The Pearly Queen

by Mary Jane Staples

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Jane Staples

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  The Pearly Queen was really Aunt Edie. She was thirty-nine, had a good job in a factory, lived in a flat just off Camberwell Green, and had never married. Her fiance had drowned in the Thames when she was a girl and since then she had been on her own, though not from choice. Everyone loved Aunt Edie – but especially the Andrews family.

  Jack Andrews was having a tough time. He’d come back from the First World War to find his wife had ‘got religion’. She’d got it so badly she finally went off, left Jack and the three children, and joined Father Peter's League of Repenters. She never really came home again.

  Jack and the children managed as best they could, but things were pretty tough when Aunt Edie turned up. The first thing she did was give her cousin, Maud Andrews, a piece of her mind, but when that didn’t do any good, Edie moved in and took over the Andrews family. For the first time in years life began to look good again. Aunt Edie was warm, generous, kind, and above all she was their very own Pearly Queen.

  The Pearly Queen

  Mary Jane Staples

  To Joanna and Niall

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Dad Andrews came home from his work on Friday, the eve of the August bank holiday, he knew something was up. His son and two daughters were waiting in the kitchen for him and couldn’t find a single smile. Nine-year-old Betsy, usually ready for a kiss and a tickle, looked unhappy. Thirteen-year-old Patsy, who could always give a good account of herself, looked upset. And sixteen-year-old Jimmy, who could be comical while looking as serious as an owl, seemed as if he’d lost a quid and not found even a farthing as consolation.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Dad. ‘Where’s your mum?’

  ‘She’s gone and joined something called the League of Repenters,’ said Patsy, coming straight out with it.

  ‘What?’ asked Dad, a lanky and sinewy man of thirty-nine.

  ‘’Fraid so, Dad,’ said Jimmy, who had recently lost his job as an apprentice with a builder. The firm had closed down for lack of orders, and Jimmy was finding a new job hard to come by. 1923 hadn’t been a good year for new jobs. Nor had any year since the war. Jimmy was gritting his teeth about his prospects. ‘She said she’s got to do the Lord’s work now.’

  ‘That’s a fact, is it,’ said Dad, upset for his kids. His own feelings were of a kind to keep to himself. He was fed up with his wife Maud and her religious crankiness. Religion was all right, it was good for most people as long as it only meant paying your respects to the Lord in church and doing right by your neighbours. But if you kept bringing it home with you, week after week, year after year, like Maud did, it was bound to make a man fed up, and his kids as well. However, Dad had no intention of making it worse for them by rampaging about and swearing his head off. He could go after Maud, he supposed, and drag her back home. No, let her stew. His job at the moment was to cheer his kids up. So he said in a good-humoured way, ‘I knew she’d get religion for keeps one day. Well, don’t you worry, we’ll manage.’

  ‘She went and poured your beer down the sink,’ said young Betsy dolefully.

  ‘The whole bottle?’ asked Dad.

  ‘All of it,’ said Patsy. ‘Jimmy could’ve stopped ’er, only he was out lookin’ for a job most of the mornin’.’

  ‘That’s done it,’ said Dad with a wry kind of smile.

  Jimmy grimaced. A glass of Watney’s brown ale now and again was Dad’s one treat, and there was usually a bottle standing on the stone floor of the larder.

  ‘She said drink’s sinful,’ said Betsy, mouth drooping.

  ‘No Watney’s left, then?’ said Dad. ‘I suppose there’s no supper, either.’

  ‘Oh, us is doin’ it together,’ said Betsy. ‘I done the greens, Patsy done the potatoes, an’ Jimmy’s doin’ the chops. You best look at them now, Jimmy.’

  ‘They’re all right for a bit,’ said Jimmy. He felt sorry for Dad, who was only thirty-nine. He’d married their mum in 1906, when he was twenty-two and she was nineteen. Jimmy felt thirty-nine was young for a man to find his trouble-and-strife had turned religious for good. He and his sisters thought him a good old dad, and he’d done his bit in the war against Kaiser Bill.

