‘I can’t stop, love,’ he said. ‘I’ve a lot of work to do–’
He had not dressed to please her. ‘This afternoon as well?’
‘Yes. I’m going down to the PA.’
‘The where?’
‘Public Assistance. There’s a man in charge who‘s going power-crazy, refusing genuine claims. You’d think it was his money.’
Elsie hadn’t much time for others’ hard-luck stories. She said, ‘Friday then. It’s our Lil’s birthday.’ Lily had drawn and coloured a few invitation cards. She had given one to Frank and asked him to come to tea on her eleventh birthday, which fell on the Friday after Easter, rent-collecting day. Frank liked to take Ray rent-collecting with him, when the boy was at home. Lily had written on his card, ‘You can bring Ray’. Lily had never met Ray but she had seen him, out with his mother or father.
Frank said, ‘I’ve told you before. We can’t let them grow up together as we did. They might fall in love.’
‘That’s no excuse.’ Sometimes she wanted to shake him and tell him that there was not a drop of Chancellor blood in Ray, but she would not. She was hurt. And so would Lily be. Frank was doing well. He was an important man in the town. The way he was going on he’d soon be mayor and then he’d have even less time to himself. He was leaving her behind. She said, ‘Isn’t our Lil good enough? Is your Ray so grand he can’t take a bite on Lily’s birthday?’
His expression hardened. He said, ‘Bolt the door. Come in the back. We have to talk.’
He went ahead and, nervous because she had never seen him so determined, she pulled the bolt on the door and followed him to the kitchen where he stood with his back to the fire. She would try to take control. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like for me,’ he said quietly. ‘The big sorrow in my life is that I can’t tell our Lil that I’m her father. I want to tell her but I know you’re right when you say we can’t burden my precious lass with our secrets. I don’t have the same feelings for Ray. You have to let a boy go. I have to protect Lily and yet I must stand back and have no say …’
‘Ha!’ she interrupted. So that was what he wanted. He wanted to tell Lily he was her father. They had made a pact from the start that neither of them would tell Lily unless the other agreed. Now he wanted to tell so he and Lily could have a cosy little secret. Where would that leave her, Elsie? On the losing side, that’s where.
She gave a bitter laugh and her eyes flashed. ‘I am sorry! It must be dreadful for you. Free to come and go – all the nice bits. “Here’s sixpence. Spend it! Eeh! What a clever girl you are …” Let me tell you something now. Lily’s better off believing she has a dead father than thinking she’s our shameful secret. Why would she want to be the daughter of an adulterer?’
‘Stop!’ He was furious. ‘I have no shame about my precious. I love that child. I’m proud of her.’
‘You are not! When I told you she was going wild-shouting across the street in a loud, common way, what did you say?’
‘When was this?’
‘Last week she had a street fight. With fists. And swearing. Minnie Grimshaw said Lily attacked Doreen. The head teacher came here.’
He was shocked. ‘l can’t have that.’
‘Exactly. You are ashamed of her! You say, “Send her to elocution. Send her for music lessons, dancing lessons! Take her away from Beech Lane. Send her to St Bride’s!”’
He snapped. ‘Well! Do it.’
‘And how d’you think I feel when your precious lass calls the daughters of jumped-up nobodies, the Posh Girls? Eh? Your precious lass feels like their inferior. She didn’t give the Posh Girls invitations to her birthday party. She never asks them back here for tea. You don’t know what it’s like for me.’
He dropped into a chair, his face pale, anger gone. ‘I know what it’s like for her, poor child. I know how it feels to be the odd one out.’
She said, ‘She’s envious of them. And I don’t know why.’
He said, ‘Take her away from there. Please. Send her to St Bride’s. I don’t want her to suffer as I did.’
‘I can’t. She knows I don’t have enough money.’
‘I’ll pay. You know that.’
‘And who do I say is paying? What do I tell my mother? My father?’
‘What more can I do?’
‘You can come to tea on her birthday. You and your Ray. It’s only an hour of your valuable time.’
He stood up. His face was set, determined. ‘No. No. No.’
This was an impasse. He would not change his mind. Elsie said, ‘Why?’
