Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  Her daughters still didn’t get a bedroom each. Margaret Ann insisted on keeping their one lodger, to pay the gas bill, but since this was a cousin, Florrie Stubbs, daughter of one of Tom’s sisters, the girls didn’t mind so much. Jean and Annie shared one room, Lily and Florrie another, and Margaret Ann had the small boxroom on her own. She was back to being a housekeeper again but of a house she owned, which made all the difference, and with the help of four young women. Well, of two of them: Lily and Florrie. Jean and Annie were hardly there – except it was now Jean and Nan, if you please. Nan copied Jean. She’d always hated Annie as much as Jean hated Jane, because it reminded her of ‘little orphan Annie’, certainly not in keeping with the image she wished to project. Her mother thought the name Nan ridiculous, not a proper name at all, and did not give in as readily to her youngest daughter’s whim as she had done to her middle daughter’s. Eventually, though, so many people called Annie Nan that she found herself following suit, to her annoyance.

  Nan was a puzzle to her mother. She grew up to be far prettier than her sisters, her hair still blonde, her skin flawless, her complexion the envy of all, and with these attractions went a liveliness, a pertness, which made the most of them. Nan was selfish and fierce, constantly on the lookout for ways of grabbing attention and profiting from it. She had a terrible temper and what provoked it most was not having enough money for the many things she craved – she couldn’t bear not to have new dresses, money for this and money for that. It drove her to a frenzy. But she could sew. It amazed her mother that it was Nan who had inherited her own natural skill as a dressmaker. She’d expected Lily to, but Lily was hopeless, all thumbs in spite of her general gracefulness. And Jean, though an expert knitter – Lily could only knit laboriously, another odd failing – was too careless to make a good seamstress. No, it was Nan who had the talent, who picked up the tricks of her mother’s trade quite effortlessly. She could cut out material deftly, follow a pattern without help and on the treadle she had a natural rhythm. It was obvious that she should try for a job at Buck’s, the shirt manufacturing factory in Denton Holme, where indeed she started work at the age of thirteen.

  Buck’s was not as good a place to work as Carr’s. This was not a Quaker-owned factory and there wasn’t the same care shown for the welfare of the workers, but in some ways girls preferred Buck’s. Here they could learn a valuable trade, one they could carry on when they married and practise at home. The factory itself was a little intimidating, a tall brick-built edifice like so many others in this little industrial suburb, but there was a tremendous spirit among the three hundred women who worked the looms there. But Nan didn’t work on the looms. She started in the machine-room on the second floor, sewing on buttons, then progressed to sewing shirt parts together, some by hand, some by machine. She was good at machine work. She had a steady hand and quickly mastered the quite tricky business of feeding often very fine material under the flying needles. And at work she was a different girl, her temper firmly under control, wanting very much to learn so that one day she could have her own business and be rich (not like mother who never charged enough and half the time made things for nothing). It was lucky she had this attitude because her job was the hardest of the three sisters’ and she was the most delicate – her mother worried about the strain on such a young girl of all that noise in the factory and the exhaustion of the long walk there and back when she was so tired. But ambition kept Nan going, her sights fixed on starting up as a seamstress on her own as soon as possible.

  She was never too tired to go out enjoying herself anyway. By the time she was sixteen there wasn’t a dancehall in Carlisle where Nan Hind and her friend Peggy Farish had not put on exhibitions which drew admiring gasps – what a sight they were, these two pretty girls, demonstrating the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Tango, laughing wildly, tossing their heads and whirling around, like mad things, in the lovely dresses they’d made themselves, then collapsing, half hysterical with the pace and fun of it all. Margaret Ann had never been in a dancehall in her life. She was suspicious of them, didn’t like young Nan – so young – frequenting them, especially the one that had opened near George Street, where she was told there were flashing lights round the walls and where sometimes all the lights were put out. But Jean went dancing too. It was what girls did, the way they socialized, the way they met boys. Jean had, if anything, more boys after her than Nan, even if she wasn’t as obviously pretty. They came to the front door in Bowman Street when others were coming to the back door and it was too much for Margaret Ann. She was bewildered by these two fun-loving daughters who seemed to think of nothing but having a good time.

