by Betty Burton
The reason why Lu is her enemy is that somebody had to be. How else can Lena give vent to all that rage and bitterness she’s got to bottle up at home. It must be Lu Wilmott because she is the girl Lena Grigg would most like to be. The Wilmotts have got a tin bath, Lu gets hair-washes in the scullery, they haven’t got no babies or kids, and she don’t have to sleep with nobody except her mum. Who else is there more deserving to be Lena’s object of hate?
From the first day at school, when Lu wouldn’t hand over her hair-ribbon, they had scrapped in the playground.
Eileen had supposed that because Lu had been a little goody-goody in class, she would do as she was told by Eileen. ‘Give us that ribbon!’
‘I’m not!’
‘Give us it or you’ll get my fist in your mush.’
But the little goody-goody hadn’t waited for the punch; she got one in first, made Eileen’s nose bleed, and finished up rolling in the playground dirt until a big girl told them to stop or she was going to fetch Miss Lake.
This morning, when she sees Eileen trying to hurry up her brother by slapping his legs, Lu’s aggressive spirit makes her need to go over and slap Lena’s legs so that she will know what it feels like. The thought of it makes her clench her teeth. Lena Grigg smells and gets scabies and nits, Lu has always had to fight her. Lu knows which of her scars have been given her by Eileen; the worst is the one which runs like a glove-seam around her left thumb; she had bled like a stuck pig and everybody at school said that Lu would get lockjaw and they would tell the police on Lena Grigg. Not that Lena doesn’t carry scars given by Lu, but these don’t really compare with the others, the ones she has collected at home. At the same time as she feels hostility, there are moments when Lu feels almost sorry for her, even though Lu can never have something nice unless some of the pleasure is taken away by Lena Grigg. Lena’s brothers don’t give her money for sweets, and she is always being sent on errands or minding her little brothers and sisters, or dragging home stuff from the market or wheeling coal in an old pram. It would be the worst thing in the world to be Eileen Grigg, and although she’s never been afraid of Lena herself, Lu has a horror of becoming her, which would be only too easy in Lampeter Street.
Of course, she is too young to understand that yet, but it is that fear which daily fuels her hostility to this model of an abused slum child of a beached woman.
This is the first time Lu has seen her enemy since she went down with ‘The Dip’. During Lu’s period of delirium, Eileen has hung about hoping to catch a glimpse of something, but somebody always told her to clear off down her own end. Lu of course doesn’t know that. She hopes Eileen won’t start anything now, because she is still too wobbly to fight. The only thing she can do is not to give her a chance of sticking her face into Lu’s and saying, ‘What you looking at, beanstick?’ Eileen flips her little brother in the face and makes him stand still while she crosses the road. Lu still keeps going, but Eileen blocks her way and says accusingly, ‘You’re going off away, ain’t you, Beanie?’
Lu stands her ground. ‘I wouldn’t tell you if I was, Lena Grigg.’
‘I suppose you think you’re the Princess of Lampeter Street just because you’re going off in that old beer lorry.’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘It don’t matter, everybody knows you are. Anyway, who cares if you got a new skirt? Who’d want a skirt that looks like it was made from her granny’s old drawers?’
‘Mind out the way, Lena Grigg, I’ve got to go to the paper shop.’
‘What you got in your hand?’
‘Something that’s mine and nobody else’s.’ It is only Lu’s determination not to let Eileen Grigg get the upper hand that keeps Lu on her feet. She feels sweat spring out on her forehead.
When people said Lu Wilmott was going to die, Eileen felt that it served her right for showing off for having curly hair and thinking she was better than everybody. She can see Lu’s sweat; everybody says she hasn’t got hardly an ounce of blood left in her veins. She’s as skinny as a herring and can’t have the strength of a louse, but she doesn’t give in. Something tells Lena that, even if she thumped her enemy and got her down in the gutter, Lu Wilmott would still be the winner.
