‘Well, she is now,’ said Daisy, ‘so you can count yourself right.’
‘And if she’d been alive I always thought she’d gone to live in New South Wales.’
‘Don’t grieve,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re not as sorry as all that.’
‘If I’d been given time I’d have been sorry,’ said Mrs Saunders.
The news was not quite as inconceivable as it had seemed. The solicitor wrote again, desiring to correct the impression (which no-one but himself had given) that the house be longed, or would ever belong, to Mrs Saunders. She had been left the end of a lease, sub-let. For the next five years, only, they would receive £5 a quarter. That will make a great difference to your way of life, the solicitor told them.
Mrs Saunders continued bottle-capping at the Falcon, because it entitled her to send her daughter to the Licensed Victuallers’ Free School in Latchmere Road. Daisy grew up to be tall and slender, but solid. She had substance to her. Life would get a lot of work out of her. Until it turned grey her hair, recklessly curling, would always attract attention, because of the difficulty of deciding whether it was more brown than red. It was all according to the light.
At fifteen she put her hair up, securing it with strong steel pins, and started as a clerical. That meant crossing the river, along with a hundred and fifty thousand other south Londoners, twice a day. The journey was compared at that time by sociological observers to a great war or catastrophe in a neighbouring land from which the fugitives, forbidden to look back, scurried over the river bridges by any means available to them, only checked by the fear of falling underfoot. At the tram stop there were no queues—queues were for free medical dispensaries only—and when the tram lurched round the corner, drawing up sharply, the crowd rolled onto it and with it like a dark swarm of bees. You had to attack and be among the first. But defence, too, had to be studied. Daisy went out to work like her friends, closely buttoned, hat-pinned, and corseted against unwanted approaches. She also wore on her wedding finger a broad gold ring, which had come to her from the long unsuspected aunt in Hastings. Had Aunt Ellie ever married? Inside it was an inscription—Whatever there is to know, That we shall know one day.
Those who did the approaching, in the stifling proximity of the tram, were inclined not to believe in the wedding-ring, and knew what else Daisy was wearing as well as she did. It was a battle with no accepted rules and when the tram began to roll with its plunging, strong-smelling human freight, men put their hands over their ticket and money pockets while schoolboys protected their genitals and women every point of contact, fore and aft.
Daisy had been taken on at Lambert’s Glazing Supplies, in Fulham. Dark and unpromising-looking as the warehouse was, it had over its entrance a large stained glass pane representing the Finding of the Lost Sheep. The sky had been cut out of a single piece of opalescent glass in which white and blue had been fused together at random, giving the effect of high summer clouds. Probably no-one in England, in the year 1909, could have produced a panel like this one; certainly Lambert’s couldn’t. Although almost every small house in Battersea, Clapham, Streatham and Stockwell had its bit of coloured glass over the front door, Daisy had never seen, either before or in church, anything quite like it before.
The hours at Lambert’s were from eight until eight. Young Daisy arrived with the irrepressible readiness to please, as though on creation’s first morning, which is one of the earth’s great spectacles of wasted force. She was given a stool and a peg in an almost lightless and airless tank behind the glass-store. The columns of figures were a delight to her, particularly if some of them had gone astray. The sight of 8073 foot of glazing at one shilling and sixpence a foot, with quarter-inch lead bars, subsequently changed to five-sixteenths, and the whole estimate to be raised by 13½% gave her satisfaction, as though she had faced defiance and quelled it.
She was earning twelve shillings a week. Mrs Saunders lost her job at the brewery. There was something wrong with her, a pain, not always in the same place. She had the time now to think about it. They had moved into two nice airy rooms on the top floor of a house where the handwritten cards, in every window except theirs, offered useful services. Plain Washing Taken In (this was on the ground floor, where the boiler was), Music Correctly Taught, Herbal Remedies. ‘You don’t want to try those,’ said Daisy. But Mrs Saunders had already been to pass the time of day with the herbalist. She was able to report that he had nothing but doses of groundsel, for bringing it on, and penny royal, in plain envelopes, for bringing it off. Nothing for a woman of her age.
