The Women of Lilac Street

by Annie Murray

  It was sad, but she got more to eat with Mr Gordon. And his mother was harmless enough, a timid, bonneted, black-clad widow who, truth to tell, was cowed by her selfish son.

  Josiah Gordon was neither kind, nor cruel in a violent way. He simply took what he wanted and expected other people to fall in with his desires. He was doing well at the bank and he expected to be king of the house. In return, Hetty slept for the first time in her life in a bed, with a black iron bedstead. A bed! It was the greatest luxury. And there was so much food. She had never had so much to eat in her life. Meat almost every day except Friday when he sent her to buy fish. Potatoes and gravy. At first, in eating terms, she thought she had gone to heaven. She soon discovered that food is not everything.

  Mrs Gordon sat on a chair with her in the kitchen and in her whining voice, taught Hetty to cook. And what she didn’t cook, they bought already made. Food was even delivered to the house. Puddings and pies. In the first year there, Hetty changed so much that her family would not have recognized her. Flesh thickened over her bones, she grew several more inches in height and budding breasts appeared on what before had been a chest as flat as a washboard. And she was full of life and energy.

  She swept, polished, dusted and scrubbed. She toiled over the wash tub and mangle and made up the fires. She learned to cook. And she did this other thing that they never spoke about.

  That first night, Mr Gordon had taken her back to his house and showed her where she would live. Hetty felt as if she was living in a dream. He led her to the top of the house, up a curving staircase.

  ‘There we are – this is for you.’ He said it in a singsong voice, as if offering her a treat.

  And it was a treat. She looked in amazement at the bed, which had a soft eiderdown on the top. It also had sheets and blankets and when she came to go to bed, it took her some time to decide where and how to get into it.

  The house even had a bathroom! Pans of hot water had to be carried up to fill the bath. She learned that it would be her job to stagger up the stairs with these. Mr Gordon told her, that evening, to pour a bath for herself and he even helped carry up some of the water. She had her first ever bath all to herself. At home they had only ever had a lick and a promise from the scullery tap and on very rare occasions, had gone to the public baths. As they prepared the water, Mr Gordon kept looking at her strangely. She wondered when he was going to start hitting her, but he never did. He gave her a candle, and he left her alone that night.

  As days passed, she found that his manner with her was sweet in a way that deceived her into thinking he was kind rather than manipulative, which was the real truth. She wasn’t used to much kindness and was hungry for it. He never raised his voice. His face was hairy, the mutton chop whiskers almost meeting at his mouth. He had slightly prominent teeth, rabbity, which made him look less imposing and slightly ridiculous. All of it was frightening at first but she got used to it. In any case, from the start she was less scared of him than she was of her father.

  The second night he came in after she had gone to bed. She heard his feet on the stairs, the door squeaked open, and light came in. He was holding a candle and stood there for a time while she kept her eyes shut and heard him breathing fast. Then he stepped in and quietly closed the door.

  Hetty felt the candlelight draw nearer. He put the candlestick down on the chair beside the bed and his weight descended on to the bed, making the springs groan.

  Hetty’s heart was pounding so fast she could barely lie still. Keeping her eyes closed, she thought wildly. Had he come to kill her? She had some knowledge of what men and women did together, but only from things overheard, a few noises which sounded like fights – nothing in detail.

  ‘Little missy, open your eyes – I’ve come specially to see you.’

  Again the sing-song voice, cajoling her.

  There seemed no choice but to look at him.

  ‘Ah, now that’s better . . .’ He sounded pleased and immediately moved closer to her. Suddenly he lifted the edge of the bedclothes, flicking them back and exposing Hetty in her ragged drawers and vest. She gasped, hugging herself as the cold air nudged against her.

  ‘Oh, dear me – we must buy you some new clothes, must we not! We can’t have you going round as a ragamuffin. I’ll get Mother to see to you. But my dear, you are very lovely . . . We are going to be good friends, aren’t we? Because you see – I do like you very much already.’

