Keeping My Sister's Secrets

by Beezy Marsh

  Women seemed to think that Peggy was so absorbed in her reading that she could no longer see them or hear what they were talking about. Children of her age were still treated like children and weren’t supposed to hear grown-up talk, so Peggy would bury her head and prick up her ears as the street went about its business. On Howley Terrace everything was so crammed together that it was almost impossible to have a private conversation, in any case. Any raised voices in the street would draw a crowd and arguments inside had to be conducted in a stage whisper or the neighbours would have their ear to the wall.

  The younger housewives, in their early twenties, who had just one or two kids, were already careworn. Mostly they had mothers or sisters living around the corner who would help them out a bit, and they seemed to be the ones with the time and inclination for a gossip. The young housewives would stand around on their doorsteps in the late afternoon, drinking tea, before their husbands came home. They always wore a clean pinny as they chatted, to show the world that the day’s work was done. Dad always gave such women short shrift: ‘Idling again, are we, Mary?’

  The older ones – her mum’s age, really – with five or more little ones round them, seemed weighed down, trudging endlessly back and forth from the communal laundry to the shops and back, fetching and carrying. Not for them the doorstep chatter; they simply had too much to do. Some worked part-time at the London Wastepaper Factory at the top of the road and would emerge at the end of the day covered in dust, the sacking still tied around their legs to keep the rats away. The more children they had, the more swollen their legs and feet, the more bent their backs and the more haggard their faces.

  Peggy shuddered. Was this what life had in store for her? She’d just started her monthlies and had thought she was dying when she woke up in a bloody sheet one morning. Mum had to explain all that and the facts of life.

  Sometimes the women stopped and chatted for a few minutes and Peggy could overhear snatches of their conversation about aching teeth, backs and worse. ‘Women’s things’ that had happened ‘since I had my last’. When one woman suggested going to the doctor, the other would sigh and say, ‘I’m still paying him off a shilling a week for the last time,’ or, ‘It’ll get better soon, I’m sure.’ The really weak and poor got coupons for extra milk from the Welfare Officer to build them up but they never drank it. They’d rather give it to their children instead and go to bed hungry.

  Come to think of it, her mother wasn’t plagued by bad feet or swollen legs or rotten teeth. She put that down to her Irish blood, from Nanny Day. Nanny was a force of nature, standing nearly five feet ten, and hailed from County Kildare. She worked as a cook at the Union Jack Club on Waterloo Road, and woe betide anyone who complained about her skills in the kitchen. She made Peggy laugh by gathering the children to her skirts and warning them, in the broadest accent imaginable: ‘Never trust the Irish, my lovelies.’ Nanny Day looked after Peggy and her brothers and sisters when Mum needed a rest, as well as caring for Grandad, whose leg had been badly shot in the Boer War and had never recovered. His mind seemed to have been affected too because some days he would be fine and others he just talked gibberish or would throw things around the kitchen until Nanny Day slapped him.

  In any case, Mum wasn’t one to stand round idly chatting. She’d say her ‘good mornings’, smile, trade a few pleasantries and then say she’d have to ‘push on’, which was true because she had not one, but three cleaning jobs to keep the family afloat. Now Peggy was getting older, her mother liked to take her into her confidence a little about the ways of the street. Peggy enjoyed that and tried to absorb as much of her mum’s wisdom as possible. It set her apart from her sisters too.

  ‘Don’t ever gossip for gossip’s sake, Peggy,’ Mum told her, ‘or they’ll be talking about you behind your back next. You don’t want people knowing your business so you don’t need to know anyone else’s, unless there is something you can do to help them and you really need to know what is going on.’

  Her mother was right, of course. It just seemed that some people in their street made it their business to find out what everyone else was up to. Take Mrs Davies at number 16. Dad called her the News of the World because she was not only likely to poke her nose in but she’d broadcast it all too. She’d stand on that doorstep from dawn till dusk, keeping a beady eye out for passers-by. The coalman and the milkman, who liked a chat, tried to avoid her. Others in the street were not so lucky: ‘Not at school today?’ or ‘Clock off early?’ She made it her business to find out. Peggy just put her head down and hurried on but once she hadn’t been feeling well with a cold and came home early from school. To her shame, Mrs Davies came running down the street and announced it to her mother, before Peggy could tell her.

