by Ros Franey
Mrs Bagshaw waved her purse in triumph. ‘Look girls, the power of the law!’
‘That’s wonderful!’ I said. ‘Mrs B—’
‘So now, girls, we celebrate! Let’s go and have tea.’
I was jumping from foot to foot. ‘Mrs Bagshaw, I’ve got to be home at four-thirty. Mother said!’
‘Nonsense!’ replied Marjorie’s mother. ‘You’re not going anywhere. Your afternoon’s been spoiled and now I’m going to make amends.’
‘But—’ I wailed.
Iris, who had been watching me closely, turned to her mother. ‘Better get her home, Ma. That stepmother of hers is a right dragon, so I’ve heard.’
I nodded gratefully. But Mrs Bagshaw was having none of it. She stopped and looked at me a moment, taking in my distress. ‘Little Annie,’ she said seriously, ‘that stepmother of yours will just have to wait for once. Don’t fret yourself. I’ll explain it all to her.’
So we went for tea at Jessops and had fingers of buttered toast, my favourite, but it stuck in my throat because I could just imagine Mother pacing the floor at home. True to her word, Mrs Bagshaw came with me to the front door in Corporation Oaks. Saturday was Maisie’s day off, so it was Elsie who answered the doorbell, her face a picture of dismay. Over her shoulder I could see the grandfather clock in the hall: it was half-past five.
‘Please can I speak to Mrs Lang?’ Mrs Bagshaw asked. She had a new sort of voice on – determined. ‘I know Annie’s a little late home, but we had a mishap and I can explain everything!’
Elsie shook her head, her eyes shining with anxiety. ‘I’m so sorry, ma’am. Mrs Lang has gone out to her Women’s Fellowship Meeting and won’t be back till eight.’
‘What about Mr Lang then?’
‘He’s not home yet,’ replied Elsie. ‘He’s at the Works,’ which is what they sometimes called the Biscuit Factory.
Mrs Bagshaw turned to me. ‘Well, Annie, you’ll have to explain it to them yourself, lovie. You must tell them they can talk to me if they like. You know where we live.’ Turning to Elsie, she drew herself up and said, ‘I shall write Mrs Lang a note to inform her I have been the victim of a felony this afternoon at Goose Fair, though I am happy to say that the thief was apprehended and my purse restored. You must please tell your mistress that we have been detained at the Police Station where the pickpocket was under arrest.’
‘I’m very glad to hear you had a happy outcome,’ Elsie told her. ‘But I must tell you that Mrs Lang is extremely angry with our Annie for being late and I fear there will be consequences.’
I burst into tears.
‘This is nonsense!’ protested Mrs Bagshaw. ‘The child is absolutely not at fault. She had no choice but to come with us to the Station. There was nothing else for it.’ She snapped open her handbag and took out a pencil and a piece of paper, which she tore from a small notebook. Elsie invited her in and fetched her the pastry board to rest on, and Mrs Bagshaw wrote the note – it was very short – and folded it.
Iris was shifting from foot to foot, looking uneasy. ‘Didn’t you ought to say a bit more than that, Mam?’ she asked.
Mrs Bagshaw hesitated. Then she handed the note to Elsie and said, ‘Please tell Mrs Lang, she can apply to me if she wants the details.’ And so saying, she turned on her heel and took Marjorie by the hand. I was still snivelling on the doorstep when Iris turned and gave me a look as they strode towards the garden gate. It said, I’m really sorry about my mother, Annie. If it were down to me this wouldn’t have happened. For a moment my heart went out to Iris Bagshaw, but then the garden gate clicked, and they were gone.
Elsie sighed and patted my shoulder. ‘Come on in, duckie. I’ll do me best with ’er, but I’m out tonight – it’s my sister’s birthday.’
‘Tell my dad, Elsie, please,’ I begged.
‘I will,’ she replied sourly. ‘If he’s home at any respectable hour. Come on, ducks, I’ll do you a boiled egg.’
Mother said, ‘Take your hands out of your pockets, girl.’
I did so. They were shaking and I put them behind my back so she wouldn’t see.