The angry girl has no conception of a strength that is superior to fists and boots. Eileen has never been afraid of Lu before, but she is now. She shouts across at her brother, who is swinging on a rickety gate, ‘Stop that, or I’ll give you the biggest walloping you ever had’, then pushes her face close to Lu’s; it is screwed up with malice, her eyes look as though she’s about to cry and her lips are wet with spit. ‘Everybody said you was goin’ to die, Lu Wilmott. I jiss wish you ’ad!’
Until that moment, Lu has never thought there was anything more to their mutual antagonism than that they were naturally against each other. She doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink. Eileen Grigg runs back across the road, wrenches her brother from the gate and runs down the road with him, his feet scarcely touching the ground.
The pleasure of choosing things at the paper shop is diminished.
Vera Wilmott comes back from the corner shop carrying a bloomer loaf under her arm and a skit with potatoes in it.
Monday: that means a fry-up of bubble-and-squeak done with a penn’orth of butcher’s beef-dripping with jelly. By the time it is ready to eat, Lu won’t be here. Going to Aunty May’s is supposed to make her better, put her on her feet again, and all that has happened so far is that she feels anxious and lonely and worried – and she hasn’t even left yet.
‘You ready, Lu? I just seen Hector’s dray turning the corner. Get your bag, and do up your cardi.’ Lu’s mother puts down the rush skit, tugs Lu’s skirt and smooths her cardi. ‘Remember everything I said. Look here… this postcard’s got a stamp ready on it. In a day or two when you’re settled in, write a line home. Oh, and here—’ Vera Wilmott folds Lu’s fingers over a paper bag, as though the contents were secret or embarrassing – ‘I got you your own toothbrush. If May don’t have any “Gibbs’s” or anything, just do it with plain water.’ Amazed, Lu clutches the wooden handle. Nobody in their house has ever had separate things, like face-cloths or a tin of toothpaste, until they went out to work and earned enough to buy their own. As far as she knew, she was the only one in her class who was made to clean her teeth. She has never told her friends: they’d think it was daft. ‘Can I keep it for myself when I come home?’ Vera has never explained that, before he died, her father had been partner in a dental practice. Vera Presley’s origins are past history.
Her Mum smiles. ‘Of course you can, I said I got it for your own. I’ve been going to get you a litde something… when you had “The Dip”. I hardly lost any piecework in that fortnight, what with Ralph helping out and you being such a good little patient…’ Being paid by the piece for her work – which was hand-sewn finishing and trimming of garments – ruled virtually every move Vera Wilmott made in the working day. Normally Lu helped with the less than fine sewing, making up the weekly numbers that had to be turned in to the factory.
‘Here’s Hec’s lorry. Be polite and helpful and speak nice. I always been proud of you, y’know, our Lu.’ Taken aback at this revelation, Lu can only nod. Uncle Hector stops his lorry but leaves its motor running. She stuffs the new toothbrush down into the bag, along with the treats from Ralph. It gives Lu a peculiar feeling, part pleasure, part apprehension spiced with a bit of smugness, to have a bag in which everything belongs to herself.
Vera gives Lu’s shoulders a smooth.
Hector Wilmott lifts her up by the waist into the cab and gets back behind the wheel. ‘Don’t you worry, Vere. In twenty years as a drayman, I haven’t so much as dented a bumper.’
Charlie Barrit, drayman’s mate, takes her bag, makes room for her, and fusses a bit of blanket to cover her knees. ‘Can be a bit draughty when we gets on top the hill,’ he says, tucking her in.
Vera Wilmott stretches her neck to see her little girl settled between the two men. She
looks as though she could be snapped like matchwood. I’m going to miss you. Vera doesn’t say it, because people don’t, and it would only upset Lu even more. But she will miss her. She hadn’t wanted her, hadn’t wanted any baby – not then, just as Kenny was off to school. She had taken doses of Woman’s Comfort, but all that famous elixir did was to purge her and make her bleed. After a week of this, Vera concluded that this baby was determined to come. Half a crown would have certainly got an abortion. Dotty next door said at the time that babies you can’t dislodge except with the knitting needle should have their chance, and although Vera knew that this was just one more of Dotty’s platitudes offered because she liked people to cheer up and make the best of things, she decided to leave things alone and only hope that all the bleeding hadn’t damaged the child. The following June, when Arthur was off again on the other side of the world, Lu had come, and had looked so wholesome and pretty and unaffected by all the Woman’s Comfort that Vera decided that, come what may, she would never give in to Arthur again. She had never stopped feeling guilty about her pre-natal treatment of her pretty little girl. She had a lot to make up for to Lu.
