by Maggie Ford
‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’ Swiftly she cut two thick slices of bread for him, cut a thin one for herself as he folded his together to dip into his stew.
‘Don’t tell me nothink’s wrong with yer. Eatin’ more like a sparrer lately. No wonder yer look all skinny. Look at yerself. Yer look like yer’ve found a penny an’ lost a pound. Ain’t yer not feelin’ well or somethink?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me, Dad,’ she repeated, sitting down at the table to nibble at her slice, toy with the tiny bowl of stew she had ladled out for herself. A week since David had gone. Where was he now? Was he lonely, unhappy? His health, was it good, bad? Was he …
‘Yer could have fooled me!’ Pushing aside his potatoes and dumplings Dad dunked his bread again, angrily. ‘If yer not ill, then fer Gawd’s sake cheer yerself up! Goin’ around with that boat race of yours as long as a kite, sulking all over the place. I suppose that bloke of yours ’as bin sent abroad and won’t be comin’ ’ere any more. Well, it makes a change fer me, not ’aving you go out every weekend. Nice ter ’ave a bit of company now ’e’s gorn. That’s when yer face ain’t as long as me arm. Gawd knows what I’ve done ter ’ave yer mopin’ all around the place.’
Letty listened to him going on, closing her mind to it, tried not to react. That at least was easy enough. She no longer had the will nor the strength even to bother.
Dad having his usual afternoon nap, Letty took the opportunity to slip out for a walk to clear a muzzy head and a vague feeling of claustrophobia.
Drawing deep breaths of the fresh spring air, she moved through the leftover litter of Club Row, now quiet and deserted but for a few stragglers still clearing up after the hubbub of the morning’s market. Reaching the end of the road she turned automatically into the Bethnal Green Road, continuing without much purpose in her direction.
Sunday afternoon. People sleeping off their Sunday dinners, the weather bright but a bit too chilly still for most to walk it off, made everything lovely and quiet. It smelt of Sunday too, cleaner, fresher than weekdays, a hint of roast Sunday dinner hanging in the air. Even the shabby Bethnal Green Road shops had a clean look today, being closed. Occasionally she glanced at them in passing; little food shops, their blinds down; larger shops that sold shoes, haberdashery, dresses, hats; shuttered greengrocers, fishmongers; the multiple windows of Wickhams with their fancy beige striped blinds.
Despite the chill, she walked slowly. May. Quite likely she’d have been married for two weeks now. David was somewhere in the Dardanelles where the Allies were fighting the Turks. She had received one letter from him, ages ago, dated several weeks before. He couldn’t have received that first hastily posted letter of hers for he made no mention of his joy at her news. She’d written several times since, telling him of it, but hadn’t had any letters from him for a few weeks now. Her time seemed to be spent these days waiting for the postman, hoping. Sometimes she couldn’t bear the thoughts that raced through her head.
The papers reporting on the Turkish campaign had not given her much encouragement to feel easy. The Turks appeared to be a formidable and vicious foe by the accounts she’d read, avidly looking for hope as the allied advances were repelled. How was David? How would she know if he were wounded or worse? She wasn’t his wife, wasn’t entitled to be informed if anything had happened to him.
She ought to contact his parents. They’d have news, could relay it on to her – if they were sympathetic enough to her feelings to do so.
Lost in thought, she had walked the entire one mile length of the road, passing the empty stalls of Bethnal Green’s market, the railway bridge with its painted advertisement for Frederick Causton & Sons Ltd, Joinery and Moulding Mills, throwing its shadow across her, before she realised how far she had come.
Pausing outside the Salmon and Ball pub on the corner of Cambridge Heath Road, she half turned to go back then changed her mind. She needed time to herself. The clock on the small cupolaed tower of St John’s Church across Cambridge Heath Road showed ten to three. Ample time before going back to the aimlessness her life had become, to think, to wallow in a little self-pity without duty getting in the way.
The crossroads here were tremendously wide, gave space to breathe after the narrow streets around Club Row. Amazing how, amid the tatty confines of the East End, there could exist spacious gardens, pleasant buildings, a museum set amid trees, leafy walks. She felt suddenly if briefly free, and with new eagerness made her way across the wide road with its ornately railed off urinals in the middle and its double tramlines, silent on Sundays, through the wrought iron gates of the railinged enclosure to St John’s Church.
