by Fern Britton
The gentlemen stood as mother and daughter pushed themselves away from the table. As Mrs Bolitho passed me she paused to kiss my cheek. ‘Goodnight, my dear, and sleep well.’
When they had left, I waited a handful of minutes before saying, ‘If you don’t mind, I think I shall retire too. It has been a lovely day, though, and thank you for allowing me to stay.’
‘Clara, what else could we do? It is what Bertie would want and therefore it is what Louisa and I want,’ Reverend Bolitho said kindly. ‘You must be tired.’ He and Ernest stood as I pushed my chair back.
‘Goodnight, Reverend Bolitho.’
‘Please call me Hugh,’ he said. ‘If Bertie were here, I would have liked you to call me Father.’
Tears sprang to my eyes and my throat constricted. ‘My dear,’ he said kindly, ‘you will always be part of our family now, whatever the future holds.’
‘Goodnight, Clara.’ Ernest smiled. ‘Breakfast is at seven thirty.’
‘Thank you. You have all been so kind.’
‘We’ll do something tomorrow,’ Ernest said. ‘Maybe a walk after breakfast?’
‘I should like that.’
‘Excellent. Goodnight, old thing.’
The same words Bertie would use.
Head down, nerves raw with exhaustion, I climbed the stairs to my room. Bertie’s room. I was longing to be on my own.
I closed the door gratefully and, leaning on the back of it, cried lonely tears.
Chapter Four
Clara, Callyzion
December 1918
I cried until there were no tears left. Exhausted as I was, I pushed myself to empty my suitcase and get undressed. I hung my one good suit, my office suit, in the wardrobe next to Bertie’s old coat, then a newish dress that Bertie had liked, and finally the dress I had been wearing.
My clean underwear and stockings I put in the small drawers by the bed, my shoes neatly by the wardrobe and my nightdress on the pillow. Bertie’s pillow. I picked it up and buried my nose in it. It smelt of fresh air and lavender, but not of him.
Quickly taking off my underclothes, I wondered whether I should wash them in the bathroom and hang them to dry on the back of a chair as I did at home. Would that be thought wrong? Should I leave them for Dora to do? Or was that not the done thing, either? After much dithering I decided that I would wash them myself tonight and then ask, discreetly, tomorrow what the system for laundering was.
Slipping on my flannelette nightdress, the one Bertie had given me before he last went to France, I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and grabbed my wash-bag.
A meagre towel had been left on the bed, by Dora I assumed, so I rolled my underwear inside it and tucked it under my arm. Fearing any embarrassing meetings on the landing, I slipped noiselessly down the corridor to the bathroom.
Eventually, my washing hanging to dry overnight on Bertie’s old chair, I lifted the eiderdown and sheets of his bed and slipped my feet down towards the end. The sheets were cold and slightly damp. I pulled the blanket and top quilt over me but they gave no tangible warmth.
I had an idea.
Getting out of bed, I went to the wardrobe. Bertie’s coat slid easily off its hanger. I laid it on top of the bed and slipped under the sheets once more. That was better. I pulled his coat right under my chin. He had worn this coat when we’d got tickets for a recital at the Wigmore Hall. Was it Beethoven or Bach? I couldn’t be certain. But I remembered clearly how we had returned to Ealing and made love to keep warm.
I pulled my right hand from the growing warmth of the sheets and reached for the pockets of the coat. My fingers closed around a piece of almost furry paper. I pulled it out. The ticket to Wigmore Hall. I held it tightly in my grip then kissed it. His fingers had been the last to touch it. I held it a few moments longer then slid it under my pillow.
Blowing out my bedside candle, I could see the black night beyond the window. I had forgotten to pull the curtains and was too weary to get out of bed and close them now. I lay wide-eyed, watching a patch of thin cloud moving across the weak glow of a waning moon.
Could Bertie see me now? Could his spirit be in this room watching me?
If he was lying by me now, he would laugh at the absurdity of the two of us in his narrow bed. His coat keeping us warm. The ticket under our pillow. Everything. He was always laughing. He would hold me gently, passing his blood warmth to me and simply loving me.