  But there was always Lily. Lily thought of other things and didn’t rush out every night as her sisters did. When she did go out, it was to more sedate gatherings, to the Girls’ Club in Union Lane, a most refined affair run by a church organization, and always chaperoned. The Girls’ Club discussed the Bible and had talks from visiting missionaries and, when they did have a social, boys came by invitation only and their names were carefully scrutinized. Jean and Nan thought it was a hoot, Lily’s club, and gave up going before they were sixteen, whereas Lily went on attending at the great age of twenty. No young men called for Lily, and that became another worry for her mother. On the one hand, she fretted over Jean and Nan flirting and having too many boyfriends, and on the other over Lily, seeming to have none. But it was Nan she worried about most. She was forever talking about money and especially in relation to boys. She liked boys who could afford to take her to dances at the Crown and Mitre and preferably drive her home (though there were precious few with cars) or pay for a cab. She liked well-dressed young men who could buy her presents and who had some style and she never had made any secret of being on the lookout for a wealthy husband. Her mother couldn’t imagine where Nan had got these standards from. Not from her, not from Tom. Nan had such contempt for how her mother had spent her life, how she had always accepted her lot without complaint and counted whatever blessings she had. Even a little thing like watching her mother wash dishes aroused Nan’s contempt – ‘I’m never going to wash dishes,’ she vowed. ‘I’ll have paper plates in my house and throw them away when they’re dirty.’ Good for a laugh in the Bowman Street kitchen, but she meant it. It made Margaret Ann feel spineless, cowardly somehow, to see how Nan regarded her labours. It depreciated the currency of what had been her entire life and she wondered what women were coming to, thinking, like Nan, that their lives could be different.

  What on earth was going to happen to Jean and Nan? And what, for that matter, had already happened to Alice? If Alice ever had a job, there is no record of it, but maybe her husband kept her in comfort – and before he did, who? – and she had no need to work. Maybe she was still expecting to have children. Would it have changed Margaret Ann’s apparent attitude to her if she had? Or would Alice’s children also have had visited upon them whatever it was kept Margaret Ann away from her?

  At any rate by 1920 Alice was respectably married, she was secure. Her half-sisters were not, not yet, not in the way their mother wished them to be.

  IV

  It was almost as though another phase of the good life had begun but Margaret Ann, though grateful throughout the 1920s, was always apprehensive. True, all three of her girls had jobs, all three of them were climbing their respective ladders and earning more money than she had ever earned in her life. True, she had her own house and with the money she made from dressmaking together with the contributions of her daughters – substantial, in Lily’s case – she was better off than she had been since Tom died. True also that her home was full of the most pleasant kind of activity – the girls rushing in and out with their many friends, full of chat – and she was never lonely, but all the same she had her fears. They could be summed up in one word: men.

  Men had to enter her daughters’ lives. She knew that, and she wanted them to, if they were the right sort of men with the right sort of intentions. She wanted to see her g
irls properly courted, properly married and, eventually, properly brought to bed of children. But where, among Jean’s and Nan’s endless stream of giddy youths, were these proper husbands? She could see no sign of them. By the time Jean was twenty-five she had gone through any number of so-called ‘beaux’ and none of them impressed her mother. These young men, she was sure (and said so, in guarded but easily interpreted language) were only after one thing and it was the one thing Margaret Ann could not bear the thought of. Suppose Jean got into trouble, trouble that began with an ‘e’ for ‘expecting’? All the girls noted how hard their mother was on women who had illegitimate babies, how horrified and censorious this normally gentle and tolerant woman became. She took to recounting clearly symbolic anecdotes about girls who had fallen, girls who had been taken advantage of, girls who had thought they could get away with ‘it’ but were ‘caught’. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mother!’ Jean would say, exasperated, ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’

