Ellie

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘But Auntie Marleen bought me the velvet frock,’ Ellie cried out in alarm, putting out a restraining hand on the woman’s. ‘She said it was for Sundays and parties.’

  ‘Parties?’ Miss Gilbert peered at Ellie over her glasses, pale eyes registering extreme shock, her mouth opening just enough to reveal yellow teeth. ‘We don’t have parties here.’

  It soon became clear to Ellie that laughter, friendly chatter and even kindness were all as unknown to Miss Gilbert as parties. First Miss Gilbert came back into the room and caught her sitting on the bed and smacked her leg hard. Later, when Ellie was asked to present her hands for inspection, dirt under a couple of nails brought on a lecture on the evils of spreading disease. When ordered to lay the kitchen table for supper, Miss Gilbert rapped her knuckles with a knife for placing a knife and fork round the wrong way.

  Ellie counteracted this hostility by making careful note of everything, intending to put it all in a letter to her mother later that night. She watched Miss Gilbert cut a few slices of bread, then measure the loaf with a piece of string before putting it away, and she also saw her add some water to the milk in a jug.

  The kitchen was very warm because of the old-fashioned black-leaded range. Yet despite being a large and scrupulously clean place it was devoid of homely touches, or even splashes of colour. The curtains were plain, unbleached cotton, the plates on the dresser pure white. The wooden hoist up on the ceiling had its airing clothes folded neatly. When Miss Gilbert opened the door of the larder, that too had the same ordered appearance, of jars of jam and marmalade in straight lines; even carrots and onions were arranged carefully on a tray. All this was perhaps very laudable, yet the way Miss Gilbert whipped around the kitchen, wiping and straightening as she prepared the meal, made Ellie feel distinctly uncomfortable.

  It was a house of many closed doors. The moment Ellie walked into the kitchen, that door too was closed behind her and she was told to sit at the table. Although it was warm and sunny outside, the kitchen was gloomy, the windows and the door leading out into the yard shut, heightening the feeling of oppression. Ellie had never before had any difficulty in striking up a conversation with anyone, but her attempts to talk to Miss Gilbert were crushed by withering glances and sniffs of disapproval.

  Mr Gilbert came in just as Miss Gilbert was putting a dish of boiled potatoes on the table. He paused in the porch outside the kitchen door to remove his boots, frowning at Ellie, then beckoned to his sister to come closer. ‘I thought I said a boy!’ Ellie heard him say in a low voice, and her heart sank even further.

  Ellie’s mental picture of an undertaker was of a tall, thin man in black with a chalk-white face and a stuckon black moustache. Mr Gilbert was tall, but there the similarity ended.

  Amos Gilbert had more in common with a docker than with the undertakers parodied at the theatre and music halls. He was heavily built, with muscular tanned forearms and a ruddy, fleshy face. Fragments of wood shavings were stuck on his moleskin trousers and grey flannel workshirt and he had ominous red stains on his hands which Ellie thought were blood.

  ‘She can sew,’ Miss Gilbert sniffed, her tone suggesting she expected no further criticism. ‘So she can help with the trimming, and around the house.’

  Mr Gilbert didn’t reply. He came right into the kitchen in his stockinged feet, looked hard at Ellie, then as if he didn’t like what he’d seen, he turned to wash his hands at the sink. Ellie caught a faint whiff of turpentine and realised, slightly reassured, that the stains were only varnish.

  ‘Your name?’ he asked. Grey eyes just like his sister’s bored into her as he took a seat at the head of the table.

  ‘Elena Forester,’ Ellie said nervously. ‘But I’m always called Ellie.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twelve, sir.’

  He said nothing for a moment, frowning as if pondering on it. Ellie was aware, although she didn’t dare check, that Miss Gilbert had become tense.

  ‘Well, Ellie,’ he said eventually, his tone a little gentler but no welcoming smile on his craggy face. ‘My sister and I aren’t used to children. You will do as you are told, and behave in a dignified manner at all times. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, head bowed. She had no intention of staying here for more than one night. It had to be a terrible mistake. Miss Parfitt, her mother and Marleen had all said she’d live with a nice family. The Gilberts and their weird, smelly house were like something from the spooky serials she’d seen at Saturday morning pictures.