After less than a year, Daisy handed in her notice at Lambert’s, and started a new job, still in clerical, at Sedley’s Cartons. That, too, did not last many months. Had there been anything wrong with her work? No, said Daisy, unmoved, they couldn’t fault her there. Mrs Saunders sighed. ‘Well, you told me Mr Lambert couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Didn’t he take any notice of poor Ellie’s wedding-ring?’ ‘Lord, mother, that’s only for the tram,’ said Daisy. ‘It’s just for travelling. I take it off at work. Lambert knows I’m fifteen, and he knows I’m not married. We won’t talk about Lambert any more.’
‘What about Mr Sedley?’
‘He’s worse,’ said Daisy. ‘He’s carny.’
‘Carny’ was a word which nobody in London south of the river used lightly. Nobody, either, would have thought of Daisy as difficult, or hard to suit, or even particular. She was, on the contrary, generous, and described as the kind of girl who’d give you the teeth out of her head, if she could get them loose. It was only that she didn’t want decisions made for her by old Mr Lambert, still less by young Sedley.
There were a lot of people out of work now, more than she ever remembered. She made out she was a school-leaver, and got a recommendation from Father Haggett at the Anglo-Catholic Mission church of St James the Less. He felt for his parishioners, and was ready to sign anything, within reason, to help them to earn. With this she got a washing-up job, but at seven shillings a week only, with threepence held back in case of breakages.
Daisy loved her mother, who was the only relative she had, but she supposed it might be said that she killed her. In the spring of 1909 the Selfridge Department Store opened in Oxford Street. A circular was printed—everyone saw it, because it was posted up in every window. Daisy read it in the Women’s Penny Reading Room at the back of the church hall. ‘We wish it to be clearly understood that our invitation to the opening of Selfridge’s, is to the whole British public and to visitors from overseas—that no cards of admission are required—that all are welcome—and that the pleasures of shopping as well as those of sight-seeing begin from the Opening Hour. Everything is NEW except the splendid old time-tried principles that must govern it—integrity, sincerity, liberality in dealing and courteous service.’
The magnificent building, with its columned frontage and pillared vistas, had gone up, said the circular, within a year, employing fifteen hundred men during this sad time of depression. There were lifts, worked by electricity. ‘I’ll take you to have a look at it if you like,’ Daisy told her mother. ‘It’ll be my half-day.’ Mrs Saunders had been up to the West End often enough, but never into a large store. The notion of going there under the wing of her tall, good-looking daughter drove her nearly crazy with joy, but she did not drop her defences.
‘I don’t mind, if you happen to be going that way,’ she said.
They took a tram to Victoria, and then the open-top motor-bus, nipping up the stairs like larks ascendant to get the two front seats on the left-hand side where they would see most, defying the dark greyish clouds to break. Oxford Street was almost at a standstill, blocked with horses and motors. They got out at Ruscoe’s, the humble draper’s next to the new great store, at No. 424. A red carpet covered the pavement, in homage to Selfridge’s customers. Even the humble ones who wanted to go into Ruscoe’s trod at least on the edge of this carpet. Inside the main door, blazing with light, Gordon Selfridge himself patrolled in a frock coat, e
xchanged, when darkness fell, for full evening dress. Mrs Saunders regally nodded to him. With Daisy to take her arm, she felt subservient to none. In fact, what was joyous to her was not the thought of the hundred departments, freely compared in the store’s advertisements to the bazaars of the farthest orient, or the twelve hundred assistants, but the chance of showing them that, to a woman like herself, they were not so much.
After they had seen perhaps twenty of the hundred departments, Daisy suggested taking the lift up to the Tea Gardens. The Gardens were on the roof of the building. They could do with some fresh air. Daisy said this as though both of them had just come up from the depth of the country, from green woods or potato fields.
‘Air!’ said Mrs Saunders. ‘They can’t make us pay for that.’
