Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles)

by Claire Rayner

  For on the tenth day of her illness, when the rash was covering most of her body and she had become irritable and clinging and not at all her usual independent and lively small self, Poppy again had a night of horror, of bad dreams and fever and pain, and had woken Mildred with her cries. This time she had one of the more dreaded complications of measles – or so the doctor, called for a second time, told Mildred – infection.

  ‘Otitis media,’ he said heavily as he peered into the pathetically weeping Poppy’s right ear with a light. ‘I can see a nasty red drum – very nasty, bulging badly – better watch out it doesn’t turn to a mastoid. Not much you can do if it does, mind you, or to stop it if it fancies spreading that way. So often these mastoids carry off these small ones, no resistance, you see, after the measles. Can only wait and see –’ And off he had gone with another half-crown in his pocket, leaving Mildred almost frantic with fear and self-blame. It had been her fault for forgetting her vow so quickly.

  Somewhere deep inside herself Mildred knew that she was being irrational. She, the sensible, cool person who had found the courage to stand up to her tyrant of a father, so that she could live her own life in her own way, she who had found the capacity to earn her own and her baby’s living without any previous experience or training for such work, to be so destroyed by a mere superstitious fear? But how can it be superstition, her deepest mind would whisper to her, when Poppy is so ill again? You vowed and you broke your vow, didn’t you? And now look at her.

  For Poppy was indeed a piteous sight. Her eyes were reddened and sore and she hated the light, so the room had to be kept constantly shaded, and she could hardly move with the pain she suffered. She lay with her head held rigid and still, turned to the left so that the right ear and the surrounding parts of her neck received no pressure, and screamed in husky agony if any attempt was made to move her. All Mildred could do was give her laudanum drops on sugar lumps to ease her misery and persuade her to sip a little lemon and barley water occasionally, and hate herself for bringing such misery on her own baby.

  Jessie came each day, bringing little delicacies to tempt the invalid’s appetite, but to small avail. Home-made calves’ foot jelly seemed to offer Poppy no inducement to eat, any more than the best beef tea did, and they watched her shrivel into thinness before their eyes as she lay and waited for the infection to run its course, either to resolve, as they both prayed it would, or to spread, a horror neither of them could bear to contemplate.

  All the time, whether she was working in the kitchen (for still the business had to be kept running if there was to be any sort of future for Poppy and herself) or whether she sat and watched or dozed uneasily at Poppy’s bedside, Mildred castigated herself. Her fatigue and her fear added together to rob her of any commonsense at all in this matter; Poppy’s pain and the threat under which she lay was the fault first of her father, for being the man he was, and secondly of her mother for being weak and selfish and breaking a vow. That was the message that thumped and thundered in Mildred’s mind and left a mark there that was to be ineradicable.

  But there was more in Poppy’s favour than her basic good physique and essential good health, for Mildred’s careful supervision of her life hitherto had protected her against many of the ills suffered by other children of her age who lived in Holborn and went to her school. Poppy had never been allowed to play in the streets too late, as other children were, to lose their sleep and to eat dubious viands begged or stolen from the stalls thereabouts. Poppy had not been pulled down by an infancy spent fighting off one illness after another, nor had she suffered the chronic infections of ears and sinuses and chests that plagued so many of her schoolmates. Mildred had done her best to give her child the sort of careful middle-class upbringing she had had herself, and with it had given her more strength than she knew.

  For Poppy’s ear infection did not spread to the mastoid, ultimately to become a cerebral abscess and kill her, as it did to three of the other children of Baldwin’s Gardens School who had been caught in the net of the measles epidemic that swept London, and indeed all England, that winter. The swollen tense drum of her ear burst and let out the threatening pus before it could break its bounds in the other direction. Poppy was deaf in that ear for some time and had to have it mopped out gently by her mother at regular intervals, but that did not matter. Her hearing returned well enough as the drum healed over – though for the rest of her life she was to tilt her head to the left to hear anything that was not absolutely clear, an endearing little movement that many people found very attractive and certainly characteristic of her – and she began to sleep more as the pain left her.