‘What’s that in your pocket? What have you got in there?’
I looked up at her. ‘Nothing, Mother.’
‘Don’t be insolent. It can’t be “nothing”.’
It was in fact Little Sid. I put my hand back in my pocket and pulled him out to show her.
‘That disgusting bear. I might have known.’
‘He’s a panda,’ I whispered, keeping my voice as quiet as possible for the politeness.
‘Give it to me.’
I did not want to give her Little Sid.
‘Give it, Annie!’ She held out her hand.
I hesitated. ‘Please’, I said. ‘Don’t do anything with him, Mother.’ I held him out to her. I had no choice.
‘You’re far too old for something like this.’ She took him as though he was a mouldy sandwich. I looked at him fiercely in her pale hand, willing him not to come to harm.
‘Can I explain to you?’ It was the second time I had tried to do this.
‘No.’
‘Mrs Bagshaw had a—’
‘I said no. Do I have to tell you again?’
It was ten past eight. Elsie had left as soon as Mother came home. I heard her say, ‘You want to read this, Mrs Lang. Mrs Bagshaw’s left a note explaining about our Annie.’ But Mother had pushed it away without looking at it and Daddy had still not returned. Beatrice was at choir practice.
‘Mother, I couldn’t help it.’
‘I’m not interested. You broke your word. That’s like breaking a promise to God.’
‘But God knows I didn’t!’ I insisted. ‘God knows everything!’
‘Don’t you try and tell me about Our Lord, my girl. Follow me.’ She turned and stalked along the hall. She had reached the cellar door before I realised where this was leading.
My hand shot into my pocket, but Little Sid, my comfort and protector, was no longer there, of course. ‘No!’ I pleaded. I shrank back but Mother grabbed me by the neck of my cardigan.
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t!’
‘No such thing as can’t.’ She tweaked me upright, still holding on with her right hand while her left unlocked the door to the cellar head.
‘In.’
I was shaking uncontrollably. ‘No, Mother. Please, Mother. Please don’t.’
‘Oh don’t be so feeble!’ She pushed me on to the top step where the jars and bottles were stacked along the shelf. ‘If you don’t want to be punished, you must think ahead about the consequences of disobedience. It’s all so simple. An intelligent child would have worked it out.’ And so saying, she closed the door firmly and locked it. I heard her hard shoes clacking along the hall.
First, I did that pointless thing that heroines do in books: I tried the door and rattled the doorknob furiously. Of course it did not open. Then I sank down on to the step and clasped my arms around my knees, burying my nose and eyes into the folds of my skirt to blot out the spidery darkness. I knew all too well that the light switch was on the outside. The dank reek of the cellar smothered me like a blanket. As my head stilled, I began to hear the sounds of it, too, a dripping and a pattering on the gritty black floor somewhere deep below. Straining my eyes, I tried to make out the bottom of the cellar, a place I had never been. For all I knew, the steps on which I was sitting could have gone down and down to hell itself, a hell not of flames, which might at least have been cosier, but a bottomless stinking clammy pit, full of the ghosts that Elsie had spoken of. I felt in my pocket again for Little Sid. But Little Sid’s gone, stupid. She made sure to take him off you first. And a great howl came from someone that I barely recognised as me, and sobs and screams that at last spilled out from all the times I had had to bite my tongue and not answer back, and the rage and the sorrow and, yes, the awful S-P, too, of course. I don’t know how long it lasted, but when it was done I did feel somehow – it sounds funny to say it – cleaner.<
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For a while I sat without moving, listening in the blackness for whether she might have realised what a terrible thing she had done, and relented and come to get me. I tried the door again, but it was still locked. And that’s when I became aware of something else, a greyness, a different, lighter place in the gloom. It was when I turned my head to find its source that a something brushed my cheek. I screamed again, thinking it would suffocate me, stuffing my knuckles into my mouth to keep the Thing out. Then I spoke to myself sternly, like Mother Miss Higgs spoke to me. Don’t be ridiculous, girl, it’s just a spider’s web. Fred had told me spiders were our friends. He never killed them. He fetched a glass and slid a postcard beneath and carried them gently out into the garden. Then I remembered Robert the Bruce and the spider, which we’d been told about in Transition class during needlework. All this I tried to think of very calmly, knowing at the same time that the only person who was going to look after me was me myself. Not Daddy. Not Beatrice or Fred. Not Our Own Mother, who was just dead and miles away in Heaven. Certainly not God, who was the God of Miss Higgs, not the God of little children or nice people; all these things rushed through my mind at once, jumbled up, not clear as I write them now. I closed my fingers carefully around the back of my neck to keep the spiders out; friends they might be, but there was a limit.