  But there was a different sort of gossip. It was still done in a quiet way, but it was all right. Like the woman who had – well, Peggy knew she shouldn’t say the word because her mother didn’t like it – but it was cancer. People said, ‘She’s very poorly’ instead. Mum and the other women in Howley Terrace would take turns minding her three kids or cooking meals and some had even tried to organize a rota to cover her shifts at the jam factory but the foreman found out and let her go.

  Things were hard because the woman wasn’t going to get better. She couldn’t keep house and she couldn’t do the laundry any more at the baths in Mason Street on wash days – Mondays. Somehow, Mum managed to do that for her too. Peggy had offered to help but Mum wouldn’t hear of it because of the dirty talk that went on in that laundry room. Peggy had once overhead the raucous whoops of laughter as women ran their husband’s underclothes through the mangle while she waited outside the door for her mother to finish their linen. She didn’t want Mum to think she had been eavesdropping. That wasn’t something she would ever do.

  The other thing she had overheard while she was sitting reading on the doorstep the other day was Mrs Davies talking about the husband of the woman who wasn’t going to get better, in hushed tones. Glances were exchanged as Mrs Davies said she’d heard his boots tapping their way up the cobblestones after midnight and one of the other women folded her arms and said she had heard from a lady in Tenison Street that his boots had been coming from that direction. Peggy guessed that he’d been visiting someone in Tenison Street very late indeed.

  ‘Ain’t right,’ said Mrs Davies. ‘With his missus being sick an’ all.’

  ‘Ain’t right of her round the corner having him over,’ the other women said. ‘We ought to get something up for her to make her think twice, the dirty cow.’

  Not that Peggy had been listening to the whole conversation, because she hadn’t. That would be wrong. She finished her chapter and closed her book. Dad would be on his way home soon. The street in the heat of a late August afternoon was full of the shrieks of young kids scampering up and down the cobbles, chasing each other, kicking up the dust from the gutters. They made their fun out of a bit of rope, a plank of wood, anything really. Peggy was the same when she was younger. She didn’t feel like joining in any more. She was too grown up, probably.

  She sighed. The smell of the river, just a couple of hundred yards away, caught her in the back of her throat. She had always hated that smell. It was awful, a proper stink, and on hot days it just hung in the air all day. Some people got away from Lambeth in the summer, packing themselves off to Kent, hopping. Whole streets would go – women and children and grannies, all packed off together to pick the hops and live in big huts. Peggy had heard about it and it sounded like a dream come true, with fresh air and countryside and even fresh eggs from the farmer. But Mum couldn’t leave her cleaning jobs and Dad was needed at the factory, so there was no chance of her coming back from a month away in the fields of Kent with the sun in her hair. She was stuck in Lambeth with the river Thames stinking to high heaven instead. She saw her dad then, trudging down the street, head down, doing his best to ignore everyone. Peggy rushed up to greet him.

  In an instant, his face lit up: ‘Hello, Peg, wha
t you reading there?’

  ‘Dickens,’ she said. ‘Hard Times.’ Well, she was reading it but she hadn’t got very far with it this afternoon.

  ‘We’re having hard times of our own, Peggy.’ He laughed.

  Dad handed over a ha’penny and Peggy tucked her book under her arm. There was no need for him to ask, it was their little teatime ritual. She headed off to the shop in Belvedere Road to pick up the Evening News, his favourite paper. But when she got there, she found a crowd of men standing around outside, smoking, their hands in their pockets, eyes downcast. One of them was reading aloud to the others: ‘It says here he has gone, resigned from the Labour Party.’ A man from Tenison Street, who worked on the docks, shouted: ‘Bloody coward! After telling us all to take a wage cut for the good of the country.’ Another man piped up: ‘And they’ve been cutting the help from the likes of me. I’ve been laid off a month now, with three mouths to feed.’ There were murmurs of agreement.

