Hettie of Hope Street

by Groves, Annie

  ‘Why? I have paid for my lessons! Why shouldn’t I learn to fly, just because I’m a girl?’ Polly demanded passionately. ‘Please don’t take me back yet, John. I’ve been longing to fly so much. Oh, look down there, at the river. How pretty it looks. You know, when I was a little girl I used to try to imagine how it would feel to be a bird and to be free like this, and now I am. I never, ever want to go down…’

  It was impossible for him not to be infected by her enthusiasm, John admitted, as she rattled off question after question, pausing only to draw breath and to say over and over again how much she was enjoying herself.

  In the end, John kept the little aircraft up for almost a full hour, telling himself that, since she had paid for his time, he owed her something. It would have been fun teaching her, he acknowledged reluctantly, if only because her enthusiasm and excitement so exactly mirrored his own. But of course he could do no such thing, since Alfred had expressly forbidden it.

  ‘Oh, we can’t be going down so soon,’ he heard her objecting as she realised what he was doing.

  ‘We’ve been flying for over an hour,’ he pointed out before warning her: ‘And remember when we do land that you are supposed to be a young man.’

  ‘Of course I will,’ she assured him.

  But ten minutes later after they had landed and were out of the plane it seemed she had completely forgotten his warning. She rushed up to him and, in full view of the mechanics, hugged him fiercely and kissed him on the cheek, exclaiming giddily, ‘I am so very, very happy. When can we go up again, John? And this time, you must really teach me something…’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ John began firmly as he removed her arms from round his neck.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why, Lady Polly. Your brother has already said that he does not wish you to have lessons.’

  ‘Oh stuff! And don’t call me Lady Polly,’ she corrected him with a small pout. ‘I will not be called Lady Polly by you, John. It is far too formal when you are such a close family friend.’

  John could feel his face starting to burn. ‘I am working for your brother,’ he pointed out stiffly, ‘and not…’

  ‘Well, Alfie says you are the best flyer he has ever known. But you are his friend as well, John, and you must not think otherwise. He is always saying how much he respects you and what a grand fellow he thinks you…Oh, why must there still be this wretched ridiculous class thing, when it must be obvious to anyone with any sense that the war has changed everything. I had thought you a modern man, John, and above all that silly mediaeval forelock-tugging, I-knows-me-place nonsense.’

  ‘If I didn’t know my place, Lady Polly, I can assure you that there are plenty of people who would very quickly show me what it is, aye, and tek pleasure in doing so an’ all,’ John returned curtly, deliberately emphasising his northern accent.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘No reason,’ John told her quickly, mentally cursing himself for betraying how much he resented the arrogant and patronising manner of some of Alfred’s friends and fellow club members.

  ‘You won’t snitch on me to Alfie, will you, John?’ Polly wheedled at him.

  ‘This mustn’t happen again,’ was all John felt he could say to her.

  But it seemed it was enough because she smiled happily at him and exclaimed, ‘I am so pleased you have accepted Alfie’s invitation to be our guest over Christmas. We are going to have such fun. Do you like charades, John? I do, and sardines, too, and we shall have dancing as well. And I warn you that next time I come for my lesson I shall expect you to teach me properly.’

  Her moods were as mercurial as an April day, John acknowledged wryly as he watched her speed off to her car. But it was, of course, his duty to inform Alfred of what she had done, a duty he could not and would not seek to avoid. He couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment at the prospect of not teaching Polly, though.

  ‘Going home?’

  ‘Eddie!’ Hettie exclaimed wearily, nodding her head and pushing the heavy weight of her hair back off her face as she looked up at him.

  ‘Fancy going for a cup of tea first?’ he asked her.

  Hettie hesitated and then nodded her head again.

  ‘And then Madame Cecile said that I was an imbecile.’ Tears welled up in Hettie’s eyes as she recalled her earlier humiliation. ‘I didn’t know that Princess Mimi had a solo ballet spot. It wasn’t marked on the script I was given…’

  ‘Poor you,’ Eddie sympathised. ‘Of course, Faye is pretty hot on ballet.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t tell me that,’ Hettie begged him wretchedly. She hardly knew Eddie really, but he was so easy to talk to and so understanding, and she was desperately in need of a sympathetic ear right now.

