All My Mother's Secrets

by Beezy Marsh

  In the crook of her arm, she held a little china doll dressed in a faded gingham pinafore. Raggedy Annie was her most precious thing in the world, apart from her brother, of course. She was her constant companion and took pride of place on her pillowslip because he had given it to her when she was first born. That’s what Nanny Chick had told her.

  She didn’t remember that, of course, or the long journey on the train, to go and stay with Nanny’s sister, Annie’s Great-Aunt May, in Suffolk when she was still a baby. She tried and tried to remember Mum bringing her to the farm and waving goodbye, so that she could go to work every day in the laundries back in London. She tried even harder to remember Dad holding her close and kissing her goodbye at the station; he must have done that as he pressed Raggedy Annie into her arms. Her doll’s pinafore would have been brand new then. And with her black hair tumbling down her back, and her little painted shoes on her feet, Raggedy Annie must have been the smartest doll in the whole of London town.

  Instead, Annie’s earliest memories were of gathering firewood with her cousins in the winter and of long summers when she ran through the wheat fields and helped with the harvest; of being carried on the farm boys’ shoulders as they made their way back to the big house in the fading light, her skin tingling from the heat of a full day in the Suffolk sunshine.

  Twice a year, her mother and Nanny Chick would come to visit her, telling her she was lucky to be in the fresh air of ‘Silly Suffolk’ with Great-Aunt May, and away from the heat and damp of the laundry. ‘Oh, you don’t want to be back in the pea-soupers, my girl,’ Nanny Chick would say, bouncing her on her knee. ‘Great-Aunt May needs you to help her run the house here and keep your little cousins in check, doesn’t she?’

  Great-Aunt May would nod in agreement and say Annie was the best helper, as children ran pell-mell around the farmhouse kitchen. She was a widow, with three strapping grown-up sons who worked on the farm and were so kind and gentle with Annie, treating her like one of their own, swinging her high in the air to make her laugh and never scolding her when she was caught sticking her fingers in the cream or scrumping apples with her cousins.

  But she was still just a little girl then. Raggedy Annie was with her as she clung to her mother’s skirts when it was time for Mum to leave to go back to London, even though Great-Aunt May spoiled her rotten and gave her a kitten to play with.

  When Annie started at the village school, some of the other girls teased her because her mother and father didn’t live with her. Raggedy Annie sat beside her in the rocking chair by the grate in the kitchen as Great-Aunt May explained she was more loved than most children because her mother worked very hard and her father was working hard too, just so she could have some fresh air. Then, out of the blue, in the summer of 1915, her mum sent word that she needed Annie’s help back at home. Annie was ten and old enough to come back to London on the train on her own.

  Raggedy Annie was packed up in a little suitcase with Annie’s clothes: her pinafores, her flannelette nightie, her itchy woollen stockings and her comb. Nanny Chick met her at Liverpool Street Station, with a special slice of a meat pie wrapped in brown paper, and they took the tram all the way to Acton, munching as they went. Annie marvelled at the big houses and the fancy carriages and even motor cars; there were shops with meat hanging up outside and glass jars in the windows of the pharmacies and children playing in the dusty streets. There were ladies dressed so smartly with flowers on their hats and gentlemen walking along beside them, smoking or carrying walking canes. The best bit was as they passed Hyde Park: a parade of soldiers, marching along in green uniforms, with their guns slung over their shoulders and a tall fella with an enormous moustache shouting orders to them as they stepped in time.

  When they got off at Acton High Street, which was bustling with people, Annie couldn’t help noticing they were dressed differently to those up in town. Their clothes were clumsier-looking, older, dirtier and, rather than fashionable dresses, the women wore plain coats, buttoned and belted, and dark felt hats, without the flowers on the top which Annie had found so pretty to look at on the journey. The coalman’s lorry was wending its way down the road and the motor-buses had to chug past the milkman’s dray as he sold milk by the pint from churns on the back. A totter had parked up to call out for rag and bone, and he had a tarpaulin over the top of his cart. The sharp, sickly-sweet smell of that caught Annie in the nostrils and made her cough.