I dreamt that night that we were back in our little nest in Ealing. I had been pickling onions in our tiny kitchen. It must have been Christmas because I had Christmas cards on the table and a small tree with red-ribboned bows and a robin on the top. The onions were the ones that Bertie had planted before he went to France the last time and this jar was to be his Christmas present.
I was washing up and looking out at our tiny patch of garden. I had used too much detergent and the bubbles were floating free past my eyes, but when I looked again the bubbles were turning into snow and in the garden white flakes were swirling, and standing in the middle of it all was Bertie. He had his big coat on and the bright green scarf I had knitted for him. He was smiling and waving at me, wanting me to join him. I opened the door and ran to where he had been standing but he wasn’t there. A snowman, wearing the green scarf, was in his place. A snowball hit the back of my neck, and as I turned I saw Bertie again. Now he was indoors. I ran back, the snowball dripping down my back, and collected up a handful of snow to throw at him. He was in the lounge sprinkling snow onto our little tree. I went to him and put my arms around him. ‘The war is over,’ he told me. ‘I am home.’
We held each other and the bliss and joy and love I felt in that moment was like no other. It was real and ethereal in one. To say it felt like heaven sounds glib, but truly I felt that angels were with us. His tears and mine were created by a greater power I now knew existed. ‘The war is over. I am home,’ he said again.
I held him tighter but he was no longer solid. The body beneath his coat was slipping away, like mist. I didn’t want to open my eyes to see him gone but I did and saw his coat slip from my arms, empty. He had gone.
I woke up in a terror. He was dead. Bertie was dead.
I had known very little of love before Bertie.
I had been born in Ospringe, Kent. My grandfather had been the closest person to me. He had at least cared about me. Given me some pride in myself. When he died and there was no one else to remember where I came from, I began to change. The one dingy room we shared, in an overcrowded almshouse, was stinking and had a family of rats nesting under his old straw-filled pallet. On the day the gravediggers slid him out of his pauper’s coffin, the foot end hinged so that the box could be reused again and again, I stood by his graveside and swore I would have a better life. I went back to that room and dragged his bed, the rats scattering and squealing, out into the field in front and set fire to it. I cleared the entire room. Watching as the flames engulfed my old life. All I had were the clothes I stood in, a small broken piece of mirror that Grandfather had found on the village tip, a pair of old boots, an empty room and my wits. There were two children in the almshouse. One aged three, one five. Their mother was pregnant again and I knew she needed some extra space. I also knew she could pay me a few pennies if I kept her children in my room. Over the next weeks and months I saved as much as I could, waiting for the chance that I felt certain life would throw at me.
I had a plan. I would deliberately cut off my old life before it stained me irrevocably. I knew what it was like to be one step away from the workhouse, my mother dead of consumption, my father a drunken sot, my grandfather keeping us out of the poorhouse, picking hops and apples every Kentish summer before dying a wretched death of lung disease after years of winters toiling in the cement works.
I would erase my poverty and lowness of birth. Rewrite my history.
And, I couldn’t have chosen a better time.
On 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. Men of fighting age were leaving the
ir work – on the land, in the mines, in offices, in factories – and were signing up to enlist. Suddenly employers needed women to man (as it were) the tractors, conveyor belts and desks of British industry.
I had belief in myself. An innate confidence. I could read and write, thanks to my grandfather. My numeracy was nimble enough from keeping score in the cribbage games played with him in the old pub. My clothes had been rags, but I took one of my mother’s old skirts and a blouse and, with some nifty stitching and darning, made them presentable enough. I took care of my skin as well as I could, and brushed my brown curls with a scrubbing brush, as my mother had taught me.
Back then, I wasn’t sure what I was preparing for, but whatever it was it would require me to be smart, bright and pretty. I was certain of it.
The fifteenth of September 1914 was the day Clara Carter, orphan of Ospringe parish, became Miss Clara Carter, trainee typist at the London Evening News, in Fleet Street, London.
