The Midwife's Daughter

by Patricia Ferguson

  This was alarming; Grace asked no further questions. Though she asked them of herself, later on, for a long time afterwards.

  Had Barty Small sat on the white-haired lady’s lap while she stroked his hair and took her pleasure in his strangeness, his similarity? Grace thought of the older girls so friendly to her when she had just started school, walking her home and kissing her goodbye, those prim young ladies, Linda Coachman, Norah Thornby, Sally Killigrew with her golden hair, big girls of nine and ten taking it in turns to hold her strange brown hand.

  Barty Small had definitely lived to grow up, in England, in the time of the King Georges. What then? There was a Lizzie Small, same colour as everyone else, in the Junior girls; there were other Smalls in the churchyard of St George’s; were they some other family with the same name or – had Barty Small stayed, and married? Were there folk walking about Silkhampton now, whose great-great-great-something he was? Now there was a thought. If it was so – where had the darkness gone? And if somehow Barty Small could know that his colour had vanished over the years, would he mind? Or would he be pleased?

  Perhaps Barty hadn’t stayed at all; perhaps when he had grown too big for the white-haired lady’s lap he had fled to the city to find others like himself, in the ports, in the dockyards. Aunt Bea’s nephew the fisherman had told Grace that he had himself more than once seen men her colour, sailormen, some in uniform, over Falmouth way, or down to Plymouth Harbour. Perhaps Barty Small had run away to join the navy. A man could do that sort of thing. A man could always escape, couldn’t he?

  Also in the Coronation Year there was a school photograph, taken at the beginning of the summer term, the whole philanthropic enterprise down to Pyncheon’s Photographic Studios in the square. Young Mr Frederick Pyncheon himself spent an entire afternoon arranging all sixty-four children pyramid-style at the edge of the meadow, the smallest cross-legged on the ground, the second row sitting on school chairs brought outside for the purpose, the third standing behind them, and the last most-favoured row standing at the back, raised on benches from the assembly hall. Then Mr Pyncheon had disappeared beneath his cloaked apparatus and effected some species of minor explosion.

  Violet knew about the school photograph, and took an interest. She was herself already the proud owner of a photograph, which stood on the top of the cupboard beside the fireplace. It was in an oval tin frame, and was very small, and seemed to show the young Mrs Dimond in her wedding clothes, wasp-waisted, deeply buxom, her pretty face tilted invitingly, a teasing look in her eyes and a rather saucy hat to one side of her head.

  Few saw this photograph, but it was a great source of satisfaction to Violet Dimond. Every time she dusted it she was pleasantly reminded, now that the danger of personal vanity was safely past, of how very good-looking she once had been, and at the same time had the consolation of remembering how firmly she had avoided making use of her good looks to ensnare herself or others in sin. There was the further happiness, now all this time had passed, of knowing that her sister Beatrice, whose photograph it actually was, had despite her own best efforts rather failed as a sinner as well, having suffered no worse fate than to marry (just in time, it was true) the author of her downfall, who, while he couldn’t hold a candle to Ned Dimond, of course, had not turned out too badly either, all things considered.

  So Violet very much looked forward to seeing the school photograph, which was to be publicly displayed for the first time at the school’s annual summer fete in July, at the very end of term. This was an even greater occasion than usual, in view of the Coronation, with stalls set up in the playground, folk-dancing exhibitions, a poetry recital, and Scenes from Shakespeare acted by the boys.

  When the Scenes had reached their fine dramatic end the stalls started up again, and Violet made her way to the table just outside the Boys’ entrance, where the new school photograph was on display beneath a painted banner reading PYNCHEON’S PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIOS. There was a little gathering already there, jostling for a closer look. Violet waited her turn, then put on her spectacles.

  There was the carefully arranged pyramid of children, boys and girls together, the boys in their dark trousers and jumpers and big white collars, the girls all in white pinafores, their hair loose on their shoulders, with ribbons here and there, oldest at the back. She had delivered many of them, Art Coachman, and Sally Killigrew, pretty as her mother. Not that pudding-faced Thornby girl, of course. But little Bertie Flowerdew, cross-legged in the middle holding the slate with Silkhampton Council School 1911 chalked on it. There was that Tommy Dando, as had upset Gracie all those years ago; and Lily, of course; and there, beside her on the end of the second row, was her own dear girl, all smiles. Violet thrilled all over with delight; and nearly laughed out loud. She looked again to find poor boss-eyed Susie Warburton.