‘How can I explain to Ray? And what’s Ray going to say to his mother, eh? “Dad took me to a child’s tea party?”’
‘What do you tell Sarah? How do you explain three nights a week and Wednesday afternoons?’
‘I tell Sarah nothing. She thinks I spend every night on my properties or at council meetings.’
‘Then it’s high time she woke up! Learned the truth!’ Her face was red. His was white as they faced one another. She wanted to apologise but she would not.
The seconds ticked by. Then he relaxed. ‘You aren’t going to come clean. Nor am I,’ he said. ‘Come upstairs.’
She could not resist. He put out a hand to her and she took it and followed him to the top floor where, on her rumpled, unmade bed, he made love to her so tenderly, so sweetly, with such protestations of undying love that all her doubts were dismissed from her mind as unworthy jealousy.
Afterwards he stroked her hair and, smiling, sang to her ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’ until she told him to stop teasing. He said, ‘You didn’t mean it did you – that our Lil’s better off not knowing I’m her father?’
Elsie had him back though she could not explain how it had come about. So she leaned over and kissed him on the ear and tried to sound deep and mysterious. ‘She can’t be told,’ she said. ‘But it’s a wise child that knows its own father.’ Then, because he often quoted him, she smiled at Frank and said, ‘Shakespeare.’
‘Robert Greene,’ Frank said. ‘Fifteen eighty-nine. Menaphon.’ There was a boyish, eager look in his eye. ‘Greene lived at the same time as Shakespeare. But it was Will who paraphrased Greene when he wrote, in The Merchant of Venice, “It’s a wise father that knows his own child.”’ Frank got up from the bed and fished for pencil and notebook in his jacket pocket. Then he came back and said, as he wrote it for her, ‘“Wise are the Children in these dayes that know their owne fathers, especially if they be begotten in Dogge daies when their mothers are frantick with love …”’ He tore out the page and handed it to her. Elsie took it, read, looked up and said, ‘What are dog days?’
He put an arm about her bare shoulders and brushed his mouth against her cheek. ‘They are the long, hot days of summer. When the dog-star rises before the July dawn.’
Elsie turned her head so that he could kiss her mouth. ‘That’s how it was when our Lil …’
‘And you were frantic with love,’ he said, as she pulled him down on to the bed again.
Chapter Seven
Mam said, ‘You’re going to elocution lessons.’
‘Why?’ Lily suspected it was because she now spoke with two voices. Her school voice was loud, and heavily accented.
‘I want you to talk nicely. So you’ll marry well.’
‘Is that all it’s for? So I can marry someone posh?’ Lily was horrified at the thought. ‘I can speak properly when I want to.’
‘Nobody will marry a girl who yells and shouts in the street, Lil.’
‘When I marry, I’ll marry a good dad, I’m going to live in a big house in the hills, and have dozens of children. And I’m going to eat delicious food. Bacon and bananas. Every day.’
‘Then you will need to marry a rich man,’ said Mam.
‘No, Mam.’
But she had to go – and she hated elocution; the teacher standing at one end of her parlour listening as the other
girl and Lily recited by turns, ‘Be goo-ood, swee-eet ma-id. And le-et who wi-ll be clairvah!’ Every inflection was false and rehearsed and made a mockery of the poem. She did want to be a good, sweet maid but she did not want to speak that way.
‘Enunciate! Enunciate!’ the old spinster called out as Lily tried to speak deliberately and roundly. But at the end of the first term she vowed she would not go back. She discovered that Mam was at it again – paying for her lessons by sewing for the teacher. She had recently been shamed at the dancing class. The highlight of her week was Miss Sidebottom’s Saturday morning Ballroom, Ballet and Tap for Girls class. It cost sixpence for an hour of sheer delight, practising ballet positions and partnering one another in the waltz and two-step. Then half an hour of clattering tap-dancing, and before going home the session ended with the modern dances like the Charleston and the Black Bottom that churchmen were calling ‘a return to the jungle’.
