A Mother's Promise

by Dilly Court

  Before Hetty had a chance to gather her scattered wits, George had frogmarched Clench down the passage and she heard the front door open and then slam shut. George returned with a triumphant smile on his face. ‘That’s got rid of him, for now at least. If I see him round here again I swear I’ll wring his scraggy neck.’

  ‘Forget him for now,’ Hetty said, snatching her bonnet off the hook behind the door. ‘I’ve got more important things to worry about at the moment. I’m going to Totty Street to bring Granny and the boys back here.’

  ‘But, Hetty,’ Jane protested. ‘Shouldn’t you ask Nora first? I mean, her letting rooms are all full.’

  ‘There’s the room that Charles had.’ Hetty’s breath hitched on a sob, but somehow she managed to keep a tight rein on her emotions. Granny and the boys needed her help and she was not going to fail them. ‘I don’t mind sleeping in the attic. We’ll cope, and Nora will welcome the extra rent.’

  ‘How will we manage though, Hetty?’ Jane asked, setting a wriggling Natalia down on the floor, where she made a beeline for Hetty. ‘How will we find food and rent for all of us, let alone pay for the boys’ schooling?’

  George hooked his arm around Hetty’s shoulders. ‘I can help if needs be, Hetty. Don’t forget I am the “and Co.”’

  ‘I won’t ever forget that, George. Ta all the same, but we’ll manage. The boys can go to the ragged school and Jane can manage my stall in the market.’

  ‘What?’ Jane shrieked. ‘Me run a coffee stall? I don’t know how. And, anyway, I got to do the cooking and look after baby.’

  ‘You’ll soon learn,’ Hetty said, smiling. ‘I did. And with two stalls we’ll double our income.’ She bent down to scoop Natalia up in her arms. ‘Granny will stay at home and look after Talia, won’t she, my little pet?’

  As if in answer, Natalia made cooing noises and gave Hetty a rather wet kiss on the cheek.

  Jane threw up her hands in despair. ‘You know that Granny doesn’t like babies. She won’t do it.’

  Hetty met George’s amused gaze with a determined lift of her chin. ‘Oh yes she will. If we’re to make money, everyone will have to do their bit. The boys can help on the stalls when they’ve finished their lessons and Granny can learn to bake cakes. One day I’ll get you all out of here into a house of our own. You see if I don’t.’

  George gave her shoulders an encouraging squeeze. ‘I don’t doubt you for a minute, girl. My barrow is outside. I’ll come with you to Totty Street and we can start shifting your granny’s things here.’

  ‘You’re not leaving me to face Nora on me own,’ Jane declared, jumping up and reaching for her shawl. ‘I’ll put baby in her perambulator and we’ll come too. I’m sure Tom would give us a hand, if we asked him nicely.’

  Hetty nodded in agreement. ‘Yes, I’m sure he would. You go on ahead and ask him, Jane. He won’t be able to refuse you.’ Despite her agitation, Hetty couldn’t help smiling at Jane’s eagerness to include Tom. Perhaps one day he would see beneath her youthful flightiness, and realise that Jane was a kind and loving person, who would make him a wonderful wife. With her own heart bursting with love for Charles, and safe in the knowledge that he returned her affection, Hetty wanted everyone in the world to experience the joy she was feeling. Even the thought of Clench and his hateful crony Shipworthy could not completely dampen her spirits. Besides, it would be good to have the whole family together again under one roof. She had missed her brothers, even if they were little imps at times, and she had even missed Granny with her caustic tongue and strict rules. She might have the very devil of a temper when roused, but at least you knew where you stood with Granny Huggins.

  ‘No! No! No! I ain’t budging from this house, and that’s my final word.’ Granny sat bolt upright in her chair by the fire, gripping the armrests as though she was afraid that someone might attempt to remove her bodily. ‘You can all go back where you came from and leave me here to defend what’s mine.’ She scowled ominously at Tom and George who stood, caps in hands, filling the small room with their large presence.

  ‘Please, Granny,’ Hetty said softly. ‘You must come with us. They’ll send the bailiffs in if you insist on staying put.’

  ‘I don’t care. It would take more than that to make me leave my home. I’ve lived in this house since I was a young bride. For forty years or more I’ve cleaned and scrubbed, polished and kept this place as neat as a new pin. Your grandfather earned the right to have this house for his lifetime and mine. I won’t be turned out of it now.’

