by Annie Murray
Annie Murray
Miss Purdy’s Class
PAN BOOKS
Boxing Day, 1935
The bottle smashed through the window and shattered on the blue bricks of the yard.
‘You filthy stinking whore!’
His father flung the door open so that the children’s screams echoed round the yard. He lurched outside. Joey stood dry-eyed, paralysed in the one downstairs room.
There had been plenty of fights. He knew it was different this time.
‘I’m not stopping ’ere one bleeding minute more!’ Wally Phillips stood out in the yard, yelling back at the house. He was a thin, stooped man. ‘I’ve had all a man can take. Four bleedin’ whelps to feed and clothe, and that brat in your belly ain’t even mine! I’ve put up with your boozing and your carrying on . . . I ain’t slaving myself to the bone for you no more . . .’ He stumbled backwards and cursed, just managing to regain his balance. ‘You’re in here with your legs spread for any tomcat who calls at the door . . . You’re filth, Dora – there’s no helping you.’
The children’s crying did not abate. Joey froze somewhere deep inside. His father was circling the yard.
‘That’s right!’ Wally yelled. ‘You all listening, all of you? Call yourselves neighbours? What’ve you ever done for us, eh? Couldn’t stop my wife being a fuckin’ whore, could you? Lying here pouring my wages down her throat . . . What did I do, eh? Loved ’er, I did. In the beginning . . .’ He lowered his voice. ‘Christ, I did.’
For a moment he stood swaying, then he raised his fist and punched at the air so hard he almost fell over. He turned to go.
‘Dad!’ Joey fought to unlock his muscles. He ran outside, seeing his father striding towards the entry bare-headed, shoulders sagging in his threadbare coat. The boy tore after him.
‘Dad – don’t!’ A great sob forced up inside him, as though his chest was ripping apart.
Wally pushed him off with the force of a drowning man. ‘Don’t, son. I can’t. Just can’t. Look after your mother, Joey. You’ll have to be a man now. I can’t live with it no more.’
Joey reeled back, clutching at the sill, his boots crunching on the broken glass. ‘Dad!’ It was a weak, childish cry now, of despair.
Through the broken window came the screaming of his brother and sisters, and his mother’s coughing, on and on, from where she crouched on the bed they’d moved downstairs for her. She was in her twenties, her pale hair unkempt and straggling round her face. She coughed into scraps of rag which came away streaked with blood. Joey didn’t turn to look at her or his howling brother and sisters. He had eyes only for the dark figure hurrying away from them down the entry. A moment later, his father turned the corner and was gone.
‘You’ll never make a wife if you carry on like this before you’ve even reached the altar!’
Her mother’s bitter words propelled Gwen upstairs to the landing, where she stood in the darkness, hands clutching at fistfuls of her festive red skirt, her eyes squeezed shut. She could hardly believe herself! She had done the one thing the Purdy family never, ever did: she had made a scene. How had her inner feelings suddenly popped out like that in front of everyone? Their faces – how awful! Yet she could feel laughter threatening to erupt too. She’d enjoyed shocking them!
‘However am I going to tell Edwin’s parents? You’re abandoning him on the eve of your wedding – heaven knows what the shock might do to an invalid like his mother!’
This was too much for Gwen. She stormed back to the top of the stairs.
‘What are you talking about, Mummy? You’re being completely ridiculous – I’m not getting married for eight months! I’ve taken the job for two terms, that’s all. Until the end of the summer and then I’m coming home to marry Edwin. If it’s too ghastly I can always throw in the towel. Whatever is the matter with that?’
‘But Birmingham, darling!’ Gwen’s mother stood beneath the streamers criss-crossing the hall. Though colourful, they sagged joylessly. ‘Gwen, what has come over you? You’ve taken this job without a by your leave and the school sounds . . .’ Ruth Purdy gave a shudder, ‘. . . well, an absolute disgrace. There’s no telling what kind of rough people you’ll be dealing with! And there’ll be no time to plan the wedding properly. You’re being very selfish. You are my only daughter . . .’ Her mother’s voice was wheedling now. ‘Your father thinks it’s quite appalling.’
