by Betty Burton
May came in bringing wine in long-stemmed glasses. ‘Tomato. It’s powerful strong but it’ll warm you through. You drink that whilst the supper’s cooking.’
‘Aunty May, I just remembered… there was a man at the service carrying a wreath.’
‘The one in the grey trilby?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was a shipmate of your dad’s. I said to Ted, how much he was going to miss Arthur. His name was Sid something. Ray and Ken will know, he came back to the house but only had a cup of tea. I only met him a minute, but I thought what a nice man he was.’
‘Oh. He must of thought I was terrible running off like that.’
‘Never. I said he was a nice man.’
Preoccupied, Lu fiddled with the fringe of the shawl. ‘I thought he might of been…’
May and her father waited.
‘…might of been somebody from Mum’s family.’
Lu swallowed a mouthful of wine which made her cough. ‘I had some brandy once when I was little… this is better. I expect that’s who I’m really angry with.’
‘Your mum’s family?’ May asked.
Lu looked puzzled. ‘No, I don’t expect she’s got anybody except us, but I just wondered. It’s him I feel angry about… Dad. They buried him on top of her.’
Gabriel said, ‘It’s quite usual, Louise m’dear.’
The pressure that had caused her to run away had been building for weeks. It had started one day when Lu, sitting in the lavatory, found herself an unwilling eavesdropper on Vera and Dotty talking over the back fence about the prospect of the Augusta returning home, their voices low but carrying. Her mother had said, ‘I don’t know what to do, I can’t go through all that again.’
‘Now you had the operation, you’re safe.’
‘I don’t mean falling… I mean the rest. I don’t want it any more… I dread it. I’d as soon let him into my grave as let him into my bed. Last time he was home, he wouldn’t leave me alone.’
Dotty had said, ‘Ne’mind, maybe he’s past it. Why don’t you tell him?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve got grown-up sons, Dotty. I wasn’t brought up like that. I can’t stand all that going on with them about. Last time Lu had to sleep in the armchair. She’s fourteen this trip.’
Lu had sat there with her hands over her ears, longing for her mother to go indoors so that she could escape down the back garden without her mother knowing that she had been overheard.
May said, ‘Married couples are often buried together, whole families sometimes.’
‘When they put him in on top, I ran away. It was like my mum was trapped there.’
She didn’t see the pained expressions on May’s and her father’s faces.
Gabriel said, ‘Try not to think of it in that way. What was buried today was the physical remains of your parents, not people with awareness, or sensitivity.’
May said, ‘Your mum was a lady with a very strong spirit, you know that yourself, Lu. That spirit wouldn’t hang around once it was free to fly, now would it?’
The mundane smell of frying bacon drifted into the room.
‘You’re going to fry that supper to a frazzle, May. Louise must be hungry, I know that I am,’ Gabriel said, rising from his chair. In the two years since the time when she had first met him, he had shrunk in direct ratio to her growth, so that now she could give him a firm kiss on the cheek without stretching up.
The marigold and valerian, or perhaps the relief of having got something off her chest, gave her a night of deep sleep. When she opened her eyes, Bar was in the room. She came to lie beside Lu on the bed.
‘Hello, Lu. I knew you would come out here.’ She got under the bed-covers, they put their arms about one another and lay as close as lovers. ‘Bar… I’m so miserable. I never realized… I know I didn’t cry but I did love her… they probably think it’s queer, not crying over your mother.’
‘I don’t, I cried a lot when my old rabbit died, but my Ma…? That’d hurt my heart a lot more than a cony. Perhaps there’s some things that’s too sorrowful for just crying. Do you think that’s it? Poor Lu, I could just cry because of you.’ She raised herself on one elbow and kissed Lu’s eyelids. ‘What say we go and sit by Swallitt. You can cry if you want to – if you don’t it don’t matter. I’ll make you a candle-boat; you can light it and send her a message in it. Or you can just know you loved her without it being anybody’s business.’
Later they walked down the lane towards the woods. Bar, wearing a tweed cap, old riding breeches and a man’s hacking jacket rolled up at the sleeves and the hem down to her thighs, might have looked like a stable lad had it not been for the black ringlets cascading down her back, and with Lu, in Granny Wilmott’s funeral coat and a pair of field boots, they might have been little girls dressed up for a game of grown-ups, except that they walked slowly, engrossed in one another.
‘They letting you off school then, Lu?’
‘I shan’t go back to school.’
‘You will.’
‘No.’
‘But it was the thing you wanted – you been on about it ever since I met you, about learning everything, and going somewhere nice to work.’
‘I know. Mum wanted me to, I think she would have done anything to get me to the grammar school, she used to get on to me every night to learn stuff at home. Her and Miss Lake. But I can see now: people like us can’t afford to keep on at school after fourteen.’
‘I wouldn’t of anyway. But you got all them clothes and stuff. Will they take them back?’
‘I don’t know. They came from charity, so I expect they will.’
‘Your Ray will be sorry.’
‘He’ll get over it. Anyway, we’ve got big debts over the funeral. I don’t want them to be lumbered with me. Ray don’t have much as it is, and Kenny likes going out. What’s it going to be like having to keep me for years after I should be out at work?’