  ‘Madame Cecile has said that I am to have two extra hours of ballet practice every day.’ She gave a small shudder. ‘And I am frightened that if she complains to Mr Dalhousie about me he will wish that he had not given me the part.’

  ‘Well, she won’t be able to complain to him at the moment,’ Eddie assured her, ‘because he has gone to London, supposedly to sort out some problem with the theatre he has hired for the show. But of course we all know that in reality he has gone to see his girlfriend.’

  ‘His girlfriend? But I thought he was married?’ Hettie said innocently.

  Eddie gave a careless shrug. ‘He is. Perhaps I should have said that he has gone to London to see the mistress he keeps there,’ he corrected himself. When he saw Hettie’s expression he shook his head. ‘He’s a very rich man, Hettie, and rich men live by different rules from the rest of us.’

  ‘Well, if that’s what being rich means, then I’m glad that I’m not,’ Hettie told him robustly. She had grown up amongst ordinary decent working folk, and she couldn’t help contrasting the happy loving marriages of Ellie and Gideon, and Connie and Harry, with the kind of marriage Jay Dalhousie and his wife obviously had, which in her opinion was no kind of marriage at all.

  ‘Rich men marry for sons to pass their riches on to,’ Eddie told her bluntly. ‘And then they look for their pleasure outside their marriages. You’ll find that out soon enough for yourself,’ he warned her. ‘Once we get to London you’ll be besieged by stage door Johnnies wanting to take you out to dinner.’

  ‘I shan’t go with them if they are married.’ She frowned as she saw Eddie trying to smother a yawn. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he agreed. ‘Tommy Harding the stage manager told us this morning that he wanted a new set designing for the first act, so I’ve spent all day painting scenery.’

  ‘Is it always like this?’ Hettie asked him. ‘Things going wrong, last-minute changes…’

  Eddie laughed. ‘This is nothing,’ he told her. ‘I worked on a new opera in Paris last year. It had eight different scenes and the director changed his mind about the stage sets for four of them two days before we opened.’

  ‘Paris,’ Hettie exclaimed, impressed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That must have been so exciting. When you were there did you…’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Eddie told her abruptly, signalling to the waitress to bring them the bill, his manner suddenly curt and cold.

  ‘’Ere, ’Ettie. It looks like you’ve got an admirer,’ Sukey Simmonds told her as they all huddled over the cups of tea she had just made them. ‘When we was out today, one of the boys said as how he’d noticed you at the theatre and was asking ever such a lot of questions about you, wasn’t he, Mary?’

  ‘I’ll say,’ Mary agreed readily.

  Hettie blushed and they all laughed, Jenny telling her teasingly that her ‘beau’ was in the orchestra and played the trumpet.

  ‘You should see the lips on ’im, ’Ettie. Bet he can give a girl a real smacker with lips like them.’

  ‘Oh, give over, Jenny,’ Babs protested amidst Hettie’s fiery blushes and the other girls’ gales of laughter.

  ‘Tek no notice, ’Ettie,’ Babs com
forted her. ‘Sukey is just teasing you. All the poor lad said was how he had noticed you, and thought as how pretty you are.’

  ‘The boys was saying as how we should all go out for a bicycle ride on our next half day,’ Jessie put in.

  ‘A bicycle ride? Me legs ache enough with all them high kicks we’re ’avin’ to do, without doing any bicycle riding, ta ever so much,’ Aggie protested.

  ‘It’s Jenny and Jessie’s birthday soon, so I reckon we should ’ave a bit of a party and invite the boys to join in,’ Mary announced.

  ‘A party? And how are we going to do that, Miss Clever Clogs?’ Babs demanded. ‘We can’t invite them back here. The minute the old battleaxe got word of anything like that, she’d turf us out and no mistake. And if you think I’m going to go round to their lodgings, you can think again. I’ve got me reputation to think about.’

