‘So, Roberta, here we are.’
Still not knowing where she was to be left, or with whom, except that their name was Dingwall, Bobbie looked from Mrs Eglantine’s face to the small gate that declared itself to be ‘Rosebank’, and from the gate up the garden path to the narrow, low door, which swung handleless and open.
‘Mrs Dingwall, my charlady, has agreed to take you in, you lucky girl. They were the only family left in Mellaston with a suitable vacancy, and since Miss Prudence and Miss Sophie have insisted that you stay in Mellaston, this is all that is left to us. She will bring you to work with her every day, so we shall be seeing a great deal of each other. Now, off you go. Behave yourself, and don’t cause trouble, will you?’
Panic such as she would never know again welled up inside Bobbie. Her eyes must have reflected her fear, not just of the unknown, but of narrow semi-detached houses that had no need of handles, or locks or bolts. She sensed that inside that cramped little house ahead of her, behind that dingy little façade with its careless exterior of weeds and half-hinged gates, lay a sort of hell.
Chapter Three
Mrs Eglantine liked to have breakfast in bed every morning, rain or shine. She sometimes murmured, ‘You can always tell a lady because she breakfasts in bed,’ as she stared at the tray that Bobbie had now been trained to place, soundlessly, on the luggage rack beside her bed.
Mrs Eglantine had a separate bedroom from Mr Eglantine, who did not breakfast in bed. He breakfasted, thankfully, downstairs in the dining room, a dining room filled with pre-war silver which Bobbie and Mrs Dingwall would clean every Thursday afternoon. Bobbie knew that silver now, after only nine weeks at Rosebank, as well as she knew her own face. She knew the newness of it. The blackness of the handles on the coffee pot and hot water jug, the shiny chromy look to the metal, so different from the dull, almost blue look of the silver at the old rectory.
The Eglantines’ house was called Grass Mead, and it was set back from the road in one of the quieter districts of Mellaston. It was a large house designed and put up by a wealthy builder in the earlier part of the century for his son and daughter-in-law. The house was surrounded by a large garden, and a gate led through to what had once been the builder’s own property, also a large square house, but of earlier origin. Bobbie hated Grass Mead as much as she had loved the old rectory. But she was thankful for it, for if it had not been for Grass Mead and the Eglantines’ sometimes unceasing demands on Mrs Dingwall, there was no doubt that all of every one of Bobbie’s days would have been spent at that hell of all hells – Rosebank. That place of smells and latrines down the garden that announced themselves long before you were upon them because of the swarms of flies in summer, and the burst and leaking pipes in winter. Grass Mead was a heavenly refuge after Rosebank and its realities.
As it was, Bobbie, having become a sort of servant to Mr and Mrs Eglantine, having joined the ‘servant class’ as Mr Dingwall would keep reminding her – ‘You’re one of us now, dear’ – was only too grateful for Grass Mead and its claustrophobic practices.
She was even grateful to Mrs Eglantine for keeping up the old pre-war ways of going on, despite the shortages, for without them Bobbie knew that she would be condemned to weeding the Dingwalls’ front garden, to digging their vegetable patches, or cleaning out their outside lavatory. Grass Mead had become a haven of decorous living compared to the terrors of life at Rosebank.
Of course she still hated Mrs Eglantine as much as ever, while at the same time feeling grateful for her, so that Bobbie’s emotions whenever she saw her, which was far too much on some days, were always a complicated mixture, part of her wanting to kick Mrs Eglantine in the shin, and the other part of her only too willing to be sent to queue for something in the town, or set to clean her lizard-skin shoes and handbag. There were no such complications with Mr Eglantine, however, for after only a short time Bobbie discovered that Mr Eglantine had no redeeming features whatsoever to counterbalance a loud laugh and a way of looking at Bobbie which was not at all nice. It was as if, should they be left alone together, he was dying to share a secret with her.