The lorry rolls slowly forward and laboriously picks up speed, watched by half the mothers from the shop end of Lampeter Street who stand in their doorways waving.
And they are away.
To Wickham, twelve miles away.
Her punishment for trying to interfere with Lu started from the time she got on her feet again after the birth. Everything dropped down. A common enough condition. Doctor Steiner, who was the Penny Club doctor, had said that it could probably be put right. But to have a man’s hands inside, stitching everything back in place? Too frightening a prospect for most women and, in any case, in those days Vera hadn’t been able to afford a Hospital Club as well. So, all these years later, Vera is still an outworker, collecting piles of pieces from the factory to be hand finished, paying for her own needles and cotton, working like a slave for a few shillings.
Times are not quite as hard as then. Kenny isn’t earning yet, but his apprenticeship isn’t taking money out, and Ralph is a white-collar railwayman. There are very few railwaymen around Lampeter Street, even fewer clerks. A railwayman’s wage too. It wasn’t so much the wage as the security of it. Vera was never more thankful than on the day when she saw both her boys out of the danger of having to go to the dock gates and fight their way to be picked out of the crowd for a few days’ or a few hours’ work. She had always promised herself that she would not make plans for Lu, except that she would use her own knowledge of teaching to give Lu some sort of homework or tuition. But Vera had not counted on her own health giving out on her. She had grown steadily more tired, then fatigued. Dr Steiner gave her big bottles of iron tonic that stained the teeth but didn’t halt the anaemia. By the time Lu was school age, it was as much as Vera could do to get her outwork done, so Lu was left with the same standard of education as the rest.
Ralph was good, though: he bought a paper every day, and in the evening he read it aloud. Vera loved to listen to him; she didn’t mind if it was the Evening News or Lu’s Rupert Bear book. The man of the house reading aloud. Something good from her respectable middle-class past, from before the time when she had allowed her future to become entangled with the tribal Wilmotts. Most of the Wilmotts despised her for her class, and for flaunting it before them with her grammar and posh voice. But that was no longer relevant, these days they could despise her for being an outworker. Lowest of the low. All Arthur’s sisters and nieces were staymaking machinists.
All of that because she had experienced the kind of lust for a rough, Pompey matelot that girls of her sort were supposed to consider beneath them.
In the throes of that intense passion, her intelligent, teacher-trained self couldn’t see further ahead than the next time she would recklessly arouse him. Her thoughts dissipated, except for those to do with her unashamed fantasies of desire and passion. Her moist body in a state of aching readiness, to be satiated, aroused, then gratified again, endlessly. Her senses heightened – hearing coarse words and saying them herself; smelling work sweat, foreign spiced hair-oil, twenty-year-old maleness; feeling fingers sliding, mouths slavering, tongues thrusting, hands kneading, nails clutching, clawing; watching the moment when he lost control because she let him. How powerful it was to be a woman, to know that she could bring a self-assured man like this tough sailor to a state of pleading – pleading for what she wanted anyway. There had been, too, such shameless pride in discovering that she was desirable – he’d told her his mates were green with envy; he’d boasted that he was having it all with the hottest piece of goods this side of the Line, a real bit of class. And she had loved it all. For the period of that one erotic fling she had been like a foie-gras goose, overstuffed to destruction.
All of that, everything, because when she was young, and a virgin, a good-looking sailor had touched her in such a way that mating hormones had surged through her, had filled her with such intensity that for a time she was no more responsible for her actions than had been her primitive female ancestors who had mating seasons and went on heat. As Arthur had discovered, it hadn’t taken long for her to cool. Not much chance that he would want her as she was now, thank God.
