Finally, frozen and exhausted, I stuffed my blue hands into my cardigan pockets and turned toward home. But after two steps I stopped. In my pocket was a hard little card. Mother's library card!
Books! Perhaps the library had the books I needed. If they had, I could keep on reborrowing them. If it was not yet nine o'clock, I could run to the library and look.
I tore through the streets, taking shortcuts through every alleyway I could, regardless of danger. Dogs barked and cats and rats scampered away at the sound of my thudding feet. I squeezed into the library's muggy warmth five minutes before closing-time, the list of books clutched in one hand.
Feverishly, I sought through the index. Had they got them? Had they?
They had.
A few minutes later, I emerged, equipped with textbooks.
At home I poured out my adventures to Alan and Fiona. It was a long time since I had had such a conversation with any of the family, and they were jubilant about the enrollment and the books. Alan oflFered to lend me his pen each evening.
"If you don't remind them, perhaps they'll forget that you owe them half a crown," he said hopefully, in reference to the school fee.
"They will have to, " I said woodenly, "because I am going to school, no matter what happens."
Brave words, but I still needed at least one notebook, and, as I put the family to bed, I worried more about obtaining twopence to buy a notebook than I worried about the half-crown.
On Wednesday, I found a piece of comb in a gutter and painfully attacked my tangled mop of hair with it. Mother had a tiny pocket-comb, which of a necessity she had kept for herself.
Father was fortunately almost bald. The children went uncombed and mostly unwashed, until more regular work enabled Mother to buy a strong comb for use by the family.
If ever I became rich, I told myself savagely, I would help to provide a basic kit for the more unfortunate of this world. It would consist of a large bar of kitchen soap, a pile of old white cloth, a pile of newspapers (newspapers can be made into beds, handkerchiefs, toilet paper, warm padding under thin garments, draught excluders, makeshift windowpane replacements, firing, and a thousand other uses), some razor blades, for beards and nails, and a comb. One has to be without such small amenities to appreciate their worth.
My appearance was not much improved when I again presented myself at school, quailing at the thought of not being able to pay the fee.
The bookkeeping teacher was as kind as before, and after she had given the class some work to do, she brought over to me a small arithmetic textbook, told me to take it home, read the instructions in the first chapter and see if I could work my way through the problems based on them. She promised to mark the work for me.
Several children had no notebooks, so she provided some paper both for their work and mine. I soon became absorbed in the struggle to make my sluggish brain work, and forgot the silent distaste with which my fellow students were treating me.
Halfway through the evening, the class was taken over by a thin, energetic teacher who was to instruct us in English grammar. She proved as friendly and helpful as the bookkeeping teacher.
Evening school has a long tradition in Lancashire, and all over the city classrooms were crowded with young people desirous of improving their education. Again I was following in the footsteps of the humble weavers about whom my old gentleman in the park had told me.
It was Fiona who one evening accidentally let fall the information that I had gone to evening school. My parents were rightly angry that I had taken such action without consulting them and both stormed at me about it.
I had long since concluded that consultation was a waste of time, so I just stated firmly, "I have been going to evening school
and Tm going to continue going." I had nothing to lose but my chains.
"Where did you get the money from?" demanded Mother suddenly.
I had to own up that I owed the Liverpool education committee two shillings and sixpence—and, worse still, I needed two shillings more for bookkeeping books and other notebooks.
This led to frirther recrimination, so I said bluntly, "Would you prefer that I stole it rather than owed it?"
Such insolence was so unlike me that it brought my parents up short.
Mother said quietly, in a tone more normal than anything she had used since we had arrived in Liverpool, "No, we would not. Probably we shall manage to find the money somehow."
This sudden reasonableness frightened me more than if she had had hysterics. I had become so used to her being ill and unable to pay normal attention to us, that I had forgotten that new hope had recently entered her life and was helping her to get better quite rapidly. Once I had got over the shock, I was pite-ously grateful.
The following Tuesday evening, hair neatly combed into a bun and held with a piece of string, and wearing Fiona's cardigan, I ran through the dank September evening to school. Hot in the palm of my hand was a half-crown, the most important coin I was ever to possess. I was to spend seven years in evening schools, and I managed in each subsequent year to win a small scholarship, which covered the increasing fees and my books, as I advanced through the system; so that I did not cost my parents anything more.
The electric lights had already been turned on in the school and a great shaft of light blazed out across the pavement from the main doorway. It was early, and no one else was entering. I looked up the stone steps, hollowed out by hundreds of feet, through the hall and up the staircase to the second floor.
The welcoming doorway was my hoping door, the worn stone steps my ladder to the stars. Kind hands, earnest people, were there to help me up them.
I bared my yellow teeth in a smile of pure happiness, charged across the threshold, and galloped up the stairs.
Part Two
WORK
TWELVE
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For the first two winters of my attendance, nobody would sit by me, because I was so blatantly dirty and I stank. Only the teachers spoke to me. In some subjects I was so behind that I needed dedicated helpers. And the teachers gave me that help.