Little by little, my breathing slowed and I remembered the greyness again. Trying not to move my head in case of spidery fingers, I searched the void with my eyes wide and found it; I should say I felt it first, because I gradually realised there was a draught of clean air coming from somewhere. Further along the shelf, where the jars and bottles sat, I could now make out a grille I’d never noticed before in my occasional errands to the cellar; and the grille was a window without glass. It must have been two feet long and about nine inches high protected with iron bars, and if I moved towards it, I could breathe without the sulphurous fumes of coke dust. And there was light, too, from a gas lamp out on St Ann’s Hill; if I strained my eyes I fancied I could see shapes out in the yard. The tiny link to home made me feel better … yet – what was I thinking of? – this terrifying prison was my home. I moved gingerly along the step in the darkness towards a place where I could sit with the draught on my face and tried to blot out everything else.
Amazingly, I must have slept, because I definitely know I woke up. How much later it was I have no idea, but it felt like the very dead of night; my body ached with being scrunched up as tight as possible and with a seeping cold that I had never felt before, colder even than Nana’s kennel. For a few moments I thought I had wakened in a nightmare, and hoped I was really still asleep; when it was obvious that I wasn’t, the terror returned. But then I realised it was a noise that must have woken me because I heard it again: a kind of whimpering, grunting, breathing – ghosts in the darkness; devils from the void. I gulped a mouthful of air to scream, but something stopped me: the sounds weren’t coming from the depths below but from the window grille. I lurched to my feet, clasping the edge of the shelf for support, and peered out, but what I saw there is something I cannot explain. Silhouetted in the lamplight, half hidden behind a jar of pickled onions, close up against the grille itself, I saw … feet. I looked again. There seemed to be two of them – I strained my neck around the onions – no, four: two had ankles, two were covered in trousers. They seemed to be facing in different directions and not in two pairs, as you might expect, but muddled up and shuffling around. This was extraordinary. My first thought was to reach through the grille and poke my fingers at the feet to let them know I was here. Whoever it was, they must be people who could ring the doorbell and tell Daddy to set me free. I wiggled my hand up to the grille and tried to stick my fingers through, but the space was too narrow and I could only reach as far as the joint on my middle finger. There was nothing for it: I would have to shout at them and risk waking Mother. But suddenly the feet began to move more definitely, swaying and staggering, and the moving went with the noises, which had started again and were louder now and not like human noises, except suddenly there was a sob and groaning, which was very human indeed. Then it was just noises again and I couldn’t tell what they were. One of the feet was now so close to the grille that I could almost touch it, and it was at that point I recognised them: the blue shoes.
By what magic I got out of that place, I can scarcely repeat: it seems too peculiar. My only explanation is that the vision of Miss Mildred Blessing’s Sunday Best shoes at the dead of an Autumn night set my mind on such a crazy journey that I thought I must be caught in a dream, and in the way of dreams I decided I must therefore not be locked in the cellar after all. Stiffly on cramped legs, I clambered the three steps to the door and turned the handle again. When it opened, dream or not, I had to stifle a sob of surprise and relief. I groped my way, half crawling, along the hall, up the stairs and at last into my bedroom. I lay shivering in bed in the dark, covered with every jumper and eiderdown I could lay my hands on, for the cold was real enough, and thought back over what had happened. I knew with absolute certainty I had tried the door when Mother shut me in, and later too: it had been locked.
As I eventually began to warm up and was finally able to fall asleep, I fancy I heard someone creeping up the stairs and past my bedroom door. But whether I really did, or just dreamed I did, I do not know.
