Poppy Day

by Annie Murray

  ‘I do love yer – just give me a bit more time, sweetheart. That’s all. I want to be yer wife. I just can’t agree to it yet.’

  John put his arms round her bony shoulders and his eyes met hers. ‘Don’t hide anything from me, Poll. I couldn’t stand that. Is there someone else yer want more?’

  ‘No! Oh John, no! I mean, not anyone like you mean. It’s Ernie. I know it seems stupid to you but I can’t marry yer ’til I’ve found a way to lay ’im to rest. Once and for all.’

  Everyone looked up as they came back in. Perce’s family had all gone and the rest of them were sitting round the back room looking relaxed and happy. As they came in, Peter Stevenson got up.

  ‘Time we were off, Davey,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we’ve outstayed our welcome already.’

  The little boy groaned. He and Ronny were playing together on the floor. ‘Oh Dad – not yet!’

  ‘Course yer staying,’ Olive commanded. ‘There’s plenty more to eat and drink and we’ve ’ardly seen yer since Christmas. We’d thought you’d gone off us!’

  ‘Don’t talk daft,’ Peter said, putting his hat down again. ‘Course I haven’t. I thought you might just want to be family . . .’

  ‘You’re almost part of the family,’ Olive insisted, eyeing Jess meaningfully. ‘How’s that kettle coming on?’

  ‘Slow,’ Jess said. She was glad of something to keep her busy. All day she had felt an emotional pressure growing between herself and Peter Stevenson. She was sure now that he was not avoiding her by accident. But she hadn’t approached him either. She didn’t know how to be with him any more, what to say. She didn’t know what he felt and was just as unsure of her own feelings. She found herself struck dumb in his company.

  As John and Polly came in Bert got up to help. He took in Polly’s emotional expression.

  ‘What’s up, Poll?’

  Polly looked round the room, then down at John as if asking his permission. Jess saw him nod.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Yer might as well.’

  ‘John’s asked me to marry him—’ Polly held up one hand as the others began to exclaim at the news. ‘But I’ve said to ’im I can’t yet, things being as they are. You know ’ow things were for me after Ernie . . . after ’e were killed. I know you thought I were going off me ’ead, Mom. But it were the only way I could face things then. But the thing is . . .’ She began to get emotional again. ‘I still feel as if ’e’s about. As if it’s a mistake and ’e ain’t really . . . dead. I know it sounds daft, but it’s not knowing where ’e is or what happened . . .’

  She stopped, looking round at them.

  Bert spoke gently to her. ‘You don’t think ’e’s not dead? Don’t waste yer time thinking that, Poll. ’E’ll be dead all right – you know that, don’t yer?’

  Polly nodded. ‘I do really. It’s just – if I could see his grave – you know, like you do with a normal death. I mean, even if we knew where ’e was, they ain’t going to bring any of them back over ’ere, are they?’

  Jess listened, one hand on the warm handle of the kettle. She thought of all her visits to her mom’s grave, what strength she had taken from it. Things need finishing properly, she thought. For all of us.

  Olive sat massaging her sore knuckles. ‘Well there ain’t no chance of that, Poll.’

  ‘There might be, you know.’

  Everyone looked at Peter Stevenson.

  ‘What d’yer mean?’ Polly said.

  ‘People do go. Some even went before the war was over.’

  ‘Well I know some do, like with money and that, but I mean it’s right over there – across the Channel. It’s France.’

  Peter smiled. ‘It’s not the ends of the earth. People do go to France.’

  ‘Not people like us.’

  ‘Well I went,’ John said. ‘For a start.’

  ‘But it’d cost the earth,’ Olive said.

  ‘There’s a fund started up, I think.’ Peter rubbed his forehead as if it would help him remember. ‘Some feller at the works was talking about it. Look – I’ll ask around, see if there’s anything we could do.’ He smiled suddenly, his gaze directed across at Jess who had not realized until that moment that she had her eyes fixed on him. It was as if each of them forgot for a second that they were not supposed to feel for each other. Shyly, she smiled back, instantly full of a warm sense of joy.

