On Tuesdays and Thursdays they were tested on the catechism by the curate, who stood in front of the assembled school and asked, ‘What is your name?’ All of them called out their names. ‘Who gave you this name?’ The answering singsong chant was My godfathers and godmothers in my baptism; wherein I was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Doreen was an authority on God. She said, ‘Your Mam’s name was Stanway before she got married. How can you be called Lily Stanway?’
Lily explained. ‘My dad, Tommy Stanway, was Mam’s first cousin. That’s why. I’m Lily after my dad‘s mother.’
On a higher plane than the rest were three children from the big houses in Tytherington, about a mile from Beech Lane. They were spoken of at school as the Posh Girls and were brought to school and collected and never played in the street outside the school yard before the bell went. They stood with their mothers or grandmothers outside the high gate, speaking in soft voices.
Lily saw their expensive clothes; the coats of Harris Tweed, soft kid boots and tailored dresses and wondered why they were there at all. They could have gone to St Bride’s, the paying school.
Mam said that they came to Beech Lane because the standard of teaching at their little Church of England school was second to none. She said that the girls’ parents were middle class intellectuals. Mam said over and over that she and Lily belonged to the millowning class and the people they met in Macclesfield were their inferiors; even the jumped-up nobodies from the big houses. But that did not stop her putting on her best voice when she spoke to these nobodies, Lily noticed. And to the delight of Mam and the fury of Doreen, Lily was the only girl from school who was ever invited to tea at the Posh Girls’ houses. But though she was desperate for a friend of her own, Lily wanted one she could tuck arms and play with, all easy after school, and she was sure it was not for friendship she’d been invited.
She wanted to run free and play wild climbing and running games in their gardens, but their mothers insisted on brainteasing games like the ‘problems’ they had at school. Lily wondered if they did it to try to catch her out so their girls would win. The mothers did not get angry when their daughters lost, but they would say, ‘Ask Lily to tell you how she got the answer so quickly, darling.’ It was condescending, the way their mothers spoke to her through their daughters. ‘Thank dear Lily for the lovely flowers her mummy sent, will you, darling?’ they‘d say. Or, ‘Shall we thank Lily for coming? Ask her to come again?’
Lily was jealous; jealous of their warm, comfortable homes, big strong toys, plentiful good food and doting mothers who didn’t drink port wine or sherry every day. But worst of all, she knew an empty aching inside when she saw those girls with their daddies. These daddies read to them at night and sat on the side of their beds, telling them what was good and right and fair. Lily wanted her own dad; a dad to comfort her and tell her all was well and what was good and right and fair.
When they asked, and they always did, about her parents, Lily said, ‘Mother is a tailoress,’ as Mam had told her to. But Mam, Nanna and Grandpa would be shocked to know that she told lies. She had promoted her father from Private Stanway to Colonel. Colonel was high up. That was what Mr Hammond had been in the Great War.
‘My daddy was a colonel,’ she’d say. ‘Colonel Tommy Stanway.’ It was not such a whopper, because, if her father had lived, that was what he’d have been – a handsome, kindly, doting colonel who loved her and Mam.
Mam was secretive and refused to talk about Lily’s dad. She would talk about ‘the memory of my dear, departed husband’ when she needed to freeze somebody off, but Lily knew better than to pester her. All Mam would say was that if she were married to him now they would not be living in Jordangate, worrying about who said what to whom and where, wondering where the next halfpenny would come from. They would have a bungalow. They would be middle class, and Mam would be in the Mothers’ Union.
Mam knew about class – who’d come down in the world and who’d gone up, for never was there a town with so much moving up and down a place or two. You could have a foot on the slippery slope and a reputation to match. Mam knew where they all came from. She knew where everyone stood. Standing and place depended on keeping your good name, making sure you were not the subject of gossip. Your place might change, but class was obvious and unchanging in Mam’s eyes and was not demonstrated by money or morals or where you lived. ‘You can always tell a lady by her clothes and her voice,’ she said.
