After all, mother had told them many times about her years in service, of the hopelessness of obtaining any other kind of employment for a girl of no means with no training except as a maid-of-all-work. Mother had said over and over that she didn’t want her girls spending their youth down on their knees scrubbing other people’s floors, nor did she want them later in life only to be fit for what she was doing now, being a waitress. They were all to stay at school and do well and make something of their lives. So Lily did. She worked harder than ever. But life was more different than even she had feared it would be and that difference was not only to do with the lack of money. It was the sudden fall in both status and expectations which took her by surprise and was hard to bear. The death of her father, the breadwinner, the one whose efforts had made them all relatively prosperous (for the times, for Carlisle, for their station), threw them into a wobbly world where nothing was certain and visions of abject poverty rose in front of them. Margaret Ann was not a widow who went to pieces – she could, and did, cope splendidly, managing by the practice of a brutal economy (which turned out to be unnecessary) to keep up appearances. But there was no joy in their home any more. Never had Lily realized how much her father had been the one to bring that joy into their family life. He was the jolly one, the lively, boisterous parent, full of confidence, a natural optimist and not prone to worry. Their mother was quiet, not a gregarious woman, forever counting her blessings in a fearful way and not imagining they would last. Once Tom was dead, this gravity of their mother’s settled over the girls like a pall.
Jane and Annie resented it and struggled against it. They tried to lift the gloom by bringing their noisy friends home, hating their mother’s, and Lily’s, preference for peace. When this didn’t work they played outside more and more, anywhere to avoid the dreariness of the house. Only Lily was ever at home when her mother got in, exhausted from waitressing. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Lily,’ she said, every day. She depended on her utterly, often voicing the reflection that when Lily married she would be lost. Lily said she would never marry, she would stay and look after her mother. It made Jane and Annie laugh to hear her say it, so solemnly, so virtuously. They certainly had no intention of staying at home with mother. Annie was, at seven, already planning to tour the world and have beautiful clothes and jewels. How? By marrying a rich, a very rich, man. How else? Jane just wanted to have a good time. What kind of good time? She couldn’t be specific, though, aged eleven as she was, she already loved dancing. She wanted to dance all the time, to have fun, to have a life of variety. Neither of these two sisters had the slightest desire to go to the Higher Grade School like Lily. They intended to leave the moment they were thirteen and get jobs and have money to spend on themselves, and never mind if Lily said Mother needed it.
After the first six months, Margaret Ann didn’t find herself in such terror of dire poverty. She had overreacted. Tom had died intestate but, just as she had been promised, there was no difficulty about his money passing to her. He had left £771 2s. 11d., which was a quite princely sum to her – no wonder he had said they could now buy a house and still be comfortable. But she didn’t buy a house, that would be folly, when any fool could see that spread over the coming years, the years until all three girls were working, Tom’s savings would soon evaporate. When he died he was bringing in two hundred pounds a year. His savings would only last four years if they continued to live at the same rate (not that they were going to). Her own wage as a waitress was meagre – £1 18s. od. a week. Her plan was to make Tom’s money spread over six years, until Lily was twenty, Jane seventeen and Annie thirteen, and all of them working. So there would be no house buying. The only concession she made was to move back into Peter Street, their old home, as soon as it was vacant, though she took one of her lodgers with her.
She wondered, in spite of being relieved to have got Tom’s money safely, what had happened to his share of the shambles in the market? Surely his partner should buy her out? But he didn’t offer to and she thought perhaps she should consult a solicitor but was afraid of incurring ruinous expense. Instead she went to see this partner, in her widow’s weeds, but suffered the humiliation of being told, on numerous occasions, that he was not at home. She got Lily to write to him, at her dictation (claiming Lily’s handwriting was better than hers, which from the evidence of her signatures on various certificates was true enough to plant doubts as to how well she could write at all). There was no reply. She thought about confronting this man, Mr Pattinson, in the market but couldn’t bear the idea of any scene. Instead she tried to earn more money by dressmaking every evening after she’d recovered from the tiredness of waitressing, but this didn’t bring in a fraction of the butchering business. She’d made clothes for the Stephensons and friends and Tom’s family all her married life and thought the money she earned prodigious until suddenly she had to rely on it and found it not to be substantial at all.
