A Distant Dream

by Pamela Evans

  ‘Personal service is what we pride ourselves on here at Bright Brothers,’ lectured Miss Matt, who was middle aged, plain and very prim. ‘We aren’t the sort of store to concentrate on a quick sale to boost turnover. We look after our customers so that they will stay with us in the long term.’

  ‘I thought we were also supposed to promote our goods and make recommendations,’ remarked May.

  ‘We are, of course, but our suggestions must be right for each individual customer,’ said the older woman.

  ‘The lady seemed very pleased with her purchases. I’m sure she’ll continue to shop here.’

  ‘If she does come back it may well be with a complaint against us for encouraging her to purchase inappropriate garments.’

  May decided to push her luck. ‘Please don’t think I’m being rude, Miss Matt,’ she began with the respect demanded of a junior, ‘but why exactly are the pretty ones inappropriate?’

  ‘The customer is a married woman of a certain age, not a Hollywood film star.’

  ‘If she can afford pretty underwear, why shouldn’t she have it?’ May enquired.

  ‘Because it’s the way things are,’ insisted Miss Matt, exasperated. ‘Why can’t you just do as you’re told without questioning every darned thing?’

  ‘I’m just naturally curious, I suppose,’ replied May, an energetic girl with bright blue eyes and a sunny smile.

  ‘Well you know what curiosity did; it killed the cat, so let’s have less of it please.’

  ‘But I thought the management would want us to take an interest in our work,’ persisted May.

  ‘That may well be so, but they certainly don’t want junior members of staff questioning the decisions of their superiors,’ claimed her colleague.

  ‘So are you saying that a woman has to wear hideous drawers for the rest of her life just because she’s over forty?’

  ‘She doesn’t have to, but most respectable older women do,’ Miss Matt explained. ‘It’s only right and proper. Besides, people like to be comfortable when they get older.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said May, finding it rather a dull prospect.

  ‘Anyway, that’s enough of your questions,’ said Miss Matt, bringing the conversation to a swift conclusion. ‘We’ve work to do. There is some new stock to put away and everything needs tidying up in the department.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Matt,’ said May politely.

  May’s best friend Betty thought the French knickers incident was hilarious.

  ‘Oh you never tried to sell them to some old girl,’ she said, giggling as they walked home together through busy Ealing Broadway, past the Palladium Cinema and Lyons tea shop, the brightly coloured striped awnings being taken in as the varied assortment of shops closed for the day, the pavements crowded with people queuing for electric trolley buses and hurrying towards the station. ‘No wonder old Matty blew her top. You might as well try and sell satin knickers to your mother.’

  ‘The customer bought them anyway,’ May pointed out, ‘and good luck to her. I hope she enjoys them even if she does have a few grey hairs.’

  ‘At least you get to work with nice things,’ said Betty wistfully. A brown-eyed brunette the same age as May, she was employed at Bright Brothers too, in the bedding department. ‘All I see is boring old sheets and pillowcases.’

  ‘Come on, you do sell the occasional eiderdown,’ said May, teasing her.

  ‘Thanks for reminding me,’ retorted Betty, taking it in good part.

  ‘I must say, I do enjoy being in the lingerie department, though Miss Matt is a bit of a pain,’ admitted May. ‘At least I get to see a bit of glamour, even if I can’t afford it myself.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll have enough money to buy satin underwear one day,’ said Betty.

  ‘We certainly can’t at the moment on the wages we get from Bright Brothers,’ May responded.

  ‘We’ll have to wait and have it for our trousseau then.’

  May laughed. ‘That’s looking a long way ahead,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to find someone to marry us first.’

  ‘You’ll be all right. You’ve got George,’ Betty pointed out.

  ‘George is just a friend and he’ll have lots of girls before he finally settles down, Mum says, and I’ll have boyfriends,’ added May. ‘She says I’m much too young to think about things like that.’