If clothes were the criterion then Mam fitted the part of a lady and Lily that of a lady’s daughter. Mam made their clothes from the best materials. She put fur collars on her winter coats, wore expensive shoes to match her outfits and bought the smartest and best of the deep cloche hats that so suited her.
If voice were the deciding factor in placing your class, then Mam was not on such safe ground. Mam had two voices. One was the good English she had learned to speak at Grandpa’s knee. This voice was used for the high-class clients she called real ladies, who came from far away for their dresses. The other voice, strong with the Macclesfield dialect, was used for chatting with local customers to put them at their ease and loosen their tongues.
Mam alternated the accents easily. She also had a third way of speaking, overlaying the accents with a tone that was husky yet girlish, and this special voice was used when any of the three men she was on first-name terms with came to the house.
Mr Hammond called to see Mam every week. He was a director of the bank his father had built and, though he went daily to Hammond Silks, on Fridays he spent a half-day at the bank before calling in at Elsie Stanway’s at three o’clock.
Mam did not have a bank account but she would give cash to Mr Hammond when she had a large bill or suppliers to pay. Mr Hammond made the cheques out for her. ‘It’s common practice,’ she said. ‘That’s why John comes on Fridays. In case I need a cheque making out.’
Lily never saw money changing hands but every Friday afternoon when she came in from school, Mr Hammond, in his morning suit, was sitting in the front shop on a bentwood chair, leaning an elbow on the counter, gazing into Mam’s sherry-flushed face as if she were an angel.
Lily loved Mr Hammond, who always touched her arm and patted her gently on the head and asked what she’d been doing since last time. He asked if she were top of the class and spoke in a sad voice about Magnus whose haemophilia was getting worse. Lily knew this. She saw Magnus and Sylvia every Saturday when she stayed at Nanna’s. She and Magnus played house when he was well. When he was in bed Lily read books, recited and sang to him to take his mind off his pain. Magnus spent months on end in bed after some minor injury caused bleeding into his hips, knees and ankles.
For Mr Hammond Mam used her best voice. She encouraged Lily to copy her because it was only through ‘talking nice’ and keeping well-in with a better-off class of person that she’d be ready for the day they would ‘get out of it’. Lily believed that this was why they never had the walls papered or the house painted. They would be ‘getting out of it’ any day.
The second man who called on them, Lily hated. His name was Howard Willey-Leigh. He had a factory in Manchester and Mam bought fancy goods, ribbons, trimmings and cravats from him. He was tall and thin and, at forty-four, very old. He acted like a lord, boasting of his big house in Southport, the seaside town where rich Liverpool ship owners lived. He lamented that he’d been done out of an inheritance and should have been a sir. His mother’s maiden name was Willey and he had added the hyphen himself to join her name to his own.
Lily once said, ‘I wouldn’t boast about that! He’s showing off! Fancy pretending to be someone! Fancy giving yourself a double-barrelled name, specially with a middle name like Willey!’
Mam flared. ‘Never be rude to my friends! Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ Lily said meekly, but she would only call him Mr Leigh.
Mam, putting it on like mad, made the name Harold sound like ‘Hah-d�
�� and this affectation annoyed Lily so much that she’d deliberately drop her aitches to deter him from coming or cause him to refuse Mam’s invitation to ‘Have a seat and take a cup of tea with me, Hah-d.’
She couldn’t abide the way Mam behaved for Mr Leigh, looking out for the black Lanchester, painting her mouth like a fast woman, pursing her lips, primping in the glass, leaning over the counter until you could peer down the V of her blouse into the shadows. Mam would gaze up at him, licking her lips, laughing softly like a young girl at his every word.
Mam said he was handsome but Lily thought he was ugly. His eyes drooped at the outside corners. He had crowded teeth and one of his side teeth was gold that glinted and flashed. His dyed black hair was plastered slick with brilliantine that smelled sickly sweet and left comb marks like channels across his head.
Mam did not order much from him, but he spoke in an over-familiar way about ‘my best customer’, saying things like, ‘Good little business, this. You must be rolling in money.’ What Lily hated most was when, behind Mam’s back, he’d catch her eye, lift his eyebrows, wink and bare his teeth in a flashing smile. It was a little thing, but she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t tell Mam.
