by Annie Murray
‘Lucy Fernandez?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
She glanced up to see Lucy’s intense dark eyes fixed on her face.
‘Ron Parks?’
As usual, there was some sort of kerfuffle going on round Ron. His hands were stuffed into his pockets and the boys round him were grinning from ear to ear.
‘Oh – yes, Miss!’ he said distractedly.
‘Ron –’ Gwen looked sternly at him – ‘if you’re going to be our milk monitor this term, you’re going to have to behave much better and learn to be sensible.’ She moved closer to Ron’s place in the third row. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Miss.’ Ron clamped his mouth shut, looking as if he was going to burst with the need to laugh.
‘Well, take your hands out of your pockets and sit up straight. What is the matter with you today?’
Ron carefully extracted his hands from his pockets. Puzzled, Gwen could see the other children watching intently. Freddie Peters’s mouth gaped open. Doreen Smith had a hand clasped over hers. Gwen was just about to ask whether the sight of Ron Parks taking his hands out of his pockets was really so fascinating when she saw Ron give a great squirm and his expression turn to one of horror. Suddenly everyone was staring at the floor by his chair. Sitting in a confused heap, after its escape into the light, was a sizeable toad. The children erupted with equal delight and revulsion, the boys roaring, some of the girls squealing.
Then everything went quiet for just a second. They all looked at Miss Purdy, waiting for her reaction. Ron had gone very red.
‘Sorry, Miss,’ he said.
‘Sit still, all of you!’ Gwen dashed across to the corner, seized the empty wastepaper basket and stalked along the aisle towards the toad. Even in the midst of everything, her capacity to view the situation from the outside and see its funny side was bringing her dangerously close to giggles herself. The terrible thought that Mr Lowry might be patrolling in the hall outside and peering in through the windows somehow made it even funnier. He’d probably give her the sack!
The toad saw her coming and began to hop frantically towards the back of the classroom.
‘Don’t let it get under the desks or we’ll never catch it!’ Gwen cried. ‘Hold your hands out – fend it off!’
The toad reached the skirting board at the back of the room. On each side children’s hands were flapping at it and a strange creature was homing in on it with a waste bin. Caught in this impasse, the toad looked understandably gloomy. Gwen dropped the bin over the top of it and held it down with her foot. The children all started to clap. Gwen couldn’t help a grin spreading over her own face.
‘There!’ she laughed. ‘Got him!’ She attempted to look more sober. ‘Well, Ron has given us an interesting natural history lesson this morning – before I’ve even finished taking the register. Unfortunately, though, we’re supposed to be having a geography lesson. Ron, come and remove this toad, please, and take it outside. Preferably without running into Mr Lowry.’
She finished the register.
‘Alice Wilson?’
‘Here, Miss.’
Gwen was reassured. Alice had been absent the day before.
‘Were you poorly yesterday, Alice?’
‘Yes, Miss.’ The child barely spoke above a whisper.
Gwen frowned. She was growing increasingly concerned about Alice. Even though she had suggested such a time ago now that Alice should be provided with some spectacles, she still had none and sat through the classes squinting hopelessly, unable to see the blackboard, even though Gwen had seated her at the front. And, having begun the year neat as a pin, she was looking more and more down at heel.
‘Now – books out, children. We’re going to learn some more about Australia. But first of all – can anyone tell me the name of a famous lady pilot who flew to Australia all on her own?’
Alice Wilson’s hand flew up.
‘Alice?’
‘Amy Johnson,’ the girl said enthusiastically. ‘And her aeroplane was called Gypsy Moth.’
‘Very good.’ Gwen smiled. ‘Amy Johnson landed in Darwin on May 24th, 1930. That’s eleven thousand miles away. Now, I’m going to show you where Darwin is.’
At the end of the morning, she told Ron Parks to stay behind. He came to her as she sat at her desk.
‘What I should do by rights is send you to Mr Lowry.’
‘Yes, Miss.’ Ron lowered his head.