  ‘Mums always say that sort of thing,’ Betty remarked. ‘Mine is just the same. You’re too young for this that and the other . . . especially the other.’

  The girls thought this was very funny and erupted into laughter.

  ‘I can’t imagine life without George,’ said May when they had recovered and were being more serious. ‘I’ve been close friends with him all my life and I know I always will be, whatever happens between us and no matter what Mum says.’

  There was rather a long silence.

  ‘Anyway, will I see you after tea?’ asked Betty, moving on swiftly rather than linger on the subject of May and George and their special friendship.

  ‘I think I’ll go for a bike ride if you fancy coming,’ said May.

  ‘No thanks,’ replied Betty. ‘That’s far too much like hard work for me.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said May.

  Betty nodded. ‘Where are you going to cycle to?’

  ‘Wherever the mood takes me,’ replied May casually. ‘I need the fresh air and exercise.’

  ‘Haven’t you had enough exercise, on your feet all day at work?’ said Betty.

  ‘Cycling is a different sort of exercise,’ said May, who’d had a bicycle from her parents for her fourteenth birthday. ‘It makes you feel really good somehow.’

  Betty was sometimes in awe of her friend and often very envious of her. May had something that Betty lacked: an independent spirit and opinions of her own, whereas Betty tended to go along with the herd. Cycling to Richmond on her own was nothing to May; she even went all the way to Runnymede on her bike by herself sometimes. Betty didn’t do anything without company, but May would do things alone if she had no one to do them with.

  The worst thing for Betty was the green-eyed monster with regard to May and George Bailey. Betty actually hated her with a passion over that. George was the best-looking boy around and he only had eyes for May. Always had! The confusing part for Betty was the fact that she loved May as a friend very much. She was great fun and there was no one else Betty would rather spend time with. So why did she hate her so much at times instead of being pleased for her? Betty, May and George had been friends since they were children, but there had always been something special between those two and Betty had always secretly resented it.

  ‘George will probably go for a bike ride with you,’ she suggested as reparation for being so ill willed.

  ‘Yeah, he might do,’ agreed May. ‘I’ll call at his house on my way out to ask him, though he may be going to the boxing club, in which case I’ll go on my own.’

  ‘No harm in mentioning it to him, is there?’ said Betty.

  They headed past the train station on the other side of the street, the road crowded with motor vehicles, bicycles and some horse-drawn carts, and walked along by Haven Green alongside the railway line and into the back streets, chatting amiably until they came to Betty’s turning, which was the one before May’s road.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then,’ said May.

  ‘Okey-doke,’ responded Betty.

  ‘I’m ever so hungry, Mum,’ said May, digging a knife into the potatoes bubbling in the saucepan on the gas stove. ‘These are done. Shall I drain them?’

  ‘Turn the gas off but better leave the spuds in the saucepan to keep hot while I make the gravy,’ Flo suggested. ‘The meat pie is ready.’

  ‘I’ll set the table,’ said May.

  ‘Thanks, dear.’

  In the living room at the back of the house where the family had their meals and took their leisure, the front room only coming into use on special occasions, May took the tablecloth and cutlery from a drawer in the s
ideboard, pausing to look at a framed photograph of her brother and herself in the garden a year or so before he died. She would have been about eleven; he was nine. Every day she looked at this and still got a lump in her throat.

  It seemed strange, even now, that Geoffrey wasn’t around anywhere, ever. They used to argue like mad – as siblings do – but they’d loved each other for all that. Being the elder she’d always felt duty-bound to look out for him, and after he died she’d thought it must be her fault.

  She’d come to realise that it wasn’t after a while, but she missed having him around even if sometimes he had been her annoying little brother. Now it was just her and Mum and Dad. No other young person in the house to josh with; no childish squabbles, or shouts or giggles or standing united against parental authority. It was as though the youthful spirit of the house had died along with Geoffrey. She loved Mum and Dad dearly – and empathised with them all the time over the loss of their child – but they weren’t young. May had become an only child on that terrible day three years ago. There was something awfully lonesome about that.