  ‘Oh, hoighty toighty! It didn’t look much like you was worrying about your reputation when you was sparkin’ with that Stan this afternoon,’ Mary sniffed.

  ‘We could ask Jack and Sarah if we could use that room off the chop house dining room, perhaps,’ Aggie suggested, stepping in adroitly to avert a quarrel. ‘I remember as how Sarah was saying they was thinking of hiring it out for parties, like.’

  ‘’Ere, Aggie, that’s a brilliant idea,’ Sukey approved excitedly. ‘We could put on a bit o’ supper and mebbe we could ’ave some music so that we could dance. I could buy mesef a new frock, one of them flapper frocks that are all the rage…You know, I was feeling really miserable on account of us not being able to go home at Christmas because we’re in the panto, but now that we’ve met the boys, I reckon we’re going to have a really good time.’

  ‘You speak for yourself, Sukey Simmonds,’ Lizzie told her sharply. ‘But I’ll thank you to remember that we aren’t all boy mad.’

  ‘What’s up wi’ her?’ Sukey demanded, red-faced, as Lizzie slammed down her cup and stalked off to the other side of the room to stand with her back to them as she stared out of the window.

  ‘Lizzie’s got her ma and her sister to think of, Sukey,’ Babs reminded her.

  ‘Oh aye, I were forgetting about them,’ Sukey acknowledged immediately. ‘’Ere, Lizzie, don’t go off in a sulk like that,’ she called out. ‘I’m sorry if I put me foot in it. Be a good sport and come back.’

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Come on, ’Ettie, don’t let that old besom get you down,’ Babs coaxed her.

  ‘It’s no good. I just can’t do that solo dance,’ Hettie repeated wretchedly.

  They were in the dressing room getting ready for the first full dress rehearsal.

  ‘Five minutes, chorus girls,’ Tommy the stage manager called out, banging on the door.

  ‘Don’t think about it, just concentrate on your singing instead,’ Babs advised her.

  ‘I can’t even get that right,’ Hettie told her miserably. ‘Not since Mr Carlyle changed my songs to another key.’

  ‘Chorus on stage, please…’

  ‘Oh, Hettie,’ Babs sympathised, hugging her fiercely before turning to join the other girls as they hurried out of the room.

  At least Faye wouldn’t be here to witness her humiliation, Hettie reflected thankfully. The other girl had a streaming cold and had been instructed to stay away from the theatre for a few days, in case she passed it on to anyone else. There was another bang on the dressing room door.

  ‘Princess Mimi, five minutes.’

  This was it. Hettie felt sick with the knowledge that she was going to let everyone down. No matter how hard she tried to master the complicated ballet steps, every time she performed them for Madame Cecile it seemed she had forgotten something or done something wrong.

  ‘Eet ees impossible to choreograph a ballet for someone with so little skill. Thees is not a ballet any more.’

  ‘And I am not a ballerina,’ Hettie had struck back, overwhelmed by exhaustion and despair.

  ‘You theenk I do not know that?’ Madame Cecile had snapped, her small black eyes sharp with contempt. ‘You thump around like a sack of ze coals, ze audience will leave their seats in disgust when zey see you…’

  ‘Princess Mimi.’

  Hettie opened the door and hurried up the stairs towards the wings, to wait for her cue.

  The male lead was a famous singer who, rumour had it, their backer was paying a fortune to take the part. He had not deigned to attend previous rehearsals, so his understudy had had to stand in for him instead.

  When Hettie heard her cue, she had to hurry on to the stage where she had to make herself visible to the audience whilst the hero was not supposed to be aware of her presence as he sang of his desire to find true love with a girl who was not interested in his wealth or position. As soon as he had finished his solo, Hettie had to appear from the shadows so that he could see her, whereupon they were to share a duet.

  Hurrying now across the stage, Hettie realised that the male lead was not standing where he was supposed to be, so she had to change direction in order that she could end up facing him, which almost caused her to trip up on the hem of her over-long skirt.

  Their duet took the form of a question and answer dialogue, and Hettie’s heart bumped against her ribs the moment she heard the opening bars of her own part.

