Wise Child

by Audrey Reimann

  'No.' Lily stood stock still. 'You do it.'

  Doreen lifted her eyebrows to heaven, opened her pouting mouth wide and gave another of the staccato, mirthless laughs Lily would come to know and fear. 'You're scared. What a baby!'

  'I'm not.'

  'Take your clothes off, then.'

  Taking your clothes off in front of strangers was brazen. Everyone knew that but Lily saw that she would have to do it, having refused Doreen's first demand. ‘Right,' she said, hurriedly ripping off her best blue dress and underwear until she was stripped bare.

  'My mum said you haven't any dad. She said you're different,' Doreen said. 'Turn round.'

  Lily was cold, going pale blue and bumpy all over but she turned right round, only to see that Doreen was laughing.

  'Fat bottom,' she said. 'Thin arms. I don't like you.' Then, before Lily could think of a reply, Doreen ran to the door, opened it and shouted, Mrs Stanway! See what Lily's doing. It's rude.'

  Lily went sick to the pit of her stomach. She tried to cover herself with her hands but she was shivering with fright when Mam and Doreen's mother came dashing upstairs.

  'Lily Stanway! I'm surprised at you,' Mrs Grimshaw said viciously. She said to Mam, 'What can you expect? All the same if she were mine she'd get her bottom smacked. I'd take the strap to Doreen if she behaved like that!'

  Mam stood back while Mrs Grimshaw took Doreen by the arm and dragged her down the stairs. Lily couldn't cry or speak, for terror. Mam waited until they had gone before heaving a sigh as if she had expected brazenness and without even asking 'Why?' put Lily over her knee, took off a slipper and gave her a sound whipping before leaving her to cry herself out on the bed.

  Most children were beaten. They were accustomed to it and thought little of it, but Lily knew she would never get used to being struck. And on that day she cried bitter tears. If she had a dad he'd have championed her. A dad would have understood that she was not brazen, that it was all the fault of her enemy, Doreen Grimshaw.

  Chapter Five,'.

  The golden years were behind her. Lily had been sheltered until she came to Macclesfield, which was noisy with roaring klaxon horns, iron-rimmed cartwheels, hooves on horse-mucked cobbles and the cries of street traders. And here, Mam had no time to amuse her.

  Mam was 'fully occupied' with the succession of people who came to the shop to talk and to buy. At first it was hard, after Nanna's loving, even-tempered nature, to adjust to this vivacious Mam and her quick changes of mood. In the mornings, before she had 'a drop,' Mam would be at her best, sparkling but listening mostly, not stooping to gossip, drawing people to her like a magnet - and her customers came from far and wide. Later, when she had taken her first drink, she'd lower her standards and say things she shouldn't; gossip and tittle-tattle. She'd miss out words so Lily wouldn't understand, 'haw-hawing' and 'hem-hemming' and Lily's heart would beat fast and anxiously. Then, when the drink gave her courage, Mam would be on her high horse.

  ‘Nobody gets the better of me,' she'd say, all hoity-toity as she set off to put someone in place, a shopkeeper or stallholder who had given short weight, or the men in the Town Hall who sent out the rates bills to her instead of to the land lord, Mr Chancellor. There was also a woman she crossed swords with, an unmarried woman a few years younger than herself. Nellie Plant, brought to Macclesfield in 1924 to work in the design shop at Pilkington Printers, lived in High Street, one of the good streets of Macc, whose houses had tiny gardens and iron railings.

  Nellie Plant said she had an invalid mother in Southport whom she supported. Mam did not believe this. 'Why would anyone come to Macclesfield from Southport?' she asked, in spite of its being a time when family men walked ten miles a day to seek work. But Southport, a wealthy coastal resort, was sixty miles distant so something else had brought Nellie to Pilkington's and Macclesfield, in Mam's opinion. 'Nellie Plant must have grabbed her chance of work at Pilkington's. She's probably in debt. Her creditors can't catch up with her in Macc.'

  Mam went twice a week to whist drives; one in the Conservative Club, the other in the Liberal Club. Politics had nothing to do with her preferences for the whist drives. Mam was strictly Conservative but they had a snowball and a bigger jackpot at the Liberal Club. In both places children played in a side room or stood quietly behind their parents at the card tables, and Lily saw at once that Mam and Nellie Plant were rivals. Nellie Plant was heard to say that Mam gave herself airs and was no better than anyone else. Mam would order Nellie Plant to stop 'passing comments'.