Mr Leigh was ten years older than Mam and unhappily married to a very old invalid lady. He was childless and Lily was afraid of being left alone with him because of what happened when she was nine.
She was recovering from mumps and longing for an orange once the swelling went down on her neck. She had not been able to swallow proper food for a week and Mam, worried that she might get thinner, said. ‘Will you be all right if I run down to Leadbetter’s for oranges?’
‘I’ll sit in the shop and watch through the window,’ Lily said.
Mam wrapped her in a blanket and sat her in the wooden armchair placed near the shop window, where, with the sun streaming through the lace curtain, Lily could watch the activity of Jordangate. Mam went to the door, saying, ‘If Hah-d comes you’d best let him in. Nobody else, mind.’
Mam had been gone seconds when the Lanchester drew up. Mr Leigh tried the door. Lily got up and unfastened the catch. ‘You are looking better,’ he said, and his artificial manner made her flesh creep. ‘Where’s your mother?’
Lily never meant to encourage him. ‘She’s out. Shopping.’ She spoke in a rare, loud voice, then threw herself back into the chair.
He put down his cases, went to the door, opened it and peered up and down the street, looking for Mam. When he came back Lily spoke up again – why, she would never know. She was not bold. What made her say ‘Hurry up and shut the door, will you? My body’s shivering all over, waiting here’? She never said the word ‘body’ out loud. It was thought coarse.
He shut the door and slid the bolt. Then he drew the brown chenille curtain, hiding the sun, making the shop gloomy. Next he dragged the bentwood chair forward. His face was near. She clutched the chair and froze.
‘I’ll warm you up, my Jordangate Lily.’ He reached over and lifted her, blanket and all, on to his knee. She should have bitten him, fought or screamed, instead of sitting there frozen with fear as he held her tight with one hand and let the other slide about, under the flannelette nightdress, feeling her bottom. Then he put cold, thin fingers between her legs, stroking, trying to move her thighs apart, hurting her with his knuckles and fingernails.
Why didn’t she kick or bite him? Why did she start crying instead of fighting back? At the sound of her cries he took his hands away, dumped her back on the chair and stood up. ‘Stop that noise! We don’t want your mother to find out what you asked me to do, do we?’
‘No,’ she cried. Why did he say she’d asked him to do it? She had not asked.
‘We don’t want your mother to know that you are an impudent little tease who asks men to do naughty things,’ he said. ‘We’ll keep this to ourselves. Shall we, Lily?’
‘Yes.’ She wouldn‘t tell a soul, she could assure him of that. She dared not tell Mam. She wanted him to go away, leave the house and never come back. And she wanted to do the trick of the mind, force herself to forget what had happened. It worked when she wanted to remember, so it would surely help her forget. Afterwards she flinched if he came near, but she pushed it to the back of her mind and later the memory became bound up with oranges, fevers and lack of assurance with men; so different from Mam.
Lily liked Mr Hammond and hated Mr Leigh, but she was full of admiration for Mam’s third man friend, Mr Chancellor. And it was clearly important to Mam that she shone for him, for Mr Chancellor owned their house and shop, the office next door and any number in Jordangate and Hibel Road. All his properties backed on to the yard and waste ground behind Pilkington Printers. He was a good landlord, always on hand, checking his properties, keeping his buildings in good order, having running water put in and real WCs in place of the earth closets that had to be shovelled on to muck carts by the night-soil men.
Mr Chancellor was clever, quick and restless, with hazel eyes that were full of laughter. Mam said he was unhappily married but he and his wife stayed together because of their son Ray, whom the sun shone out of.
Once, Lily said, ‘Is that why you call him Ray?’
‘What?’ said Mr Chancellor.
‘Your son. Ray? For the sun that shines out of him?’
He roared with laughter. ‘No,’ he said.