  ‘That’s for the tallow factory down Packington Road,’ said Nanny Chick, hurrying past. ‘Hold your breath.’

  They walked down the lane and under a grimy railway arch and then it was a sharp right turn into Fletcher Road, where Mum was waiting for her on the doorstep. It was just as Nanny had described it, with a big bay window at the front and a little window above it and a short front path that took no more than two steps to skip up. ‘This is home,’ said Nanny Chick, giving her hand a little squeeze.

  Mum had a big surprise to show her in the scullery at the back of the house, the best thing ever, better than a kitten – her own little brother George. She fell in love with him then, his long fingers curling around the shawl Mum had knitted for him and his eyes tightly shut. She knew then she’d protect him forever, because she was his big sister.

  Annie asked when Daddy would be coming home. Her mother turned away and poked at the fire. Nanny Chick told her softly: ‘He has gone away to war and is fighting at the Front with all the other brave men. We don’t talk about him no more. It makes your mother sad, see?’

  Annie ran upstairs and flung herself on the bed and sobbed, clutching Raggedy Annie, whose painted face just stared back at her, her pouty red lips frozen in a smile. She hated everything then, even her doll, so she threw her on the floorboards and the china on her nose got chipped, which made Annie cry even more.

  She felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder and turned and buried her face in her lap. ‘I’m so sorry, Annie,’ Mum said. ‘But we will be all right: you, me and George and Nanny Chick. I promise you.’

  ‘I hate you!’ shouted Annie, and she saw the pain of her words register in her mother’s eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me he had gone to the war?’

  Mum sighed and looked away. ‘Annie, I didn’t want to burden you with it, not while you were away from home,’ she said.

  ‘But I wanted to meet him. I wanted to see him and now I can’t!’ She pummelled the bedspread with her fists as huge sobs racked her little shoulders.

  Mum’s skirts rustled as she stood up for a moment and went over to a little wooden box on top of the chest of drawers in the corner. She lifted the lid and took something out and brought it over to Annie.

  ‘I have some things that he wanted to give you right here, but you have got to stop crying, Annie, because you are a big girl now and you’re going to wake the baby if you carry on like this.’

  ‘I don’t want things from him, I have Raggedy Annie. I just want Daddy back and you made me stay on the farm until he’d gone away!’ she wailed.

  The bedroom door creaked open. It was Nanny Chick.

  ‘What a lot of fuss and nonsense. You are a very lucky girl to have been out in all that fresh air, and it was the best place for you. It was where your father wanted you to be,’ she said. ‘So, you stop crying now like your mother says. I need you to think about baby George and so does your mum.’ Nanny sat down on the bed, beside Mum, and stroked Annie’s hair, her tone softening. ‘Crying won’t change anything, chicken. See what your mum has for you and then I will put the kettle on and make us all a nice cup of tea.’

  Annie sat up and wiped her eyes. It was useless to protest because Nanny was always right, she knew that, and a cup of tea was the answer to all life’s problems as far as she was concerned.

  Mum opened her hand to reveal a small silver ring and a little brass horse on a gilt chain. ‘See, Annie,’ she said, offering them. ‘These are for you, from Daddy. I didn’t bring them to Silly Suffolk in case they got lost and I knew Raggedy Annie would be tak
ing care of you, right enough, but now you are a grown-up girl and helping me out in London, you can have them in your own little box, like treasure.’

  Annie slipped the ring onto her finger and picked up the little horse charm and put the chain over her head. She tried to smile a bit, just for her mum’s sake, because this was a special gift from her father.

  ‘He would be so proud of you,’ said Mum, giving her a hug. She made a little choking sound, as if she was stifling a sob.

  ‘Well, that’s better,’ said Nanny Chick, putting her hand on Mum’s arm, as if to say, That’s enough, now. She turned to Annie: ‘You look like a proper lady, with your jewellery on. No more tears. Do you promise?’

  ‘No more tears,’ said Annie, not knowing what she was going to do with the empty, sick feeling inside her.