  Hetty was gratified to hear this, although quite unsure what it meant.

  ‘Do sit up, will you?’

  She pushed herself up, feeling very small and scruffy.

  Mr Gordon’s eyes were looking all over her, almost as if he was going to eat her.

  ‘Oh –’ He sounded overcome. ‘Do let me hold you . . .’

  She was clasped in his arms and she could feel his heart thumping loudly. He seemed suddenly very excited and was fumbling at his clothes.

  ‘You see, I have to have you . . .’

  He pushed her back a little and used both hands to unfasten his fly buttons. Hetty shrank back. What she caught a glimpse of was a sight she had never seen before. She had known plenty of little boys in her life, but she had never seen a grown man down there before. She gave a cry of surprise, but Mr Gordon became stern suddenly.

  ‘Now – none of that,’ he ordered. ‘Quiet, miss.’

  He started fondling round her flat little bosom. Hetty’s chest was so tight that she was struggling for breath and for a second he stopped.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m going to teach you things you need to know, my dear. It may be a bit uncomfortable for you at first, but you’ll grow to like it. You’ll like it very much. Now sit back . . .’ His voice sounded strained. ‘That’s it – now we’re going to take those off . . .’

  ‘No . . .’ she protested. He wanted her to undress in front of him! She was horrified.

  ‘Do as I say,’ he said sternly. As she obeyed, trembling now, he pushed her down on the bed with one hand and with the other was feeling into her privates, his face intent.

  ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘No – you can’t!’

  Without knowing the facts she understood what he was going to do.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, soothing, hypnotic. ‘This is for you. This is how it’s meant to be . . .’

  He was panting, very excited, trying to push up into her. She was so skinny and small and felt he was breaking her open. Then his weight was on top of her. She grabbed at handfuls of the silky eiderdown, screwing her eyes shut as he moved in a frenzy. All she could feel was the hardness of him poking inside her and his heaviness on her, until he stopped as if running abruptly out of steam.

  ‘There,’ he said as he pulled away from her. ‘Not much to ask, is it?’

  She turned on her side, and he flung the bedclothes back over her.

  Hetty stayed in Mr Gordon’s house for a year and a half. He was right, she did get used to it, to the things he wanted at night. He came up to her two or three times a week. It never took very long and in the day she shut all thoughts of it away. In that time she filled out so that she grew large and buxom, which he found exciting. She could eat and eat and he encouraged her to. He called her ‘splendid’ in size.

  Josiah Gordon’s mother lived an enclosed, monotonous life. She only went out to visit the shops sometimes and to one friend. Otherwise she stayed in the house, sewing, and for a lot of the time, so far as Hetty could see as she cleaned the house around the woman, just sitting. Hetty found it strange after her own mother, who seldom had a moment’s rest. Mrs Gordon was a subdued, colourless person who scarcely ever laughed and was not much company. But she was not unkind and she taught Hetty a good many things.

  One morning, when she had been in the house over a year, Hetty woke up and found blood between her legs and stains on the sheets. She sat up, shocked. Whatever was it? There was a low gripe in her stomach. He had come up to her last night. Had he injured her? Or what about the stewed rabbit they had eaten y
esterday. Could that have made her poorly?

  For a moment she was full of panic. Then she remembered the rags that Nancy used to wash out every month. Of course – that’s what it must be! Nancy had called it ‘her monthly’ and said it would happen to Hetty as well one day.

  She found some rags and saw to herself, washing them out at night and hanging them in her room to dry. In any case, the bleeding was not very heavy.

  Six months later she became sickly. Then her belly started to grow. It was Mrs Gordon who noticed one morning when she came into the kitchen and showed the first signs of energetic life Hetty had ever seen in her.

  ‘So that’s it!’ she cried out of nowhere.

  Hetty jumped, taken by surprise.

  ‘You stupid, wretched, filthy girl!’ She picked up the jug of milk from the table and hurled it towards Hetty’s head. Hetty stepped back in time and the jug hit the front of the range and smashed, sloshing milk up Hetty’s legs.

