pair of scissors and cut her out of her best summer frock. She gaped at him and yelped, ‘Wot you done?’

  ‘You’re more important than the dress, Miss Barnett,’ he comforted her, as he peeled the dress back to expose purple bruises on Fanny’s back.

  As his delicate fingers probed round the wounds, Fanny sniffed back her tears. Nobody had ever called her Miss Barnett before.

  He turned to Polly. ‘I don’t think anything is broken. Have you any arnica in the house?’

  ‘Aye. Miss Alicia’s bound to have some.’

  ‘Bathe Miss Barnett’s back with it, and I will give you a little laudanum to help her sleep tonight and tomorrow night.’ He took a tiny bottle from his bag and dripped a little liquid into it from a bigger bottle. He corked it down firmly and handed it to Fanny.