A pale sun struggled through watery clouds above the grey roofs of Duke Street. Duke stood at an upstairs window, looking down at Dolly Ogden dragging an unwilling Charlie and Amy off to church. She did her best to smarten them up, sending Charlie down the pawn shop on a Saturday tea-time to redeem his Norfolk jacket for Sunday best. Come Monday morning she’d be sending it back, bundled up with her one decent pair of boots and a couple of china dogs from her front-room mantelpiece. That bit of money was vital to see them through the week since Arthur had lost his job at the glass factory. But Dolly was canny; she’d never see them go hungry, and she was bent on putting Charlie through school until his scholarship money ran out. So she sailed up the street to church every Sunday with her kids, one on either side, like a battleship in full regalia, escorted into port by two dutiful tugs.
‘Pa,’ Frances began in her quiet voice, ‘did you hear, they’re recruiting for jobs in the Post Office exchange?’ She sat in her upright chair by the table, where she kept, her sewing basket with its never decreasing pile of socks and stockings for darning. That’s how she kept herself busy now, weaving her needle in and out as she sidled into conversation about Jess.
‘Listen here, it says I can buy a motor car for only one hundred and thirty-three pounds.’ Duke held up his newspaper and pointed to an advertisement, ‘One hundred and thirty-three pounds! Rob needs to think again, I say. Taxi-cabs. Motor stables.’ He snorted and rubbed the end of his nose with his forefinger, then thrust his large head back between the pages of the paper.
But Frances was not one to be deterred. Her long fingers dipped and bobbed as the needle sped in and out. ‘It’s women they need to work the switchboards. It’d be a definite step up from tweeny work.’ She held her breath and let the idea sink in. ‘The Post Office is an up-and-coming job for a woman nowadays.’
‘Switchboards.’ Duke insisted on missing the point as stubbornly as Frances persisted in making it. ‘Telephones. Newfangled nonsense.’
‘Now, Pa, telephones are quite common and I’m always on at you to get one for here, you know that. But listen, most women want to come out of service these days. Everyone wants the Post Office jobs and you can’t blame them. Look what happens when you stay in service all your life.’
‘No need to tell me.’ Duke stared stolidly at the advert for the Model T. Then he broke the silence. ‘How can you work on a switchboard when you’re carrying a babe in arms? That’s what you’re on about, ain’t it? It’s Jess. But you tell me how she can have a baby and go working for the Post Office!’ He was angry. Prances must be wrong in the head, thinking that Jess could go applying for jobs in her condition, and unmarried.
Frances sighed. ‘Look, Pa, Jess is having this baby, we know that. But it ain’t the end of the world. It don’t have to be. We’ve got time to think about things, ain’t we? First off she either has the kid, or she don’t.’
Duke left his newspaper and came and banged the flat of his hand on the table. The veins in his neck stood put. ‘No, you look. The girl’s a fool!’ he cried. ‘Getting herself into this mess!’
‘How do you know she had any choice?’ Frances looked up at him with her steady gaze. ‘From what Jess told me, there wasn’t even a by-your-leave.’
‘Who was it, that’s what I’d like to know?’ Duke backed off, stunned.
‘The Holdens’ son, Gilbert.’
Duke leaned on the table, covering his forehead with one broad hand. Then he breathed deep and stood up straight. If you got a wound in the war, or a kick from a horse, you went and had it cleaned up. A few stitches saw you right. But no one knew how to stitch up this kind of blow.
‘Any rate,’ Frances went on, ‘without the kid she could go about getting a job straight off. If she decides to have it, well, there’s plenty of us around here to help her look after it. She can still go out to work and earn her keep.’ She kept steadily at her darning. What she wanted was for Duke to take it for granted that Jess would come home, where she belonged. ‘That’s why I’m telling you, Pa. There’s plenty of jobs for women around these days. And the sooner Jess is out of service the better.’
‘If there’s plenty of jobs around, why’s young Amy Ogden sweating away over them top hats in Coopers’?’ Duke demanded. ‘If there’s plenty of jobs, why’s our Ett parading herself half-naked in front of them dirty-minded little bleeders at the Palace every night of the week? Tell me that. If there’s jobs, why are them poor bleeding women walking the streets out there? Don’t talk daft, Frances!’
