Miss Purdy's Class

by Annie Murray

  Sounds roused him: the tearing noise of paper – Mrs Simmons’s kids were playing at something – then another knock at the door. More voices.

  ‘I’ve told them.’ It was a man’s voice. ‘I’ve just been to Barnardo’s and the other place – they said they were full. Too many already. Barnardo’s said they couldn’t be sure they’d all be kept together. But there’ll be someone round in the morning, sharp.’

  Barnardo’s. The word reached Joey, hammered into his stunned mind. The people who took Polly and Kenny were coming for him and Lena! The ice in him melted to be replaced by a tight sensation, as if he was going to explode. He strained his ears, listening to every word.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ Mrs Simmons said. She coughed convulsively, her whole body quivering. Joey thought he would burst, waiting for her to recover, to hear what she had to say next. ‘Still – what else can I do? Sooner the better – get it over with. They’ll be best off in a home. Poor little buggers.’

  Thirteen

  There were two women in the shop when they reached 15 Alma Street and they stood back to let Gwen and Daniel through with Lucy. Theresa Fernandez was behind the counter. Gwen saw she was wearing a navy blue blouse buttoned to her throat and her dark hair was taken back more tightly than last time they met. The overall effect was to make her look neater and younger.

  ‘Afternoon, Miss Purdy,’ she said, sounding a little startled. Her eyes were anxious. ‘Everything all right with Lucy?’

  Gwen could feel the two ladies’ eyes examining her coat, hair, shoes.

  ‘Oh yes, she’s perfectly all right,’ Daniel said, nodding at the customers. ‘I just asked Miss Purdy back for a cup of tea.’

  ‘Hello.’ Gwen smiled. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Theresa lifted the hatch in the counter to let them through. ‘It was just, seeing you, I thought the worst for a minute.’

  As they went out, she heard one of the women in the shop say, ‘Pretty little thing, ent she? She really a teacher? She don’t look old enough!’

  Daniel led her into the blue back room, then seemed at a loss.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ he said awkwardly, nodding towards the table. Resting on it was a block of salt, obviously newly delivered. The end where it had been cut was a gleaming white. The chairs were all tucked neatly under the table. Gwen pulled one out and sat down. She felt nervous too.

  Next to the salt was a newspaper. The Daily Worker, Gwen read. She felt Daniel watching her as she looked at it. She was acutely conscious again of being in a household utterly foreign to her: people who were Catholic, spoke differently, read newspapers she had never heard of before. The thought was both unsettling and exciting.

  In the sudden silence she became aware of Lucy making faces at her brother and looking meaningfully at the stove. When he still didn’t get the message, she hissed, ‘Daniel, aren’t you going to make Miss Purdy some tea?’

  ‘Oh yes – sorry!’ Daniel looked enquiringly at Gwen.

  ‘Tea would be very nice,’ Gwen said, smiling at their awkwardness. But she too felt flustered and self-conscious.

  ‘Right then.’ Daniel hobbled over to the stove and stared at it as if he’d never seen it before. He leaned down to turn on the gas.

  ‘Is there any water in the kettle?’ Lucy prompted.

  ‘Ah well – no, probably not . . .’ He turned suddenly, gave a disarming grin and went to lean his crutch against the wall.

  ‘Let me do it.’ Gwen got up and swiftly took the kettle to the stone sink in the scullery in a fraction of the time it would have taken either Daniel or Lucy with their bad legs. It was a big kettle and she had to lift it with both hands once it was full.

  ‘There – you must need a big one like this with a family this size,’ she said, putting it down over the lit flame. Lucy was smiling, appearing thrilled at having her beloved teacher making tea in her house.

  There was a clamour at the door and Rosa came in, followed by Vincent and Dominic.

  ‘I’m hungry!’ Dominic cried. He was eleven or so, Gwen calculated – older than Rosa and younger than Vincent, who was soon to leave school, and a handsome, dark-eyed boy with an intense expression, more like Daniel than any of the others.