  ‘Ma? I’ve spent all my money. Can I have another penny, please, please – there’s the china stall, I ain’t gone on it yet, I dint see it in time, oh do.’

  Violet tore her eyes away from the photograph. ‘What?’ She looked down at her daughter’s eager face. ‘China stall?’

  ‘You pays a penny,’ said Grace urgently, ‘and they gives you three balls, and you throws ’em at the ol’ plates all laid out on shelves, and smash ’em all to bits!’

  ‘Shocking waste of china,’ said Violet, but she paid up, and watched Grace run off. She turned back to the picture for one last look. It was something about the light, presumably. Something about the black-and-whiteness; but oh, thought Violet, what a joke to see the Warburton child on that photograph, or the Thornby girl, ha! better than any china-smashing: for all the children in the photograph seemed to be the same odd colour.

  Look at it whatever angle you pleased, by some accident of placing or light (and how annoyed Mr Freddie must be!) it was a picture of sixty-four grey-faced children, in clothes of black and various shades of grey, beneath the dark-flecked leaves of a black oak tree; Gracie merely slightly greyer than the others. It was a similar joke, thought Violet, to the picture of Bea at home, the one that looked so much as if it might be of herself. Why, how shockingly the camera could lie, after all! It didn’t know what it was seeing, thought Violet. How could it, a mere machine? It was held up and shown things, and manoeuvred about, and what it gave out after that might just be downright wrong.

  Like people, I suppose, thought Violet, and she went to find the china stall, to watch the fun of breaking plates, and admire her Gracie’s throwing arm.

  11

  Usually Violet and Grace visited Bea every Easter, staying in the cottage on the harbour for a week of sea air and dress-making and alterations. One year though, with only a day’s notice, Bea wrote to put them off. She had been offered a paid booking instead; would Violet send her Grace’s latest measurements, for a nice bit of cotton lawn she had put by?

  ‘And not a word of apology!’ Violet was disappointed, for Grace’s sake, she told herself. Poor mite, she had been so looking forward to the seaside!

  In fact Grace could hardly believe her luck, and offered Bea a silent prayer of gratitude. She loved her aunt, and her aunt’s sewing machine, and her clever fingers. But Porthkerris was not Silkhampton. There were visitors there, always new and unfamiliar faces, stares, second glances, and now and then a level of non-friendly attention that Grace could feel on the air. Sometimes it was all she could do to walk up the hill and down again, for the curious eyes she felt on her from so many windows, from so many idling passers-by. It was hard to carry on chatting to Violet or Bea, feeling so looked-at. It was hard to frame words, her mouth would feel stiff.

  Once when she was on an errand on her own she had felt something soft hit her skirt just below her knee, and looked down to see what looked like a handful of prawns all scattered at her feet, flaccid old ones, the dirty juice of them running down to drip on to her boot. She had not dared to look around to see who might have thrown them, but turned and ran home again, and pretended that she had fallen.

  The woman in the
bakery would sell her a loaf, it was true, but she was careful to lay the change down on the counter.

  These were small things, hardly worth seeing, certainly not worth talking about. If she had told her mother, what would Violet have said? Take no notice. Just foolish unkindness – and prawns, not a stone! How could a few prawns hurt you?

  No one threw them at you; it is not your touch that is despised. As yet Grace did not quite think these things clearly. For the moment she had only the feeling that she was making a weak fuss about nothing much, and at the same time being crushed almost to death by the combined weight of an army of men and women like the baker, like whoever had thrown stinking fish at her, an army she had no defence against, whose movements she could not predict.