The war had already, in 1916, made widows of so many women that Margaret Ann was fully aware that compared with some she was still well off. The good years might be over but her situation was far from bad. She had a roof over her head, money in the bank, a job, no debts and three healthy daughters. It didn’t matter to her that she had no life of her own – her pleasure was her family and everything she did was towards supporting them and giving them the best life she could. Her family came not only first but second, third, all the way down to last. A family was what she had always craved and now she had it, even if the head of it was dead. She impressed people by saying she was more grateful for what she had than resentful because of what had been taken away from her.
But how did poor Alice fit into this?
By 1921 Margaret Ann’s circumstances had changed quite dramatically, and very much for the better. All three girls were working, Mr Pattinson had grudgingly given her if not half the share of the shambles at least a lump sum of four hundred pounds (shamed into it by public opinion among the butchers in the market), which satisfied her and she was able to leave her job as a waitress. She stopped working in 1919, once Lily was established in her job and giving all her money to her mother.
Lily loved her job. She became a clerk in the Public Health Department in 1917, as soon as she left the Higher Grade (with a clutch of impressive certificates and prizes). The competition to get this job had been tough. First there was a two-hour written examination in the Town Hall, with forty other applicants, men and women, then an interview, together with the other five who had done best in the written part, with Dr Beard, the Medical Officer of Health. The interview clinched it. Dr Beard was immediately taken with the attractive, calm Miss Lilian Hind – she of the top marks in Arithmetic, the faultless typing, the almost perfect shorthand taken at impressive speed. He had an eye for a pretty girl, did Dr Beard, for all he was married, but that wasn’t enough to make him appoint a clerk on looks. He was a demanding employer with a demanding job and he needed a clerk – there were no secretaries as such then in Carlisle’s Health Department – who could cope. He reckoned this young woman could. She seemed temperamentally suited as well as highly qualified.
He was right in his judgement. Lily became one of the four clerks in the Department, two men who were senior to her and another woman, Mary Purdham, who started at the same time. Mary was the exact opposite of Lily in looks and personality, though almost her equal in ability (except for shorthand). She was squat, whereas Lily was willowy, and had a permanent scowl on her square, heavily fringed face, whereas Lily’s habitual expression was pleasantly tranquil. Mary was grumpy and people were frightened of her. No one was frightened of Lily who was immediately popular even with Mr Barrow, the chief clerk. What impressed Mr Barrow was Lily’s shorthand – he was a shorthand fanatic and could hardly credit the standard (120 words a minute) this slip of a girl had reached. He could understand why Dr Beard made Lily into his right hand almost from the start, junior though she was.
Going to work gave Lily such joy and Margaret
Ann the deepest possible satisfaction. Quite apart from the prestige of the job – and it was prestigious, people were in awe when told where Lily worked and for whom – the place of work in Fisher Street in the centre of Carlisle was so pleasant. The room where Lily and the other three clerks and the three Health Visitors spent their working day was large and airy, on the ground floor with windows facing on to the street. There was a long desk running the length of these windows, the old-fashioned sort with a sloping lid, and the clerks sat together in front of it on comfortable seats, not stools. Mr Barrow sat behind them by himself and behind him was a table upon which rested two important-looking typewriters, one for Lily and one for Mary. The atmosphere was relaxed, in spite of Mr Barrow’s air of vigilance, and friendly – not even Mary’s grumpiness spoiled the pleasant feeling of camaraderie. It was a busy room most of the day but never noisy even though a stream of people passed through the edge of it, presenting various kinds of chits entitling them to payment of some kind. Sometimes these chits were for free milk tokens, sometimes for actual cash. The greatest number were for having killed rats. As part of Carlisle’s Pest Control programme a rat’s tail was worth tuppence. The tails had to be shown to the Destructor Attendant at the Municipal Dump, as evidence that a rat had been killed, and he would sign a chit which then had to be surrendered to a clerk in the Public Health Department. But Lily didn’t have much to do with such lowly traffic. She was almost always in Dr Beard’s office taking dictation and then busy at her typewriter preparing his letters for signature.
