by Annie Murray
‘No—’ Susan spoke up. ‘It weren’t ’er fault it were me. I tipped it over – knocked it with me arm. Mercy didn’t do nothing.’
Mabel stared from one to the other of them, eyes gluey with sleep, the skin under them wrinkled like rice paper. Even she could see it was pretty unlikely Susan could create a crash like that, but she wasn’t in the mood to keep on about it. She wanted her morning cuppa.
‘Pick up the bits,’ she ordered Mercy. ‘Don’t cut yourself or there’ll be that to deal with as well. Take ’em down the yard. You’ll ’ave to do your business in the bucket from now on, the pair of yer.’
She went off, heavily, down the stairs. They heard her cursing over the broken tread.
Still rubbing her sore head Mercy gaped at Susan in bewilderment. Susan’s face broke into a broad, mischievous smile.
Chapter Six
May 1912
‘Come and see, Mom – Mr Pepper’s nearly finished it!’
Mabel Gaskin sat on a rickety chair outside number two, Nine Court, Angel Street, her face bullish with resentment. Susan’s joyous cry as she came rattling towards her along the yard only made her scowl more and pull her arms tight across her pendulous bosom.
Susan’s face was alight with hope and laughter as Mercy hurtled along with her, squeezed into the go-kart belonging to the twins, Johnny and Tom Pepper, from number one. Susan was clinging to the sides of the ancient black pram from which it was made, her wasted legs and feet flapping up and down over the end.
‘I ain’t shifting nowhere,’ Mabel snarled.
Her eyes met Mercy’s for a second over Susan’s shoulder. The girl’s hair was a tumbling skein of gold after last night’s dunking in the tin bath, and there was so much of it it almost seemed to overwhelm her delicate face. Her prettiness was marred though, by harsh mauve bruising round her left cheekbone, and the expression of loathing in her narrowed eyes directed at Mabel could have melted lead. Mabel glowered back. Every time she looked at that kid nowadays she longed to batter her. And that was often what she did.
‘’Ere—’ Alf Pepper called. He was a huge bloke, a Black Countryman with a ruddy, bashed up face from boxing and the nickname ‘Bummy’ on account of his low slung trousers. ‘I’m gunna need them wheels off o’ there in a minute.’
Eyes smouldering with triumph, Mercy struggled to turn the go-kart and, leaning all her weight on it, rattled back along the blue-brick yard to where a gaggle of the neighbours was gathered round Alf who was building Susan the first wheelchair she had ever had.
Susan turned her head for a moment, eyes pleading, but Mabel stuck her nose in the air and looked away. She wasn’t going to stay out here to be shamed any longer. She got up and carried the chair indoors in as stately a manner as possible and slammed the door.
‘Old misery,’ Elsie Pepper said, bending to pick up little Rosalie who was ‘momming’ at her skirts. She was a sturdy-looking woman, dressed in her usual attire: a long, rough skirt with a blouse tucked in. Her thick auburn hair was usually taken up under a man’s cap when she was working, which was nearly always, but she’d left it off today. ‘There’s summat wrong with ’er, that there is. That child’s right enough given a bit of kindness.’
Elsie was in her mid-forties, had given birth to nine children, eight surviving, and believed implicitly in hard work and family life. She was blessed with more energy than the average person, had a sound idea of how to feed a big family well on Bummy’s modest but regular wages as a chippy and, to make means stretch further, took in washing. She always had a house full of it.
There were several things which made Elsie’s blood boil and these were dishonesty, men with no sense of responsibility, and cruelty, especially to children.
Cruelty was what she saw in Mabel Gaskin, and Elsie had made it her business, as she did frequently for folk in need, to look out for Mercy and Susan and take them under her wing.
Inside the house Mabel climbed the rotting stairs shaking with rage and humiliation. Going to the girls’ room she stood back from the window, peering out at the far end of the yard which was buttressed by the high wall of the wire factory.
