Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  The education Lily received at the Higher Grade was adequate in most respects and excellent in some, but if she had been a boy in that school she would have been better off. The headmaster obviously thought it nonsense that, as the nineteenth-century feminists argued, there was no sex in intellect. Boys in his school had a different and harder curriculum to follow. Boys were taught fractions and equations while girls had to be content with multiplication and division; boys learned Physics, girls Physiology; boys had Chemistry lessons while the girls had Botany. But at least both boys and girls took commercial classes. These were very popular because, as was well known, knowledge of everything to do with commerce led to office jobs and everyone wanted those, even the brilliant Lily who certainly didn’t think an office job too lowly for her academic talents. Ask her what she was going to do when she left school and she’d say, get a job in an office if she could. She had no other ambition. Nobody mentioned university or college, an outlandish notion for a working-class girl, and she never thought of it herself. She hoped to get a good job, then eventually marry and have children. It was what girls did.

  Yet in spite of her happiness at school, and her success there, Lily had an anxiety about her which her father could not understand. She was always worrying. It seemed to Tom abnormal for a young girl to fret so much when there was nothing to fret about. Really, nothing at all. She had a loving mother and father and two sisters and times were good, and yet there was this ever-present apprehension in Lily’s eyes. Even on Sundays, when Tom took his girls in the pony and trap to Wetheral, a village on the river Eden, five miles away, and then out in a boat – even then Lily seemed anxious. If he told her to cheer up, it might never happen, she took this as a criticism and tears filled her eyes. So Tom just had to let his favourite daughter be. She liked to sit up at the front of the trap with him, holding his thumb, and then she’d smile and he’d think he’d been exaggerating her solemnity. She just wasn’t noisy and giggly like Jane and Annie, that was all.

  Margaret Ann never went on these Sunday outings to Wetheral. She said the river gave her a headache, which was strange because it was a very peaceful river, broad and pretty with lovely trees coming right down to the edge of it, and absolute silence the length of it except for the plop of salmon. But she went with Tom and the girls on their rarer outings to Silloth and loved it. Silloth is a small town on the Solway Firth, twenty miles from Carlisle, much loved then as a holiday resort, imbued with a special quality for all working people – going to Silloth was exciting. It was a comparatively new town then and had all the virtues of a planned town, laid out like a square with straight streets at right angles to each other. These were wide and well paved and planted with trees. Between the streets and the sea was the Green, thirty-six acres of fine turf bordered with pine shrubberies. There was a sea wall, perfect for promenading along, and all manner of amusements to hand – donkeys to ride, an eighteen-hole putting green, a pavilion where regular shows were put on, and the Silloth Town Band.

  Tom took a house every July and the whole family went for a holiday, as did half Carlisle. The normal population of Silloth was under two thousand but in July it was swollen to over six thousand. Margaret Ann and the girls adored being there – it was the best of times. All of them were happy in their different ways and wished they could stay for ever. Tom fished for codling and flounders, and Margaret Ann sat crocheting on one of the seats on the front, and Jane and Annie and even Lily rode on the donkeys and paddled and watched the Pierrots, enraptured. Why, there was never a dull moment even if it rained, and in all their memories it never once did.

  It was a good life, and then it ended.

  III

  All those sixteen years, the best of her life, the good years, my grandmother was hiding a secret. Not only the greater secret of her first twenty-three years, shrouded in general mystery, but a more specific one. At some point before the good life ended with her husband’s death she was obliged to confide in him. Maybe she did it when he proposed, or maybe he had always known of it because he was part of it and it was his secret too. It is impossible to know.

  Thinking about the woman who claimed to be my grandmother’s fourth unacknowledged daughter, I decided to check through the whole of the birth, marriage and death registers for all the five parishes then in existence in Carlisle. My grandmother’s surname of Jordan made the task not too difficult – it was unusual enough not to crop up with the monotonous frequency of Graham, or Armstrong. I knew she was born in 1869 and so began searching for any birth to a Margaret Ann Jordan from 1893, the year she said she started work for the Stephensons, the year from which she dated her adult history. Immediately, it was there: to Margaret Ann Jordan, general domestic servant, aged twenty-three, on 12 April 1893 a girl, named Alice, born in Wetheral, the village Tom took his girls to, but where Margaret Ann would never go. No father was named. Several weeks later she had the baby baptized, though not in her own church of St Mary’s but in Holy Trinity, Caldewgate. She gave as her address a house in St Cuthbert’s Lane in which, two years earlier, at the time of the census, had lived one Elizabeth Jordan, an elderly woman, on her own.