Sometimes, if Bobbie found herself in the same room as him and, by some terrible misfortune, for a few seconds alone, he would immediately lean forward and whisper, ‘Come and sit on my knee and we’ll go riding together, Roberta. You know “This is the way the farmer rides”, surely?’ At this Bobbie would find herself dodging behind furniture and darting out of the door, while his raised voice could be heard following her, laughing and saying, ‘You’ll never make a farmer’s wife, my dear, not unless you learn to sit to the canter the way the farmer does!’
Thank heavens he never issued his invitation to Bobbie to go riding with him when Mrs Eglantine was at home. Then he would stay in the drawing room, or in his study, usually standing in front of the fireplace whether a fire was lit there or not, and talking loudly at his wife while she sewed ‘something for the war effort’.
And so when Mrs Eglantine took Bobbie out on what she called her ‘rounds’, visiting other children who had been placed by the Mellaston Committee in other households, Bobbie was yet again overwhelmingly grateful to Mrs Eglantine, so grateful that she quite forgot to hate her for a few hours. Indeed it was on these rounds that she learned what it was to be humble, and well behaved beyond any possible imagining.
Mrs Eglantine had devised the habit of introducing her to the different families that made up the more refined circles they visited together as ‘poor little Roberta’, whom ‘we had to place with the Dingwalls’ – ‘Nothing else to be done. The Misses Mowbray insisted, and you know how it is with spinsters, they are quite determined when it comes down to it.’ And while Bobbie sat as still as she could, trying not to stare at ladies in pre-war fashions who still sported hairstyles like the bob, or the shingle, Mrs Eglantine would set about loudly explaining her kindness to Bobbie to their various hostesses.
‘She was an unhappy little thing, really. She was placed first of all permanently boarding, parents killed, long before the war, nothing else to be done. And then by the London WVS with the Mowbray sisters, and of course they couldn’t cope. They’ve been single just too long. And so I volunteered to take her on, and now she’s with my Mrs Dingwall, who bless her, has taken in the poor little mite. Of course we have to make sure she is given a good bath every time she comes to us, despite the soap shortages – otherwise the smell, you know, could be quite frightful or lice might happen – but really it’s a small price to pay, really it is, in order to make a little child happy. Soon I hear the school will be found a new building, somewhere reachable so that Mrs Dingwall can walk her there, and she will no longer have to rely on myself to lend her such books as are suitable. But again, as I say, that is surely a small price to pay to make a little child’s life better, really it is. And I know that.’
After one or another variation of this speech, Mrs Eglantine would pat Bobbie on the head and allow one of their many hostesses to give the ‘poor child’ a ‘little treat’ in the shape of a piece of Melba toast with a smear of much-revered W.I. jam on it.
It did not take long for Bobbie to appreciate life as seen through the eyes of a charlady’s child. And after only a very few weeks she found she no longer resented Mrs Eglantine’s insistence on taking her to those affluent houses in Mellaston, houses which, it seemed to Bobbie, appealed as strangely decorous after the eccentricities of the old rectory. It was as if everyone they visited was determined that nothing of the old world would change, as if the hands of their grandfather clocks had, by common consent, been set to stay at the same time of 1920. A time of flappers and cloche hats, of new slang, and left-over gaiety, of mad jazz patterns, and Parisian clowns, of love left too late, or arrived at too soon.
And so it was that in the many corners of the many drawing rooms they visited gramophones stood with handles unturned, the records in their paper sleeves in serried ranks beside them, and, like party dresses suspended from hangers in otherwise empty cupboards
, Bobbie saw that they were now, without any doubt, sad tokens of a life that they were all pretending might come back, just as they were pretending that the dresses would be worn again, the rugs rolled back and the records played again, that perhaps if the ladies of Mellaston hung on to their hairstyles of former years, to the same vibrant colour of lipstick and the same slang, they might be able to will those days to return, and everything would be all right again.
Such was not the case with the Dingwalls at Rosebank. Mr Dingwall could not wait for the war to be over so that he could ‘bring about a new order’. He wanted to lick Hitler, of course, and said so many times when he came back from the pub, but most of all he wanted to lick the people who kicked people like him about.
Whenever he declared his intention to do this Mrs Dingwall would wink down at Bobbie, then lick her index finger and point it in the air and say, ‘I wonder which way the wind is coming from today?’