Duke had raised his voice, but now he halted. That last remark had hit a nerve with him. He turned away, shaking his head. That’s what had struck him the night Frances first told him about Jess; what if she ended up like those skeleton-women, clutching her bundle of rags that was really a baby starving to death? He walked to the window to gaze out. Then he took a deep breath. ‘Tell her she can come home,’ he said.
Frances nodded without showing any reaction. But she was satisfied. She finished off her work, snipped the thread and rolled the socks into a pair. ‘I’ll go and fetch her this afternoon then.’
Duke’s head had sunk to his chest.
‘Will you tell the others, Pa?’
‘Yes. Go and fetch her home, there’s a good girl. Quick as you can.’
Frances went to him, reached up on tiptoe and kissed his lined cheek. She’d been thirteen when her mother passed on. Never since that time had she seen her father look so bad as he did this moment. ‘Don’t worry, Pa, we’ll manage.’
‘I’ll knock his bleeding head off if I get the chance!’ His voice was cracked and hoarse.
She nodded and went to put on her coat and hat. She stepped straight downstairs and out of the house, her heart heavy. She only hoped Jess would be good and co-operative now, since Duke had relented. She’d better realize what it had taken out of the old man; this arrow of disgrace in his respectable heart.
The tram took her up Duke Street, along Bridge Road to Southwark Bridge. Over the river, she stepped out of the cold drizzle down into Cannon Street underground station. She headed north-east to Hackney, feeling the train rattle and shudder, blind to the attractions of Van Houten’s Cocoa and Nestlé’s Milk Chocolate. To outsiders, she was the schoolteacher figure in her high-necked grey costume with its fur collar and matching toque hat. She sat severely, hands crossed over the black leather bag on her knee.
Frances had always been called Frances, never Fran, even within the Parsons family. One look at her told you she warranted the use of her full name if you wished to avoid the risk of receiving one of her somewhat haughty stares. She didn’t invite intimacy, with her straight-backed carriage and fastidious manners. She didn’t invite suitors either, since she lacked the easy banter of her sister Hettie, or Daisy O’Hagan from down the court.
Her cool appearance might be something she regretted but couldn’t do anything to alter. She’d lost her mother at precisely that age when a girl needs some role model in her budding relationships with the opposite sex. She’d no one to turn to when she needed to know the details of how to behave after a man began to show interest. Not a natural flirt, her uncertainty converted at first into shyness, then into a distinct air of reserve. At the age when most girls walked out on the Common or went cycling into the countryside with the boy of their choice, Frances turned to books and study. This was an unusual thing for a girl, even then. She filled her head with novels, with images of Mr E. M. Forster’s elegant young ladies touring round Italy or showing up in India to be married. And she turned her back on the Chalky Whites and Syd Swans who drifted in and out of the tenements or who propped up the bar in the pub downstairs.
If she was lonely she didn’t show it. Her one disastrous experience in life came after she’d finished with Board School, where she’d won prizes and praise from all around. ‘Frances should go and train as a teacher in college,’ her own teachers informed Duke. ‘She’s very able.’ But the family was poor, with different expectations. So she submit
ted to being sent into service much against her will. At seventeen, she wrote home to Hettie in her beautiful copperplate hand that the work for her Mayfair family was dreary and disgusting. She skivvied from dawn till dusk. But worse, the children of the house persistently bullied and cheeked her in front of their parents, much to everyone’s amusement. There’s an old dog called Bob in the house and he’s not too bad, I suppose. Otherwise I hate them all, every last one,’ she wrote with uncharacteristic bluntness.
By nineteen her heart was set on moving on. She scoured the newspapers for job advertisements, wrote many letters of application, mostly to the biscuit, cardboard-box and glasswork factories in her home borough. But biscuit factories didn’t need women with perfect handwriting and scholarly punctuation. She suffered dozens of rejections. Finally, Boots the Chemist announced that it was extending its branches into many East End districts. They did need women clever enough to decipher the illegible scribbles made by doctors on their prescriptions, and fastidious enough to measure and mix small quantities of medicinal substances. Frances wrote off and secured a position.