  These comments, made at Pilkington's were overheard by Doreen's father and relayed back to Mam by Mrs Grimshaw. Mam had taken to the Coco Chanel fashion and looked like a rich, aloof lady, but on one occasion, after one of Nellie Plant's comments had riled her, Mam tightened her pretty mouth into a firm set not at all like a lady and went down to High Street with Lily trailing behind, to 'see to Nellie Plant, once and ror all'.

  Mam rattled on the brass knocker and when Nellie Plant appeared said, 'I want a word with you.'

  Nellie Plant, a pretty, fair-haired woman, plump and blowsy, had an accent that to Lily sounded exotic. To Mam it was broad Liverpool. 'Come inside, Elsie,' said Nellie. 'I don't want the neighbours to hear.'

  'Certainly not!' Mam put her shoulders back and with the same set look on her face said, 'You've been telling everyone at the mill that I have men round at my house. Why wouldn't a man come to my shop, may I ask?'

  Nellie put her hands on her hips and opened wide her big blue eyes. 'I said you're not short of men. They go into your house as well as your shop. Everyone says you're hot stuffl'

  It was a wicked thing to say. You could not be too careful. If a woman on her own invited a man into her house, everyone talked about her. She would never hold her head up again. Women who did not mind their reputations were 'asking for it'.

  Mam lowered her voice. 'How dare you! Gossiping at the mill about what I do in my own house. That's rich, coming from you.' She stepped forward. 'I'll have you summonsed, Nellie Plant. You won't get away with spreading libels and lies about me.'

  Nellie gave a world-weary sigh. 'I know for a fact that Mr Hammond calls on you. Howard Willey-Leigh from Southport - that toffee-nosed twerp with a woman in every town. And Frank Chancellor comes round on half-day closing!'

  This was too much. Mam went closer. Her face was now only inches from Nellie Plant's. 'He comes for his rent. He owns my shop. Same as he owns your house!'

  Lily hung back, sick to, the stomach in case they came to blows, hoping not to be noticed, trying to please Mam with an expression of innocent trust. Mam grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, saying, 'Isn't that right, our Lil?' then, issuing more threats of summonses, said that if she heard another comment, Nellie Plant could repeat them in court. Then Mam grabbed Lily's hand and .marched out of the gate and off up High Street, with Lily running to keep up.

  To Lily's surprise, once they were round the comer and into Park Lane, Mam was warm and loving, stroking her hand as they walked home, saying, 'I'm glad I've got you. You have to feel sorry for Nellie.'

  Lily held tight on to Mam, 'Are you really sorry for her?'

  'Yes. She won't last long. She's a rotten designer -all those clashing colours, bright reds, with orange and purple - ugh! You have to be good at your job to get on at Pilkington's.' Then she was generous towards Nellie Plant, in thought if nothing else. 'She's a poor thing! Just a poor, poor Woman!'

  'We're poor. Aren't we, Mam?'

  Lily was eight and not so afraid of Mam's moods, but she minded very much about their poverty. Mam hadn't a penny piece saved and what was worse, she didn't care. It was sinful to set store by riches, Grandpa said, but since leaving his care· Lily had become a mercenary child. When anyone said they would not do a thing for love or money, she did not understand. They were the most important things in her life. Fear of debt made Lily feel ill.

  She would never know the hopeless poverty Grandpa had lived with as a child, but his tales of the wor
khouse, the evil tasting skilly they were given and the shame of destitution had burned deep. She'd heard Mrs Hammond telling the governess that the inmates of the workhouse loved her visits. They were delighted by the handshakes they received. Mrs Hammond only need remember a few of their names, need only ask about their health to see the delight her personal enquiries brought. Perhaps that was why Lily knew a cold dread whenever Mam said, 'People think we're well off because of the shop. I can put a good front on. We just don't have any money.'

  'Nanna has,’Lily said. 'Can't she give us some?'

  Mam looked at her as if she were a worm who had come out of the cracks in the flagstones. 'I'd never ask Nanna for money.'

