In Her Mothers' Shoes

by Felicity Price

  Mind you, there had also been a doting father in all the pictures and she knew there wouldn’t be one of those at the birth. What other unpleasant realities were in store?

  ‘It’s a bit late to be put off now.’ Meg said, laughing at her own joke.

  ‘I suppose so.’ Lizzie didn’t think it at all funny.

  Meg’s laugh turned bitter. ‘In here,’ she said, entering a room that was much warmer than the cool chill of the rest of the building.

  She soon saw why. Through the steam she could make out, lined up against the outside wall, a row of laundry coppers, just like the one at home that Mrs Mullen presided over every Monday and Thursday morning. Each one was steaming away furiously, and a short, stout girl was running between them, stirring the contents with a long wooden pole.

  ‘Here you are, Christine, I got you a biscuit.’ Jessie handed over the tea-stained biscuit she’d saved from morning tea. It’s got raisins in it.’ She gave Pearl a taunting glance.

  Pearl ignored her.

  Christine ate it at once, continuing the incessant stirring with her other hand. ‘I’ll take that over now, you have a break.’ Christine smiled gratefully and retreated to a corner near the door where she lowered herself, with some difficulty, onto a small, three-legged stool.

  ‘Come on, Lizzie, I’ll show you what to do.’

  Lizzie, being the newcomer, was put in charge of stoking the fire under each copper, adding small pieces of wood through the firebox door, making sure the fire was drawing properly and the smoke was all going up the chimneys inserted into the side wall and not blowing back into the laundry. She was told not to let the fire get too fierce, nor was it to die down too low, so the water would continue to boil in the big vat above. Fetching and carrying the wood from outside, carefully opening each firebox with a thick cloth and feeding the flames took up the rest of the morning. It was hot work down by the fireboxes and she had to wipe her forehead all the time to keep the sweat from trickling in her eyes.

  If the next month or so was going to be like this, she doubted she could cope. Were these the wages of sin the vicar used to talk about in his Sunday sermons? You committed a sin – like sex out of wedlock, she realised – and you paid for it stoking the fires of hell for all eternity. Or at least it seemed like eternity stretching out before her on day one. How would she make it to day thirty-one? A whole month of this before they got moved onto gardening.

  She’d never been as relieved as when Jessie said she could let the fires go out it was time for the final cold-water rinse.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so hot in my life,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘You get used to that,’ Jessie said.

  ‘And not caring two figs for how you look,’ Meg said, wiping her brow with her wet hands.

  ‘My hair must look a fright,’ Lizzie said, quickly rubbing a hand across it. ‘It goes frizzy just at the sight of water.’

  ‘It looked lovely when you came in. You’ve got nice hair. Nice and thick. Not like my thin, stringy strands.’ Jessie said.

  ‘I’d rather that than a frizz.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry now,’ Meg said. ‘It’s plastered to your head. That’s what happens to you in the laundry. You end up looking like a wrung-out tea towel.’

  ‘I certainly feel like one.’

  ‘Then you can get to work on the wringer and see for yourself.’ Lizzie’s job now, Jessie told her, was to operate one of two mangles beside the rinsing tub. Anahira, the next most recent arrival, was on the other one.

  The mangle wasn’t quite as bad as stoking the fires, but it had frequent moments of terror when, turning the handle to feed the sheets and towels through, she almost got her fingers caught between the two fearsome rollers.

  In her head, as she fed and turned, fed and turned, she wrote a letter to her mother telling her how it was, every awful detail of the laundry. But she knew she’d never send it. There was no point. What would her mother say? ‘Sorry, all is forgiven, come home now?’ Not a chance. She was stuck here at Bleak House for the next five months and there was no other alternative – she had nowhere else to go.

  Chapter 5.

  Christchurch. Christmas Eve, 1950.

  The smoggy, misty Christchurch dawn cast a grey pall over the windows outside Bleak House, sending a lingering chill through the dormitories and shower blocks inside. But Lizzie scarcely noticed the cold – she’d become so used to it at this hour it was hardly worth a mention. In a few hours, the place would be hot and stuffy in the summer heat and she’d be looking forward to the cooler evening.

  She raced with the others to the shower – the quicker you got there, the less you felt the cold – set down her spongebag, threw off her nightdress, turned on the taps and waited until the temperature was just right before jumping in.

  ‘Your nipples have gone all brown, Lizzie.’ Meg said across the chest-height dividing wall between the showers. ‘Mine haven’t yet.’

  Lizzie unselfconsciously looked down at hers and, sure enough, the areola was a smooth chocolaty brown while each nipple seemed to be larger than before and almost hard.

  ‘So they have.’ she said. ‘Pearl’s and Anahira’s went like that ages ago.’

  ‘Isn’t it funny how they seem to get so much bigger?’

  ‘What, your nipples?’

  ‘Yes. They never warn you it’s going to happen.’