She paused, thinking with distaste of Mr Lowry and his collection of canes. ‘I don’t think it will be necessary this time. But, Ron, do you think you could try to come to school with nothing in your pockets – just for once? No gobstoppers, marbles, toads . . . Nothing except a handkerchief, perhaps?’
The corners of Ron’s mouth twitched.
‘Yes, Miss Purdy.’
Fondly she looked at his round face, the rumpled brown hair. Ron seemed to her to be a boy without a streak of malice in him.
‘Ron, have you seen anything of Joey Phillips since he left?’
Ron’s face creased in a worried sort of way. ‘No, I ain’t seen him. Don’t know where he can’ve gone to. I s’pose they took him to the home. That’s what they said.’
‘Who said?’
Ron shrugged. ‘I dunno. Just, you know, our Mom. I ain’t seen him.’
‘All right. Well, if you do, will you tell me?’
Ron nodded.
‘All right – go and get your dinner or your mother’ll be cross. And . . .’
‘Yes, Miss?’ he said, from the doorway.
‘Where exactly did you put the toad?’
‘I put him down over by the wall of the pub, like, so he daint have to cross the road by himself. I thought he might be able to get back down to the cut.’
‘Well, let’s hope so,’ Gwen smiled. ‘Go on. Off you go.’
They’d been back at school for a couple of weeks. Millie Dawson had been replaced by a young woman called Miss Rowley, who was now teaching in the room next to Gwen, and she was civil enough, though Gwen didn’t find the immediate warmth of friendship that she had with Millie. Charlotte Rowley was a tiny, doll-like person with brown eyes, a sallow complexion and black hair cut short and very neatly round her collar. She was always immaculately dressed and, despite her shrill, childlike voice, seemed to wield absolute control over her class. At the same time, the fact that she was young and had a slightly sultry air about her provoked the immediate and bitter suspicion of Miss Monk, who couldn’t find a polite word to say to her.
‘What is the matter with her?’ Miss Rowley asked Gwen on her second day, when Miss Monk had been blatantly rude to her. ‘Have I done something to upset her?’
‘Only being young and pretty,’ Gwen said. ‘She thinks anyone younger than her is a threat to her chances with old Lowry.’
‘Lowry?’ Charlotte Rowley’s brow wrinkled.
‘She keeps waiting for him to notice her. It’d be sad if she wasn’t so incredibly unpleasant to everyone else.’
Miss Rowley said nothing in reply. She just stared back at Gwen, who decided she was rather strange.
The first weeks of term had been a period of calm. Gwen returned to school full of common-sense resolve. She had been measured for her wedding dress, she had managed to get on amicably enough with her mother and she was going back to marry Edwin in August. Edwin was right: that was where she belonged, not trying to concern herself with the woes of the poor of Birmingham or anywhere else. Something about her marriage to Edwin felt inevitable. Anything else would be unthinkable now. And this was not just because of herself and Edwin – it involved her parents, and James and Edwina Shackleton. She was almost like one of their family already. There was something reassuring and safe about this, but at the same time it was frightening, as if she had no say in deciding her own fate.
All brides are nervous and worried, she’d told herself as her train chugged its way closer to Birmingham at the end of the holidays. This is just normal. And on the first day of school, as soon
as she reached the prison and got off to walk along Canal Street, her whole being seemed to tingle with anticipation and she worked hard to persuade herself that this was not because she was in the neighbourhood where he lived, that she was not hoping with every fibre of her body that round every corner might appear Daniel Fernandez.
The first afternoon, as the children left at the end of school, Lucy was the last one out as usual.
‘Lucy.’ Gwen called her to her desk. Surely it would not be out of place to ask after the family now?
‘How are you all?’ She tried to sound casual, fiddling with the top of her fountain pen. ‘Everyone well at home?’
Lucy nodded with a shy smile. ‘Daniel’s not here.’
Gwen felt the blood rise in her cheeks. It was as if the child could read her mind! Was it written all over her face that this was the one thing she was really longing to know? But she soon realized this was not the reason.