Mam said afterwards that she had been cheeky and she must never speak that way again to Mr Chancellor who was an important man in Macclesfield. He was well respected because he hated injustice and helped people. Mam also said that he was not only good-hearted and generous, he was astute. He bought and sold property. He had recently registered anonymously a trading company under which he could deal, buy property and lend money – as Mam put it, ‘without all the nosy-parkers in Macc knowing who’s behind it’.
Mr Chancellor’s brothers and his mother lived in his properties. He owned the Swan Hotel next door to the shop. He had started to buy public houses in good positions in the town. He put managers into them and when they were closed down by the licensing justices in Crewe – and this happened regularly to Macclesfield pubs – he got as much as nine hundred pounds in compensation. And he still owned the buildings, which he could rent out.
Lily promised never to be cheeky to him again, so the next time he came for the rent and asked, ‘How’s our Lil?’ she replied in a prim, well-mannered way, ‘Very well, thank you.’
He came back with one of his working-man sayings, ‘Good lad, little ’un!’ and biffed her affectionately on the cheek. He always spoke to her first, she noticed, before he went on to pass a private little joke with Mam who laughed merrily, forgetting her airs in his presence.
Lily wanted Mr Chancellor to like her and she thought he did because sometimes, when she was alone in the school holidays, he would drop by on half-closing Wednesday and ask why she was playing inside. Didn’t she have a friend?
‘No,’ Lily answered. ‘Only an enemy.’
‘An enemy? At your age?’ he said. ‘Who is it?’
‘Doreen Grimshaw.’
‘Our chief clerk’s daughter?’ and he roared with laughter again when she nodded. ‘Can’t have little girls with enemies!’
Every holiday Wednesday after that he gave her a silver sixpence for a bar of chocolate, a bag of toffee and an afternoon at the Picturedrome. Lily always sat in the front row and kept threepence change.
Lily noticed that Mam was quieter than normal when Mr Chancellor brought his wife to the shop, and that Mr Chancellor was not so funny when he escorted her. Perhaps that was because in Mam’s eyes Mrs Chancellor was a religious fanatic. Mam never went either to chapel or to church but Lily knew that secretly she’d like to be one of the select few who were in the Mothers’ Union.
Sarah Chancellor looked at her husband over breakfast and gave a little cough to get his attention. They sat far apart, one at each end of the oval dining table. Bessie, the maid, was at the sideboard, putting out the dish of scrambled eggs Frank
liked every morning. The girl was loitering, listening. Sarah did not want her to go rushing down to the kitchen, telling the staff that madam and the master had had ‘words’ again. The servants speculated on the state of their employers’ marriage, implying that the master must have lady friends because he had no need of his religious old wife. There was no other woman in Frank’s life, of course. He was not, like those in the lower classes, a demanding man. In a town like Macclesfield it would be impossible to keep infidelity, a natural source of gossip, a secret. There were no rumours, no scandals about the good name of Chancellor.
But here, in the house, the servants could see that he never came to her bed. A good man would have shared her bed without expecting favours, if only for appearances’ sake. And for the sake of their son who tried to make a joke of it, saying, ‘Why do you keep Dad out of your bed, Mother? I‘m beginning to think you don’t love him!’ She never refused Frank the right to share her bed. It was he who decided they should sleep apart. Frank had done well out of marriage.
He looked over the pink pages of the Financial Times. ‘Well?’
Sarah waited until the girl had gone before she spoke. ‘I hope you’ve remembered,’ she said. ‘It’s my birthday.’
‘Fifty.’ He smiled, then went serious again. ‘Many happy returns. I have sent you a card. The post hasn’t arrived.’
‘A card? Is that all?’ He had never bought her a present. He said she had everything she wanted, when in fact he had all he wanted. He had built up quite a little empire of property. The printworks had a factory manager. Frank’s work there only took up two full days of his week. And though he enjoyed his house and his way of life, he seldom spent an evening in her company. Sarah said, ‘Where are you off to tonight?’
‘Council meeting,’ he said. ‘Why?’
Frank was an alderman – a council legislator – and if he continued the way he was going, one day he’d be mayor and a justice of the peace. She said, ‘I want you here tonight. I’m having a dinner party …’
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