The Whicharts

by Noel Streatfeild

  The child struggled for words. At last:

  “It’s nice,” she said.

  Daisy raced out on to the down-side.

  “Oh Howdy,” she called out, “what a stage!” and rapidly turned one cartwheel after another.

  They had the sea breezes that Rose wanted, for every day, taking their lunch and tea with them, they went to Birling Gap.

  On the beach they got to know a family of boys, who taught them to swim and the glories of catching prawns. The children had never known boys before. The boys had no sisters, and considered all girls delicate creatures, but even so they expected a far higher standard of physical courage from the children than had ever been expected of them before. With the result that before they left, they could all swim a little without one foot on the ground, and would fall about on the sharp slippery rocks while prawn-catching, covering their legs with scratches without a murmur. On their first day’s prawning, the youngest boy, who was not much older than Daisy, scraped his leg on a barnacle, and positively streamed with blood. The girls exclaimed in horror, and remarked on his bravery in not complaining.

  “Goodness!” the eldest boy Geoffrey had replied, “I should just think he wouldn’t. I’d like to hear him hollar at a little thing like that!”

  The girls said nothing. Their standard up to date had been of the “kiss-it-and-make-it-well” variety. Not to complain when hurt? It was a new idea, but they quickly absorbed it. For that the boys should think well of them was the secret ambition of all three.

  Rose and the boy’s mother sat together on the beach. They took to each other, and would sit happily sewing and chatting for hours together, until an outburst of cat-calls from the rocks would warn them that their respective families were returning, anxious to be fed.

  Nannie seldom came down to the beach. Sea breezes were all very well in their way, she said, but she didn’t hold with all that unnecessary trapesing and scrambling about, when there was all that good air to be breathed by just sitting outside the cottage. The truth being that she was getting rather fat for strenuous exercise.

  Sometimes, when the tide was wrong for prawns, there was cricket on the downs. The girls did not shine at this. Their life of lessons and dancing classes had left no room for games. But they made up in willingness and enthusiasm what they lacked in skill. Truth to tell, the boys would have been disgusted if the girls had been any good.

  “Cricket’s not a woman’s game.”

  Cricket showed the girls another point of view surprisingly different from their own. Maimie, disgusted with her bad batting, and to show that at any rate she was good at something, turned two rapid cartwheels and did a splits. But the boys, far from admiring, were shocked.

  “I say! I wouldn’t do that here,” one of them said. “There are people about, they’ll think you are showing off.”

  As all the children believed “showing off” to be their duty, this point of view amazed them. They said nothing to each other, but the words sank in. Dancing in front of people when they hadn’t asked you to, that was “showing off,” and showing off like that was a thing the boys despised. How very curious! But no more acrobatics appeared while they were in Sussex.

  Tania was the favourite, because of her amazing knowledge of cars. She was as quick, or quicker than the boys, to spot a make of car as it flew by. She knew such a lot about their engines. What car she would like, and why. Geoffrey would talk to her by the hour, while they scrambled about. “She is a nice kid,” he often told his mother.

  On the last night before they left there was a supper picnic on the downs outside the cottage. The moon came up before they had finished. It was a lovely night. Tania discovered that she was not the only tongue-tied person in the world. She and Geoffrey were looking over the downs, which were a shining sheet of silver-grey. The sky was a mass of stars. The air had that odd, newly-washed smell of the downlands.

  “Are you sorry you are going back to school to-morrow?” Tania asked.

  He looked across the downs. And Tania looking up at him knew that he felt just as she did—sort of afraid that things could never be quite so lovely again—not exactly afraid of growing up—but that, too, somehow.

  She said, “Looks nice, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, not bad,” he turned away embarrassed.

  The families parted with promises of soon meeting again, of other jolly holidays, and seeing each other next time the boys were in London. Perhaps the boys forgot them, the girls never knew. They wrote for a bit, childish scrawling letters. Tania wrote regularly to Geoffrey, and just at first he wrote back, then he didn’t answer, and didn’t answer, so she stopped writing. They never met the boys again.