They were all out there, laughing and carrying on, all against her as usual. Most of all she loathed the Pepper family with all their kids and their self-righteous ways. Elsie, who everyone seemed to regard as the yard’s gaffer, handing out her opinions left, right and centre. ’Course, she’d got Mercy well under her thumb. And all her flaming kids. No one should have that many kids. There were the twins who Mercy adored, and more infuriating still, the Pepper family were so taken with her. And now thanks to that scheming, interfering Mercy, Susan was going to have a wheelchair and she’d be out, for everyone to see her as the cripple she was.
‘She’s mine!’ Mabel’s voice came out in a harsh, irrational outburst. ‘My baby. I won’t let you take her away. She’s mine, mine, mine.’
Unable to stand watching any more of this merriment outside she went to her own room. She loathed Mercy for her energy and guile, for her devotion to Susan and for being more than she herself would ever be. Yet now she couldn’t do without her. She wanted the very best money could buy for Susan, but she barely had any money and couldn’t bear anyone else to be the one to help her. She was above all these slummy people yet had to live among them.
She fell on the bed in a turmoil of self-hatred provoked by the crowd out there all bunched against her, Susan’s glowing hope, the wheelchair – yet another of the things she’d failed to provide. Failed. That’s what she was, in every way, and Susan, her one scrap of hope, the one who would always have to stay with her and depend on her, was pulling away now as well.
Mabel Smith was born in 1873 in the workhouse at Winson Green. Her mother, already in poor health, died of TB two years later never having left the workhouse, and Mabel and two older siblings, a boy and a girl, were orphaned. She never knew who her father had been.
At fourteen Mabel was put into service as a kitchen maid to a family in Handsworth. Over the next couple of years her thickset features, which had given her a skulking, toadlike appearance as a child, spread and thinned to an earthy sort of glamour with those gappy teeth, the hooded eyes and long black hair. Her body was generously curved and stayed lithe through housework.
Albert Gaskin – then seventeen, whirling along the streets on a baker’s delivery cycle – started shilly-shallying at this particular door in Broughton Road, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mabel’s broad hips and supple waist bending over a bucket, the breasts full of promise, strong arms wringing a cloth, sleeves rolled, muscles moving under the skin.
Mabel, whose head had been rammed full of the notion that as a workhouse orphan she’d never be of anything more than heavy domestic use to anyone, suddenly found a more generous slice of hope than she’d been expecting.
Albert, thin, gangly, with high cheekbones, shorn brown hair and a jauntily-angled cap, pursued her with cheerfulness, persistence and a seething eroticism that quite took her by surprise. The sounds of desire he let out even at their first kiss were something she’d never forget.
When eventually Albert said, ‘Will yer marry me, Mabel, my true love?’ she had long ago made up her mind.
Things started well. Albert moved into factory work and Mabel carried on in service as a ‘daily’. They rented a couple of rooms. After all the anticipation the wedding night in 1893 was a sad disappointment (Albert had had several too many pints of Butler’s Ale). But things improved on that front and others. Mabel fell pregnant. She bloomed. She had a home, or half a one, a sweet-natured husband in work and she was to be a mother. Workhouse-born she may have been, but look what she was making of herself now!
The baby, a girl who they named Victoria, was born dead. Albert stayed off work for a week and promptly got the sack. After, he came home with two finches in a cage who chirruped mournfully and pecked their ash-coloured breasts until Mabel screamed for him to take them away again.
By the time a second baby was on th
e way, Albert had long found another job, and the sad darkness haunting the rooms near the canal thinned and blazed into hope again. Dulcie was born on All Hallows Eve, a plump, fair baby. Albert wept again, this time for joy.
At three months Dulcie contracted whooping cough. Mabel rushed for a doctor, uncaring of the expense and cursing the mother with a whooping child she’d spoken to when crumbling crusts for the ducks over in Handsworth Park. In five days she was dead.
Mabel fell into mourning and depression. They didn’t see Albert’s scattered family, and with none of her own to mourn with her she took it all on herself. Somewhere in her nature was a dulled, lugubrious space reserved for grief and disaster, perhaps cultured in the workhouse. But this was not the case with Albert. He was sunshine and tears all at the surface, his personality as slim as cardboard, enough to accommodate only the thinnest of shadows.
