London Pride

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘What sort a’ time d’you call this?’ he said. He sounded as cross as he looked.

  To Peggy’s surprise Mum spoke to him in the oddest way, bridling and flirting her eyes at him and using a voice she’d never used before, a wheedling, deliberately sweet voice, like Baby when she wanted something. ‘Oh come on Dad, that’s not like you. We can’t help the trains.’

  Grandpa grunted and stared at the carrier bag she was carrying. ‘Don’t you go making the place untidy,’ he said.

  ‘As if I would,’ Mum wheedled. ‘Where’s Maud?’

  ‘Down to Tillingbourne,’ Grandpa said. ‘Prayer meetin’.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Mum said.

  Then there was a long pause while Grandpa finished wiping his hands and his four relations stood where they were in the dungeon and watched him. Isn’t he going to say ‘sit down’ or ‘make yourselves at home’ or something? Peggy wondered. But he didn’t.

  ‘I’m off to see to the ’osses,’ he said, walking to the door. ‘We’ve had our supper long since. Don’t know how you’ll make out, I’m sure. Serves you right for comin’ so late.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Mum placated. ‘Are there eggs?’

  ‘You can ‘ave four of ’em,’ Grandpa said from the doorstep. ‘Don’t let ’em go to waste. That’s all. And remember this is a tied cottage so you mind your P’s and Q’s. No bad behaviour, d’you hear?’

  Mum’s tone changed as soon as he was out of earshot. ‘Four eggs!’ she snorted. ‘The idea! We’ve not come here to starve, an’ he needn’t think it. Not with my pension. We’re not beggars. You could eat two, couldn’t you, Baby? My, this place is in a pickle. You can see Maud’s out. Never mind, we’ll all get set to tomorrow and give it a good scrub down once he’s out the house. Now where’s the lamp? We’ll need to look sharp with these eggs or he’ll come back an’ catch us at it.’

  ‘What’s a tied cottage?’ Peggy asked.

  But Mum didn’t enlighten her. She was already cooking.

  With an oil lamp lit and Mum’s nice fluffy scrambled eggs inside them the girls felt a little more cheerful. Peggy was just going to ask her mother where they were going to sleep when Aunt Maud came in through the door.

  She was uglier than they remembered her too and not a bit like Mum, with that squashy looking face and hardly any forehead and those rotten teeth. And so fat, like two great bolsters tied in the middle with string. She grimaced when she saw them and bent forward to peck Mum’s cheek.

  ‘You got here then,’ she said. ‘Seen Dad, have yer?’

  They admitted they had.

  ‘Had supper?’

  They admitted that too.

  ‘Well that’s a mercy,’ their aunt said, taking off her hat and hanging it on a hook on the back of the door. ‘We’ll put those dishes in the sink before he can see ’em, an’ then we’ll get you children off to bed. Don’t want ’em up when he gets back, eh?’

  ‘No,’ Mum said with feeling. ‘We don’t.’

  Then he is cross, Peggy thought, instinctively understanding that Mum and Aunt Maud were afraid of him. And she made up her mind to try and keep out of his way as much as she could.

  The two women put the dishes in the sink and covered it with a red cloth. ‘I don’t know where you’re all going to sleep, I’m sure,’ Maud said, lighting a second oil lamp. ‘There’s only the two beds. Darn silly idea comin’ here, you ask me.’

  ‘Where else could I go, Maud?’ Mum said plaintively. ‘A poor widow woman. I couldn’t manage on my own.’

  ‘I’d ha’ found somewhere in London,’ Maud said, ‘if it’ud been me. Why didn’t you go to Greenwich with Gideon?’

  Peggy’s opinion of her aunt improved at once. She might be hideous but she had the right idea. They should have found somewhere in London.

  ‘You don’t know how difficult it is all on your own with three young children,’ Mum said, wearing her most hard-done-by expression. ‘You need someone to look after you then, I can tell you. Why shouldn’t I come home, I should like to know?’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Aunt Maud said, picking up the second lamp. ‘I can’t see how we shall all make out crammed in here, and that’s a fact. You never think though, do you?’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Mum said, rather grimly Peggy thought. ‘If the worst comes to the worst one of us can sleep on the floor. I’m sure we’re tired enough.’

