Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles)

by Claire Rayner

  Jessie worried a good deal about her at first, fearing she was overworking and concerned because she ate only sparingly. ‘You need to eat for two!’ she would cry, piling Mildred’s plate high with pieces of pale boiled chicken on Friday nights, and adding masses of potatoes over which she poured melted spoonfuls of pale amber chicken fat. ‘Come on, now, think of your baby! Oy, I’d give a fortune to be in your shoes! Me, I have to watch every mouthful or I get like a horse, and you can eat all you like and stay like a stick, and still you won’t eat! There ain’t no justice!’ But she would laugh and pat Mildred’s back and then try to urge her to eat great slabs of lockshen pudding, which she made with vermicelli and apples and butter and lemons, until Mildred, struggling to push the food down, thought she would burst with it.

  But she didn’t. She did, however, start to look a great deal rounder. The flat breasts over which she had mourned so often began to swell and lift and sometimes, after she had taken her bath in the battered tin tub Jessie would set before the kitchen range, she would stand and peer at herself in the dark and rather spotted old mirror over the mantelshelf and marvel at what she saw.

  The nipples, so much larger and darker, and those rich curving lines would excite her, and she would run her hands over herself and then on to her rounded belly and her smooth thighs, which though still thin, shared some of this unusual new bloom, and think of that night with Lizah amongst the daffodils. And she would close her eyes with shame at how specific were the feelings such thoughts created. There were times when she wanted him very badly, wanted again to feel that urgent use of her that he had made, wanted once more to feel his fingers touching and encouraging her the way they had on that dark March evening; and she would then open her eyes and, moving briskly, wrap herself in her nightgown and drag the bath to the door and call for Jessie to help her empty it. Such thoughts were not to be tolerated; they were sick and stupid, she would tell herself angrily, and might harm the baby, for did they not cause a tightening of her belly and those deep inside feelings? That cannot be good for a growing infant, she would scold herself, and must stop.

  And stop they did. She always had an ability to control her thinking. It had been a very necessary survival skill during the bleak years of her growing up and living in that cold and stiff Bayswater house that had been her home. To be able to remove her mind from present misery and transfer it to a fantasy world where she could control what happened and make sure that all events were to her pleasure and benefit had been essential to her sanity. And now that ability came into good use.

  She would sit and sew and think of her baby, and visualize exactly how he would be, and what sort of person he would grow into. She saw him small and helpless and in such deep need of her that only she could please him, and that was a thought that made her feel so good that she would smile as she worked, watching her baby cry and others – Jessie, usually – trying to placate him as he cried more and more; and then watching herself pick him up and seeing him at once cease his weeping and start to smile. It was a most agreeable vision; and then she let her images grow and stretch themselves, so that she saw her baby become a sturdy little boy with a beautiful body and strong arms and legs and a brain so sharp and alert that every lesson he was given he immediately learnt. He still loved and needed his mother more than anyone else in the world, of course, but everyone else admired and petted him – it was a lovely dream with which to fill her head as she felled the heavy overcoats with hot sweating hands and an aching back.

  She did, once or twice, try to imagine her baby as a girl, but this was much more difficult. Whenever she conjured up a girl baby in her mind’s eye she saw ugliness and scrawniness, not beautiful sturdiness. She saw dullness and slowness, not sharpness and alert thinking, and she came to the conclusion that this was because she was in fact carrying a boy. Jessie would add to her conviction by sometimes coming and looking at her and trying to decide what sort of baby was hiding within the shroud of her belly. She would stare at Mildred judiciously as she stood at the scullery sink washing their evening supper dishes and say, ‘You’re carrying that baby very high – it’s a boy, you know.’ Or, ‘There’s a lot of you there in the front – that means it’s a boy –’ and even once offered to use the wedding-ring test.

  ‘You tie a thread to your wedding ring and hang it over your belly and if it’s a boy it goes back and forth and if it’s a girl it swings in circles,’ she said. And then laughed. ‘But seeing you haven’t got no wedding ring, better you don’t try it. No use using mine – it’s not my baby –’ And she would make a little face and Mildred would hug her affectionately, knowing how deeply Jessie envied her.

  ‘Once this baby’s here and I can get out and about more,’ she promised, ‘we’ll do something about getting you married again. It isn’t right someone so young and charming should be alone. You’ll see – this time next year you’ll be married and have a baby of your own on the way –’

  ‘Listen to her! A shadchan yet! A matchmaking shicksah! I like it – but no one else’ll play the game with you, dolly, so forget it. If the good Lord means for me to have babies, he’ll send me a fella. If it ain’t meant –’ And she shrugged. ‘It wasn’t when I did have a man, after all. We tried hard enough, God knows –’ And she grinned reminiscently. ‘Never stopped, he didn’t, and that’s the truth of it. But there it is – if it ain’t meant, it ain’t.’ And she would laugh again, but her eyes weren’t amused at all.