‘You going out to work then?’
Lu nodded. ‘I’ll get the aunties to speak for me at Ezzard’s.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a corset factory, all the Wilmotts work there. Granny Wilmott used to, and my cousin Mary has just started. She won’t half laugh up her sleeve when she knows I’m giving up the grammar.’
‘You hate them factories.’
‘I know, but there isn’t anywhere else. You can earn more than in a shop, but it’s hard work, kills you when you get on piecework.’
’Are you going to tell this aunty?’
‘I’ll tell Mr Strawbridge first. He won’t try to persuade me one way or the other. If he knows I’m serious, then he will help me say it so that it doesn’t look as if I’m being daft or ungrateful. And I’m not doing it because I’ve took things bad because of Mum. I must go out to work and earn my keep. I really need to. I expect they will offer to help out with money, but that would just be another debt to be paid back.’
Bar helped her communicate with her mother in the flame of a candle-end sent floating across The Swallitt on a tin lid. No one except them would ever know. You couldn’t talk about that kind of thing – except to a half-gypsy girl who seemed wiser than anybody. Lu still didn’t shed any tears, but what with having let her mother go with the floating candle, and having let her chance of being a scholar go, she was soon ready to go home.
Ray, of course, insisted they could manage, but she told him, ‘Don’t treat me like a kid, Ray, you know we can’t. It’s going to take months to pay off the funeral.’
‘But it’s such a waste. Miss Lake says you’ve got a really good brain.’
‘What makes you think I’m going to waste it? Look, Ray, I wanted to go to grammar school because I saw it as the first step towards going to university. I wouldn’t be satisfied with just a taste of it. I’m greedy, I’d want everything. You can’t keep me for the next six or seven years.’
Kenny didn’t join in the discussion, except to say, ‘It won’t be long till I’m earning a bit more, Lu
.’
‘And what happens if either of you decides to get married? I’m sure you’ll get a lot of girlfriends if you have to tell them you can’t afford to marry them because your little sister is still at school at twenty.’
There was no answer to the logic of her argument. When Ray went round to see Miss Lake, he asked her to leave Lu to make her own decision. ‘She’s got some idea she worked out with an old friend of ours, my aunty’s father. She’s going to keep on reading different subjects, and later on maybe she’ll go to evening classes. I thought maybe you could guide her a bit too.’
Miss Lake was obviously bitterly disappointed. ‘I suppose it was something of a dream, Ralph.’
‘No, I don’t think so, Miss Lake. It was just bad luck that we happen to have been born poor.’
‘Things will change.’
Ray smiled, ‘You should tell our Kenny that, and he’d tell you that the seeds of destruction of the system have already been sown.’
‘Who knows, perhaps we have too narrow a view of what our academic institutions can do? Perhaps there is some truth that the university of life produces graduates who are of more use to society than those with letters after their names. Certainly there are very many brilliant minds that have never been near a conventional institution.’ She held out a hand and took Ray’s warmly. ‘I wanted Lu to be the first of many, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. Please, do promise that you will allow me to help in any way I can.’
‘Perhaps you could give her a recommendation to take when she applies for a job?’
‘Willingly.’
Leaving Childhood
Louise Vera Wilmott, the child who had once felt that she changed after she had seen both sides of the Portsdown Hills, had grown up to be, at fourteen, shapely and tall.
Having burned her grammar-school boats, she will now need to go humbly to her aunts for help, and then cap-in-hand to ask for work in a factory. All that Lu has to offer, that a factory manager might want, is the Wilmotts’ reputation for hard work and docility.
In Britain, in these years of the early thirties, large-scale unemployment makes the whole country uneasy. It shows up most particularly in factory areas like the Lampeter slums with its ‘beached’ women providing such an enormous pool of dirty-poor female labour. Here, it is important to know somebody who knows somebody who might be taking on a novice.
Eileen Grigg was one fewer girl in the labour pool.
She had disappeared overnight, and it was rumoured that she had been sent away to a Home for Wayward Girls, but nobody seemed to know the truth of it. Not that that stopped people talking.
The school doctor, on his annual visit, had asked the first question which started Eileen on the road to the Home. Mrs Grigg had been told to come up to the school. Mrs Grigg had sworn at the vicar and the vicar had threatened her with the police. Mrs Grigg brought men home and took money to let them go with Lena. Lena Grigg went with her brother, Brian, who had got a disease that had made little crabs grow on private parts and then Lena caught them.
Lu disbelieved most of it, particularly about the crabs, until she went down to the library and read it up in the section that had given her most of her information about human biology and disease.
But there was no reference book to consult when it came to what knowing what Lena herself had said about it all. Lu had asked Dotty if it was true that Lena Grigg had been sent to a Home. ‘Yes, she’s a dirty little bitch like her mother.’
Lu had thought about Lena and Brian Grigg until she could stand it no longer, and went knocking at Miss Lake’s front door at home. When Miss Lake had said for her to come in, Lu had shaken her head. ‘I just wanted to know if it’s true about Eileen Grigg? Is it true she’s in a Home for Wayward Girls?’