  Dad’s name was Jack William Andrews, he’d been born in Camberwell and had set up home with his wife, Maud Ellen, in a terraced house in Manor Place, Walworth, close to the public baths. The rent was only ten bob a week, and there were three bedrooms upstairs, and a parlour, bedroom, kitchen and scullery downstairs. Dad managed the rent comfortably out of his wages as a delivery van driver for a firm of grocery wholesalers operating on the south side of London Bridge. The van was drawn by two horses, which he called Patty and Cake.

  ‘Fancy calling them that,’ said Mum Andrews. Dad said it was from an old nursery rhyme. ‘But calling a horse Cake,’ said Mum, ‘when it’s one of Joshua’s proud creatures.’

  ‘Who’s Joshua?’

  ‘He was anointed of God,’ said Mum, ‘and threw down the walls of Jericho.’

  ‘Must have been before my time,’ said Dad.

  Jimmy, their first child, had escaped being called Joshua only because Dad put his foot down. ‘Well, Elijah, then,’ said Mum, devoted to the Old Testament and its prophets and heroes. Dad nearly had a fit. He wanted their first born to be called Alfred, after his own dad, Alfred Edward. Mum suggested Isaiah Luke. Dad said he’d shoot himself. Mum didn’t want that to happen. Committing suicide was a mortal sin. All right, but not Alfred, she said. Edward Alfred, said Dad. James Alfred, said Mum. Mum won.

  Aunt Edie, her cousin, told Dad that no Walworth boy should have to go through life being called James. She was going to call him Jimmy, she said, which she did, right from the start, and so did everyone else in the end, including Mum.

  Dad being a Territorial soldier, he was called up immediately war broke out in 1914. It put Mum in a bit of a paddy, and she went about saying it was criminal and ungodly for a man to go off to war when he was a husband and father, and Betsy only a baby at the time. But on the day he departed to do his bit, she gave him a large square biscuit tin with a big round fruit cake in it. It was a sign she’d prayed to the Lord to forgive him, and that the Lord had answered and said, yes, all right and bake him a cake.

  She’d started getting irritatingly religious well before the war, and it was at the beginning of 1914 when she took to praying. She said the Lord nearly always answered her when she prayed hard enough. She prayed once for something to be done about Mr Maggs, a neighbour who was always accosting women’s bosoms whenever he’d had one over the eight. The very next day, when he was lurching up to Mrs Shaw’s bosom in the Walworth Road, he fell over and broke his leg. On top of that, the day the plaster was removed, Mrs Maggs reminded him about his accosting ways by hitting him over the head with an egg saucepan. Mum Andrews said it was the L
ord’s hand at work. Jimmy, eight at the time, asked if she meant the Lord’s egg saucepan. Mum Andrews said, ‘I’ll give you something, my lad, if you take the Lord’s name in vain like that.’

  ‘I was only asking,’ said Jimmy. Only asking was a standard riposte from most Walworth kids.

  When Mum Andrews gave Dad Andrews the cake to go off to the war with, she told him to make sure he went on all Army church parades, then the Lord would take care of him. Dad said he’d like it if the Lord would just take care of the cake tin, as he already had his rifle and kitbag to carry. Mum told him not to talk unholy. He managed to cart the tin off with him. But how he managed to go all through the war, mostly out in Mesopotamia against the Turks, was a bit of a miracle. Four times he was wounded, and in 1917 the Army sent him back to Blighty in a hospital ship to recuperate from shrapnel wounds in his chest. It had been touch and go for him in the Army hospital out there in the heat of Mesopotamia, but he was tough and gutsy, and wasn’t going to give in to any Turkish shrapnel. Mum took the children to visit him in a hospital in Middlesex, where he was making a recovery and tried to read bits from the Old Testament to him, the fire and brimstone bits. Dad nearly had her chucked out.