The bookkeeping teacher taught me the simple arithmetic, which I had forgotten through long absence fi-om school. The English teachers gave me essays to write, in addition to the business letters they demanded fi-om their other pupils. They drew my attention to poems and to essays I should read. Later, I took German and French, and again the teacher drummed additional grammar into me, and introduced me to the translated works of foreign authors. Shorthand, a possible gateway to employment, was largely a matter of practice, and I practiced zealously.
I dreamed of becoming the treasured secretary of some great man of affairs, like Sir Montague Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, to whom I had once been introduced. He had given the silent, small girl by Father's side a new shilling, and I had curled up in an agony of shyness and refused to say thank you, much to Father's embarrassment. But, of course, when I became a secretary, I would always be ready with the correct, polite remark and flawlessly typed letters ready to be signed.
During the day, as I walked little Edward in the squeaky Chariot, I read books balanced on the pram's rain cover. I discovered Trevelyan's histories and read all those that the library had. The librarian suggested histories of other countries, so I read not only the histories of France and Germany, but those of China and Japan, of the United States and of the countries of South America.
The heroines of some of the Victorian novels I read studied philosophy in their spare time, so I plodded through the works of several German philosophers far too difficut for me.
"Don't know what they're talking about," I told Edward crossly.
I found a book by Sigmund Freud and decided that he did not understand females at all. I never associated his work with the strange spasms and longings in my own maturing body. To my mind, Freud did not seem to do so well at interpreting dreams as Joseph in
the Bible did.
Despite our big family, I suffered great loneliness. When Father was not too tired, he would sometimes talk to me about his wartime experiences in Russia or we would discuss eighteenth-century France, of which he had considerable knowledge. Without pen, ink, paper, or stamps, I could not write to the school friends I had left behind in my earlier life. In fact, at first my parents refused obdurately to allow me to write.
"Why not?" I demanded crossly.
"Because it costs money, and there may be some creditors who still want to trace your father."
They also forbade me to write to my grandmother.
When I went to the local shops, I saw only older, married women, or children sent on messages, and, to me, some of the girls who lived in neighboring streets seemed hardly human. Still young enough to be employed, on Saturdays and Sundays they went about in twos and threes, dressed in cheap finery. They gawked and giggled and shrieked at the gangling youths hanging uneasily about the street comers.
Sometimes, when Edward and I passed a group of them, they stared and laughed at me behind their hands. Once or twice they shouted at the idling boys to inquire which of them had "caught" me. It was a long time before I realized that it was generally assumed that Edward was my illegitimate child. When I did discover it, I cried with mortification, because I knew that to have a baby out of wedlock was very wicked.
I was very vague about the origins of babies. I did not think about it very much. Dimly, uncertainly, I imagined that they came from the same place as foals and lambs and calves did. But I had never actually seen a birth, and how this could be was beyond my imagining. I never equated men with stallions, rams, or bulls. But, to be respectable, a child had to have a visible father or a substitute, like a gravestone, to account for his absence. Once,
when I was small, Mother dismissed our parlormaid without a moment's notice, and I knew from the maids' gossip that she was expecting a baby—and she was not married.
I had only two close contacts to assuage this sense of isolation. One was my old interpreter. But one day he was missing from his usual seat and never came again. I presumed he had died and had gone to join his wife and two sons.
The other friend was Cristina Gomez, who had given us the Chariot. But since we moved away from Mrs. Foster's, I no longer saw her very often.
In my position as surrogate mother, I had neither time nor opportunity to play. As the children became rougher and, in order to survive, more like the other boys and girls in the district, the gulf widened between us, and there seemed to be no close communication. Even Alan, so close to me in age, was like a child to me.
Because I did not have a shopping bag, the grocer used to wrap up potatoes and other vegetables in newspaper for me, and when I arrived home, I used to read these papers. There were descriptions of local tennis tournaments among young people, and stories of balls and receptions. I would stand dreaming with the muddy paper in my hands, imagining myself scampering about a tennis court delivering serves that raised cheers from the onlookers or skimming around a ballroom in a billowing net dress. And how good it would be to go to the theater again! In me were the stirrings of womanhood, though I did not understand them, and I had an instinctive desire to be clean, to be prettily dressed, to hide as much as possible the ugliness which I had been assured was mine.
When I thought about it, I became so afraid of the friendless, empty future that sometimes my legs would begin to give under me, and I would have to cling to the pram handle until the sense of blind panic passed.
Mother worked on short contracts in the bigger city department stores. She demonstrated new products, like kitchen gadgets, or was engaged specially to sell slow-moving goods that might deteriorate if kept in stock too long. She slowly gained a good reputation, and stores would pass her from one to another, to get
rid of piles of baby baths in unpopular colors, baby clothes that threatened to harbor moths, cameras and photographic supplies left over from the summer season, and the newest wringer washers and gas stoves.
