by Liz Trenow
A duchess! Well, you can imagine how excited we are, but scared too as we haven’t a clue what to expect and our imaginations go into overtime. We was going to live in a beautiful mansion with a huge garden and sew clothes for very important people, and Nora is going to fall in love with one of the chauffeurs but I have my sights set a bit higher, a soldier in the Light Brigade in his red uniform perhaps, or a city gent in a bowler hat. Either way, both of us are going to have our own comfortable houses next door to each other with little gardens where we can grow flowers and good things to eat, and have lots of children who will play together, and we will live happily ever after.
There’s a pause. She clears her throat loudly.
Forgive me, Miss, don’t mind if I has a smoke?
‘Go ahead, that’s fine. Let’s have a short break.’
No, I’ll just light up and carry on, please, ’cos if I interrupt meself I’ll lose the thread.
A cigarette packet being opened, the click of a lighter, a long inward breath and a sigh of exhaled smoke. Then she clears her throat and starts again.
Not that there’s much chance of me forgetting that day, mind, when the duchess’s housekeeper is coming to visit. We was allowed a special bath and then got dressed in our very best printed cottons and Sister Mary helped us pin our hair up into the sort of bun that domestic servants wear, and a little white lacy cap on top of that.
At eleven o’clock we got summoned into Sister Beatrice’s room again and she looked us up and down and gave us a lecture about how we must behave to the visitor, no staring but making sure we look up when she speaks to us, no talking unless we are spoken to, answering clearly and not too long. She gives Nora a ’specially fierce look and says the word slowly in separate chunks so she’s sure we understand: and there is to be ab-so-lute-ly no giggling.
‘How you behave this morning will determine your futures, young ladies,’ she said. ‘Do not throw this opportunity away.’
She went on some more about if we got chosen we must do our work perfectly and never complain or answer back or we’ll be out on the streets because we can’t never return to The Castle once we have gone. My fantasies melted on the spot. We was both so nervous even Nora’s laugh had vanished.
The housekeeper was a mountain of a woman almost as wide as she was tall, and fierce with eyes like ebony buttons, and spoke to us like she’s ordering a regiment into battle.
She wanted to see more examples of our needlework because, she said, we would be sewing for the highest in the land.
‘“The highest in the land”?’ Nora whispered as we scuttled off down the corridors to the needlework room to get our work. ‘What the heck does that mean?’
‘No idea,’ I said. My brain was addled with fear and I couldn’t think straight for all me wild thoughts.
We were told to lay our work out on Sister Beatrice’s table, and the mountain boomed questions at us: what is the fabric called, what needles did we use and what thread, why did we use those stitches, what did we think of the final result? We answered as well as we could, being clear but not too smart, just as Sister told us. One of my pieces was the start of a patchwork. I’d only finished a couple of dozen hexagons as yet but I was pleased with the way it was shaping up, and when I showed her the design drawn in coloured crayons on squared paper she said, ‘The child has some artistic talent, too.’
‘Indeed,’ Sister Beatrice said back, ‘Miss Romano is one of our best seamstresses,’ and my face went hot and red with pride.
When the housekeeper sat down the poor old chair fair creaked in torment and Nora’s giggles returned, shaking her shoulders as Sister Beatrice poured the tea. Not for us, mind. We just stood and waited, my heart beating like I’d just run up all four staircases at The Castle, while they sipped their tea, oh so ladylike. She ate four biscuits in the time it took to give us a lecture about how we must, as she called it, comport ourselves if we was to be invited to join the duchess’s household: no answering back, no being late for anything ever, no asking for seconds at dinner, no smoking, no boyfriends, wearing our uniform neat and proper every day, clean hands, clean face, clean hair, always up, no straggly bits.
When she stopped there was a pause, and I was just about to say we are good girls, Miss, very obedient girls, but she put her cup and saucer down on the table with a clonk and turned to Sister Beatrice and said, ‘I think these two will do very nicely. Our driver will come to collect them the day after tomorrow.’