  Hetty had no idea what she was supposed to have done wrong.

  She would never forget the terror, the gruelling agony of that evening.

  Mrs Gordon walked with her, grim faced. They set off as the sun was going down and they soon reached the place, down an alley. Mrs Gordon was looking round as though she was afraid they were being followed. She had Hetty by the arm, in a vicious grip.

  They were shown into a front parlour. Hetty remembered seeing china dogs on the mantelpiece. The woman, a Mrs Dickins, was middle-aged, and rather fat with a plain, bacon-pink face.

  Money was exchanged and Mrs Gordon let herself out. Stopping at the door, she turned and said to Hetty, ‘You can come back and get your things. We’ll leave them out at the back for you.’ And she was gone.

  ‘Well – you’d better come upstairs,’ Mrs Dickins said.

  Hetty couldn’t stop herself crying. Did that mean Mrs Gordon had dismissed her? And what was going to happen? Why was it her fault?

  ‘What am I here for?’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t know what’s happening.’

  ‘You’re here to get rid of the child, of course,’ Mrs Dickins said. ‘You can’t keep it, can you, a bastard and you nothing but a child yourself?’ She looked Hetty up and down. ‘How old’re you?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ Hetty said.

  ‘You’re a big girl for your age, I’ll say that. Now come upstairs. It won’t take long and it’ll hurt a bit but then it’ll be all over. One minute – let me get the kettle.’

  Hetty followed behind her, the woman’s thick ankles showing beneath her skirt as she lumbered up carrying the kettle of boiling water. There was a smell, of sweat and mothballs and something else, stinging and unpleasant. At the top of the stairs she led Hetty into a back room with a rough little table right in the middle. The floorboards were bare and round the table there were dark stains on the floorboards. To the side, on another table, were long sharp things and cloths.

  ‘No . . .’ Hetty began to see what was afoot. She started shaking and her teeth began to chatter. She backed away towards the stairs.

  ‘Look, child,’ the woman said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s this or the workhouse. You’d best do it and get it over.’

  Mention of the workhouse struck fear in anyone. Never go there, never.

  Hetty stared desperately at her. The woman’s pebbly eyes stared back.

  ‘Get your underclothes off, and get on the table.’

  Twenty

  From that day to this, she could not remember how she returned from Mrs Dickins’s alley to the back door of the Gordons’ house. But she could not forget the feel of the stone step under her as she lay faint across it, blood seeping from under her skirt, sticky and unstoppable, and the tearing agony in her innards.

  Her belongings had been bundled up and were set beside the step.

  ‘Let me in,’ she sobbed weakly, rapping on the door.

  After a while Mrs Gordon opened up a crack. Hetty was slumped with her back to her, so Mrs Gordon could not see the red stains spreading down the back of her skirt. In any case it was almost dark.

  ‘You get away from here,’ she hissed. ‘Your pay is in with your things. We don’t owe you anything.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Hetty started to say, but the door clicked shut. ‘Help me,’ she whispered. She was too weak now even to cry.

  Soon after that, everything went dark and she knew nothing about what happened until she woke in her bed up in the Gordons’ attic, the pain still writhing in her guts. There was something wrapped round the lower part of her body and it felt heavy and clogged with blood. She desperately needed a drink, but was unable to move and soon she passed out again.

  The days disappeared into pain and fever. She was dimly aware of someone caring for her – either Josiah Gordon or his mother. She heard their feet on the floorboards, the mutter of voices. They lifted her head to drink. Someone else came, a doctor, she realized later.

  Later, once she began to recover, she understood they had taken her in out of panic, not concern for her. They had found her unconscious by the back step. What if someone else had stumbled upon her?

  As she came to, she lay in a haze of weakness. Mrs Gordon was doing the cooking for now and they brought her food, saying very little to her, as if she was a dog that needed food and water but could have no other sense of itself.

