The Past and Other Lies

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Um. Thank you. Yes, thank you, one and all for your kind toast...er... And to my, er...to Mr Flaxheed, of course—’ he tipped his head in his father-in-law’s direction without actually looking at him, ‘for his kind and, um, generous speech.’

  Silence.

  ‘We—that is, myself and Miss—I mean, Mrs Booth, my new wife. Um. We’d like to thank you all for coming to this, our wedding. So, thank you.’

  The bubbles in Jemima’s cider had dissolved and it tasted like ordinary apple juice. She wondered if she ought to have had beer instead but that looked just as flat. What she really wanted was a cocktail, but she might as well have wished for a honeymoon in Paris.

  Ronnie, who had confided to her on their first night out that his ambition was to be a public speaker like Mr Cannon, had ground to a halt, but just as it appeared that he had run out of people to thank and might, therefore, have to sit down, he reached into his jacket pocket and fished out a folded scrap of paper, which he hurriedly unfolded and smoothed out.

  Jemima twisted her glass between her fingers and wondered why, if you had gone to the trouble of writing out a speech, would you then forget to actually use it?

  ‘Ah, I just wanted to add, just finally, that it’s a great honour to be here and, more than that, that it’s—that I’m—that we’re all very fortunate to be here. Many of us aren’t here...’

  Jemima looked up and glanced along the length of the two tables to see which of them wasn’t here, but apart from the odious Mr Jamie Cannon and Mrs Grantham-Jones, she couldn’t see anyone.

  ‘...many hundreds, well, thousands of us aren’t here.’

  Ronnie squinted at the scrap of paper and Jemima’s heart sank. Socialism, he was going to talk about socialism and the working classes. Dad was going to be furious.

  ‘...I’m talking about the thousands of unemployed miners and shipbuilders and textile workers and their families in the north, men who fought for the future of this country and who now find themselves facing years, years of unemployment. In parts of Tyneside and Durham and South Wales the unemployment rate is as high as fifty per cent. Fifty!’

  Ronnie paused and looked up into the roomful of frozen, waiting faces, wiped a sleeve over his top lip and plunged on.

  ‘The War cost this country nine million pounds—nine million—and who is it that pays this debt? It’s the poor, the impoverished, the sick, the elderly, the unemployed, through increased taxation and higher prices and lower wages and lost jobs! And we—we who are here—we...’

  We what? thought Jemima, exasperated. For God’s sake, sit down.

  ‘We are here...at this wedding.’ And Ronnie did sit down, very quickly and grabbed his beer glass and drained it.

  A silence settled over the room, eyes twitched from side to side. Mum raised her head and smiled hopefully at no one in particular. Bertha, leaning forward, her head bent, appeared to be studying the hymn sheet from the service, and on the other side of Ronnie, Jemima could see Dad glowering down at his hands where they rested on the table. And then she realised, with a suddenly freeing sensation, that it really didn’t matter what Dad thought or how furious he might be, as she was now a married woman.

  She was Mrs Ronnie Booth.

  They would be in Torquay by ten o’clock. It seemed incredible that they could be seated around this table in this church hall in Acton drinking flat cider and then in six hours they would be checking into a hotel on the seafront at Torquay. Seven nights at the Majestic Hotel.

  What would they do?

  She had never been to Torquay and neither had Ronnie, though his own parents had apparently honeymooned there. They were both long dead now, his father employed on the railways and dying of some work-related accident, his mother of scarlet fever when he was ten. He and his sister had been brought up by an aunt in Stockwell.

  She knew more about his parents, Jemima mused, than she did about Ronnie himself, who complained a lot about the conditions at his school and of the conditions of the mines in County Durham, but who said almost nothing about his childhood, his War service or how he came to be attached to a socialist league and living in a boarding house in Acton. Maybe he was waiting till she asked him about himself? She hadn’t asked him. Well, there was plenty of time. Perhaps in Torquay.

  What would they do in Torquay for a week? What did anyone do?

  She had seen married couples at Eastbourne, sitting silently opposite each other over their dull little boarding-house meals, holding doors open for each other and politely saying ‘Thank you, dear’ to each other and walking arm in arm along the seafront on moonlit evenings with an awkwardness that told you they would never walk arm in arm if they weren’t on holiday. She hoped there would be a cinema in Torquay where she could sit in the dark and watch the screen and no one would have to say anything to anyone.