It hadn’t been all that long a walk, one she’d done many times in the past, happily, laughing with girlfriends as she went. Was it her condition or simply lassitude of mind, but she felt strangely exhausted as she sat down by the church steps, shivering as a cold light breeze found its way under her coat collar.
She glanced down at the shapeless garment. All her clothes these past few weeks were purposely loose, and shapeless, hiding the bulge, that was as yet mercifully small. Even so, she would eventually begin to show, and then what?
The sensible thing would have been to try to rid herself of it as soon as she’d discovered her plight, David no longer here to lend it respectability. She had thought of it but, fear of the deed apart, couldn’t bring herself to destroy what was David’s. Too late now.
Surreptitiously, as if even here in this quiet place the action might be seen, her hands traced the small bulge beneath her coat, noticeable to her exploring fingers. There was Dad to face yet. He’d be appalled, full of disgust, unable to believe what he saw, curse her for a whore. Sooner or later, though, it would have to be faced.
Wearily she got up as though prompted by the thought and began to retrace her steps homeward. The sun had sunk appreciably lower, she’d been out much longer than she’d intended.
Bethnal Green Road seemed endless and she felt ready to drop as she turned into her own street. The traders had long since gone, leaving their debris to a street cleaner, stolidly wielding his broom in short sharp stabs at the gutter. He didn’t look up as she passed, dispirited, negotiating the battered metal bins outside each shop door, their lids tilted, filled to the brim with rubbish.
Three doors from home a disturbance in one distracted her; a brief rustling, but enough to prick the curiosity.
It stopped as she glanced down, but almost immediately began again. Cautiously, Letty lifted the lid, holding her breath against any smell that might waft up to meet her. There, peeping out from under some crumpled newspaper, green feathers wet and ragged, a gaping brown beak, two dull little eyes, lids half closed.
Sickly birds and poorly kittens were often cast into the rubbish bins after the market closed. It was sad. It was cruel. But what good was protest? People had enough problems of their own to rush about raising Cain over a few dead birds. But somehow the sight of this tiny greenfinch struggling for life touched Letty’s heart as it had not been touched in a long time.
Instantly alert, she pushed aside the newspapers and bits of soiled straw, lifting out the tiny bird. It lay cupped in the palm of her hand, warm, trembling, breast fluttering rapidly. Letty stared down at it. In her hands she held life. In her womb life also stirred. Covering this poor little body with her other hand, she hurried indoors hearing Dad’s voice greeting her, asking where the hell she’d been and telling her he’d been worried sick, her not telling him where she’d gone, him left all on his own wondering what had happened to her …
He came and looked at the greenfinch as she laid it on a saucer in a hanky for warmth on the kitchen table.
‘What yer bought that in ’ere fer? Stupid cow – the thing’s on its last legs, yer can see that. Sling it out. Probably full of fleas.’
She didn’t reply, went and got it a drip of water in a dish and a bit of bread. Watched for it to take interest, dip its fragile beak in the water, peck at the crumbs. It did neith
er, merely lay there, its head floppy, limp breast feathers fluttering erratically up and down.
‘Go on, you silly thing,’ she urged, feeling strangely desperate for it. ‘Eat something. It’ll make you better. It’ll make you live.’
‘Stupid cow,’ Dad said again, and left her to it.
For half an hour she sat, still in her coat, eyes never leaving the scrap of life huddled in its handkerchief, its head all to one side, its beak half in and half out of the water to which she’d physically urged it. She watched the eyes close, the beak begin to open, but it still breathed and she dared to hope.
Her neck ached with watching. Her heart leapt as it made a struggle. It was reviving. She watched eagerly as it stretched its neck with an odd wriggling movement, then suddenly it was limp and still.
She’d seen only one other death. Mum’s. This was like seeing it all over again. For an hour she sat by the stiffening little corpse, with tears running freely down her cheeks, a throat that hurt from the constriction of misery. It was only a bird, one of thousands that die in cages each week from ignorance and neglect when they should be flying freely, taking their chances against nature’s dictates instead of man’s. But she was crying for more than just a bird.