Mr Dingwall was a very small man, as small as Mrs Dingwall, which in a way was just as well since Rosebank had less space than half a cottage. Bobbie slept in the attic, what Mrs Eglantine – when she once visited Mrs Dingwall for a few minutes to make sure that she had delivered the jam to the WI – called a ‘boxroom’ and, having stared up the wobbly ladder for a moment, immediately declared to be ‘very cosy’.
Mrs Eglantine was not entirely wrong. Bobbie’s boxroom in the eaves of the semi-detached house was cosy to the point of roasting in summer, while in winter it was freezing and damp. The water tank opposite her bed leaked, and sometimes when Mr Dingwall climbed up the rickety ladder to find out why there was not enough water coming through to the kitchen he would fish out a dead rat from its murky depths, or on other occasions a drowned pigeon which had been causing the blockage.
Bobbie would never forget winter at Rosebank. How she would fix her mind on the cleanliness and warmth of Grass Mead. How she would look forward to that moment when she followed Mrs Dingwall through the tradesmen’s side gate and round to the back door, how the Aga felt when she put her small, frozen hands on its smooth exterior, how her hands tingled and pained until at last warmth returned and she was once more able to pick up a bucket or hold a duster in the normal way.
Mrs Dingwall’s hands were evidence of the harshness of her life. They felt, to Bobbie anyway, like sandpaper, as if they could usefully rub down the outsides of cupboards, taking off the old paint, preparing the wood for fresh. The state of Mrs Dingwall’s hands started to obsess her guest. Why they were like that was evident: so much scrubbing with soap and ammonia, so much wringing of cloths and clothes, so much taking down and putting back again, water for rinsing, water for emptying, hot water, cold water, icy water, dirty water, water in cans, water in buckets, water poured into baths to make them hotter, water poured into old-fashioned jugs set about bedrooms in old-fashioned hand basins. Soft though water was it had made Mrs Dingwall’s hands as harsh as Mrs Eglantine’s voice.
After only a few weeks at Rosebank the state of Bobbie’s own hands too started to become an obsession with her. She would wake in the night and place them against her face, not just to warm them, but to reassure herself that they were still as soft as when she had gone to bed. Sometimes when Mrs Eglantine was sitting at her dressing table putting on her moisturizing cream she would turn to Bobbie and rub some excess into the child’s hands, an act of such unexpected kindness that Bobbie would feel like putting her arms round her neck and hugging her – not that she would dare to do such a thing.
‘Bobbie has learnt to know her place in this life,’ Mrs Eglantine would purr on their rounds. ‘One day she will make someone a nice personal maid, or some such. Indeed, I shall miss her when she goes to school, when the school re-opens.’
Just that word school struck terror into Bobbie’s heart. She had already been to school and she knew it to be a place of harsh beatings and children crying at night, sometimes all night. She hoped she might die before that day of returning to school arrived; and sometimes, during her first months under the eaves at Rosebank, when a rat ran across her face, or she could hear Mr Dingwall shouting at Mrs Dingwall and making her cry quite horribly, when her chilblained hands were cracked and bleeding from the cold and she could not even accompany Mrs Dingwall to Grass Mead because her shoes were at the mend, and she now had only one pair, she found herself lying in the upstairs loft of that cramped little half-house longing with all her might for death.
During that terrible winter with the Dingwalls, when there were so many shortages, and Mrs Eglantine was forever complaining about there being no stockings or lipstick, or Mr Eglantine came back from London having spent all night in an air raid shelter, Bobbie noticed that the Eglantines were quite able to ignore her. Even though she would sometimes take a long time to shuffle past one of them, a duster in her hand, a pair of mittens exposing her unfortunate fingers, the laces of her new secondhand shoes missing, they still did not appear to notice her. Even when they did, their concerns being quite other they only glanced at her briefly, and then would merely carry on, happy that Bobbie was busy with their dusting, and that despite the war they could be secure in the knowledge that at least Mrs Dingwall was attempting to keep up their pre-war standards of housekeeping.