  But the speeches were concluded, general conversation began again around the table, and Mr Westing sat back in his seat and beamed at the happy couple.

  ‘Didn’t know you was into that all that communist stuff, Ronnie,’ he commented loudly.

  Ronnie turned purple. ‘Not communist,’ he hissed, leaning right over the table. ‘Socialist. We’re a socialist league.’

  ‘Socialists never helped me,’ said Uncle Alan in his slow West Country drawl, picking up his spoon and pointing it at Ronnie. ‘No socialist turned up in my cowshed to milk my cows morning I were laid up bad with me back. That Mr MacDonald and his Labour cabinet didn’t come rushing round to rub ointment on my cows when their teats got bad with the udderwort.’

  He placed his spoon neatly beside his plate and Aunt Nora, who was seated on his left, slid a few inches to her left.

  ‘As if the Prime Minister’s going to give two hoots about your cows’ udders, Alan,’ boomed Dad. ‘And in my opinion you’re better off without that sort so much as setting foot on your land, Al—mark my words, they mean to take it from you and turn it into a collective.’

  ‘It happened in Russia,’ added Aunt Nora, who read the newspapers and recalled something like this happening in 1917.

  ‘Do the Russians get udderwort?’ whispered Janie to her mother and beside her Edie piped up: ‘What is udder-wort, Mum? Have we had it?’

  ‘No, dear, that was the whooping cough and you were very lucky to survive it, praise be to God.’

  ‘They’ll have a fight on their hands if they try and take my land, I can tell you. They’ll have to take me out feet first or not at all!’

  ‘Whooping cough! Really, Nora, Doctor Durnley said it was a nasty chest infection and a tickly cough,’ said Mum.

  ‘Anyway, communist, socialist, what’s the difference?’ yawned Jemima. She couldn’t see what were they all getting so excited about. What was one word versus another?

  ‘It was indeed the whooping cough, Alice. Mrs Vance at number ninety said it was and her three got taken by it last winter.’

  ‘What’s the difference?!’ gasped Ronnie, turning to her.

  ‘Telegram!’ exclaimed Mum suddenly, and even though the War had been over for seven years you could still feel a ripple of tension sweep through the room. Conversation ended abruptly and all eyes fixed on the telegram boy, who was standing in the doorway holding a plain brown envelope in his hand. It was only after Bertha calmly got up and went over to him that the guests seemed to recall that this was a wedding and that telegrams were often received on such occasions.

  Jemima sat up. She had never received a telegram before. The telegram boy—who, come to think of it, wasn’t a boy at all but was, in fact, Mr Lake from the post office—looked very self-important with his peaked cap and his Royal Mail armband and his sign here, please.

  Bertha, who probably knew Mr Lake better than anyone as she’d taken to loafing about the post office a great deal towards the end of last year, had taken possession of the telegram, just as if the telegram were for her. After smiling and exchanging words with Mr Lake as if there was no urgency whatsoever and a whole hall full of guests were no
t waiting to see who it was from, Bertha excused herself and brought the telegram over. Jemima reached over and took the telegram before Ronnie could get hold of it because she knew very well he would make an absolute hash of reading it out.

  ‘Telegram!’ she exclaimed, waving the brown envelope in the air, because she knew how to create a dramatic moment. She tore open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of typed paper.

  ‘MR RONNIE BOOTH STOP DOUBLE CHANCE WINS NATIONAL STOP BAD LUCK STOP JC STOP’

  A cheer went up, mingled with rather a lot of laughter, and Jemima sat down furiously. A horse race! The Grand National, for heaven’s sake! Who would send a telegram about the Grand National on the day of her wedding? It was humiliating.

  ‘Damn,’ muttered Ronnie crossly. Then he saw her face. ‘I had a little flutter,’ he explained, adjusting his cravat. ‘Jamie had a tip. I thought it might pay for the honeymoon.’

  Jemima laughed sweetly and patted her husband’s hand. ‘Never mind, dearest, it won’t spoil our honeymoon,’ she reassured him because everyone was still watching them.