Miss Lake, her eyes level with Lu’s, with her bun unwound and wearing a kind of robe tied with a cord, stood saying nothing. This was the first time Lu had come face to face with her headmistress since the funeral. Lu’s knowledge that she had disappointed Miss Lake over the grammar school did nothing to lessen her aggressive air.
‘I have a right to know, Miss Lake. You know how it used to be between me and her, but that don’t mean I think it’s fair what people are saying about her.’ Lu’s voice was croaky from the restraint she was trying to show.
‘So you may, Louise, but you do not have a right to stand on my doorstep and demand that I tell you.’ She held the door wide, with a command that drew Lu into the hallway, then went on leading her into a small room in which there was nothing but a desk, a couple of chairs, a lamp and whole walls full of books. It had the same smell as the library which Lu loved. Her desk was piled with school exercise books.
‘Please sit down.’
Lu hesitated. She was stimulated by her anger and did not want it to be drained away by Miss Lake’s lesson in the proper way to behave. ‘Good manners stem from consideration for others, Louise, so if you do not wish to sit then I shall have to stand too, for you are the visitor here.’
Lu sat. ‘They’re saying a lot of dirty things about Eileen Grigg. I didn’t like her and she did mean things and she liked hurting people, but if it was her brother who did what people are saying, then I don’t think it’s fair that it should be Lena who’s the one sent away. Lena is only my same age and their Brian is nearly as old as my oldest brother. If he made her do it, she wouldn’t have been able to stop him, would she? He’s a man, a big dockie. If anybody was going to be shut up it ought to have been him.’ She paused, her heart seeming to beat fast and loud. ‘Is it true, Miss Lake?’
‘How can I possibly answer such a question, Louise?’
‘Because they say that you were one of the people who decided.’
‘Unfortunately that’s true, but in a position like mine, there are a good many things that I can never discuss. I hold confidences regarding my Lampeter Street families, and if I were to discuss them with every person who came knocking at my door and demanding that I should, do you think anybody would trust me? Would you?’
‘But miss, this is different. People are saying that their Brian…’ Now that her anger was being deflected into reasonable discussion, she found it difficult to say the shocking things she had intended to fling at Miss Lake on her way here.
‘I know full well what the gossips are saying, Louise.’ Miss Lake opened a box and took out a cigarette which she pressed into a short holder and lit up. Who would ever have supposed that Miss Lake smoked cigarettes? ‘Louise, you are one of the most intelligent girls I have encountered since I took up teaching, which means that I have too great a regard for you to offer mere platitudes. I am impressed that you care so much about wrong having been done that you have come to confront me.’
‘I wasn’t meaning it was only you, miss, but 1 don’t know who else to ask, or what to do about it not being fair.’
‘What is it that is unfair?’
‘Brian Grigg should be locked up, not Lena.’
‘Do you know what Brian Grigg has done to Eileen?’
Lu saw the catch. ‘No, of course I don’t actually know, only they can actually know… but it wouldn’t be likely it was Lena who forced him to mess about with her, would it? And she wouldn’t get a… vernal disease on her own.’
Miss Lake blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke and tapped her holder on an ashtray. ‘The word is venereal.’ Lu watched as the headmistress began to change into a woman. She said a sex word without being embarrassed. The dictionary had said it was associated with lust. Vernal disease wasn’t something you talked about.
‘Your friends call you Lu, don’t they?’
‘Yes, Miss Lake.’
‘Would you mind if I called you Lu?’
‘No.’ Miss Lake had always surprised you with things like that, speaking to kids as though they were real people.
‘Thank you. Well, Lu, let me put this to you. If you felt certain in your own mind that a friend of yours had been harmed, what would you do?’
‘Tel
l the police.’
‘Then what could you do if, having gone to the police, your friend denies the whole story – probably because she is scared out of her wits that if she tells the truth then she might be hurt much worse in future?’
Lu did not answer at first, but sat looking steadily at Miss Lake. ‘Is that what Lena said?’
‘If your first concern is for your friend, then mightn’t it be best to get her away from the source of the trouble? Wouldn’t that be the best you could do in the circumstances?’
Lu looked up at the rows of books. Rows and rows, all different sizes and shapes and colours of binding covering the walls better than distemper, a bit like being in Mr Strawbridge’s room. ‘Is a Home for Wayward Girls safe? I thought it was like a prison.’
‘There aren’t always perfect solutions. Maybe there is a better way and I just haven’t seen it.’
Lu didn’t know how closely Miss Lake had watched her clever girl’s innocent anguish as she struggled to find another way out of a dilemma where there was none. ‘But it’s not fair, miss. It’s just not.’
Miss Lake removed the cigarette from its holder and blunted the burning end until it went out. ‘You’re absolutely right, Lu, and I’m glad that you think so. When the choice is between something bad and something worse, it’s hard on those who have to do the choosing.’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘Perhaps we should not be so willing to accept situations which involve making decisions which affect other people’s lives.’
Miss Lake continued to watch the girl: such potential.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Lake.’
‘For what?’
‘For coming here and saying those things… I didn’t know.’
‘You still don’t. We talked only about a hypothetical case of a friend being abused and afraid to tell.’