Miss Purdy's Class

by Annie Murray

  ‘Will you?’ Ariadne suddenly clasped Gwen’s hand, managing a watery smile. ‘Oh you are a sweet girl! None of my lodgers has ever said that before!’

  Twenty-Five

  ‘If I wasn’t having Lance’s baby,’ Millie said a week before her wedding, ‘I think I would have got over him fairly quickly, really.’ Sighing, she looked into the distance and added, ‘Well – I’ll have to see it through. I’ve only got myself to blame.’

  The ceremony was held in their local parish in Edgbaston. Millie’s mother, Mrs Dawson, greeted Gwen with a tense smile as she went into the church. She was a kind woman who had stood by her daughter, despite her embarrassment over Millie’s condition, though she had drawn the line at ‘any fuss’ over the actual wedding.

  ‘She just wants to rush it through,’ Millie said. ‘I feel as if I’m being smuggled into marriage.’

  The vicar had kindly suggested that as there were to be fewer than a dozen people present, they hold the ceremony in the Lady Chapel, where Gwen sat two rows behind Millie’s mother and sister. She had worn her favourite summer dress, a pretty frock covered in sprigs of sweetpeas, in mauve, pink and white. She sat looking at the back of Lance’s head as he waited on the other side of the aisle, and pictured Millie arriving outside. She wondered how she was feeling. In a moment there came a small flurry at the back of the church and there was the bride.

  Millie had no father or brothers, so she was escorted along the aisle on the arm of a family friend, a middle-aged man with a black moustache, who was smiling broadly. Gwen warmed to him for trying to add some joy to an occasion which everyone else seemed to regard as one of gloomy necessity. Millie looked very pretty in a cream dress with a softly gathered skirt which hung just below the knee and disguised any hint of pregnancy, and she was carrying a small bouquet of yellow roses and white carnations. She was well made up, and smiled when everyone turned to look at her, catching Gwen’s eye as she passed. Gwen felt a pang, watching her. She could see the strain Millie was under, despite the brave expression. She was delivered to Lance, who was now standing and watching her solemnly. He was a tall, gangling man, an academic sort who, Gwen observed to herself, could not even manage to look smart on his wedding day. He had a long face, with a sagging expression, and his clothes, though not actually crumpled, looked somehow limp. Did he want this wedding any more than Millie?

  The thought that Millie was now stuck with the droopy, if kindly, Lance for life seemed dismal. And, Gwen thought, as the two of them both quietly pronounced their vows, in less than three months it was going to be her turn. She would have to make the same vows and become Mrs Edwin Shackleton. That was the reality. Edwin was her fiancé and he was kind and reliable. And where, in fact, was Daniel this week? Once again he had gone off without warning. She tried to pretend she wasn’t hurt and angry, but the feelings welled up all the same. When he came back, of course, he would be all over her, but sometimes she felt she was being picked up and put down. No: whatever she felt for Daniel Fernandez, she should be facing the fact that he could have no part in her future.

  Within days, however, he was back and she went to her first party meeting with him in a murkily lit room in the centre of town.

  ‘What’s it going to be about tonight?’ she asked on the way.

  ‘Oh, it’s not a speaker or anything like that tonight. More of a business meeting. But it’ll give you an idea – it’s the centre of all the activity, where we get things done.’

  The party offices were over a left-wing bookshop. The room was thick with cigarette smoke, though there were fewer than a dozen people round the table, and on first impressions Gwen thought them disappointing. The great majority were men, though she saw three women, all of them dressed in the most workaday clothes and two looked particularly dowdy. The third had a head of thick, black curly hair which could have looked very pretty but was scraped severely back into a bun, and she had thick eyebrows and strong, intense features. A certain intensity marked the atmosphere in the room. Gwen immediately felt as if her pretty frock and hair ribbon and the smile that she directed at them marked her out as trivial and she shrank back inside herself, wondering what she was doing there.

  Daniel’s manner was confident, though she felt suddenly as if he was very distant from her.

  ‘This is Gwen Purdy,’ he told them. ‘She’ll likely join the party. She’s here to listen in, see how we do things.’