  As August limped wearily into an equally hot September, Mildred became less and less willing to go out into the streets in daylight. She had been used to go out late in the afternoons, when she had done her day’s share of sewing, to buy their food, having learned many of the skills from Jessie. She knew that going to the stalls just before they closed up for the night paid well, for the stallkeepers were eager to get rid of as much stock as they could. Vegetables that were still saleable late in the afternoon were no longer fit to eat after spending the night languishing in a stuffy outhouse somewhere. Only the poorest could be persuaded to take cabbages that were slimy with dying leaves or carrots furred with mould. So she would go from stall to stall with Jessie’s plaited straw bag in her hand and dicker over what was available to get the lowest prices and then go to the fish man and try to find a piece of haddock or cod that was not too tired to be edible.

  She did not buy the Friday night chicken; that was a task that Jessie insisted on keeping to herself, though she would take Mildred with her, and she learned to enjoy their late shopping on Thursdays. Jessie would make a progress down the market, shouting greetings to old cronies and teasing the men and generally making what almost amounted to a royal progress. And at the chicken stall she would prod the birds that hung, glassy eyed and limp, from the cross rail, trying to assess how much flesh there was beneath the feathers and then would stand and watch as the old chicken woman, her knees spread wide to accommodate the sag of her sacking apron, would set to work to pluck the bird of her choice for her, her fingers moving with as much speed as Mildred’s did when she sewed, so that feathers flew and they all coughed and sneezed.

  And then they would take the naked pimply thing home and Jessie would show Mildred how to draw the bird – and great were the celebrations when they found she had chosen well and there were lots of golden globules of unlaid eggs inside – and then how to kosher it, salting and soaking and singeing it to make it fit for a good Jewish household to eat. Then she would simmer it for hours with carrots and onions and parsley root to make the soup into which she would put the cooked vermicelli she called lockshen; delectable food, and Mildred would eat it and remember the nastiness of the dinners at Leinster Terrace and marvel at how much better the living was in the poverty of the East End.

  But now her pregnancy was so advanced that it was obvious, the joys of shopping for chickens and all their other necessaries had to go, she felt. No longer could she walk among the crowds in her state and with her hand naked of any wedding ring. That there were others in a
like situation who cared not a whit for anyone’s opinion and went wherever they chose mattered not at all to her. However much Jessie tried to persuade her, she refused to venture out until it was dark.

  October and November slid away, and now she became more active with preparations for the baby. She had been curiously unwilling to organize herself in any way, feeling a sort of superstitious dread of doing so. Perhaps if she was too confident in her expectations her baby would die? But Jessie would have nothing to do with such notions.

  She came in late one Monday evening, dragging a big wooden box with her, and dumped it on the kitchen table before slumping in front of the big fire that Mildred had kept tended all day. Her day’s sewing, completed and neatly piled, stood on a chair in the corner waiting for Jessie to take it back to the factory next day, and she was resting with her head back against the crimson cushions of the big chair, half asleep, when Jessie came in.

  ‘There!’ Jessie said, with great satisfaction. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Think about what?’ Mildred was bewildered, still half asleep.

  ‘A crib,’ Jessie said. ‘It came in today to the factory – Joe’s bought some fancy new machine and it came all packed up in this and as soon as I saw it, I thought – a crib. What do you say?’

  ‘A crib?’ Mildred stared at the wooden box. ‘You want me to put my baby in that?’

  ‘Of course – but not till it’s fixed up. A bit of padding on the inside, all sewn in, and a touch of rubbing down and polish on the outside – it’ll look lovely. You’ll see! As soon as I’ve had some supper, I’ll fix it –’

  And she did as Mildred sat sleepily in her chair and watched her. Jessie sewed cheap pink rep into the inner part of the box, over layers of tow she had brought in the market as she had come through on her way home and though Mildred had protested a little at the colour she had been too sleepy that evening to care enough to make a major fuss. She knew of Jessie’s predilection for all tints of the colour red, and it really didn’t matter, after all –

  But next morning she did care and she had looked at the finished work, which really had made a very workmanlike crib, and felt a stirring inside her that was the baby and thought, almost in panic – I’ve done nothing for this child. Nothing at all. I’ve just dreamed the time away – and she took the crib and set it in her room on the floor beside her bed, and then went to look at her underwear. She did not have a great deal but there was enough and she selected two chemises and a nightgown she could manage without and hurried downstairs with them. And for once setting her money-making work to one side, she spent the rest of the day cutting out baby gowns from the fabric of her underwear and sewing and smocking them into shape.

  And it really was, she told herself happily, rather nice to be handling delicate fabric again. The heavy woollen coats that made her back and wrists ache so much seemed a million miles away as the white cambric slipped through her fingers and she found herself humming softly beneath her breath as she worked.

  After that there was no stopping her – nor Jessie. Both of them sewed busily now, using fabric that Jessie once again brought from the market, with strips of lace that she managed to get hold of too, and by the beginning of December the top shelf of the wardrobe in Mildred’s room bore several diminutive nightgowns and pilches, vests and binders and long baby dresses, as well as a good number of muslin as well as towelling napkins. There were even two bonnets, which Jessie had rather inexpertly knitted, but which were pretty enough, and mittens and bootees that Mildred had sewn out of soft woollen material. And finally, a large and very ornate pink shawl, with bright embroidery on it, which Jessie had found and brought home with such pride that Mildred had not felt able to protest, even though she hated its decorations of great tumbling red poppies in bud and in flower, in profile and in full front-facing exuberance. Jessie had held it out to her, her face alight with pride and pleasure in her own skill at finding so splendid a thing in her favourite colour, and Jessie now was too important a person to Mildred to be hurt in any way. In time, she promised herself, Jessie would forget she had ever given it, and Mildred would be able to leave it at the back of the wardrobe and never use it.

