The Silversmith's Daughter

by Annie Murray

  ‘Bye, Den.’ She stood in the street as his khaki-clad back moved away. Little Den Poole from Pope Street. They’d known each other since Den was nine years old and she ten. Suddenly she found herself convulsing, and the tears ran down her cheeks.

  Eleven

  Margaret looked at Philip across the office table as they heard the front door of twenty-four Chain Street open and close with a bang followed by hurried footsteps along the passage to the staircase.

  Margaret frowned. It was a while since Daisy had come thundering into the house like that. In fact, she had been remarkably quiet lately. Miss Allen kept her eyes on her work as if there had been no sound, Edith smiled at Margaret and Philip raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Sounds as if someone’s had a bit of a difficult day,’ Edith said fondly.

  They had all grown used to Daisy slamming into the house either furious or elated while she was a student at the Vittoria Street School.

  ‘They made me draw portraits!’ Daisy had never seen the point of drawing people – she wanted to design beautiful things, not draw people. Why must they make her do all these pointless exercises?

  Or on other days, ‘They sent my bowl to Kensington – and I won first prize!’ or, ‘Mr Gaskin came into the class today and he spent ages looking at my designs – he said they were excellent . . . !’

  Mr Gaskin had picked Daisy out as a star pupil from the beginning.

  These days, however, she seemed to be even more up and down than usual. It was true things in general were so uncertain with the war on. But Margaret had noticed that Daisy had started coming back late, often did not want her dinner, saying she was not hungry. And precisely because of the war and all the wider concerns on everyone’s mind, this kind of moodiness and lack of consideration was especially exasperating to Margaret. She had been brought up to be much more self-controlled. Really, she thought, trying to quell her irritation, Daisy shouldn’t be storming about like that – our Lily doesn’t behave as badly and she’s only seven!

  Philip, still in his Holland overall from the workshop, was frowning over something at the desk with Mr Henshaw. Seeing that he was in no position to do anything, Margaret reached inside herself for an extra supply of patience. She loved Daisy like her own, but she really was the limit sometimes.

  ‘I’ll go up and see her.’ She touched her husband’s shoulder lightly as she passed him, and he gave her a distracted smile.

  In the passage she could hear sounds from the back room of Mrs Flett, who was giving John and Lily their tea. Margaret paused, brushing bits from the lap of her calf-length skirt. It was of a deep rust colour and the soft sateen material felt somehow comforting against her palm. She could hear Lily chattering to dear old Mrs Flett. Things sounded cheerful enough. She drew in a deep breath and went to face her less than harmonious stepdaughter.

  Two flights up, she peeped into Daisy’s workroom. No one was there, but the bedroom door was shut. She listened, expecting perhaps to hear a storm of tears from inside. But instead, there was an ominous silence. Margaret tapped on the door. There was no reply.

  ‘Daisy, dear?’ She found her heart was fluttering nervously. Daisy’s was a personality to be reckoned with. ‘May I come in?’

  She turned the handle and gently pushed the door open, thinking she might find Daisy sprawled dramatically across the eiderdown. Instead, the girl was sitting bolt upright on the edge of the bed, one leg crossed tensely over the other. In the afternoon light through the attic window, she looked arrestingly beautiful. Her head was in profile from where Margaret was standing, a strong, well-proportioned outline, her thick blonde hair fastened softly back from a middle parting and twisted low in her neck into a thick knot. She wore her blue work dress and brown shoes with stylish Cuban heels. But she had her knees primly together, hands clenched in her lap and her pretty, usually animated face wore a tense look of misery. Margaret could see from her red eyes that there had already been tears.

  One brief look was enough to send her hurrying to sit on the bed beside Daisy. This was obviously not just a little tantrum about something trivial. Margaret was only ten years older than Daisy and when things were easy and friendly between them, as they often were, it could feel almost as if they were sisters. As Daisy had grown older though, there had been more flare-ups.