  Jane gave a nervous cough. ‘But Granny . . .’

  ‘Don’t you try your wheedling ways on me, girl. I’m staying put and I’m not budging for anyone.’ Granny turned her attention to George, wagging her finger at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, young man. This is a family matter.’

  Hetty cast him an apologetic glance. ‘He is almost family, Granny. George has helped me out no end of times, and you know it.’

  ‘He’s a costermonger. A street trader! You could do better for yourself, Hetty. Don’t forget that your grandpa was a respectable head clerk. He wouldn’t have allowed you to go walking out with a common coster.’

  ‘Granny!’ Hetty knew she was blushing and she cast an anxious glance at George, but he seemed to be genuinely amused.

  ‘You mustn’t worry, Mrs Huggins,’ he said, chuckling. ‘Hetty is not stepping out with me. She has better taste. I’m just a friend and business partner, and I’ve come to help you move your belongings to the house in Princelet Street.’

  ‘Have you now? Well, you’ve had a wasted journey, young man. I ain’t going.’

  Jane nudged Tom in the ribs. ‘Say something, Tom. She likes you.’

  ‘I heard that, Jane Huggins,’ Granny said, scowling. ‘I’m not deaf and I’m not senile. I can make my own mind up, and I tell you, I won’t leave my home.’

  Sammy and Eddie had been sitting quietly on the floor with Natalia, who was crawling all over them, but at this moment Sammy scrambled to his feet. He clutched Hetty’s hand. ‘I’ll come with you. I’ve missed you, Hetty. And I don’t mind leaving school to help you on the stall. I could be part of the “and Co.” with George.’

  ‘Me too,’ Eddie cried, attempting to get up from the floor, but Natalia was sitting on him and chuckling as if this was all part of a game. ‘Get her off me, Jane. She’s got a wet bum.’

  Tut-tutting, Jane picked up Natalia and took her, protesting loudly, out of the room.

  ‘Maybe she needs a hand,’ Tom murmured, hurrying after her.

  ‘Go on,’ Granny said, waving her hand at Hetty and George. ‘You go too. I don’t need any of you. I can look after myself.’

  ‘Oh, Granny. Must you be so stubborn?’ Hetty demanded, sighing. ‘Why won’t you come with us?’

  ‘Because this is my home. I’ve lived here for most of my life and I’ll die here. You can take the boys if you must, but I’m staying. I’ve got my business to run, and neither Shipworthy nor all the governors of Tipton’s Bank are going to force me to move out.’

  Hetty’s patience was being stretched to its limit. Granny was a stubborn old woman, and, although she admired her spirit, Hetty was not going to stand by and allow her to be ejected forcibly or humiliated in the eyes of her neighbours. She nudged George in the ribs. ‘Leave this to me. I’d like a few words with Granny in private.’

  ‘Call me if you need me,’ he said, beckoning to the boys. ‘We’ll wait outside.’

  Hetty waited until the door closed behind them and then she turned to her grandmother. ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Yes you are, Granny. You either come with us now, keeping a bit of dignity, or I’ll go away and leave it to the bailiffs to throw you out on the street in front of all your neighbours.’ Folding her arms across her chest, Hetty stood squarely in front of her. ‘It’s your decision, but I’d think about it carefully if I was you.’

  ‘Don’t you try to browbeat me, girl.’


  Hetty was quick to hear the tremulous note in her grandmother’s voice, and, for the first time, she saw a hint of fear in the faded blue eyes, which must once have been almost the same deep shade as her own. She realised suddenly that they were alike, she and Granny Huggins: strong, determined women with wills of their own. But for all her bold words, Granny was growing old, and the world was a harsh place for the elderly and unprotected. Hetty knelt down in front of her, taking the thin, veined hands in hers. ‘Granny, you took us in when we was destitute. You never asked us to come here and you didn’t want us, but you still fed us and gave us a roof over our heads. You saw off Clench and Shipworthy with all guns blazing. They might have won for now, but I promise you I’ll make them both sorry they ever had it in for the Huggins family.’

  ‘You and whose army?’ Granny demanded, sniffing.

  Hetty chuckled. ‘You’ll see one day that I’m a chip off the old block. Come with us now, please. We need you in Princelet Street, honest we do.’

