by Marie Joseph
Very dear Daisybell. Goodnight. Take the greatest care of your good self. You are unique. I think God threw away the mould when He made you.
Yours ever,
Sam
He had forgotten to enclose the postal order, but Daisy knew he would remember next time. She would buy the book herself and tell him it was from Sam. The first thing to do was to run upstairs and tell Jimmy that his dad had written to them.
Jimmy was sitting up in bed reading a comic. He looked washed-out and seemed to have lost weight from his face and neck, making him appear younger and more baby-like.
‘I don’t want a book,’ he told Daisy. ‘I want a Meccano set. The O outfit is only three shillings. My dad said I could have it. This week,’ he added, narrowing his eyes in the hope that Daisy wouldn’t guess he was lying. ‘I bet he’d let me have the Number Ten set. That one makes cranes what really work.’ The eyes almost disappeared in his attempt at sincerity. ‘My dad said he’d buy me a watch from Woolworth’s. I bet he’d buy me a bicycle with a three-speed if I asked him. I don’t want a rotten book. I hate books,’ he continued in the same low monotone, grumbling in earnest as Daisy smoothed his undersheet and plumped his pillows up. ‘Sissies read books.’
Daisy’s silence was making him mad. She always stayed quiet when he made one of his fusses. Not like his mother who would have yelled at him to stop moaning and asking for things he knew he couldn’t have.
He tried again. ‘I want a train set,’ he whined, ‘with wagons and coaches, and a Flying Scotsman that reverses when you wind it up. I’ve seen them in books.’
‘I thought you never read books.’
Daisy was smiling at him, not cross at all. Jimmy knew with a sickly certainty that if she ruffled his hair he would bite her. He closed his eyes.
‘I bit Montague,’ he said faintly.
‘Whereabouts?’ Daisy was still smiling.
‘On his ear.’
‘Did it bleed?’
‘Ears haven’t got much blood in them, especially kittens’ ears.’
‘Fancy you knowing that!’ Daisy marvelled.
‘What’s a fancy-piece, Daisy?’
There! He’d got her now. Jimmy held his breath. He had known it was a pretty bad word by the way his dad had reacted that morning when his mother had screamed it at him at the top of her voice.
‘Well, if you can’t look after him, why not take him to your fancy-piece?’ she had shouted, her face going white the way it always did when she was in one of her tempers. ‘Oh, yes, I know all about you taking her to the seaside in the Rolls. I even know her name – Daisy. Oh, my God! You didn’t expect the kids to keep quiet about that, did you?’ Then she had said something about never going out in the Rolls herself, not once. And yet his dad had given his fancy-piece a ride in it. That had really got her going. Jimmy had thought his dad was going to hit her. He remembered the cold feeling of fear in the pit of his stomach.
‘My mum said you’re a fancy-piece,’ he said, miserable with the hurting memory of the ugly scene.
Daisy felt sick. She could have been sick right then and there. Holding a hand to her mouth, she ran into the bathroom, locked the door and leaned over the wash basin, feeling the bile rise and burn her throat.
To hear a child say a thing like that! To know it must have been said in his hearing. Oh, dear God, how stupid could a person be? Of course those two children would have gone back and talked about her. About the ride in the Rolls, about the meal in a restaurant, and possibly about Martha dying in her deckchair, though what Sam’s wife would have made of that she couldn’t imagine. And yet in Sam’s letter he had said. …
The letter was in Daisy’s apron pocket, so she took it out and read it again. Friends, he had told his wife. Friends who ran a boarding-house by the sea. Joshua, Bobbie, Florence and Daisy. Unwittingly, in her letter to Sam she had verified that.
Daisy put the letter back in her pocket, her mind a turmoil of worry and apprehension. Oh, dear God, she wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing. Respectability meant too much to her. Be honest now. Respectability meant everything to her. Take that away and you might as well strip her stark naked and stand her at the top of the Town Hall steps!
