The Whicharts

by Noel Streatfeild

  “Yes,” said Rose. “I will.”

  “Now who are they?” she puzzled. “Orphans? No, on the whole not orphans, they take such a lot of explaining. “What! both parents dead! Poor little dears, do tell me how it happened.’ No, decidedly not orphans.” She couldn’t face that. “Parents abroad? Yes, that was better.” Parents abroad only live in one place—India.

  She went in search of Nannie. “I’m looking after the babies while their parents are in India.”

  “And very nice too, many of the best children ’as their parents abroad.”

  “Would you explain all this to Cook and Annie for me, we must all say the same.”

  “You leave ’em to me, Miss,” Nannie replied grimly.

  As it happened, Rose wasn’t called upon for further invention. The babies were admired. The story of India believed. The women who came in and out were always in a rush. In those early war days everyone was far too busy and important to ask questions about babies, unless they happened to be Belgian refugees.

  In the summer of 1915 the Brigadier turned up. He was a most conspicuous and important figure. The papers were full of him. He was worried and anxious. His eyes looked tired.

  “You know, Rose, one never knows what’s going to happen these days—a lot of my money was in shows abroad—I’m damned poor now­ but you’ll be all right—I’ve seen a lawyer about you—this house is yours—you can do what you like with it—leave it where you like—and there’s enough money settled on you to bring you in about five hundred a year whatever happens to me.”

  “And the babies?”

  That was the trouble. The money he had settled on her was all he had to settle. The rest was tied up in Grace. Of course as long as he lived he would see they were all right. Send money as usual. But if anything should happen to him, she’d have to get someone to adopt the children.

  Rose questioned him about himself. Gently probed to see if Tania still held the field.

  He looked ashamed. He’d left Tania.

  “Took it terribly hard, poor little devil—didn’t seem to understand that you can’t force love­ when it’s dead it’s dead.”

  Then was there someone else?

  The Brigadier’s face lit up. His eyes ceased to be tired. He’d fallen in love, he said, as he’d never fallen before.

  “Imagine it, Rose—me a staid old soldier—and I’ve fallen for a golden-haired dancer—I might be a subaltern.”

  The golden-haired dancer was apparently called Daisy. She lived in Balham. Just got her first part. Had always been in the chorus before.

  “By Jove Rose, that girl can dance.”

  He didn’t get much leave now, but all he could scrounge he spent with Daisy.

  “You two must meet some day—you’d love each other.”

  Rose went up to the nursery. She picked up baby Tania and sat her on her knee. Afterwards Nannie told Cook she had never before seen Miss Howard take such an interest in Tania.

  She couldn’t know that somehow Rose hoped to comfort the mother by loving the baby.

  One night early in 1916 the door bell rang. Cook answered it. Money had been so scarce lately that Annie had been dispensed with.

  Afterwards describing the scene to Nannie, Cook would say:

  “And there ’e stood, but that white and queer­-looking I declare to you I didn’t know ’im ’e’d a bundle in ’is arms. ‘Fetch Miss ’oward quick,’ ’e says to me all of a gasp like. And I runs for Miss ’oward Down the stairs she comes like a streak. Looks in ’is face. ‘Oh my dear,’ she says all lovin’ like, ‘what is it? ’oo’s ’urt you?’ ‘It’s Daisy,’ ’e says, ‘she’s dead, and she’s left me this.’ ’e pulls back the shawl from the bundle in ’is arms. And believe me or believe me not, there lay a baby girl. ‘Cook,’ says Miss ’oward, all as casual as though babies came to our ’ouse every day—”

  “Which in a manner of speaking they do,” Nannie would interrupt.

  “‘Take this baby up to the nursery, and give ’er to Nannie. Tell ’er I’ll explain later.’ With that she pops Daisy here in me arms. Leads the gentleman into the drawing-room. And shuts the door.”

  Poor Brigadier. Life had caught him at last.

  Hurrying home to spend his few days’ leave with his Daisy, he arrived to find her dead.

  Her father had told him just what he thought of him, and had pushed the baby into his arms.