  A few days later he called again, quite late in the evening, without David who was asleep at home. Polly let him in and Jess was startled at his sudden appearance, hat in hand, ducking his head to come through the door. For a second his eyes met hers, then he looked quickly away. Jess moved briskly across the room, finding things to busy herself with. He hasn’t come to see me, she told herself. He’s come out of kindness for Polly.

  ‘There is a fund, like I said. Just starting up.’

  Polly was watching him, her expression full of misgiving.

  ‘If you go with a London travel company it’ll set you back thirty-five pound – more even. If you go through the fund it’s fourteen.’

  ‘Struth!’ Olive exclaimed.

  Bert was shaking his head. ‘Fourteen quid! The bloke’s dead!’

  Polly ignored him. ‘That’s still an ’ell of a lot of money.’

  Jess moved over and put her hand on her cousin’s shoulder. ‘Poll – if you want to go that bad and put your mind at rest, we’ll find the money for yer. I’ve got some savings – put away for a rainy day, like.’

  ‘But I can’t go to France on my own!’

  Peter Stevenson cleared his throat. ‘If you don’t mind – I’ve got a suggestion to make.’

  Forty-Three

  May 1919

  Jess leaned her head against the grimy window, feeling the rocking rhythm of the train as it chugged through the Staffordshire countryside. It was two weeks after Sis’s wedding and she and Perce were home and getting settled into their tiny house on Sherbourne Road, though she was forever popping back to see them. She seemed happy and lively as ever, but missed the girls’ company.

  ‘Perce’s lovely to me,’ she said. ‘But ’e don’t talk all that much. I don’t even know as ’e’s listening to me ’alf the time.’ She’d said she was too busy getting straight to come with them.

  Polly and Jess sat side by side, each of them with their hats in their laps. Olive was opposite, dozing, mouth slightly open, hands slack. On the seat beside her was a posy of spring flowers. Outside was cloudy but dry, sunlight through breaks of cloud. They had started off very early that morning, taken a train up through the Black Country, seeing the red glow of furnaces in the grey morning, a pall of soot seeming to engulf everything, buildings, grass, trees. They changed at Stoke-on-Trent and were now on the branch line looking out at the fields green with young wheat, at tarnished churches, stone buildings. It’s peaceful round here, Jess thought, and solid. She liked things to be solid. Sure. The nature of their visit filled her with a great sense of poignancy. Travelling by train made her think of the passage of time, of life itself passing by in a way she seldom had time to do normally. She thought of Alice and Louisa. Her mother and grandmother, their lives cut short so young, and both, one way or another, because they were women. She found herself thinking of her own dead child. Ned’s child. It came to her that every time a woman fell pregnant she took her own life in her hands, forever. Whether the babby lives or dies, none of us is ever the same again, she thought. And will there ever be any more children for me? Any more love for me?

  Peter Stevenson’s face came into her mind, the look he had given her that night outside the house, when he left with David asleep on his shoulder. She had been too frozen inside then, too full of grief to respond. Whichever way her mind turned it seemed to fasten on something sad: children, Ned, Peter. She turned to Polly who was looking across at Olive.

  ‘Be there in a minute,’ Jess said. ‘It’s no distance.’

  ‘I hope this ain’t going to upset her again.’ Polly looked anxious. ‘Mom’s been through
enough.’

  ‘She wanted to come. Like you and France.’ They were making arrangements, with Peter’s support and help.

  ‘I know it’s the right thing to do. She should know where ’er own mom’s buried. I think it’s terrible our granddad never took ’er to see. I feel ever so churned up though, thinking about it.’

  Jess nodded. ‘I do an’ all. Sort of touching the past. Gives yer a peculiar feeling.’

  The train slowed and Polly leaned forward and gently prodded Olive’s knee. ‘We’re there, mom.’

  Olive opened her eyes, bewildered for a second as the train braked abruptly. ‘Feels as if we’ve been travelling for days.’ She gathered her coat stoutly round her, picked up her bag and they hurried off. Polly had picked up the flowers.

  As they stepped out on to the little station, a goods train made up of trucks full of sand rumbled past, the wind lifting a light silt of it sharp against their faces, making them blink their eyes.

  ‘Ugh!’ Polly said. ‘It’s windy up ’ere – let’s get on.’

  On the street, they stopped, at a loss.