  ‘You’re forever hungry, Dom,’ Daniel said, cutting slices from a loaf for them all. ‘I think you’ve got a worm inside you.’

  ‘Sister Bridget took my dinner away when I’d hardly started it – she said I had bad manners,’ Dominic said resentfully.

  ‘Why – what were you doing?’ Daniel teased.

  Gwen watched his face. He’s lovely, she found herself thinking. For a moment she remembered her dream and a blush flooded across her cheeks. She hoped none of the children had noticed.

  ‘He put his knife in his mouth,’ Rosa sounded disparaging. She seemed old for her eleven years. ‘You’re stupid, Dom – you know Sister Bridget’s mad on manners and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Just mad, more like,’ Dominic said sulkily.

  ‘Now, now,’ Daniel said. ‘We have a teacher here, remember.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Gwen laughed and stood up to slip off her coat.

  ‘Take the salt, Dom, will you?’ Daniel nodded towards the scullery and Dominic came and lifted the block off the table.

  The Fernandez children each wolfed down a slice of bread and margarine, all talking at once, then the room went quiet as they disappeared out through the shop again, Rosa taking charge of Lucy.

  ‘She’s very beautiful,’ Gwen said, watching the older girl lead her sister out of the front door.

  ‘Rosa? Yes, I s’pose she is,’ Daniel said. Clearly he’d never thought about it before. ‘She’s a good girl. Helps our ma a lot.’

  ‘It sounds as if you all do.’ She had been struck by how close the family were.

  Daniel nodded, limping to the table with the brown teapot. For a moment his expression was serious. ‘Needs must.’

  He sat opposite her, the tea brewing between them. There was an oilcloth on the table today, and Daniel had brought over three thick white cups. She looked shyly across at him.

  ‘So – do you have a job? Yourself, I mean, apart from the shop?’

  Daniel nodded, jiggling the handle of the teapot. ‘Off and on. What I can get. I do a bit of house painting, repairs and that. Can’t do any of that with this though –’ He looked down ruefully at his leg with the plaster cast on it. ‘And I’m not always here, see.’

  Gwen was confused. ‘How can you keep a job if you keep moving about?’

  ‘I work when I can. But my real work is with the movement and the party.’

  She could hear the passion in his voice, but she had no idea what he was talking about and just stared at him, feeling foolish.

  ‘The NUWM – National Unemployed Workers’ Movement,’ Daniel explained. He leaned forward, elbows on the table. His tone was patient but she could sense his disbelief at her ignorance. ‘The valleys are full of unemployed men who’ve been locked out of the mines or forced out by scab labour. They’re expected to let their families starve while the bosses rake in the profits. The princes of capitalism have all the power to decide the fate of the working man. They can cast him aside when he can’t or won’t produce the profits they want to wring out of him by the sweat of his labour. And even when he’s unemployed they beat him down with the means test, take away the last of his dignity and make him live like a beggar, a pauper on the parish. The movement is getting unemployed men together as a body to say – enough!’

  All this came pouring out fluently. The intensity of his words thrilled through her. He spoke without looking away from her, eyes ablaze under the thick black curls. In those moments, Gwen knew for certain that she was with someone quite unlike anyone she had ever met before.

  ‘Only when we’re together can we be strong, can we stand up to them. We will not be the slaves of capitalist dictators!’

  Daniel seemed about to thump his fist on the table, but inst
ead he poured the tea. He got up to take a cup to his mother in the shop and was talking on the way back before he had even sat down.

  ‘Look what happened at Mardy – 1931, when the means test was biting into mining families who’d had no work in months or years. That’s what they do, see?’ He sat down, leaning forward to impress the words on her, knowing she came from another world, did not understand. She could feel the force of his need to make her understand, and she wanted to know, but already she was floundering. Where was Mardy?

