Goodbye Piccadilly

by Betty Burton

  ‘Of course I am not, Ma. Why on earth should I do that?’

  ‘You know very well. I asked Max here hoping that you might listen to sense.’

  ‘Now Em, don’t you go bringing me into it.’

  Emily Hewetson looked as though she felt like hitting the traitor.

  ‘Right, Uncle Hewey. And don’t go bringing me into it either. You have had your say, Ma. You have made it very clear that you do not approve of my taking a teaching post in Islington.’

  ‘Islington! Do you hear that, Max?’

  ‘And Pa has had his say – he would prefer that I teach in a pleasant, fee-paying girls’ school. And now Uncle Hewey has had his say, which is that he does not want to be brought into it.’

  She helped herself to a tomato and beetroot and ate quickly.

  ‘And you are determined to leave us and go off to live in some squalid little rented rooms?’

  Otis put down her knife and fork and rested her hands in her lap and turned to her mother in an attitude of conciliation. ‘I have no intention of leaving you and Pa,’ she said gently. ‘I shall come here frequently I hope. I should like to keep my room and have some of my things here as I did whilst I was at Stockwell. But I do want to live as part of the community whose children I shall be teaching.’

  ‘I really do not know how this has all come about.’ Emily closed her eyes and gave herself a shuddering shake. ‘You have been obstinate about my going to inspect these rooms, and I did believe that you would not go so far. Now, however, I insist that your father takes a hand. Martin, it is up to you.’

  ‘Uncle Hewey came yesterday. You approve, don’t you, Uncle Hewey?’

  Emily Hewetson burnt a look at the viper who had been calmly eating her roast beef at her own lunch table. ‘You have been there? And you said nothing? Max!’ She was deeply hurt and Max would suffer for it later.

  Looking faintly uncomfortable, but putting a face on it, Max Hewetson said, ‘I kept my word to Otis that I would not. Really, Martin,’ (though his eyes were fixed upon Emily) ‘the rooms are perfectly clean and respectable. There are no trees in the streets and no gardens, I will give you that, but it is not at all badly kept up. She might have done very much worse.’ Now he looked at Otis who stared innocently back at him. ‘It will be very convenient for her living over a little restaurant. I sampled the food myself, it was excellent, I assure you.’

  ‘Over a restaurant! Martin, you must do something.’

  ‘Very well, Em, I will go and inspect the rooms.’

  At which Otis smiled inwardly. As with her Uncle Hewey, so she had always been able to twist her pa around her little finger. Her rooms were secure.

  Martin Hewetson very much disliked finding himself in the situation where his two women were in disagreement. He had never yet found a satisfactory way of dealing with it. What tended to happen was that, unless forced to do so, he offered no comment until he was alone with each of them, then he would sympathize with each argument, and at the same time would diplomatically try to ease in a bit of the opposing viewpoint.

  ‘Neither I nor your father will be able to rest easy in our beds whilst you are living in the midst of those people.’

  Otis opened her mouth to defend ‘those people’, but her father spoke first. ‘Em, my dear. I think that we have to admit defeat on this. We have lost the case. And we really ought to give Otis credit for her common sense and trust her.’

  But Emily was not in a mood to concede anything.

  Otis folded her napkin and had arisen before Max Hewetson could give assistance. ‘Yes, Pa, I am afraid that you have lost the case. No matter what. All that I need is my letter of confirmation.’ It was not often that Otis’s expression was so determined but, when it was, it was easy to see how much of her mother’s forceful character she had inherited. ‘Not that I admit that there was any case to answer. I am now a trained teacher and I believe that I shall be a very good one. Where are trained teachers most needed? We are needed where the children are poorest and most deprived. Now I ask you, Uncle Hewey, what use are the bad teachers to those children? And if I am to teach them, then I must know about them. Can you imagine how impossible that would be if I were to live here and only visit on a daily basis? How patronizing that would be: Miss Lavender Hill condescending to teach London’s poor children.’