  ‘It’ll be me,’ Joan whispered to Peggy, when Aunt Maud turned away from them.

  And of course she was right.

  As the three girls rapidly discovered, Grandpa’s cottage was cramped and inconvenient. It had two irregular rooms on each floor, kitchen and parlour below, two bedrooms above, and a smelly earth closet out in the garden. The staircase that divided the rooms rose as steep as a cliff and entirely unlit from behind the dark door of a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen. When Aunt Maud led them upstairs on that first evening she held the oil lamp above her head to show them the way, but even then it was horribly dark and Peggy and Baby both stumbled.

  At the end of their climb they found themselves crowded into a narrow landing lit by one small attic window. Two ricketty doors led to right and left, one to Grandpa’s bedroom, which faced the path at the front of the house, the other to Aunt Maud’s, which was the smaller of the two and overlooked the cabbages and the hen run.

  ‘In here,’ Aunt Maud said opening the left-hand door and setting the lamp on the sconce beside the jamb. ‘Mind how you go.’

  It was a necessary warning, for if the kitchen was a dungeon, this room was an overcrowded draper’s shop. In the flickering light it seemed to be full of linen. For a start there were two beds piled with coverlets and embroidered pillows and draped with chintz curtains, each with at least two valances decorated with huge floppy bows of cheap pink ribbon. One was a brass bedstead pushed against the wall under the eaves, the other was a high double bed set in the middle of the room, like a galleon in a pool. The ceiling bulged towards them, which was really no surprise because clothes hung from hooks all over it, ballooning dresses, petticoats like yellowing sails, stockings on strings, a mud-coloured coat as stiff as a board, turning and swaying in the breeze between the open door and the cracks under the window.

  ‘Gosh!’ Baby said.

  ‘You can sleep on the floor,’ Aunt Maud told her. ‘I’ll put pillows down.’

  ‘Indeed she will not,’ Mum said, bristling in defence of her darling. ‘With her delicate bones. The very idea.’

  ‘They can’t all sleep in a single,’ Aunt Maud said, sucking her remaining teeth. ‘Even if they top and toe. I told you that. The springs wouldn’t stand it.’

  ‘Joan and Peggy can take it in turns,’ Mum decided. ‘A night on the floor won’t hurt them. Not now an’ then.’

  ‘She seems to forget it’ll be every other night,’ Joan said from the pillows when the two adults had taken the lamp downstairs again and left them all in the darkness.

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ Peggy said, trying to cheer them both up, ‘ ’cause we can’t be going to stay here for long, can we?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Joan said. ‘Bli this floor’s hard!’

  None of them got much sleep that night. Mum and Aunt Maud made ever such a row coming to bed, and then, when Mum was quietly asleep, Aunt Maud either lay on her back and snored, or bounced about so that the springs twanged like a banjo. In the middle of the night, when the room was as black as pitch, she got up and pulled a chamber pot from under her bed and made a lot of noise using it. And when it was very clearly morning she suddenly swung her legs out of the bed and flung back the curtains.

  ‘Harvest!’ she shouted. ‘Ups-a-daisy! It’s a beautiful day. Weather’s holdin’ up lovely.’ She was struggling into the clothes she’d left strewn all over the foot of the bed the night before. ‘Up gets Flossie!’

  ‘What?’ Mum said, sitting up among the tousled bedclothes with her hair wild about her face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘They�
��ll be harvestin’ the long field today sure as fate,’ Aunt Maud said, buttoning her blouse across the straining mounds of her bosom. ‘If I don’t get his breakfast ‘fore they come a-callin’ for him, he’ll have somethin’ to say, I can tell you. Get up, do!’

  ‘What’s a time?’ Mum groaned.

  ‘Ha’ past five.’

  By then all three children were awake and yawning. ‘You stay here,’ Aunt Maud told them. ‘Get yourselves all nicely washed an’ dressed, while me an’ your Mum gets breakfast; We got a busy day ahead.’

  That was an understatement. It was the most exhausting day they’d ever known.