There were always a great many letters. Dr Beard worked her hard but she didn’t mind. She started at nine o’clock prompt, signing her name in the attendance book. A line was drawn across the page at precisely nine by the chief clerk and it was a disgrace to have to sign one’s name under it. Officially she left at six o’clock, except on Saturdays when the office closed at one, but she and the others often worked until later and there was virtually no objection except from Mary who was constitutionally made for objecting to all manner of things. There was a generous lunch break of one hour and twenty minutes, ample time for them to get home and eat. Everything Lily did in her job interested her but then she’d joined the Public Health Department at quite a significant period in its existence. It was expanding rapidly at the beginning of the 1920s because of all the additional services local authorities were now obliged to provide under the recent Acts of Parliament, passed in a flush of post-First-World-War enthusiasm to improve the health of the nation. A new maternity hospital was opened and an infant consultation clinic and ante-natal clinic too. Fresh measures were taken to combat scarlet fever (still an average of 150 cases a year in the city), diphtheria (about the same) and tuberculosis (even more, a veritable epidemic). These involved Dr Beard in complicated administrative procedures and a great deal of practical organization. He was engaged in permanent battles with the town council’s committee on health, with architects, with builders and with other doctors who did not always support him. No wonder Lily had so many letters to write.
Dr Beard had once practised as a barrister and had a barrister’s eloquence even on paper. Lily marvelled at how fiercely and cogently he argued with anyone who opposed him, and thought the letters he dictated had a magnificent ring to them, unlike those he received in reply – poor squibs of things, in her opinion, written in stilted official language and very often, as Dr Beard would contemptuously point out, positively ungrammatical. But if Lily admired Dr Beard’s way with words, he admired what he told her was her ‘natural feel for language’. If he was searching for the right word (which was admittedly rare), he was surprised to find young Lily could often supply it. He asked her if she read a lot and she was embarrassed to confess that no, she did not, only novels by Annie S. Swan and suchlike. He couldn’t work out either how Lily came to be such a good speller if she didn’t read widely – it was most unusual and intrigued him, this proof of an innate linguistic sense. But then he was intrigued by her in general, as well as attracted, though any attempt on his part to demonstrate either the esteem he held her in or the attraction he felt for her seemed to embarrass her. A hand put over hers and kept there, an arm round her shoulders, an invitation to move her chair closer – all were met with a flush of discomfort and an uneasiness which warned him off. He was, she knew, old enough to be her father.
There were others in the department who were also smitten with Lily’s charms, but she kept her distance from them. Everyone assumed Lily must have a suitor but when asked if she was spoken for she said no with such firmness she was completely believed. She loved her job and it was perhaps relevant, the other clerks thought, that they knew matrimony meant the instant loss of it. The rule was inflexible: married women must resign. If they didn’t, they would be sacked. A woman could be engaged, though even that was frowned upon, but not married. Married women belonged at home. They were the clear responsibility of their husbands. Married women took the jobs men needed more, that was the thinking. It was not only greedy of these women to cling on to jobs but it showed a lack of both responsibility and pride in their husbands – husbands were shamed by their wives working, or at least those in Carlisle.
