Knitting ain’t fine or fast enough for her, thought Violet, but out loud she only mentioned her husband’s mother, who had made real lace for ladies.
‘That my granma?’ How did you make lace then, Grace went on blithely. Could Mamma make it? Was it knitting only with string, like?
Violet could not answer. She had felt a most curious sensation wash over her, when she understood that Grace thought herself to be her own child. Not insulted, exactly: but the ghost of that feeling, mixed with simple surprise. How could she –? How could I possibly –?
But what are you doing, Violet asked herself, finally catching on to her own responses. Of course the child will think she’s mine; won’t remember any other by now. I’m her mother, no matter how widowed or old I am; or how white.
If she were white, I would have foreseen it, expected it: well, more fool me. It’s her innocence sees no difference, finds no puzzle.
The innocence made Violet’s heart ache, though at the same time it seemed to her almost divine, and beautiful. But soon enough Grace would be starting school; it would not do then, to let her talk of her mother Mrs Dimond, or her grandmother the Silkhampton lacemaker. Folk would sneer, and those who would rather leave the shop than queue behind her would enjoy that sneering all too well.
For a moment it occurred to Violet that Grace’s future, every tiny eventuality, was all of it set with possible snares. She’d noticed this one just in time, she could stop Grace stepping into it; but surely there would be others no one could foresee, a cruel multitude of them.
‘Look now,’ she said, her voice sterner than she had intended, ‘her with the lace, she weren’t your granma at all – you know that, Gracie, surely; we two ain’t related by blood. You’re an orphan, by rights; that means your own poor mother, she died. That’s why you was in Aunt Bea’s Home for a while.’
There was a silence. Grace stopped knitting. She looked up once, a quick stricken glance at Violet’s face; then away.
‘Don’t you remember?’ asked Violet, more gently. ‘Gracie?’
Grace shook her head. It seemed to Violet that she had grown smaller. She sat so still.
‘You was only a baby then,’ said Violet, over her own rising sense of panic. If only she could take it all back! If only she could take it back, and think about it, and come up with – but with what? There was no easy way to tell a child she was an orphan, surely?
Grace’s fingers found a loose loop of wool in her lap, and twisted it about. ‘So – you ain’t really my mamma, then? Aunt Bea ain’t really my auntie?’ Her voice broke.
The truth was always best, Violet reminded herself. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really.’
‘Who was, then?’
‘Don’t rightly know,’ said Violet. There was another pause.
Grace went on pulling at the loop of wool, and Violet was piercingly reminded of the dying baby in the Home.
Help me, Lord. Oh, help me, Bea. What am I to say?
She cleared her throat, and the words came sweetly into her mouth: ‘But you’re my own little girl now though,’ she said. ‘You’re as much my little girl as ever my Ruth was.’
For the truth was always best.
‘Gracie? And no one ain’t ever going to take you away from me,’ Violet went on. ‘Not ever. That’s a promise.’
Then at last Grace let the knitting fall. Violet took her daughter on to her lap, and held her tight.
Grace didn’t really take to knitting, it turned out; gave up altogether soon afterwards. Violet made the scarf herself, finished with a fringe of woollen tassels, but it was the mittens Grace loved best. In her usual way she refused to take them off at first, even indoors, despite the obvious drawbacks.
‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. She held them up. ‘I’m like everyone else now!’
Violet only smiled.
9
Word soon got about, and some of it turned ugly. Many were sorry, or professed themselves to be. Mrs Harvey, little Phoebe’s mother, spoke to Violet with genuine tears in her eyes; she was expecting again, and had hoped to have the blessing of Mrs Dimond’s attentions this time too. But for some the news was more in the nature of a lark: Mrs Dimond, the Holy Terror, was deposed. Served her right, mean old besom, carrying on like the Old Testament, and messing about with darkies!
And others who had been grateful for Violet’s services for years suddenly felt alarmed, and counted themselves lucky to have survived her ignorant ministrations. At least now there was a proper trained midwife, who knew what she was doing!