It used to amuse me to carry Edward into a shop and watch her demonstrate the use of a gadget, beguiling housewives into impulsive purchases.
One day, Avril and I stood at a discreet distance behind her in a baby-wear department. I held Edward in my arms, and though he must have known he was watching his mother, he placidly sucked his thumb and did not call out. She was selling violently pink rubber baths.
She tenderly picked up a rubber doll and plunged it into imiaginary water, talking all the time, first to the doll as if it were a baby and then to her audience, who, quite amused, slowly gathered around her. She dried the doll and dusted it with baby powder and put on its diaper. Young mothers and obviously expectant mothers were her targets, and they soon found themselves hooked into fi-iendly conversation. Mother seemed able to make them feel that their baby was her only interest in life, and if they already had a baby bath, she would skillfully pass them to one of the shop assistants, whose battle for a sale of baby clothes was, of course, already half won.
Before Father went bankrupt, she had for years been a member of operatic and dramatic societies, and she knew enough of stagecraft to use her voice and manner to the best effect. She was never paid enough for her ability.
She looked very attractive, despite her thinness, in a black dress and black shoes purchased from a secondhand shop. I used to cut her hair for her with Father's cutthroat razor and then curl it each morning with a pair of curling tongs, bought for a penny from the pawnbroker's oddments table.
Of course, I never approached her while she was working, and Avril understood that she must be quiet and tiptoe away at an appropriate moment. I doubt if she noticed that we were there, because she never mentioned seeing us.
Avril's and my great enemies were the shopwalkers. Sometimes when we were cold, we would go into a big shop and skulk around the different departments until we became warm again. And then the shopwalker would pounce.
shopwalkers always looked very imposing. They were usually elderly gentlemen dressed in stiff, white, Victorian wing collars and black suits. They perambulated stiffly up and down the aisles of the shops, hands clasped behind their backs. They glared ferociously at the young girls and boys who served behind the counters. Then, with a slight bow, they would lend a courteous ear to customer inquiries, the whispered remarks almost drowned by the loud rings of the pneumatic tubes, holding payments or change, shooting along wires above their heads.
I never argued with the shopwalkers.
"What do you want?" they would snarl.
"I'm just looking," I would say loftily, exactly as I had heard people around me say.
The usual reply was "You can look in the windows."
Then they would stride crossly to the nearest door and fling it open, and Edward, Avril, and I would slink out like lost puppies.
One October day, we went into a shop in which Mother was working, to get warm. Mother was selling photograph albums. Her voice penetrated clearly through the murmur of shoppers as she extolled the advantages of having an album for each particular type of photograph. Avril, Edward, and I settled down to watch.
I had not been feeling well for two days. My back ached, as did my head. I had got very wet in a rain storm earlier in the week, and I shrugged ofiFthe low-level discomfort as being due to this. As I watched, however, the pain in my back began to feel as if an iron belt had been suddenly clasped round my waist. Pains shot down the sides of my stomach.
I gasped to Avril that we had to go home quickly, and dragged her back to the pram, parked in the shop doorway. She protested in a loud whine as I plunked her into the pram with Edward. Panting with pain, I began the long ascent up Renshaw Street.
The pain came in ever-increasing waves. Sweat beaded my forehead, and I leaned on the pram handle for support, as I almost ran for home.
Opposite the Women's Hospital I started to lean against a brick wall as a particularly agonizing pain ripped down the side of my stomach
. Though I stared at the hospital with glazed eyes, it did not occur to me to seek succor there. To a child, in those days, hospitals were usually where old people went to die. After a bit, I resumed my stumbling walk toward home.
I ran the pram up to the front step of our house, and tugged at the string sticking through the letter box. The string pulled back the lock, the door swung open, and I almost threw first Edward and then Avril into the narrow hall.
The pain was again surging in my stomach.
Frightened to death, I slammed the fi-ont door, snatched up Edward, and carried him through to our back yard, leaving an angry Avril howling in the hall. Perhaps if I went to the lavatory, I would feel better.
I left the lavatory door ajar, so that I could watch Edward, while I snatched down my panties.
The torn, gray garment was covered with blood.
I thought I would faint with sheer terror. Was it appendicitis?
Again the waves of pain. I dropped down onto the seat, clasping my stomach. When the pain eased slightly, I hitched up the soaked knickers and took Edward back into the house. I had to lie down.
Avril was sitting on an upturned paint can, playing with a stray cat, which had wandered in a day or two before. When she saw me, she let out a fresh bellow. Normally, I would have comforted her, but this time I dumped Edward unceremoniously down beside her.
"Watch Edward," I ordered.
Where should I lie?
My bed upstairs was a door set on four bricks and I could lie on it. But Edward might follow me up the stairs and then fall down again.
Better to go into the nicely furnished front room, a place I normally did not enter because Edward was usually with me— and he always had grubby hands and was not yet reliably watertight.
Minerva's Stepchild Page 14