The News, as it was known, had acquired a reputation for employing women. The shortage of manpower created by the surge of men wanting to enlist to serve in the war meant that women were prepared and wanting to work. What the newspaper knew, and found attractive, was that they didn’t have to pay female workers as much as their male counterparts. Board members must have rubbed their hands in glee at the prospect. War meant profit. Newspaper sales were up. Wage bills down.
I only discovered this by chance when taking the half-hour walk from Ospringe to my small cleaning job in Faversham.
Miss Hampton’s Haberdashery on the High Street was small but busy, supplying all kinds of fabric from seductive satins that fell down in ripples, to tough tweeds, scratchy but windproof. Miss Hampton was a respectable unmarried woman, probably in her late thirties or early forties. I felt quite sorry for her. A lifetime as a lonely old spinster couldn’t be much fun, but then when I saw how happy she was, doting on her customers and deciding for herself what she would have for supper, and when or even if she would have it, I rather envied her.
Each week I arrived just before she opened up for the day, to clean the shop, the storeroom, her kitchen-cum-parlour and her small, feminine bedroom.
That morning, I had found on my journey a copy of the previous day’s Evening News. I picked it up for no other reason than to practise my reading and use it later for the fire at home.
Miss Hampton spotted it immediately. ‘Good morning Miss Carter, I didn’t know you’d taken to reading the news.’
‘I found it. I’ve never really read one before and I thought it might be interesting. About the war and everything.’
‘Good for you,’ Miss Hampton said, ‘You could read it to me over lunch if you like?’
‘Thank you. I would like that.’
‘Excellent. We women need to keep up with what’s going on in the world. It’s our duty to understand what is being done in our name.’
Miss Hampton was a suffragette. She didn’t know I knew. Suffragettes in our part of the world kept their beliefs quiet. Most men and many women thought they were mannish troublemakers. So, when I found a brooch in Miss Hampton’s dressing-table drawer, a circle of purple, green and white stones, the suffragettes’ colours, I knew what she was. I admired her, and if she wanted it to be kept a secret, no one would hear it from me.
Miss Hampton carried on. ‘As women we must stay strong. Keep the home fires burning. Remind those poor devils who are facing the enemy that there is still an England to return to.’ She folded the paper and tucked it under the counter. ‘And we’ll start with you getting the shop swept.’
I loved my days in the shop with Miss Hampton. For a starter, I stayed clean all day. The bolts of fabric always needed sorting and measuring. The ribbons rolling. The buttons counting.
At first, when customers came into the shop, Miss Hampton expected me to disappear and get on with the work in the rest of her home. But a few months back she had asked me if I would like to take home an offcut of soft grey wool and make it into a garment that I could wear at work. She didn’t have to explain that my mother’s old skirt and blouse were far from decent. I made a simple dress with a neat neckline, bracelet-length sleeves and a neat-fitting bodice and skirt that accentuated my thin frame. I wore it to work every day from then on. As soon as I had finished my cleaning duties, I was allowed to be Miss Hampton’s assistant to the customers.
Today, after I had the back room in good order and the bolts of fabric lying neatly on their shelves, it was time for our simple lunch. Miss Hampton locked the door at exactly one p.m. every day and I could hear her doing so as I ran water from the pump at the sink, filled the kettle and lit the hob.
‘Now Miss Carter,’ Miss Hampton arrived in the back room and glanced around to make sure all was shipshape, ‘did you have breakfast?’
‘Not yet, ma’am. My grandfather cooked a mutton stew last night so I wasn’t hungry.’ I lied convincingly but Miss Hampton, although never revealing so, knew very well that there had been no mutton stew and that my grandfather lay now in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
‘Perhaps you could manage a little bread and ham? I made the bread last night.’
‘Thank you, ma’am. I would.’
‘You’ll find it all in the larder. We’ll eat it at the table here.’
‘May I get the newspaper?’ I asked politely.
Miss Hampton was gathering plates and cutlery. ‘Please do.’