  Lily was ashamed of herself, but she hated going to Leadbetter's, the greengrocer's in Hibel Road and having to say in her most polite voice, 'Can we pay you later, Mrs Leadbetter? Will you put it on the slate till the end of the month?' It was always she who asked for credit. And as if credit were not enough, she had to ask for an orange or tomato box, so Mam could chop them with an axe in the back yard for kindling. Mam would not lower herself to ask.

  It was Lily, not Mam, who ran up to Wragg's butcher stall in the Market Place when it was dark and the stalls, lit by paraffin flares, were about to close, to scramble with the poorest for something cheap - neck end of mutton or a bit of beef skirt for a stew. And she had to hide, to stay silent when the order boy from Seymour Mead's was heard coming up the entry. If Mam was in they were expected to pay, but if nobody was there he would plonk the box by the back door and then they avoided the shop until the end of the month, which was when Mam said she settled up.

  And though Seymour Mead's delivered that box of groceries which they paid for at the start of the month, and the box they couldn't pay for a fortnight later, they ate badly in Jordangate and Lily learned what it was to go to bed hungry, to lie awake, feet cold, stomach rumbling. To Mam, cooking a hot meal was an effort. If she had a few coppers to spare she would send Lily running to the chip shop in Crown Street, or along Coare Street for a hot meat-and-potato pie at noon, there being no food in the house.

  Lily was given a thick crust and margarine with a mug of tea for breakfast, before Mam handed her either a halfpenny or a penny to take to school - depending on how much she had for a Ha'penny Milk or a Penny Milk and Biscuit.

  There must have been some money coming in, Lily reasoned. They paid rent and sent the sheets, pillowcases and towels to the steam laundry. Mam worked hard. She was energetic. Lily never saw her sitting about in the daytime. She was constantly working, so there must have been money from her trade to buy material and stock for the shop, and to pay for sherry and port, which cost five shillings a bottle. Lily had no money box, no savings, and she saw it as a disgrace to have nothing - to be broke. Children boasted about their savings at school. Doreen Grimshaw especially. Doreen brought her Penny Bank book to show to everyone at playtime at Beech Lane School, where she was the boss of the playground.

  The school was a low brick building, flanked on three sides by cobbled streets and backing on to the muddy Spring Gardens, an unmade street that sloped downhill through a 'gennel' to the River Bollin and Lower Heyes Mill. The classrooms' windows had frosted glass below and plain above so they could not see out and there was a high brick wall topped with broken glass surrounding the school. The playground was divided into two, one side for boys, one for girls, but there were other divisions, social divisions between the children. The social walls were just as difficult to breach.

  At the bottom of the heap were a handful of very poor children who came from the crowded slums; frightening places of danger and foul smells where women fought and screamed abuse across courtyards shared by as many as ten two-room cottages. The children were often absent, but when they came they were hungry and would gather round a better-placed child in the playground, begging, 'Save us the core' if the child had an apple; or 'Give us a bit!' of the biscuit or the butty. They thought nothing of swearing or striking out at the children who, like Lily, had nothing to give. Some had fathers, others had none. Either they had never had them or, like her own dad, theirs had been killed in the war.

  Doreen questioned them. 'Did you have a father once?'

  If they said no she would tell Lily they were bastards, which meant that they were born in sin and would never go to heaven and neither would their mothers. Doreen said that bastard was swearing and she never swore. The real word was 'illy-jittie-mate'. She called all the bastards 'Illy-jitties' behind their backs. If she said it to·their faces they would have set their big brothers on to her, since they didn't have fathers.

  Lily hated herself for not standing up to Doreen. Instead she said, 'I had a dad, once. Before I was born. He was a hero.' Tommy Stanway's photograph stood in the middle of their mantelshelf at Lily's request. She could prove that she'd had a dad - a hero dad.

  Then Doreen demanded to see her baptismal certificate. Lily asked Mam for it and discovered that she had not been done, because in Grandpa's nonconformist chapel, baptism was carried out in adulthood.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays they were tested on the catechism by the curate, who stood in front of the assembled school and asked, 'What is your name?' All of them called out their names. 'Who gave you this name?' The answering singsong chant was 'My godfathers and godmothers in my baptism; wherein I was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.'