  They returned to London the next morning. The Cromwell Road seemed incredibly stuffy, drab, and unbearable. They had carried away with them a last glorious glimpse of Sussex. It was a perfect morning, but there had been rain in the night, the downs looked so clean, the air smelt lovely. Walking down to where the bus stopped they picked handfuls of little mauve scabious. When they got to London Tania was still holding hers. She carried them up to the nursery and arranged them in a mug. She tried, as she looked at them, to bring back the downs. It seemed incredible that she had picked them only that morning. That the downs were still there without her. The sea still pouring over the rocks. And neither she nor Geoffrey there to see.

  Chapter 7

  THE next day they started work. It was a very busy autumn. Madame had promised a programme from her children at a dancing matinée. Royalty would be present; rather minor Royalty, but still Royalty. A very grand affair. Daisy, to the disgust of her sisters, was to star. A solo dance. Première Danseuse of the Babies’ Ballet.

  “She will be insufferable after this,” said Maimie. “Little Balham show-off!”

  “She will,” Tania agreed. “And the awfullest part you don’t know, because you aren’t in our class. On the programme she’s to be called ‘Babsy!’ ‘Babsy Whichart’ Such a disgrace to bring on our name!”

  Maimie was really shocked. The minor aggravation of Daisy’s stardom faded into the background.

  “Oh, it mustn’t be. We’ve always kept our name in honour. If she is going to call herself ‘Babsy,’ she mustn’t use the ‘Whichart.’”

  “There’s another thing,” Tania sighed. “We’ve got to do a ‘Pas de Trois’ as the ‘Whichart Sisters.’ Imagine what fools we’ll look!”

  Maimie, however, privately considered this last good news. She was only expecting to appear as one of the “Corps de Ballet.” That she was to be picked out in any way was pleasant hearing. So she reverted at once to what she called “The Daisy Scandal.” “Don’t let’s stand for it. ‘Howdy’ must see Madame.”

  Rose was most unwilling. She hated seeing Madame, of whomMadame, of whom she was secretly terrified. She could not see that it mattered terribly whether Daisy was called “Daisy” or “Babsy.” Especially as Daisy herself had not minded, until she found her sisters were shocked and angry, and cold­shouldered her as though she had committed a crime. But in the end she did go because the children’s family pride touched her.

  “Poor darlings,” she thought, “so delicious of them to be so proud, and after all it is their name, they invented it.”

  Madame was glad to see Rose. She considered her rather an ornament to her establishment. So very lady-like. So different from the mothers of most of the children. She agreed at once on Rose nervously explaining her errand:

  “Of course, of course, of course.”

  She seized a pen overflowing with red ink, and with one dash erased the “Babsy” for ever.

  But when the posters for the matinée appeared, Daisy found herself in worse disgrace. “A Special Matinée,” it said. “By the Pupils of the Madame Elise Academy of Dancing. When the following children will appear.” Here followed a list of star pupils, finishing up with—“And Little Daisy Whichart,
The Wonderful Baby Dancer.”

  The children saw the poster on their way back from school. They stood solemnly in front of it, and read it in silence. Nannie, bursting with pride, read it too.

  “Well!” said Maimie to Tania, “I think we’d better be getting on. There’s some people too common for us to know.” She threw a withering look at Daisy, who began to cry.

  “Oh, Maimie, I didn’t know, truthfully I didn’t know.”

  “To think,” Tania said, “that this shameful thing is stuck up where all the school can read it. Why even the mistresses might see it.”

  “If they do,” Maimie burst in, “I wouldn’t wonder if we was all expelled, such shame for any school.”

  “Don’t you listen to them, my blessed lamb,” Nannie protested. “It’s jealousy, that’s what it is! Ordinary troupe children they are, while there’s you dancing, all of your own, before Royalty.”

  “I’d rather be a troupe child for the rest of my life than be ‘The Wonderful Baby Dancer.’ Ugh!” exclaimed Tania ferociously, and she stalked on.

  Maimie followed her.

  “You stay with Nannie, ‘Baby Daisy,’” she called over her shoulder.