  Aunt Edie also went to see him, taking ten-year-old Jimmy with her. She was a single woman, the same age as Mum Andrews, but much livelier and much more fun. She was also a pearly queen. Her mum and dad had been pearlies, and she followed in their footsteps. Pearly kings and queens were plentiful all over cockney South London. It was an easy-going fellowship devoted to upholding family togetherness, to bringing good cheer to life, and to giving kids a good time. Extrovert Aunt Edie was a natural bringer of good cheer and accordingly a natural pearly queen. She had suffered one sad happening, however. When she was twenty, her fiancé was drowned following a boating accident on the Thames. Dad was a caring and stalwart friend to her during the subsequent months, helping her to get over the tragedy, and Aunt Edie never forgot just what his friendship and help had meant to her.

  So, of course, when she went to see him in hospital, she bucked him up in a brisk and scolding way that hid her emotions. She told him that after three whole years of getting himself wounded, she hoped he wasn’t going to be silly enough to get his head knocked off when he went back to the war. That could be fatal, she said, and would upset a lot of people. Dad answered her back, of course, and Aunt Edie gave him some more talking to, and Jimmy thought it all bucked his dad up no end, he had grins all over his face. Aunt Edie said she didn’t know what he was grinning at, he could still do something daft.

  ‘Have a cup of tea,’ said Dad, ‘I’ll get the nurse to bring you one, and Jimmy as well.’

  Aunt Edie said, ‘Bless you, you silly old soldier, Jimmy and me could do with a nice cup.’ Jimmy thought her eyes were a little bit misty. But when they left the hospital she looked a little bit angry.

  ‘What’s up, Aunt Edie?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s just not right,’ she said, ‘your dad’s a fine man, a fine soldier, and deserves better—’ But she broke off and didn’t say any more, not for a few minutes, anyway. Then she said, ‘Don’t worry, Jimmy, your dad’ll pull through. Your dad’s a man, Jimmy.’

  Dad did pull through, his toughness saw to that. Mum Andrews said the Lord had done it, the Lord knew Dad had repented. Patsy, seven at the time but already owning a tongue, asked what Dad had repented of. ‘Of his sins,’ said Mum.

  Patsy, fond of her dad, asked, ‘What sins?’

  ‘We’re all sinners,’ said Mum, ‘we’re all weak creatures.’

  ‘Not my dad,’ said Patsy with spirit. ‘My dad’s a soldier.’

  ‘Don’t answer me back,’ said Mum. ‘Answering back’s a sin.’

  Dad was nearly as good as new when he came home for a fortnight’s leave from a military convalescent home. He was given a rousing welcome by his children, and Mum Andrews proceeded to do her Christian duty by taking him out and about for walks and exercise. She cleared a path for him with her umbrella if people got in his way. Mum Andrews was rarely without her umbrella. Dad, fighting irritation, said, ‘Turn it up, Maudie, I’m not a cripple.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ said Mum. ‘The Lord didn’t help you get better so that you could gallivant about and fall over people and injure yourself.’ Having no sense of humour, she couldn’t think why Jimmy grinned and the girls giggled. Jimmy said he’d heard gallivanting about was supposed to be good for soldiers on leave, it was what they came home on leave for, to do a bit of gallivanting about. Well, that was what he’d heard, he said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know who you’ve been listening to,’ said Mum, and gave her son a tap with her brolly to let him know she expected him to be more careful about who he listened to in future. During these outings, she made her children walk behind whenever they were part of such excursions. She said it would be the work of Satan himself if Dad got injured by falling over his own flesh and blood.

  She was very ‘churchified’ by then, she’d got religion on the brain. In one way, it had its funny side, but there was too much of it, it went on all the time. To avoid upsetting the kids, Dad spoke to Mum more than once in private, telling her to put a sock in it. It made no difference. She responded with some of her fire and brimstone stuff. By this time Dad, whose loyalties were pretty constant, was beginning to lose what affection he still had left for Mum. But he put up with her because she was the mother of his kids, and he thought the world of them. And he was not a man who’d make them unhappy by having stand-up slanging matches with their mother.