  Of course, Daisy missed her mother. But she had very much wanted Margaret to marry her father, Philip, when they met after Margaret moved to Birmingham in 1904. In fact, she had almost campaigned for it with the emotional force of a nine-year-old. And Daisy could be a handful, there was no doubt, but today, seeing the girl looking young and so upset, Margaret felt very much in the role of mother, and tender towards her.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, resting her arm round her stepdaughter’s slim shoulders, ‘whatever is the matter? Your father and I hate to see you so unhappy.’ She imagined friend troubles, or someone outdoing Daisy, who was fiercely competitive in her work.

  She half expected Daisy to be angry and throw her off. It was not the first time Margaret had asked if there was something wrong over the past few weeks but she had never seen the girl looking as desperate as she looked this afternoon.

  ‘A trouble shared?’ She tried to sound light-hearted, not wanting to make too much of things. And after all, it really couldn’t be so bad, could it? ‘Why don’t you tell me about it, dear? I’m sure it would make you feel much better.’

  Daisy hesitated, rubbing her fingers together restlessly. Margaret noticed that all her nails were bitten down to the quicks. For a moment Daisy turned with a direct, hungry gaze, her big eyes searching Margaret’s face as if for an answer, but then, with a twist of misery coming over her features again, she looked down into her lap.

  ‘I can’t.’ It was only a whisper. Then louder, ‘Pa will . . .’ She stopped, shaking her head, before looking up at Margaret again. Her expression was not hostile, just desperate, and a second later her features crumpled and she burst into tears. ‘I can’t,’ she gasped, bent over, her hands covering her face. Margaret was disturbed to feel the sobs convulsing her body. ‘I just can’t, Ma.’

  Margaret softly stroked the girl’s back, trying to offer what comfort she could. She could see that for the moment she was not going to find out what was wrong. At the same time, though, something was nudging at her; a worm of misgiving, which had been turning under the surface of her mind, began to push itself fully into view. Surely not . . . ? No. She told herself she was being ridiculous. How could that be possible?

  ‘Look’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘let me bring you up a cup of tea. Perhaps we could have a talk about it later, umm?’ The ache in her heart at the girl’s suffering was now accompanied by a stab of dread. What was going on? This was definitely something more than one of Daisy’s little moods about being forced to do things in classes that she did not want to do, or some other passing thing.

  She went down to fetch her a cup of tea before going back into the office. Philip was still in there with Mr Henshaw and he looked up as she came in.

  ‘I tried.’ She shrugged, giving him a smile which said, We’ll talk about it later.

  But as she went back to her office work, checking the payment of the business’s invoices, the thought which had begun nagging at her when she saw Daisy’s pale, sickly face, took hold. She felt a surge of panic so strong that it felt almost like rage. But she forced the feeling down. It was so unlikely, so unthinkable, that she told herself not to consider such a terrible thing. Daisy would never be so immoral, so stupid . . .

  But the thought would not leave her.

  As the two women of the house, she and Daisy could not help but share a certain intimate knowledge of each other. Soon after she and Philip married, instead of making do with the tin bath and the lavatory in the yard, they had a proper bathroom installed upstairs at the back of the house. The pads that she and Daisy made for their monthly periods, folding them from strips of muslin, were soaked in a pail, tucked discreetly in the cupboard in
the corner of the bathroom. Only now was she beginning to look full in the face the fact that for the past couple of months, she had been the only one to put any cloths in there.

  Daisy sat holding the teacup while Ma’s steps receded down the stairs. Cries of playing children came from the street outside, with the clop of horses’ hooves and the rumble of cartwheels, but she was oblivious to all this, locked as she was into the world of her own aching heart.

  Putting down the untouched cup of tea on the chair next to her bed, she slipped her shoes off, desperate and sick, to lie curled on her side. She screwed her eyes closed, trying to shut everything out, but she could not get away from the aching dread inside her. Muffling her mouth with the eiderdown, she gave way once more to her tears.

  Twelve

  Annie Hanson hurried along Pope Street. It was one of the poorer rows of houses fringing the Jewellery Quarter, where the more ornate buildings and variegated brick of the bigger, prosperous factories gave way to rows of shabby, tightly packed brick terraces, many of the front houses backing on to others behind, crammed in around narrow yards.

