An East End Girl

by Maggie Ford

Her mum, dishing up the greens on to plates of roast lamb, baked potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, looked at her. ‘I bet it feels a bit empty at times, just you and Teddy there? When do you two plan to start a family then? Babies are a blessing when they come along. Help to fill up an empty home.’

  ‘We’ll get around to it when we’re ready,’ Daisy said, passing her a plate for her Aunt Maud.

  ‘You should. Time goes too quick. Before you know it, it’s almost too late. And you don’t want to be too old before you start. Come on, sit up to the table, love.’

  She and Dad, her aunt and uncle and Mum sat themselves down to eat, Mum passing the gravy round in its dish – a special Sunday tradition; the rest of the week gravy got poured over each plate of potatoes, meat and greens before being brought to the table.

  ‘And Teddy’s that much older than you, luv,’ Mum took up her point again, spooning mint sauce over her lamb. ‘What I mean is, if you two don’t start thinking about it soon, he’ll be too old to be a father. I mean to say, you not needing to work, don’t it get lonely for you in your big fla…apartment?’

  ‘Oh, I’m never lonely,’ Daisy defended, cutting into a slice of her roast lamb with real gusto, her mind on that first succulent taste. It was nice to get back to good old English cooking after the continental stuff they were always eating, Teddy was fond of his French and German food. ‘Not with Cissy and the baby there and it’s going to be a real joy for me looking after her when…’ She stopped forking up her piece of lamb, her head still down but her eyes furtive, aware that her mother had also stopped eating.

  ‘Baby? What baby?’

  ‘Oh…’ Daisy thought quickly. ‘I sometimes give eye to…’

  ‘You said something about Cissy? You don’t mean Cissy Farmer what you used to go around with – the one what you used to work with? Not ’er? Didn’t she go to France too? And she’s got a baby? So she got married then? Do ’er and ’er ’usband live with you as well?’

  ‘Nice to see a place full of young people,’ Aunt Maud said through a mouthful of Yorkshire pudding.

  Daisy was flustered, looking for a reply, but her dad intervened, obviously aware of her confusion.

  ‘Ain’t no ’usband around if you ask me. Ain’t married, is she?’

  ‘Well…’ There was no thought of eating for the moment. She put down her knife and fork and stared helplessly at her parents. ‘Look, it’s supposed to be a secret. Cissy doesn’t want me to tell anyone. She doesn’t want her family to know anything about her.’

  ‘Don’t tell us the poor girl got into trouble,’ quavered her aunt, her small mouth with its faint moustache on the upper lip forming an ‘O’ shape, while her uncle carried on ploughing into his food. It was none of his business.

  ‘Of course she ’as.’ Daisy’s father, usually so indolent about the silly problems of womenfolk, was suddenly intent. ‘And you’re over there, ’arbouring ’er?’

  ‘I’m not harbouring anyone, Dad. She’s not a criminal. She’s someone who’s been badly let down. Her…her husband-to-be jilted her.’ She decided on the spur of the moment to keep to a similar story to the one she’d told at the hospital when Cissy’s baby had been born. ‘He let her down and left her to have her baby all on her own. I had to take her in.’

  ‘Of course you had to, luv.’ Her mother laid an understanding hand on her arm. ‘It’d be like you to help a friend in need. But don’t her family know nuthink about it?’

  ‘No. And she doesn’t want them to know. So, please, Mum, keep it to yourself.’

  Warming to the tale, she let it all unfold throughout dinner, like one of those wandering storytellers of old who would go from village to village long before anyone could read or write, taking pleasure from the oohs and ahs it drew. It certainly was a burden off her own shoulders after so long having to keep it out of her letters.

  ‘But it mustn’t go any further,’ she cautioned when the tale was done. ‘For Cissy’s sake. She’s my best friend. Promise now.’

  ‘Well, I never,’ sighed her mother, getting up to dish up the apple tart and custard to round off Sunday dinner. ‘Of course, I’ll promise. Won’t we, Dick?’ and as her husband shrugged, having already put silly women’s gossip out of his mind, thus liable to say nothing, she added, ‘We won’t tell a soul,’ her eyes wandering to her sister who nodded vigorously and brother-in-law who made no response, already buried in the more urgent business of eating his afters.