Oh my, that drive was so exciting. Don’t forget we’d been stuck in The Castle for most of our lives, never been in a coach, never even been out of the East End. Our eyes was on stalks all the way, like we had never seen the wonderful things passing by, watching the people doing their shopping, hanging out their washing, children playing. In one place we passed a factory at clocking-off time and got stuck in a swarm of men on bicycles – like giant insects, they looked to us – and so many we quickly lost count. They saw us gawping through the coach windows and waved, which made them wobble all over the place, and it was an odd feeling to be noticed, not being invisible for once.
It was just as well we had plenty to distract us ’cos by the time we’d said our goodbyes at The Castle both of us were blubbing. Strange, isn’t it, you can spend so many years wishing yourself out of somewhere and, once you get out, all you want to do is go back? Not that I ever felt that about this place. It’s a funny old feeling, coming here today, I can tell you.
‘It was very good of you to take the trouble to see me.’
Don’t mention it, dearie. Makes a good day out, Nora said. Now, where was I?
‘You were sad to leave The Castle.’
Ah yes, them nuns was a kindly lot, as I think I’ve said before – forgive my leaky old brain, dearie – but they never showed it, not till the last minute when both Sister Mary and Sister Beatrice gave each of us a hug and pressed little parcels into our hands. I nearly suffocated in all those black folds, but this was what set me off on the weeping – it showed they really did care about us, after all. We waved at all the other children peering through the windows and climbed up into the coach with the lay sister Emily, who was to be what Sister Beatrice called a chaperone.
After a while the dirty old streets of the East End turned into clean, wide roads with pavements for people to walk, and tall beautiful houses either side.
‘I didn’t know we was going to the countryside,’ Nora whispered to me, pointing out her side of the coach and sure enough it was green grass, shrubs and trees stretching away as far as our eyes could see, and even people riding horses. Around the edges were real flowers, planted in dazzling carpets of colour, brighter than you could imagine. More brilliant even than the printed cottons we loved so much.
‘That’s Hyde Park, silly,’ sharp ears Emily said, ‘where the grand ladies and gentlemen go to take the air, to walk or ride.’ Well, that silenced us both – the very idea of having the time to wander freely in a beautiful green place like that – and it wasn’t long after that the coach passed beside a long, high wall and slowed down to enter a gate with guardsmen on either side, went round the back of a house so tall I had to bend down beside the window to catch a glimpse of the roof, and then we came to a stop.
We had arrived.
The voice stops and the tape winds squeakily for a moment or two then reaches the end, and the machine makes a loud clunk as it switches itself off.
Chapter Two
London, January 2008
‘Panic stations, darling. The Cosy Homes people are coming next week, and they say I have to clear the lofts before they get here, and Peter down the road was going to help me, you know, the man who suggested it all in the first place, but he’s gone and hurt his back so he can’t come any more and I don’t know what I’m going to do …’
My mother Eleanor is seventy-three and her memory’s starting to fail, so it doesn’t take much to upset her. Plus she’s always nervous on the telephone.
‘Slow down, Mum,’
I whispered, wishing she wouldn’t call me at work. The office was unusually quiet – it was that depressing post-Christmas period when everyone is gloomily slumped at their desks pretending to be busy while surreptitiously job hunting. ‘You’re going to have to tell me what all this is about. For a start, who are Cosy Homes?’
‘The insulation people. It’s completely free for the over-seventies, imagine that, and they say it will cut my heating bills by a quarter and you know what a worry the price of oil is these days so I could hardly refuse, could I? I’m sure I told you about this.’
I racked my brains. Perhaps she had, but with everything that had been going on in the past few days, I’d clearly forgotten. On our first day back after the break we’d received an email announcing yet another round of redundancies. Happy New Year, one and all! Morale was at an all-time low and the rumour mill working overtime. And, joy of joys, next week we were all to be interviewed by some of those smug, overpaid management consultants the company had called in.