  ‘I don’t mind really,’ she said now, watching Violet crossly feed Bea’s letter to the fire. ‘I prefer it here.’ Where the army was at any rate of known quantity. Silkhampton was divided for Grace into possible and impossible areas. There were tracks through the forest, places where she blended like anyone else into the ordinariness she longed for more and more as she grew older. School was largely safe, especially while Tommy Dando did not look unkindly upon her. Mr Vowles the headmaster tended to boom down at her, and jovially call her his dusky or nut-brown maiden, but she could see he meant to be friendly. The church was fairly safe; since she was nine she had sung in the choir, and if anyone objected after all these years they had not done so to Mr Godolphin. Though sometimes Grace wondered if that had anything to do with the rood screen, ornately carved with trumpeting angels, that so effectively hid the choir from the congregation. And the choir left the church via the back door, through the vestry; no need for any of Silkhampton’s church-goers to notice Grace Dimond in their midst.

  Every Sunday Grace had that thought, and every time tried to repress it, as making the sort of vain self-centred fuss Violet so disapproved of.

  ‘Course they’re not staring at you! They got better things to do!’

  That was another of Violet’s mantras. And it might be true for any other young girl, it seemed to Grace. Any other young girl who felt stared at and judged. The girl Ruth would have been, had she lived. But not true for me.

  And she had the strange feeling too that Violet knew it, that she was being wilfully blind to something real, in a way that old folk, grown-ups, so often were. The blindness must be important, then; serve a purpose. Be the only way.

  The fact was that now she had turned thirteen Grace knew, some of the time, that she was repulsive. When she looked in the mirror, it was her colour that she saw, and her colour was wrong.

  She no longer prayed to be changed, but now and then she daydreamed about it. Suppose she were the same as everyone else! Everything would be different then. Everything would be better. She would learn to be a real dressmaker in London, she would make Ma silk dresses and warm winter coats, and take her for drives in her own car, she would get married, of course, but not straight away, and she would buy Ma and Aunt Bea adjoining fine houses exactly the same.

  Sometimes at night, getting ready for bed, Grace looked straight at her reflection in the small mirror beside the sink and studied her own extreme otherness. No boy would give her a second glance, she thought. No one would want to marry her any more than anyone would take on squashed-up Judith Laws. And like her, in some deep ways Grace hardly existed at all. There were no pictures anywhere of anyone like Grace Dimond.

  There were schoolbooks, of course, with pictures of natives wearing absurd and shamefully scanty clothes, and carrying silly babyish weapons, spears and so on. There were novels: there was the hideous embarrassment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the people like her talking like children, and being generally downtrodden, there was the beautiful Foulata in King Solomon’s Mines, who loved Captain Good, even though ‘the sun cannot mate with the darkness,’ as she pointed out to him while neatly dying in his arms; there were girl-cannibals with nasty habits in The Coral Island – but nowhere were there any girls like Grace, being normal in proper clothes, being ordinary, talking English. No illustrations, no postcards, no magazine. No comic. No cheap novelette or girls’ paper. No newspaper picture, nothing.

  No illustration featured Judith Laws either, of course. She didn’t exist, other than in her own odd self. No heroine squinted; Susie Warburton didn’t exist either.

  I just don’t count, thought Grace sometimes as she pulled on her nightgown. There is no one else like me in the whole wide world. The desolation of these thoughts came to her sometimes in the street, when someone spoke civilly to her, or tried to be friendly, even, and made her hang her head and blush, made her hands clasp one another in front of her and writhe together, as if they were anxious all by themselves.

  So the safest place of all was the Silkhampton Picture Palace, which opened without much fanfare (but to gathered crowds, so many that the police had to come to keep order for four nights running, so fevered was the queue for tickets) in the spring of Grace’s last full year at school.

  Rumours had begun weeks earlier, when workmen had moved into the old tithe barn, unused now since the opening of the new church hall at the time of the coronation. There was wild talk at first of an opera house, or petrol pumps, but soon it became clear that the company in charge was Pyncheon Photographic Studios, and that Mr Freddie Pyncheon intended nothing less than Silkhampton’s first cinema.

  Grace went with Lily, the second week after the opening. The first thing to be surprised about was the anteroom of the tithe barn, freshly painted pale green, and with a wooden kiosk newly built into one corner. The next thing was Miss Pyncheon herself, beaming inside the kiosk.