  Lying awake at night, hearing Jean being brought home by one of her many swains, Margaret Ann had no faith in Jean’s confidence. She heard the scuffles, the suppressed laughter, the groans and prayed and prayed that the worst would not happen (without ever admitting to any of her daughters that it had happened to her and that in her case the worst, poor spurned Alice, was living one street away). She didn’t want Jean or Nan to give up all the fun they were having – the dancing, the outings in charabancs to Blackpool, the holidays in the Isle of Man – when they worked so hard, but she wanted them settled as soon as possible before the worst befell them. Jean had her offers but turned them all down. Her mother warned her that good offers, and at least two had been from respectable, sober citizens, did not grow on trees but she was ignored. When Dave Wallace came on the scene everything changed and marking this change Margaret Ann was full of a quickly expressed foreboding. From the first, she was wary of this Dave. He wasn’t a Carlisle man. He was a Scot whom Jean had met at Blackpool, on a Carr’s works outing. So far as could be ascertained, he had picked Jean up on the promenade, just like that, and taken her to a dance. He lived in Motherwell, near Glasgow, and that should have put a stop to any blossoming of romance but it didn’t. No sooner was Jean home than Dave appeared, coming down from Motherwell on the back of a friend’s motor bike and staying at a bed-and-breakfast for truck drivers in Warwick Road. Every weekend he came and every weekend Margaret Ann grew more and more alarmed: Dave Wallace was dangerous, she was afraid of him.

  She supposed what she feared was Jean’s obvious attraction to him. He was attractive, Margaret Ann could see that – he was tall, fair, lively and he had been to America which gave him a kind of glamour. But he was only a fitter and he was a Scot who, if he wooed Jean successfully, would take her away. He liked a good time as much as Jean, did Dave Wallace, liked to dance and sing, also – very bad news – to drink. Many times Margaret Ann heard Dave and Jean come singing home late on Saturday night and she was sure the singing was more than happy, it was slurred. They’d been drinking, both of them. She tackled Jean about this but only got more of ‘for heaven’s sake, Mother!’ She became upset, pleaded with Jean to give Dave up, but no, Jean wouldn’t. The whole point of her week now was to get through it until the bold, singing Dave arrived. Yet no proposal of marriage was made. Dave was not well off and he had a widowed mother he supported. If Jean had been officially engaged Margaret Ann would not have been so apprehensive, but she was not. Dave might disappear at any moment leaving Jean – well, leaving her – leaving her ‘caught’ if what her mother suspected was going on was indeed going on.

  Hardly less of a worry was Nan. She’d done so well by 1928, actually got herself set up in a couple of rooms above a shop in Lowther Street in a dressmaking business with Peggy Farish. It was remarkable how Nan’s ambition had fuelled her to achieve such a thing – only twenty and with her own business. Margaret Ann had visited the rooms and been impressed. Nan and Peggy were so organized. They had made the rooms look efficient and attractive, what with their respective sewing-machines – saved for and bought out of their own wages over many years – set up on tables covered with bright pink sateen and a basket chair (from a second-hand shop) for customers to sit on, and a pretty floral curtain in front of an alcove where they could change in privacy. In the other room was a long trestle table (a throw-out from the market) which had been scrubbed and scrubbed – Nan wasn’t too proud to scrub when it was for her own ends – and upon which they did their cutting out, and a swing mirror (loaned by the shop below) and a chest of drawers. They had plenty of business. Two pretty, lively, flirtations girls who were themselves walking advertisements for their own dressmaking – no problem. Margaret Ann was scandalized at the prices Nan and Peggy charged, but they were not a bit embarrassed. Their work was quality, they explained haughtily, and for quality people were prepared to pay, especially for quality wedding-dresses which was what eventually they chose to specialize in.