  In the morning Mum and Aunt Maud rolled up their sleeves and made two fruit pies while the bread was baking. Then they gave the kitchen what they called ‘a good clear out’ while Baby sat in the sun and played with her dolls and Joan and Peggy shifted the furniture about and washed the windows and polished the spoons and finally cleaned the knives with pieces of cork and a harsh powder that coated their fingers with dark grey grime. And then just when they thought they were going to sit down and have a rest and something to eat, their trunk arrived on a wagon and had to be lugged indoors and unpacked and hidden away in the attic at once before Grandpa could know anything about it, and after that Aunt Maud took her new bread from the larder and packed it into a basket with a hunk of cheese and pickled onions and a flagon of cider and off they all went into the fields.

  It was hot and dusty in the long field and the harvester was hard at work cutting the corn, and Grandpa and all the other men were hard at work with pitchforks gathering it into sheaves. Peggy saw that there were other women and children trudging through the stubble with their baskets, and she wondered whether they would all be allowed to stay in the fields after their dinner and play.

  But harvest was no time for play. When the food had all been consumed and every last drop of cider squeezed from the flagons, the men returned to their labours and the women and children worked with them. For the rest of that long hot afternoon, they tied sheaves and carried sheaves and balanced them neatly into stooks, until their arms and legs were crisscrossed with scratches and Baby’s nose was sunburnt.

  ‘Poor Baby,’ Mum commiserated, examining her reddened skin, ‘You’d better stay at home tomorrow, darling.’

  The farm hands laughed them both to scorn. ‘Poor Baby!’ they mocked. ‘Hulkin’ great lump. If she’s a baby your Dad’s the farm bull.’ And that made them all raucous with laughter, which embarrassed Grandpa horribly and made him look shrivelled and unsure of himself, which Peggy thought very odd when you considered how fierce he was at home.

  From that day on she and Joan worked every morning in the kitchen and every afternoon in the fields. By the end of the third day their backs ached and their shoulders were sore and their arms felt as though they’d been pulled out of their sockets. And to make matters worse whoever was sleeping on the floor had precious little sleep no matter how tired they were.

  But at last the corn was cut and the fields had all been gleaned and there was a sack of flour from their gleanings sitting on a chair in Grandpa’s kitchen like the honoured guest it was, and the labourers were looking out their Sunday clothes ready for the harvest supper.

  ‘Be school soon,’ Aunt Maud said to Mum, ‘an’ then we shall have to see about gettin’ a job for your Joan. She can’t go sleepin’ on the floor for ever.’

  ‘She can’t take a job yet,’ Mum objected. ‘She’s not fourteen till the end of September.’

  ‘A few weeks,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘We can wink at that. I’ll ask up the Manor.’

  ‘What about the School Board man?’ Mum worried. ‘I don’t want any argy-bargy.’

  ‘Never you pay him no mind,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘He won’t argy bargy with the Manor.’

  ‘Aren’t we going back to London then?’ Joan hoped.

  ‘Not yet awhile,’ her mother said.

  ‘By Christmas?’ Peggy suggested. Oh if only it could be by Christmas.

  ‘Now don’t start,’ her mother said. ‘My nerves are ragged without that.’

  Two days after the harvest supper, which had been a rough and rather drunken occasion even though there was plenty of food, Aunt Maud told Joan to ‘dress black and white’ and pack her things in a carrier bag because they were going ‘up the Manor’.

  ‘Is this the job d’you think?’ Peggy asked as Joan put on her funeral skirt and her best cotton blouse.

  ‘I’ ‘spect so,’ Joan said.

  ‘D’you mind?’ Peggy asked. It was awful to think she was being sent away like this.

  ‘Not a matter ‘a minding, is it,’ Joan said, setting her belt and her mouth. ‘We’ve all got to work. That’s the way it is. It’ll be your turn next.’ Her resignation was stoical and total. What was the point of minding? ‘We’ve all got to work.’

  ‘Yes,’ Peggy said, putting on her pinafore, ‘I suppose so.’ But it was horrid just the same.

  There was no time for any more conversation because the kettle was whistling, and no time for farewells either. Breakfast was eaten in its usual munching silence, and the minute Grandpa was out of the house, Joan was told to put on her hat and coat.