  Whatever retort Emily Hewetson might have made was interrupted by one of the maids bringing the midday post to the master. This he sorted, handing one to Otis. ‘Shouldn’t you say that this was the one you have been waiting for?’ With the name and address facing, he handed Otis a long envelope.

  ‘I have been accepted! Oh! I cannot believe it.’

  Otis felt that having stopped breathing she would never start again. ‘Look, Ma. Look, Uncle Hew. “Miss Otis Hewetson BA.” There! BA. Did you ever think that you would see that, Pa?’

  ‘No, my dear, I never did. Well perhaps in this last year…’ and he thought how, if she had been a son, she would now have been coming into the practice.

  Max Hewetson, using a suitably avuncular voice, told her that she had been a very clever girl and that he intended buying her a bracelet inscribed with her name and qualification. He thought how fast things were changing and how difficult life would be for a man married to one of these new women.

  London’s poor! Oh, how Emily Hewetson ached to arrange a wedding such as their friends had not seen in twenty years.

  1914

  Jack Moth had not wished to visit his inheritance, Mere Manor, but Esther had persuaded him that, whether he liked it or not, he had certain duties and responsibilities. And, having persuaded him that he must at least visit the place and talk to the estate manager and staff, and as Bindon had been ordered away on a seven-day firearms course, she volunteered to accompany her brother.

  ‘Have you thought about the staff, Jack? It is not their fault that Sir Norbert left the place in your care.’

  ‘Nor is it my fault that Sir Norbert was irresponsible enough not to consult the person he nominated to run the damn place. He should have found out at least that I am not only not a fit person, but am not in the slightest interested in country estates and farms.’

  ‘I doubt if it would occur to any benefactor that his heir would be upset at having a country estate wished upon him.’

  ‘Then it should have occurred to him. It is a Clermont way of trying to claim me. Whatever I become in life, I want to have become it by my own efforts. I will not have my life interfered with by the Clermonts. They have to learn that they cannot buy everybody.’

  ‘I should have thought they learned that when Mother and Father married in spite of them.’

  In the end Esther had persuaded him, and the outcome was that they were now dining on an express train as it steamed through the West Country towards Lyme Regis.

  ‘Oh Jack, come on, cheer up.’ His sister poked him in the ribs as she used to when he was in a mood with his mathematics and flung his books across the room. ‘Are you sure that your objection is not to do with the fact that Sir Norbert turned out to be not the kind of person a man can be proud to inherit from? Not a little afraid of what people might think?’

  ‘Ess!’ Jack almost blushed at what his sister was suggesting. Married woman or not, he was taken aback both that she knew of Sir Norbert’s secret life and that she referred to it openly.

  ‘Being a married woman has gone to your head. You have come out with some very shocking things recently.’

  ‘Oh, how stuffy you are growing. You are in grave danger of becoming a lawyer. Mentioning perversion to my own brother is hardly shocking, there is no one to overhear us. It would be quite understandable if you were perturbed that people might wonder whether you had inherited Mere for some special reason to do with him.’

  ‘Oh Ess, do give over. How much do you think that people know? I mean, the whole matter was hushed up and nobody mentioned anything at the funeral or the reading of the will. Lord, Esther, how comes it that you know? I mean, da
mmit, it is not the kind of thing young women usually know about.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Don’t you mean that it is not the kind of thing that young men like to believe that young women know about? I think that I knew about him before I was old enough to know that he was perverted. You remember how he used to take us all down to the lake and how he would always be ready with a towel for the older cousins – not the girls. Girls get to sense such things when they are still quite little; so that when a man like Sir Norbert takes no interest in them, they see at once that he is not the same as other men around them. He never made much fuss of any of us girl cousins, or bought us any of the expensive surprises he did you boys.’

  To Jack, Bindon was stodgy and a stuffed shirt with no imagination, yet somehow he had been the catalyst for change in his sister. A cliché it is true, but she had blossomed. Yet to Jack he was the same unimaginative army officer who had courted her faithfully for three years. ‘Marriage suits you, Ess. I shouldn’t have believed it.’

  ‘You have just said that it has gone to my head.’ Unexpectedly, she blushed. ‘I think that I am very lucky to have found someone like Bindon. I only wish that he was not a soldier. I am afraid for him going off to fight.’

