The Midwife's Daughter

by Patricia Ferguson

  Finding a pencil took some time. She had been sure there was one in the kitchen table drawer, then almost certain she had seen one in a teacup on the dresser. Eventually she found a small stub, its point broken, in her own drawer in the bedroom, and had to sharpen the kitchen knife before she could use it on the pencil, and altogether quite a satisfactory amount of time had gone by before she sat down again at the table, the book open before her, the pencil (its too-sharp point softened against one of the flags on the kitchen floor, so that it would not indent the paper) all ready to use. She picked it up.

  Ah. The whole weight of her hand was altered. It was the first time she had tried to write anything, she realized. Could she still do it? She went and fetched one of Miss Thornby’s magazines, and made use of the margins, to practise.

  She wrote her name. The edge of her hand was alright, of course, but there had been a way of holding the pen, of resting the hand against the paper, that used all the fingers, even the little one, curled in support. As it was she must hold the pencil almost like a needle, in forefinger and thumb; it was slow, but not so difficult. It felt odd, but she would get used to it; and it was still recognizably her handwriting. Her own hand, she thought.

  She turned at last to the little book, its clean first page all waiting. Hesitated. Then she turned it, so that the first page would always stay unspoilt, and on the second leaf wrote her name, quite small:

  Grace Dimond

  She turned the page, and wrote her first sentence:

  I am the Silkhampton darkie.

  Somehow writing this made her heart beat fast, as if she had broken some rule. At the same time it seemed to release something in her memory. She held her breath, thinking hard.

  At the Council School the top class, or at least its strongest pupils, had sometimes been required to write essays. These were to a title given out by Miss Broughton or by Mr Vowles, A Day in the Life of a Penny or The Ruined Mill or A Woodland Pond. Grace thought of Mr Vowles telling them all in his booming voice to begin with the morning and work their way through the day to the evening and nightfall; this would give their thoughts structure.

  Grace began with the morning, going to call for Lily after breakfast, finding her out already sitting on the wall outside her house, swinging her skinny little legs in their unlaced boots.

  Grace hesitated; should she say how old they had been? She thought of the stories she had read in the magazines Mr and Mrs Vowles had brought her, The New Age, strange scrappy little pieces that often seemed to start in the middle and then not go anywhere very much, but just show you very keenly a bit of someone else’s life.

  No. I don’t need to. It will be clear from what we do how old we are.

  She wrote on, remembering how excited they both had been because there was a fair on the ground outside the old common, where the bus depot was now. How they had passed the morning planning their visit, until it was finally time to go to the common. She wrote about its shaggy grasses and the trees dotted about all draped with tangles of flowering blackberry. She wrote about the tents and the caravans, the skulking strangers glimpsed here and there, the stalls just opening, the coconut stall, the Aunt Sally, the firing range with rows of little tin ducks, the greasy pole, the test-your-strength stall with a hammer neither Grace nor Lily could actually lift off the ground, swing boats, and best of all a glorious thing like a roundabout, except that instead of horses to ride there were a series of small iron chairs hanging from an upper circuit, and when the whole was in full motion the chairs swung out on their chains, higher and higher, at a wider and wider angle, while their occupants, also tipped sideways and high above everyone’s heads, hung on for dear life.

  Lily had said she wouldn’t go on it if they paid her; not that she had thruppence anyway. And Ted Hall was there in the little crowd saying it was only for boys. At that Grace had instantly marched forward, though her insides quivered with fright, paid up and chosen her chair, a chipped bright blue one. She could hardly get on, it was so high off the floor, clearly meant for grown-ups, and there were few other takers, this early in the day. Worst of all there was a thin iron bar that came down across her lap, with a hook, to hold her in. She needed holding in! And suppose the chain broke, suppose its bolts just gave? She would be hurled in her hard metal chair out out over the heads of the gathering crowd, she would hurtle through the air to a horrible jolting death, oh my goodness! But it was too late to change her mind – the thing was already moving, faster and faster.

