Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  The first of Margaret Ann’s daughters to marry was Jean. She married Dave Wallace on New Year’s Day 1930. A quick wedding, speedily arranged, with suspicions inevitably running high in spite of the bride having known the groom for over two years. Jean offered no explanation for the sudden decision to marry. She just said to her mother that her mind was made up at last and there was no point in waiting. Dave had some time off over the New Year holiday and it would be a good start to marry on New Year’s Day, the first day of a new decade. She hoped it snowed. It would be so romantic to be a snow bride, it would bring luck.

  It didn’t snow nor was the wedding very romantic. Dave had been up all night celebrating Hogmanay and looked terrible. Jean looked even worse, absolutely ashen, but it seemed she had a chill on her stomach and had been sick that morning (and the one before and the one before that…). Margaret Ann was less than happy as she attended Jean’s wedding in St John’s church, London Road – not even her own church, but then Jean never went to it, only Lily was a church-goer. Arthur Forster was best man and Lily and Nan maids of honour, but there was no sense of occasion. Afterwards, Margaret Ann gave a wedding breakfast at Bowman Street but the celebrating was half-hearted, what with Dave’s head feeling as if it was going to split into two and Jean’s ‘chill’ bothering her. There was no honeymoon. The newly married pair left that evening for Motherwell to stay with Dave’s mother, whom Jean had never met, until they found somewhere of their own. The farewells were emotional and painful, with all the women weeping, even Nan. Jean looked so pathetic, surrounded by her cases and boxes, so small and thin beside the tall Dave. Margaret Ann could hardly bear it, though her tears were the most restrained. Jean swore she would write regularly but what use were letters? Facts had to be faced: this daughter was leaving the family and that was that. The ninety or so miles to Motherwell might as well be nine thousand for all they would now see of her. And what sort of life was she going to lead, so far from her own family, surrounded by strangers and with a ‘chill’ already? Margaret Ann had never had to part with a mother, she had never known what it was to leave one family for another. It was the first time, she said to Lily and Nan when Jean had gone, that she was glad of it.

  But Jean kept her word and did write, long letters too, quite surprising for one who had never shown any taste for the written word. She and Dave had found a room and kitchen in the Buildings on Belshill Road. There was a bed-in-the-wall in each room, so her mother and sisters could come to stay. The rent was a scandalous ten shillings a week, which on Dave’s wage of thirty-five shillings a week was far too much but there was nothing else available. Lily and Nan encouraged their mother to go to visit Jean, to have a holiday in Motherwell. When had she last had a holiday, after all? Fifteen years ago, in Silloth. So she went, in March, when the weather was a bit better. Lily and Nan put her on the train and Jean met her at the other end. She saw straight away Jean was expecting – she was too thin for her pregnant state not to be extremely obvious. September, the baby was due in September, Jean said. It was March. Margaret Ann looked at Jean but said nothing except that she was delighted. Jean was safely married, after all. This child would be born within wedlock, well within wedlock, and it would probably be possible to claim it was premature. There was no point in expressing, at this stage, any disapproval or sorrow as to the date and circumstances of its conception. But Jean was relieved her mother did not inquire. Dave said it was ridiculous but she’d been so nervous about telling her mother she was expecting – her mother was so moral, so hard on anyone who gave in to temptation.

  That first visit to her married daughter’s home depressed Margaret Ann. She shook her head sadly and sighed when she told Lily and Nan about Jean’s situation. God knew her own life had been hard enough but when she started married life she had been going up in the world in every sense. It seemed to her obvious that Jean was going down. The room and kitchen in which she lived were dingy and inconvenient, with steep steps at the back down to the row of wash-houses and lavatories, each with its own big iron key which had to be carried back and forth. It was far worse than popping out into one’s own back yard and made Margaret Ann feel she had been privileged in every house she’d lived in. Then there was the constant noise above and around Jean’s rooms. The Buildings swarmed with families and there was rarely any peace. Outside at the back was a giant slag heap, the bing, and in front a busy road to Glasgow. Jean knew no one but then she had just arrived. She was alone, trying to make something of her rooms, and cooking in a tiny corner near the door to the steps, until Dave came home. They went out only on a Saturday night and not any more to dances. Jean wasn’t having the fun she loved and she missed her job desperately. Her mother saw she was trapped, that all her daughter’s fine ideas of quite another sort of existence were finished and she tried to describe Jean’s new life in such a way that Nan and Lily would take heed and think hard before they followed suit.