‘We haven’t paid for anything yet,’ said Daisy.
In these early days a bugle was to be blown every morning when Selfridge’s opened, and again when it shut, as though every day spent in shopping was an epoch of history. Mrs Saunders, however, although she had talked a good deal about the promised bugle, seemed, now that she had the chance, not to care whether she heard it or not.
‘I think I’ll go home now,’ she said. ‘You can only see so much.’
‘You’re getting tired, mother.’
‘No I’m not,’ said Mrs Saunders. ‘Do I ever?’
‘It’s not such a sin to be tired.’
‘It’s a great mistake to admit it, though.’
After that she said very little until they had transferred once again to the tram and crossed the river back to their own country. The market streets were dark, the stalls wheeled into the side alleys and shrouded closely in oilcloth. You could smell the cramped stables, and hear now and then a horse shut up for the night, shifting from foot to foot. Under the gaslights at the street junctions the preachers, the political speakers, the Marxists, the suffragists, had given up all hope of audiences, and gone back to whatever homes they had.
‘What did you think of it, though, Daisy?’ Mrs Saunders asked. ‘How long do you think it’ll last? Floor after floor of stuff, I didn’t hardly look at how much they were asking for it. And all laid out for everyone to stare at, it didn’t seem quite decent.’
‘I know,’ Daisy said. ‘They’re almost asking for people to come in and help themselves to the things.’
She took the front door key out of the pocket of her skirt.
‘Well, I did take just one thing,’ said Mrs Saunders.
My God, she never, Daisy thought. Still, it can’t have been anything very big. She asked, ‘How did you get it back here?’
‘Just in the old way.’ In her umbrella, then. She put her arm round her bony little mother.
‘I took it for you, Daisy, as a present for you.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ said Daisy.
‘Well, perhaps not.’
It turned out, when they got upstairs, to be a ‘rat’, a roll of artificial hair over which you combed your own, to make it look luxurious enough for the present style. Unfortunately, the rat usually showed through to some extent, and this one was of a golden yellow shade.
‘Do you really like it?’ Daisy asked doubtfully.
‘No, not really. I’m not so keen on it now I look at it again. It don’t match my hair and it don’t match yours. It reminded me of the colour I had when I was your age. We might take it back if we go that way again.’
‘I shouldn’t worry, with twelve hundred assistants on top of the customers, I expect they’ll find a good bit missing at the end of every day. You ought to have taken something you really wanted.’
Three days later Mrs Saunders died, while Daisy was out at work. She felt the loss through and through, and, even more keenly, the thought that she hadn’t been there to take charge. She did not ask the doctor whether the outing to the West End could have brought on the heart attack because she knew he wouldn’t be able to give a definite answer either way. Therefore she said nothing about it.
The herbalist, the teacher of correct music, and the taker-in of plain washing all found their way to Daisy’s room, where the washstand was, and the oil stove, both curtained off. They had come, as she very well knew, to see if there was going to be anything to spare from her mother’s things. She told them that after she’d seen to the arrangements, they could come and see what there was. She wasn’t going to keep anything except one photograph of her mother as a young woman. It didn’t suggest that Mrs Saunders had ever had golden hair, but then the photographer, when he did the tinting, might have got that wrong.
‘Not keeping the furniture, Miss Saunders?’ the herbalist asked.
‘I’m not staying here,’ said Daisy.
‘But the washstand?’
‘I shan’t take it with me.’ He must have worked out it was behind the curtain, or else he’d been poking round and knew it had a marble top.
She notified the solicitor, who desired to express his regret. When she called round to ask him about her Aunt Ellie’s house, he pointed out that on Mrs Saunders’ death, the payment of £5 quarterly automatically lapsed.
‘Who gets it, then?’ Daisy asked. The solicitor said that she would do well to consider her future carefully. Daisy told him that she had always wanted and still wanted, now that she didn’t have her mother to consider, to be a hospital nurse.