Silly, yet she couldn’t stop; not as she wrapped it carefully in tissue paper used for wrapping her customer’s purchases, not as she put it in among the rubbish in their own bin with all the semblance of a burial. And when she went to bed, she wept for the life in her womb lest that die too, knew she could never have rid herself of David’s child; wept for David that he would come safely home. And she had wanted so very much to save the finch’s life.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said to her old friend, Ethel Bock.
Ethel had married two years earlier, going from brash girl to meek housewife hanging on every last word of her handsome husband who clearly fancied himself more than a bit as some sort of devil-may-care, swanking about the neighbourhood in grey suit and bowler hat. He’d enlisted, full of euphoria, and gone off to war already counting himself a hero, leaving Ethel pregnant and broke on a tiny army allowance.
She had, however, lost the baby. Having to get over it on her own had hardened her again. With her husband no longer around to tell her what she could or could not do, she had got herself a job as a tram conductress earning a good wage.
She and Letty had taken to going up West once a week, bolstering their spirits with tea and toasted teacakes in a Lyon’s tea shop in Leicester Square. Airing their problems, they didn’t always listen to each other but that didn’t matter – talking about them was enough.
‘Yer should have got rid of it, yer know,’ Ethel said, and stopped abruptly as the waitress in black with white collar, cap and apron came with their order.
They watched mesmerised as she laid out the silvery metal pot of tea and one with hot water, a milk jug and sugar bowl, pretty flowered bone china crockery, a plate with four piping hot teacakes, a small pot of butter, another of jam, a knife each for spreading.
It was a bit pricey as always, but well worth it; the décor pleasant, the atmosphere opulent, the subdued murmur of conversation and the soothing clink of tea cups upon saucers never failing to envelope Letty’s jaded nerves as warmly as a motherly embrace.
The tea shop was full of customers. Ladies sat in pairs, in groups, or with husbands or fiancés in uniform. London was a different city to a year ago: full of uniforms, of men in bandages or on crutches, of nurses in white, of women in men’s jobs – hair bobbed, wearing wide skirts several inches off the ground, and loose jackets. Gone the inconvenience of the tightly swathed dress, the hobble skirt. For Letty in her present condition it was very fortunate, she said drily after the waitress had gone.
‘Yer wouldn’t have to be in this state if you’d done something about it earlier,’ Ethel said, pouring tea.
‘I couldn’t,’ Letty said as Ethel reached for a teacake.
‘More fool you.’ She vigorously buttered the hot cake, spread jam over that. ‘What yer goin’ ter do now?’
‘Have it, I suppose,’ Letty replied lamely.
‘What’s yer dad said about it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ain’t yer told ’im yet?’
‘No.’
‘Best ought to.’ She stirred her tea noisily. ‘Break it to ’im as carefully as yer can and as soon as yer can. If yer don’t, there’ll be ’ell ter pay when he finds it out fer ’imself, ’cos he’ll only think yer’ve bin under’anded with ’im. And that always puts fathers’ backs up. I know one thing, I wouldn’t fancy bein’ in your shoes when yer do tell ’im.’
Sipping her tea, Letty didn’t fancy being in them either, tried not to think of it.
‘I’ve not had any letters from David,’ she said, hastily changing the subject, though really it was one and the same thing.
Ethel looked up from her teacake. ‘What, none at all?’
‘Well, only the one I had from him in the beginning. He hadn’t got mine then – the one I sent ’im telling ’im about meself.’ Easy with Ethel to fall into the accents of her childhood. ‘P’raps he got it later and got frightened, me telling him I was pregnant? Sometimes I think that’s why he never wrote to me after that. Other times I get scared he might have come to some harm and I don’t know about it.’
‘Why don’t yer contact ’is parents? They’d tell yer.’ Ethel took a bite out of her teacake and a large gulp of tea to moisten it while Letty nibbled listlessly at hers.
‘I’m not sure about them. They’re proper toffee-nosed. Don’t want to know me at all. I wouldn’t lower meself askin’ them.’