I didn’t really want to be here anyway – it was only meant to be an ‘interim job’ to raise enough cash to realise my dream of starting my own interior design business. But the macho, target-driven environment, the daily bust-a-gut expectations and ridiculous deadlines had become surprisingly tolerable when I saw the noughts on my monthly pay slip and annual bonus-time letter. The financial rewards were just too sweet to relinquish. Especially now that I was newly single, with a massive mortgage to cover.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I said, distractedly scrolling down the recruitment agency website on my screen. ‘I was planning to come at the weekend, anyway. I’m sure we can get it sorted together in a few hours.’
I heard her relieved sigh. ‘Oh could you, dearest girl? It would be such a weight off my mind.’
My Mini can virtually drive itself to Rowan Cottage, home for the first eighteen years of my life. My parents moved there in the 1960s, after they married and my father was recruited by the new university that had recently opened on the outskirts of Eastchester. He was already in his fifties and there was a twenty-year age difference between them – they met at University College, London, where he had been her doctorate tutor – but it was a very loving marriage. I was born five years later, to the great joy of both.
When I was three years old, he and my grandfather were killed in a terrible head-on collision on the A12 in heavy fog. All I can recall of that dreadful night is two large policemen at the door, and the woman officer who held me when my mother collapsed. She took my hand and walked me down the lane in my pyjamas and slippers, clutching my favourite teddy, to be looked after by our neighbours.
My grandfather was fairly senior in the local police, and my father by then a noted academic, so the accident was widely reported, but no cause ever explained. When I turned seventeen and began to take driving lessons, I asked Mum who’d been at the wheel that night, whether anyone else had been involved or whose fault it had been, but her eyes had clouded over.
‘We’ll never know, dear. It was a long time ago. Best let sleeping dogs lie,’ was all she would say.
Thanks to my father’s life insurance policy she managed to hang on to the house and kept his spirit alive by displaying photographs in every room and talking about him frequently. He looked like a typical sixties academic, with his gold-rimmed glasses and baggy olive green corduroy jacket, leather-patched at the elbows, often with his head in a book or a journal. Mum always says that she fell for his eyes, a kingfisher blue so brilliant that they seemed to hold her in a magic beam every time he looked at her.
There he is, frozen in time, lighting his pipe, playing cricket at a family picnic, sitting in the car with our small dog, Scottie, on his knee. In the photographs he seems to wear a perpetual smile, although apparently he could also be impatient and bossy – traits which, alas, he seems to have passed on to me. I have also inherited his slight stature, blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin, although the genes that gave him a brilliant academic brain seem to have passed me by. I’m more like my mother in temperament: always daydreaming and with a tendency to become distracted.
Money must have been tight. We had few luxuries but I always felt happy and loved, and never overly troubled by the lack of a father in my life. Mum never had any other relationships, not that she let me know about, at least. ‘You should join a dating agency,’ I suggested once – such things appearing to my teenage self as exotic and daring.
She brushed away the suggestion. ‘What a stupid idea,’ she said. ‘Why would I want a new beau? I’ve got my house and my health, my friends and my singing. And I’ve got you, my lovely girl. I don’t need to go out dating at my age.’
I took the slip road off the A12 and into the peace of the lanes. After the urban sprawl and unlovely highways of outer London, North Essex is surprisingly rural and beautiful. At this time of year, furrows in the bare fields collect rainwater and reflect silver stripes of sky against the brown soil; giant elms and oaks stand leafless and black against the wide sky, and rooks gather in their branches each evening, their fierce cawing echoing across the countryside.
Every village is dominated by an outsized flint church, each with its tower reaching robustly towards heaven, built in medieval times by a landed gentry grown fat on wool farming, who sought to secure their seats in paradise. These days the villages still attract fat cats: sleek City types drawn here by the newly-electrified line to Liverpool Street, who worship the great god of annual bonuses and whose vision of paradise is a new Aga in the kitchen, a hot tub on the patio and a sports car in the double garage.