  ‘That’s what’s so good about being in this together,’ Lizzie said. ‘You get to know what to look for.’

  ‘And it saves you getting in a stitch about it. You just ask each other.’

  ‘And if we don’t know, you can ask the lot ahead of us.’

  Jessie stuck her head over the wall on the other side of Lizzie. ‘Like when Pearl’s tummy button started to stick out,’ she said.

  The three of them laughed at this.

  ‘You could see it through her dress at the dinner table, like she had a little bumpy knot on top of her belly,’ Meg said. ‘Pass me the shampoo please, Lizzie, I’ve run out.’

  ‘It’ll happen to all of us soon,’ Anahira called from the next cubicle.

  Lizzie squirted out a dab of shampoo and passed the bottle to Meg. ‘Thanks.’ She lathered her hair.

  ‘Isn’t it funny how we can talk so easily about such things?’ Meg said, passing the bottle back.

  ‘I’d never have believed it a couple of months ago,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’d never have dreamed of showing my breasts to anyone.’

  ‘Not even to your boyfriend?’ Jessie popped her head out from under the flow of water to speak then popped it back again to rinse her hair.

  ‘Especially not to him.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Meg was still lathering. ‘What about you Pearl?’

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ Pearl snapped. ‘I’ve told you before.’

  ‘Oops, sorry. I’d forgotten how tetchy you were about him.’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’ Pearl shut off her shower taps, picked up her soap and stalked over to the bench where her clothes were waiting in a neat pile. Of all of them, Pearl was the tidiest and the most reserved, preferring to hide in the corner when getting dressed.

  ‘Well there must have been a boy somewhere in the picture, or you wouldn’t be here,’ Jessie called after her.

  Pearl plucked her towel off its hook and wrapped it tightly around herself before turning back to Jessie and giving her a withering look. ‘It’s none of your business.’ She took a few steps towards the showers. ‘That goes for all of you. Just leave me alone.’ She was shouting now, her eyes narrowed in anger. ‘If my father was here, he’d put an end to your prying questions.’

  ‘Your father?’ Jessie snorted as she lathered her arms with soap. ‘The way you talk about him, you’d think he was your boyfriend.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Pearl screamed. Clutching her towel with one hand and grabbing her pile of clothes with the other, she stormed out, dropping her soap without stopping to pick it up.

  ‘Now yo
u’ve upset her,’ Lizzie called to Jessie.

  ‘Must have touched a sensitive nerve,’ Meg said.

  ‘Maybe it was her father who …’ Jessie stopped soaping herself and put her hand to her mouth, not finishing the sentence.

  ‘Jessie! That’s a terrible thing to say.’ Meg turned off her taps and stepped out of the shower, away from Jessie and the others.

  ‘No, that’s not possible.’ Lizzie thought they were being ridiculous. ‘Fathers don’t do that with their daughters.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ Jessie looked incredulously at Lizzie for a moment then suddenly changed her expression to one of conciliation. ‘No, of course they don’t.’

  Lizzie shut of her taps with a determined twist, stepped out of the shower onto the wet duckboard and started to towel herself dry. How could Jessie suggest such a thing? She was sure Pearl had done it with one of the boys on the farm. She’d as good as said so and Pearl wouldn’t lie to her. There were no secrets among any of them.

  They were in this together, ‘the bad girls’, the girls who’d got caught, the girls who wore their disgrace out front, right where everyone could see it, so that the monthly trips to town to go to the library became a lesson in public humiliation.

  Passers-by sniggered openly as the girls walked by, two-by-two, an ungainly crocodile weaving along Worcester Street and through the doors of the solemn brick central library building.

  ‘It’s so embarrassing,’ Lizzie had said the first time it happened. She felt like cringing. This was quite different to the last time she’d walked in a crocodile with the girls at Marsden on an outing to the zoo. She was used to overhearing comments of admiration at their neat formation, their tidy uniforms, their obedient demeanour, not sentiments of disgust. She wished she could be invisible.

  But Jessie was striding along beside her, swinging her arms nonchalantly. ‘No it’s not,’ Jessie said. ‘Why would it be embarrassing? We don’t know a single one of those people.’

  ‘And even if we did, I wouldn’t care.’ Meg, in front of Lizzie, waved an arm dismissively.

  ‘But imagine what they’re saying to each other,’ Lizzie said. ‘Imagine what they’re thinking.’

  ‘They’re judging us,’ Pearl said.

  Lizzie turned back to see her shrinking from the stares.

  ‘I hate it,’ Pearl continued. ‘They should mind their own business.’

  ‘What does it matter what they’re thinking?’ Jessie shrugged. ‘You worry too much, you two, what other people are thinking of you. All that matters is what you think of yourself.’

  ‘And what your friends think,’ Christine added, catching them up.

  ‘Yes, the people that really know you.’ Anahira was ahead of Lizzie, walking next to Meg.