  There were nods and looks of approval in her direction and she immediately felt proud to be with Daniel. The man closest to her stood up, holding a cap in his hand and offered her a chair.

  ‘Welcome, comrade,’ he said solemnly.

  Gwen sat, feeling the intense, unsmiling gaze of the black-haired woman on her from across the table. On the wall to the woman’s left she saw a banner on which a muscular man was waving a huge red flag.

  Once the meeting began, Gwen struggled to concentrate. There was a good deal of talk about the practical details of printing leaflets and recruiting members.

  One of the younger men spoke despondently. ‘It’s such an uphill struggle. Everyone seems to live with their head stuck in the sand. They can’t see that it’s getting closer. The fascist tide is sweeping over Europe and all they can think about is the next pint, the next pay packet . . .’

  ‘That’s for those who get any pay,’ an older man retorted scathingly. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a clutch of screaming kiddies with empty bellies, that’s your trouble. No wonder the masses can’t think for themselves when they’re drugged with hunger and want. After the revolution, no one will go hungry. They will be awake!’

  A debate ensued about tactics. One minute they were talking about a United Front and a Popular Front and about Italy and the National Government’s appeasement of Mussolini. Then the discussion moved on, bitter in tone, to the Labour Party and the ILP and during this Gwen began to feel sleepy and wished there was a clock in the room. The trouble was that the problems of fascism and what was happening in Europe all seemed too big and far away for her or anyone like her to be able to do anything about them, and other things like which parties would let the CP be affiliated with them seemed tedious and nothing to do with reality. With a sinking heart she realized she really wasn’t made to be involved with politics. All she really wanted was for the meeting to end so that she and Daniel could be alone. She sat pressing the soft cotton of her skirt into sharp creases and trying to stifle her yawns. It was only when Daniel spoke beside her that she jerked to attention again.

  ‘Comrades, once again we’re getting ourselves bogged down in discussions which send us round and round like rats in a trap. That’s what they want, our oppressors. They feed on our divisions, on our lack of clarity.’

  He spoke quietly, but with such conviction and authority that immediately Gwen saw everyone was listening.

  ‘We must keep in mind our strategy. We know that for many years now – I’ve seen it over and over again in the Welsh valleys – we’ve been divided, we’re broken into splinters and fought a little battle here, a strike there. That suits them. They can defeat us when we are divided and we divide so easily with our preoccupation with the details, with our squabbles over purity and ideology! We must be practical, comrades! The threat of fascism is real and it is growing, and it is a capitalist threat. Unless we keep our eyes on our strategy of unity, we shall be defeated.’

  There was a pause and Gwen glanced at him, to see him looking challengingly round the room. He was sitting bolt upright, hands on his thighs, arms straight, tensed, his eyes alight. It was as if he spoke as the conscience of the meeting and she loved him so much in that moment, which, if she tried to see it through his eyes, transformed a tired-looking collection of working people into the visionary agents of revolution. They waited for him to finish.

  ‘But if we are united in right, if we are disciplined and work as a united force of justice for the oppressed, nothing will be able to stop us!’

  ‘Comrade Fernandez
is right.’ The dark-haired woman said fervently. She had a powerful, well-spoken voice. ‘When we bicker and get diverted into arguments we are behaving like amateurs, like a group of small-minded bourgeois shopkeepers! We are betraying the true spirit of the revolution!’

  As she spoke she was looking across at Daniel. Gwen saw him nod in approval. She felt herself wither inside again. What on earth was she doing here? She knew nothing about any of this. She wasn’t really part of Daniel’s world. He needed someone who shared the same passion and could debate with him, walk side by side with him into the revolution that they so believed in! She felt close to tears as the meeting ended.

  As soon as they stood up a number of people came to greet her and she had to compose herself to talk and smile. They seemed so glad that she was there and she knew it was because they wanted to recruit her to the party, but it still felt like an honour to be welcomed and treated in this way. The dark-haired woman had come to them straight away. She wore a long, straight dress in dark blue corduroy, a crimson scarf at the neck and flat brown shoes. The overall effect was at once severe and bohemian and she looked striking.