  ‘How do we know which way to go?’ There was a tremor in Olive’s voice. ‘Oh Poll, we can’t ask – not for that.’ The terrible shame of it filled all of them. They would have to go and ask for the Mental Hospital. As good as admit that someone, one of their own, had been in an asylum, locked away from the world. For a moment they were completely at a loss.

  ‘Maybe if we was just to walk round for a bit?’ Polly suggested.

  ‘No.’ Jess pushed her chin out with furious defiance. ‘She was our flesh and blood, Alice was. I’ll find out. I’ll go back in there and ask.’

  They had to walk out of the village, the stationmaster told Jess. He was a middle-aged, kindly sort who set them on the right road.

  ‘You can’t miss it,’ he said. ‘Look for the tower.’ The blackened, brick tower was the first they saw of the hospital. Once on the long drive the rest of it came into view, tucked in with hills behind, a low collection of buildings so desolate, so marked in its isolation from everything around it that the sight made the three of them reach for each other’s hands. They had not spoken much on the walk out there, each of them too full of feeling. Jess breathed in deeply, trying to calm herself. Was this Alice’s place? The walls behind which pretty, young Alice had lived out the rest of her days? She looked anxiously at her aunt and saw Polly was doing the same. How much more Olive must be feeling!

  Olive showed no outward sign of emotion.

  ‘This is it then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jess said gently.

  ‘I can’t really take it in.’

  ‘You awright mom?’ Polly had a catch in her voice.

  Olive’s eyes moved over the collection of buildings. ‘This is where they put ’er then. Where they took ’er. All that time . . .’ She shook her head, beyond words.

  When she had taken in the sight of the place for a time, Jess said,

  ‘Shall we go and ask to see the graveyard?’

  Olive seemed to steel herself for a moment, then nodded. As they walked along, arm in arm, she pulled the two of them closer to her. Jess looked round at her, remembering holding her aunt’s hand the day they buried Louisa, when her head only reached up to Olive’s elbow.

  The main door was black with a small grille set in it which opened quite some time after they had pulled the bell. A man’s face appeared, eyes narrowing against the light.

  ‘We’re expected,’ Jess said. ‘Mrs Beeston. We wrote to say we’d be coming.’

  After a long process of rattling bolts and turning keys, they stepped inside, as if into another life.

  ‘Follow me,’ the man said. ‘It’ll be Mr Lang you want.’

  He led them halfway along a deserted, echoing corridor and into an office where a dark-haired man with thick horn-rimmed spectacles sat owlishly behind a desk. Seated at another desk behind him, a woman was typing at high speed.

  It was Polly, in the end, who did the talking. Olive found herself incapable and sunk down on to the chair opposite the desk. Jess found Mr Lang a little strange at first. He didn’t look them in the eye, and he spoke slowly, as if unused to it, in a low, gravelly voice, but he was obliging enough. He searched through a pile of papers for Jess’s letter.

  ‘Let’s see – you say you want to look for the grave of an Alice . . .’ he strung out the words, ‘Tamplin. Hmmm. Now I don’t know anything about her, of course. You’re certain she was here when she died? Good, well, I’ll get someone . . . no, look, let me take you. That would be easiest.’

  He stood up and put his coat on and a hat over his thin black hair. ‘I shan’t be long,’ he told the typist.

  To Jess’s relief he led them, with loping strides, back the way they had come to the front entrance. She had been afraid they would have to walk through the labyrinth of the hospital, and the place appalled her. The man asked no questions, just kept walking, slightly ahead of them. Once they had walked out and round the side of the building he pointed and said,

  ‘You can see the hospital chapel there.’ The geometry of that part of the building differed from the rest, the roof curving up to a point, rather like the prow of a ship, with a cross on top, and the end wall, which jutted out, had crosses built into the pattern of the brickwork. ‘We need to go just round behind there.’ His tone was low and considerate.

  ‘It’s very quiet,’ Jess said uneasily. ‘Where is everyone – all the inmates, I mean?’

  Mr Lang pulled out his watch as he walked and looked at it. ‘They’ll all be inside on the wards. Except a few who’re out working in the grounds, but that’s over the other side.’