  She began to eat more too, and as the rash at last faded and left her peeling slightly, she became ravenous and ate everything that was put before her, much to Jessie’s delight. She took it upon herself to bring food, vast quantities of it, no matter what Mildred said, or how hard she tried to protest, and after a while Mildred gave in, for there was no doubt that Poppy enjoyed the way Jessie arrived with her basket carefully packed and settled herself at the kitchen table so that Poppy, who spent her convalescent days wrapped in blankets and propped on pillows before the kitchen fire where Mildred could keep an eye on her all day, could watch and clap her hands with delight and nibble all that she was offered.

  For the rest of her life she was to have a taste for the exotic Russian and Polish delicacies her aunt brought her when she was recovering from measles in the winter of 1899: miniature blinis of the puffiest yeast pastry filled with cream cheese and slivers of smoked salmon; and tiny balls of the chopped fish mixture called gefilte fish which arrived in little pots of delicate pale amber jelly in which slices of carrot as well as the fish were embedded; and bowls of chicken soup which had to be heated on the fire and served in a bowl in which freshly cooked shreds of fine vermicelli floated. All very different from the sensible nursery food that her mother provided, the boiled eggs with toast fingers and bread and milk with honey and butter, and the little sweet cakes with coconut shreds on top which were her favourites. Different, but so different that she still enjoyed her mother’s cooking, and the two women between them settled to seeing her through her convalescence so that she would be fit and ready to return to school. But it would not be till after Christmas, Mildred warned Poppy, for she had already been ill for a month, and it would take her at least as long to get really well again. And now it was raw November, with sulphurous smoke filling the streets with fog as the fires of London burned in the grates and spilled black smoke into the heavy protesting air. Outside was not fit for man nor beast and certainly not her Poppy, Mildred said firmly and she must just be patient. School days would come again – if she was good and ate up all her food and went to bed as soon as she was told –

  She took to sitting at the window of the little front room which they so rarely used, for the kitchen was so much warmer and cosier, but there was nothing to see from the windows in the kitchen except the little yard with its tinned iron bath hanging on a hook on the privy wall, and the patch of sad earth where Mama grew her mint and sage and parsley for the pies and puddings. From the front window she could see the market, and that was lovely; so Mildred would light the fire in the parlour for her each day and there she would spend the long daytime hours, perched on the slippery horsehair sofa and staring out between the Nottingham lace curtains to the busy life outside.

  There was plenty to see, even in the small area of the street which the window commanded; on the far side there were the stalls which sold boots and antimacassars and blacking and soap and ironmongery of various kinds, and on this side there were the stalls which sold food, potatoes and carrots and turnips and cabbages and parsnips, and sometimes she would sit and stare at the great splashes of colour the vegetables made in the yellowish grey of the wintry days, and pretend to herself that they were really golden treasures piled up for her, the Princess who ruled this kingdom. The carrots became gold and the turnips silver and the cabbages piles of emeralds, and she
would imagine how it would be if she were to open the window and cry out, ‘Take the treasure for yourselves! Take the treasure and be happy!’ and what old Solly, who kept the vegetable stall, would say if she did it and all the people came and took away his vegetables and gave him no money. And that would make her laugh.

  People started to get used to seeing her there, her small face framed in the frills of the curtains, peering out for hour after hour. Solly would wave to her when he caught her eye and so would many of his customers. The old woman who kept the chicken stall on the other side of Solly, where she sold live chickens (Poppy would not let herself think about what happened to them when they had been bought) and eggs as well as chickens ready to be cooked, waved too, as did Mary who sold coconut ice and humbugs and crackjaw toffee and peanut brittle from a stand next door to her. Sometimes Mary came and tapped on the window and when Poppy opened it, pushing up the heavy sash with some effort, would give her a piece of pink fondant wrapped in paper, or a piece of sticky peppermint rock, and Poppy would take it and whisper thank you and close the window carefully, knowing how much Mama would disapprove if she knew. And she would eat the sweets and feel just naughty enough for it to be interesting and wave her gratitude to Mary whenever she looked up. Oh, there was plenty to watch and see at the window, and she was happy to sit there all day sometimes.