At the end of the lane, in a shallow dip between two gentle hills, is a small green clustered around with a dozen cottages and farm buildings now converted into the price-inflated dream homes of weary commuters. At the edge of the green is Rowan Cottage, once a pair of farm labourers’ houses, with a pantiled roof and dormer windows. It’s the scruffiest property around but, unlike most of the others, seems to be fully at ease with the landscape, as if it has always been there.
As a teenager I hated the isolation, and the fact that the last bus left our local town at the ridiculously early hour of nine o’clock. But Mum still loves it here. After her shockingly early widowhood, she gave up her own academic ambitions and took a job as a school secretary so that she could be at home for me. Then, when I was about ten, she took a part-time job as a lecturer at the local polytechnic and, on those days, my grandmother would pick me up from school, take me back to her house and indulge me with chocolate biscuits.
Granny Jean, my father’s mother, was a feisty old woman with strong views, who read The Times from cover to cover, finished the crossword in a few hours and always had a book or a notebook and pen at her side, and sometimes a needle, darning, sewing up a hem or taking in a seam.
I loved going to stay with her, even though she refused to have a television. After tea, she would read to me all the children’s classics: Wind in the Willows, the Just So Stories and, my favourite, Alice in Wonderland. Of course I was too young to get Carroll’s surreal humour, but I loved the illustrations, especially the ones of Alice with long hair held back with that trademark hairband, her white apron, puffed sleeves and blue stockings. Oh how I wanted long hair and a pair of bright blue stockings!
When I grew old enough, Granny taught me how to sew: embroidery stitches and some very basic dressmaking. One memorable weekend, when I was about twelve and desperate for the latest fashions, we made a lurex mini-skirt – I cringe to recall it, but this was the 1980s after all – which I adored but never had the courage to wear. I’m sure it was Granny’s influence which led me, in the end, to study fashion.
But after she died and there were just the two of us left, it became ‘Mum and Caroline against the world’, a close, almost hermetic relationship which has left me with an overdeveloped sense of duty and a fear of letting her down. Her job was demanding, dealing with unruly students and warring staff, and I sometimes wonder whether the stress of being a single working
parent, on top of the grief of losing her husband and father-in-law on a single day, caused changes in her brain that, many years later, have resulted in the tragic and insidious onset of her dementia.
Mum’s face lit up when, after a second’s hesitation, she recognised me.
‘Caroline, dearest girl, how lovely to see you,’ she said, reaching out with skeletal arms. She used to be tall, with dark curly hair and high colour to her cheekbones, but she’s shrinking now and her hair is now almost pure white, her skin pale grey. She seems, literally, to be fading away.
‘Come in, come in, I’ll get the coffee on,’ she said, leading the way to the kitchen, all stripped pine and eighties brown-and-orange decor. Little has changed at Rowan Cottage since I left home, and my interest in interior design must surely have been triggered by my parents’ lack of it. Their minds were focused on higher matters; what did anyone care what the inside of their house looked like, or how ragged the furnishings, so long as they were still serviceable and comfortable?
As a teenager I was so embarrassed by what I perceived as my parents’ lack of style that I refused to invite friends home. These days I’ve come to accept that Mum feels comfortable here, and will never change it. Colours and patterns clash with joyous abandon, chintz loose covers fight with geometric cushions, Persian carpets lie alongside rugs in swirly sixties designs – quite retro cool these days. Books jumble higgledy-piggledy on cheap pine bookshelves that sag under their weight of words. Some of the furniture, such as the Parker Knoll chairs and G-Plan coffee table, is so old-fashioned that it’s become desirable again.
The bedrooms are built into the roof of the cottage, just two of them, each with a dormer window, so there is hardly any proper ‘attic’ above them. But the space between the walls and the angle of the roof has been converted into long cupboards, triangular in section and too low to stand up in, accessed through sliding doors in each bedroom. Despite their awkward shape these cupboards are spacious and, I knew, contained the junk of a lifetime. Clearing them was going to be a mammoth task.