* * *
Ralph, a clerk with the Southern Railway, hard at work poring over the spring timetable newly sent down from the statistics office, looked up and saw that the time was five to seven, the time when Uncle Hec said he would pick Lu up, and again hoped that he was right about Lu being sure to enjoy herself. He’d never forgive himself if this holiday didn’t live up to the promises he’d made her.
At work his contact with other people went in bursts, such as when a train was in and the guard supervising the loading of the goods van exchanged a burst of chat with him, usually about PFC and football generally, or a bit of gossip that was of interest only to Pompey men. This morning there was no one around, though, and he kept finding his mind going back to Lu and then to his mum.
Naturally she and Ray never spoke about it, but he knew well enough about his mother’s woman’s problem. It was the reason why she had been forced to take outwork, because she couldn’t sit on the machinists’ backless stools. You could see her problem in her face, weary, dragged down and fit to drop, even though she did her work seated in a low, easy chair. Sometimes he would come in and find her with her hands cupped beneath her ‘high’ stomach. How he hated to see it. But she’d always make herself perk up and say, ‘Oh dear, Ray, look at me, I was miles away.’
He wished he earned enough so that she didn’t have to do it. He had been stupidly blind at first, but now he realized there could be only one reason why she didn’t draw a Navy allowance. Once, and once only, he had been thoughtless enough to bring it up. She had flushed bright red, and plucked at her lower lip, and looked as though he had caught her out in some shameful act. The pause when she couldn’t answer had seemed so long. Even if she had at last come up with an answer that could have salvaged her respectability, he hadn’t, by then, wanted to hear it. It was a moment when he had loved her so much that he wished he had known how to tell her, instead of which he had said, ‘If I don’t mend that fire now, it’s going to go out’, and had gone to the shed and sawn off a length of old railway-sleeper hard as iron.
That weekend she had got him a new tie from the tallyman. ‘Go on, you have it,’ she had said when he’d insisted he didn’t need another one. ‘You’re good to me, Ray, and I never like to see a man go out in the evenings wearing his working tie.’
The best he could do was to see to it that she never had to do anything heavy. Ken brought in the coals for the range, Ralph filled and emptied the copper-boiler on wash-days, and ever since she’d been able to reach, putting washing through the mangle and out on the line in her school dinner-time had been Lu’s job; she also ran errands to the Co-op for potatoes and other heavy shopping.
* * *
‘What you think of that then?’ Mr Barrit points to th
e harbour far below. ‘Looks like a toy town, don’t it?’
Hector Wilmott’s lorry, rattling its crates of bottled beer, has laboured up the narrow winding road that leads out of Portsmouth, and has halted on the crest before taking the smooth run down over the Portsdown Hills. The sun pours down, sparkling the distant sea. In the hedgerows, last year’s brown grass is already being overgrown by new green, and buds are showing on everything except the brambles, but even their purple stems are engorged and saturated with their life-force.
Lu nods, solemn and wide-eyed, slowly dissolving a sweet in the hollow of the roof of her mouth with her tongue; sees her home town spread out far below. It is a strange feeling, from here Portsmouth looks like a map with models on it. A working model. Trails of smoke where trains are being shunted in the goods yard. Ships slide out of harbour and past the Isle of Wight. Dockyard cranes dip and swing. She wants to be pleased because of Mr Barrit and Uncle Hec, but apprehension makes her stomach knot and her skin cold. She doesn’t want them to know that she’s not excited, but she doesn’t want to tell them lies; they’ve been so nice to her, telling her old riddles and asking if they still learn the same poems at school. They think this must be the greatest treat in the world for her.
Without her mother to correct her, she automatically slips into Lampeter Street cockney, which is how Mr Barrit and Uncle Hec talk. ‘We was going to come up here with the Sunday school outing, but last time boys kept running down the steep part, so the teachers said they wouldn’t come no more, so we had a picnic and games on the common and a paddle in the sea, and we never come up here. It was nice though.’