  If Maimie and Tania were disgusted, the kitchen was bursting with pride. So were most of the boarders. Cook got hold of a poster, hung it in the kitchen, and showed it to all the tradesmen. Mrs. Williams came down to admire. So did the two women on the second floor. Violet almost swaggered.

  “I spotted the kiddy’s talent when she was three.”

  The other two could have borne all this fuss at home, if only the school had backed them up. But the school was far from angry, it was proud. They hung a poster on the gate. The matinéewas for a laudable object. Royalty was patronising it. Daisy, who had been considered the least interesting of the sisters, sprang to a sudden fame.

  Nobody except Rose understood exactly how the elder two felt. Nannie openly said they were jealous.

  “It isn’t only that, Nannie,” Rose tried to explain. “Of course they are a little jealous, it’s only natural. But it’s partly they hate having a show made of their name. I’ve so often laughed with them at all this wonder child stuff, and tried to show them that it’s theatrical, and unnecessary, so they hate seeing Daisy making an oddity of herself. If she wasn’t using the ‘Whichart’ they wouldn’t have minded half as much.”

  The matinée was an enormous success. Daisy had a small triumph. She was very small for her age With a pretty though rather commonplace little face, and a really lovely mop of red curls. She had very real gifts as a dancer. The “Pas de Trois” went well, it was a lively affair, and the fact that it was danced by three sisters appealed to the audience.

  Nannie was so proud of her nurslings, and particularly of her godchild, that she couldn’t enjoy herself in case something went wrong to mar the glory of the afternoon. She said to Cook who was sitting with her:

  “I’m that fussed when them blessed lambs is on the stage, in case they does it wrong, or their knickers fall off or something .”

  Cook sniffed at this, and said if that was all, Nannie could sit back and take it easy, for from the look of them, there wasn’t much in the way of knickers to fall anywhere.

  Rose and Violet sat together. Curiously enough Rose had scarcely ever seen the children dance. Now she saw at once that Daisy had a chance of really reaching the top, if only she stuck at it and worked hard And that Maimie and Tania had been well-trained. They struck her as being extremely proficient. She had always thought stage children rather pathetic, and she thought so again now, as she realised the years of hard work that lay behind those neat legs raised so easily over their heads. Those nimble cartwheels and splits, those pretty little professional gestures and hand­ kissings, those bright smiles. It was Tania’s steady bright smile that touched her most. She knew the child hated her work, and yet she smiled. When the performance was over and she went behind, it was not for the brilliant Daisy that she first looked, but for Tania.

  “Darling, you were very good. I was very proud of all my children. But you do know, don’t you, that as soon as you are old enough you can be trained for something else if you’d rather.”

  Tania didn’t understand.

  “Goodness! I must have been bad,” she thought.

  That Christmas Maimie had her first engagement. It was in a pantomime. She was one of a troupe of forty children; “MadameElise’s Wonder Mites.”

  The immediate result of Maimie’s becoming a wage-earner was that she suddenly became very childish. From being very much the eldest of the family, she almost degenerated into baby talk. In the theatre she was treated as if she was about six. She was the youngest of the troupe, many of whom, in spite of socks and baby ways, were seventeen. She found she was expected to behave childishly. The grown-ups in the cast, if they spoke to her at all, petted her, pulled her curls, and asked her if she liked dolls; she who hadn’t touched a doll for years. The result was rather unbearable at home. She lisped, she wanted her hand held when she crossed a road. Tania was only voicing the opinion of the entire household, when she said in a burst of fury:

  “Would you like a puff-puff on a little string to pull to the theatre?”

  It wasn’t altogether Maimie’s fault. Being the eldest had deprived her of much baby petting. She adored it now she had it. And no star of a musical comedy ever played to her gallery better.

  The pantomime ran well into April. Rose banked the whole of the child’s earnings each week. They weren’t large, but they accumulated to a nice sum. Violet wanted her to spend some of it on Maimie’s clothes, but she refused:

  “It’s worth everything to me to know the children have something saved. It makes me shiver to think what might happen to them if I should die.”