  ‘They steal their jobs, then steal their homes. The movement stood with a household where they’d come to take away the furniture before they’d pay them a penny to feed their bellies. Well, they got them for unlawful assembly, didn’t they? Called them “conspirators – little Moscow”. When they went to the assizes in Cardiff, twenty-nine of them were sent to prison – seven years’ hard labour for the lot of them.’ Daniel sat back, his lip curling. ‘Police courts – that’s what they are, lock, stock and barrel. No one else’s word counts.’

  He took a gulp of tea and there was silence for a moment. Gwen could just hear the distant sounds of children playing out at the front.

  She didn’t know what to say, where to begin. There had been marches in protest against the means test, that she remembered. Grainy newspaper pictures of groups with banners. But the test had been something far away, had not come near to touching her. Had it touched any of her pupils in Worcester? She didn’t know, hadn’t thought. One or two, perhaps. She felt ashamed that she didn’t know. Everything Daniel was saying seemed so new, so different from the life she had known.

  ‘And the party? You said you worked for the party?’

  Daniel reached to take something out of his back pocket.

  ‘My party card,’ he said, showing it to her proudly, before replacing it. ‘Communist Party of Great Britain.’ His voice contained a swell of pride. He was watching for her reaction, but she didn’t understand what sort of reaction he expected. Russia, she thought. The Soviet Union. Revolution. Lenin. What else should she know about Communists? She just thought of them as foreign and even more distant from her life than the means test. And she’d never been interested in politics. Edwin talked about it sometimes – about Hitler and Mussolini, how they had to be stopped. But it never felt real and Edwin did tend to go on a bit. Usually she just waited until he’d finished. Her parents never said who they voted for, but she knew they voted Conservative. She wasn’t sure how she knew: it seemed to be taken for granted in the circles they moved in.

  Blushing, she said, ‘I’m dreadfully ignorant, I’m afraid.’

  Daniel watched her in silence for a moment, as if trying to decide something. Then he got up. ‘Just a moment. Let me show you.’

  Taking his crutch, he went to the tiny cupboard under the stairs. Gwen heard a sound like a tin box opening. A moment later he came limping back with a big leatherbound book. She was startled. Of course Catholics had statues of Mary and Jesus, but somehow she hadn’t imagined Daniel to be religious. Religion was another thing her family didn’t talk about at home. They simply went to church on Sundays and that was that. Even Edwin, in a funny way, didn’t actually say much about what he believed. It was taken for granted that it went with his calling, with the dog collar.

  ‘Are we going to do a bible study?’ she asked, flippant in her uncertainty.

  Daniel stared at her, then burst out laughing as he put the heavy book down on the table. The sound of his laughter passed right through her.

  ‘Well, it’s my Bible,’ he said, moving his chair closer to hers. ‘And I dare say Jesus Christ would find a lot in here to agree about. Though Mam might have a go at me for saying that!’

  Gwen leaned down to read the gold lettering on the spine. ‘CAPITAL. KARL MARX.’

  ‘This,’ Daniel said solemnly, his hand stroking the worn maroon leather, ‘is the message of justice and liberation for mankind.’

  She was struck by his certainty, felt in herself immediately a hunger to understand what gave him such passionate conviction. Daniel sat down next to her and in those moments she became aware of an overwhelming combination of feelings, as if her whole being, mind and body, was subject to an electric current stimulated by his physical proximity, by his words, the fact that he was about to tell her his thoughts. Once again all the hairs on her body were standing on end, as if raised by a magnet. She gave a small shudder, as if something had stroked her all over.

  ‘You cold?’

  ‘No! I’m perfectly all right,’ she said, smiling.

  Daniel opened the book. Its flyleaf was covered in tiny writing in a neat, copperplate hand. Gwen saw a note. ‘Read page 786. This chapter is one of the classics of Socialism.’ As Daniel turned the pages, she saw that there were footnotes and annotations in the margins, and sheets of paper inserted between pages, again all closely written over. She read various chapter headings, ‘Commodities and Money’, ‘The Labour Process’, ‘Division of Labour and Manufacture’. Her eyes met Daniel’s.

  ‘All that writing – did you do that?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve studied every line of it.’