  And Mildred was grateful for that, for as the winter bit down harder, more and more people wanted her wares. It seemed that whatever time she got up in the morning and however late she dragged herself to bed each night, she would never catch up. Nellie worked for her full time now, arriving each morning at seven – by which time Mildred had been hard at work for at least two hours – and leaving at seven in the evening, but even she was not enough. Sometimes she brought one of her brothers with her, to help. Not the really silly one, who had been funny since his birth but was biddable enough, but one of the others. There were so many children in Nellie’s family that no one ever knew how many there were. Everyone in the district was used to the tumble of dirty ill-kempt half-fed creatures who went in and out of the corner house, like bees in and out of a hive, and no one gave them much thought; except Mildred. She had taken an interest in Nellie from the first, when the girl had shown that under her dirty and unprepossessing surface there was a lively intelligence and a good deal of willingness to work, and above all an affection for Mildred. No one had ever taken any interest in Nellie all her life, until Mildred came along, and in consequence the girl adored her. No matter how much Mildred scolded when she made mistakes or failed to reach her standards of cleanliness, she went on trying to please her, and now was a well turned out, even spruce looking, person of considerable ability and very much part of Mildred’s business.

  But her brothers, sometimes dragooned as extra hands, were not so useful, a fact which reinforced Mildred’s dislike of men coming into her house, even to work. But Nellie persuaded her to let her bring them when the kitchen was particularly busy, and would settle one or other of them at the table to pick over raisins, a tedious and time-consuming task, or to rub down sugar or, in real emergencies, to beat the sponge mixtures which often needed a full hour of thorough beating of eggs and sugar with two forks to make them really light and white.

  Late one afternoon in the first week of December, Mildred sent Nellie home. The girl had been struggling to keep up but had obviously been unfit, for she had a severe cold and had quite lost her voice. When she coughed, which was often, it obviously hurt her, for she would cling to the edge of the table and bark until her eyes ran tears, but she had steadfastly refused to go home until Mildred had almost frogmarched her to the door and told her that if she was so anxious, she could send a brother back to help wash up the tins, as long as she herself went to bed with a dose of Balsam on a sugar lump, and slept off her ills.

  Poppy watched Nellie go, pressing her cheek against the glass of the window so that she could see her for as long as possible, and was sad for her, for she drooped along the road, picking her way listlessly between the stalls and the fallen rubbish on the greasy pavements with none of her usual bounce. It was horrid to feel ill; no one knew better than Poppy and because she had become attached to Nellie – she was so much a part of her life she was almost like the kitchen range – she wanted to cry for her. That had happened a lot since she had been ill; before that crying was something Poppy didn’t do much. Not like some of the other children at school, who cried just because they bumped their knees or hit their heads or someone shouted at them. Poppy thought people who cried a lot were silly; yet since the measles she had cried a lot herself – and crossly she rubbed her eyes to get rid of the tears and watched Nellie go.

  And saw her brother arriving, and shrank back a little from the window. She didn’t like Nellie’s brother, at least, not this one. Some of them were cheerful enough; there was even a very young one who went to Baldwin’s Gardens School, but this one she did not like. She had seen him, often leaning on the wall opposite her window and had hidden as much as possible behind the curtains, for he seemed to stare at her all the time. He was tall and thin – taller than people of seventeen usually were, Poppy thought – and had a drooping lower lip which was always wet; even looking at it made Poppy feel uneasy. Worse than that he had sad eyes with which he would stare at Poppy a lot, and not only outside in the street. She often caught him doing it from the corner of her eye when he was working in the kitchen and if she turned and stared at him he would let his eyes slither away like the eels on the slab of the fishmonger’s stall along the market and that was even worse than when he stared at her. It was as though he had stroked her with his wet hands. Horrible –

  As he came walking up the market towards the house he saw her at the window, even though she had pulled away into the curtains again, and he stared at her, but he didn’t smile. He never did that. Just looked. If he had smiled or spoken she might have liked him better, Poppy thought. It was the strange way he stared and then looked away in silence that made him so nasty. And rather scary, too, though she didn’t like to admit that. It was silly, after all, to be scared of someone for no reason.