  I held on, I held on so tight the chains hurt my hands, and then the seat began to tilt over sideways, I was sitting right out sideways, leaning hard against the side of the chair and the right-side chain, flying along, the wind pulled at my hat and blew my skirts out, Lily down there face turned up, more faces, tops of hats and bonnets, I saw the striped roofs of the stalls and the swing boats to and fro, three distant horses under a tree in the neighbouring field, the tower of St George’s, then Lily again still looking up, hello Lily!

  Suddenly unafraid, suddenly in an ecstasy of delight, aloft in a chair that had grown wings and set itself free from the earth, Lily waving, striped roofs, swing boats, horses, church tower, Lily, higher and higher, Grace let go of the right-hand chain and waved back from her perfect circular flight; once more round, then she felt the slight drop, the beginning of the end of the ride, as the turning slowed, and the chair began to fall back to its normal perpendicular.

  It was wonderful!

  Lily was anxious to do something else, though, once Grace was back on the flattened grass beside the roundabout, would hardly stay to hear how wonderful the ride had been. There’s a giant, let’s go and see him! He was only a penny. So they could both afford him. Grace was still breathless with joy, still full of the glory of bravery. ‘Nothing to it,’ she said airily to Ted Hall as they passed him on the way to the giant’s tent, and she handed over her final penny with hardly a thought. She and Lily passed through a sort of arcade of canvas, smelling sweetly of crushed grass, until they came to a curtain of heavy faded chintz.

  Hello, I said, is anybody home? So that Lily laughed, we were both nervous, there was no one else about and there was supposed to be a giant waiting for us on the other side of the curtain. Who’s there, said a voice, it was an ordinary voice, not deep, a boy’s voice, with a funny accent.

  We’ve come to see the giant.

  You paid?

  Yes, sir.

  You better come on in, then.

  So we did. We pulled back the curtain and we both nipped round it. It was dark in the tent. There was a great chair like a throne set up with its back to us. Its wooden back went right up towards the top of the tent far above our heads. We had to walk all the way round it to see if there was anyone sitting in it. First we saw his knees, jutting out from the arm of the chair. They were the biggest knees we had ever seen. We held hands. We went further round and we could see his boots, and they were giant-sized right enough. They were as big as apple boxes. They were laced with rope, and tied in big bows. One end was frayed. The giant’s trousers were rough serge, his hands together in his lap. His knees slack against one another. He lay back in the wooden chair, and rested his enormous head against the back of it as if he were exhausted. He had a boy’s face, but odd-looking, weighed down by his jaw, his forehead all knobbly brow. I saw his eyes. They were so deep you could not tell what colour.

  Afternoon, little lassies, said the giant, and we did our curtsies, afternoon mister. Lily said could he get up? The giant said no, he didn’t like to. The tent was too small for him, he said. He was nearly eight foot high, he said, all but one inch. But he did not sound proud.

  And I was not frightened, no, whatever Lily said afterwards. All of a sudden I could not stand being in that tent any more not for a single second I let go of Lily’s hand and I said I had to go and I went, and I started running as soon as I was outside and I ran all the way home and lay on the bed and told Mammy I had a pain in my stomach, which was a lie. I did not know
why I had to leave the giant. I could not bear to meet his eyes. I did not know why

  Here Grace stopped in mid-sentence. It had occurred to her that she was not, as she had first imagined, writing at random, describing an old childish memory merely to pass the time. Somehow she had chosen something important without even trying. She had chosen something that still puzzled her; except that, as she wrote, it puzzled her no longer, as if the act of forming the letters had been all that was needed.

  I saw that he could not stop being a giant. I saw that he had no choice. I saw that it was the first thing everyone always saw about him, the only thing. He was The Giant. I saw from his eyes that he would have liked sometimes to be ordinary, he would have liked to get up and leave his enormous heavy body behind him on the chair in the tent, and go out freely amongst the crowd, and have no one stare or call or ask him anything stupid or mocking or jokey.

