by Mary Gibson
‘I do understand.’ Miss Gutman put a hand on her arm. And Kate thought, No, you don’t.
‘But anyone is welcome to come along and read here after their working day – quite without charge!’ She led Kate on a circuit of the room, stopping to adjust a vase of yellow chrysanthemums.
‘This room is used for our Sunday lectures, which, again, are free for all to attend. On Mondays we have a French class here…’ She paused, giving Kate the chance to express an interest. ‘Yes, well, Tuesdays are elocution lessons, Wednesdays we have play and poetry readings. Our numbers are growing and quite frankly, they can be a messy bunch! So, as well as cleaning the shop, we would like you to clean this room.’
Kate’s only experience of an interview had been for Boutle’s, but she was certain this one must rank as unusual. She wasn’t sure if she was being assessed as a cleaner or a possible member.
She didn’t like to disappoint Miss Gutman by showing no interest in the book side, but she had to put her straight. ‘I can’t see me having time for the French classes. But I’ll do your cleaning – what days do you want me?’
‘Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Our rate of pay is one shilling and sixpence per hour.’
Kate tried not to look impressed, but she couldn’t help smiling. This was a better hourly rate than at Boutle’s! She found herself wishing that bookselling were a dirtier trade – then they’d need even more of her services. They agreed she would start on Monday, and Miss Gutman told Kate that either herself or a volunteer would be at the shop to let her in.
As the young woman let her out, Kate pointed to the sign. ‘What does that mean, Miss Gutman?’
‘Ethel, please. We’re all on first-name terms in the Bermondsey Bookshop. But thank you for noticing our sign – not many people do. It’s Habakkuk – chapter two, verse two.’ She struck a pose and, lifting both arms, holding her head high, declaimed in a loud voice, as though she were a prophet of old: ‘“Write the vision and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.”’
Kate nodded her head. ‘Mmm, but I still don’t understand what it means.’
Ethel Gutman dropped her pose and laughed. ‘I believe that admitting our ignorance is the first step to wisdom! The meaning? I like to think of it as a promise – that somewhere there is a place where working men and women, always hurrying, may sometimes stop and read in peace.’
‘A refuge,’ Kate said, thinking of her garret.
‘Exactly, my dear.’
*
Kate had to work out her week’s notice at Boutle’s, during which she intended to fit in the bookshop cleaning during her dinner break. She’d also managed to get a few hours’ cleaning at the Hand and Marigold pub and had spent the early hours mopping up last night’s spilled beer and cleaning the men’s urinal. After the sapping heat of soldering all morning, she found herself wishing for an hour to herself and a chance to rest her slowly healing arm. But the bookshop was a lifeline, and she ran all the way to the bright orange shop.
‘Are you always out of breath?’ Ethel Gutman asked, letting her in.
‘Didn’t want to be late!’ Kate gasped. ‘I’ll start upstairs. You said it’d be messy after a lecture?’ She wanted to make sure she’d heard correctly.
‘Excellent idea. We had Mr de la Mare speaking last night!’ she said, waiting for Kate to be impressed. ‘And, as you can imagine, there was a huge crowd, people even had to sit on the stairs! It really was an excellent evening, and he honoured us by reading some of his own poetry…’
Kate couldn’t imagine. She had no idea who Mr de la Mare was. She began edging her way into the back room. Ethel Gutman called after her: ‘The cleaning cupboard is—’
‘I know! You showed me.’
Kate soon emerged from the back scullery with a broom, mop, bucket, duster and polish. She brushed past Ethel, giving her a friendly smile, but one which invited no more conversation. She wasn’t here for chit-chat and she wasn’t here to continue her education – Aunt Sylvie had put her right on that score the day she’d dragged her along to Boutle’s.
‘Yes. You go on up. Can you manage? Sorry about the mess!’
Kate had been wrong. Books were not a clean trade after all. The cosy, refined reading room she’d first seen was now looking a bit like the Hand and Marigold, but without the beery aroma. A long refreshment table was piled up with dirty teacups and plates of half-eaten buns. Overflowing ashtrays and discarded programmes littered the smaller tables, which had all been pushed back along the walls to make room for rows and rows of chairs. She let out a long breath. ‘Phew, get wired in, gel,’ she told herself, tucking her curls under a red bandana and slipping on her factory overall.