ELEVEN
1926
Elsie had to wake me in the morning.
‘Annie!’ She was shaking me. ‘You’ll be late for Mission, duckie. I’ve called you three times!’
I sat up with a jolt. ‘Oh no!’
‘Yer all right, if you hurry; Beatrice and your mother went out early.’
I stared at her, trying to take this in. I was still half asleep.
‘Come on, Annie. I’ve your porridge on the stove. Blessed if I know what’s got into you this morning.’
She left the room and I swung my feet to the floor. There, facing me on the bedside table, sat Little Sid. With a cry I snatched him up and cuddled him. How did he come to be there? Had she put him there last night? If so, why hadn’t I seen him when I came to bed? I stood up unsteadily. Could it be … that none of this had ever happened? Had it really been a nightmare? Mother, Little Sid, the cellar, the door locked and mysteriously unlocked, everything?
And the blue shoes out in our yard?
I tottered over to the washstand and poured water into the bowl – dear Elsie, she had brought me warm water today. Splaying my fingers over the surface I looked at my nails, no more than averagely dirty. But when I turned my hands over, I thought I could distinctly see a few clinging specks of coal grit from the cellar windowsill and a fragment of something that might have been a spider’s web. I lifted the palms to my nose and sniffed – and, yes, the musty reek of the cellar, of damp and coke dust, was there, unmistakably. This slender evidence was peculiarly comforting: perhaps I was not going mad.
Nothing further was said about my late return from Goose Fair. I did try to explain to Daddy, because I couldn’t bear the thought that he would blame me. The conversation went something like this:
ME: Daddy, can I talk to you about Goose Fair?
DADDY: [reading the paper] Hmm.
ME: Daddy, I’m sorry to disturb you but you probably heard I was late back.
DADDY: Were you, Annie? That wasn’t very good, was it?
ME: Well, we had some trouble. I couldn’t get home because we were at the police station.
[I pause for effect at this point.]
Without looking up from his paper, Daddy says: Oh, I see.
ME: Mrs Bagshaw had her purse stolen by a pickpocket.
[Daddy stops reading at that point]
… But she shouted out and chased him through the crowd and a police constable arrived and they got him and we had to go to the Station. But there were lots of crimes and all these people and we had to wait ages. And I said to Mrs Bagshaw that I was afraid I would be late, and she said you leave that to me, I’ll explain. Only Mother was out a
nd she didn’t read Mrs Bagshaw’s note and… [I pause guiltily. I have not mentioned tea at Jessops.] And Mother was cross and she said I’d let her down, only I didn’t mean to.
I stare at him anxiously. I’m wondering whether to tell him about the cellar, but something stops me. I’m not sure why, but I can’t say it. Maybe the Cellar didn’t happen. And as for the blue shoes …
Daddy looked at me for a moment and then he took a deep breath. ‘Annie, why are you telling me all this?’
I felt panicky and helpless. If he didn’t understand, how could I explain? Maybe I wanted to tell him, Because I want you to know how horrible Mother is, but you can’t say things like that. ‘I didn’t want you to think I’d broken my promise,’ I said at last. It was a sort of whisper.
He thought about this. Then he went back to his paper. ‘It’s all right, Annie. You can run along now.’ I stayed where I was for a moment, staring at the headline at the spot where his face had been: Second Girl Goes Missing, it said (but I only remembered that later). I really needed him to say something more, or maybe just give me a hug. But he was deep in the paper again. It was as if we hadn’t spoken. I stood up and softly left the room.
After that, I had a sort of dread feeling in my stomach. Everything felt upside down. I terribly needed someone to tell me that they understood, they had made a mistake and it wasn’t my fault; but no one spoke of it. Although I knew I hadn’t, I felt I had done wrong and I was ashamed.
On the Monday morning, Marjorie Bagshaw said, ‘My mam wants to know, was your mother all right about Goose Fair, then?’
‘She was angry,’ I said.
‘And? Did she read the note Mam left?’
‘I didn’t see her read it, no.’
‘So what happened? Were you punished?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh no! What did she do?’