  She had startled him a little herself, she saw that too.

  Grace read over what she had written with pain and exhilaration. The writing itself seemed awkward to her, full of her own clumsy voice. She had seen the picture in her head so clearly, like something at the cinema, and now and then as she wrote seemed to feel the presence of the words that would precisely convey the picture on to the page; as if they were floating around somehow, all ready, waiting for her to catch them. Sometimes she had managed to, but most of the time they drifted out of reach, or vanished like a dream, or turned out when she caught them not to be right after all. She had been forced to try others, and now they looked wrong as well, nothing like the glowing clarity she wanted.

  Still, there it was, written down, solid effort, words on a page. On the whole she was pleased with herself, and aware of a strange deep peacefulness inside. She read the several closely scribbled pages over and over again, and saw that what she had written was already somehow separate from her memory. She could change it any way she wanted to, she thought. She could alter things to make them plainer, more pointed.

  There was the brown child, there was the giant, looking at one another.

  I ran away in case I saw his eyes say, You too.

  ‘Gracie? What you up to sitting here, you alright?’

  ‘Hello, Ma – oh, I’ve been busy, I – I’m writing a journal. About my recovery, like Mrs Vowles said.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Violet, the opposite of reassured. ‘Did you pull us some carrots?’

  ‘I’ll go now,’ said Grace, but before she went out she carefully hid the leather-covered book, sliding it between her pillow and its case. It was her job to strip the bed, so she felt fairly safe. When the carrots were pulled, though, she had to take the book out again to write something else. She turned to the back; this was not part of the account of the giant, it was the merest stray thought, perhaps connected to what she had written earlier. As yet she did not quite know how, or whether it fitted in at all, but it seemed to have jumped into her mind all by itself as she eased the fork down between the green feathery rows.

  No escape from the physical, she wrote, then slipped the book back inside the pillowcase, and went to the kitchen, full of a new satisfaction, to put the dinner on.

  All the next week she wrote further versions of the meeting with the giant. She had as yet no term at all for what she was doing. It was just something she felt like doing, she thought: this week, anyway. She put names in, changed some of the things that were said so that Lily seemed more clearly to be someone else in her mind, hardly Lily at all; she made the other child less herself, and finally not even brown, but a little-girl version of the cripple, Clifford Petty. It had been strangely exciting, being not herself at all, but a version of someone else. She described the boot in some detail, the thick wedged heel of it, the weight, and was vaguely surprised to realize that she had never actually seen Clifford’s deformed foot at all, never even heard tell of it. Its hiddenness was part of its horror, she thought.

  She knew it was clubbed, but what did that mean?

  How could she write about someone with a club foot if she had no idea what a club foot looked like, let alone felt like? I’ve only ever seen Clifford from the outside, she thought. It was some days before she remembered that she was living with someone who had not only seen poor Clifford’s foot, but every other inch of him as well.

  ‘Ma, you know Cliff Petty?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What’s his foot like?’

  ‘Gracie – what on earth are you asking that for? What a thing!’

  ‘I’m writing about him, about school and that,’ said Grace. ‘Is it that bad, his foot, Ma? Go on.’

  Violet, most uneasy at being asked, as she saw it, to betray something of a confidence, was at the same time aware that Cliff Petty, maimed as it were in the womb, might well have some new significance for her daughter, so lately maimed by accident. She thought of Dr Summers writing down on the certificate, in his black joined-up difficult scrawl, the one word equinovarus, telling her that it was the Latin and medical term for the scrunched-up hoof-like little foot now hidden in the new baby’s flannel blanket. She remembered Mrs Petty’s wan face.

  ‘It’s like – he can’t put his foot straight. It wants to stand tippy-toe all the time, it don’t bend. The boot just makes him level, see. And his brother had a hole in his heart; died just before Cliff come along, poor little mite. What you writing about him?’