‘Does he? Since when has Daddy ever cared what I do?’ When she had made her announcement, carefully leaving it until after Christmas Day, her father had sat in the corner with his newspaper, opting out of family life as usual. His was the only unscandalized face apart from the baby’s.
‘Of course he cares.’ Her mother lowered her voice to hiss up at Gwen. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’
Gwen clenched her fists so that her nails dug into her palms. ‘Mummy, Daddy wouldn’t notice if I did the dance of the seven veils in the middle of the parlour.’
‘Don’t be vulgar . . .’
But Gwen could not contain herself. She could not keep the bitterness from her voice. ‘He’s only ever wanted the boys! In fact, let’s face it, he wanted Johnny to hand the pharmacy on to. Poor old Crispin hardly gets a look in either! All Daddy requires from me is that I keep out of his way and toe the line. Mummy – I am going to do this job in Birmingham. It’s not for long, and whether Edwin likes it or not is not the point. I’m not a vicar’s wife yet. I shall have the rest of my life to fall in with Edwin’s plans. And we shall sort out the wedding, but it doesn’t take eight months’ continuous labour. I’m sorry, I’ve made up my mind. You’re not going to change it.’
Ruth Purdy pushed her hands down into the pockets of her long cardigan in extreme agitation. She was a thin, faded version of her curvaceous daughter and was always terrified of what other people would think. And until now her daughter had been the sweet, biddable teacher at the local school of whom everyone thought so highly.
‘You’re a complete fool, is all I can say. You’ve caught a good man with a respectable profession, you’re teaching at one of the best schools in Worcester and now you want to go and live in a slum!’ She seemed ready to explode with anger.
‘Well, maybe I’m just what they need,’ Gwen retorted. ‘I don’t expect they get many good teachers there. I’ll be able to teach them all a thing or two!’
‘Oh really, there’s no talking to you.’ Ruth began to walk away. ‘You’ll live to regret it – and don’t be surprised if Edwin doesn’t think again about who he’s marrying. He’s not going to want a wife who just takes off without any warning. He’s quite a catch, don’t forget. There are plenty of others who’d jump at him, and it’d serve you right!’ She stalked back to the sitting room, closing the door hard.
Gwen put her hands over her face, opened her mouth and let out a silent scream which came out as a prolonged hiss of breath. She sank down on the top step.
Whatever happens, she vowed, I’m going. She’s not going to stop me.
They’d all be there by the fire – her mother, two brothers and Johnny’s wife, Isabel. They had little James, and already another on the way. And now she’d broken her news they’d all be discussing her in that sober, let’s not really say what we’re thinking, oh-dear-what-a-shame sort of way, pretending that her mother’s cry of horror and her outburst at Gwen had not really happened, like a bad smell in the room which everyone would ignore out of politeness. Especially her sister-in-law, ‘dutiful, beautiful Isabel’, as Gwen secretly called her. She was dark-haired and endlessly serene like the Mona Lisa and she was another reason Gwen wanted to scream.
Gwen crept into her room and sat on the bed looking out at the apple tree. On the bedside table was a small picture in a frame. She picked
it up, smiling ruefully. She really ought to have a picture of Edwin by her bed, with his thick blond hair combed back and his ever-optimistic smile. Edwin looked almost permanently like someone who’d just enjoyed a good cricket match. Instead she was looking at a picture of Amy Johnson, her heroine. She thought Amelia Earhart was wonderful too, though her being American made her seem more distant. Amy was her favourite. Gwen had clippings about all her famous flights: to Australia in her Gypsy Moth in 1930, then later to Japan, Cape Town, the USA. This was her favourite picture. It showed Amy in her flying helmet, goggles perched on her forehead, wearing a leather flying jacket, the high astrakhan collar turned up round her chin. Her strong face looked out from the picture, up towards the sky, as if she was seeing all the places she would soar away to. Gwen stared longingly. How must it feel to fly a plane by yourself? To climb into the cockpit and take off, away from everyone, knowing your life was in your hands alone?