She splashed her face with cold water. Her mother had been right. Going out with a married man brought trouble, real trouble, especially if a wife was looking for evidence of her husband’s infidelity with another woman. Fear, ignorance and guilt fought for supremacy. Why, oh why couldn’t love be like it was in the films? Holding hands in candle-lit restaurants, running along deserted beaches, leaning over the rail of an ocean liner – a pure unsullied heroine gazing into the eyes of the man she loves. And coming to a bad end if he happened to be married.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, before I fell in love with you?’ Claudette Colbert in Zaza, stalking her boudoir in anguish in a frilly loose gown over her nightie, with her married lover (Herbert Marshall) frowning elegantly in the background. ‘What is to become of me, now?’ Claudette had cried, not a hair of her fringe out of place.
Daisy looked at herself in the mirror over the washbowl. Putting up a hand she touched her own straight fringe and winced.
Since moving into the house there hadn’t been the time or the inclination to bother with curlers. She wasn’t even sure where they were. Daisy forced herself to look hard at her celery-straight hair. The grey buttoned-up cardigan she wore looked as if it had been knitted on poker needles by a very old lady with trembling fingers, and the pom-poms on her down-at-heel slippers resembled a couple of cremated ferrets.
This unlovely apparition a breaker-up of marriages? The object of a married man’s unbridled passion? A fancy-piece?
When she went back into Jimmy’s room she was outwardly composed. Sitting down on the bed she spoke quietly.
‘Jimmy? I want you to listen to me. Carefully. That wasn’t a nice word you used just now. You must never say it about me again.’
‘What word?’ Jimmy was reading a six year-old Film Annual, totally engrossed in pictures of Lupino Lane being chased by a shock-headed lion. ‘I think I’m ready for a drink of lemonade.’
‘Fancy-piece. It’s a very bad word.’
‘As bad as bum?’
‘Worse.’ Daisy took the book from him. ‘So I want you to promise you’ll never say it again.’
‘I might forget.’ His eyes were calculating slits in his small white face.
‘Then until you promise I’ll take this with me.’ Daisy stood up and closed the Annual. She walked to the door, taking it with her.
‘You’re a fancy-piece!’
‘Right!’ Daisy had had more than enough. Taking off a slipper and flexing the sole she marched back to the bed. ‘Over!’ she ordered, ignoring the howls of protest.
She had never had the slightest intention of hurting him – a bedroom slipper, she knew, produced the maximum noise with no damage at all, but if she had hammered red-hot nails into Jimmy’s behind he couldn’t have screamed any louder.
Within seconds three faces were framed in the doorway. Florence disbelieving, Joshua trying not to laugh and Mr Leadbetter looking as affronted as if Daisy had just been caught swinging a day-old baby round by the heels and bashing its head against a wall.
‘He asked for it!’ Red-faced but certainly not breathless from her exertions, Daisy faced them. ‘He’s been using foul language and he’s not too ill to be punished.’
‘What did you say bad enough to deserve that, lad?’ Mr Leadbetter glared at Daisy.
Jimmy’s tears stopped as suddenly as if a tap had been inserted in the side of his head and turned off. Upending himself, he allowed a left-over sob to creep up into his throat.
‘I called her,’ he said, eyeing Daisy with a new awareness she had never seen in his eyes before. For a full minute their eyes held hard. ‘I called her. …’ Jimmy said, while Daisy held her breath. ‘I called her a bum,’ he whispered at last.
‘Oh, Jimmy. …’ When Daisy held out her arms he
hurled himself into them and as she held him close Daisy knew she had won some kind of a battle.
But the most important thing was that Jimmy knew it, too.
Chapter Three
Dear Sam,
I made up my mind not to tell you how disappointed I was when your plans for coming up this weekend fell through, and here I am telling you in the very first line of this letter! Still, Easter isn’t very far away, and though I’ll be run off my feet – four lots of visitors up to now – you’ll be able to take Jimmy out to enjoy himself. Blackpool is coming to life already. The season seems to start earlier each year according to Mrs Mac and that’s in spite of so many folks being out of work. They come for short breaks now that the charas and the trains run special rates. We Northerners have always set great store by our holidays. We work hard and play hard and though we won’t waste money we’re not afraid to spend what we’ve got.