  Granny drew her hands away and she fumbled in her pocket, bringing out a hand-kerchief and blowing her nose. ‘You and your wheedling ways, Hetty Huggins. You get that from your grandpa. He could talk his way out of anything.’

  ‘Then you’ll come with us?’

  ‘I suppose someone has got to keep an eye on you all, but I want every last stick of furniture moved out of this house. I won’t leave anything for those blackguards, not a thing.’

  It took Tom and George several trips with the barrow, but eventually they managed to empty the house before midnight. Hetty sent Granny, Jane and Natalia home in a hackney carriage while she pushed the perambulator filled with Granny’s best china and silver-plated spoons, and Sammy and Eddie trudged beside her with their few possessions bundled into two sacks.

  By the time they reached Princelet Street, Jane had explained everything to Nora who, as usual, had taken it all in her stride and was bustling about organising the rooms. She greeted Hetty with a cheerful smile. ‘No need to say nothing, girl. We look after our own in the East End, and Nora Jackson has never turned away a soul in distress.’ She drew Hetty aside, nodding her head in Granny’s direction as she sat in the rocking chair by the fire. ‘She’s fair wore out, ducks. She might be spunky, but she’s old and tired. You done right in bringing her here, Hetty. I’ll put the word round the market. If that bloke Clench sets foot in there again, he’ll be sorry.’

  If Hetty had had any doubts about how Granny and Nora would rub along together, she was surprised and delighted to find that she had worried needlessly. Despite Granny’s notion that people fell into two basic categories, those with brains and breeding and those without, she and Nora hit it off from the start. Granny appeared to recover quickly from the shock of being evicted from her home, but Hetty sensed that the hurt went far deeper than she was prepared to admit. Her altered circumstances might have chastened her abrasive spirit just a little, but Granny Huggins was not one to give in to despair. She accepted her new role with resignation, if not with good grace, and she took over the cooking with more enthusiasm than Hetty would have thought possible. Perhaps it had something to do with the huge kitchen range, which had two ovens and a large water boiler creating an endless supply of hot, strong tea. Nora was not stingy when it came to housekeeping, and, although their diet was plain, there was plenty to go round and no one went to bed hungry.

  Granny was a reluctant nursemaid, but she tolerated Natalia now that she had grown past the helpless baby stage and was attempting to walk, pulling herself up on her chubby legs and clambering round the furniture with the inevitable tumbles. Sammy and Eddie were sent to the ragged school, coming home with the occasional black eye and an impressive selection of bruises from playground fights, but Granny’s advice was unchanging. ‘You’ve got to stand up for yourselves in this world. If they’re the same size as you, hit them back. If they’re smaller than you, tell them that Spring-heeled Jack will get them. If they’re bigger than you, kick the little blighters in the shins and run for it.’

  Having left Jane in charge of the market stall, Hetty took her newly equipped barrow to a pitch outside Liverpool Street station. At first she had to jostle for a place, competing with other street traders, but she had learnt to be tough, and was not as easily scared as she had been when she had first tried to sell hot potatoes in Bethnal Green. In a matter of weeks she had attracted a regular stream of customers, and she had added cocoa to her menu, as well as tea and coffee. She knew that some stall-holders adulterated their coffee with chicory but Hetty bought freshly roasted coffee beans and ground them herself. She used only the prime cuts of gammon, and bread fresh from the bakery each day which she spread with butter and not margarine. She might have made more profit by what she considered to be cheating, but she soon earned the reputation for the finest coffee and the tastiest sandwiches in the East End. Hetty took pride in providing only the best.

  To everyone’s surprise, Jane had taken to working on the market stall with enthusiasm, and she was proving to be a great success. Her naturally vivacious and flirtatious nature attracted customers both male and female, and she was soon the darling of the costermongers. She even began collecting pearl buttons and spent her evenings sewing them on her clothes under the guidance of Nora, whose festive costume was so heavily embellished with mother-of-pearl that it would almost stand up by itself. Both Tom and George were regular callers at the house, although, as Granny remarked with acerbity, ‘it’s hard to say which one of you girls attracts them the most.’

  Hetty hoped that Tom was coming to see Jane, but he seemed to be as happy when he was amusing Natalia or the boys as he was when chatting to either Jane or herself.