She cleared the room, stacking chairs and rearranging reading tables and lamps as she remembered them. Then she set about emptying ashtrays and clearing the debris. Adjoining the reading room was a small kitchen with a hot water geyser over the sink where she could wash up crockery. Books had been left lying about, and she tidied these into piles, not knowing where on the shelves they should go. Half an hour had passed before she’d even started cleaning. Filling a bucket from the geyser, she mopped, swept and polished until the room shone and then swept the stairs as she descended.
Ethel Gutman was at the large table at the rear of the bookshop, together with a pretty, small-boned young lady. They were surrounded by piles of typewritten pages. The girl was making rapid red marks all over one sheet while Ethel seemed to be doing some sort of craft work with blue paper and a jar of paste.
‘Ah, Kate! This is Lucy, one of our gallant volunteers!’ Lucy looked up, giving Kate a brief nod, before quickly bending her head to her work. ‘We’re just now going through the articles for the first number of our very own publication.’ Ethel held up her craft work. It was a blue magazine cover with a yellow title label on the front. ‘A mock-up for our quarterly. We’re calling it The Bermondsey Book. What do you think?’
Kate glanced at it. ‘Same colours as the walls?’ She nodded towards the painted friezes. This woman liked bright colours. Ethel Gutman looked slightly deflated.
‘It’s very nice. Sorry, Miss Gutman, I haven’t got time to do any more cleaning today. Do you want to inspect upstairs?’
‘Ethel, please. And of course I don’t need to check! I’m sure you’ve done an excellent job. It’s not as bad as this every day – I warned you the lecture crowd is a messy bunch…’
‘It’s no different to the Marigold – when people are enjoying themselves, they don’t want to be bothered tidying up, do they?’
‘Quite so.’ Ethel Gutman smiled, but Lucy remained buried in her manuscript and she gave an irritated shake of her head as she crossed out something in red ink. Kate wondered if she’d done anything wrong. But she preferred being ignored to being engaged in chat about a world that wasn’t hers.
‘I’ll concentrate on the shop on Wednesday, then,’ she said, massaging her injured arm and hoping the French and elocution classes enjoyed themselves a little less than the lecture crowd.
*
When she returned to the bookshop on Wednesday there was no answer to her knock, so she tried the door, which was unlocked. She found Lucy alone, and Kate gave her a friendly nod.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you knocking,’ the young woman said, dabbing at puffy eyes and blowing her red nose.
‘I’ll be out of your way in a minute, miss,’ Kate said, remembering the girl’s previous irritation and knowing that sometimes it was worse if people asked you what was wrong. But when she came out with her bucket and mop, Lucy was slumped over the table and her tears were flowing fast enough to soak the latest article for The Bermondsey Book. As Kate edged past, she could see words on the manuscript already disappearing into a violet wash of ink. It wasn’t her problem. It was best to stay out of it… but she thought of someone’s hard work, just melting away because of this silly girl’s tears.
‘Miss,’ she whispered, then, getting no response, louder,
‘Miss! You’re losing your words…’
The young girl looked up with a desolate expression. ‘You are quite right. I have lost my words. I am rendered speechless… that he could be so cruel!’ And she waved a letter at Kate.
Kate used one of her dusters to blot the running ink. ‘I meant these words.’
‘Oh no, Ethel’s Introduction! Have you managed to save it?’
She plucked the tear-spattered paper from Kate’s hand and read: ‘“In an age of lost fairylands, disenchantment broods darkly…”’ She held the paper up to the light filtering through the painted window hangings. ‘Darkly over what? Lord, her opening sentence has been washed away! Can you make it out?’
Kate took the paper. ‘“Disenchantment broods darkly over thoughts and things”?’
Lucy looked at her properly for the first time. ‘Oh, yes. You’re quite right. Well – thank you, er, Kate, is it?’
‘I’ve got to start me cleaning.’ And she handed the sheet back to the girl, who studied it closely.