For the last eight years she’d worked hard to establish herself as an indispensable employee of the pharmacy. The work was repetitive and tiring, but it wasn’t demeaning. To have broken out of the degrading cycle imposed on most East End girls in service was a matter of pride to her. She even went on with her learning, through Workers’ Education classes in literature and politics. It set her further apart.
At twenty-eight she had become this serious, subdued woman in grey, sitting beneath the gaudy advertisements in the underground train, staunch in her family loyalty, respected but not popular. Frances would nevertheless rescue Jess from the Holdens and keep the family together. She steeled herself to the task, left the train and emerged up the steps into the cold grey light.
Getting Jess out of the house in Hackney proved straightforward enough. Frances arrived on the Holdens’ front doorstep and announced that she’d come to take her sister home.
Mrs Holden, a whalebone-plated woman with a wistful and rather helpless air despite her ample proportions, looked puzzled. She’d just returned from church, and called to her husband for help with this strange request He came down the stairs past the gilt-framed pictures, across the Turkish rug. Mr Holden was prepared to stand no nonsense.
Before he could say, ‘Now look here!’ between clenched teeth, Frances stepped in with, ‘Your son, Gilbert, has misbehaved towards my sister, Mr Holden, and we want her home to look after her.’ She looked him straight in the eye.
The head of the household blustered, the wife looked shocked and faint. But it turned out, when Jess was summoned and the final confrontation took place in the housekeeper’s room, that Mr Holden was forced to admit that his wayward son was already a father twice over, in similar circumstances. That Jess was merely an unfortunate third couldn’t be denied. Still she had to surfer Mr Holden’s unreasonable indignation at her for ‘putting herself in Gilbert’s way, don’t you know!’ and tempting him once again off the straight and narrow.
‘Hush,’ Frances warned Jess, who struggled through her tears to defend her bludgeoned reputation. ‘My sister will take her wages and we’ll leave without fuss, Mr Holden. We wouldn’t want to cause your family any distress just before Christmas, you see. And you can tell your wife that I’m very sorry indeed for her son’s behaviour. I trust she’ll soon recover her spirits.’ Mrs Holden had already been led away upstairs in a stare of shock.
Mr Holden, rendered powerless by Frances’s cool tactics, handed Jess eight pounds ten shillings; half her annual wage. She went up and packed her small canvas bag while Frances was sent to wait in the back scullery. No one spoke as they took their leave of the house by the servants’ door; not the housekeeper who’d seen it corning a mile off, not the cook who’d befriended Jess for a time, and certainly not Gilbert Holden, conspicuous by his absence during the row, but who stood now in his shirt-sleeves looking down on them from an upstairs window. The glass reflected light from the cloud-laden sky as Jess glanced back up.
‘Good riddance,’ Frances said, hurrying Jess down the path on to the street. ‘Now, Jess, you got to know Pa ain’t exactly waiting to welcome you with open arms when we get back.’ Her voice had relaxed into the East End twang.
Jess nodded. ‘What about the rest?’
‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’ She hurried away, the nasty taste of hypocrisy still in her mouth. ‘Oh, it’s very nice being shocked and throwing a faint all over the place!’ she exclaimed. ‘But what’s the betting she’s back at church with that son of hers, for the nativity service, loving her neighbor and angling for a respectable girl for him to marry!’
‘Poor cow, whoever she is,’ Jess agreed. ‘But don’t let’s talk about it no more.’ She looked straight ahead, shoulders back, walking firmly alongside her eldest sister. ‘And there’s one more thing, Frances. I don’t want to explain nothing about what happened back there, and that’s that!’
It hurt too much to remember Gilbert’s endless dirty remarks, his hands pawing her at every end and turn, the disgusting behavior that had led to this disgrace. There was one dark and violent moment that Jess would lock away for ever and never talk about. In those unspeakable seconds, a woman was helpless, friendless and alone. Then she had to carry her own pain and humiliation as best she could. Jess clurched her bag and marched along.
‘I don’t think Pa could believe it at first.’ Frances felt deeply for Duke in all this. They’d descended into the underground on to an almost empty platform.
‘Me neither. I sometimes think maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and find the whole thing’s been a bad dream.’ She grinned at Frances in a brave attempt to lighten the mood.