  She started to sing and then realised in shock that she was out of tune with the music, which suddenly seemed much faster than it should have been. She could see the male lead frowning at her as she hesitated and missed a note completely.

  Somehow she managed to get through the duet, although her face was burning with shame by the time she reached its end. And then, as if that hadn’t been bad enough, in her rush to leave the stage she caught her foot in the hem of her costume and almost stumbled.

  As soon as they were in the wings, the male lead began demanding loudly to see the director, and Hettie knew that he must be complaining about her performance.

  Her ballet solo was in the second half and, although she did her best to struggle through it, once again the music seemed different and she was out of time so badly that she could hear the whispers rustling from the wings where the chorus was watching her.

  She was less than halfway through it when Madame Cecile herself burst onto the stage in a fury, sceaming at Hettie, ‘You are useless, useless!’

  ‘What the devil is going on?’

  Everyone, including Madame Cecile, froze as Jay Dalhousie’s voice rang out from the darkness of the stalls.

  ‘Stay where you are all of you,’ he commanded as he strode towards them, past the orchestra and then leaping nimbly on to the stage, followed by an awkward-looking young man whom Hettie didn’t recognise.

  Eddie had told Hettie that Jay wasn’t expected to return to Liverpool until after Christmas and it was obvious that both the director and Madame were shocked by his presence.

  ‘I’m afraid that Miss Walker is not quite perfect in her role as yet, Jay,’ Hettie heard Mr Carlyle explaining unctuously. ‘You see, she has no ballet training, unfortunately…’

  ‘Why would she damn well need any?’

  There was a sharp, expectant pause.

  ‘The part she is playing includes a solo ballet spot,’ the director said smoothly.

  ‘Since when? I don’t remember any solo ballet spot.’

  Hettie watched as Madame and the director exchanged brief glances.

  ‘Well, no, but we did agree that we wanted to emulate the success of Broadway, and…’

  ‘My pupil Faye is an excellent ballet dancer,’ Madame joined in fiercely. ‘But zees…nothing…she cannot dance at all.’

  ‘I want to see both of you in my office right now,’ Jay told them curtly, pausing as the young man said something to him. ‘Get the conductor up here,’ he instructed Eddie who was standing a few feet away.

  The orchestra conductor was a fierce-looking Italian with a fiery temper, and Hettie shrank back a little as he hurried on to the stage, baton in hand.

>   ‘Our composer wants to know how come you’ve messed up his score?’ Jay asked him bluntly, indicating the young man at his side.

  ‘I change the key and the pace of the music because I am told to do so, by the director,’ the conductor explained immediately. ‘I tell him that it will not work and that the girl has a perfect voice for the score as it is written, but he will not listen. He insists the composer has instructed him to change the tempo and the key.’

  ‘Is that right, Archie?’ Jay asked the composer.

  Hettie could see the young man’s Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat as he cleared it and said nervously, ‘No, it is not.’

  The whole theatre was agog with what had happened. No one had ever seen or heard of anything like it before.

  ‘Never seen a dress rehearsal stopped right in the middle and the director hauled off to explain himself,’ Eddie confirmed later, shaking his head.

  The boys had urged Babs and the girls to join them for tea whilst they waited to see what was going to happen, and now they were all speculating excitedly about what had taken place.

  ‘You know what I think, ’Ettie,’ Lizzie declared importantly. ‘I think that his nibs and Madame were trying to make you look bad so that they could get your part off you to give back to Faye.’

  ‘Lizzie, you’re right,’ Aggie agreed, nodding her head vehemently.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hettie protested.

  ‘Well I do. Mean conniving so and so’s,’ Babs declared forthrightly. ‘I just hope they get a taste of their own medicine.’

  ‘Aye, well if they do, we are going to be left without a choreographer and a director,’ Mary pointed out.

  ‘Which means that we could be left without a show,’ Eddie added.

  They all looked at one another worriedly.

  ‘But we’re supposed to be leaving for London after Christmas.’

  The gossip and speculation of the previous half hour gave way to anxiety and gloom. Maybe they would all be out of a job in a few hours’ time.