  Annie was a nimble figure in a simple dress the colour of milky coffee, a baggy brown cardigan flung over it. She had coiled her straight brown hair carelessly into a bun and plonked her brown felt hat on the top. Familiar with the street, she did not look about her. She hurried along and turned into an entry leading to the yard of houses behind. Though she did not come here often now, its chill darkness was familiar and by habit she knew to step round the holes in the path, picking her way until she reached the gloomy light at the other end.

  The entry opened on to a yard paved with broken blue-bricks, four dingy houses strung along one side with a gas lamp bracketed to one of the middle ones. At the end of the yard, against a blackened wall, were two dry-pan lavatories and a brick wash house.

  Annie’s heart sank as it always did when she came into the Pope Street yard. Not every yard was as drab and gloomy as this one – why ever didn’t Mary Poole move? She tutted to herself. There were surely enough of them earning in the family now for them to go somewhere better? But Mary stubbornly clung to what she knew. Her neighbour, Mrs Blount, was one of the few people she had ever been able to rely on.

  And with Mary about to become a mother herself, yet again, this was all the more important. Annie had made a special point of coming, knowing she must be nearing her time.

  The door was not fastened but Annie knuckled the rough planks and waited, wiping her fingers against the dark wool of her cardi to shift the sooty grime of the door. A moment later the pale, worried face of a young woman appeared.

  ‘Annie!’ Her expression lit up. ‘Hello, stranger – come in! Mom, guess who’s here? Oh, thank heavens, Annie. Mrs B’s gone for Mrs Geech – I dunno know what’s keeping ’er. You’ve come just at the right time.’

  Oh, Lord, Annie thought, have I? She could imagine just what Lizzie meant, and even before she crossed the threshold she heard the groan of a labouring woman.

  Lizzie Poole stood back, her sweet features lifted by a smile, though Annie could see she was anxious. Though now in her mid-twenties, skinny little Lizzie looked hardly older or bigger than the young girl Annie had worked with at Marshall & Hogg’s pen factory, when she first moved to Birmingham and got to know the Poole family and their troubles.

  The one living room of this dwelling, half a house which shared, back-to-back, the roof of another house facing into the next-door yard, had not changed much over the years. There had been more than one attempt to shore up the damp, bowed ceiling, the purchase of a new table and chairs and a few extra knick-knacks. A new peg rug covered the bricks next to the range at the side of the one living room. But it was a poor, sagging place like those around it, damp and bug ridden. Annie, brought up to have a social conscience, thought of it like a warren or hive, to keep the workers as close to the factories as possible with the minimum investment and consideration of their health. It always made her angry, seeing what rotten little places they were. Yet yards like these were tucked in out of sight behind streets all around the city.

  Mary Poole was standing braced by the table, her head bowed and clearly well on in birthing a child. As the pain swelled, then receded, she let out another low keen of pain.

  ‘I’ve only just got in myself,’ Lizzie said, frantically shovelling coal and slack into the range. Though now in her mid-twenties, she was still living at home, still propping up her mother. ‘Found ’er well gone. I’ve put the water on.’ She gestured at the two pots she was heating.

  There was no sign of Ivy, who must still have been at work. But six-year-old Ethel, or Etty as she was known, a blonde scrap of a girl, was sitting on a stool right in the corner, quiet and wide-eyed at the sight of her mother.

  Annie, who had rather been hoping for a cup of tea and a friendly chat after many days on duty in the hospital, gave a brief sigh and took her cardigan off, trying to find the energy she would need to get to work once again.

  ‘Mary?’ She went over to her.

  The woman had been in the midst of such intense pain that only now did she notice someone had arrived.

  ‘Oh!’ She looked round, mortified that anyone had seen the state she was in. ‘Oh, thank the Lord it’s you, Annie! I wondered who was here for a moment!’ She even raised a welcoming smile. ‘I dunno where Mrs Geech’s got to.’

  ‘Never mind, we’ll manage,’ Annie said, though rather hoping Mrs Geech would come and rescue her. Lizzie always thought Annie could do everything, being a nurse, but she had little experience with birthing mothers.