He didn’t start drinking heavily though, until later.
Susan was born in 1899, with Mabel’s dark eyes. She smiled from the first week – Mabel was certain of this even though the few people she allowed near the child said it was wind. She was placid and sweet and thrived steadily, if delicately, into a solemn-faced yet mischievous child.
Afterwards Mabel came to think of these as the last years of her marriage. Albert, his frame already shuddering under the terrible weight of responsibility – all these lives, these deaths – was kept steady by Susan. By the light in her eyes when he came into a room, the frantic, joyful kicking of her legs as he lifted her high in the air as a baby, her running to him as she grew into a five-yearold with his own loving nature. Of all his daughters she charmed him the most, softened him as Mabel no longer could, gave him hope.
When she fell ill they thought at first the fever was influenza, unseasonably in July. When the doctor pronounced it something far more serious the first image that blazed through Albert’s mind was another small white coffin.
Memories of those days, then weeks were almost impossible to recall, so strange and fragmented were they as to be discounted as a dream. Absolutely sure and certain for Mabel six months later though, was that she had a child who would never run into her father’s arms again, a drunk for a husband and that her hopes for an increase in the good things in life had been sadly misplaced.
There were another seven years of something that passed outwardly for marriage. Susan stayed small and loveable. Albert stayed drunk on and off, no longer sweet, sometimes working, sometimes not. He tried to be tender with Susan, wanted to take her out and about.
‘But she’s a cripple!’ Mabel raged. ‘Look at ’er legs. She’ll ’ave to stop at ’ome. I’ll not ’ave ’er wheeled out like a freak show.’
She took over Susan in a perverse, compulsive way. Overprotective, smothering yet ashamed, shutting Albert out. She kept even Susan’s existence as secret as possible, only letting very few people see her, like the crusading Miss Pringle with her pince-nez, her bag of coloured sewing threads and offcuts of cotton and felt.
‘She has such dextrous fingers,’ Miss Pringle said. ‘Such a pity to waste a skill like that. She could be marvellous at the piano, you know, or the violin.’
Mabel stared at her as pigs struggled to take wing around the room.
But Miss Pringle did make it possible for Mabel to live with all the contradictions of her feelings towards her remaining daughter. Susan, whom she would have been mortified to take out in the street, Susan, her companion for life who would never leave her because she couldn’t walk away and no one would marry a girl with wizened legs. Susan would always be there. Susan, in whom all her guilt, her compassion was invested. Who for so much of the time she couldn’t stand to be anywhere near, embodying as she did all the loss, all the failure of a life in which Mabel had once found hope.
Their possessions – not plentiful to begin with – Mabel was pawning piece by piece. They were already poor when Albert left. He had not been getting regular work and the jobs he did get were now unskilled and insecure. He’d had two spells in Winson Green prison for drunkenness. At home he was neither raucous nor violent. Sober, he was gentle with Susan. Drunk he was silent, lost.
And then he was gone. On a beautiful summer day when birds sang in small gardens and there was a breeze to blow the city smoke away, he left and never came back. Mabel who had believed, whatever his state, however distant they grew from one another, that he would always be there, was more shocked than she’d ever thought she could be again. She knew he wasn’t coming back – in the summer warmth he had taken his coat and hat.
Her time living as a respectable married woman was over. Now she and Susan were on their own. She was that workhouse nobody again, living in the slums where you had to burn the bugs off the ceiling with a candle before you could get to sleep, and surrounded by slummy people whom she hated almost as much as she hated herself.
‘Mom!’ Susan’s voice rang up the staircase. ‘It’s finished – come and see.’ There was a pause. ‘Please?’
‘I’ll go up,’ Mercy said, muttering ‘miserable cow’ under her breath.
Mabel’s hands gripped the cover on her bed, her teeth grating together. She heard the clatter of two pairs of boots on the stairs, an abrupt knock at the bedroom door and to her outrage Mercy and Johnny Pepper appeared.
‘Get out!’ she shrieked, sitting up in fury. ‘What the ’ell d’yer think yer playing at coming pushing your way in ’ere?’