  ‘Not horrible busybodies like them.’ Suddenly Lizzie felt hot with anger at the women across the street who were staring; she poked out her tongue at them.

  ‘Lizzie!’ Meg giggled.

  The women looked horrified, turned their backs and walked away.

  ‘That’ll show them not to judge us.’ Jessie grinned at her.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Lizzie.’ Pearl was looking away from the women. ‘You shouldn’t draw attention to us.’

  ‘You should try it sometime, Pearl. It makes you feel a lot better,’ Lizzie said.

  Pearl looked at her resentfully.

  They passed an old lady hesitating at the exit of a shop doorway, who had held up her hand to shade her eyes from the awful prospect of the obviously pregnant ‘wayward girls’. ‘I dare you.’ She nudged Anahira and Meg then turned to Pearl and Christine behind.

  All of them except Pearl stuck their tongues out at the old lady as they waddled by. Despite the blocking hand, the woman obviously saw, because she drew up her shoulders, pursed her lips and returned inside the shop.

  The girls burst out laughing – all except Pearl.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll get us all into trouble.’

  Jessie stopped laughing and turned back to Pearl. ‘Nonsense.’ Then she looked across at Lizzie. ‘It felt good, didn’t it?’

  Lizzie couldn’t answer for a moment, she was laughing so much.

  ‘Girls, pull yourselves together back there,’ Miss Mayhew called from the front of the crocodile. ‘You’re making a public exhibition of us all.’

  At that moment, they arrived at the library where they had free reign to select the books of their choice. For Jessie, predictably, books about medical complaints and human biology; for Christine, magazines like The Weekly News and books about child care, even though she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to keep the baby; for Meg and Lizzie, any of the classics or the latest novels they could get their hands on, starting with the authors she knew, like Noel Streatfeild, enjoying again the perils of Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, the three adopted children in Ballet Shoes; reliving the Waterbury children’s train-watching spy story in Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children; before moving on at Meg’s suggestion to Lizzie Sutcliffe’s new book The Queen Elizabeth Story. Her reading had moved up a level when she borrowed Jessie’s copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and her most recent discovery, her first real adult fiction, had been Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice.

  Library visits represented the highlight of each month. Every day she painstakingly marked another cross on her home-made calendar – topped by a rose-tinted painting of her home – counting off the days to the birth and the day she could at last return home. Library day, marked in heavily scored HB pencil, was a welcome milestone in the horrendously long path of gestation, as were the weekly letters from her mother. Kindly but never emotional, filled with news from home – Penny’s achievements at school and at her new ballet classes; Jerry’s scores on the rugby field – there was no mention about how she, Helena Hamilton, was feeling about having her daughter so far from home in such an alien environment. Not that Lizzie told her the whole truth about just how drear her existence had become. Her mother would never believe it. She seemed to think her daughter was at a private school boarding house with the sort of jolly japes and iced lemonade serialised in those British girls’ annuals her mother used to buy.

  Lizzie could remember the way they spoke: ‘Well played, Pip! Jolly well played!’ for the heroine, while the bad girls were ‘beastly’, ‘rotten’ and ‘mean’. The worst they got up to was ‘ragging’ a girl’s study or pulling a girl’s hair. Pregnant teenage girls were unheard of.

  Her mother had sent her one of those thick story books, Popular Stories for Girls, last month in a parcel with one of her famous fruit cakes (they’d eaten it all within the week), some warm socks, and a painting of the family (or at least that’s what her mother said it was of) by Penny. Penny had stuck a note on the back of the painting – her big-print notes were often included with her mother’s – saying ‘I miss you Lizzie,’ which she’d had to put out of sight very quickly until her eyes stopped prickling.

  She’d opened up the Popular Stories for Girls eagerly, hungry for something new to read, but had soon realised it was intended for girls much younger than her. Why couldn’t her mother see she was a young adult now? An adult, in fact. Carrying a baby surely qualified her for something more grown-up to read than a schoolgirls’ breathless story book. She’d put it away in the bottom of her cupboard, not wanting the other girls to see.

  Library books remained her salvation. Although getting there was a mission, involving catching a bus into town then walking from Cathedral Square down the main street and across the river to the big red-brick library building.

  She’d learnt to shrug off the stares but each month it became a little more difficult; the more advanced their pregnancy, the slower their steps. Her pelvis ached, the bones at the top of her legs felt sometimes as if they were splitting apart, as if the baby were preparing to pop out any minute. At the same time, burning liquid kept bubbling up in her throat and her stomach felt as if it had been squashed to one side of her body.
Every time she ate anything but the blandest of food, it churned round inside. There seemed to be no respite. And she always felt so tired. The only relief had been promotion out of the laundry into the garden.

  And now it was nearly Christmas Day.

  After just a little over two months in residence, Lizzie was familiar enough with the place to know that Christmas at Bleak House wouldn’t be a joyous celebration.