  ‘But it looks so . . . dense.’

  ‘It’s not easy. But there were lectures, see. I went to the Labour College down London for a time. Now I study on my own, keep it going like.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it. But I don’t know anything,’ she said wretchedly.

  And Daniel began to talk. He talked about the working classes, about how the only way they would achieve justice for themselves was by uniting together against the enemy, which was the capitalist system. He talked and talked about Marx and his writings, some of which she understood and some she didn’t. How, in the course of history, capital had become the basis of commodity production. The workers made something from materials that cost almost nothing, and through giving their labour turned it into something that could be sold for profit.

  ‘Profit is theft from the workers of what is rightfully theirs,’ he said.

  Gwen nodded, trying to keep up with him.

  ‘The capitalist owners have the power to keep the workers in their place. Capitalism survives on their exploitation. And while we’re all divided, our energy sapped, nothing is going to change. Our task in the Communist Party is to unite the workers, that’s when we’re powerful. I’ve seen it – I’ve caught glimpses of it, Miss Purdy, in the valleys, in the coalfields, when the workers unite and speak with one voice.’ His voice was low and passionate. ‘And it’s a vision. A force and a vision of what could be. So yes –’ once again he laid his hand on the book. It was a strong, fine hand and she found herself longing to lay her own over it – ‘it’s my Bible. My vision of the heavenly city if you like. Against oppression and the scourge of fascism.’

  She watched him, entranced. For moments, as he talked, he reminded her of Edwin, talking without pause, eager to voice his ideas. But with Edwin she tended to find her mind wandering, whereas with Daniel she was caught by the earnest force of his words. She felt as if her mind, her life, was expanding as she listened to him, as if a wide window was being flung open onto a way of thinking and seeing that she had never experienced before.

  ‘But . . .’ she stammered, ‘how?’

  ‘By making them wake up! By education, by speaking and showing people that they don’t have to lie down under oppression! By showing them that unity is our strength. That’s what I do, you see. That’s my life’s work.’

  This last statement resulted in a pause, during which Paul Fernandez came in from work. Gwen felt as if she had been woken from a dream.

  ‘Afternoon, Miss Purdy,’ he said shyly. He was the fairest of the Fernandez children and very like his mother. Gwen guessed him to be about sixteen.

  She roused herself. It was time to get home! She was going to be late for tea, and there was no telling what Harold Purvis might accuse her of getting up to.

  ‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘time’s getting on – and I had marvellous intentions of
going to see that boy, Joey Phillips – the one whose mother died. I’ll have to go tomorrow now.’

  ‘I waylaid you,’ Daniel said.

  ‘No, I was willingly waylaid. It’s been very interesting – thank you.’ Her words sounded feeble compared to the way she felt.

  They stood up and for a moment were unnervingly close to one another. Gwen stepped back.

  ‘I’ll be here a while longer,’ Daniel said. ‘Will you come and see us again?’

  ‘Lena. Lena!’

  Joey whispered urgently to her in the darkness. There was no reply. He could only hear her rasping breaths beside him.

  ‘Wake up – you’ve got to get up!’ He shook her, desperate now. Lena’s only response was a little catlike whimper.

  All day Joey had waited, trying not to show the neighbours anything of what was going on inside him. Barnardo’s. They passed the word around the room with each new visitor, whispered or spoken aloud as if he was deaf or didn’t exist. Tomorrow morning. Someone would be coming to take them away. In his mind it was always a man, so tall that his head was out of sight up in the sky, and he would have huge hands, gripping chains which he’d wrap round them like the strong man in the Bull Ring then drag them away to the orphanage. Orphanage. The word clanged in his mind over and over, like an iron door slamming shut.

  All day he said not a word, but the fear twisted and tightened in him. At last the Simmons family had made their rowdy way up to bed and Joey and Lena were put downstairs to sleep on a straw mattress. Lena had hardly opened her eyes all day. In the evening she woke for a short time and sipped some milk, but then she sicked it up again and went back to sleep.