  ‘Nothing really,’ said Grace, with some truth. She was calling the story ‘The Giant’ now. The two little girls went to the fair, one of them rode the roundabout-chairs, and then they went to see the giant, and the giant saw them. It made sense somehow to change herself into the girl-version of Cliff, it felt safer. To be Grace Dimond, the Silkhampton Darkie, writing about being a darkie – no, that would be too much, too much for her, anyway. She would hide behind Clifford Petty’s great boot.

  Presently, without thinking about it a great deal beforehand, she began to go out. At first she could leave the house only after dark and wearing the veil Bea had brought her nearly a whole year before. Her heart pounded, closing the front door behind her after all this time, but soon calmed down again. It was only a street after all, only Silkhampton, where everyone knew her.

  And I’m old news now, she thought, as she and Bea made their way to the Picture Palace. She supposed for a while that the streets had always been this busy, that she had forgotten, in her long imprisonment, how packed the High Street could become; but no, said Aunt Bea, it was the war.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, boys on leave – they want to have a good time, don’t they? Pack the pubs out, all the dance halls – they don’t hang about at home talking to Mammy, they want a drink and a dance and so on. While they still can, see?’

  The crowds were good-humoured, thought Grace, men in uniform jostling past, some of them familiar – wasn’t that little Bert Flowerdew? They’d let him join? And there, Art Coachman and Tom Winterhouse! Soldiers!

  Suppose she met Tommy Dando? What if he were on leave and coming round this very corner right now! Suppose he was in the cinema already!

  The thought made her heart speed up again, but she told herself that she was safe behind her veil. He could not see her eyes, her face. She would float right past him, stare all he might, and give not a trace of a start. She would seem not to see him. She would seem never to see him, ever again.

  The Palace was full, the atmosphere rather more rowdy than she remembered, the audience more vocal. When Mr Bundy, who usually played in St George’s, stepped diffidently up to the piano at the front there was wild applause, so prolonged that Grace eventually realized that there was something teasing in it. When he began playing the whoops of delight drowned him out altogether, and when the lights dimmed several members of the audience appeared almost delirious with excitement, jumping up and down, giving shrill whistles.

  ‘Where’s Mr Pyncheon?’ Grace shouted into Bea’s ear.

  Presently, when she had repeated it, Bea shouted back, ‘He�
��s joined up – gone to France.’

  ‘Ain’t he too old?’

  ‘It’s the others too young,’ shouted Bea. ‘Anyway, he kept showing these here films about the Front and all – gets to thinking he has to go himself. Should a stopped showing ’em, silly beggar.’

  On-screen the young men marched and laughed and sang, and practised their drill, and shook hands with visiting bigwigs. The audience, it seemed to Grace, was largely taking no notice whatsoever; most were talking just as loudly and freely as before poor Mr Bundy had started hammering at the piano. It was just about possible to hear him, over the noise. In front of her big guns jumped, spouted smoke; there were one or two shots of broken trees.

  Finally the newsreel ended, and the one-reeler began, a comedy about a fat man on a beach, chasing after lots of slender pretty young women. It was idiotic, thought Grace, but just then the fat man fell backwards down a flight of stairs, very quickly and as if weightless, his expression resigned, doleful, and she nearly shed tears laughing.

  On the way back, after the Charlie Chaplin, trying to explain to Aunt Bea how much better Mr Pyncheon had been at accompanying the films, she realized that she had forgotten to pull the veil back down over her face.

  Well, what if he were to pass me in the street right now? I would still not see him. I’d look straight through him; it would just be clearer to him that I cannot see him.

  If she were ready, how fine it would be, to walk right past him with her nose in the air!

  Grace went to see Mrs Ticknell. It was the first time she had left the house alone, but apart from a little surprise at the glaring brightness of the day this hardly registered. The elder Ticknell twin, James, Jim, had died of his wounds a week before, buried by his comrades that same day in France, just behind the front line. The telegram from the War Office had arrived, Violet had told Grace, just before Jim’s chatty last letter. It seemed there had been a moment or two of agonized hope, before Mrs Ticknell had understood what the date on the letter must mean.