Fenwick Houses

by Catherine Cookson

  On such days as these I was wrapped around in a warm comforting glow.

  When some months later I again put the plea of learning to swim to her, she shut me up quickly with a snapping reply, and I went out and down to the lavatory and had a good cry. When I returned to the scullery I knew that my father had come in, and that she had been telling him, for I heard his voice saying quietly, "Don't be afraid for her. God has a way of looking after his own," and I stood in some bewilderment. What was she afraid of? Why should she be afraid for me just because I wanted to learn to swim? Other girls learned to swim and their mothers weren't afraid for them, at least, I didn't think so. It should be the other way round; she should be afraid because I couldn't swim and would likely drown in the river if I fell in. Her attitude to this matter was very puzzling. Then one Saturday morning, when I was wrapped around with the warm glow again and the smell of baking in the kitchen, she began to talk to me. Not looking at me, she told me that I mustn't go off on my own with any boys.

  "But I dont go around with boys, Mam, you know I dont." I was slightly huffed.

  "Only with Don and Ronnie and Sam."

  There was a long pause, before she said, "Well, never go out with Don on your own, always see that Ronnie goes along."

  I didn't want to go off with Don on my own, anywhere, or at any time, but did this rule apply to Sam? So I said, "Not with Sam, either, Mam?"

  "Oh." She straightened her back.

  "Oh, Sam is just a boy." And she turned and looked at me and smiled warmly at me as she added, "Sam's all right."

  Well, what was there to worry about? I didn't want to be alone with anybody, only perhaps Stinker when we went over the fells or into the wood. There were times when I was happier with Stinker than with anyone else I could think of. With Stinker as my sole companion I felt free; the closed-in feeling that I had in the company of Ronnie and Don fled and I felt lighter, able to run or sit if I wanted to without the restricting touches of their hands or contact with their bodies.

  I had a sense of guilt when I felt that our Ronnie's presence, too, was irksome to me, for I had a nice feeling for him, at least during the day. But not at night when he came creeping into my room and woke me up because he wanted to talk. This had happened twice since that first night, when he told me I was pretty.

  Then one day I went to the wood to take, so I told myself, my last walk, for on the morrow I was starting work. This business of starting work held no joy for me, for I was going into Mrs. Tumbull's draper shop. Father Ellis had got me the job. I was to start at quarter to nine in the morning, and four evenings a week I would finish at seven o'clock, but on Saturday it could be eight or nine, all according to custom, Mrs. Tumbull had pointed out. Wednesday I finished at one o'clock. Mother comforted me by saying it might lead to better things.

  What, I couldn't see, as there was only another girl and Mrs. Tumbull in the business. And the other girl was new, too.

  Aunt Phyllis said I was lucky to get a job at all when there were dozens of girls with 'something up top' who would have jumped at the chance, but there, was nothing like finding favour in the priest's eyes. And now, she had added, and this was in the absence of my mother, I might stop acting like a wild thing and grow up and have some sense. I knew

  5i

  she was referring to Don and Sam following me about, and I wanted to say to her that I didn't want anybody to follow me about, I would rather be on my own, but I had strict orders from mother never to be cheeky, not to anyone, but particularly not to Aunt Phyllis. When speaking about Aunt Phyllis my mother always finished with, "She has enough on her plate."

  And so I walked in the wood with Stinker at my heels. He seemed to feel the coming breach, too, for he didn't scamper about among the undergrowth but walked with his tail between his legs and his head cast down. He was taking his cue from my feelings. I went through one bay after the other, and it was when turning to make my way home again from the tree bay that I saw Fitty Gunthorpe.

  When I had come across him in the wood following the incident of the rabbit I had run to get out of his way, but now I didn't run, for as on the morning that I had been riveted to the ground at the sight of the nailed rabbit, so I was equally riveted now, for Fitty was looking at something in his hand. It was a small bird. It was bare and had been plucked clean. If it had been large I would have known he had killed a pigeon and was going to eat it, but this was a small bird, too small to eat. Its body looked the size of a tiny mouse. It lay on its back in his great palm, its two spidery little legs sticking up into the air.

  As if coming out of a trance Fitty took his eyes from the bird and looked at me, then he dropped it on to the ground, so quickly that it seemed as if someone had shot it from his hand, and he nicked his hand twice as if to throw off contact with the poor thing. Then coming towards me with slow steps, his eyes darting from my face to Stinker, who was growling now, he began to jabber.

  "I didn't ... Listen ... listen, I found it. It wasn't me, I've done nothin' to it.... You're the one that's ..."s ... said about the r ...

  rabbit... aren't you?"

  I could only stare unblinking into his face. He was standing an arm's length from me now, and I was terrified. Then he frightened me still further by flinging his arms wide and crying "You've ... you've got to listen, see. I found it. I tell you I found it, it was still warm.

  Somebody's plucked it, not me, not me. I swear by Christ, not me! "

  Then his manner changed, and his voice dropped to a whining whisper, as he pleaded, "Don't say anythin', will you? They'll say it was me. It wasn't me. Please, for Christ's sake, dont say anythin'."