  Jack put his large hand over her tiny one. ‘Bindon will be all right, Ess. I ask you, what general is going to send the drums and trumpets into battle?’

  Appreciating his attempt to comfort her by joking, she smiled. ‘He says that he is a soldier first and a musician second.’

  ‘Perhaps they will keep him in a safe place and only bring him out to sound the bugles when there is a victory.’

  ‘Oh Jack, aren’t wars the most terrible things? I never thought about it before. Until recently wars and battles took place in history lessons and Shakespeare plays. When I was young, I never thought of there being actual people involved, but simply Roundheads and Cavaliers, Picts and Scots. Suddenly, wars are fought by men called Bindon, and Alexander and Philip and Robert and Jack.’

  He was about to say something about that when she said, ‘I have to tell someone. I am going to… I am expecting a child.’ She was visibly delighted.

  ‘Ess! So soon?’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Dearest Ess, it means nothing except that I am surprised and delighted. I had not expected to become an uncle so soon. You will be the best of mothers.’

  She pressed his hand and smiled affectionately. ‘“Uncle Jack”. How does that sound? I have written to tell Bindon.’

  ‘Well, he will be pleased.’

  ‘I know. We had planned to take a house in Southsea and suggest to father that we take Kitt with us. But I suppose that he will not return to Southsea until the war is over.’

  ‘Father must take responsibility for Kitt now. He has relied upon you for too long. I think that you and Bindon should still consider taking a place on your own. If you stay on at Windsor Villa, it is inevitable that you will still be responsible for Kitt.’

  ‘But I want to be close to Bindon when he returns.’

  ‘Do you know where his regiment will be based when it returns?’

  ‘No. Though he has heard unofficially that it is to be moved to Salisbury.’

  ‘That would be about two hours’ train journey to London, and another half-hour to get to Hampstead.’

  ‘Yes, not really much difference from the time it takes him to get from Southsea to London.’

  He smiled and clasped her two hands between his own. ‘And scarcely different from the journey we’re on now. Salisbury to Exeter and five minutes in the trap to Mere.’

  ‘Jack!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Leave London?’

  ‘Yes, have your child at Mere, Ess. Take the place as your home, put the mark of normality on the place, the mark of the Moths.’

  1914

  Esther, Frm Sat my address will be: f/o Barker’s, Market Street, Islington London. I shall be v. cosy here. My landlady is a v. obliging person. We shall still be within visiting distance at weekends. Yrs affct, Otis

  Otis Hewetson looked around her rented rooms with satisfaction. For this area of London they were quite luxurious; as well as having a living-room with a dresser and a minute iron range, it had a separate small bedroom. Her landlady had shown her how to get the range going, although as yet Otis did not know much about how to prepare food. In answer to her mother’s questions about how on earth she was to survive, Otis had given the assurance that, as her rooms were above a small restaurant, she would eat out. Barker’s Pie Shop, which ‘restaurant’ Otis never mentioned by name, sold baked potatoes and peas, in addition to a variety of meat or fruit pies. It had four small tables for diners at the rear. This facility, known by Lou the proprietor as The Parlour, might truthfully be described as a restaurant.

  It was a Saturday and the first day in her own accommodation.

  As she smoothed the counterpane Otis tentatively, gently, sniffed the air and smelt lavender bags, Mansion polish and the all-pervading aroma of the baked pies and potatoes from below. From Greywell to Market Street would have been a culture change that even Otis, with her determination to succeed, might, at one time, have found difficult, but the three years in accommodation with several of her sister students from Stockwell College had knocked the corners off her. There she learned to make toast and muffins and brew tea, to light a fire, clean a room and see to her own linen, all without the aid of the servants to which she had been accustomed since birth. Now, the smell of the clean room was her own achievement. She felt that she could survive in the world perfectly well without paid help.

  I have earned myself a supper. She went downstairs and along the passage that led into Lou Barker’s shop.