For Violet Dimond had with immediate effect been removed from the Roll of bona fide midwives; Dr Summers had come to break the news in person.
‘I did my best, it’s – to be honest, it simply isn’t up to me any more.’
‘So … that means I can’t work no more? Is that it?’
‘Not delivering. No. I’m so sorry, Mrs Dimond.’
‘What about Ma Higden – Joanie Trewith?’
‘Oh – well, neither of them were on the Roll in the first place. So they weren’t subject to any sort of report. But they weren’t practising legally, and they still aren’t.’
‘Are they going to be stopped, then?’
‘Certainly. Unless they want to be arrested,’ said Dr Summers.
Ma Higden, Mrs Trewith, behind bars for helping out!
Violet herself barely noticed her own precipitate loss of status, though several children – one she had delivered too – followed her about the streets for a day or two, suddenly unafraid, shouting things, jeering. She was too busy.
For even before she had shown Dr Summers out, she was calculating. There were the contents of the tobacco tin in the front room. There was a little in the Christmas club at the greengrocer’s in the High Street, and a small sum in the Post Office. There was money put by for her own funeral, saved over many years with the Co-operative in Exeter. There was almost nothing she could sell. She had earned enough to live on, and no more. She had savings to last for two, maybe three months, if she was careful; and no more.
She knew of some nursing work, but had to turn down nights, while Gracie was so small. She charged for a laying-out, since she had discovered that the new professional lady midwife was not allowed to touch the dead at all, for fear of infection; the dead man’s family were in desperate straits though, so she could not ask for much. There was some cleaning work, rough work; but the pay was not enough to live on. She wrote laboriously to a service register in Exeter, thinking to live-in somewhere, as widow with orphaned grandchild, and sub-let her home. But the difficulty would always be the added complication of Grace’s colour. Who would take on an elderly woman with a stray negro child? Some would, she had no doubt, but how was she to frame the application?
There were one or two local charities, set up to keep folk out of the workhouse; Violet did not try them. Mrs Caterham, Mrs Grant-Fellowes and Mrs Thornby were on the boards of both; she could not bring herself to ask for charity from those who in the first place had plunged her into want. Not yet. Reluctantly Violet accepted a pound from Dr Summers, when he came round again to let her know that despite his initial hopes there was no question of a Council pension. She began to sell off her hens, and killed the weakest layer, making it last more than a week. To lose the final two meant no more eggs; but keeping the birds meant feeding them, and this would soon be impossible if she wanted to manage the initial outlay to make her pies, and pay the quarterly rent.
She wrote to Bobby, and considered writing to her sister Bea. But she knew that whatever she might have managed in the past, in the Red Lion Hotel days, Bea was now essentially in service herself, without a penny to spare. And her husband’s nephew and his children would have first call if she did. No; Bea must be last resort.
‘Old folk don’t need so much,’ she said, when Grace noticed that there was more on her own plate than on Violet’s. But every mouthful the child ate soothed Violet, satisfied more than mere hunger.
Slowly the w
eeks went by, but the savings shrank fast. Bobby sent a postal order for ten shillings, with his apologies. Things had not been going well for him. They were moving again, south to America, to another mining place somewhere; it was true what they said, any deep hole the wide world over, you’d find a Cornish lad with a shovel at the bottom of it. He would write again with more money when he could, and when he had an address. What else could he do, but go where the work was?
But I can’t do that, thought Violet. Wherever I go the work is forbid me. She spent some of the money on new boots for Grace, who would soon be starting school.
She found herself thinking continually of the terrible time long ago, when her own father had been away looking for work. There had at first been not enough to eat, and then even less, and finally for an indeterminate length of time nothing at all, and then her mother had gone somewhere, perhaps to look for him, and she and Bea had stopped talking, stopped arguing, stopped even whining, stopped doing anything but lie in one another’s arms in their bed – for it was cold, wintertime – as if waiting, in a silence full of pain, that took slow stealthy charge of every bit of you. How your twisting empty innards panged, how your cold legs cramped, how the light hurt your eyes!