  I backed from him, and when he cried again, his voice breaking as if on the verge of tears, "Don't, will you?" I shook my head in a sickly daze and whispered, "No, no, I won't." Then I turned and went out of the wood, not running, yet not walking. But when I reached the top of the street, away from the shadow of the trees, I had my work cut out not to fly into our house and cry, "The poor bird! the poor bird!"

  I said nothing about the bird to anyone, not because I was thinking of Fifty, but because I was seeing his father's face as he had looked at me all those years ago. Next morning I presented myself at a quarter to nine at Mrs. Tumbull's shop. Dad had gone with me to the bridge, and before leaving me he had grinned down at me, saying, "Well, lass, you are on your own now, life starts from this morning Away you go now." With a pressure of his hand he pushed my reluctant body across the bridge, and now here I was, confronted by Mrs. Tumbull and meeting, for the first time, Mollie Pollock.

  Mrs. Turnbull was a short woman, and very fat. She seemed to me to be all large bumps, and strangely enough Mollie Pollock too was short and fat, but her fat didn't appear like bumps, it was more like molten flesh, pouring continuously from some central point of her body, for ever mobile.

  Mrs. Tumbull informed us both abruptly and without any' preamble that we had a lot to learn and we had better get started. The shop had two compartments but only one entrance. Into the second compartment she led me, and placed on the counter, apparently all ready for me, were numerous boxes, some holding cards of buttons, and others, a jumble of coloured tapes and bobbins of thread. My first duty was to get these all sorted out and counted, and to label anew the boxes, which had their place in a high framework that formed the dividing wall of the shop.

  There was no window in the second compartment, only a skylight, and I found my eyes drawn to this time and again. The first hour seemed like an eternity, and I had my work cut out not to take to my heels and fly out of the place, for I felt I couldn't breathe. The air was thick, the smell was thick, it was what I called a calico smell.

  At eleven o'clock Mrs. Tumbull brought me a mug of cocoa. This, too, was thick and I couldn't drink it. All morning I sorted buttons, tapes and threads and wrote labels, and the latter didn't suit Mrs.

  Tumbull, my writing was too large and sprawly, and a number of the labels I had to do again. Also I had spelt button 'buttin'. She
was very sharp with me about this.

  My dinner hour break was from quarter past twelve until one o'clock; it took almost twenty minutes hard walking from the shop to our house, which left only a few minutes for a meal. My mother asked me somewhat anxiously how I got on, and I could not dispel the hope in her eyes by telling her the truth, that I hated the shop, so I just answered weakly, "All right." Dad patted my head and said, "There, lass, it's a new world."

  Yes, indeed it was a new world.

  By the end of the week it was decided that I must stay in the town for my dinner, so Mam put me up a packet of sandwiches I told her I could sit in the back shop and eat them, and this I did for the first two days of the new arrangement, until Mollie whispered to me in passing one morning, "I'm bringin' me dinner an' all, but I'm going to have it in the park. You comin'?" Instinctively, I nodded, "Yes." And a feeling of excitement arose in me at the prospect of being able to sit in the park without being accompanied by any one of the boys.

  From that dinner-time Mrs. Tumbull's shop took on a lighter shade.

  And the credit for this was due solely to Mollie, for she, even at sixteen, was a character. But she was a character my mother would certainly not have liked me to associate with, had she known how Mollie spoke.

  There was very little swearing went on in our house. Out side, men swearing was as natural as a "God bless you'. But women who swore were not nice, and I had been warned not to stand and listen to women who talked like this, as the lads would do.

  But here was Mollie, swearing and cursing with nearly every other word she spoke, and it did not stop me from liking her. The strange thing about it was I found myself wanting to laugh as I listened to her, although I must admit her opening comment on our employer not only startled me but almost choked me, for I was swallowing a mouthful of meat and bread at the moment Mollie exclaimed in a doleful tone,

  "Doesn't fat-arse Turnbull give you the pip?"

  When she had thumped my back until I had spat out the meat, I sat up on the bench and we looked at each other, then we burst into gales of laughter. From that moment we were friends.

  She informed me that this was the fifth job she'd had in a year, and if she lost this her mother would bash her brains in. Moreover, that she had only got it because her sister lived in Norton Terrace and was respectable, her husband being a bus driver. Mollie herself lived in Bog's End and was one of eleven children. Her father, when in work, was a ragman. But now, as she said, everybody was in bloody rags, so business was at a standstill.

  It was strange that I could sit listening to Mollie swearing and cursing and not once think, Eeh! she's awful, or Eeh! she's bad.

  Mollie was a natural swearer there are such people who space the words into their own language and so colour it. It is, in a way, a gift, and she was the only one I ever met who had it, for when Cissie Campbell said even "Damn and blast!" something would curl up inside of me against the repulsive sound, but not so with Mollie, Yet, nevertheless, I did not take Mollie home, for I knew immediately what my mother would say. She would find no entertainment or charm, in Mollie's language, and I had no doubt about what would have been her attitude had she known that I was listening to it every day.

  Sitting on the park seat in the bright sunlight one dinner hour, Mollie turned to me and said, "Eeh! Christine, you know, you are bonny." I felt my cheeks broadening with pleasure, but I denied the statement, saying, "I'm not really, it's only me hair," and I tossed over my shoulder one of my two plaits.