  Equipped with Alice’s birth certificate, I hoped to locate her in the Carlisle of the turn of the century by tracing her address through school records. But those school logbooks for all the local schools between 1898, when Alice reached five, and 1906, when she was thirteen, and likely to have left school, reveal no Alice Jordan. (These logbooks are not registers in any case but sometimes they do list the names of the reception class each term.) I turned to the marriage registers. If Alice was born in 1893 it was likely that if she ever married it would be between 1909 and, say, 1929. Again, it was easy. On 1 January 1915 Alice Jordan, father unknown, married William Muir, a pork butcher of 48 Brook Street. There were three witnesses to her marriage. One of them was Thomas Hind. What was my grandfather doing as witness to the marriage of his wife’s unacknowledged, illegitimate daughter? Then I noted Alice’s address: 14 Peter Street, the house to which my grandparents and their girls had recently moved. Was Alice merely using that address for some reason but never resided there? How could she have lived in a small house with half-sisters of thirteen, ten and six without them knowing? Impossible. Curiouser and curiouser.

  It occurs to me, as it surely would to anyone, that Thomas Hind was a witness to Alice’s marriage because he was her father. The story of the slow courtship, which his daughters loved to hear, and which in turn was relayed to me, may not have been entirely untrue but it could have had a quite different and earlier beginning. Suppose Tom knew Margaret Ann before 1893 and when she became pregnant could not for some reason marry her? His mother Jane, the butcher, depended on him and he may have been afraid to leave her and marry. Or, though a bachelor, he may have been involved with someone else…

  But no, I don’t think Thomas Hind was Alice’s father, but perhaps this is because I don’t want to. Tom was always described to me as a kind and gentle man who loved all children. To find that he had been party to the abandonment of Alice would make the whole thing worse. There must be some other reason why he, and not Alice’s mother, attended her marriage. Nor do I believe Alice really was residing at the address she gave, my grandparents’ new home in Peter Street. Yet where had Alice been from 1893 to 1915? Surely Margaret Ann, who had suffered all her life from the stigma of illegitimacy, had not abandoned Alice? Even if there had been reasons why she could not keep her baby in 1893, solid economic reasons, why did she not claim her and take the child into her own family in 1899 when she married? Alice was only six then, young enough to be moved from wherever she was. Had Alice been given to some family who would not part with her? Had a deal been made in 1893 that Alice should never know who her real mother was if some other woman took her in? Did Alice herself break the agreement and discover Margaret Ann?

  Where, oh where, had Alice been?

  It was a good life, and then it ended, in 1915, but not because of the war. Tom was too old for t
he war. It was Margaret Ann’s immediate thought when war was declared and so many men rushed to serve King and Country. Tom was fifty–four and, as yet, not needed. He was safe and for the first time Margaret Ann was glad she had borne him no sons.

  Carlisle was not particularly affected by the war. A few wooden huts were erected near the castle, though no one quite knew what for, but there was no blackout, and rationing, when it came, was not severe. The only way Carlisle noticed there was a war on was through observing the lack of men on the streets. And in the market. By 1915 the meat market was showing signs of losing its porters and it was the older men, like Tom, who were having to do the heavy work they thought they’d left behind them. Tom was big and strong but not as fit as he had once been. Carrying carcasses, something he’d once done with such ease, now tired him, but there were no young men left who could swing a whole pig over their shoulders and think nothing of it, so he had to do it. Margaret Ann always felt that the strain of returning to this kind of physical effort had weakened him so that when he caught a chill he did not have the resistance to throw it off.

