The Petticoat Men

by Barbara Ewing

  And Freddie. Well – well he’s a young man who’s the same age as my brother, and who’s got a funny warm face whether he’s dressed as a man or a woman – well, to me he’s always Freddie whatever clothes he’s wearing, he’s a kind lovely man.

  I dont think they were – well – look, I’ve already said, I’m not stupid and I know there’s all kinds of love and people who pretend not have got their eyes closed and how do I know if they loved each other like that, I dont know how it all works. It doesn’t matter. You meet all sorts in the theatre, my Ma and Pa knew some very strange people and we’ve had some very strange tenants in Wakefield-street, one man had a pet bumblebee, it was bright-striped, yellow and black, and he bought chocolate for it and talked to it and cried when it died in the bottle he kept it in, poor lonely man. But maybe, in the end, Freddie and Ernest were the strangest. And maybe once they had been – beloveds – for all I know or care or understand but all I know is Freddie loved Ernest.

  I know Ernest actually lived, for some time anyway, with that Lord, that Lord Arthur Clinton. After that performance in Clapham where we’d seen him with his pretty sister, Lord Arthur used to visit our house occasionally (he was the first Lord I ever met, and a bit scrawny I thought). And Ernest couldn’t help it I suppose, he always said, ‘This is Lord Arthur Clinton,’ very proud and coy, he just couldn’t help stressing the title, ‘Lord Arthur Clinton,’ and do you know our Ma said to him one day, ‘Where’s your mother living now, Lord Arthur?’ and Lord Arthur gave her a really, really funny look and said very grandly and imperiously – as if she hadn’t the right to address him at all, even if he was inside our house – ‘My mother lives in Paris.’

  And Ma said: ‘I met your mother many years ago, Lord Arthur. I worked at the Drury Lane Theatre. She came backstage one evening to meet one of the actresses. Your mother was a lovely and charming woman.’

  Lord Arthur looked so surprised. But, for just a moment, pleased in a funny lonely way, or it seemed like that.

  When Billy met him, another time he was at our house, Billy said: ‘Lord Arthur, weren’t you the Member of Parliament for Newark?’ straight up, the way Billy always is. ‘Before the last election I mean? I know you’re not there any more but I work in the Parliament and I used to see you sometimes.’

  Billy’s a clerk at the Palace of Westminster, he got promoted from a messenger because he’s so clever, he’s been there since he was thirteen, he’s twenty-three now, knows all the Members, he reads absolutely everything to do with Parliament, he’s like a Parliament fiend, Ma and I tease him. Now Billy actually works sometimes in the Prime Minister’s office, calm as anything about it he is. When suddenly more clerks are briefly needed for some reason Mr Gladstone’s office – not Mr Gladstone himself of course, but his office – often calls for Billy.

  ‘I used to see you in the Parliament,’ said Billy again to Lord Arthur.

  Lord Arthur looked again a bit thrown, not to say a bit annoyed, all this impertinent questioning from our family every time he crossed the threshold! – I suppose they’re more respectful in the upper echelons (I read echelons in a book lately and asked Billy what it meant) – and again Lord Arthur nodded rather regally (except like I said he wasn’t really a very regal-looking person, a bit small and bald me and Ma thought) but really, all he could do, Lord Arthur I mean, was moon and spoon over Ernest. He loved Ernest too, but in a quite different way, he was smitten, anyone could see. He was berserk with love! was what me and Ma used to say. That naughty Ernest could wind Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton (that was his whole name) around his little finger, Ernest held all the cards, it was clear.

  Except money.

  Then after Lord Arthur was made bankrupt we never saw him in our house again. Ages ago. (And if anyone had told that me and Billy would see him again, would be shut up with him, just us, in a tiny secret room, we would have told them to go back to Bedlam with such an unlikely story.)

  Ernest and Freddie and their visitors never made a really spectacular noise or anything disturbing, they laughed loud, and sang a lot but – well, well not raucous and rowdy. There’s a little piano in that upstairs room they usually took if it was free, that piano was there when we came and I learned to play it and dont ask me how it was got up to the first floor! I like to think of the previous owners huffing and puffing up and trying to carry it round corners on the narrow stairs, we couldn’t imagine we’d ever get it down again. Me and Ma and Billy really enjoyed all the singing and laughing wafting down the stairs, even if one of the tenants in the room below, Mr Crosby, a salesman from Manchester, got cross. But he died (Mr Crosby I mean) so that’s why he was cross I expect.