Jimmy is getting used to school, and goes off unwashed if he can get away with it! Florence caught him wetting his toothbrush under the tap and spitting vigorously in the washbowl one morning, and how he can have a bath without washing his neck beats me, but he won’t allow us in the bathroom with him. Sometimes I suspect he just fills the bath, swishes the water round with his hands, then lets it out again, but you know how innocent he can look even when he’s just emerged after a twenty-minute soak looking like a miner straight from a pit. Mr Penny (Joshua) made me laugh the other day. He has a really dry wit when you get to know him better. Jimmy refused to stop sliding down the banister, so Joshua said: ‘Don’t try reasoning with him. Just remember you’re a lot bigger than him!’ It did put things into perspective, I admit.
The house is looking so nice. Florence chose lovely friezes for the dining room and lounge – lightning flashes in orange and electric blue – they really brighten up the walls, which have come out a bit paler than I expected. Everything seems to have cost more than I budgeted for. I replaced all the flock mattresses with Vi-springs, and the worn blankets with soft fleecy. They were half a crown each! No wonder I have to run past the bank in case the manager sees me!
Sorry about all the boring domestic details, but my head is filled with them these days. Will the house be finished in time? Did Mr Leadbetter mean it when he said his workmen will be here for the next two years, give or take the odd Bank Holiday? There are days when I’m sure they’ll still be here when Jimmy has gone into long trousers!
Dear Sam, it’s past midnight and everyone in the house is in bed but me. I am sitting in the kitchen with wood shavings littering the floor and a pile of sand by the door. Mr L. and his merry men have been finishing off the downstairs toilet. They were here until six o’clock and they’re coming tomorrow – Sunday. Do I mean today? The days seem to be blurring into one session of hammering, with men all over the house drinking gallons of tea laced with pounds of sugar. All on double pay, as it’s the weekend. Oh, help!
I hope there’s a letter from you in the post, but I understand how busy you are with your final exams looming. Take care and God bless.
Yours,
Daisy
SLOWLY, DAISY CLIMBED the stairs to the top floor. When the visitors began arriving Jimmy would have to give up his room and move in with her. She would put a camp bed up for him. It was either that or having to share with Florence, and Daisy knew which she preferred. Privacy and modesty was an obsession with Florence. She undressed beneath the brown dressing-gown. ‘As if the sight of an inch of your bare flesh would send strong men wild,’ Daisy had once teased, but Florence hadn’t smiled.
‘I could hear Bobbie turning over in bed!’ she complained. ‘So he must be able to hear me.’
‘Probably kneels up on his bed with his ear to the wall, his tongue hanging out as he listens eagerly for the snap of your knicker elastic,’ Daisy had said, only to be reminded that she could be very vulgar at times.
‘Honest vulgarity,’ Daisy muttered, as she undressed quickly. ‘Most Lancashire folk have a bit of that in them. Hardly offensive, surely?’
In bed she curled herself up into a ball. ‘Back to the womb,’ Florence had told her. ‘Proving you haven’t freed yourself yet from the umbilical cord, even though your mother is dead.’
It was all right Florence thinking she knew it all, but no one knew everything. One thing Daisy knew for certain and that was that the letter she had written to Sam was a disgrace. Boring and unloving. She closed her eyes, willing a sleep that would not come. But how could she write what she wanted to, putting her feelings down in black and white? The very mention of the word ‘divorce’ still upset her. Three out of every hundred marriages ended in divorce these days, and the figure was rising all the time.
Look how quickly the country had got rid of the new King when he wanted to marry Mrs Simpson. The newspapers had printed the news about the friendship, as they called it, in even bigger letters than the news about the Jarrow marchers. What Daisy’s mother had said about Mrs Simpson couldn’t stand repetition. Florence had said Mr Baldwin should keep his mouth shut till he knew what he was talking about!