  But she had her two best friends, George and Betty, and they both meant the world to her. She wiped a tear from her eye with the back of her hand and got on with laying the table. Tiddles, the family cat, strutted into the room with his usual proprietorial air and rubbed himself around her legs meowing demandingly. She picked him up and stroked him, loving his shiny black fur, yellow-green eyes and the feel and sound of his vibrating purr. He was a glutton for cuddles and that was fine with May, because she enjoyed making a fuss of him.

  Her father came into the room and sat in the armchair by the hearth, unlit at this time of year. As he opened the newspaper she noticed a picture of the American athlete who was doing so well in the much-publicised Berlin Olympic Games that were on at the moment.

  ‘Has Jesse Owens got another medal, Dad?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, peering at her over the top of the paper after glancing at the headline.

  ‘The star of the games so they say.’

  ‘He certainly is, and Mr Hitler will be none too pleased about that,’ he said.

  ‘Is that because he only wants his own people to win?’ she enquired.

  ‘Something like that,’ replied her father.

  May knew that there was some sort of controversy about the games in Germany and that it concerned Hitler and the Nazi party. But her interest in the Olympics was purely sporting and everything else went over her head.

  ‘Grub’s up,’ called Flo from the kitchen, and May went to help her bring the food in.

  There was an argument in progress when George Bailey got home from work, which wasn’t unusual because his sister and their mother were always at daggers drawn lately.

  ‘Oi oi,’ he said, hearing shouting coming from the kitchen. ‘Pack it in, the pair of you.’

  ‘Tell your sister that,’ said his mother Dot, a sad little woman with dark shadows under her eyes, her once black hair now almost white. ‘She started it.’

  ‘What’s it all about this time?’ he sighed, and turning to his sister added, ‘Sheila, what have you been saying to Mum to upset her so much?’

  ‘She’s pathetic,’ declared Sheila, a feisty thirteen year old. ‘Why can’t she be like other mothers and do the things they do like shopping and ironing our clothes? Why do I have to go to the butcher’s before I go to school every morning and do the household jobs when I get home?’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt you to help out,’ said George.

  ‘Help out, I’ll be doing the bloody lot before long,’ declared Sheila, who was similar in colouring to George and had brown hair worn in long plaits. ‘All she does is mope about the house all day.’

  ‘That’s enough of that sort of language,’ admonished George.

  ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’ she shouted. ‘You’re not my father.’

  ‘No, but seeing as he isn’t here, I’m standing in for him,’ he said. ‘Mum’s had a bad time, so go easy on her and treat her with respect.’

  ‘That’s right, take her side like you always do.’

  ‘She’s our mother,’ he reminded her sternly.

  ‘Huh. I thought mothers were supposed to look after their kids,’ retorted Sheila.

  ‘She does her best,’ said George.

  ‘For what it’s worth.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Sheila,’ he told her. ‘You didn’t used to behave like this when Dad was alive.’

  ‘She used to be a proper mum then, didn’t she?’ she said, her face suffused with red blotches and eyes brimming with angry tears. ‘Now all she does is feel sorry for herself.’ She looked at her mother, who was standing in the doorway crying silently. ‘There she goes, booing her eyes out again. She’s not the only one who suffered. We lost our dad.’ Sheila’s voice broke. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I just can’t stand it, coming home from school every day to your miserable face. Why don’t you try to cheer up and give us all a break?’

  With that she ran from the room sobbing.

  George went over to his mother and put an affectionate arm around her. ‘She doesn’t mean it, Mum,’ he said. ‘She’s growing up and getting stroppy with it.’

  ‘I try, George, but I can’t shake it off,’ she said thickly. ‘This terrible despair.’

  ‘I know,’ he said kindly, holding her close. ‘But maybe if you were to keep busy it might help somehow. It’s two years since Dad died. You’ve done enough grieving.’

  ‘He didn’t just die, he was murdered,’ she reminded him.