  And then they’d go out, Ernest and Freddie, appearing in their gowns just like actresses going on stage, with maybe a gentleman escort waiting with a hansom or a cabriolet and they’d float out on a cloud of scents and powders (and gin, they had bottles in their room – sometimes brandy, sometimes gin), pulling on their gloves and patting their hair and adjusting their bracelets and necklaces – and always laughing and excited. I used to think the row of gowns hanging in their room made it like a theatre dressing room – a bit perspiration-smelling and a few grubby bits close up, and unwanted or dirty clothes just thrown careless into a portmanteau and just left there! but when they appeared all dressed up and perfumed they always looked lovely in the soft lamplight.

  Ernest and Lord Arthur used to live together in various different places before Lord Arthur got bankrupt. I think Freddie still lives by himself in Bruton-street.

  By himself.

  I think.

  All families have their own stories, but that’s their business. Even, so it turned out, the Prime Minister Mr Gladstone has got his own stories just like we have, that are his own business, that he’d prefer to keep to himself. The Stacey family of 13 Wakefield-street – us I mean, me and Ma and Billy – we would have gone along, our own lives our own business – if Freddie and Ernest hadn’t come to our house and made their story partly in our house, ‘the seedy headquarters of criminal activity: 13 Wakefield-street’. ‘Run by that prostitute,’ people said (meaning me). And can you believe people came and hung around our house and stared? we would see them outside as the story went on, and sometimes things got writ on our walls, how would you like that on your house that you loved? SODOMITE LOVERS they wrote, no one wrote on the walls of 10 Downing Street did they?

  Not that it was his fault I suppose, Mr Gladstone, he was just caught up too, like we were (but all his caught-up-ness kept secret of course) and actually he was kind – well I thought he was kind in the way he thought kind, I know this sounds a bit peculiar but I felt – I dunno, I just felt a bit sorry for him when I met him, he seemed – it just felt for a moment when he stood there in the dark that there were deep things that he literally couldn’t possibly allow himself to think. So he didn’t.

  Still, no one wrote SODOMITE LOVERS on the walls of 10 Downing Street did they?

  Our Ma, with her wardrobe connections, had got me trained as a milliner when I was thirteen (in case no one married me, I used to think), which perhaps gives you an idea that I was not the prettiest young lady in London. All right I’ll just get it over with, I’m not ugly or anything but I’ve got something wrong with one of my feet. It doesn’t make me either backward or ugly, so dont think it does, in fact because I’m always looking in the glass to try my hats I know perfectly well I’m pretty – not like Ma used to be, well – well, she’s still beautiful even though she’s old, everyone says so, Freddie told me he thought she was beautiful, so I dont mean I’m like Ma, but I’m a bit pretty, the only thing is I cant run like the wind like heroines do, like Cathy in Wuthering Heights, like heroines do in almost all the novels I’ve ever read and I’ve read more novels than most people I’ve ever met once my Pa got me going. But my foot is all that’s wrong with me, got it? And it makes no difference to me, I walk everywhere, I walk and walk, just as well as everybody else, all the time. It dont even hurt most of the
time, just maybe gets a little bit swollen and red if I dont stop walking for a bit. But that’s all, got it? and that’s all we’re hearing about my stupid leg. But that’s why I wasn’t just called a whore, but a crippled whore as well and that’s why I’m writing down who we really are.

  Ernest and Freddie wore my hats sometimes (even paid me sometimes! well, Freddie usually paid for them both of course, and one time another man did, who was visiting). And I’ve got several good customers, they tell each other about me, and I work hard in the right light (Ma always saying to watch my eyes, and she knows because of being a wardrobe mistress). They both, Freddie and Ernest, used to come often and watch me in my room, stare at how I was sewing brims and feathers and flowers, and Hortense having my hats hung on her when they was part-finished.

  Freddie and Ernest always said, ‘Greetings, Hortense dear!’ when they came in to try more hats.