  Annie had seen the Pooles through many times of sadness, but she had never seen Mary birthing a child before. Mary was a scrawny woman with straggly, faded blonde hair that had almost turned to grey now that she was in her forties. As she straightened up, her belly looked like a vast growth against her thin body.

  ‘How are you coming along, Mary?’ Annie asked carefully.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Mary groaned, sinking on to a chair, leaning back to give room to her swollen body. ‘When it started off, I thought, oh, Lor’ no, not this. I can’t do it all again. But ’ere I am . . . Oh!’ Her face tightened and she struggled to her feet. ‘’Ere we go again.’

  Once she had panted her way through another pain, Annie said, ‘Don’t you think it’s about time we got you upstairs, Mary, away from Etty? And Ivy’ll be back in soon, too.’

  ‘Mrs B give me some papers for the bed,’ Lizzie said, holding out copies of the Birmingham Gazette. ‘And the water’s coming on.’

  ‘You’ve done well,’ Annie said. She smiled wearily, taking Mary’s arm to help her to the stairs. ‘Make sure there’s some string handy – have you got scissors, Lizzie? It was rather quick last time, I seem to remember? Best get her up and comfortable, I think.’

  Annie watched Mary Poole’s face as she laboured on the bed in the dingy upstairs room. With every seizure of pain her lips contorted in a wide grimace. She had turned over on to her hands and knees, the newspaper rustling under her and getting all in a mess, and Annie kept trying to tidy the bed.

  ‘Here . . . I bet you need this.’ Lizzie carried another cup of tea into the room and a slice of bread with a scraping of lard. ‘There’s a bit of broth . . . ?’

  ‘This’ll do me for now, thanks, Lizzie,’ Annie said. She smiled gratefully, thinking what an astonishing person Lizzie was, the way she had somehow coped with so many things life had thrown at the family. She sank her teeth into the stale bread. Her head was swimmy with exhaustion. A couple of hours had passed and the light was beginning to die outside. ‘Have you got a candle you can bring up?’

  Mary Poole gave another low cry of pain and sank forward on to her arms to rest her head, her backside high in the air.

  ‘I can’t,’ she moaned indistinctly. ‘I’ve no strength.’

  ‘Can you drink a sip or two of tea?’ Annie said. ‘It’s sweet, dear – it’ll help.’

  Mary pushed herself up with what seemed li
ke a superhuman effort and took a couple of mouthfuls of the tea.

  ‘I’ll get you another cup, Annie,’ Lizzie said, disappearing.

  Soon Mary was lost in her world of pain again. Annie was starting to feel uneasy. She had thought this birth would carry through more quickly and that she could say goodbye and hurry round to see Margaret and the family. Should she call someone? she thought. A doctor? But that would mean payment. She could offer to pay, but she knew Mary would be embarrassed and not want it. If only there was a decent midwife. Lizzie had said they would far rather have her here than smelly old Mrs Geech, but at least the woman had more experience than she did.

  In the moment’s quiet, she heard Ivy and Lizzie exchanging a few words downstairs and then Lizzie coming back with another cup of tea.

  Mary gave a pitiful whimper which turned into a cry of agony. She twisted back up on to her knees again, panting. ‘It’s coming! Oh . . . Oh, my . . .’

  Her waters broke with a gush over the bed and almost instantly the pains overtook Mary with terrible intensity.

  ‘I caa-a-n’t . . . !’

  Annie jumped into action, trying to wipe her down with one of the squares of rag Lizzie had brought up. It was too late to change the newspapers on the bed. ‘All right, Mary – don’t fret now.’ She tried to keep her voice steady. ‘You’ll be all right. You know what you’re doing.’

  Which is more than I do, Annie thought, suddenly panic-stricken. The room was so dark, the air thick with the cloying smells of sweat and discharges from her patient. She wished powerfully for a moment that she had not come, and was sitting in Margaret and Philip’s room in Chain Street catching up on news and being spoilt with cake and chatter . . .

  ‘Lizzie . . .’ The girl appeared with another cup of tea, but seeing the situation she put it down and rushed to her mother.

  ‘Can you lie on your back now, Mary?’ Annie said, close in to the woman’s ear. Her body was saturated, her hair hanging down over her face.