  He came home on the evening of 3 September 1915, looking awful – grey-faced, his breathing one long wheeze, his skin clammy. His wife knew immediately that this was no ordinary chill. It was a beautiful late summer’s evening but Tom complained of feeling cold, so she lit the fire and sent Lily to boil the kettle and mix hot water and lemon while she found a shawl, a big heavy woollen shawl, and wrapped it round his burly shoulders. He groaned and croaked that whisky was the best medicine but she persuaded him to take the lemon and water together with two aspirins. He sat there for an hour, the wheezing getting worse, his eyes shut, though he wasn’t asleep. He wouldn’t eat, not even soup. About nine o’clock he said he’d be better off in his bed but he had trouble standing, said he felt dizzy and couldn’t seem to see properly, and even more trouble getting up the narrow stairs. It took Lily behind him, doing her best to push, and his wife in front, pulling, to get him up. He collapsed fully clothed on to the bed and didn’t want to be bothered undressing, so they loosened his collar and removed his shoes and left it at that till later.

  Margaret Ann never knew whether he slept that night or not. She certainly didn’t and neither did Lily. They both heard the dreadful breathing, quite shatteringly loud and laboured, and both longed for morning so that a doctor could be sent for. By morning Tom seemed delirious. Lily went first thing to Dr Edwards with a note and he came back with her. He examined Tom and said straight away it was a case of pneumonia. The very word terrified Margaret Ann, but Dr Edwards assured her that her husband was as strong as an ox and his constitution would see him through together with the careful nursing he knew she would give him. After he’d gone Lily asked her mother what was the matter with her father and, seeing the child’s scared face, Margaret Ann didn’t mention pneumonia, only said Tom had a chill but he was strong as an ox and so would soon be on the mend. Lily, as ever, was so good. Jane and Annie were packed off to school but Lily stayed at home and sat all day with her father, wiping his brow, trying to get him to drink those quantities of fluid Dr Edwards had advised. At ten o’clock her mother sent her to bed. Her friend Annie Broadhead had arrived to sit through the night with her. ‘You’ve been a little angel, Lily,’ her mother said.

  Lily slept deeply that night and had a lovely dream about Silloth, about all of them sitting by the sea at Silloth, and her father in his shirtsleeves laughing at them from the boat where he was fishing. She woke up feeling happy, but then felt the deep silence around her. No sound of her father’s wheezing. Did it mean he was better? But then her mother appeared in the doorway and her face was enough. She had her finger to her lips and gestured to where Jane and Annie were sleeping. Lily crept out of the room and followed her mother. Her father lay with a sheet up to his chin. His eyes were closed but they had pennies on them. She stared at the pennies, the dull copper circles where his blue eyes should be, and heard her mother say, ‘He’s gone to Jesus, Lily. Don’t cry.’ Lily didn’t cry. She was too terrified to cry. She backed out of the room without a word and ran down the stairs and shut herself in the cupboard underneath them. There she crouched among the dustpans and brushes. She buried her face in the apron hanging on the back of the door and only then began to sob. It was dark in the cupboard, not even a sliver of light coming through the tightly fitting door. She had her back wedged against the wall and her knees drawn up and only just fitted in. Still in her white cotton nightgown, she pulled it over her knees until it stretched tightly and enclosed her cramped legs. Her heart was pounding and there was a pounding somewhere in her head too. She heard her mother’s plaintive call – ‘Lily!’ – but she couldn’t answer it, she couldn’t leave her hiding-place. She heard the doorknocker. It was already muffled, tied up with a rag, but she heard the soft thud, thud, thud, and her mother’s feet going slowly down the stairs above her head, and the door being opened and then shut, and the rise and fall of whispering voices. People went backwards and forwards, past the cupboard without guessing she was there. Her eyes grew used to what had been the intense dark. She made out the suitcase jammed in the corner, the one used for Silloth. The thought of Silloth and her happy dream made her cry harder and now she was hiccuping. They wouldn’t be able to go to Silloth ever again. How would they manage without their father, what would they do? Terror joined grief and she rocked and rocked in the small space.