  Peggy pushed past, with a polite ‘’Scuse me’, and made her way into the shop. She read the headline ‘Day and Night of Great Excitement – HIS MAJESTY CONFERS WITH PARTY LEADERS’. There was a picture on the front page of a man with a moustache, and another one of policemen holding back a big crowd in Downing Street. Peggy knew from reading the paper with her father in the past that the man was the Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald. She needed to get home. She ran down Belvedere Road and into the little turning to Howley Terrace, nearly knocking over that nosy parker Mrs Davies, who was gossiping on the corner. Mum was already serving up stewed pieces and vegetables for Dad by the time Peggy got through the door and into the scullery.

  ‘Look,’ Peggy said, holding the paper up high. ‘Macdonald’s left the Labour Party and the men in the street say he is a coward!’

  ‘Slow down, Peg,’ said Dad, through a mouthful of stew. ‘Let me see.’ He read for what seemed like an eternity, before looking up at her again. Sometimes he took ages to explain what all the politics of it meant but Peggy was prepared to wait.

  Peggy thought her father was the wisest man in the street, if not the whole district, because he had travelled and seen the world in the Merchant Navy. And he wasn’t even born in this country like most people’s dads. He was a Canadian, a part of the British Empire, and had come over here during the Great War to help out by bringing a convoy of food. He had met her mother while she was working as a cleaner at the Union Jack Club and they fell in love and married and so he never went back. Well, he did try once, at the end of the war when Peggy was just a baby but Nanny Day had had such a bad dream about them going that she wouldn’t hear of it and begged and begged them to stay. It was a good thing they did because the ship they were supposed to be sailing on sank to the bottom of the ocean. At least, that is what Nanny Day told her, although she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it, because it was a sort of family secret.

  Peggy couldn’t work out why but her father didn’t talk much about Canada, other than to say his mother was from a tribe of Indians living by the Fraser River. She wasn’t supposed to talk about that either, in case people made fun of her or her brothers and sisters. And when he was growing up he lived with fur traders and in a fort and on some lakes, but life was hard and so he ran away to join the Navy. He even lied about his age to get in because he was just ten at the time, the same age as Eva, really, which was a funny thought. She imagined Eva having to scrub the decks and climb the rigging. That made her laugh out loud.

  ‘It’s no laughing matter, Peg,’ said Dad sternly.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She couldn’t very well explain why she was laughing at a time like this. ‘What does it all mean?’ Peggy always asked him to explain what the papers meant because there always seemed to be more to it than the headlines exclaimed.

  ‘The King wants him to make a government with the Conservatives but that isn’t what people voted for and they won’t help the likes of us,’ he said. ‘It means life is going to get tougher but we will have to cope somehow.’

  Her mum spun around, her ladle still in her pot of stew, a look of irritation etched on her features. ‘Oh, stop filling her head with all that nonsense, James. It’s not like she’s going to rule the country!’ The only reason Mum tolerated his newspapers was because she could make good use of them when he had read them, cutting them into neat squares to hang on a peg in the lavvy in the back yard.

  She put her hands on her hips, as if she meant business: ‘Now, James, I wanted to talk to you about having some extra housekeeping because Frankie needs a new pair of boots and I’m running a bit short . . .’

  The silence seemed to last forever. Then he looked up at her, the tenderness in his eyes gone.

  ‘What do you mean, Margaret, running short?’

  ‘It’s just things are getting expensive: the coal, the food, all the clothing and then there’s the rent and the insurances . . .’ Mum started to fidget with the corners of her apron.

  ‘Expensive,’ he murmured, staring at his food.

  ‘Well, am I to go to the parish, then, to ask for some boots?’ She put her hands on her hips again, raising her voice to him. ‘The shame of wearing them, James! They have the labels on so they can’t be pawned and all the neighbours will know! Is that what you want for your children?’