‘He’s gone to Cardiff,’ Lucy announced proudly. ‘He’s going to speak to people outside the assizes and tell them not to send all the miners to prison.’
‘Is he?’ Gwen replied, startled. She hadn’t the least notion of what the child was talking about. ‘Why should the miners be sent to prison?’
‘Because of the strikes. They stayed down the mine at Taff Merthyr.’ As Lucy spoke, Gwen could see in her the same fire that she saw in her brother. ‘Daniel says they were on strike against the company’s union – last year. They stayed down the pit for days and wouldn’t come out. And now the bosses want to send them to prison.’
‘And Daniel?’
‘Daniel goes all over the place, speaking and that.’
Ashamed of her own ignorance once again, Gwen bought a newspaper on the way home. Why was she so unaware of everything going on in the world? It was as if she had been living in a dream all these years. Waiting for her tram, she scanned through the paper. In a column inside she read that the trial at Cardiff Assizes was to be the biggest mass trial of industrial workers ever held in Britain and she sat on the tram burning with pride that Daniel was there, would be speaking out against injustice. She wasn’t even sure why it was unjust, but Daniel would know. She imagined him standing in front of a crowd, shouting out with the passion she had seen when he talked to her.
She had found the courage to ask Lucy whether he was coming back to Birmingham. ‘He’ll be back,’ Lucy said assuredly. ‘He always comes home to our mam – we just never know when, that’s all.’
But the days had gone past and there was no sign of Daniel’s return. She read that the court had sentenced fifty-three men and three women to terms of hard labour, ranging from three to fifteen months. How could this be? she wondered. If all they were trying to do was to defend their livelihood? Surely they must have done something terrible to be sent to prison to do hard labour. For a time she doubted Daniel. What was he really involved with? After all, she barely knew him. She wasn’t used to being associated with people who went to prison.
When he didn’t return she calmed down a little and tried to persuade herself that it couldn’t possibly matter if she ever saw him again. After all, he was just the brother of one of her pupils: he was nothing to her, nor she to him. It was true that she found his company a novelty. It was exciting. But Daniel must see her as an ignorant little miss, with her comfortable middle-class home. He probably despised her. And she was engaged to be married, for goodness sake! Even if she hadn’t been, Daniel was certainly not the class or type of person her parents could ever conceivably approve of. The very thought was absurd! So she kept herself in a calm, sensible mood and wrote jolly letters to Edwin, telling him the details of her daily life that she thought he would want to hear. And they certainly did not include Daniel. Nor, for that matter, did she describe just what it was like living, these days, in the Soho Road house.
Seventeen
Ariadne shuffled into the breakfast room, bearing a rack of toast which left a trail of blue smoke in the air behind it.
‘I’ve overdone it again just a little bit, haven’t I?’ she said with a playful glance at Harold Purvis. She deposited on the table the charred remnants of what had been a reasonable loaf of bread, shedding a miniature cascade of black crumbs onto the embroidered cloth. Harold Purvis stared gloomily at it. Gwen tackled her egg with the vigour it demanded after fifteen minutes fast boiling and managed to prise the top off to reveal a pale yoke, ruffled and dry as old velvet. She tried not to think about who had slept in whose bedroom last night, or feel Harold’s little sideways glances at her. Every morning was like this now. It might have been amusing to begin with but it certainly wasn’t any more.
While she had been away, things had developed. Almost every night now Ariadne crept along the landing and begged to be let in at Harold’s door. Or Gwen might hear her saying, through the door, ‘You come to me, Harold, darling. Why don’t you come along to me? I’ll be waiting for you.’ And once or twice she had heard him go. She lay in bed picturing Harold plodding along the landing in his striped pyjamas, his white hands hanging below the sleeves. Every time he passed her door she tensed, her heart pounding. He had never tried to come in, but she still had the feeling that he might. She had started pushing her chair up against the door just in case. What with that and Harold’s trumpet dreaming of marble halls every evening, living in Soho Road was becoming a horrible strain.