  Miss Gilbert pressed her hand on Ellie’s neck, forcing her to kneel.

  ‘Say a prayer,’ she hissed.

  It was Sunday morning. Ellie was sandwiched between Mr and Miss Gilbert in St John’s Church, just five minutes away from the house in High Baxter Street. Mr Gilbert looked like an undertaker today, in a dark suit with a high wing-collar, his brown hair slicked back with oil. Miss Gilbert’s everyday dark blue dress was replaced by an identical one in pale grey with a matching hat and gloves. She had given Ellie back her pink dress this morning, but made a point of saying it would only be worn on Sundays and that in her opinion it was far too short for such a big girl. She’d also insisted on her wearing a borrowed straw boater hat and white cotton gloves and was appalled that Mrs Forester hadn’t considered such items essential requirements for a young lady.

  All Saturday, Ellie had waited patiently, expecting a billeting officer or even Miss Parfitt to call at the undertakers. She had a little speech prepared, a polite but insistent demand that she was either moved or sent back home. But when no one arrived, Ellie took this to mean no one cared about her at all.

  Ellie knew little about churches, and even less of the procedure of a service. Her mother never had time for such things. It smelt funny in here from something they were burning and she didn’t like the gruesome pictures of Jesus carrying his cross. It wasn’t even a pretty church: compared with some she’d seen, it seemed too high, chilly and bare. She did know, however, that it was God’s house. Since no one else seemed to realise how unhappy she was, perhaps he might be a good person to have on her side.

  The prayer she offered up was more of a bargain. ‘Get me out of this and I’ll do anything to please you.’ For good measure she asked that he kept her mother and Marleen safe and that the threatened war wouldn’t happen after all.

  The first hymn gave Ellie hope. It was ‘Fight the Good Fight’ – one she knew well from school, which she loved singing. The church was packed, right up to the back pews. She could see little Rose across the aisle between two bigger girls with dark hair. Someone had clearly put her blonde hair in rags as she had fat, shiny ringlets. Ellie didn’t dare look behind her, but she’d spotted Doris Smithers and Carol Muller as they came in, and both of them looked happy enough. She wondered where the rest of the children from Bancroft Road had been billeted and whether any of them felt as desperate as she did.

  Miss Gilbert had made her stay in the house all day yesterday helping with the cleaning, so Ellie knew nothing more of the town than she did on her arrival on Friday. But glancing around here at the congregation, she thought they looked like the people on the posters in stations advertising ‘Bracing Skegness’ or ‘Wonderful Weston-super-Mare’, with rosy scrubbed faces, no missing teeth and straight backs.

  Seeing all these healthy, happy families dressed in their Sunday best, Ellie could appreciate why her mother had sent her away. Had she been billeted with the motherly lady in a blue polka-dotted dress with artificial daisies on her straw hat, surrounded by her five children, she’d be more than content. But Miss Gilbert wasn’t motherly in any way.

  Mr Gilbert had barely spoken to her yesterday, but Ellie felt this was more because he was unused to children than from real nastiness. She had heard him speaking to the stonemason out in the yard and his tone was that of a reserved, private man, not another tyrant. As she had seen so little of him, it was hard to make a real judgement, but she had the distinct impression he didn’t li
ke his sister any more than Ellie did.

  In Ellie’s view Miss Gilbert was not right in the head. Aside from her inability to speak unless she was squawking out an order, she was obsessed by cleaning. She never stopped, scrubbing the table, polishing, dusting as if possessed. She’d given Ellie the cutlery to polish, and even though they were soon gleaming, Miss Gilbert inspected each fork and rejected them all, saying she’d missed parts of the prongs. When that task was done to Miss Gilbert’s satisfaction, Ellie was sent to scrub the outside lavatory. Compared to the lavatory in Alder Street, and considering it was used only by the stonemason and Mr Gilbert’s apprentice, it was clean enough for almost anyone. But Ellie was ordered to scrub the pan, walls, floor and even the wooden rafters above the cistern with disinfectant. Then she had to cut newspaper into sheets exactly four by six inches and thread them on a string to hang from the door. Unfortunately the newspaper was full of interesting snippets and Ellie had her ears boxed for lingering over the task.