The tea was made, and the food set out quickly and neatly.
I was always thankful for these simple lunches. Not only was it good food, but watching Miss Hampton, the cutlery she used and the delicate way she ate and drank, was a valuable lesson in manners. I also studied the way Miss Hampton spoke and tried my best to imitate her soft voice and accuracy of speech.
Taking her last mouthful of bread and dabbing crumbs from her mouth with a napkin, Miss Hampton placed her knife and fork in the middle of her empty plate and picked up my copy of the Evening News. There were many pages of war news, but she hurried through them, muttering ‘Dear God’ and ‘Unbearable’, before stopping at an advertisement showing the latest ladies’ fashion styles. ‘Skirts are getting short.’ She raised her eyebrows, ‘In my day you would never show your ankles. I still don’t.’
‘May I see?’ I asked.
The advertisement read: ‘The new workwear for young women’. The two models were wearing quite different outfits. One a neat, peplum-waisted jacket with a companion narrow skirt, the other posing in a floaty, floral tea dress. ‘Ideal office wear for any season,’ I said. ‘I like them.’
Miss Hampton got up and collected the lunch dishes to take them to the kitchen.
I turned a few more pages of the paper and came to the Situations Vacant column.
THE LONDON EVENING NEWS NEEDS YOU.
Are you a young woman prepared to do essential war work?
Be part of our ground-breaking News Team and become a typist.
Full training, board and lodging available.
Applications in writing to:
The London Evening News
Fleet Street
London
This was the sign I had been waiting for. The moment I had been preparing for.
A job in London with board and lodging, a skill to learn and a wage to be had.
I jumped up and ran to Miss Hampton who was drying a plate. ‘Miss Hampton, ma’am, can you help me write a letter?’
I haunted the village post office for days waiting for a reply and then it arrived.
Dear Miss Carter,
Thank you for your letter of 17 August.
We should like to offer you a position on the London Evening News as a trainee typist.
We can offer a room in a nearby boarding house where many of our female employees live. The rent is deducted directly from your wage.
Assuming all this is in order, we look forward with pleasure to your suggested arrival on 15 September next.
I remain yours sincerely,
Miss Anita Flint,
Office Manager
Miss Hampton had been almost more excited than me.
‘You’ll need clothes.’
I looked down at my grey wool dress. ‘What’s wrong with this?’
Miss Hampton inclined her head. ‘Well, shall we be reminded that fine feathers make fine birds? And being so thin you don’t take much fabric.’ She unrolled her tape measure. ‘Stand still.’
Out of shop hours, Miss Hampton and I picked out old remnants of fabric, and between us we sewed two dresses, one work suit and two blouses.
‘That should do you if you take care of them. Now what about your footwear?’ Miss Hampton asked.
‘I’ll polish these boots up.’ I looked at my scuffed and thin-soled shoes. ‘They’ll be fine.’
Miss Hampton sighed, ‘They are worn through. No, no. Let me see what I have in the back.’
It turned out that Miss Hampton’s shoes were a pretty good fit, although my feet were a little thinner.
‘Wear thicker stockings to pack them out a bit.’ Her eyebrows twitched. ‘You don’t have stockings, do you?’
I was embarrassed. ‘No. Just these long socks.’ I hitched up my skirt for her to see.
‘Oh dear.’ She rubbed her chin. ‘What about personal items of underwear?’
I reddened and shook my head.
Miss Hampton smiled. ‘Dear me. You are a regular Cinderella, aren’t you? You are lucky to have me.’
Miss Hampton kitted me out with all that she thought a young woman should need when starting a new job in a new city. Not only that, she also let me use her tin bathtub. The first hot, soapy bath I had ever had.
On the morning of my departure for London, I crept out of my shared room, leaving the two children snoring and a note for their mum – if she could read – and took the walk to Miss Hampton’s.
Miss Hampton had my travelling clothes hanging up in her back room, with all my other garments packed into a small case she had bought for me.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ I said as I stood and looked at myself in her mirror.