Bea had known all the time that their mother would come back. But Violet had allowed herself doubt, and it seemed to her now that this doubt had gone right into her, stayed there and stained her all the way through. We were six years old. How good we were, the two of us, me and Bea, how quiet and meek we were, waiting for death!
Sometimes twisting in a brief doze Violet awoke unable to remember for a moment where she was, and whether she was hungry in childhood or in old age. By day she spent as much time as she could in St George’s, praying and trying to think straight.
If only she could have the inspection again, knowing what it was for! Mrs Thornby’s face, when she showed her the special bag; hadn’t been able to so much as touch it. She had thought it unclean. Violet knew the contents of the bag were as clean as she could make them, quite as clean, in fact, as they needed to be, but all the same whenever she remembered the scene her empty insides dissolved with shame. A lady had considered her unclean. For some part of Violet, this was enough.
And Dr Summers must have known what was to happen for nearly a whole year, she realized. The clever ladies on the committee had read Mrs Thornby’s report and decided together that Violet Dimond was unworthy; and ever since then all sorts of wheels had been quietly turning, advertisements written and placed, interviews arranged and conducted, and the appointment finally made; and all the while Violet had been going about almost as usual, tending to the child, working in garden and kitchen, without the least suspicion – apart from the curious shiver that had troubled her so at each childbed lately, at the memory of the propelling pencil – that her livelihood was to be taken from her, and that she was to be shamed and cast out in the name of the public good.
Was it because of Grace?
If an ordinary pale little English girl had stumbled in sickness out of the bedroom, would Mrs Thornby have written a different report?
Violet thought back. Perhaps; perhaps not. But surely Grace had sealed her fate; made sure of it, poor little innocent. For the first time Violet understood what she had done in taking Grace on, realized fully that those ready to despise Grace for being brown would include herself in their hatred. She had thought to protect Grace; but from, as it were, the enemy’s own side of the fence. Well, it seemed that she and Grace must be dark together – and she had already, so early, been exposed as helpless!
Violet remembered again the time that she and Bea had waited quietly for death to take them, and of the fear that had ever since possessed her. It had always seemed to Violet that to be alive, and especially to be a woman, was mainly to do with fear. But for Grace, surely, this would be more so: she would be dependent on others, but more so. She would be judged for her looks, but more so, subject to the whims of men, but more so, vulnerable, but more so.
And her mother all the while powerless, and on the same losing side. She was ruined. And Grace with her.
On the way back she decided: she would give up her home and the garden, her own so usefully these thirty years, and she would write, this very afternoon, to Bea, offering – no, asking – whether they might not come to the Home, she and Gracie, so that she might work there in exchange for board and lodging. She wouldn’t need a wage, she would tell Bea. But they must have a roof overhead, she and Grace together.
At home she got down on her knees by the cold hearth, and prayed aloud for strength.
She was aware as she spoke of the thought that often made itself apparent in her mind as a sort of low grumble, suggesting that all this disaster had happened to her because she had adopted Grace. For a while she attempted not to let the thought surface. But it occurred too often for that.
It was certainly true, she thought, giving up on prayer for a moment. But if she had the chance, if she could go back and change things, would she do anything differently?
I’d listen out for that Mrs Thornby, thought Violet, answering herself, and when she did her knocking I’d creep up all quiet-like, and turn the key against her.
I could not have done anything else differently, she decided. Not from the first time I see her little face.
Slowly, rather shakily, Violet arose. She must think out exactly what to write, she told herself, before she put pen to paper, think out all the spelling. She would have to buy a sheet of paper and an envelope and a stamp, but she had just enough for that, thank heaven. As she brushed off her skirt there was a rattle at the door. Violet started, and for a dreadful moment thought again of Mrs Thornby. She crept to the door, all quiet-like, she thought, dizzily, and stood behind it.