‘Please, just one second, your eyes are obviously better than mine. Half of the last sentence has gone too. She slaved over it! Here… “sensitiveness to beauty and desire for knowledge…” What’s the rest?’
Kate shook her head – this time she could see only violet smudges – but then a theatrical voice rang out from the doorway: ‘“… sensitiveness to beauty and desire for knowledge are as keen in mean streets as in Mayfair”!’
Ethel Gutman came in, followed by a young man dressed in the flat cap and white scarf of a docker.
‘What have you done to my immortal words, Lucy?’ Miss Gutman asked, not seeming at all upset.
‘Nothing! I was just reading them to Kate… so inspiring!’
While Miss Gutman took off her coat, Kate began cleaning. She flicked the feather duster over books and polished bookcases. When she came to mop the floor, the three of them, now seated round the table, picked up their feet without being asked and continued their conversation as if she wasn’t there.
‘John, this is a very good piece. We’d be delighted to include it.’
‘Really?’ He sounded surprised. ‘But are you sure your readers will be interested in a docker’s typical working day?’
‘Yes, yes, we’ve had many requests to include articles by local people. The Bermondsey Book is for new voices, not just the old guard. So long as it’s well written, we’ll take it. You should be very proud of this.’
The young docker didn’t look at Kate as he left, but he stepped over her broom, careful to avoid the little pile of dust she’d already collected.
As the door closed behind him, Ethel said to Lucy, ‘John Bacon is such a modest young man, don’t you think? So clever, so promising, it’s such a shame – if he’d been born in Mayfair, he’d be a household name by now…’
‘It’s just as you wrote, Ethel: “sensitiveness to beauty and desire for knowledge are as keen in mean streets as in Mayfair”.’
Kate began to dust a porcelain figure on the mantelpiece. Aunt Sylvie would have called it a ‘dust harbourer’ but Kate had never seen anything as delicate and realistic.
‘The way he’s overcome such a sordid home life… that mother of his!’ Lucy said with a shudder.
Kate began polishing the brass candlestick. She didn’t know if John Bacon was clever, but she knew that in East Lane everyone called him Rasher – the boy who had had his pick of the girls when they all used to hang around the gas lamp after school. The sort of boy who wouldn’t look twice at the likes of Kate Goss in her threadbare dresses and her cardboard-stuffed shoes. The boy she’d been in love with for as long as she could remember.
After she’d finished her cleaning and was washing cloths in the downstairs scullery, Lucy came in.
‘I apologize for my silliness earlier. And thank you for your quick thinking with that duster!’
Kate wrung out the mop, running it under the tap till the grey water turned clear. ‘That letter. You shouldn’t put up with it, you know, not if someone’s treating you bad. The more you try to please ’em, the worse they get. Bullies love a weakling.’
‘You sound like an expert.’ She eyed Kate’s strong hands as they squeezed the mop dry. ‘But you don’t look like a weakling.’
‘I’ve had years of being treated bad – from my so-called family. Best thing ever happened to me was when Aunt Sylvie chucked me out. It never seemed like it at the time, though.’
She took off her overall and stuffed it in her bag.
‘The letter is from a young man. He says he loves me. But then I found out he’s actually kissed my best friend! I was so hurt, I’ve cried for a week.’
Lucy was a beautiful young girl, with a halo of fine, fair hair and large blue eyes that were still slightly bloodshot.
‘Words are cheap,’ Kate said. ‘It’s what people do that matters. If he’s cruel to you, then no matter what he says, he don’t love you.’
Lucy looked taken aback. ‘No. I suppose he doesn’t.’
‘I’d give him the elbow if I was you.’
Kate might have had experience of being bullied, but she’d never experienced being ill treated by a chap – nor of being well treated by one either. Rasher had been the only boy she’d ever noticed with anything other than revulsion or disdain. Perhaps Stan’s gropings had put her off men, and she’d long ago accepted that her love for Rasher was nothing but a childish fancy – until today, when the rush of excitement at the unexpected sight of him had caught her off guard. He seemed not to have noticed her, and she was glad, preferring to keep her feelings for him as just another secret fantasy, along with the dream of her father’s return.