  Towards the end of the war, when Dad was back in Mesopotamia, she became chronically religious. She took to carrying her umbrella as if it were the sword of Joshua. Woe betide any drunk who got in her way. She’d land the point of her brolly right in his overloaded paunch, and order him to go home and repent. When Dad was home for good and with his old job back, she managed to calm down a bit during the first year of peace, which allowed the reunited family to settle down to post-war life without having to listen to too many biblical quotations.

  Then the call of the Lord hit her again in extreme fashion. By 1922, she was set on getting everyone to repent. Patsy asked what for? ‘Be sure your sins will find you out,’ said Mum. That always foxed Patsy, and Betsy too: they couldn’t think that sins had anything to do with them. True, they had occasionally nicked apples down the market, but only specked ones, and only from under a stall. Jimmy had pinched lots when he was younger. All Walworth kids did.

  Patsy asked if Jimmy was a sinner. Mum said her son must ask his conscience. Jimmy spent half a minute asking it, then said he didn’t think he was a sinner yet, but he might soon be because he was tempted to run off to Gretna Green with Susie Brown down in Brandon Street, whom he saw nearly every Sunday in church. ‘But she’s seventeen and goes to work,’ said Patsy, ‘and you’re only fifteen and only an apprentice.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Jimmy, ‘but I still feel sinful about her.’

  Mum nearly collapsed with the shame of his confession, delivered with a straight face, and by the time she’d recovered, Jimmy was well out of the range of her punitive umbrella. Still, she was able to berate Patsy and Betsy for giggling.

  She was thinner than she used to be. Her wedding photograph showed her with a prettily plump figure. Her roundness had gone, although some of her attractiveness remained. But she was prim. She let Dad know that marriage was for having children, and that as they had children, desire was now a sin. Dad’s natural good humour, which had been taking a beating for too long, deserted him at this point. ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ he said. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘it’s me duty to inform you, Maudie, that you’re about as exciting as a wet weekend under Southend Pier.’ Well, she never had been much good in bed, except at the beginning. It was no hardship for him to give up what she called sinning.

  She took umbrage at his remarks, but made no attempt to get her figure back. She didn’t believe in vanity or in women being plump. She said plumpness was a sig
n of gluttony in most cases, and that the Lord frowned on it.

  ‘What about plump men?’ asked Jimmy in the spring of 1923.

  ‘Disgustin’,’ she said. ‘I ’specially don’t like gluttony in men and no repentin’ of it. You’re not gettin’ plump, are you?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Jimmy, who was lean like his dad.

  ‘I don’t want to have to put you on bread and water,’ said Mum.

  ‘Couldn’t it be toast and marmalade?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘Don’t give me no cheek now, and don’t let me see you growin’ up fat,’ said Mum. ‘I won’t ’ave no gluttony in this fam’ly.’

  However much Jimmy tried not to take her seriously, the fact was plain to him and Dad and Patsy: Mum was a sore trial to her family. Her talk about gluttony was barmy. Jimmy knew there wasn’t much of it among the London cockneys. Gluttony was the last thing they could afford. Not that he and his family suffered an empty larder. In the spring of 1923, he and his dad were both working, although his wage was only that of a builder’s apprentice. Still, the family could afford decent food and for Mum to do regular baking, except that lately she’d done very little. She had decided things like treacle tarts, fruit cakes and fruit pies encouraged sinful eating. On top of that, she was making Patsy do some cooking. Patsy actually didn’t mind, and when Dad bribed her by giving her a shining new sixpence she promised to learn how to bake cakes and tarts.

  In July, Mum gave very serious thought to doing far more work for the Lord and a lot less for her family. Dad, in private, told her she was doing a lot less, anyway.

  ‘Don’t you talk to me like that, Jack Andrews,’ she said.

  ‘Listen, my girl,’ said Dad, ‘you go off too often on account of the Lord, and you might come home one day and find the family’s shut the door on you.’ In response to that, Mum told him to remember Joshua, and how he took up the sword and slew the enemies of Israel.

  ‘Maud, you’re bleeding barmy,’ said Dad. It was water off a duck’s back.