‘’Ow else yer goin’ ter find out?’ Ethel said simply and studied Letty with a critical eye. ‘You’ve got a kid on the way – ’is kid. ’E’s got ter know. At least got ter acknowledge it’s ’is.’
‘How can I make him if he don’t answer my letters?’
Ethel thought a bit, rubbing her snub nose. ‘I don’t think ’e’d leave yer in the lurch, Let. Never struck me as that sort. You said ’e was out in the Dardanelles? According ter the papers, our blokes are gettin’ a bashing out there. P’raps you ought to find out from the War Department if he’s bin killed …’
‘Oh, Eth, don’t!’
Ethel looked a little crestfallen, then perked up again, took full command of the situation, forgetting her second teacake, her tongue going nineteen to the dozen.
‘Yer’ve got ter face it, Let. ’E could have bin. I’m ’avin’ ter face it, ain’t I, with my George? Lots of us women are ’avin’ ter face it. It ain’t the war we thought it was goin’ ter be. Them poor sods in the trenches are bein’ killed right, left an’ centre, an’ it’s just as bad with them fightin’ them bloody Turks. An’ honestly, Let, I’m as worried fer my George as you are fer your David. ’E could have been killed. Mind, I’m still gettin’ George’s letters.’
Ethel’s face took on an earnest look. ‘Or ’e could have bin taken prisoner - ’ave yer thought about that?’
She had thought about it, but hardly dared to linger on even that likelihood, fearing the contemplation of anything dire might become parent to the event.
But if David were a prisoner of war, it would at least be better than the ultimate dread that so often swept through her.
Taking Ethel Bock’s advice, she wrote to David’s parents – lacking the courage to telephone – and waited. Meanwhile her waistline was thickening steadily. She grew more pale and tired from worry, knowing she would not be able to ward off the fateful day of confession for much longer. And still there were no letters from David.
Vinny’s eyes held a speculative look as she gazed out of the window upon a dull June Saturday afternoon, boredom – her fractious sons having been taken off her hands for an afternoon stroll by their nanny – brushed aside for a moment.
‘Our Letty’s pregnant,’ she announced after a while.
Without looking round, she knew Albert had glanced up from reading his
paper, his surprise conveying itself in the rustle of the newspaper, the sharp click of his pipe stem against his teeth as he removed it.
‘She’s what?’ Then, more moderately, scathingly: ‘How do you know?’
‘I know.’ Her tone was one of impatience. ‘I’ve carried four times and lost one. I know when someone is in that sort of condition. And she is.’
Albert’s newspaper rustled again as he laid it down, becoming interested. ‘I’ve not seen anything different about her.’
Now she turned to him. ‘You wouldn’t would you? Men don’t notice these things, but I have. She’s putting weight on her stomach even though she tries to conceal it with those ridiculous dresses of hers. She looks like a sack. Pretends she’s following the new fashion. Tsch! It’s obvious what she’s up to. She knows she’ll be in disgrace when we find out and she thinks dressing like that we won’t notice.’
‘Could be she’s just losing her trimness as she gets older?’
‘I’ve not lost mine, nor has Lucy. Nor will she, except on certain occasions – like now. No, she’s pregnant. How she can walk about with her head like it’s on a stick like a blessed duchess, her knowing what she’s carrying under those clothes of hers!’
Incensed with righteous indignation, Vinny got up from the window and wandered over to the occasional table in the centre of the parlour to pick out a cigarette from the fancy box on it.
She’d taken to the fashion for cigarettes. Girls everywhere were smoking them, not just society women but girls in munitions factories, on the land, conductresses on trams and buses, those who drove vans and did men’s jobs while they were away fighting – nearly all smoked.
Vinny fitted it into a slim ivory holder, lit it from an ornate table lighter, blew smoke into the air in a thin stream to watch it wreath and curl.
‘She didn’t look the least bit ashamed when we saw her last week. It can’t be anyone’s but that David’s, so she must be at least six months. He’s been gone that long. And all that time she’s been hiding it from us – no shame whatsoever! If it was me, I’d be mortified. I mean, what are Dad’s neighbours going to say, her not married? Poor Dad, he’ll never be able to hold his head up again. I’m sure he hasn’t wheezed it yet. But when he does …’