She put the picture down and sighed. Lately she had felt so odd, thoughts and impulses bubbling up in her that she’d never known before. And the way she’d spoken to Mummy! Gwen wasn’t used to disapproval. She’d always tried to be good. She thought of Edwin: tall, good-looking Edwin, who was always so sure he knew right from wrong.
My fiancé, she thought. Dear old Edwin, so good and solid. Her rescuer. She just needed to get this great restlessness out of her system, then she could settle down and marry him.
She sat staring out of the window as the winter sky darkened smokily outside.
Contents
SPRING TERM
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
EASTER HOLIDAYS
Fifteen
SUMMER TERM
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
AUTUMN TERM
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Epilogue
SPRING TERM
1936
One
‘Miss Purdy!’
Knuckles rapped hard on the door. ‘I don’t seem to see you downstairs. I did say breakfast would be at seven forty-five sharp!’
Gwen sat up, heart pounding. Where on earth was she? She took in the dressing table next to her bed, the colourless light filtering in between the curtains. Heavens, the new job! Birmingham! And that voice was her chain-smoking landlady’s. She was out of bed and peeling off her nightdress all in one move.
‘Coming! I’m coming, really I am!’
‘Mr Purvis and I are waiting,’ the voice complained. ‘And your kipper’s spoiling.’
Mrs Black’s tread departed mincingly – Gwen knew it was mincingly because it was the only way she could walk in those heels.
Gwen pulled her clothes on: brassière, camisole – a squeeze to pull it over her generous breasts – stockings, cursing as a splinter from the bare boards snagged into the ball of her foot. Normally she liked dressing: she enjoyed bright colours, hair ribbons, scarves, but there was no time now. Washing herself would have to wait too.
‘Oh, damn you, you wretched things!’ She pulled savagely at her suspenders with trembling fingers. How could she have overslept when she’d spent the night wide-eyed as an owl, staring at those limp curtains which didn’t quite meet in the middle? The last thing she could remember was hearing a tram rumble past outside and dimly, as she faded into sleep, a rising groan of sound which Mrs Black had told her she’d have to get used to when several went off at once the afternoon before. They were the factory ‘bulls’, the sirens indicating the beginning or end of a shift. She must have fallen into a deep sleep only minutes before it was time to get up. What a dreadful start to her first day!
She pushed her feet into her shoes without unfastening the straps, hastily coiled her thick hair up at the back, skewering it into place with a hairslide and tore out of her room along the brown lino of the landing and down the sludge-coloured runner of stair carpet. Dear God, this house was awful! But it was an adventure, she told herself, and adventure was what she needed.
‘Do I hear you coming, Miss Purdy?’ Mrs Black’s plaintive voice came to her. ‘Your kipper’s almost on its last legs.’
Meals, Mrs Black had informed her the evening before, were to be taken in the back room, a fussy place crammed full of pictures and ornaments. A row of dolls with china heads and big sad eyes sat along the dresser. They had sat together, a most meagre fire struggling for life in the grate, for a meal of Welsh rarebit edged with crinkly slices of pickled beetroot, topped off with cherry Madeira cake and a cup of tea. Gwen’s fellow lodger, a Mr Harold Purvis, had only arrived two days earlier himself, to take up work in the accounts department of a local machine-tool firm.
‘So nice,’ their landlady had said fawningly as she introduced them, ‘to begin the new year with new faces in the house.’ She gave a sigh. ‘I’m reduced to lodgers since I lost my George.’
Mr Purvis blushed and murmured a greeting. He was well into his thirties, with a doleful face and a bald pate, around which clung a ring of black, neatly trimmed and rather oily hair.
The Welsh rarebit had had a strangely lumpy consistency which made Gwen grateful for the sharp vinegar in the beetroot.