  Annie kept her promise to Nanny Chick for a very long time, but there were more tears not long after the New Year, in January 1917. She remembered the month because of the bitter cold, which seemed almost to prod at her every time she scurried up the stairs at bedtime.

  One evening, after a long day at work, Mum and Nanny called her away from the fireside and sat her down at the table and told her they had very sad news.

  ‘Your daddy isn’t coming home,’ Nanny explained gently, as Mum sat there in silence, her fingers pressing themselves together, almost as if she were about to pray.

  Annie ran to her mother, blinded by tears, and hugged her tightly, wishing it was all a dream. In her mind she was staring down into the well at the farm; it was so pitch black down there, it used to scare Annie silly. Now she was tumbling head over heels into that well and falling, into the darkness. She was hot and cold at the same time and the blackness was right in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Every day he is up in heaven, looking down on you, feeling proud of everything you do,’ said Mum, stroking Annie’s hair.

  Over the weeks that followed, she used to hear Mum crying to herself softly at night, when she thought Annie was sleeping, and that would make her sob too, until her pillowcase was cold and damp. And sometimes Mum would be counting the pennies on the kitchen table and Nanny would have to put the kettle on because Mum was crying again, especially when the rent man came knocking and Annie’s boots didn’t fit any more.

  Then, one day in the summer, Nanny Chick said Mum should let her hair down a bit and go with the other laundry workers to Southend for the day. Annie skipped all the way down to Bollo Lane with Mum that morning to see the big charabanc and shout, ‘Throw yer mouldies out!’ in the hope of catching the pennies that the laundresses would chuck out to the kids. There was something about the way that Bill, one of the laundry hands, helped Mum get on that charabanc that Annie didn’t care for. And he ruffled George’s hair too, which Annie didn’t like either. His mouth was curling at the corners as he gave Annie a little wave goodbye, but his eyes weren’t smiling.

  Bill was a regular visitor to the house after that, and he started calling Annie ‘doll’ and ‘duck’, which she hated. She spat in his tea once when he wasn’t looking, and when she went to the church, All Saints, with Nanny Chick on Sundays she prayed to God to make Bill go away but that didn’t work, so she whispered all her fears to Raggedy Annie before she went to sleep at night instead. In her dreams, her father came home from the war and he marched into Hope Cottage. He towered over the Missus and Bill and he was six feet tall and so handsome, all the laundresses gasped. He swept Mum up in his arms and then turned to Annie, saying: ‘We can be a proper family again.’

  But there was no homecoming when she woke up the next day, nor the day after that. There was just Bill, turning up at their house with a bunch of flowers and wearing a collar and a tie, not just his usual shirt and waistcoat. And he told Nanny Chick he wanted to ‘make an honest woman of Emma’. Mum was the most honest person Annie knew in the whole world in any case, so she couldn’t see the point of it, but they got married just before Christmas and then Mum’s stomach started to get big. Annie had her hands full then, helping Nanny Chick around the house and with George, as well as in the laundry. Most girls started there at twelve but she’d gone a bit earlier than most, to help out her family.

  The main thing was that Bill took her favourite spot on a wooden stool by the fire every night in the scullery and she had to sit on the rag rug in the evenings if she wanted to warm her toes. He wasn’t funny and kind like Great-Aunt May’s sons had been at the farm. In fact, he almost relished telling her off or finding fault.

  ‘Ain’t you getting a bit old for that dolly, Annie?’ he asked her one night, as he toasted some bread and dripping, taking all the best bits for himself. His greying hair flopped forwards over his face as he threw another lump of coal on the fire, making the flames flicker, and he coughed and spat into the grate. There was a glint in his inky blue eyes as he spoke, and Annie knew better than to answer him. She just smiled and shrugged her shoulders. ‘What’s the matter, girl? Cat got your tongue?’

  Annie didn’t take Raggedy Annie downstairs any more after that, in case Bill took her away. Her doll stayed on her bed, out of his grasp, her face still frozen in a little smile.

  It was the same every night once November had Soapsud Island in its icy grip, and 1918 was no different. George kept Annie awake half the night, lying next to her in the bed, wheezing and spluttering.