  Doreen was an authority on God. She said, 'Your Mam's name was Stanway before she got married. How can you be called Lily Stanway?'

  Lily explained. 'My dad, Tommy Stanway, was Mam's first cousin. That's why. I'm Lily after my dad's mother.'

  On a higher plane than the rest were three children from the big houses in Tytherington, about a mile from Beech Lane. They were spoken of at school as the Posh Girls and were brought to school and collected and never played in the school yard before the bell went but stood with their mothers or grandmothers outside the high gate, speaking in soft voices.

  Lily saw their expensive clothes; the coats of Harris tweed, soft kid boots and tailored dresses and wondered why they were there at all. They could have gone to St Bride's, the paying school.

  Mam said that they came to Beech Lane because the standard of teaching at their little Church of England school was second to none. She said that the girls' parents were middle class intellectuals. Mam said over and over that she and Lily belonged to the mill-owning class and the people they met in Macclesfield were their inferiors; even the jumped-up nobodies from the big houses. But that did not stop her putting on her best voice when she spoke to these nobodies, Lily noticed. And to the delight of Mam and the fury of Doreen, Lily was the only girl from school who was ever invited to tea at the Posh Girls' houses. But though she was desperate for a friend of her own, Lily wanted one she could tuck arms and play with, all easy after school, and she was sure it was not for friendship she'd been invited.

  She wanted to run free and play wild climbing and running games in their gardens, but their mothers insisted on brain-teasing games like the 'problems' they had at school. Lily wondered if they did it to try to catch her out so their girls would win. The mothers did not get angry when their daughters lost, but they would say, 'Ask Lily to tell you how she got the answer so quickly, darling.' It was condescending, the way their mothers spoke to her through their daughters. 'Thank dear Lily for the lovely flowers her mummy sent, will you, darling?' they'd say. Or, 'Shall we thank Lily for coming? Ask her to come again?'

  Lily was jealous; jealous of their warm, comfortable homes, big strong toys, plentiful good food and doting mothers who didn't drink port wine or sherry every day. But worst of all, she knew an empty aching inside when she saw those girls with their daddies. These daddies read to them at night and sat on the side of their beds, telling them what was good and right and fair. Lily wanted her own dad; a dad to comfort her and tell her all was well and what was good and right and fair.

  When they asked, and they always did
, about her parents, Lily said, 'Mother is a tailoress,' as Mam had told her to. But Mam, Nanna and Grandpa would be shocked to know that she told lies. She had promoted her father from private Stanway to Colonel. Colonel was high up. That was what Mr Hammond had been in the Great War.

  'My daddy was a colonel,' she'd say. 'Colonel Tommy Stanway.' It was not such a whopper, because: if her father had lived, that was what he'd have been - a handsome, kindly doting colonel who loved her and Mam.

  Mam was secretive and refused to talk about her dad. She would talk about 'the memory of my dear departed husband' when she needed to freeze somebody off, but Lily knew better than to pester her. All Mam would say was that if she were married to him now they would not be living in Jordangate,worrying about who said what to whom and where, wondering where the next halfpenny would come from. They would have a bungalow. They would be middle class, and Mam would be in the Mothers' Union.

  Mam knew about class - who'd come down in the world and who'd gone up for never was there a town with so much moving up and down a place or two. You could have a foot on the slippery slope and a reputation to match. Mam knew where they all came from. She knew where everyone stood. Standing and place depended on keeping your good name, making sure you were not the subject of gossip. Your place might change, but class was obvious and unchanging in Mam's eyes and was not demonstrated by money or morals or where you lived. 'You can always tell a lady by her clothes and her voice,' she said.

  If clothes were the criterion then Mam fitted the part of a lady and Lily that of a lady's daughter. Mam made their clothes from the best materials. She put fur collars on her winter coats, wore expensive shoes to match her outfits and bought the smartest and best of the deep cloche hats that so suited her.

  If voice were the deciding factor in placing your class, then Mam was not on such safe ground. Mam had two voices. One was the good English she had learned to speak at Grandpa's knee. This voice was used for the high-class clients she called real ladies, who came from far away for their dresses. The other voice, strong with the Macclesfield dialect, was used for chatting with local customers to put them at their ease and loosen their tongues.