  "It isn't only your hair," went on Mollie, 'your hair's got nowt to do with it really, it's your face.

  The shape of it, and your eyes. " Then she leaned back against the park seat and, hanging her hands over the rail, she surveyed me and exclaimed, " My God! what I wouldn't give to have your eyes. I'd run bare skinned round the bloody shipyard for them. Y'know what? " She had come up close to me now, lowering her voice, " You could marry a bloody duke! "

  When my laugh rang out, she shook my arm, saying, "I'm not jokin', Christine," although she was herself laughing, 'honest to God, you could! Coo, if I had your face, Fellbum wouldn't see me backside for dust. "

  Now I was laughing louder and louder, and, warming to her theme, Mollie ranted on telling me what she would do if she was me.

  That night I lit a new candle and stared at my face in the small mirror on top of the chest of drawers, the only article of furniture, beside the single bed, which the room would hold. My face looked waxy and pale and somehow far away. I moved nearer to the glass and stared into my eyes, but they didn't seem to stare right back at me, they looked dreamy, and I gurgled to myself, "They're not paying attention." And my eyes weren't paying attention to me, they were looking deep inside me, right into the place where my dreams were. For now, strangely enough since I had started work, I was dreaming more and more. In the mornings, surrounded by tapes, bobbins and bales of flannelette and drill, I released myself from the shop and went straight up through the fanlight into my dream world, the dream world which held the river and the wood and fells, and . someone. This someone who was big, yet had no definite outline. He was no one that I knew, not even Father Ellis, but he was someone beautiful to look upon, someone who spoke with a soft voice, a caressing voice, someone who kept saying, "Christine, oh, Christine." And this someone had no resemblance to our Ronnie, oh no, none whatever, although Ronnie kept saying, "Christine, oh, Christine."

  There had lately come into me a fear when I heard our Ronnie speaking my name like that, and he was doing it more and more, for. he was always wanting to talk to me in the night. He had never touched me or sat on my bed. He just squatted on his hunkers by the side of the bed and talked and talked in whispers. Yet fear of his visits was growing in me and I was terrified lest my mother should find out, for somehow I knew she would blame me. Yet I kept asking myself, why, why should she?

  I had been at Mrs. Tumbull's a year when I got a shilling a week rise, which brought my wages to eight and sixpence,

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  and because of this I was detailed to do a job for which I had no taste. This was going round the other shops in the centre of the town and taking note of their prices. If they were selling winceyette at one and threepence three-farthings a yard, Mrs. Turnbull would alter her card to one and three-pence- farthing. She was the first of the cut-price shops, I think.

  It was on one of these distasteful excursions that I ran into Don. He wasn't in his working clothes, but had on his good suit and looked very big and hefty and, I noticed for the first time, somewhat handsome.

  "Where you off to?" he asked, surprised to see me out.

  When I told him he laughed and said, "Well, she's got her head screwed on all right, I must say that for her. Look, come on and have a cup of tea."

  "No, no, I can't, Don," I protested; "I've got to get back, she'll raise the roof if I'm late."

  "Let her." He was looking at me from the depths of his dark eyes. I could almost feel the gaze coming out of them, sharp and piercing, going through my clothes, right through my skin.

  When I turned away, saying again, "No, Don, I can't," he pulled me back without moving a step. He just reached out with his great arm, and there I was, standing where I had been a second before, looking at him.

  Then without any leading up, as was the custom with lads, even this much I knew without having had experience, he said, "This is as good a place as any to tell you, you're goin' to be me girl."

  I strained back from him, unable for a moment to say anything to this straight statement. Then vehemently I declared, "Oh, no, I'm not, Don Dowling!"

  At this he laughed and sang softly, "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey?"

  then added, "That's how. you said that. Oh, no, you're not, Don Dowling! Well, I am, and you are, Christine Winter, do you hear?"

  There were people passing us in the street now and looking at us, and he turned me about as if I was a cloth doll and led me down a cut that gave on to the town boat landing. I wriggled in his grip and cr
ied,

  "Don't be silly, Don, leave go!" But he took no notice until we were standing on the empty landing, the river flowing coldly by, and then he said, without any laughter now, "I'm sick of this. What does your mam expect? Does she think you're going to end up in a convent?

  And there's your Ronnie an' all getting' as bad as her. "

  "I dont want any lad. And Mam says I'm too young, I'm only fifteen.

  Anyway," I added with some spirit, 'you'll not be my lad, Don Dowling.

  "

  "Now look here, Christine," his voice was softer now, 'dont take that line. I know it's not you talkin', you want to come out with me all right, but it's your mother, isn't it? God damn! you've got to come alive sometime, she's got to let you come alive. " Now his voice fell to a low, angry tone as he finished, " She can't keep you in blinkers all the time. "

  "Leave me go, leave me go!" I pulled away from him.

  "My mother doesn't keep me in blinkers. And I dont want a lad, you or anybody else, so there!"

  I turned from him and again he was blocking my way, and now his voice and manner changed once more and he was pleading, his words running into one another.