by Marie Joseph
‘He’s no worse, is he, Doctor?’
Doctor Bates fiddled with his watch-chain. She was very bonny, this girl, this child standing before him. She had the bold solid look he’d noticed in so many East Lancashire girls. Soft in colouring, but with a fierce determination about her. Aye, fierce. That was the word to describe young Maggie Craig. With her childhood gone before she had savoured it, solemn-eyed, hands folded in front of her over the sacking pinny covering her flowered cotton overall. Brown hair looped back from a centre parting and pinned high at the back of her head in a tight bun.
How much simpler things would have been if the good Lord had issued a double ticket when Hannah Craig had died of the diphtheria. One for her and the other for her husband.
The twins were as self-centred as their father, and they could have got on with their soldiering, and this little lass could have come to live with him and his wife in their three-storeyed house set into the hill.
Maggie was bright and pretty, and would have filled their declining years with joy. He touched the end of his violet nose with his finger, and Maggie looked quickly away.
The doctor was going to tell her something serious; she could tell that by his expression. She was worried sick about her father, but that nose! Jonathan had once said that if you set a match to it there would be an explosion.
‘The doctor would disappear in a cloud of blue smoke. Pouff!’ he’d said.
Maggie gulped the giggle back in her throat, a little girl again with her brothers teasing her straight face away, then raising their eyes in mock despair as her laughter bubbled out.
Just for a moment she could hear Miss Hepinstall’s piercing voice:
‘Out here at once, Maggie Craig! You’ll be laughing the other side of your face before the day’s out. Hold out your hand!’
Miss Daisy Hepinstall. ‘Oh, flippin’ heck,’ as the girls at the mill were always saying. ‘Maggie Craig thinks summat’s funny again.’
‘Your father,’ the doctor was saying carefully, ‘has something wrong with him. A sort of nervous complaint which is making him grow old – senile – before his time has come to grow old.’
He fingered the nose again, but for Maggie the urge to giggle had gone, and her face flushed red with a terrible anxiety.
‘That’s it,’ she agreed. ‘He does look like an old man. His hair is turning proper white, and he won’t walk anywhere if he can help it. But there’s no pain because I keep asking him, and anyway I’d know. My father is not a very good sufferer.’
Doctor Bates permitted himself a fleeting smile, but oh, dear God, it was all wrong that this lovely child should have full responsibility for the failing man upstairs. He tapped the nose, then his head. ‘There’s a fault in your father’s brain, and this fault is preventing the messages getting through to his limbs – telling them to move. Do you see? That is why he shuffles instead of lifting his feet up when he tries to take a step, and that is why he spends so long in his chair, and lying on his bed. His reactions are those of someone much older.’
‘Is he going to die, then?’
Maggie’s voice was low and pleading, but her eyes demanded that she be told the truth, no matter what.
‘No, he’s not going to die, love. He could live for a very long time, but he’s never going to do a day’s work again. Certainly not teaching. There might be something in the mill. . . .’
‘Never!’ Maggie’s tilted chin emphasized her defiance. ‘Me father’s not going in the mill, not sweeping or something like that, and that’s what it would be because his fingers aren’t quick enough for him to be a weaver.’
She spoke with quiet determination. ‘Me father was a teacher, Doctor, and he wouldn’t be like he is if me mother were still alive. It’s his heart what’s stopped those messages getting through to his legs, isn’t it? It nearly killed him when me mother died.’
Doctor Bates took his watch out of his pocket, and raised bushy eyebrows as he saw the time.
Out of the mouths of babes, right enough. But he did not go the whole way with that theory. No, Thomas Craig was a sick man, but a weak man also, and more than a bit of a coward come to that. He should have pulled himself together, smartened himself up a bit, and looked around for a woman to marry.
Not to put in his wife’s place, or even in his bed for that matter, but a woman who would have taken the burden from this little lass’s shoulders.
He walked towards the curtain that separated the living-room from the front parlour, and parted its folds with an impatient gesture. He had come to help, and what had he achieved? Nothing.
‘Heard from the boys?’ he asked as he stepped out on to the pavement.
‘No, not for a long time, but they’re not much at writing letters. They’ll just turn up one day, the both of them brazen as brass.’
Doctor Bates hesitated before walking away up the street. There was something in the way Maggie held her head . . . by the gum, but she was going to be a bonny woman. She was smiling at him as graciously as if she was showing him out of a grand house, and she wasn’t a child at all. The blue stuff of her cotton blouse atop the awful sacking pinny was pulling in creases underneath her arms, and the buttons down the front looked ready to pop at any minute. He tried to work out exactly how old she was, and wondered vaguely if there was someone, another woman, to explain certain things.
As if she had been conjured up out of his thoughts, a short stout woman came out of the house next door, a cup held in an outstretched hand.