*
But it seemed she wasn’t the only one with a secret. How could it be that Rasher, who’d left school at fourteen, was here, writing an article for Ethel Gutman’s new publication? He’d been in the year above her at school but had no reputation as a swot. If Miss Gutman thought his home life was sordid, she’d never been down East Lane. His mum hadn’t been a bad woman, just too drunk most of the time to look after her son properly. Kate had often helped her home in the evenings and Mrs Bacon had always resolved to stay sober the next day.
When Kate left the shop, about to set off at her usual trot, Rasher stepped out of a side alley.
‘Hello, Kate,’ he said, looking shamefaced.
‘Oh, so you know me now! Why didn’t you say hello in there? Was you too embarrassed to let on you know the cleaner in front of your posh friends?’ She hurried past, eager to put some distance between them.
‘Don’t be stupid!’ he said, falling into step with her.
‘And you’re so clever, John?’
‘I was a bit embarrassed, but not for you, for me. Don’t tell anyone in the lane about seeing me in there.’
She shrugged. ‘Why would you worry about that? No one’s interested in you.’
‘Thanks!’
In fact, the opposite was true – she knew a few girls who were very interested in Johnny ‘Rasher’ Bacon, and many boys who’d have liked to understand quite what he had that they hadn’t.
She relented. ‘I just meant you shouldn’t worry what people think. But I am a bit surprised to see you here.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged again. This was the longest conversation she’d had with him since she’d stopped playing with the kids in East Lane and started at Boutle’s. She felt unusually tongue-tied. ‘Because you’re not that sort of bloke – you never wanted to be anything more than a docker – did you?’ This sounded even more insulting and she just wished she could shake him off. But Boutle’s was still some distance away.
‘Don’t remember you ever asking me what I wanted to be, you just took it for granted. Same as everyone round our way.’
‘What made you go there?’
‘To the bookshop? One of the union blokes – Ginger Bosher – he took me to a lecture on the trades union movement. And then I started using the reading room, they’ve got
all of Marx and Engels. Anyway, I’d rather go there after work than back home!’
‘I thought your mum’s been better lately… but don’t you feel awkward with them lot? Your accent’s a bit different to theirs…’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘They don’t care about that, and nor will the readers. Besides, they can’t hear my accent when they’re reading my articles, can they?’ He gave a short laugh, pleased with the idea.
They had reached Boutle’s.
‘You should give them a chance, Kate.’
Kate pulled a face. ‘I don’t trust ’em. They pretend we’re all the same, but I don’t need to be friends with them, I just need a few extra hours’ work! If they could give me that, I’d love ’em!’
‘Oh, you’re a hard-hearted woman,’ he laughed, and she liked that he’d called her a woman and not a girl.
His eyes held hers with a confident gaze that brought back that rush of excitement she’d been trying so desperately to suppress. She hoped her rosy complexion masked the undeniable blush rising under his lazy stare.
‘Want to come for a drink one night?’
Kate was taken by surprise and blurted out, ‘I can’t, sorry. I’ve got to work…’
‘Every night?’
‘If I can. Boutle’s are laying me off and Mr Weston’s charging me ten shillings a week.’
‘For a garret!’ His anger flared quickly. ‘The robbing bastard! You see, Kate, that’s why we need to get ourselves a voice and be heard – The Bermondsey Book – it’s international! Canada, Russia – just think, they’ll all read what it’s like to live on dockers’ wages or to want something better for yourself than living six to a room in East Lane… Don’t you see?’
This Rasher was totally different to the one she’d known on the streets. But she thought she did see. And she repeated Ethel Gutman’s last line to him, mimicking her dramatic tones: ‘“… sensitiveness to beauty and desire for knowledge are as keen in mean streets as in Mayfair”!’
He laughed with delight. ‘You sound just like Ethel!’ Then he leaned closer, so that she could see the tiny gold flecks in his eyes, forming what looked like a star around the dark pupils. ‘You really should come out for a drink with me, Kate Goss,’ he said, with certainty.