  When she did eventually fall asleep, she was woken by the windows rattling every time a train went past because the railway line was just over the back yard. When it wasn’t the trains it was the noise from the pigs kept in the backs the other side of the tracks. There were patches of land down the side of the houses that were still fields, but some people even kept the animals in their back yards, not just to have something to fatten up for themselves to eat, but to sell on. Nanny Chick said they’d been driven out of Notting Hill because of the fear of disease and had come further west, out to Acton-in-the-Fields, and then Soapsud Island had grown up around them. They were far enough away not to smell – well, unless it was high summer – but the oinking and squealing when they had their babies running about was enough to wake the dead. George liked to look at them playing in the dirt because it made him laugh, but she couldn’t help dreaming of bacon frying on the range in the scullery, without Bill helping himself first.

  Nanny Chick said the change in the season had brought George’s chest on again and she was threatening to mix him up one of her tonics. She had a great big red book, called Consult Me for All You Want to Know, which sat on a shelf over the range and had all sorts of recipes in it, everything from a cough medicine to corned beef hash. That and the Bible were the only two books in the house, and it was fair to say that Nanny’s red book was probably more important to her. Nanny’s cooking was a worry but her medicines – Gawd, just the thought of how vile they tasted was enough to make you get better, sharpish.

  Annie was just checking that George was tucked up in a shawl in the scullery when Nanny Chick pulled a cork from the little glass bottle she’d got from the tallyman the other week, sniffed it and poured it into a bowl, with a few strange-looking powders. She poured some water in and then started to mix vigorously while poor George shrank back in fear of what was to come. ‘You can be off now, Annie,’ she said, shooing her with a wave of her hand. ‘This’ll have him right as rain by later on.’

  By the time Annie got to the laundry, her mother and the Missus were standing over a pile of sheets in the wash house, inspecting them closely.

  ‘Oh, don’t get your corsets caught in the mangle,’ Bessie was saying. ‘It’ll come out in the wash.’

  Annie’s heart sank as she peered at the heap of sheets. They were flecked with blue stains.

  ‘Some silly idiot’s gone and forgotten to stir the bluing tub properly while the sheets were in it, and I want to know who it was!’ said the Missus, folding her arms over her chest. Annie couldn’t help but notice that the Missus’ bosom almost reached the waistband of her skirt.

  Mum was running her hands over
the stains, assessing each one.

  ‘We should be able to get them out, but they will need a good boiling to do it,’ she said, holding a sheet up at the window.

  ‘Well, it had better come out, or I’ll have someone’s guts for garters,’ said the Missus. She spun around and eyed up her workers: ‘Now, which one of you good-for-nothings did it?’

  Annie swallowed hard. It must have happened when the headmistress knocked at the front door and she left the blue bag in the tub. But before she could speak up, Esther stepped forwards.

  ‘It was me,’ she said. ‘It was my first day, see, and I forgot how to do it properly. I’m very sorry.’ She looked at the floor.

  Annie was about to say this wasn’t true, but Vera grabbed her hand. ‘Let her take the blame,’ she whispered. ‘She’s got a guilty conscience, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Well, I will be docking you a shilling, but you’re honest enough to own up, so you can keep your job,’ said the Missus. ‘Let this be the last time I have to talk to you about mistakes.’ And she stalked off out of the wash house.

  Esther flushed pink as Vera tutted at her on her way out to the sorting room to fetch some starch. Annie waited a moment before going over to Esther at the copper, where the water was bubbling away: ‘You shouldn’t have said it was you, when we both know it was my fault.’

  Esther turned to her, looking downcast. ‘It’s all right Annie. Let’s face it, I know I’m not liked here. It just seemed pointless for you to lose pay over it. I’ve seen how hard you work, and your mum has the baby on the way . . .’

  ‘But you need the money too!’ said Annie. ‘I’m really grateful, Esther, truly I am, but I was hoping you’d be here long enough for us to be friends at least.’

  ‘Friends?’ said Esther, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, her face lighting up in a smile.