  All this success of Nan’s and yet what was she now doing? Risking the loss of everything by associating with a most alarming man, far more alarming than Jean’s Dave Wallace. He’d picked up Nan, though in a different way from how Dave had picked up Jean. Nan thought it a wonderfully romantic story but her mother didn’t. One wet, windy day Nan had been crossing Lowther Street, leaving her work to go home, when her umbrella was blown out of her hand and down the street. There was a car waiting at the crossing for Nan to cross the road and the moment her umbrella blew away a man got out and dashed to retrieve it. He bowed to Nan as he presented her with her now damaged brolly and asked if he might drive her home since she would no longer be sheltered under its broken and bent spokes. He was an immaculately dressed, incredibly handsome rich-looking stranger with a posh accent and Nan never hesitated, she was in his car like a flash. The drive to Bowman Street took less than five minutes but it was long enough to learn that this gorgeous man’s name was Jack Marshallsay and that he was only passing through Carlisle.

  He passed through the next week and the next and the next, and each time he took Nan out in his car. He took her for dinner to the Crown and Mitre and presented her with flowers. When he left, he always gave her ‘a memento’ – perfume (Je Reviens – he kindly translated the meaning for uneducated Nan), chocolates, lipstick (Passion Pink, which needed no translating). After three months of this it was Nan’s birthday and he gave her a necklace. The moment Margaret Ann saw it she felt apprehensive. The necklace was a pearl necklace and she knew at once that these were not artificial pearls. Mrs Stephenson had had a real pearl necklace. Real pearls were creamy-coloured, just like these. ‘Give it back to Jack at once,’ she said to Nan, snapping shut the blue velvet-lined case. Nan said she certainly would not, she loved pearls, she had always wanted pearls, and she defiantly put the necklace on there and then, with her jumper and skirt, not even bothering to wear a good dress. When Jack next came to pick her up, Margaret Ann could not bring herself to greet him. Who was he, anyway? Nan said he was a gentleman, quite out of the run of Carlisle men. Certainly he looked and sounded like a gentleman, and he had the clothes and car for the part, but what was his background? Why was he always just passing through Carlisle? He was a completely unknown quantity and the more he apparently doted on Nan without ever proposing marriage the more suspicious Margaret Ann became.

  Thank God for Lily. Lily did, at last, go out with young men, but always in groups. Her mother was glad about this. She approved of Lily going for a holiday to the Isle of Man with two other young women and three young men, the women staying in a boarding-house and the men in a camp. She had new clothes to go in, a cream shantung dress and a fawn coat and a white beret, and when she came back she was so beautifully tanned that in the dark of the back kitchen all that could be seen when she came through the door on her return were her bright blue eyes. One of the young men on this holiday trip was very keen on Lily and had been for several years by 1928. Arthur Forster had got himself invited to a Girls’ Club social and then he had pursued L
ily ever after. She didn’t seem so keen on him and Margaret Ann could understand why. Arthur was not Lily’s type (even if Lily in fact had no type). He was perfectly presentable, quite good-looking really, and smart, but his personality was at odds with Lily’s. Anyone could see that. Lily was quiet, elegant, fastidious, altogether what her mother labelled ‘naturally refined’. Arthur was… Well, he was not refined in any way. He was gruff and awkward; his manners left a great deal to be desired. He was a mechanic, working at Pratchitt’s, and he lived in Denton Holme. At least that was something to be said for him. He was a Carlisle man who, should he win Lily over, would not take her away. And he adored Lily, his expression said it all. But what did Lily, aged twenty-seven now, think of him? She seemed embarrassed by his devotion, if anything, and she was sensitive to careless remarks made about him, remarks especially from Nan – ‘Ugh! A mechanic. You shouldn’t waste yourself on him, Lily.’ Instead of laughing at her sister for being a silly little snob, Lily blushed.