  Nan, it seemed to her, was doing no thinking at all. She had just announced that she had been offered ‘a good opportunity’ in Glasgow by a friend of Jack Marshallsay’s and that she was going to take it up. Margaret Ann knew immediately what that meant, she wasn’t stupid, and questioned Nan closely. What was this ‘good opportunity’? How could it be better than the already thriving business she had with Peggy? What about letting Peggy down? Where would she live in Glasgow, a big city, a city she didn’t know and no place for a young woman of twenty-two. She was angry with Nan for being so deceitful and, for once, though direct confrontation was never her way, challenged Nan to admit she was going to Glasgow not because of any ‘good opportunity’ but because it was where Jack Marshallsay now lived and worked since he had stopped his mysterious passing through Carlisle. Nan glared, turned red, but admitted nothing. Her mother asked outright. ‘Has he proposed? Any decent man would have proposed by now. He’s leading you on and you’re letting him. You should be ashamed of yourself, Nan Hind.’

  But Nan was not ashamed. She knew by then that the reason Jack had not proposed was that he was already married, but she didn’t dare tell her mother that. Jack had applied for a divorce and the moment he was free they would marry, and then her mother would be told the truth. Jack was so honest. He hadn’t tried to hide anything. His marriage had been a mistake, a case of youthful folly. His family – a good family who lived in Surrey – hadn’t approved and they’d been right. His father was a surgeon and lived in a big house which would be Jack’s one day (and Nan’s, too, naturally). Jack had been to a public school and had trained at Guy’s Hospital to be a doctor but gave it up. He was too sensitive to be a doctor which was why he had now decided, after a few career fluctuations, to be an optician. All this Nan believed implicitly. Some of it was true but the most important thing was not: Jack had not applied for a divorce. He had set no divorce in motion by the time he tempted Nan to come to Glasgow and live with him. He had married one Lily Howard in 1927 when he was twenty-two, only one year before he passed through Carlisle and raced after Nan’s umbrella on the Lowther Street crossing. On his marriage certificate he gave as his profession ‘commercial traveller in costumes’ not medical student. There is no record of his ever having studied medicine and his father was a dental surgeon not a surgeon.

  Yet Nan was not really wickedly deceived because Jack did truly love her and had no intention of seducing her and then deserting her. He was just in a mess, afraid to ask his wife for a divorce and wondering how and when he could persuade her to give him one when she didn’t even yet realize that he had left her for good. In any case, none of this could be told to Nan’s mother, and the pretence had to be kept up that Nan was going to make her fortune in Glasgow working for a well-known firm of tailors and living in a most respectable boarding-house. Nan was excited by this adventure and took very little persuading. The only thing that made her hesitate, and not for long, was her mother’s anger and distress. There was a terrible day when Margaret Ann went to see Peggy Farish privately to beg her to use her influence t
o stop Nan going off to Glasgow. Peggy, relating what had taken place, described to Nan the state her mother had been in, how horrified at the prospect of her youngest daughter running off with Jack Marshallsay about whom so little was known. Peggy could only say that Nan was determined to go and nothing she could do would stop her.

  So Nan, too, left Carlisle and Margaret Ann had only Lily now. At least it was the right daughter to have near her. (Though the unacknowledged Alice was also near her, just round the corner in fact.) Lily would never get herself into trouble, or run off to Glasgow without being married. It affected her, though, the fortunes of her sisters. When Jean’s baby was born, a boy, on 15 July 1930, Lily was rather subdued, even though she said all the right things, and when she went through with her mother to see the new baby, Stuart, she seemed quite wistful. Lily was almost twenty-nine, time to be thinking about babies before it was too late, and she was the one, not Jean or Nan, who had always loved children. Then she was affected in a different way by Nan’s passion for Jack Marshallsay, her utter delight in his company. Her mother never talked to her about it but tried to make it clear that this kind of feeling of Nan’s for a man wasn’t necessarily crucial for happiness. Nan was Nan, Lily was Lily – they wouldn’t be likely to feel the same, to respond in the same way. But Jean’s lovely baby son and Nan’s impetuous flight to Glasgow seemed to influence Lily. She decided, in the autumn of 1930, to marry Arthur Forster in the April of the following year.