Frances smiled back. ‘Ready?’ she asked when they’d negotiated the tram journey and the light traffic of Duke Street.
Jess pulled at the skirt of her dark-blue coat and checked her reflection in the windows of the Duke. ‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ she announced, stepping upstairs into the lion’s den.
‘She’s here!’ Hettie called back into the living room. She’d pepped over the banisters and seen the top of Jess’s head coming upstairs. Then she fled into the kitchen.
Sadie sat as instructed at the table with Ernie, stiff and awkward as if they expected visitors she hardly knew. She pulled her long plait in front of one shoulder, then tossed it back again. She bit her lip. ‘Sit still, Ern!’ she told him. She could head Jess and Frances pause on the landing before they came in.
Ernie glanced at Robert for his lead. Rob leaned against the mantelpiece smoking a cigarette. Everything was all right then, Ernie thought. He smiled back at Sadie.
So when Jess finally came in, Ernie jumped up as he always did when she came home to visit on her half day off. He went right up to her and hugged her, knocking her hat off. ‘Make the tea!’ he shouted through to Hettie. ‘Jess is here!’
‘Watch it, Ern!’ Robert jumped nimbly forward to rescue the hat.
‘Leave him be, I won’t break, you know,’ Jess said. ‘I’m only having a kid.’ She put one arm around Ernie’s waist and gave him a cuddle.
‘Blimey.’ Even Robert had to admire her coolness. ‘I thought I was the one who knew my way around the place!’ He felt he was seeing a new Jess here. He had expected her to creep back home like a mouse, yet here she was making jokes about the worst thing that could happen to a girl. ‘Good for you.’ He winked. ‘I’ll go down and tell Pa you’re here.’
Then Hettie came in with a full pot of tea, tears in her eyes, hardly knowing where to look. Jess was the last one she’d expected to be in this mess. It was one thing when a girl at the Palace got into trouble. There was a network, people to tell them what to do next. But not your sister. She thought Jess looked pinched and peaky. They’d worn her out at that horrible place and sent her home in this condition, fit for nothing.
Jess let go of Ernie and went up to Hettie. ‘That’s a nice blouse you got on, Ett.’
She took the pot from her and set it on the hob. ‘I like the trimming.’
‘I got it from Annie. It’s a bit she had left over on the roll,’ Hettie said. ‘I’ll try and get you some next time I’m down the market.’ She plumped up a cushion in the easy chair, inviting Jess to sit in it. The ‘trouble’ was vanishing like Rob’s cigarette smoke.
And soon they were having their Sunday afternoon chat; Sadie complaining to Jess that Charlie Ogden was made of stone, despite all her efforts. ‘I want him to ask me to walk out with him,’ she protested. ‘But he’s always got his nose stuck in some flamin’ book!’
‘He must be blind then,’ Jess commiserated. Sadie had come to sit at her feet on the hearthrug. ‘You getting to look so pretty and all.’
Sadie beamed up at her. ‘Do you trunk so? Here, how do you like my new blouse? It’s only an old one of Ett’s, but we put a bit of extra lace round the neck. What d’you think?’
Without them knowing it, Duke had sidled into the room and taken a cup of tea from Frances. He stood by the door listening to the female chit-chat, watching his grownup children gathered together; the contented smiles, the pleasant laughter.
His gaze fell on Jess and his mind now back down the years. A third daughter, the midwife had told him. ‘But there, never mind, we can’t choose these things.’
When Robert followed on a couple of years after, it was almost as if Duke completely forgot about Jess. With her father’s mind absorbed by his son, little Jess missed the fussing and petting he’d lavished on the older girls, and she seemed easy to overlook. He recalled her as a quiet child, without Frances’s strong will or Hettie’s sparkle. The only clear memory he had of Jess from her early years was that she ran like the wind. She carried home prizes from the running races at school, having beaten all the boys. ‘Look, Pa!’ She would hold up her spinning-top for him to see.
‘Ern, go and give Robert a hand downstairs,’ he said gruffly. Jess started at the sound of his deep voice. The blood rushed to her face as she stood up to face him. Frances edged her forward. ‘Go on!’
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