‘Susan wants you to come,’ Mercy said in a voice of steel, standing firm in the doorway. She looked in disgust at Mabel whose appearance had deteriorated over the past months. She’d spread and sagged and her clothes were unkempt and often dirty.
‘Oh you always know what Susan wants nowadays, don’t you? Well, you can tell ’er from me she’s gunna ’ave a long wait, ’cos I ain’t coming just to see where Mr God-Almighty Pepper’s nailed a couple of wheels on to some planks.’
She lay down on the bed again feeling Mercy’s piercing look of loathing through her back. Mercy and Johnny went back down again.
Susan was sitting enthroned in her ingenious, very straight-backed chair at the threshold of the house. Her face fell as Mercy reappeared.
‘Never mind—’ Johnny set out to cheer her up. ‘Come on – ’ave a ride!’
He took hold of the metal bar at the back of the chair and careered along the yard so fast that the neighbours had to scatter. Mercy’s eyes followed them. It had worked! She laughed with delight. Now she and Susan would be able to get out!
‘Johnny!’ Elsie bawled at him. ‘Go easy!’
‘She won’t come,’ Susan said as they skidded to a halt. ‘She ain’t feeling too well.’
Everyone saw this for the thin excuse it was.
‘Never mind,’ Elsie said. ‘She’ll come round to the idea.’
‘Go on then,’ said Bummy. ‘Take it off up there again – I want to see ’ow well it’s going.’
Susan managed to turn the wheels a little on her own, but being unused to any form of exertion was soon exhausted. Mercy completed this next lap of honour for her as everyone clapped, down towards the entry then back up to the factory wall, past the soot-dusted cabbages in the little garden at the front of the two cottages.
‘She’s evil, that Mabel Gaskin,’ Mary Jones spat out in Susan’s absence.
‘Nah.’ Her husband Stan, a taut, stocky bloke with black hair and a thin moustache was smoking, leaning against the brewhouse wall. ‘She’s all right really, she is.’
‘And what would you know?’ Mary turned on him. ‘You wanna keep yer eyes to yourself, you do.’
‘Eh, you two,’ Bummy said, then called to Susan. ‘D’yer like it then?’
The expression on her face was enough of a reply.
Mabel’s fury had been building up all that Sunday, and by the evening she was an unexploded bomb.
Mercy knew she was only biding her time, waiting for an excuse. She knew the signs: the silence, Mabel’s clenching of her jaw, the way she averted her eyes from bo
th of them.
Susan was at the table (the wheelchair was to be stowed in the brewhouse at night – Mabel said she wouldn’t have it in the house). Mercy was moving round her laying the tin plates and the few eating implements they had, and Mabel was at the range with her back to them, stirring a pot. The room was lit only by the last of the summer evening light.
‘What’s to eat then?’ Susan asked cautiously.
‘Wait and see,’ Mabel snapped. She looked a dreadful mess from lying round on her bed half the afternoon, hair tumbling everywhere, and she knew it.
Mercy stepped round her, eyes downcast, went to put a fork on the table and dropped it with a tinny clatter on the bricks.
Mabel jumped and struck out savagely with her spare arm, knocking Mercy across the room so she crashed into the wall.
‘Yer clumsy little bitch!’ Mabel roared. ‘You’re useless, that’s what you are. Dropping things all the time and breaking them!’ It was true. Mercy lived in such a state of nerves around Mabel that it made her clumsy and there were frequent breakages. ‘What do we want forks for any’ow, when we’re ’aving broth? No bloody brains in yer ’ead, that’s your trouble!’
Mercy slid down the wall, curling into a ball, head and arms pulled in tight to her knees to protect herself, a position she’d had to take up so many times in her life, it came now by instinct.
Mabel thought she would burst from rage. She grabbed one of Mercy’s arms and dragged her with no difficulty to her feet, fingers pressing viciously into her flesh.
‘Look at me!’
The child raised her eyes, those glittering grey eyes, which even in her fear were stony with disgust at the woman in front of her and Mabel almost flinched. She squeezed her fingers as tight as claws into the tops of Mercy’s arms.
‘Mom, don’t, please . . .’ Susan begged.