  When Hetty had finished work for the day, she would drag her tired limbs up four flights of stairs to the attic room where she slept amongst the items saved from Granny’s house. It was like living in a furniture repository, but Hetty ignored the discomfort. In the flickering light of a single candle she would read and reread the letters from Charles which arrived with unfailing regularity every week. In these rare quiet moments she would write in reply, struggling with her grammar and spellings and the occasional ink blot made even larger by the tears that sprang to her eyes when she realised how much she loved and missed him. He was, he said, now working in his father’s bank and was the most junior of all the clerks. He was at everyone’s beck and call, but he wrote, underlining the words in bold strokes, that he did not mind this at all if it brought their reunion a little nearer. His pay was so low that it was an insult, but his father was adamant that Charles was not to be given any privileges above the rest of the staff. He was going to learn the banking business if it killed him. With a hint of humour, Charles said that he was so far at the bottom of the heap that he could go no further without tunnelling into the vaults.

  When Hetty wrote back she was careful only to tell him about the positive aspects of running a coffee stall outside one of the busiest railway stations in London. She did not recount the incidents when certain cabbies refused to pay, threatening her with a beating if she called a copper, or the insults she had to bear from other stallholders who resented a woman working in a male-dominated trade. She failed to mention the pilfering of food by half-starved street urchins, to which she turned a blind eye, reasoning that in different circumstances it could have been Sammy or Eddie who were driven to such depths of despair.

  In the silence of the attic room Hetty felt so close to Charles that she could almost reach out and touch him. She would hold the ever increasing bundle of letters to her breast, closing her eyes and conjuring up a vision of his face. She recalled the way his hair would suddenly flop down over his eyes, causing him the thrust it back with an impatient hand. She could mentally trace the firm outline of his cheekbones and the slightly lopsided curve of his lips when he smiled, and his eyes that changed from smoky blue to misty grey when he was sad. Every look and every word he had ever addressed to her was imprinted on her memory to be remembered with delight and
a great deal of heartache. Even the paper on which he had written in elegant copperplate held a faint trace of his own familiar scent: expensive cologne and sandalwood soap with just a hint of a fine Havana cigar. She could still feel the tender touch of his lips when he had kissed her in the park, that hot and steamy Sunday in July. Her longing for him was a physical pain, but the memory of it put steel in her soul and made her even more determined to make a go of her business. If Charles did not send for her within a year, Hetty had made up her mind to go to Philadelphia and seek him out.

  On the hot summer nights, when she was too exhausted to write any more, she would lie down on her narrow iron bed and stare through the grimy panes of the roof window, peering at the diamond pinpoints of stars twinkling in the black velvet sky. Was Charles looking up at them and thinking of her? She would eventually drift off to sleep and dream that he had come for her, but harsh reality would return with the dawn, and each new day brought the prospect of long hours, sore feet and blistered hands. Hetty suffered it all without complaint. As long as she could put away a little money each week in a leather pouch which she hid beneath a loose floorboard in the attic, she was satisfied that she was on her way to a blissful reunion with the only man she had ever truly loved.

  The blistering heat of August eased gradually into the mellow month of September. The days grew shorter and the mornings chillier in October, and November brought the return of the dreaded peasouper fog that wrapped itself around London in an evil-smelling, suffocating blanket, blotting out sight and sound, and making trade impossible. When the fog lifted, the pot-bellied clouds brought torrential rain to the streets, and workers who might have stopped for a cup of something hot or a bite to eat before embarking on their bus or train journeys to the suburbs hurried past Hetty’s stall intent on getting home as fast as possible.

  Late one afternoon towards the end of November, a sudden thunderstorm had forced Hetty to pack up her barrow earlier than she would normally have done. She was soaked to the skin before she reached Spital Square, and the sore throat which had started that morning had now developed into a racking cough. She trudged homewards, pushing the heavy barrow with her booted feet slipping and sliding on the wet cobblestones. Someone hailed her as she was about to pass the north entrance to Spitalfields market, and she stopped to wipe the rainwater from her eyes. George came hurrying out of the market with a piece of sacking held over his head and a look of concern on his face. ‘Hetty, you looked like a drownded rat, girl. Come inside and dry off a bit before you catch your death of cold.’