  The honeymoon wasn’t paid for? They needed to rely on bad tips from Ronnie’s unsavoury friends to pay for it? Her wedding was a place where racing results were read out and discussed?

  On the far side of the hall Muriel was laughing heartily and Jemima felt the blood rush to her face. Common little East End tart. And to cap it all off, there was Bertha actually asking the telegram man to sit down at their wedding table and have a slice of the wedding cake!

  ‘Aren’t you going to give him a farthing?’ she said crossly to Ronnie, nudging him and nodding in the direction of the presumptuous Mr Lake.

  Ronnie looked round guiltily. ‘Oh, well, I suppose...’ And he got up awkwardly and sidled over to where Mr Lake was tucking into a large slice of currant and orange fruitcake with pink and white icing on top. Jemima watched with grim satisfaction as Ronnie made a show of handing him a farthing which Mr Lake stiffly refused. Instead he pushed back his chair, replaced his peaked cap on his head and backed out of the hall with a muttered apology. Bertha flushed darkly and looked along the table at her sister.

  But Jemima was up and on her feet because someone had finally cranked up the gramophone and the dancing was to begin and in less than an hour she and Ronnie would be on the train to Torquay.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AUGUST 1925

  ‘I SAID MAYFAIR NINE-six-eight-oh-eight!’ repeated the testy male voice down the telephone line and Bertha winced, feeling her ears burn red, and prayed that Miss Crisp was not standing behind her.

  ‘Thank you, caller, hold the line, please,’ she said in the singsong voice you were supposed to adopt. Her eyes skimmed across the bank of indicators in front of her and her fingers hung frozen in midair. Nine-six-eight-oh-eight, nine-six-eight-oh-eight. Finally her brain, eyes and fingers began working as a team. ‘Connecting you now,’ she gasped as she stabbed the jack into the switchboard. The male voice disappeared and Bertha drew a deep breath.

  ‘Rude so-and-so,’ she muttered half to herself, half to Elsie, who was perched on a stool beside her, but Elsie was in the middle of a complicated trunk call connection to the Glasgow exchange and didn’t hear her.

  The West Western Telephone Exchange was housed in a square, solid red-brick structure built in a style of architecture reminiscent of a Victorian workhouse that thumbed its nose at the new trends of concrete, chrome and decorative facades. The switchroom was situated at the heart of the exchange. A vast, chilly, hollowed out, cathedral-like hall, it was forty feet from floor to ceiling at its centre, its roof held aloft by a series of cold steel arches, its floor covered with dark polished parquet. In the centre of the switchroom was Miss Crisp, seated before a forbidding Victorian desk, surrounded by thick black ledgers and with command over the single gas heater. Except that Miss Crisp was not at her desk.

  ‘Miss Flaxheed. I should like a word, please.’

  Bertha froze. And for a split second, every operator in the switchroom froze too, forty pairs of hands hung motionless in the air, forty heads jerked perceptibly in one direction and forty unseen callers continued speaking into their receivers even though no one was listening. It only lasted a moment before the constant murmur of female voices resumed its normal level, and a sea of pale, unadorned hands once more flickered over the switchboards connecting and disconnecting as seamlessly as machines.

  Bertha brought her own pale, unadorned hands down into her lap and swivelled around on her stool to face Miss Crisp.

  ‘Yes, Miss Crisp?’

  Miss Crisp was West Western Exchange’s switch-room supervisor and had been so since before the switchroom went automatic in the nineties. She wore her hair up in a severe bun when everyone else in the switchroom—even Nancy Probart who was over thirty and had a nine-year-old daughter—had their hair cut short in a bob or else shingled. Miss Crisp was also the only woman in the switchroom who wore, each day without fail, the sort of starched, white, high-necked blouse and heavy, black ankle-length crinoline skirt that your mother might have thought quite smart in 1901. Her face was very pale, her lips were the colour of lips—quite remarkable in a workplace where every other pair of lips was brilliant scarlet. In fact, Bertha now saw, when you looked closely, Miss Crisp had no lips at all, which was no doubt down to the fact that for thirty years she had pursed them so tightly they had simply vanished.

  Miss Crisp pursed very tightly the area around her mouth where her lips ought to have been. ‘Is there...a problem, Miss Flaxheed?’