  Much of the house was still a mystery. She’d helped change the sheets on Miss Gilbert’s bed. This was a large but austere room at the back of the house, with old, heavily polished furniture protected by crocheted cloths. Mr Gilbert slept in one of the front rooms, though she hadn’t had as much as a glimpse in there. Aside from the bathroom, there were two more unused rooms on this floor and attics above that, reached by a tiny staircase.

  Downstairs there was a living-room, parlour and the shop, but it was those closed doors behind the shop which daunted her most. A surreptitious peep over the yard gates had shown a door leading from the side road into one of these rooms, and as she’d heard muted voices coming from it, this had to be the Chapel of Rest. It made her flesh crawl to think a body was lying in there. Each time she looked at Mr Gilbert she wondered how a man could earn a living dealing with such things.

  Worse still than the cleaning and the creepiness of the house, was the hunger. Breakfast at seven was a slice of bread and margarine; at twelve she was given a fish paste sandwich, and the dinner served at five in the evening consisted only of a thin slice of ham, half a tomato and a dollop of mashed potato. She watched hungrily as Mr Gilbert ate four thick slices of ham, a fried egg, mushrooms and a mountain of potatoe, plus almost half a loaf of bread spread with thick butter. When she tentatively asked if she could have a slice of bread, Miss Gilbert raised her eyebrows in horror and said she’d ‘had quite sufficient’.

  Last night, after being cooped up all day in the stuffy house, Ellie had been unable to sleep. She couldn’t read, write a letter home or even look out of the window, as Miss Gilbert had tacked black-out material right over it and made it clear it was never to be removed. Although there was electric light in all the other rooms she’d seen into, this one had none, so the black-out seemed unnecessary. Pinpricks of daylight filtered through it, creating a grey, prisonlike gloom.

  As Ellie lay there tossing and turning, she could hear children’s voices in one of the gardens behind Mr Gilbert’s workshop. The sound was so evocative of nights at home in Stepney that she wept into her pillow. Sunday had always been the best day of the week. Polly didn’t have to work and they spent the day just enjoying being together. Often on warm days they sat out on the doorstep in the afternoon talking to their neighbours, or took a walk to Victoria Park with a picnic. Sometimes Marleen joined them and came back for a supper of bread and cheese, and occasionally there would be an impromptu party down the street. These parties were always family affairs, with everyone welcome from the smallest child to the old people. Those that couldn’t get into the host’s tiny rooms spilled out into the street or sat on the stairs. So often Ellie and Polly had gone home at around eleven and lay in bed as the sound of revelry wafted up to them. Edna Ross doing her party piece, ‘NEllie Dean’, Alf Meeks the rag-and-bone man playing his wheezy piano accordion, and a spirited jig on the fiddle from Joe Flagetty, accompanied by the sound of dancing feet.

  As Ellie lay in bed she heard the children’s mother calling them in. She wiped her eyes on the sheet, trying hard not to think of the bedroom at Alder Street, of her mother snuffing out the gas light and the whispered conversations they had before they drifted off to sleep. Slowly even the pinpricks of light through the black-out disappeared, and the only sound was her own breathing and the creak of the bedsprings as she tossed and turned sleeplessly.

  ‘Let us pray,’ the vicar said suddenly, and Ellie hastily dropped to her knees with everyone else. Her stomach was rumbling ominously and she quickly offered up another prayer that Miss Gilbert would realise she was hungry, without her having to appear greedy and adding another black mark to her chart.