  ‘Gracie, dear, how nice to see you! Hello again, Lily, enjoying it all?’ This was a very different Miss Pyncheon: her narrow face almost glowing, transfigured with excitement. ‘Two fourpennies?’

  So grown-ups, even the pitiable ones, could still be subject to powerful emotions! It was an unsettling thought. Grace and Lily could not help meeting one another’s eyes, and grinning with embarrassment as they turned away with their tickets. Various framed photographs had been hung about the anteroom walls, above the ancient panelling. Grace would have liked to examine them, for Mr Pyncheon was known to take his photographic trips all over England, but Lily was anxious to show her the new cinema, and to establish once more that she herself was an old hand at Picture-going.

  ‘Come on, we need to get good seats!’

  They gave their tickets to Ted Hall from school, another surprise, standing in his Sunday best beside the velvet curtains now hanging over the great arched doorway. He tore both tickets in two with practised nonchalance, at the same time giving Lily a special soft look, which she enjoyably ignored.

  ‘This way!’

  They parted the heavy velvet, and went inside. Transformed! The tithe barn was all dark now, from the shutters built over the windows. Here and there electric lights burnt with unusual dimness, and straight away they were approached by a figure waiting ready with a lantern, Ted’s big brother Geoff.

  ‘Fourpennies, is it?’

  They were directed towards the back of the hall, but not as far as the raised platform where the dearer seats were. The seats were real theatre seats, whispered Lily, whipped-out numbers and all from a music hall gone bust over Plymouth way. She sat down almost at the end of a row, and Grace sat beside her in the aisle seat. This sort of behaviour was typical of Lily. Giving Grace the aisle seat meant that there could be no other person sitting right next to Grace, or rather, no chance of anyone making clear their disinclination to do so. Did Lily know what she was doing, when she acted this way? It was impossible for Grace to know, since it was also impossible to ask. There was a chance, she felt, that if she did, something fragile would be broken. It was best not to speak sometimes. None of this was fully conscious: just glimpsed, and turned away from.

  They had been almost first in the queue, but the place soon filled up about them, until it seemed half the town was crammed inside, and people we
re standing at the back, and huddled about the doorway, everyone talking and shouting as if they were at a party, until at last the lights dimmed further, all by themselves, like magic, and someone started playing the piano in front of the old stage at the front of the hall. Suddenly an enormous light flared into being on the closed stage curtains, its edges wavery with the old velvet. Ted and Joe appeared onstage to pull the curtains aside, disclosing a great white screen set up on wooden struts, huge, almost filling the stage, and now brilliantly lit. Looking up and behind her Grace saw that the light came from what looked like a tiny slot of window let into another new wooden kiosk, this one built up in the high old gallery at the back of the barn. The light started out very small and too fierce to look at, but spread out as it beamed, so that when it reached the stage it all but filled the waiting screen.

  Meanwhile the pianist went on playing, something sombre, but with a clear beat to it, exciting.

  ‘It’s ol’ Freddie himself, he’s proper brilliant! Plays every time!’

  Another surprise. Sometimes Mr Freddie Pyncheon stood in for the usual organist at St George’s, when Mr Bundy was absent. Once or twice Miss Pyncheon, too, had stepped into the breach, especially at choir practice. But this was piano-playing like nothing Grace had ever heard him play before. This was suddenly jaunty, a dance, a light piece of prettiness.

  ‘Makes it all up as he goes along, see!’

  The show began with a newsreel. The King opened parliament. He rode in a coach like Cinderella’s, through city streets few watching in the tithe barn had ever really seen. Grace, for a few seconds more, was aware of herself, Grace Dimond sitting in the dark in Silkhampton, and at the same time watching the King himself walking about in London, talking to real people, being real himself. Grace Dimond seeing the King!

  Then the film cut to a garden party and for a little while Grace ceased to exist at all. She had gone to the party, where ladies in clothes as delicate and beautiful as flowers walked about the grass in silken high heels, carrying parasols made of petals, or of something else as light, as faery; wondrous beings attended by gentlemen in masculine versions of the same unimaginable finery, in top hats that gleamed in the sunshine. Real ladies and gentlemen, of London, the King’s own friends, taking their ease among the rosebeds, and on view, on display, like splendid creatures in a zoo!