  With the end of the pantomime Maimie grew up again. She was tired of behaving like a baby. Besides, it was difficult to be babyish, and yet extract the respect from the others due to the wage­ earner. Her family were delighted; better, they thought, a rather cocky Maimie than a posey Maimie. Their delight was short-lived, for two months later she ‘got religion,’ and got it badly. It seemed to attack her suddenly, but was really the result of a schoolgirl crush for her form-mistress, who was very high-church. It upset the household, particularly on Sundays, for she insisted on attending High-Anglican Mass. Nannie had always taken the children to a Children’s Service on Sunday afternoons. She had been brought up Chapel, but she took the children to Church, as she said it was her duty; all gentry being Church. But take Maimie to High-Anglican Mass she would not. “ Next thing we knows, Miss ’oward, she’ll ’ave gone over to Rome, an’ then where’ll she be?”

  Rose, who had stayed at home on Sundays, considering it a well-earned day of rest, decided she must take the child herself. Maimie’s nature had always worried her slightly. “Perhaps religion will be a help to her,” she thought. She found she rather enjoyed the service. She was tired, and in spite of Maimie’s shocked lifted eyebrows, she sat most of the time and gave herself up to enjoying the music. She had been brought up Low Church, so she couldn’t follow the ritual; “All that fussy business up at the altar,” as she described it to herself, and she did not believe that in spite of all Maimie’s deep bowings, and crossings, and unexpected kneelings, that she did either.

  Maimie said she must be confirmed. Rose, determined to do the right thing, asked the advice of the High-Church form-mistress, Miss Marmaduke, who said:

  “Oh, she must go to Father Sutch, a marvellous man; just the influence Maimie needs in her life.”

  Rose doubted this, and took a great dislike to Miss Marmaduke, whose feelings became so much for her when she spoke of Father Sutch, that she almost slobbered. Still, if Miss Marmaduke recommended Father Sutch, Maimie would insist on being prepared by him. So to Father Sutch Rose went.

  She found him a tall, good-looking man, dressed in a cassock and biretta. Althou
gh very busy, he was very kind, and showed her round his church, and asked her to admire his new lamp hanging before the Reserved Sacrament. He fixed the hours for Maimie’s classes, and then left her in a hurry to hear some confessions. She felt completely confused, and tried, by reading the notice board outside, to discover whether the church was really Church of England or not. “Oh well,” she thought, “I suppose one religion will suit Maimie as well as another.” She climbed wearily on to a bus and went home.

  Maimie’s confirmation was the cause of a real quarrel between her and Tania. The two girls now shared the old day-nursery, while Daisy and Nannie slept in the night-nursery. Rose had turned a small empty boxroom into a sitting-room for the children, and they fed with everyone else in the dining-room on the ground floor. This arrangement had worked beautifully, for Maimie and Tania were the greatest friends, and shared their room with complete amicability. But the weight of Father Sutch’s teachings changed Maimie. First she went in for such deep meditations, and said such long prayers, with such bowings and crossings, that Tania, who considered it “showing off,” was driven nearly mad. “Showing off” in the Dancing Academy sense might be right; “showing off” at your prayers most certainly was not. Then one day she came into their bedroom to find in the corner a small altar. They possessed a little table; on this Maimie had put an old red tablecloth, two small candlesticks with red candles, a vase of red flowers, and in the centre a cheap wooden cross. To Maimie it was beautiful. She might be carried away by her emotions, and a love of outward show, but she was honestly straining after something. She wanted to be good, she wanted to please Miss Marmaduke, and Father Sutch, and incidentally, God. She couldn’t help it that subconsciously she pictured people saying: “That’s a wonderful child, dancing all day, and then coming home to her little altar at night.” She hoped people would feel goodness emanating from her: “She’s a real example, that child.”

  She had been to her confirmation class. She felt quite uplifted. She ran into her bedroom to spend a few minutes kneeling at her altar, in the way Father Sutch had taught her. She found her flowers, and cross, and candles lying on the floor, and Tania with the tablecloth clutched in her hands, her face white with rage.