  ‘Settled in then, duck?’ Lou Barker was the same age as Emily Hewetson and looked old enough to be Otis’s grandmother. Under her old-fashioned cook’s cap her hair was grey, but few people ever saw the hair, for she was in her working clothes to get the oven going at five o’clock, and still in them when washing down the tiles of The Parlour at eleven. In the six hours when she was not working in the shop she lived the rest of her life.

  ‘Yes, it looks a real treat, Lou.’ Nowadays, in addition to the English of the class into which she was born, Otis spoke two other dialects – the plain schoolteacherish pronunciation of the classroom, and slightly bent vowels when in Lou’s or local shops. ‘I’m famished. I don’t mind what it is so long as it’s food.’

  Lou soon carried a plate of steaming meat pie and potatoes into The Parlour. ‘There y’are, dearie, get yer ribs round that. I’ll bring you some tea when it’s stewed a bit longer.’

  Otis had to admit to herself that it was perhaps the way that tea was served in her adopted country that she found most difficult to like. Strong Indian blends, stewed until they were dark and bitter, then made rusty red with sweet condensed milk. The sweeter the tea, the sweeter the giver. Sweetness was the great sign of affection here. In good times food was lavishly sprinkled with it. On Saturday nights children were taken to the market and bought bags of sugar fish and humbugs. Otis was still shocked at the profligacy of parents who could not afford shoes in which to send children to school but blew sixpence on boiled sugar and saw it gone in an evening.

  Lou put down a tray laden with teapot, cup and saucer and an opened tin of Fussells, Unfit For Babies, milk with a spoon standing in it. ‘You can help yourself to milk, I got plenty. You sit there as long as you like; there won’t be anybody in till the pubs turn out.’

  The pie was good. Even so, she did for once momentarily long for one of the Hewetson’s Saturday evening, leisurely meals of light foods and iced puddings, with some of Pa’s phonograph music, shared with Uncle Hewey, or perhaps a client of Pa’s who might be interesting.

  As she ate she thought of Esther and wondered whether she was well. Since the wedding, everything had conspired to keep them from one another. She knew from a letter about the pregnancy and about the possibility of her going
to live in Lyme Regis and about Bindon being in France. It seemed ages since she had even remembered to wonder whether he might be safe.

  From time to time as she ate at the little table for two, the shop bell rang, a bit of banter or gossip was exchanged and the bell rang again. Lou came in, took away the empty plate and brought in a slice of apple pie.

  ‘Goodness, Lou, I shall soon become much too plump if I continue taking my meals down here.’

  Lou smoothed down her own round bosom and hips. ‘Tell me one man who likes bones? A bit of flesh is what they likes. “Cushions without feathers” my dear old Alby used to say skinny women was. You eat in Lou’s and you’ll get yourself a feller in no time.’

  ‘I can’t have a fellow, Lou, teachers aren’t allowed to be married.’

  Lou laughed. ‘I never said nothing about getting married.’

  The bell rang again and Lou went into the shop part. A deep voice percolated through to Otis. A man asking Lou questions, in a voice that Otis thought familiar. A school governor or education official? At last she gave in to her curiosity and leaned to one side so that she could see into the shop where, looking back in her direction was six foot three inches of Detective-Inspector George Moth.

  Raising his eyebrows in surprise, he turned to Lou Barker. ‘I thought you said you had had no customers this afternoon.’

  ‘That lady’s not a customer in the regular way. She lives here.’

  ‘Lives here?’ Interest and perhaps amusement flickered in his face and went out. Turning to Lou, he said, ‘I still think that I should talk to the lady.’

  Otis felt confused.

  Lou said to the inspector, ‘You just wait here whilst I clear away and I’ll bring you a drink of tea in.’ To Otis she said confidentially, ‘He’s after that chap that was lassooing girls round their throats. His name’s Moth,’ she laughed, ‘not as you’d think so to look at him, would you? He’s been down this way a couple of times before this. He’s a plain-cloves copper but he’s not a bad chap once you get to know him. We had some trouble one time with a slasher. Old Moth copped him as soon as he was brought in on the job. Now he’s asking questions about…’