‘Who’s there?’
There was no reply, and presently Violet noticed the envelope poking halfway through the letterbox. Bobby again, so soon! She pulled the letter clear and hurried back to the kitchen with it. But as soon as she had her glasses on she saw that the handwriting was different. Someone else had written to her. A stranger: this was a hand she had never seen before. She sat down, in case it was something nasty, and tore the envelope open. There was no letter at all; nothing but a single sheet of paper, which she recognized after some scrutiny as a postal order, made out to herself, and for ten shillings. She was still trying to understand when she noticed the tiny slip of paper still in the envelope. This had such small writing on it that she had to stand up and hold it directly to the window. Another unknown hand. It read: To be paid weekly.
Her first thought was of Dr Summers. Had he not offered to pay for her to do the special course? Had he not told her barely a fortnight since how much he felt he owed her? And no one else she knew could afford to lose more than twenty pounds a year. But this was not his handwriting. His wife’s perhaps, the occasionally glimpsed Mrs Summers?
Whoever had sent it, it was charity.
Violet’s eyes filled with tears. All my life not a farthing have I taken that I didn’t earn, by the honest sweat of my brow! I will not take it, I cannot. And not even knowing who it’s from! Suppose it was the Committee, suppose it was Eleanor Thornby herself!
Violet sank down again into her chair, and tried to think. It came to her that her prayers had simply been answered; and that the Lord was also testing her. She must now decide whether to accept the help He had prompted, or refuse it.
I would rather starve than take charity if I were on my own. But if I were I wouldn’t need it in the first place.
I’m not on my own though. And by my own choice. No one made me take her. Would I rather starve Gracie than take charity? When she asks me for bread, shall I give her a stone?
Violet put her hat on, went to the Post Office, cashed the postal order, and bought bread and cheese and a ham hock and some dried peas, and ordered in coal.
‘Ooh, Mammy!’ Grace cried that evening on the doorstep, as she came in. ‘Oh, what’s that lovely smell?’ All ready for bread
and marge again, poor mite, thought Violet, or another bowl of thin porridge.
‘Wash your hands,’ she said soberly. ‘The Lord has provided.’
Silkhampton Council School was in Bishop’s Road, on the eastern edge of the town, a walk of half a mile from home. It was a red-brick building, with separate entrances for boys and girls, and to one side, reached by footpath, a big stretch of green beside the railway line, so that in summer all the children could play on the grass and wave at passing trains. There were two rows of flushing toilets out on the far corners of the yard, there was a central hall with parquet flooring, and four large classrooms, one for Infants, one for Juniors, two for Seniors, all equipped with paired solid wooden desks with fixed seats and inkwells and lids that lifted sideways through a natty little finger-sized hole. All of these things were still rather new, and only just acquiring the overall school smell, that long-term patina of chalk, floor polish, and clothes and footwear worn too long.
Violet was extra-careful with Grace’s appearance that first day, and drew some comfort, on the way there, from considering how well the child was dressed, from her summer flannel vest to her lightly-starched pinafore. Her new boots shone, her hair was neatly pulled back into a little round ponytail, ministrations which had made her go very quiet, though for days now she had been hopping about demanding to know when she was to start.
To start in the lion’s den, thought Violet, but had done her best to hide her own fears. She timed their arrival in the playground for just before the bell rang; there would still be many there, she thought, who had no idea of Grace’s living in their midst.
‘Look, there’s Lily!’ Grace let go of Violet’s hand to wave.
‘You be a good girl now,’ said Violet, and watched her race away across the playground, without a backward glance. She thought suddenly of a boat ride she had once taken with her young man, a lifetime ago, on a fine summer afternoon: of the blithe and beautiful butterfly that had flown across their bows, and gone on fluttering past them, lightly heading out to sea.
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