  ‘Why should Mattie have all the fun?’ they said to Ma. ‘Why should ladies have all the fun? – all the beautiful, elegant gowns and bustles and bosoms and boots and hats that ladies have, and look at us in our tedious gentlemen’s attire! We were born too late to be dandies!’ and they would laugh and take my half-finished hats and parade in front of the glass – they did it even when they were dressed in their men’s clothes. Ernest in particular was so fascinated by himself – how he could change himself, how much he could look like a woman – he stood in front of the mirror wearing my different hats I was working on and preened himself, turning and posing and staring, fascinated. At himself.

  Once, one night late I was still up sewing with Hortense when Ernest came in alone. I heard him fall in the door almost, and I went hurrying down into the hall. His gown was covered in mud and his chignon a bit battered and he did smell a lot of brandy.

  ‘What’s wrong, Ernest?’

  ‘I’ve been to the Holborn Casino,’ he said, staggering against the wall. ‘I lost.’

  He looked at himself in the glass in the hall and for a moment he made those chirruping noises at himself, like street ladies make when they’re trying to catch attention, and then he fell on the floor. I helped him up the stairs.

  ‘Where’s Freddie?’

  ‘Dancing,’ said Ernest giggling. ‘I have no doubt my sister Fanny is dancing her head off!’ He was asleep, well, he passed out, before I got him properly on the bed.

  By working really hard when I wasn’t cleaning the house and that, I earned £18/18/4d from my hats in the last year and although Ma panics sometimes because of the past, money isn’t one of our worries now, because Billy works at the Houses of Parliament on – listen to this – £90 a year now that he’s a clerk – and when he was promoted to be a clerk from a messenger I made him a silk top hat because clerks have to wear top hats and we laughed, Ma and me, at this new Billy. But he looked so splendid we also nearly cried with pride. And Mr Gladstone’s private secretary with an eye on him.

  And we had our tenants – we were almost always full. So poor sad old Mr Flamp not being able to pay his rent was never going to put us in the workhouse! And though we were just one of hundreds of boarding houses round Kings Cross there was a group of cotton salesmen from the North came back to us over and over, said we were pleasant and clean and reliable. Course the salesmen were always telling us how to run our boarding house better, make more money – some of them had their eye on Ma and the business, that’s what me and Billy used to reckon. Even me, some of them tried.

  One of the cotton salesmen, Mr Plunger he was called, used to pinch my bottom in the hallway if I couldn’t get out of his way quick, and one week he presented me with a pretty cotton shawl that I would quite like to have kept (as long as I didn’t have to have him as well). ‘Shall I wear it?’ I asked Ma.

  ‘What, that Mr Plunger’s shawl? Well’ – she felt it with her fingers – ‘it’s very nice cotton – as long as he doesn’t plunge anywhere near my daughter without her permission!’ and I saw she was glad when I laughed too, I hadn’t been laughing much for a while.

  So I wore the shawl once but Mr Plunger thought that immediately meant he could come and sit with us, a bit too close to me, in our little back parlour and look about and comment rudely about our Pa’s Joshua tree and the chairs and why didn’t we have a maid?

  ‘You need a man to take over here,’ he said. Billy was blooming well right there in the room! and at once I saw Ma starting to ruffle, and then Mr Plunger sort of put his arm round me, you could smell beer and pies, really strong. Ma was wild, for Billy’s sake, and seeing me moving away carefully, trying not to be too rude, from Mr Plunger’s sort of embrace.

  But Mr Plunger didn’t know Ma and he went on: ‘I dont mind marrying a cripple.’

  I’m used to it, I dont care, who cares, but Ma cannot stand that word: cripple. She sat up very straight and made a kind of strangling sound like she does when she’s really angry (sometimes she reminds me of that turkey that lives on the other side of Regent-Square) and I looked at Billy and he winked at me very quickly.

  ‘If you think, Mr Plunger…’ and Ma sort of fluffed herself up, even more like that turkey. ‘If you think you would be lucky enough to marry my beloved daughter and somehow receive 13 Wakefield-street as some sort of dowry, you have made an unfortunate mistake. We have a man in charge thank you and there is no way 13 Wakefield-street will ever have the word Plunger attached! Off you go!’