  Hetty was a strong girl and began to gather her strength. After two weeks Josiah Gordon came up to her. He sat on the edge of the bed and smiled his toothy, self-obsessed smile. Hetty had never felt as if he looked at her. When he spoke it was as if he was looking in a mirror, talking to himself.

  ‘Now you’re better, Hetty,’ he said, ‘it’s time for you to move on. Your time of usefulness to us has come to an end . . .’

  It felt terrible. This house was all she was used to now. Where was she supposed to go? But as she tried to protest, he held up a finger to admonish her. ‘No – no playing up. There’s nothing to be said. You can’t stay now. I’ve found another little girl to replace you. Her name is Alice.’ He put his head on one side then and in his silly sing-song voice he said petulantly, ‘You should have told me about the blood, Hetty. That was a naughty girl. Keeping a thing like that from Daddy.’

  Hetty stared at him. She shrugged. All her feelings were a shrug.

  The next morning, still bleeding, she was out on the streets.

  Coventry’s cobbled streets were choked with carts and barrows doing morning deliveries. It was a warm midsummer day and at first Hetty enjoyed being out in the air, watching the sights, the ladies out shopping and carters bustling about. She soon found herself in the familiar streets of the middle of town, Butcher Row, with its wiggly fronted houses, then Hertford Street and down to the corner where a cluster of men were standing around outside the Peeping Tom pub. Peeping Tom had looked out as Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets and Hetty looked up and saw the little man, the statue that commemorated him, in an upstairs window of the pub.

  She turned back and walked on, not knowing what to do. She was soon very hungry and reached into her bundle for the few shillings that were in there from her final pay from the Gordons. She bought a meat pie and went and ate it sitting on a bench outside a church. It tasted delicious. Then she went to a coffee shop and drank a coffee dash – milk with a dash of coffee – having put plenty of sugar in it. She felt quite the lady being able to buy her own food.

  But she was utterly alone. The sky seemed vast above her. For the first time in a very long while, she thought of her mother. She had nowhere else, so maybe she should go home. She wondered if she could find Nancy. Her sister had said she should, if she ever needed anything. But she could not even begin to think how to get out to where Nancy lived. She would try to find her family home.

  She headed for the market square to get her bearings, then set off towards the street where she had grown up, with its narrow, cramped houses. It felt as if she had not been there for many years, rather than twenty months, which was what it was. It was at once painfully famili
ar, yet like a foreign land. She stopped a distance from the house. In the doorway sat a bristly-faced old man with a rug draped over his knees. She didn’t know who he was. He stared at her vacantly as she came closer and she thought he must have lost his wits, but at last he said, ‘Who d’yer want?’

  ‘I’m Hetty Barker,’ she said. ‘Where’s my mom gone?’

  ‘Barker?’ he mumbled wetly, having no teeth. ‘Ain’t no Barkers ’ere now. Been gone six month or more. Dunno where, before you ask.’

  She asked a couple of the other neighbours, but they shrugged contemptuously. Hetty turned away. So that was that.

  Hetty knew she should look for work, but while she still had a few shillings to call her own, she didn’t have the will. A great numbness had come over her, even more than before. She felt unclean and uncomfortable and it was hard to find anywhere to have a wash. For a few days she wandered out towards the countryside, through Stivichall and beyond, sleeping at the edges of fields and in barns. The weather was warm and dry. When she needed food, she went to a farm or village shop. She managed to have a quick wash in streams and ponds, rinsing out the rags she was using and drying them in the sun before moving on. Sometimes she sat for hours under a tree, or lay by a hedge, just staring, her mind almost blank. It felt impossible to think about the past or future. She seemed to have no energy.

  Only once did anyone challenge her, a man she met on the road with a cart.

  ‘Where’re you heading to, young wench?’ he asked.

  Hetty’s heartbeat thudded fast. A man. She knew now what men wanted, even though his tone was jovial.

  ‘Going to see my sister,’ she said and walked on purposefully.

  Eventually when she was down to her last couple of farthings, she walked back into town. She was alone in the world, so far as she could see, with almost nothing. But still she didn’t weep, or let herself ask for help.