‘There are two ways of entering nursing,’ he said, ‘either you go in as an ordinary probationer—most probationers, I believe are from the domestic service class—or you go in to train as a lady nurse, paying a premium, and of course wearing quite a different uniform, and not being required to undertake any distasteful work. You would, I imagine, have very little contact with the lady nurses.’
He charged nothing for this advice, perhaps as a compensation for the loss of the rent from the Hastings house.
9
The Blackfriars Hospital
The matron at Blackfriars interviewed applicants only between two and four o’clock on Fridays. When Daisy had rung the bell and been admitted through the outer and inner doors, she braced herself to measure up to the other applicants. She was wearing a navy-blue coat and skirt and a navy-blue straw hat painted over with a patent lacquer so that it would keep its shape even in quite heavy rain. Two pins with plain glass heads secured it. The sleeves of her costume were rather short. She had had to turn them up a bit to hide the wear on the cuffs. Some inked them in, but Daisy never. On the inner door there was a painted notice which read ‘This hospital turns away more than a thousand applications a year from persons desiring to train as nurses. Every year perhaps 4 or 5 are accepted.’—Words of challenge, welcome to the free spirit. Because or in spite of them, every chair in the waiting-room was occupied. Daisy stood with her back to the wall, looking at the stiffly sitting girls. All wore navy-blue costumes, all the sleeves were unnaturally short, all wore straw hats with the exception of one dark, foreign-looking woman, perhaps Spanish, perhaps from Gibraltar, older than the others. You couldn’t apply over the age of thirty-eight; perhaps she was thirty-seven. She asked Daisy if she had come far. Daisy said she was used to walking. The others looked away, as though, if they listened, conscience might drive them to offer her a seat.
‘The next one will soon be out,’ said the dark woman. ‘She is not taking long today.’
‘Have you been here before, then?’ Daisy asked, but that was not an acceptable question, and there was no answer. The white-painted brass-locked door of the matron’s office opened and a girl came out, crossed the room with head bowed, and said something (but nothing that anyone could hear) to the receptionist. All the applicants stirred a little. Either she had had a cold, or she was in tears. The porter was called; the receptionist told him to get a cab. A lady applicant, perhaps.
Daisy was the last to be called. She looked with respect at the woman sitting on the other side of the desk. You had to struggle, perhaps fight and bleed, to get to a position like that. Matron was short, pale and pale-haired, as straight as though s
uspended from a hook.
‘You may sit down.’
She repeated from the application paper in front of her Daisy’s name and address.
‘You are nearly eighteen. Are you a single woman or a widow? If you are a widow, have you children? If children, how are they provided for?’
‘I’m single.’
‘And have you anyone dependent on you for support?’
‘Not now.’
‘You may call me Matron.’
‘Not now, Matron.’
‘But recently?’
‘There was my mother. She died in March.’
‘And that left you free to apply to enter the nursing profession, which of course would entail your living away from home.’
‘I suppose it did.’
‘So that her death has been release for you.’
‘No, I won’t say that, and I don’t say that. It wasn’t a release for her either.’
The matron appeared not to listen to this, but fixed her attention on the papers on her desk. ‘Your birth certificate. You’re too young, but the Governors have changed their policy about that to some extent. Vaccination certificate. Height?’ Daisy said she thought five foot six, without heels. ‘It’s not a matter of thinking,’ the matron said. ‘Educated at the Victuallers’ School, certificate of good conduct and application. Did you study Latin? Do you understand what I mean by enemata?’
Daisy did not, but said she was prepared to learn.
‘I don’t expect the girls who come to us to know anything. Now, are you strong and healthy, and have you always been so? Let me explain, in order to save time, that several of the applications today mentioned, apparently only as an afterthought, that they had rheumatic fever as children, which meant that if they were accepted here they might collapse and become a nuisance and an expense at any given moment.’
‘I’ve always been strong and healthy,’ said Daisy and beneath her put-on clothes she felt her physical self-respect extend and stretch itself, like a cat in the sun.
The Gate of Angels Page 6