  ‘Not a soul, we won’t.’

  Daisy wasn’t so sure and wished she hadn’t been quite so candid. It must have seemed such an unusual story that relayed to even the most innocuous listener in time it was bound to filter through to those concerned. It only needed her mother to go boasting about the grand life her daughter was leading in Paris with her wealthy husband, adding the bit about her daughter’s generosity to a friend in need in order to open up a way of mentioning how opulent her Paris apartment was.

  She could just see the direction her mother’s thoughts could take. A casual remark to a neighbour or two – no harm in that? Living here in Plaistow, Cissy Farmer’s people living in Canning Town, the busy Barking Road and East India Dock Road dividing them, it was as good a barrier as the Grand Canyon, neither borough with any excuse to bother the other.

  But what if one of her mother’s neighbours had a relative living in Canning Town who might know the Farmers? If it got out, how could she ever face Cissy again? She’d been so carried away she’d given none of this a thought.

  Daisy’s imagination knew no bounds and tormented her for weeks after coming home, waiting for a letter to arrive from the Farmers, or worse still, a ring of the bell to her apartment and a voice asking for Cissy Farmer.

  A month passed. Two months. No letters, no unwanted callers. Daisy relaxed. At her persuasion, Cissy began looking for employment, doing the rounds, reluctantly leaving Noelle to her care.

  Finding a job in a modiste or a boutique or even a mercerie – in England a common haberdasher’s – was proving more difficult than she or Cissy had imagined.

  ‘I’ve no qualifications, no experience,’ Cissy bemoaned, relaying what she had been told. ‘No one wants me. I can’t speak French well enough for them.’

  ‘Give it time,’ Daisy consoled. ‘You’ve only just started. Someone is bound to take you on eventually.’

  It was cold comfort and Cissy grimaced. ‘I’ve got to get something. The money Langley gave me is running out quicker than I ever thought it would, just on keeping me and Noelle.’

  If it was a hint for her to waive the measly ‘rent’ as they termed it, which Cissy had insisted in the first place she took, Daisy almost succumbed, but there was a principle here, and Cissy had been spending her money on other things, personal things, clothing, bon-bons, make-up, records which she had taken to playing over and over on Daisy’s new fine lacquered radiogram, and a dozen other personal indulgences. The nominal rent she handed over was the least of her outgoings.

  Daisy said nothing, but Cissy was already off on another tack.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Daisy, why don’t I buy a shop anyway and put in an assistant who knows the ropes to run it for me? That way I won’t have to learn it myself. There are lots of shopkeepers like that.’

  ‘That is not a good idea,’ said Theodore when Daisy told him. ‘It is known that employees will diddle…is that the word, my dear, diddle? Will diddle their employers right, left and centre.’

  He was proud of the colloquialisms he had picked up from her over the twenty months of their marriage, airing them as often as possible, gratified to see her smile at this one as he enlarged on his advice.

  ‘She would be a fool to embark on such a venture. I will tell her no, she must not go down that road.’

  He sat down to explain it to Cissy, patiently, in the face of her constant distraction with Noelle’s needs to be changed, to be given a rusk to suck, to have her little hands and face wiped afterwards, and to be settled down in her cot for a nap. Th
e folly of her good idea finally getting through to her, Cissy was impelled to resign herself to going out yet again to look for a suitable position.

  It was another five months before anything came along. In December, staff, any staff, were urgently needed for the Christmas rush and she was at last taken on by a small boutique on the outer perimeter of Paris. It was a start and served to supplement her fast-decreasing resources.

  It was the hardest thing she felt she had ever done, taking herself off to work that first day, knowing too that she was only on probation until Christmas was over.

  She hadn’t worked since leaving Cohens. Then she had been young and carefree. She’d had Daisy working with her. She’d also been in England. But here, all on her own in strange employment, in what was suddenly a strange country for all she’d been here three years, her whole body was shaking as she entered the rather old-fashioned boutique. She felt entirely alone. Not only that, but leaving Noelle to Daisy had been the greatest wrench she had ever imagined, greater even than when Langley had gone.

  Terrified perhaps for the first time in her life, sick at heart at having to leave Noelle, those deep blue eyes wide with questions at her leaving still etched on her very soul, she stood watching her new employer come towards her.