  ‘Goddamn you, Margaret!’ He slammed his hand on the table so hard that the gravy splattered off the blue and white crockery. ‘I expect you to manage, woman. I am working myself to the bone to provide for this family but it isn’t enough, is it?’

  In an instant, he got to his feet, raised his hand and delivered a ringing slap to the side of her face. Mum cried out. Peggy looked at the table. She shouldn’t be here. She was frozen, unable to move.

  ‘Get upstairs, Peg,’ said Dad, under his breath.

  As she left the room, she found Eva, Frankie and Kathleen gathered, wide-eyed, in the tiny hallway and ushered them all in front of her up the stairs. They were as quiet as mice and they could hear their mother sobbing in the yard.

  Later that night, when the sun finally went down, she heard her mother pulling the bed out in the front room, where her parents always slept. She listened intently. There were a few more sobs, then silence. Peg lay gazing out at the sky through the thin curtains which her mother had sewed in an attempt to brighten the little bedroom. She thought of her mother’s fingers sewing that material, every stitch, to make life better for them all. Through the darkness, Peggy heard a faint tap-tapping coming from the scullery.

  In the morning, when she went downstairs, her father had already left for work but Frankie’s boots were mended, as good as new, on the kitchen table.

  3

  Kathleen, February 1932

  ‘The British Empire,’ intoned Miss Price, ‘is one of the wonders of the world, a great achievement of which we must all be proud.’

  Chalk dust flew off the blackboard as she wrote, in her neat copperplate handwriting: ‘Australia, Canada, Africa, the West Indies, Burma and India . . .’

  Georgie Harwood put up his hand.

  It was as if she had eyes in the back of her head, because she said, without turning around: ‘Yes, George, what is it this time?’

  ‘Miss, India wants independence, don’t it, miss?’

  ‘Well, yes, George, perhaps it does but the Empire is a very good thing and we don’t want to let it go now, do we?’

  ‘My dad says—’

  ‘That is quite enough, George,’ said Miss Price curtly. ‘This is St Patrick’s Catholic School not a meeting of the local trade union.’ She emphasized those two words, to signal her distaste.

  ‘But, it is true, Miss!’ he protested.

  ‘That is quite enough!’

  She slammed her hand down on the desk, breaking her chalk in two in the process. The class gasped.

  ‘Come here,’ she said. Her eyes were like little grey stones behind her glasses. Kathleen thought she was really quite a horrid teacher, though she had her favourites, and her sister Peggy was one of the
m.

  George got out of his seat and walked slowly, very slowly, to the front of the class.

  ‘Hand out,’ said Miss Price, pulling a wooden ruler from her desk drawer. He obeyed, mutely. She brought the ruler down three times on the palm of his fat little hand, each time saying, ‘Do not interrupt!’

  As he turned back to face the class, Kathleen could see that he was fighting back tears. Feeling sorry for poor George, who was really quite handsome with his blue eyes and blond hair, she smiled at him. He blushed.

  Silly Georgie Harwood. He was always butting in. It was all his father’s fault. He was a shop steward working on the docks and had got a lot to say for himself. George spent most his life repeating it to anyone who would listen.

  Daddy seemed to like Mr Harwood and said he was a good fellow, but Mum said the family thought they were a cut above because they lived on the other side of the Waterloo Road, in Roupell Street, known as ‘White Curtain Street’. That meant they thought they were a bit better than folks from Howley Terrace, really. They did jobs in offices and things like that. One of them even had a car, which Kathleen’s brothers, Jim and Frankie, thought was the most terrific thing ever.

  None of it seemed to do George any good at school because he was always getting whacked with that ruler for talking. Why couldn’t he just be quiet and let Miss Price get on with the lesson? She was a right old bossyboots and Kathleen had learned it was better to keep your mouth shut. She suppressed a cough because it would only annoy Miss Price further. Her throat had been hurting her for weeks now and although Mum did treat it with honey and lemon juice at first, that had run out and there was no way they could afford more. She swallowed, feeling as if someone was scratching the inside of her throat with their fingernails.