  She pronounced the word ‘problem’ in the same way a Victorian lady might have pronounced the word ‘illegitimate’, as though she had heard of such a thing but until this moment had never believed she would encounter it. She raised herself to her full five feet and one quarter inches and quivered. Bertha almost expected to hear the creak of whalebone.

  Bertha opened her mouth but instead of saying something turned beetroot red. A long second passed.

  ‘No, of course not, Miss Crisp. No problem at all,’ she replied at last.

  ‘And yet you appear to be making more mistakes than usual, Miss Flaxheed. More. Mistakes. Than. Usual.’

  Bertha concentrated on Miss Crisp’s highly polished Balmoral boots. Boots that ought to have clicked smartly across the parquetry floor of the switchroom but which, due to some cunning piece of cobbling, made no sound at all, allowing the wearer to slide stealthily and silently about her domain. Out of the corner of her eye she became aware that Elsie had cocked her head to listen, leaving her Glasgow caller dangling on the line. On Bertha’s other side, Fliss Cutler tutted beneath her breath with mock disapproval. And on the far side of Fliss, Nellie Trenoweth had gleefully terminated a call and whirled herself around on her stool to watch.

  There was a perceptible drop in volume in the switchroom, so much so that it was quite likely the callers on the end of the telephone lines would be able to hear Bertha’s reply to Miss Crisp’s observation—if she ever made one.

  ‘Very well then,’ declared Miss Crisp, having received no satisfactory reply—indeed no reply whatsoever. Her bosom rose in majestic indignation. ‘Be warned, Miss Flaxheed, that your conduct is under observation and that any further transgressions on your part shall, indeed will, warrant a full disclosure to Mr Littlejohn!’

  And with this, Miss Crisp swept away with all the grandeur of the Orient Express pulling out of Victoria station.

  Mr Littlejohn.

  A shiver ran the length of the switchroom to the furthest end of the hall, where the single shuttered window high in the ceiling looked out over the rooftops of northern Acton. The shiver rippled back up the opposite side of the room and stopped dead at the solid, firmly closed door that led, by means of a corridor, a second door and an outer office, to Mr Littlejohn’s office.

  Someone sniggered. It sounded like Nellie. ‘Spiteful old cow,’ murmured someone else, and with such perfect diction that it must have been Fliss Cutler.

 
‘She wouldn’t dare, Bert,’ hissed Elsie, leaning over and patting Bertha’s hand.

  No doubt this was intended as a sign of her solidarity. But Bertha had not forgotten that it was Elsie who had let the cat out of the bag to Jemima a year ago about her meeting with Ronnie.

  ‘You have a temporary connection now, caller,’ sang Elsie into the transmitter at her mouth.

  Mr Littlejohn was controller of West Western Telephone Exchange. Few in the switchroom had ever actually seen him until the occasion—now part of West Western folklore—when a raven had flown in through the solitary window and had, for an hour, flapped and squawked and swooped amid the steel rafters of the switchroom, causing mayhem and terror and the whole of the West Western Exchange had come to a complete halt, leaving all of west London from Shepherds Bush to Ealing incommunicado. Eventually Mr Littlejohn himself—six foot tall with steel-grey hair and brandishing a pistol—had emerged through the solid and usually closed door. A number of shots had been rattled off and the raven disposed of. The solitary window had been shuttered immediately and had remained shuttered ever since.

  Bertha had been off sick that day, the result of a nasty head cold contracted after a disappointing picnic at Kew the previous Sunday, and so had missed the one and only exciting event to happen in the switchroom’s history.

  Remembering that particular picnic at Kew five months ago—just two weeks, in fact, after Jemima’s wedding to Ronnie—Bertha forgot entirely about the threat of the mythical Mr Littlejohn and the reality of the vitriolic Miss Crisp. Instead, she allowed herself to dwell on the reason for her ‘more than usual mistakes’ that morning.

  That reason was Mr Lake, of the post office.

  Mr Lake, whose Christian name was Matthew, had appeared unexpectedly at the wedding reception that ghastly Saturday afternoon in March bearing a telegram that had irked Jemima and caused her to summarily dispatch him very shortly afterwards.