On Saturday mornings all the little girls queued in the entryway of the big house on Roe Street where the class was held. Lily never spoke to anyone because she only knew the others by sight and they were all paired off. Once inside she would be in a lather of excitement; the very sight and smell of the dancing shoes in the changing room made her heart beat faster. Gold and silver kid pumps, satin ballet slippers and red leather tap shoes with red ribbon ties were set out in rows for the children, of whom she was one, who did not bring a shoe bag with their own dance shoes.
But first she had a palm-sweating charade to go through. The girls in front of her slapped down on the hall table their sixpenny pieces or six heavy pennies, and the lady pianist let them through. And Lily was not to put anything down because Mam ‘did a bit of sewing’ for Miss Sidebottom in place of payment. She would slide past the table with her head high, bright red with embarrassment, hoping nobody would see that she had no money. Then one day it was not the lady pianist at the table. When Lily reached her, the new woman demanded her name before shouting over her shoulder, so everyone could hear, ‘Is it Lily Stanway who doesn’t pay?’
After that, Mam said she would never embarrass her again, yet here she was making her go to elocution, up to her old tricks. Lily would tackle her. When she did, Mam turned the tables on her, saying, ‘You are always on the want. You want to learn everything that’s going. I want! I want! That’s all I hear.’
‘Like what? What do I ask for?’ She seldom asked for anything, knowing she wouldn’t get it.
‘Music lessons. Swimming lessons,’ Mam said. ‘Only last summer, all at once walking was not good enough. You wanted a bicycle. You begged me to buy you one.’
‘I was hoping. But I didn’t get one.’ In fact Lily prayed for one every night. Every morning she ran outside, first thing, looking down the entryway to see if God had left her bike.
Mam was sharp. ‘You’ll have to earn money then, for a bike.’
‘I wish I could.’ There was nothing she wanted more than to have enough money. ‘How can I?’
It was like a red rag to a bull, arguing with Mam. Anyone would think something else was wrong with Mam and she was taking it out on Lily. Mam said, ‘How? You’ve a cheek, our Lil! There are girls younger than you going out cleaning to fetch a bit of money into the house.’
Lily did not answer, and Mam went on, ‘The world’s going to the dogs. American money’s worthless. A stock-market crash on Wall Street. Mills closing. People with no work!’ She was red with shouting. ‘We’ll never get out of it at this rate! I work my fingers to the bone and you expect me to spend hard-earned money on bicycles and dancing lessons!’
Lily expected to feel the weight of Mam’s hand across her legs, but she did not flinch. ‘Why don’t you pay me for all the sewing I do?’ She spent hours at night, treadling the machine and threading needles for Mam, since the gaslight was bad for Mam’s eyes.
Mam’s hand came up. She was going to hit her. ‘I had to sew for your lessons! I’m not made of money. Don’t look like that!’
Love for Mam flew out of her mind and, just as she had been when she fought Doreen, she burned to get her own back. She thought of a clever, sarcastic answer, put her shoulders back and stared Mam out. Then, with a sneer on her face, in a loud, flat Macclesfield accent she said, ‘No money? How do you pay for yer booze at the Angel, then?’ She saw the shock in Mam’s eyes, but she did not stop. ‘If you don’t sew for booze, what do you do for it?’
There was a moment’s silence before Mam smacked her over the head, harder than she had ever done. Lily overbalanced and fell to the floor. ‘Don’t ever question your mother,’ Mam shouted. ‘If it was not for you, I’d have finished up a lady.’
Lily would not put up with another minute of bullying. Not from Doreen and not from Mam. A flaring, reckless urge, a ‘to hell with the consequences’ impulse would come again and again to plague her, but this was only the second time in her life it had happened and she had not yet learned to recognise the loss of self-control that could make her insides boil with fury.
As she scrambled to her feet, she saw the shock in Mam’s eyes and heard the stinging slap as she delivered it, right across Mam’s face. She loved her Mam more than anyone in the world – her own lovely, beautiful Mam. And she hit her hard and heard herself crying, ‘Don’t blame me for the way you’ve finished up! If you are a drunken fool it’s not my fault! I’ll never, never, never pick you up off the floor again! Next time you fall down drunk, you can stop where you lie!’