  “Take her. She’s yours. Our Daisy was everything to us, you’ve killed her. We don’t want any brat of yours about the place to remind us of you.”

  The Brigadier went back to France.

  “Come and see me off, Rose. I’ve a sort of feeling this is the end. I shan’t come back.”

  Rose arrived at Victoria in the early hours of the morning. It was dreary and cold. The station was shrouded in grey mist. On the platform everyone was cheerful, with that dreadful smile that is entirely an action of the mouth, and can be continued however large the lump in the throat. Mothers chatted to their sons. Wives to their husbands. Sisters to their brothers. All curiously restrained. Grown-up boys going back to a school they didn’t care about—nothing more.

  The Brigadier arrived late.

  “Bless you, Rose. God bless you, my dear. Good-bye.”

  He got into the train. It slowly steamed away. She turned to go. Her eyes were full of tears. She couldn’t see properly and bumped into a girl. She murmured her apologies. But the girl didn’t hear, she seemed frozen, staring at the bend where she had last seen the train. Suddenly she grew conscious of Rose, she tried to speak, but only a cracked whisper came.

  Rose never knew what the girl had said. But that morning in Victoria Station she understood war.

  Chapter 3

  THE sudden appearance of little Daisy caused a slight fracas in the nursery.

  On the evening of her arrival, after the Brigadier had left, Rose had gone up to examine the baby. She found its little crumpled red body lying face downwards on Nannie’s flannel-aproned knee.

  Nannie, holding an enormous powder-puff, looked up as Rose came in.

  “I was ’opin’ you’d come up, Miss. This is too much, this is.”

  She angrily shook a shower of “Fuller’s Earth” on Daisy’s underneath.

  “I know, Nannie, but what can I do? Here she is.”

  Rose looked helplessly at Daisy.

  “’Tisn’t right. ‘ Ere are we, Maimie four-and-a-’alf. Tania nearly three. Old enough as you might say to know what’s what. And suddenly down you pops this little fly-by-night, come by God knows ’ow. ’Tain’t right.”

  “Oh, but Nannie, they’re half-sisters.”

  “And ’oo’s the Mother? That’s what I likes to know in my nursery. Miss Anybody for all we knows.”

  “I believe she was a dancer.”

  “So I should say.”

  Nannie snorted in disgust.

  “Just the sort of Mother I should expect. Blessed lamb!” she added to the baby.

  Rose was worried.

  “After all,” she said; “the other mothers were—”

  Nannie interrupted.

  “As nice a pair of young ladies as you could wish. If unfortunate. If I lives to be a hundred I’ll always speak well of Miss Maimie. Speak as you find I say. As for Miss Tania: well, she was quite the little lady. As I often says to Cook, it was ’ard to believe she ’adn’t got no wedding-ring. And now this! A dancer indeed!”

  Nannie bristling with indignation pulled a tiny vest over Daisy’s unprotesting little head.

  “Well, Nannie, if that’s how you feel, she must go.”

  “Go! ’oo said go? She’s come, an’ she must stay. But she starts with a nasty ’andicap, po’r little thin’. An’ there’s one thing I do say: come by as she’s been, let’s start ’er decent. Christened she must be to-morrow mornin’. I
t didn’t so much matter for the others leavin’ it a week or two. But for one startin’ life as this one starts, you can’t be too careful.”

  Rose got to her feet.

  “Right, Nannie. I’ll arrange for it first thing to-morrow morning. And you must be god-mother.” This was a stroke of genius. The last words Rose heard as she shut the door were:

  “Godmother indeed. Blessed lamb!”

  The summer of 1916 passed peaceably over the Cromwell Road. Rose worked hard at her equipment office. The babies cooed and quarrelled in the nursery.

  But money was growing short.

  “I must find paid work in the autumn,” Rose thought.

  Before the autumn the Brigadier died.

  He died, according to the papers, from pneumonia. Actually it was from exhaustion; he had been terribly overworked. Perhaps too he wasn’t very anxious to live.

  His death was on every tongue. His face on every placard.