  The graveyard looked neglected, the grass long and full of clumps, and a riot of weeds and wild flowers had colonized all over it. Mr Lang explained that part of the hospital had been vacated for use as a military hospital during the war, the inmates moved elsewhere.

  ‘Everything went downhill as you can imagine. Still recovering. I’m very new here myself, of course. Now – perhaps you’d like to have a look . . .’

  He stood aside with his hands clasped behind his back as if to dissociate himself from their emotion as they began to wander up and down the rows of graves together, reading the plain little crosses and headstones, some of them wood, a litany of strangers’ names, waiting for the words, ‘Alice Tamplin’ to be there, to jump out at them. Row by row they looked, reading along the fifty or sixty graves until they came to the last.

  ‘Must be here,’ Polly murmured. ‘’Ow could we’ve missed it? We can’t’ve done, can we?’ Jess felt she was studying each one more intently than the last, as if to force the name on it to be Alice’s. When they reached the last stone, it read, ‘Susannah Peters’. They looked up at each other.

  ‘Well where is she then?’ Olive said shrilly. ‘What did they do with her?’

  Mr Lang was beginning to sound weary of the whole affair. He led them back to his office.

  ‘You say she died – when?’

  ‘It’d have been eighteen eighty-four,’ Olive said. She couldn’t hide her distress. ‘That’s when my father told us. I was thirteen . . . She must be ’ere somewhere. I’ve always known of ’er being ’ere . . .’

  ‘One moment Mrs – ?’

  ‘Beeston.’

  Olive sat, breathing audibly as Mr Lang went through a door at the back of the office and returned with two leatherbound ledgers which he opened on the desk and stood leaning over them like a carrion bird.

  ‘What year was the lady in question sent here?’

  Polly and Jess looked at Olive.

  ‘Eighteen seventy-seven. August eighteen seventy-seven – no, ’ang on, that’d be Birmingham. She came out ’ere the following year. Eighteen seventy-eight, early on, about February.’

  He replaced the ledgers with others, opening yellowed pages and running his twig-like fingers down inky lists.

  ‘Ah.’ He stopped. ‘Yes. Here we are.’

  Olive’s right han
d went to her throat.

  ‘Alice Tamplin – from Birmingham? They brought her all the way out here?’

  ‘Was that unusual?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Rather – but not unheard of. There are hospitals in Birmingham, of course. But if they were over-full, for instance . . . Or a request from the family. Now . . .’ He turned over a few pages, musingly. Jess felt as if her eyes were trying to bore through the pages. Show us! she wanted to shout. Show us what it says!

  Mr Lang turned another page and a sheet of paper fluttered to the floor. The woman who had been typing had stopped to listen, and she picked it up. Mr Lang peered with sudden attention at the page.

  ‘Oh! Ah – now, here we are! Well well . . .’

  ‘What does it say?’ Jess couldn’t keep quiet.

  ‘No wonder we couldn’t find her in the graveyard.’ He looked up at them over his spectacles. ‘Alice Tamplin did not die in this hospital.’

  They gaped at him.

  ‘What d’yer mean?’ Polly could barely do more than whisper.

  ‘On the fifth of May eighteen eighty-seven, an Alice Tamplin quitted the hospital.’

  ‘Quitted?’ Olive said faintly.

  ‘Yes, left. Was allowed to leave. Discharged.’

  They looked back at him in sheer disbelief.

  ‘But—’ Jess said eventually. ‘How could she just leave?’

  ‘It seems that she was considered of sound enough mind, of no danger to others or to herself. It does happen occasionally. But someone must claim responsibility for any inmate who is to be released. In this case,’ he looked down at the page again. ‘The person named is a Mr Arthur Tamplin.’

  Shock came so fast upon shock that they hadn’t the time or capability of making sense of it. Olive sat quite silent, quite still.

  ‘But where did she go then?’ Polly asked. ‘She never came ’ome, did she?’

  ‘No,’ Olive whispered. ‘Never.’

  ‘She may have gone to Leek to seek employment. Or even as far as Stoke. I’m afraid there’s no record of that.’

  ‘I think this might shed some light on it.’ The woman at the typewriter was peering at the yellowed slip of paper which had floated to the floor. Mr Lang turned to take it from her, but she got up and handed it straight to Jess.