Florence said that Joshua Penny was one of nature’s gentlemen. Florence said that Bobbie Schofield had twinkle toes but nothing between the ears. Florence said that Mr Leadbetter’s laugh wasn’t a laugh but a nervous tic. Florence said that Jimmy was a victim of circumstance and would probably end up in Borstal. Florence said the Depression had merely weeded out the people too inefficient to find work. Florence said. … Florence said. …
Daisy sighed. There were days when she wished her friend would, just for once, express a bit of self-doubt. Would stop and question her strong beliefs. Not be such a clever-clogs all the time.
‘Bound in to saucy doubts and fears. …’ The quotation came unbidden into her tired mind. Shakespeare, she wondered? Florence wouldn’t need to wonder. Florence would know!
The next Sunday Florence got off the Blackburn train, walked with her mannish loping stride down the slope and out into the Boulevard. Past Queen Victoria, regal on her plinth, down past the White Bull, across the road to Woolworth’s, then along the street flanking the market square.
Now, on that Sunday morning, the visionaries and the cranks and buskers had taken over. In the shadow of the Victoria Buildings a man stood on an orange-box, shouting the odds at the top of his voice to a small crowd gathered round him. What would his subject be? Florence guessed either the Means Test, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler, Mussolini, the British Union of Fascists, Free Speech or Communism. One of those burning questions for sure. All of them controversial. She wished she had time to cross over and do a spot of heckling.
She thought she caught a glimpse of Strong Dick, the local escapologist, who delighted his audience by wriggling free of his ropes and chains while his mate went round with the hat, then she remembered that Thursday afternoon was Strong Dick’s day for performing his act.
We are all bound and shackled in some way, she told herself, passing the school clinic, then St John’s Church with a stream of worshippers coming out with hurried steps on their way home to a Sunday dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. If they were lucky. Glancing upwards at the reed and shuttle weather-vane, she reminded herself that the lovely old church had been consecrated at the time of the French Revolution. A pity that same spirit of revolution hadn’t gripped folks up here, she told herself, but along with so many other things patriotism was a dying virtue. The Depression was making people apathetic.
Daisy was so insular minded, she told herself, turning into the familiar street at the side of the pie shop and beginning her climb away from the town centre. Daisy’s horizons were set no further than her own front door, her mind cluttered with trivia. Wash-basin taps, wallpaper, curtaining by the yard, bleached twill sheets – oh, the mediocrity of it all!
And that man of Daisy’s, with his crisp black hair and his craggy dimples, like the hero of some stupid romance. Daisy was so guileless, so innocent, in spite of having spent an entire night in the arms of her
lover. Florence felt her neck grow hot. She unfastened her scarf.
Samuel Barnet was a cad. She felt it in her big bones. He was using Daisy, and one day he would go back to his wife. His sort always went back to their wives in spite of all that talk about divorce and separation.
The house Florence had been born in was the only one in the street with an unmopped front step. So cleanliness wasn’t necessarily next to godliness, Florence told herself, raising her hand to the iron knocker set high on the shabby front door.
‘I could swear I just saw Florrie Livesey walk past the house.’ Straightening up from pawing over the flocks in the mattress of the bed she had shared with Arnold since their marriage, Edna pushed past their Betty, bless her, and made for the top of the stairs. But by the time she reached the front door and wrenched it open the street was empty and Florrie Livesey, if indeed it had been she, had vanished.
‘There’s summat up. I’ve got one of my prepositions,’ Edna told Arnold. He was hammering leather toecaps on to a pair of shoes, the last held firmly between his bony knees. ‘I’ll be glad when Easter comes and I can see for myself. Daisy sounded right powfagged in her last letter. She’s bitten off more than she can chew with that lodging-house. I could have told her so at the time, but would she listen? Not on your nelly. I reckon her brain’s been a bit addled since our Martha passed on.’
‘Daisy knows what she’s doing.’ Arnold spoke through a mouthful of tacks. ‘We’re going for a bit of a holiday, not to put the cat among the pigeons, so don’t go putting your spoke in where it’s not wanted.’
Edna shot him a withering glance. ‘I’ll speak my mind. I’ve never done nowt else, have I?’
‘Never!’ said Arnold as, totally unbidden, an image of Edna’s grey permed head sticking up from the ground like a tent-peg appeared beneath the hammer he was wielding with quite unnecessary force.