  Rose sent for Nannie and Cook.

  “Both of you have been with me so long, that you know the secrets in this house. Maimie is now five, and very quick—”

  “Sharp as a needle,” agreed Cook.

  “I don’t want the children ever to know who their father was. If they ask you awkward questions please just say that he was a soldier.”

  “And died for ’is country like a ’ero,” added Nannie.

  Rose smiled sadly.

  “Yes, you can say that if you like. Only never his name. You understand, don’t you?”

  The death of the Brigadier made Rose feel curiously isolated. It was as though the raison d’etre of her life had gone. She cared. But more as a spectator than as the person to whom some­ thing had happened. His leaving her, had happened so long ago. His leaving the earth couldn’t take him further from her.

  Money grew really scarce. The Brigadier’s shares had fallen. The five hundred a year he had settled on Rose proved to be a doubtful four.

  Rose looked round for paid work, and instantly thought of munitions. Fabulous stories were abroad as to what women earned in munitions.

  “If others can do it, why not me?” she thought. She got a job gauging in a fuse factory. The gaugers were not as well paid as the women who worked the lathes, but they sat for their work. As they worked in shifts of twelve hours, Rose knew her earning days would be short if she was expected to stand.

  She worked from seven in the morning until seven at night for a fortnight. Then reversed, and worked from seven at night till seven in the morning.

  She went to work on a workmen’s train. And whether working by night, or working by day, returned so tired that she had time for nothing but to fall thankfully into the bath Nannie had ready for her. And to eat quite unconsciously any food set before her.

  She struggled daily with thousands of other workers through a police-guarded gate. She had a numbered disc, which checked her time-keeping. She wore a dreary khaki apron and cap. She became with the passing months almost an automaton. The ferrules of millions of fuses passed through her fingers. She gauged them all, and either rejected them or passed them on.

  There were pleasant little pauses in the work. The ten minutes that was on day-shift breakfast, and on night-shift tea. The hour for dinner. The half-hour for tea on day-shift, and breakfast on night.

  There were curious long nights when her eye­ lids seemed to weigh a ton. Nothing would keep them open. When she would start back from depths of sleep as the overseer banged a hammer on the table.

  There was the roar, roar, roar, of the thousand lathes. The curious smell of hot brass. The queer hootings outside from strange little engines. A hooting which when she heard it in after-days, always brought back the war.

  The nights when there were air-raids. The sudden bray of the warning hooter. The curious silence that followed, as the power was turned off, and the straps stood still.

  The hurrying and running with everyone else to get under the concrete roof. The half-hour of waiting that followed. The distant booming of the guns, nearer and nearer. The smashing sound as pieces from the anti-aircraft shells fell through the glass roof. The chitter-chatter of the machine-guns. The pause as the enemy passed on to central London. The feeling of cold and exhaustion now that the excitement was over. The terror of falling asleep in case the rats ran over you. The distant booming beginning again. The enemy passing overhead. The half­ hour wait. Then up with the lights. The roar, roar, roar of the straps. Cold and exhausted back to work.

  She stood it for a year, and then was caught by the influenza epidemic. Coming in from work one day, she fainted in the hall.

  Nannie, in spite of three babies, nursed her wonderfully. But she was quite ill. And it was a fortnight before she really sat up, and paid attention to life. Then it was the thought of the money she was missing that pulled her together.

  “Nannie,” she said, “I must get back to work on Monday.”

  “We’ll see,” Nannie humoured her.

  “We won’t do anything of the kind, it’s a case of must. I’ve been having a doctor and medicine. Where’s the money coming from?”

  Nannie sat down on the end of the bed. “It’s time you an’ me ’ad a talk,” she said.

  Nannie, it seemed, in the proud position of friend of the mothers of two of the babies, and godmother to the third baby, considered herself in a position to dictate about the future.