  ‘So – Gwen, isn’t it? Are you going to join the party?’

  Though she felt flustered, Gwen looked back coolly at her. She wasn’t going to bark because this woman commanded it!

  ‘I’ll consider it,’ she said. ‘This is my first meeting, after all.’

  ‘I’m Esther Lane.’ She held out her hand and shook Gwen’s with masculine vigour. ‘I’m from the BCPL but I’ve joined the party as well.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Gwen said, which provoked an ironic smile on Esther’s face which Gwen took to mean that she had just said something bourgeois or in some other way considered not quite the thing in Communist circles. She had no idea what the BCPL was but she wasn’t going to let Esther know that.

  After that, the woman spoke only to Daniel. Watching her, Gwen tried to place her age, and guessed that she must be in her late twenties, perhaps older than Daniel. Whatever the case, she knew she was not imagining the woman’s attraction to him. She was talking about a leaflet they were about to produce and seemed determined to delay him, actually holding onto his arm as they talked. In fact a number of people were keen to talk to him afterwards, and in the end Gwen went and sat down by the table again to wait, trying to put aside a desolate feeling of being ignored. She told herself not to be so childish. This was Daniel’s work, after all.

  At last his comrades seemed prepared to leave him alone and he came over to her, his smile cheering her immediately.

  ‘Sorry to make you wait like that,’ he said. ‘There’s always so much to be done . . .’ He reached for her. ‘Come on now, lovely.’

  Gwen felt Esther Lane’s eyes on her as she and Daniel left the room and she couldn’t help feeling triumphant. Esther might be very clever when it came to politics, but it was her Daniel chose to be with.

  ‘Well, what did you think?’ he asked eagerly as they set out along the street.

  She was happy now, able to be full of enthusiasm.

  ‘It was ever so interesting. But I’ve got so much to learn!’

  ‘Oh, you’ll learn, my girl.’ He flung his arm round her shoulder and she revelled in his closeness. ‘It’s not difficult – not the basic principles, least. What Marx and Lenin and Engels – all of them – were teaching us was justice and common sense. What we have to do is put it into practice – bring it about!’

  As they walked home, Gwen asked him what the BCPL was. Daniel told her that the Birmingham Council for Peace and Liberty were a group who were against fascism. Then he set off to explain at length about the discussion the meeting had had about the Labour Party, that it had not wanted Communists in its ranks after the CP was formed in 1920.

  ‘What we’re asking for is a Popular Front of all the groups opposed to fascism, but to do that we have to unite all the socialist parties. The Labour Party still won’t have us.’ His voice was bitter. ‘They’re not worthy of the name socialist! They’ve no vision – they’ve betrayed the working man right down the line!’

  He talked on and on and she started to feel glum. Was he going to talk like this all the way home? She was interested, it was true, but she didn’t want to hear about politics, politics all the time. Couldn’t he give a little bit of time just to her? Suddenly, though, he broke off.

  ‘Here’s a good patch!’ Taking a piece of chalk from his pocket, he began to write on a smooth piece of wall next to them. He wrote the time and place of their next meeting and stood back to look. ‘There – another brick in the wall!’

  ‘That woman at the meeting,’ Gwen said as he flung his arm round her shoulders again. ‘Esther . . .’

  ‘Oh yes – our Esther.’ There was amusement in his voice.

  ‘She seems – interesting.’

  ‘She’s all right. Very academic. She’s from the university.’ He chuckled. ‘Quite formidable, isn’t she? The sort who won’t stop until she gets what she wants. The revolution needs people like her, full of passion.’

  She wants Daniel, Gwen thought, going cold inside. Did he know? Did he want her in return? She was horrified by her jealousy, by the sense that she wanted to know about every encounter, every word that had been spoken between them ever. She told herself not to be so ridiculous. Daniel sounded quite offhand about Esther and he’d known her for some time. If he was interested in her, surely he’d had his chance?

  She said nothing more, and a moment later Daniel stopped. ‘Oh, I forgot! I’ve got something for you.’

  He released her for a moment to pull a little book out of his jacket pocket.