Ariadne had lately got into the habit of coming down to breakfast in her dressing gown. It was pale green cotton, reaching almost to her ankles and she fastened it very tightly at the waist. Her bright pink slippers had ribbons at the front and made little slip-slap noises as she walked. Her hair was bagged up in a brown net, under which were rollers, and pins securing kiss curls round her forehead. She invariably had lipstick on and had pencilled in her eyebrows.
‘I put my face on after,’ she once confided to Gwen. ‘But I can’t come down completely naked, can I?’
Ariadne breakfasted on her usual diet of tea, cigarettes and whichever newspaper came to hand, which this morning was the Birmingham Gazette.
Gwen smeared margarine over the raven-coloured toast.
‘Oh, my word,’ Ariadne said, ‘look at this – “Man Chased to His Death by a Dog . . .”’ She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew smoke across the table.
Gwen frowned. ‘So how did he die?’
There was a pause as Ariadne ran her finger along the lines of print.
‘Says here he drowned – jumped off a pier . . . And oh, look – that Nurse Waddingham’s going to be hanged – day after tomorrow.’
Nurse Waddingham had been sentenced in February, but now the hanging was about to happen, on 16 April, and it was the talk of Birmingham. Ariadne was full of it and the teachers at Canal Street School debated the pros and cons in the dinner hour, sitting round on the battered old chairs with their sandwiches.
‘There’s no smoke without fire,’ Miss Monk declared, crossing one hefty brown stockinged leg over the other. ‘She’s benefited from the woman’s will – seems obvious she had a hand in hurrying the old girl’s end. Good riddance to her, the scheming shrew.’ She cast a bitter glance at Charlotte Rowley, as if bracketing her in the insult as well.
Gwen had learned from Ariadne that Nurse Waddingham was a thirty-four-year-old mother of five children, who had been nursing eighty-nine-year-old Louisa Baguley in a home in Nottingham. Both Louisa Baguley and her daughter Ada, who was fifty-five, had died in mysterious circumstances, having willed money to ‘Nurse’ Waddingham.
‘I think it’s a scandal,’ Miss Drysdale declared, with an emphatic gesture which caused tea to spill from her cup onto the brown linoleum. ‘Imagine, that we’re still hanging people in this country. Taking a life for a life – it’s most un-Christian!’
‘Huh – calling yourself a Christian!’ Miss Monk scoffed half to herself, and Gwen wondered what on earth she meant. How vile the woman was! Otherwise, though, there was a general murmur of agreement. Mr Gaffney was nodding.
‘Well, I agree with Mr Lowry,’ Miss Monk pronounced.
‘Of course you do,’ Gwen said, managing to keep her tone so neutral that Agnes Monk wasn’t sure whether she was being insulted or not. Gwen looked back innocently at her, and pulled a cheese and onion cob out of a paper bag. From the corner of her eye she saw the corner of Charlotte Rowley’s mouth twitch with amusement.
Miss Monk glowered suspiciously at Gwen. ‘You may be aware, Miss Purdy, that Mr Lowry is a strong believer in discipline and I have respect for his views.’
‘There’s discipline, and there’s barbarity,’ Lily Drysdale said. ‘The woman has five children – the baby’s only a few months old! Who’s going to bring them up? I shall protest with the others who’ll stand against this, in the strongest terms.’
‘Huh,’ Miss Monk said contemptuously. ‘A lot of good that’ll do you. They’re set to hang her, whatever you say, or that red, Violet Van der Elst, and all her campaigning. Good riddance to her.’
Gwen listened to the arguments, feeling immediately opposed to the hanging because Agnes Monk was for it. Her whole being rebelled against the idea – she thought of the woman waiting in her cell, imagining the rope tightening round her neck, her last gasp of life followed by everlasting darkness. Frightful even if she was guilty. But what if she wasn’t?
‘It is barbaric, isn’t it?’ she said to Miss Rowley.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Miss Rowley said. She sat very straight and neatly, her feet lined up side by side in little blue shoes with straps. ‘She took someone else’s life, after all. She showed no pity.’