  On the whole, Margaret Ann was pleased. No rush here. Lily had known Arthur now for very nearly nine years and he had shown himself to be steady and reliable and devoted throughout that time. He wasn’t the kind of man everyone had imagined Lily would marry – someone from the office or some doctor, they’d thought, when speculating – but she had never had any other serious suitor, rather to their surprise (and her own). Plenty of admirers but no offers, it seemed, except from Arthur. Everything was proper enough to satisfy Margaret Ann’s desire for respectability and this time she enjoyed the wedding preparations. Lily and Arthur even had a house to move into when they were married. It was a council house, one of those newly built on the estate of Raffles, to the west of the city. This was a vast estate, with nearly two thousand houses planned. Carlisle City Council were proud of being the first in the country to snap up the subsidy offered by central government towards the cost of new housing. They claimed, with some justification, that their building plan was the best in Britain, that they had responded the most whole-heartedly and eagerly to the King’s Speech of April 1919 in which he had said ‘the only adequate solution to the housing question is to build houses specifically for the poor’. This, His Majesty had added, was ‘the foundation of all social progress’. The men coming back at that time from the trenches to homes in slums must be given somewhere to live worthy of their wartime endeavours and suffering. Carlisle didn’t have great numbers falling into this category but the political parties represented on its council were for once united in agreeing that housing for the poor would be their priority in the decade after the end of the First World War.

  The first council estate in Carlisle was ready for occupation by 1922 and how proud the City Council were, inviting other cities to send their representatives to inspect it. It was on the west of the city, at Longsowerby, beyond the small industrial Denton Holme area, and it consisted of only six hundred houses. But each house was well built of good materials, no skimping just because these were houses for the poor. Many of them had parlours with bay windows, and some even had proper bathrooms and indoor lavatories. They were so attractive that, to the great indignation of the council, white-collar workers, who could well afford to buy their own houses, or at least rent privately, were taking tenancies. The slums of Rickergate and Caldewgate were certainly not being cleared by any happy exodus to Longsowerby – it was a cheat, and an expensive one. There were furious protests made by Labour councillors that too much money had been spent on too few houses when it should have been spent on building many more basic, cheaper homes for the thousands who needed them. So when Raffles, where Lily and Arthur went to live, was planned it was in quite a different way. The main thrust in the 1930s was to be genuine slum clearance with provision for unskilled and semi-skilled workers only.

  The Raffles site was purchased in 1926 – ninety-eight acres for ten thousand pounds – and the city architect was told to get as many houses of the non-parlour variety out of it as possible, but nevertheless to make this estate into a community with provision for a park, shops, a church and other kinds of social amenities. The specification that there were to be few parlour-type houses had one Labour councillor thundering that ‘the working classes are as entitled as everyone else to a parlour’, but in general the thinking behind the directive was approved. Percy Dalton, the city architect, was also enthusiastic about the community brief – he envisaged Raffles as a miniature garden city with the required housing but plenty of green spaces, even apart from a park. The houses were to have front and back gardens and there would be land set aside for allotments and trees lining some streets. But he was handicapped by what had happened at Longsowerby – the materials used in the Raffles houses would have to be poorer to satisfy those outraged by the cost of the top-quality materials used there. As for the proper bathrooms, very few houses would have those. To save money, the two-bedroomed houses were built with lavatories incorporated into the fabric of each house but in order to reach them the tenant had to go out of the back door and in at the separate lavatory door. Better than having to go to the bottom of a yard, or share a privy with ten other families, as many were still doing in the city, but a ludicrous economy all the same. Wash-houses were built in the same way, part of the house but not reachable from it without going outside.