Mam’s blue eyes filled with tears but she made no retaliation. She went back into the shop, in silence.
Afterwards Lily was ashamed but could not say sorry. But she could pray that Mam had not turned against her for ever, and that Mam wouldn’t tell Nanna and Grandpa about it. She tried to make amends, cleaning the house from top to bottom, opening the windows to air the rooms, closing the doors when the rooms were done, then scrubbing the stairs until the varnish was all but gone.
And Mam told Nanna and Grandpa. She must have said not to say anything, but Lil saw the sad look on Grandpa’s face when he took her aside and in a voice deep with disappointment said, ‘It’s come to something, Lil. It’s come to something when a girl lifts her hand against her mother.’
Not until then had it occurred to Lily that Mam was Grandpa’s first concern. He was Mam’s father. Mam came first with him and always would. Lily hung her head, knowing in her heart that it was right that Grandpa was chiding her. He loved Mam best and Lily knew the awful emptiness of having no father to champion her.
A few days later Mam said, ‘If you want to earn a bit of money, why don’t you make up a few pairs of camiknickers? You can keep your profit once you have paid for the material.’
Lily thought for a minute. ‘What should I make them in? Celanese or silk?’ Celanese, a rayon material that was said to be doing the silk mills out of business, was all the rage. They printed it at Chancellor’s, tiny rosebuds on peach and pink and pale green. ‘Will you teach me?’
‘Yes, I’ll teach you to be a dressmaker, if you like.’
‘Will Mr Chancellor let me have a few yards of Celanese?’
Mam thought for a minute, then she laughed. ‘His father-in-law is dead. Frank’s in charge now. Yes. I’ll ask him. I am sure he’ll do it.’
He did. After he had marked up the rent book he gave Lily one of his affectionate taps on the face and said, ‘Well, our Lil! You are a resourceful young lass.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘Good lad, little ’un! Pay me when you’ve sold everything.’
Lily did not want him to say ‘Good lad, little ’un’ any longer. She kept her face straight. ‘I have two shillings,’ she said. Mam’s jaw dropped. Lily had been saving her milk halfpennies – hiding them behind a loose brick in the lavvy. ‘I’ll consider what you have.’ She might have been offering to buy one of his alehouses. ‘I can put down two shillings. For good faith.’
The camisole sets, in flimsier styles and materials than Mam’s, were gone within two weeks and Lily paid for the material and bo
ught, for two guineas, a lovely bicycle that was shiny black all over, with a carrier on the back and a deep basket in front. And not content with one success now that she could make a little money, from that day on she always had something for sale in the shop – a pair of camiknickers with matching shift, or a nightdress and peignoir. She would put them in the window when they were done – and there were hours of hand-sewn shell-edging in those sets – and within a week or two Mam would sell them. Mam kept a bit of money back, suggesting that they save it towards the day they could send her to St Bride’s. Lily snorted in derision. ‘I’m not going there! I love Beech Lane.’
Mr Hammond opened a savings account for her at his bank, and she gloated over the little red passbook. She was earning her own money at the age of eleven. It would be she who would save Mam and herself, get them ‘out of it’. And at last she could pay for piano lessons, which she took at Lindow on a Saturday morning.
It was late November. Country men were predicting that 1930 would be the coldest winter ever, and it was bitterly cold at the back end of the year. Doreen’s mother came for a fitting, and Doreen and Lily were sent outside to the back yard.
Lily was pleased with herself because Mr Chancellor had sent an invitation. She said, ‘I’ve been asked to the party at Chancellor’s.’
‘You’re going?’ Doreen said, incredulous. ‘It’s only for the workers’ children. Why have they asked you?’
The party was an annual affair. Every year there were photographs in the paper of a line of smiling, happy children clutching gifts.
‘Why shouldn‘t they?’ Lily said with a cocky air. It was the first time she had been invited.
Doreen said, ‘My dad’s the chief clerk. I go every year.’
‘WeIl?’ Lily tipped her head back and looked down her nose.
Doreen’s mouth was working itself into a twist, then holding. ‘You’ll have to sit with the orphans,’ she said. ‘On the bottom table.’
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