  Gwen took it, but could seen nothing in the dark street.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ten Days that Shook the World. It’s all about Leningrad in 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. The man who wrote it was there! Now – you read that and you’ll touch the heart of the revolution! I promise you will. You can keep it.’

  ‘Oh, thank you – I will!’ She was delighted with the book, more because he had given her a gift than because of its contents. She felt him watching her as she turned it over in her hands and she looked up at him. He held out his arms and drew her to him.

  She wrapped her arms round him with a sense of relief. ‘I’ve been longing to do this all evening.’

  Twenty-Six

  ‘Come on now – eat up, little sparrow!’

  Siobhan sat beside Joey on the mattress, as he spooned sweet porridge into his mouth. He could feed himself now, but it was one of her good mornings. There were days when she wasn’t well after drinking and lay on the floor until the afternoon. Sometimes she got sick and would retch over the old tin can, then ask him to bring her water from the broken pipe in the kitchen. But at the beginning, when he was still too weak to move, she or Christie sat and fed him and every day he grew stronger.

  Every day, except on Sundays, Christie was gone by the time Joey woke. He went out, and waited to be picked up at dawn to work on the building sites, coming back like a ghost, sagging with exhaustion and coated in brickdust and plaster. However early he got up, he almost always built a fire and made a pot of porridge. Siobhan told Joey that they had taught Christie regular habits when he was in the seminary in Ireland. Joey didn’t know what a seminary was, but Christie made the best porridge over that fire in the grate that Joey’d ever had.

  John was out all day too, ‘bringing in the taters’ as Siobhan put it. Joey didn’t know where John went, but there never seemed to be a day when he didn’t come back without some money or food, at least, and sometimes the bottles for Siobhan that got Christie angry. Joey dreaded John bringing the bottles too because they made Siobhan bad and she cried and moaned and then often just ran off, out of the house and sometimes Christie tried to go after her. He couldn’t stop her, and he’d come back in and sit by the fire so silently, so far away he might not have been there at all. Sometimes, long after he’d settled to sleep, he heard Siobhan come stumbl
ing back in and Christie always seemed to be awake. Joey wondered if Christie ever slept. He hated it when they were both like that and tried to shut his mind to Siobhan’s broken weeping. Worst of all, to Christie’s. He made himself think about other things. Often he thought about Miss Purdy, remembering how she had put her arms round him and how she smelled lovely, of flowers.

  Micky hardly ever moved from his position in the corner.

  ‘He’s not a well man,’ Siobhan told him as they sat together in the dusky light of the room that morning. Things felt safe for now. Siobhan was sober, and kind. ‘He won’t be long for this world by the sound of him.’ Micky’s cough bubbled up from him and he had to fight for each wheezing breath.

  Joey scraped the last bits of porridge from the old pan. The bottom of it was black and knobbly with ‘mend-its’, bits screwed in to block off holes, and they had one bent metal spoon between them.

  ‘There ye go.’ Siobhan took the pan from him and snuggled up closer, putting her arm round him, cradling her to him. It was comforting and warm, but the soft feel of her body filled him with dread. He wanted Siobhan in the same way he longed for his mother, and she was like Mom had been, pretty and sweet with her blue eyes and thin, pointed face and – all his instincts screamed – dangerous. With her would come something terrible. He pushed her away and scrambled to his feet.

  ‘You’re a peculiar child if you’ll not have a cuddle!’ Siobhan leaned over on her elbow and held out her other arm to him, looking up through her long black hair. He could tell he had roused some emotion in her, something which crouched curled up inside. ‘Ah, come on – come and be with your Auntie Shiv!’ Her voice was wheedling now, and Joey felt panic rise inside him.

  ‘No!’ He felt his face harden into a scowl.

  ‘Sure, you’re the hard man, aren’t ye?’ she said, and her voice had a savage edge to it. ‘Well, please yourself, though you’d think you’d have some gratitude, you little slum rat. Christie and me – we’re from a good family, I’ll have you know. You needn’t go thinking you’re anything so special, you little bastard!’ She shouted as he let himself into the hall.