  By 1930, when Lily and Arthur were planning to marry, the Raffles estate was near completion and already reckoned a great success. The houses were plain, meant to be neo-Georgian in style with flat frontages (though the few parlour-type had the same bay windows as in Longsowerby) and built in a pleasantly varied combination of terraces and semi-detached blocks. People came out to Raffles to walk round the estate and admire that very garden feeling the architect had envisaged. Those who were allocated these new houses were greatly envied and in awe themselves of the splendour of their new homes. The council kept its word and it was the industrial workers mainly from Caldewgate – Raffles lay beyond Caldewgate, to the far west of the city – who were rehoused. By 1931 91 per cent of the heads of households in Raffles were manual workers. The average rent was six shillings a week, paid out of an average wage of £2 3s. 2d. The clamour to be put on to the Raffles estate was great, not just because of how attractive the place seemed but because it was near to all the main factories – Carr’s, Buck’s, Dixon’s, Pratchitt’s – unlike some of the other council estates being built at the same time to the south and south-east of the city where the distance travelled to work, for the majority of tenants, was three times as great.

  Lily and Arthur were lucky to get a house in Raffles. There was a waiting list of 1,521 families by 1931 and they were newly married with no family and no real claim to be housed. Arthur was a manual worker but he lived in his father’s privately owned house which had three bedrooms, and Lily was a most superior white-collar worker who lived with a widowed mother, also in a house with three bedrooms and privately owned. Young couples who could perfectly well live with their families were not entitled to any council housing but there was a faction on the council, on the Housing Committee, which thought the composition of Raffles should from the beginning be balanced. They were enlightened enough to see that the future of the estate would be better served by including some childless-as-yet couples who would grow with it and have a stake in its prosperity. A member of the Housing Committee who knew someone in the Housing Department mentioned this desire on the part of some members to have young couples as well as slum-clearance large families, and he in turn mentioned it to Lily in the Public Health Department. In this r
oundabout way Lily was told that if she and Arthur put in a written application they could have one of the two-bedroomed, non-parlour, semi-detached houses on the boundary road, Orton Road.

  Margaret Ann went with them to view the house as soon as the builders had finished. She was quite impressed. There was only one living-room but it was a decent size and the range along one wall had a good oven even if it was of the old-fashioned kind (strange for a modern house). One of the bedrooms was fairly large, larger than her own in Bowman Street, and the other big enough for a double bed. There was also a bathroom which was literally that, a room with a bath but no sink, and no lavatory, which was outside. There was a garden round three sides of the house which was at that moment all mud but Arthur would soon transform it. Lily was anxious about what she would think, so she said what she thought – ‘Compared with Jean’s rooms in those Buildings this is a little palace.’ Nan, naturally, was not so complimentary. ‘It wouldn’t suit me, Lily,’ she said. ‘I’d want a proper bathroom and a lounge.’ (Nan didn’t say ‘parlour’ any more – Jack was educating her, a veritable Professor Higgins.) It was such a stupid, thoughtless, Nanlike thing to say because Lily would have liked those too. She was settling for 44 Orton Road because it was the best she could get.

  The bigger question was whether she was settling also for Arthur Gordon Forster? Nan went on about this endlessly to her mother, who didn’t really want to hear what she had to say. Nan in her own way loved Lily. She admired her, she worried that Lily was too good and, even though she was seven years older, too innocent and trusting. She didn’t see ahead the way Nan did, and what Nan saw was a sister who loved her job giving it up to marry a man for whom she felt no passion and who was wrong for her, and doing all this because she so much longed to have children and her own home. To Margaret Ann there was nothing wrong in this. To her that was more or less what most women had to do. But to Nan, high on her own passion for Jack, and proud of her ability to earn her living, set up as an independent dressmaker, Lily was making all the wrong choices. ‘No woman should marry without being passionately in love,’ said Nan, and ‘No woman should sacrifice her career for marriage.’ ‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ her mother said. ‘Don’t be so silly, Nan.’