  ‘I’ll send you a letter,’ she whispered to Peggy as she buttoned her coat.

  ‘I hope you get on all right,’ Peggy whispered back.

  And then her sister was gone, oh so quickly, walking quietly up the hill beside Aunt Maud’s determined bulk. Nobody was surprised when two hours later Aunt Maud waddled back to the cottage on her own.

  ‘Took on in the kitchens,’ she said to Flossie. ‘She’s a lucky girl. Now we’ve only got to get these two down to Tillingbourne school and we can have this place back to rights. I never seen such clutter in all me life.’

  The next day Mum walked Peggy and Baby through the fields and down into Tillingbourne where she enrolled them both at the village school. Baby was pale with apprehension at the thought of being away from her mother’s protection for the first time in her life, but Peggy took it calmly. One more change among so many would hardly make any difference, and school was school, wherever it was. And her calm was rewarded because this school made her so welcome. She liked it at once.

  For a start it reminded her of the Tower, because it wasn’t just one school but three, infants, juniors and seniors, in three separate buildings standing side by side behind a long fence in an asphalt playground where trees and bushes grew. Two of the schools were made of sand-coloured stone and red brick like the barracks and the one she went to was exactly like the Beauchamp Tower. She felt at home straight away.

  And her teacher was lovely. She was called Miss Butt and she had nice smiling eyes and smelled of lavender and wore her hair in two thick mounds piled on top of her head like a cottage loaf.

  ‘We shan’t be stayin’ long,’ Peggy told her, when she’d hung her coat on a peg and had her name written in the register. ‘We’re Londoners you see, Miss. We got to go back to London soon.’

  ‘Yes,’ Miss Butt said kindly, ‘of course. However while you’re here perhaps you wouldn’t mind writing your name on this book.’

  The autumn days grew shorter and colder and the cross-country trek to school longer and more mud spattered. Joan wrote a letter from Tillingbourne Manor to say that she was ‘working hard and hoped it found them as it left her’, and Grandpa started ‘the ploughin” with the result that he came home every evening chilled and mudcaked and ready to find fault with the least little thing. And Mum suffered torments with her nerves.

  But Peggy could endure all these things now because she had school to look forward to. She made friends with two girls called Rose and Lily, she learned to play the local games, and her classroom was a warm, welcoming place that felt more like a home to her than her grandfather’s cottage. There was a fire in every classroom in the building where wet gloves and boots were set to dry and where she and the other farm children were allowed to sit and eat their bread and cheese at dinner time. And the s
chool was full of familiar reassuring sounds, the drone of prayers, and the sing-song chant of times tables, and the gaslight being lit in the middle of the afternoon with its lovely reassuring plop. Oh so much nicer than those smelly old oil lamps.

  ‘School is alright,’ she wrote to Joan. ‘I like Miss Butt.’

  ‘Tillingbourne Manor is alright,’ Joan wrote back. ‘The work is hard. Cook is alright. Food is good. There are four of us in my room but I would rather it was you. I have a bed of my own. Cook says I can have a day off Wednesday week to come and see the Carnival. See you then.’

  She arrived at the cottage just as they were dishing up dinner. It was lovely to see her again. She was wearing her uniform and black stockings and black lace-up shoes that made her look ever so grown-up, and she smelled different, of carbolic soap and greasy dishes and starched cotton, and there was a long red burn not quite hidden on her right forearm, which everybody saw and nobody mentioned. But she kissed them all most lovingly and said she was getting on all right.

  After dinner they all went down to Tillingbourne to watch the procession, except for Grandpa who said he was too long in the tooth for that sort of caper. It was a very cold day and they got quite chilled while they waited, but the procession got going eventually. There were decorated trade carts and shire horses rattling their brasses, and floats from the Women’s Institute and the pubs and all the village shops, and a fairy-tale coach painted red and gold for the Carnival Princess who sat huddled on her throne in the middle of her shivering attendants, red nosed but smiling bravely. The only trouble was it reminded Peggy and Joan of the last procession they’d seen, when Dad had walked beside the State Coach and they’d all been so happy. And that cast them both down into unhappiness again.