And yet Mrs Eglantine must have noticed something, some loss of colour whenever she mentioned that ‘Roberta will be going to school soon’, because she said one day, stopping the small girl in the middle of polishing what seemed to be an endless array of fish forks and knives, ‘I do think that it would be nice if you went to the rectory for Miranda’s birthday tea party, don’t you, Roberta? They asked if you might, when I visited them, only the other day. We might find out where they intend Miranda to go to school, and you might be able to go together, to the same place. I hear there is one for young girls opening up quite soon, in the cellars of the George and Dragon in the High Street. At least that is the rumour.’
Bobbie looked up at Mrs Eglantine, hope bursting through the expression on her small face, and it was obvious to them both that at the mere mention of Miranda and the rectory, it was as if Mrs Eglantine had held out a piece of hot buttery toast to a starving child.
‘A tea party? You’ve been asked to a tea party at the rectory?’
Mrs Dingwall looked across at Bobbie. She could not look down at her, since she was hardly taller than a child herself. She put a small, brown hand to her throat and eased the collar around her neck as if the freezing cold of her little kitchen with its uneven floor had suddenly grown to tropical temperatures.
‘Well, Roberta, we had better put your hair in papers tonight, ’adn’t we, eh?’
Bobbie looked at her, startled. She did not know what was meant by putting her hair in ‘papers’, but a few minutes later she did, and after an uncomfortable night spent lying against the wretched twists she went downstairs to have them taken out.
As soon as Mr Dingwall saw her, coming in from the garden still doing up his trousers, he started to laugh. Since he had not yet put in his teeth to eat his breakfast, it was not a nice sight. Bobbie coloured scarlet when she saw the reason why he was laughing. The mirror in their small front room showed Bobbie just what she looked like. No wonder Mr Dingwall had laughed. Her hair stood out in a terrible bush of ringlets. Standing on a small leather stool Bobbie saw quite clearly that she didn’t just look plain now – she looked worse. She looked stupid.
‘What you done to her, Dolly?’ Bobbie heard him demanding. ‘She looks like an ’edgehog. She looks like Milly Molly Mandy. She don’t look like herself. She looks like a comedian’s joke, like something on the wireless.’
But Mrs Dingwall was proud of the way Bobbie’s hair looked, so it stayed the way it was. Back in London, where both the Dingwalls came from, a girl could never go to a party without her hair in ringlets, Mrs Dingwall told Bobbie as she dressed her in an old party frock that had once belonged to the Dingwalls’ daughter – ‘rest her’.
They walked through Mellaston that afternoon, but instead of stopping a
t Grass Mead and turning up the side to the tradesmen’s entrance, they walked on to the outskirts of the town, and on up the narrow country road to the old rectory. This time Bobbie and Mrs Dingwall did not head up the side of the house to another entrance but walked up the old drive to the front door, and Bobbie found that she was in such a state of anxiety and excitement that she quite thought that she was going to be sick.
Using a strange sort of voice that Bobbie had never heard her attempt before, Mrs Dingwall announced, ‘Roberta Murray come for the party,’ in proud tones to a woman Bobbie did not recognize.
Bobbie obediently followed the primly dressed and hatted Mrs Dingwall through the familiar front door and into the hall, after which Mrs Dingwall made a strange little movement, a sort of feint, and whispered, ‘See you later, dear. I’ll come to the front door again, mind, so you’ll be fetched same as how the rest of them are fetched, don’t you worry.’
For a few seconds Bobbie looked up and around her. She could hardly believe it. She was home once more, back at the rectory at last. And for some few seconds she breathed in that special smell she associated with that dear house, the smell of wood smoke and lavender dried and placed in bowls, and she saw that the stairs ahead of her were still shallow and of polished wood, and there was the sound of a piano playing, and laughter.
And of a sudden there were Aunt Sophie and Aunt Prudence and they were both staring at Bobbie from the dining room door. There was a momentary pause, as she peered up at them through her ringlets, while they took in her secondhand dress of brightest pink and her angora wrap-over cardigan of brightest green and her ballet shoes, all of which had once belonged to Mrs Dingwall’s late daughter. Bobbie smiled nervously and over-brightly up at them.
The Blue Note Page 5