  She heard her mother let him into the house and take him through to the kitchen and by straining her ears she could hear after a while the clatter of pans and knew he was washing up. A big job that, with all the cake tins and the bowls and pots to be scrubbed, and the filling and refilling of the copper to get the hot water, and the scraping at the tins with Borwick’s knife powder until they shone like new grey satin. It was not work Poppy would have liked to do; she would have liked to make pastry and cut it out for pies, as Mama did, but she was never allowed to – so she felt a bit sorry for Nellie’s brother having to do it. But she still didn’t like him.

  The lamplighter came down the street outside and Poppy watched him contentedly. He was one of her favourite people and would wave to her as he passed her, just before reaching the lamp that stood almost outside the house next door, where he would pull down the chain with a deft twist of his wrist and then tip the little lever so that the gas plopped into life and glowed and glittered in the smoky air, and then he would wave again and she would wave back. Once that had happened it wasn’t daytime any more and Poppy would start to think of ways to persuade Mama to let her stay up late.

  There were footsteps outside and Mama came in, tying on her bonnet and wearing her warm winter pelisse over her shoulders.

  ‘Poppy, I have to deliver some cakes myself. I am so put about I hardly know which way to turn – Nellie so ill and this Ted so useless he can’t understand half I tell him. I shall have to take the cakes myself. Mercifully, it’s just a half-dozen so I can manage them in the omnibus. They are to go to a tea shop in Watling Street, and I can get there in the Shillibeer’s that goes to Cheapside and walk through – it will take me no more than half an hour, I do hope. But they say they must have them by five tonight, or they will not take the order, so what can I do? It’s now just after four, so come and sit in the kitchen where
you will be safe and warm and Ted can keep an eye on you, and be good, now. No running about and getting yourself tired, for you’re still not fully well, and I don’t wish you to be ill again –’

  Poppy knew better than to argue. When Mama chattered and fussed like this it was because she was worried, and when Mama was worried she was all too likely to get cross and then there would be no staying up late at all. So, obediently, she slid off the sofa and waited until Mama had raked down the little fire and set the guard in place and then followed her into the kitchen. It was warm in there, almost too warm, and as Mama pushed her towards the chair beside the fire she pulled off the shawl which Mama insisted she wear and tucked it behind her cushion. Her dress and pinafore were quite warm enough and she hoped Mama wouldn’t notice.

  Mama did not notice. She was in such a flurry, giving instructions to Ted, still clattering as he stood speechlessly scrubbing in the kitchen, and collecting her parcel of cakes which she was carrying by a carefully knotted string handle. But at last she was ready to go and bent and kissed Poppy and then went to the door where she lingered for a moment, her lower lip caught between her teeth.

  ‘I shan’t be any longer than I can help, Poppy,’ she said. ‘Now, be good. Don’t touch the fire – let Ted look after it if it needs attention – and stay there till I return. You hear me? Stay here in this room so that you will be safe –’

  ‘I will, Mama,’ she promised. ‘I will,’ and did not turn her head so that she could see Ted in the scullery. If only she liked him better it would be easier –

  The clattering from the scullery went on for some time after Mama had gone, slamming the front door behind her, and Poppy sat curled up in her armchair staring at the flames as they hissed and swirled behind the bars of the range. Watching the flames was almost as pleasant as watching the people outside in the street, and she became a little dreamy as she looked and saw caverns of crimson and scarlet and gold open up amid the piles of coals, and thought of what it might be like to be a princess who lived in such a place; and slowly felt herself getting sleepy and rather liked the feeling.