  Madame Flavigny had interviewed her prior to this, but this second meeting was no easier than the first. She was a thin, narrow-faced, middle-aged, formidable woman in sombre black but for several long strings of deep red garnets over her flat bodice. She wore long earrings and the hem of her dress only just cleared her ankles, far longer than the new fashion of hems again below the knee, conveying an impression that hers had never been any shorter than it was now. Slightly greying, but once jet-black hair scraped back from the forehead into a bun, pince-nez clenched a narrow nose over which she peered at Cissy.

  Facing this intrepid-looking woman in the quiet interior of this her domain, Cissy took a deep breath and swallowed hard.

  ‘Je m’appelle…Medemoiselle Farmer,’ she faltered, saw the thin lips tighten at her accent. There came a curt nod before turning away, a forefinger crooked over her sharp little black shoulders for her to follow.

  ‘Veuillez passer par ici, Mademoiselle.’

  Cissy shivered at this her first introduction to her place of work, saw before her a life of bowing and scraping, learning nothing, going nowhere. She wanted to turn and run, to go home – not to Daisy’s but really home, to have her mother cuddle her, to see her father smiling at her, to feel Eddie’s comforting arm around her waist, but she could only follow as she had been bidden. Oh, God, what a fool she was!

  Chapter Eighteen

  Madame Flavigny glared over her pince-nez at Cissy. ‘With a customer, you will not gaze elsewhere, Mademoiselle Farmer, as though you have no interest in her. From now on you will concentrate your whole attention solely upon my customers and nothing else. Do you understand what I am saying?’

  Abashed, Cissy nodded. It wasn’t easy to follow Madame Flavigny’s terse French when she was angry, but she grasped that in her effort to get the gist of what her customer had been asking – a customer who had immediately gone to complain to the proprieter of the inattentiveness of her staff – she had indeed looked away, but only to see if a clue might present itself as to what the woman required.

  Most of her customers she understood. Hearing her English accent, many would out of kindness speak a little slower for her benefit and some seemed to enjoy the experience of being attended by an English woman. Others, however, beset by centuries of resentment of anything English, by tradition deriding their cousins across the Channel, seemed to Cissy to take a delight in speaking even faster so that she must pinpoint all her concentration on what they wanted so as not to provoke Madame Flavigny’s displeasure by mistaking what was being asked of her. It seemed no matter what she did it was always wrong.

  As months went by she was beginning to comprehend even the fastest talker, with of course the odd hiccup, as now. But try as she might, her accent remained as strong as ever, and this was another bone of contention with some of them.

  ‘This is impossible!’ observed one particularly awkward customer, loud enough for the whole shop to hear, when Cissy had been there for just over four months. ‘What pleasure is there when being attended to, having to be addressed in such discourteous, crude terms? Where is the proprietor? Why are we being asked to put up with such service?’

  Madame Flavigny, with a hard glance towards Cissy, had taken the woman aside, speaking in low urgent tones with a flourish of gestures, the customer nodding and shrugging until served by Madame herself had finally left the premises duly satisfied with a triumphant smirk at the mortified assistant.

  ‘If you cannot speak civilly to my customers,’ Madame Flavigny told her afterwards, ‘then you had better not speak at all. Merely nod and say as little as possible. Meanwhile, Mademoiselle Farmer, I would advise you to concern yourself more upon learning to speak our language properly during your leisure moments than flitting about enjoying yourself. If you cannot or will not improve yourself, I shall have to dispense with your services.’

  Taking the hint, Cissy applied herself to getting her tongue around those French ‘r’s and correcting her vowel sounds. But it was so hard. There were still those customers whose naturally short tempers or whose day had been less than happy gave them cause to vent themselves upon her as an excuse to let off steam.

  ‘I don’t think I can take it much longer,’ she told Daisy at the end of June. ‘I almost wish she would sack me. Except that I come cheap.’

  ‘What would you do for another job?’ Daisy asked, her mind more on pretending to walk a fluffy toy dog for eighteen-month-old Noelle’s amusement, while Cissy looked on, her daughter so wrapped up with her friend that Daisy might have been her mother rather than she.