  And then it all went sour. The long months of dreaming and waiting that had made her so happy seemed now to be interminable. Her body was no longer pleasingly round, she told herself, but hideously distorted. She hated the great smooth dome of her belly, with the navel now turned quite inside out, perched on the top like an obscene pink cherry. She hated the heavy veined look of her breasts, so high and round that they felt like someone else’s stuck on her chest wall, not hers. She hated the way her back ached and her legs dragged and the frequency with which she had to hurry out to the cold dark privy in the back yard because of the way the baby kicked against her bladder, and mostly she hated the queasy sensations she felt as it moved within her. It was an active baby and often woke her from her sleep, and she almost began to hate it too.

  But then, one afternoon when it was dark outside with clouds lowering, heavy with unshed snow, the sense of deep boredom and dreariness and irritation lifted suddenly. She had woken feeling rather less weary than she had been lately, and had indeed found herself bustling round the kitchen tidying it, and then the scullery, scrubbing it clean with a surprising energy, and had then settled to her work as usual and felt quite capable of dealing with as many as twelve coats today. But as she sat at the table there was another of the hard tightening spasms across her belly that she had become accustomed to, and she had leaned back a little to let it pass, as it usually did, before getting on with her work. And felt a sudden hot gush come away from her and soak her legs.

  She stood up and lifted her skirts and stared in disbelief at the state she was in. Had she wet herself? She had not been aware of any need to run to the privy again, and anyway, even when she did go, she did not produce this volume of water – and then she caught her breath in excitement as another spasm of tightness crossed her belly and pushed out yet more liquid. It had started; she was about to give birth and it was as though the darkness outside had quite disappeared, leaving everywhere bright with excitement.

  She did her best to mop up the floor and then, moving carefully, undressed and mopped up herself and then put on her nightdress. She knew little enough about what was to happen to her in the coming hours except that it would be hours; she remembered that from what had happened when her stepmother had given birth. So she was not too anxious; Jessie would be home in plenty of time.

  But by the time Jessie did come home at nine o’clock, for the factory was going through one of its busy periods, she was having strong pains every ten minutes and was beginning to be fearful that she would have to deliver her baby all on her own, and fear trickled into her and made the contractions seem harder to bear than they had been. A great deal harder to bear – she was in fact in tears when Jessie came into the kitchen and took one horrified look at her before turning and rushing out again.

  ‘I’ll be right back with her!’ she called as she ran. ‘Just hold on, Millie – I’ll be back with her as soon as I can –’

  By the time she did come back, the pains were coming at three-minute intervals and were tight and hard and sore and Millie was half lying, half sitting in the big chair, her head thrown back and sweating heavily. She was alone, all alone in an agony of pain and no one cared whether she lived or died and she was going to die, for what else could happen to her but that? She and her baby, alone and frightened as they were, were meant to die –

  And then Jessie was there beside her again, this time with someone else who was dragging at her nightgown, pulling it unceremoniously upwards to reveal her huge belly and she scrabbled helplessly, trying to pull it down again and be decently modest, but those strong hands were no match for her.

  ‘So hold her hands already, Jessie!’ It was a harsh voice, high and cracked and ugly and Millie shrank away from it as she had shrunk from the hands on her nightgown. ‘I got enough trouble seein’ wh
at’s goin’ on here without her gettin’ in my way!’

  ‘Go away –’ Mildred tried to say. ‘Go away and leave me – I don’t know who you are – go away –’ But no words came out. Instead she found herself holding her breath and pushing downwards, as though she had a compulsion to turn her whole body inside out. It was dreadful, as though she were no longer in charge of herself. She had become a gasping panting object that did nothing but tighten its throat and push obscenely downwards and outwards –

  It seemed to go on for hours, with respites so short that they were a cruel mockery. The desire to push would lessen and go and she would open her mouth to speak, as soon as she had caught her breath, wanting to tell the old woman she could now see as the owner of the hands and the voice to go away and leave her unmolested, but then it would be there again, and she would feel her face get hot and engorged as she pushed and grunted and pushed again.

  And then it all blurred again and ceased being pain and hard work, but became a great crest of excitement, as the pushing went on and at last she felt it happen, felt the great mass of the thing that was making such urgent demands on her ease itself and come through her. She felt the wet heat on her thighs and then heard a loud cry from Jessie, a wordless cry that was so full of emotion that it seemed she was about to weep, and even louder words that she could not understand from the old woman, and then another push and it all slithered away from her, and the old woman was holding it up, a grey and pinkly streaked object with a curly rope dangling from it. And then it opened a great cavern of a mouth and let out a mewling sound that made Jessie clap her hands and the old woman cackle with laughter.