  Jane and Annie knew where she would be. How she hated hearing them cry. ‘Lily will be in the cupboard under the stairs, she will, she will!’ Then there were taps on the cupboard door, and entreaties to come out, but she wedged her feet firmly against it and it could not be budged. She could hear her sisters, all excited, squealing as though she was a trapped animal. Her head ached, she felt sick and her throat burned, but she wanted to stay in this hole for ever, to die in it and be buried like her father soon would be. But thinking of his burial made her want to vomit and she had to swallow the bile which rose up and try to control her desire to scream and scream at the vision of his dead body and the worms eating it. She drummed her heels on the wooden floorboards and shivered, but she was hot, not cold, feverish, her nightgown drenched in perspiration. All the activity outside her sanctuary seemed to have stopped. It was quiet again. Jane and Annie had disappeared. She heard her mother say softly, ‘Lily? Come out, I need you. There’s only me now.’ Guilt stopped her sobs. Common sense told her she couldn’t stay in this cupboard for ever – she was Lily, the sensible one. She put her head on her knees and cried some more and then she was sensible. She opened the door and crawled out like a dog, her hair matted and damp, her face blotchy and disfigured. ‘Oh Lily!’ her mother said. ‘Oh Lily, Lily, look at you!’

  But even out of the cupboard and trying to be sensible she didn’t yet speak to anyone. She did what she was told, but with her eyes lowered, and silently. Jane and Annie disgusted her. They cried every now and again but she could tell they were not really sad. They brightened up so quickly when they were measured for their mourning clothes. Their mother had their photographs taken when they were dressed in these, but Lily refused to pose. She couldn’t. Let Jane and Annie preen themselves. But she was glad to have her own black dress, though she wished it even uglier and less becoming than it already was. It made her feel better to be clothed so drably and she had no desire for the lace collar Jane pleaded for, and got, nor for the sash conceded to Annie – plain, harsh, unadorned black suited her feelings. So did the funeral, every awful minute of the ride to the cemetery and the long walk down the main path to the plot near the huge copper beech tree where her father was to be buried. Jane and Annie cried for real then, whimpered pitifully and hid their faces in their mother’s skirt, but she stood straight and unyielding, watching the coffin descend every inch of the way, hearing the thud of the soil on the varnished wood, tiny stones hitting the brass fittings with an almost musical noise.

  That was not the hard bit. The funeral was satisfying, what she felt to be approp
riate if dreadful. It was the period after the funeral which was much more terrible, those first weeks without her father when her mother’s worries about money became her own. There was no will. Mother explained to her what a will was and why it was important to have one. And Tom had left no will, no will and no immediate access to the money Margaret Ann knew to be in the bank, the money he had said only recently was now more than enough to buy them a house, outright, at last. There was only five pounds in cash in the house. A man came to see Margaret Ann and he said there would be no problem since she was Thomas Hind’s legally married wife and would be granted something called probate with no difficulty. But it would take time and since there was a war on maybe as much as three times the normal minimum time of six weeks. He said a loan could be easily arranged, but Margaret Ann said at once that she would not take a loan, she would manage somehow. She acted immediately. First she moved her family out of Peter Street, where the rent was nine shillings a week, to a house in Kendal Street, Caldewgate, where it was only four shillings. Then she took in two women lodgers and put them in one bedroom while she and her girls all slept in the other. Lastly, she got a job.

  She had hoped to get a job as a seamstress, at Bullough’s, but when she applied she was told she was too old (at forty-four) to join the twenty-five girls (average age twenty) who worked in the shop’s alterations department. The only job she could get, apart from scrubbing houses or offices, was as a waitress, at Robinson’s, Carlisle’s first emporium, a huge department store, everything from clothes to ironmongery, which had taken over a whole block of buildings in English Street. Robinson’s had a Jacobean café on its second floor and here she worked, carrying laden trays backwards and forwards, on her feet for eight hours at a stretch and her legs aching more than they had ever done while she was working for the Stephensons. At home, she relied on Lily, who gave Jane and Annie their meals and did all the housework after school. Lily wanted to leave school and earn money so that her mother wouldn’t need to work, but Margaret Ann was adamant. She reminded Lily of her father’s pride in her and how he had planned for her to stay on at the Higher Grade until she was sixteen and had learned all there was to learn. Then she could leave and get a good job, far better than any she could get now at fourteen. ‘See sense, Lily,’ her mother said, and sensible Lily did.