  Hearing it was like a physical blow, but he didn’t want her to know how much it hurt because she was in no state to take on anyone else’s problems. She needed him to be strong and supportive. ‘Yes, I know, Mum,’ he said. ‘But it’s all over now and Dad’s murderer has been hanged. It’s time for you to start living again.’

  ‘I feel as though I can’t do anything because I’m so weak,’ she said.

  George felt completely unequal to the problem of his mother. Common sense told him that the persistent low spirits that had troubled her for such a long time must surely be something more than just grief. But even if he could find the money to seek medical help he risked having her carted off to the lunatic asylum. That was what they did to people who got sick in the head. So all he could do was be kind to her and encourage her to get back to doing normal things, like going out and looking after the home properly.

  ‘I know,’ he said sympathetically. ‘Why don’t I make you a nice cup of tea and you sit down quietly and drink it.’

  ‘Thank you, son.’

  ‘Have you managed to get a meal ready for us?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘It’s in the oven.’

  Thank God for that, he said to himself. More often than not when he got home from work his sister was out with her pals, having rebelled and refused to cook a meal yet again, and he had to go and get fish and chips, which he couldn’t afford often on his wages as an errand boy. And his low pay was something else he had to deal with as a matter of urgency.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said.

  ‘You’re so good to me, George,’ said Dot.

  Filled with guilt for sometimes being irritated by her hopelessness, he said, ‘And you’ve always been good to me, Mum. Together we’ll get you through this rough patch, don’t worry.’

  ‘I know, son,’ she said pitifully, twisting his heart. ‘I know.’

  ‘Can’t you try to be a bit kinder to her, sis?’ asked George, finding his sister sitting on her bed sobbing.

  ‘I do try, but all this misery of hers is driving me mad,’ she said. ‘I miss Dad and I know you do too but we don’t go about like the living dead every day, do we? At first it was understandable for Mum to be upset, but it’s just going on and on.’

  ‘We’re young, we’ve got more stamina than she has and our lives ahead of us, as well as friends and outside interests,’ he said. ‘Whereas Dad was her husband and
her whole life.’

  ‘I know I’m awful and I hate myself for being so mean to her,’ said Sheila, wiping her eyes. ‘But it’s all wrong the way she is. My friends think she’s loopy; they talk about her behind my back and are always making remarks about my having to do all the shopping. I won’t put up with that so I end up defending her and quarrelling with them. And that makes me feel even worse. I’ll be glad when I’ve left school altogether. I wish I could leave home too.’

  ‘Well you’re not old enough to do either yet, so how about giving me some support with Mum to help her get back to her old self instead,’ he said.

  ‘S’pose I shall have to,’ she agreed miserably.

  ‘You can start by telling her that you’re sorry for your outburst, and then we’ll sit down together and eat our meal and you can try not to lose your temper again.’

  ‘All right, George.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  ‘I don’t know how you manage to stay cheerful with Mum the way she is.’

  ‘It must be in my nature,’ he said, but he wasn’t as happy-go-lucky as he seemed. Unbeknown to anyone else, he suffered from fierce bouts of fury towards the man who had robbed them of their father and broken their mother’s heart.

  Their dad, Joe Bailey, had been a small-time boxing promoter who had been in the business for the love of the sport, not for the money. Other people in the boxing community were more materialistic, and when Dad had refused to agree to allow a fight to be rigged, he had been attacked by a man called Bill Bikerley outside a pub in Shepherd’s Bush and had died of his injuries.

  Even though justice had been done and Bikerley had been given the death penalty, the anger remained in George’s heart, and when he saw the broken woman his mother had become, it grew almost unbearable. Senseless he knew, since there was no one to direct his rage to now that Bikerley was dead. But still it came, especially when Mum had a bad day as she had today.

  ‘Oh, by the way, George, there’s a school trip coming up and I need tuppence to pay for it,’ his sister was saying. ‘Will that be all right, do you think?’