  And off he went and me and Billy was laughing and in the end Ma recovered herself and she joined in too and that was the end of Mr Plunger. And you needn’t think just because there’s something wrong with my foot that I’m all virginal and innocent either, course I’m not, and I’ve been – well never mind about all that, I’ve had an interesting life and I know lots.

  And we dont need a maid! We’ve always worked hard, we dont provide meals, just breakfast sometimes if they ask (and always something for Mr Flamp of course) and although we had acquired “Mrs Beeton” like everybody else in London we didn’t use it much, except if we got stomach-ache or something.

  And anyway it was Ma herself who decided not to let Mr Flamp go. He had lodged with us for ages, permanent, he was a merchant’s clerk until he got too old and then one day after all those years living with us, he came to Ma and me and said, ‘Mrs Stacey, I have looked into my situation and I have planned for the future. I have come to say goodbye.’

  And he had packed up all his things in only a little bag and he was wearing his best jacket that he kept neat in the cupboard for special occasions. All his belongings in the world in one small bag.

  ‘Where are you going, Mr Flamp?’ said Ma, surprised, and he said, very dignified, ‘I’m going to the Christian Mission sit-up, that will be my next home, it is a penny, and I thank you all for your kindness,’ and Ma straightway said, ‘Mr Flamp. You are not going to sit up all night for a penny in the Christian Mission or anywhere else. You’ve been here for years and you know everything about 13 Wakefield-street – we need you here, you are our watchman when we all happen to be away from the house. In fact the truth is, Mr Flamp – we cant manage without you. So you would do us a great favour by agreeing to stay, and your monthly payment, from us to you, is the room – plus five shillings, and I’ll hear no more about it!’

  Mr Flamp had a strange look on his old face. We realised it was him trying not to cry. We made him big thick potato soup and put two sausages in it and I helped him hang up his best jacket again.

  Ma is the kindest person I know, no matter that she ruffles up sometimes. She’s always kept a little bag of pennies in her cloak, for as long as I can remember, and every time she passes an old lady begging she gives a penny. Always. No one else, well if you gave one penny to all the beggars in London you’d be a beggar yourself but Ma always says to me when she sees an old lady: ‘What was her life, I wonder, Mattie?’ She talks to them quite often and she’s always giving her shawl to someone.

  We both clean our house, Ma and me, and do the washing, and I do the front steps and Ma does o
ur cooking and I sew my hats by the window or under a good lamp, and when Billy comes home we all sit in our basement kitchen and tell of our day. Billy so likes his work at the Parliament, specially now that he does the clerical things, he often tells us such funny stories about the goings-on there, how Mr Gladstone speaks very loud, and gets secret letters inside other ordinary envelopes for instance!

  ‘Who from?’ we said.

  ‘Spies? Mistresses? I dont know!’ and we all laughed to think of the Prime Minister of England having one or the other.

  ‘Very nice handwriting, William!’ said Mr William Gladstone to my brother Billy years ago.

  ‘We’ll get maids when I’m old,’ Ma said firmly when we asked her if she might like to do less, and Billy and me looked at each other and rolled our eyes, she’s fifty now! She made Billy’s shirts too, and pretty gowns for me, and finally we purchased her greatest treasure: a Singer Sewing Machine! We like the clicking hum it makes when the treadle goes up and down – she sews in our little back parlour in the evening sometimes, and on Sundays, and the Singer Sewing Machine hums and clicks, and Billy reads us books or the newspapers, just like our Pa used to.

  That’s enough. That’s all you need to know about our life.

  Well – that was our life I mean up till that first Sunday in May when we first heard of the arrest of Freddie and Ernest, with Billy reading to us from the Reynolds News in our little back parlour.

  ‘You want to hear a bit about the case from The Times?’ said Billy now to us.

  ‘We know it’ll sound different, course we do,’ said Ma, sipping her port, only today she wasn’t laughing, she sounded sarcastic.

  Decent people may not willingly hear of these things, but a case presenting novel and extraordinary features is sure to be a subject of curiosity to hundreds of thousands, and acquires an importance which may demand some notice.