  “Things needs lookin’ into. Maimie’s nearly six, and sharp as a cartload of monkeys. Tania’s four. There’s Daisy on me ’ands, me nurseries to do, and what time I ’as left for givin’ a ’and to Cook. It can’t go on. Cook can’t do all the ’ouse alone, and it’s time Maimie ’ad a bit of teachin’, and it wouldn’t do Tania no ’arm neither. I’ve taught ’em their prayers, an’ that’s about all. The children’s ignorant, an’ the ’ouse downright dirty. Now what? ‘Let!’ says Cook. And let! says I. ’ere’s all the ’otels full, ’ere’s ’alf the ’ouse empty. Take in a nice couple. Or two young ladies. Or even two gents. Give ’em bedsitting-rooms on the second floor, where your bedroom and the spare bedroom is now. And send Maimie an’ Tania to school. That leaves me free so I can give a ’and to Cook. An’ out of what the lodgers pays ’ave a woman in now an’ then to ’elp with the cleanin’ an’ that.”

  “School?” Rose looked thoughtful. “Aren’t schools terribly expensive?”

  “They are, an’ they aren’t, so to speak. An’ you’ve no cause to be flyin’ ’igh. I’ve found a very nice school not far from ’ere. Very moderate it is. An’ very nice little children I seen go in an’ out.”

  Rose was impressed.

  “Well, Nannie, you have been looking about. Do you think perhaps Daisy could go to school too, or is she too young?”

  Nannie snorted with indignation.

  “Maybe, with your munitions, an’ your illness an’ that, you’re forgettin’. Daisy’s one year an’ eight months No school would take ’er at that age. Per’aps, Miss, you thought of sending the blessed lamb to a creche?”

  “Of course not, Nannie; how dreadful of me. I never remember their ages.”

  Rose did not go back to the factory for a month.

  During that time she found two girls to take her rooms.

  They were friends, working for the Y.M.C.A.

  They had been living in great discomfort in a hostel, and were delighted with the Cromwell Road. Rose also examined the school. It was not the class of school she had been at herself. But she was charmed with the headmistress. The education was very thorough—terrifyingly so,

  Rose thought. She spoke vaguely of the children as her wards, and said she might send them to the kindergarten next term.

  In the nursery Rose confided a difficulty to Nannie.

  “If we send the babies to school, what are we going to call them?”

  Maimie was standing by the window. She turne
d round and came to Rose.

  “At school, Howdy, they will call us by our name.”

  All the babies called Rose “Howdy.” It was a relic of the older Maimie. It avoided the usual “Aunt.” In that house it was a mistake to stress imaginary relationships.

  Rose put her arm round Maimie. “What name, darling?”

  Tania’s little sallow face looked up at Rose from her other knee. She had a curious fastidious aloofness. So very like her mother, Rose often thought. Now the child stood by her, but wouldn’t touch her.

  “By our Paver’s name in course.” Rose was puzzled.

  “What name, darling?”

  “Whichart, in course.”

  Rose must have looked hopelessly fogged, because Maimie said kindly as one helping an imbecile:

  “Our Father Whichart.”

  “In Heaven, you know,” Tania added.

  Rose looked helplessly at Nannie, who for once was nonplussed. But Maimie continued firmly: “Everybody takes their Father’s name. Cook told me so. So I’m Maimie Whichart. And Tania’s Tania Whichart. And that—.”

  She pointed a scornful finger at the youthful Daisy, who was crawling rapidly across the nursery floor.

  “That is Daisy Whichart.”

  Rose looked at Nannie.

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” she murmured.

  Chapter 4

  MAIMIE and Tania went to the kindergarten. At once Nannie found herself in difficulties.

  Maimie asked:

  “Have me an’ Tania a pension? I expect we must have. There’s lots of children at our school whose fathers were killed in the war, and they all has pensions.”

  “So ’ave you, no doubt.”

  Nannie carefully felt her ground.

  “That’ll be what Miss ’oward pays for your schoolin’ with.”

  A day or two later Maimie asked:

  “Are we orphans? They asked me that in school, an’ I said I thought my mother died when I was a teeny weeny baby, ’cos I’d never seen her. And Miss Jones laughed an’ said she thought I’d got that wrong somehow ’cos I’d got two younger sisters. When did our mother die?”