By 1920 Lily was earning £2 4s. od. a week. But, though she had by far the best job of the three sisters and earned the most money, with her salary rising all the time, Lily’s was not the only source of income in the Hind family. Jane was working too and contributing some of her wage, though she wasn’t called Jane any more; she was called Jean, which she much preferred. She hated the name Jane with its connotations of ‘plain’, and the moment she left school at thirteen changed it to Jean, refusing to answer to Jane. Margaret Ann was exasperated and told her daughter her father would have been most upset because Jane was called after his own mother, but the newly styled Jean said he was dead, so it didn’t matter what he thought, frankly.
Jean started work at Carr’s, the biscuit factory in Caldewgate, built in 1831 by Jonathan Dodgson Carr, the Quaker. He was a good employer who gave his workers a reading-room and a library in his factory and provided a bathroom where those without baths at home (virtually the entire workforce) could have a hot bath. By the 1920s, when Jean worked there, Carr’s employed three thousand people, most of them women. It was a fine sight to see them streaming along Church Street towards the factory, clad in their white overalls and turbans, but Jean didn’t wear either because she worked in the offices, hardly a factory girl at all. She’d had to get a special certificate, proving she was over thirteen, before she could start work there or anywhere else – the Factory and Workshop Act of 1901 required it. Her job was that of a very junior trainee clerk which for the first three years meant being at the beck and call of everyone, and doing nothing more interesting than carry things from one place to another, sharpen pencils, fill inkwells and clean floors and desks. It was a long, long time before she did any clerking but she earned ten shillings a week all the same and benefited from being able to use the factory’s facilities for its workers.
The best of these was the canteen. Carr’s had a breakfast-and dining-room for employees which provided food at prices well below the cost of the ingredients. A cup of tea – a large cup, and the tea was very good quality – was only a ha’penny. Every day of the week had a set menu, all good nourishing stuff. Monday there was a choice of browned beef at tuppence a plate, or peas and potatoes for a penny, but the favourite day was Thursday when there was hotpot for tuppence. If you couldn’t afford that – though Jean could – you brought your own food and as long as it was handed in to the kitchen by a certain time it would be cooked for you free of charge. Breakages had to be paid for, naturally – thruppence for a broken cup, fourpence if it was a glass – but Jean was careful and never broke anything. She was also good at sums, which had got her into Carr’s offices in the first place, and progress for a bright girl with a head for figures was rapid once this was recognized. There were set rates of pay up to the age of twenty-one, but after that it was quite likely she c
ould earn as much as Lily in spite of her slow start.
It was at this stage – with two daughters earning and a third about to begin – that Margaret Ann took a deep breath and bought a house. Tom’s money had lasted the six years she had counted on (and was still not done) and now she had the money from his business partner, as well as two wages coming in, it seemed the right thing to do. And the girls were urging her on, desperate to get out of Peter Street and say goodbye to lodgers (though their mother wanted to keep them on as a kind of insurance policy). They moved to Bowman Street, on the southern side of Carlisle, near the City General Hospital. Amazingly, it was near Brook Street, where Alice lived with her husband William Muir and his brother and family. Why did this not inhibit Margaret Ann from buying this particular house? Bowman Street lies at a right angle to Brook Street – the two streets could not be closer. If my grandmother had had no contact whatsoever with Alice since her wedding day in 1915, then she may have assumed the Muirs had moved, but people did not move house easily then and she could not have counted on it. How could she bear to run the risk of being confronted by Alice every time she went out? But she went ahead and moved into Bowman Street. It was only half a mile from Peter Street, and the house, although technically a much better one, was not, to any but a discerning Carlisle eye, all that superior. True, it had three bedrooms and a parlour – oh, the joys of a parlour at last! – and the rooms were bigger, but nevertheless it still opened straight into the street and had a yard, not a garden. It was bought outright in 1922 for just under four hundred pounds, the exact amount exacted from the shambles share. Perhaps Margaret Ann would have been wiser, better advised, to put only half the money down but, psychologically, knowing the house was hers gave her a tremendous confidence. Whatever happened, she now had a house to sell and was full of awe at the thought – to be a house owner was a fine thing, something she had never thought she’d rise to.
Hidden Lives Page 6