  Working six days a week, crowding onto an omnibus or flocking into the Metro for home each evening, seeing so little of Noelle and seeing her turn more and more towards Daisy because she wasn’t there, for how much longer could it go on? There was no likelihood of her being shown how a shop was run, being treated more like a general dogsbody. She had gleaned some idea on her own, but she wasn’t so sure she would ever make a success of running a shop here in Paris.

  ‘You had enough trouble finding that job,’ Daisy continued. ‘I’d stick with what you’ve got.’ She wriggled the fluffy toy in Noelle’s face. Cissy’s heart ached hearing the resultant giddy laugh. ‘Apart from that, you haven’t got such a bad life here, have you? We do try to make you as happy as possible, me and Teddy.’

  ‘I know you do,’ Cissy said, watching her daughter. ‘I’m grateful.’

  ‘You don’t have to be grateful. I like you being here. Me looking after Noelle. Without you both it would be so quiet here. I miss us not going shopping during the week as we used to, of course. Still, I do have Noelle, don’t I? I daren’t think what I’d do without her.’

  Cissy looked sharply at her. She was lately beginning to say things like this in a yearning tone as if she had a wish for a child of her own. She had never said it outright and even scoffed at the idea of being saddled with a family, saying there was lots of time for that. Yet it sometimes sounded when she spoke of Noelle as if she was almost laying claim to her and as though she were filling some need.

  ‘I’ll have to leave here one day,’ Cissy said now in a strange urge to test her. ‘I can’t go on living here indefinitely.’

  Her test was proving positive. Daisy’s brown eyes grew fractionally alarmed. ‘You’re going to find it hard going to work with her around.’

  ‘I’m going to have to face it sooner or later.’

  ‘Yes, but…’ Daisy relaxed visibly as if convinced of the weight of her next words. ‘Not for ages yet. You couldn’t go out at weekends living on your own. And you couldn’t afford a nurse for her. Pity you haven’t made any friends where you work. Though we do try to make life interesting for you here, don’t we?’

  It was
n’t easy to make friends. At the boutique there was just her and a middle-aged cashier, seemingly chained to her high stool behind the railed cash desk. But Theodore saw to it that she was seldom left out if they went to the theatre, a nurse hired to look after Noelle. Last Saturday, they had visited the Theatre l’Apollo to see the show entitled Au Temps des Valses – in London, it was called Bitter Sweet. The songs of course were in French: ‘Je Vous Reverrai’ – ‘I’ll See You Again’, and ‘Abandonnee’ – ‘Kiss Me’. Just as lovely to hear, except that her eyes had filled with tears of nostalgia for the dear old London days, listening to reviews and musicals from up in the gods, all she and Daisy could afford then, but such happy days they had been.

  On Sundays if the weather was fine, all three, with little Noelle, would eat out, stroll in the Tuileries or by the banks of the Seine; wander around the flea market fingering second-hand and antique wares. Sometimes they would go for a spin into the countryside in Teddy’s German Daimler, maybe just to nearby Auteuil racetrack for the steeplechasing where he’d buy them champagne. Sipping hers, Cissy would recall when she had taken such things for granted instead of feeling a hanger-on.

  On these occasions, yearning for what had been, became something of an obsession, as did dreaming of great success perhaps in the fashion business. They were just dreams; her dwindling savings viewed with alarm these days. One needed lots more than she had to get started. Theodore might have agreed to help finance her had she asked, but she wasn’t prepared to go cap in hand to anyone. But they did torment her so, those dreams, just as her old memories taunted her. Yet she wanted them to taunt and torment – a way of keeping her up to scratch, she supposed.

  It was on a whim of recreating those days of opulence the following evening that, instead of going to the Metro after a long day serving customers, she diverted to go and take a peek at the last of the afternoon shoppers in the Rue de Rivoli.

  Every shop window looked like a stage in the golden light of the long summer evening, rich women were loading the back of their cars with bright and beautiful parcels and boxes. She knew the drill well: tonight on a man’s arm, they would go on to the opera, or to the theatre, maybe to a private bar or a teeming jazz club, a group of black jazz musicians playing the night away – no work for society women to get up for in the morning – while they drank cocktails. Ah, those lovely cocktails.