‘It’s hard to go wrong with pickles, isn’t it?’ Mr Purvis remarked gloomily. He was evidently cursed with adenoids.
Gwen smiled and agreed, thinking: Oh my goodness, are we going to have to sit here making polite conversation every night? They had asked one another a few questions – yes, he was new to the area, had moved across from Oldbury. Oh, she was a teacher, was she? That was nice. From Worcester? Gracious. Bit different here, eh?
Mrs Black’s voice sounded as if she gargled with tin tacks. All the time they were eating, she raided her packet of Player’s for one cigarette after another and the air had a blue tinge. She kept calling Mr Purvis ‘Harold’.
‘Harold is a musical man, he tells me,’ she informed Gwen. ‘He plays the trumpet. I hope you don’t mind me calling you Harold?’ She told them her own name was Ariadne.
‘I like people to know.’ She held a little piece of cherry Madeira between her stubby finger and thumb, little finger crooked. ‘The name Black is so very ordinary, isn’t it? I like to feel my Christian name is something rather out of the way.’
‘It’s certainly that,’ Gwen agreed.
‘Latin, isn’t it?’ Mr Purvis ventured, wiping his chin. ‘Wasn’t she the er . . . lady with the hair made of snakes?’
‘Oh, aren’t you clever?’ Mrs Black cried, leaning towards him.
Gwen, from reading books of myths to schoolchildren, knew perfectly well that Ariadne was the one who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth using a ball of string, but this didn’t seem the moment to mention the fact. She eyed Ariadne Black, trying to decide how old she was. Anywhere, s
he decided, between forty-five and sixty. Mrs Black favoured floaty, diaphanous clothes and wore her hair shingled and shaded a gingery blonde that could only come out of a bottle. She looked, Gwen decided, as if she’d just stepped off the stage of a variety performance. And her affected Brummy accent made Gwen want to giggle.
This morning, as Gwen dashed in, mouthing apologies, she found Mrs Black standing behind Mr Purvis’s chair, slightly to the side of it, one hand resting on the back almost as if she was expecting someone to come and paint a portrait of the pair of them. Her eyebrows were brown lines pencilled in at an enquiring angle and even this early in the morning she had applied a fulsome coating of scarlet lipstick.
‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘At last! Mr Purvis has been ever so patient, haven’t you?’ She leaned down and patted his arm before taking her seat.
Harold Purvis said, ‘Good morning,’ and stared so hard at Gwen’s chest that she felt compelled to glance down and check whether the buttons of her dress had come undone. She hurried to her seat, bracing herself for the food.
They sat in morning light strained through net curtains. The one window faced over the side alley, but Mrs Black still kept it well shrouded. There was no fire in the grate and the room was cold. On plates in front of them, the kippers lay like a pair of moccasins left too long in the sun. Ariadne Black seemed to be breakfasting on cigarettes and tea. Beside her plate lay a copy of the Birmingham Gazette.
‘I hope you won’t mind.’ She pursed her lips coyly at them both. ‘Mr Purvis already knows I like to have my little read of the paper at breakfast time.’
‘Not at all,’ Gwen said, picking up her knife and fork.
‘You do like kipper?’ Ariadne Black leaned towards her and Gwen saw swirls of powder across her cheeks.
‘Oh yes, thank you,’ she lied, wondering how, this morning of all mornings, she was ever going to swallow it down.
In the homes around Canal Street School, the children were getting ready for the first day of term after the Christmas holidays.
Two boys burst out from the front door of a shop, setting the bell clanging madly. Parks’s Sweet Shop was situated almost under the railway bridge, so on sunny mornings the colourful array of goodies in the windows blazed in the light, but by the afternoon it was so dark and shaded it was, as Mrs Parks often remarked, ‘like living buried in a plot in the bleeding cemetery’. This morning, as it was the first day back at school, she followed her two youngest offspring to the door, pulling her cardi round her in the freezing morning. The two lads were off along the street, hands going to their mouths pretending they were smoking and puffing out warm breath to condense in white clouds in front of them.