  During the sermon Ellie forgot her problems as she became engrossed in watching the vicar. He was very theatrical, flinging his arms out wide to stress a point, then leaning his knuckles on the pulpit and glaring at the congregation as if daring someone to get up and argue with him. His message was lost on Ellie, who was too captivated by his extraordinary mouth to listen to his words. It was wide and loose and he twisted it this way and that. At times his false teeth slipped and his tongue would push them back in. Mum would love an impression like that, Ellie thought, mentally rehearsing it.

  Ellie became aware of a slight shift in the congregation. The vicar was still speaking, but now he had moved on to something about men joining up. Glancing around, she noticed one man consulting his fob watch. Even Mr Gilbert, who hadn’t moved a muscle for the entire sermon, seemed to be on edge.

  The vicar left the pulpit suddenly, hurrying down the few stairs, and crossed the chancel towards a wireless set up on a small table.

  A low rumble of whispering, clearing of throats and fidgeting in seats puzzled Ellie. As a loud crackling sound came from the wireless, she turned to Mr Gilbert, hoping he would enlighten her.

  All at once the sound of Mr Chamberlain’s voice boomed out across the church.

  ‘I am speaking to you,’ he said, ‘from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

  ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.’

  Ellie was stunned. She knew, of course, as everyone did, about Germany invading Poland. Before she left London everyone had been talking about it. But since arriving here, her own problems had taken precedence and the Gilberts hadn’t discussed any further developments in front of her.

  Horrified gasps came from every quarter of the church and Ellie heard a sob from someone behind her. The vicar held his hand up to silence everyone, indicating that Mr Chamberlain was still speaking.

  ‘I know you will all play your part with calmness and courage. Report for duty in accordance with the instructions you have received. It is of vital importance that you should carry on with your jobs. Now may God bless you all. May he defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against, brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution, and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’

  The wireless was switched off, and at once a babble of voices broke the stillness in the church.

  Ellie turned to Mr Gilbert. ‘Does that mean they’ll start bombing now?’

  There was no time for an answer. The vicar mounted the pulpit again, urging everyone not to panic and reiterating all that the prime minister had said.

  ‘I look to you all to think of your country,’ he said earnestly, looking from face to face. ‘Today I ask you to remember that each one of us will be tested in the months to come, not just the men expected to fight. From now on we must each rise above self-interest and pool our resources for the common good. The harvest this year is more important than ever before. We have evacuee children in our midst who must be cared for. I beg each and every one of you to give of your b
est, to offer help and solace to those in need. To maintain the black-out rigorously and follow the instructions you’ll be given in the event of an air raid. But above all, I ask you now to pray. For all our brave men who are prepared to give their lives for England. For God’s safe deliverance for all of us.’

  The vicar’s words were still ringing in Ellie’s ears as she stepped outside the church porch between Mr and Miss Gilbert, suddenly aware that this was a momentous day, one she’d remember for the rest of her life.

  St John’s Church was in a narrow street which led down towards the station. Next to it was a small school. There was no churchyard as such, just a few steps down to the pavement. No one was making tracks for home – they were all standing around in groups chattering nineteen to the dozen but otherwise everything looked so normal. A clear blue sky, bright sunshine, the terraced houses opposite just as tranquil as they’d been for the last hundred years. Was it possible that all these people might have to use those hideous gas masks slung over their shoulders? Would German planes really come flying over here and drop bombs?

  Despite the knowledge that Britain was now at war, Ellie still had the same objective she’d set out with this morning: to get herself moved away from the Gilberts’. To her delight, she spotted the large woman who’d met them at the station and led them to Corn Exchange. She was standing across the road, outside a gentleman’s outfitters with bow windows, chatting to another couple of women. Even at a glance she was clearly a figure of authority. Her wide-brimmed pink hat wouldn’t have been out of place in Regent Street, and her matching dress and jacket stood out amongst the more soberly dressed women.

  Mr Gilbert paused to speak to an elderly man with a large stomach and a red face.

  ‘What about you, Amos?’ the old man asked. ‘Will you be called up? Or do you reckon you’ll have your work cut out here?’