‘Have you such a thing as a cup of sugar, love? I’ve got me scones half mixed and I’m that much short.’
Then she saw the doctor, and whipped the cup out of sight beneath her pinafore. ‘Ee, I didn’t know you’d got company, love. I’ll come back when it’s more convenient like.’
The doctor raised his hat, his mind registering the twinkle in Maggie’s eyes. Either the borrowing was a regular occurrence, or the neighbour had seen him through her front window and come to see what was going on. And Maggie knew it. She’d all her chairs at home had young Maggie Craig.
He continued on his way, his mind more at ease. Yes, that neighbour looked like the salt of the earth type. She would keep a motherly eye on Maggie, and her father, he felt sure of that. Closer than Siamese twins the folks in some of these little streets. In and out of each other’s houses with basins of nourishing broth, and running for the doctor if one of them looked like dying. Yes, he’d done his duty by the Craig family, more than his duty come to that. His own widespread practice was as much as he could manage, and he wasn’t getting any younger. His wife was always reminding him of that.
Stepping out briskly, his mind at ease, Doctor Bates turned into the main street leading to the market square, and mentally crossed the Craig family from his list of worries.
‘Who was that, then?’ Clara Preston asked the question without preamble. If she wanted to ask anything she asked it straight out, and why not? If folks did not want to tell they could always keep their mouths shut. She would not take offence. She’d find out in her own good time, anyroad.
‘He’d got a right conk on him, and no mistake. Bet you wouldn’t have to tell him what to do with a bottle of beer.’
Maggie smiled, busy at the dresser filling the cup with sugar. She knew that Clara had timed her appearance deliberately, wanting to know who the visitor was, and why she had not been told of his coming.
She had weighed Clara up from the first week in Foundry Street. Keep your own counsel and Clara would find out somehow. Tell her everything and she would be your friend for life.
And this wasn’t the time to turn your nose up at a friend, even one as unlikely as Clara Preston, with the glide in one eye, and a mother next door who kept her as close as if she had never left the womb.
‘You don’t want to speak to her,’ Clara would say of a neighbour. ‘She’s no better than what she should be, me mother says.’
‘I wouldn’t get your meat from that butcher’s. They say he�
��s got another woman,’ Clara would say.
Maggie hesitated, but not for long. The urge to talk about her father was overwhelming.
‘He’s not really ill in his body, Clara. It’s just his mind forgetting to tell his body what to do. That’s why he never wants to walk far.’
Clara’s left eye glided into the corner.
‘He didn’t say your dad would have to go in the looneybin, did he?’ She sat down obviously relishing the prospect.
‘Of course not. It’s just that he never really picked up after me mother died. It was the shock brought this on, you see.’
Clara brightened up. ‘Aye, shock’s a terrible thing. I once knew a girl who set stiff as a board when a man showed her his johnwilly down by the canal. They had to carry her home like a plank.’
Maggie’s laughter rang out, then she glanced towards the foot of the stairs and clamped a hand over her mouth.
‘You are a one, Clara Preston. Sometimes you say worse things than the girls at the mill. Me Grandma Butterworth would have made you wash your mouth out with soap and water if she had heard you say that.’
She picked up the poker from its stand, and moved the kettle-grid over the fire.
‘Let’s have a cup of tea, eh?’
‘Thought you was never going to ask,’ Clara said with a fat smile that almost disappeared into the folds of her neck.
‘Aye, you’re right, love. Compared to you I’m as common as muck, and don’t deny it, for it’s the gospel truth. When you first moved in and I heard the way you speak I told Arnie, I said: “Them next door is out of a higher drawer than what we are”.’ She set the rocking chair into motion with a movement of her foot. ‘Not that it bothers me. Folks is folks, and if you do what’s right, me mother says, you won’t go far wrong.’
Maggie sat down in the chair opposite to Clara, and listened to her talk with amused affection. It was hard to believe that Clara was only twenty-four, a married woman for only three years. There was a middle-aged look about her flat features, and a matronly shelving of her drooping bust. There was nothing glad about Clara’s mournful pudding of a face, but it was a kindly face just the same. She would have been surprised if she could have overheard Clara reporting to her mother:
‘She knows nowt that little Maggie Craig doesn’t. She might read poetry books and newspapers, but she needs telling a few things, she does that ’n all.’
So Clara had explained to Maggie what she could expect to happen now that her chest had started ‘sprouting’, leaving her feeling that her whole body had suddenly become dirty, with one place in particular singled out for unbelievable nastiness.
‘And that’s only the beginning of what women have to put up with,’ Clara said, fat jowls wobbling earnestly. ‘If men had to put up with what women do they wouldn’t go around looking so chuffed with themselves. It’s nothing to get upset about, love. Just remember never to put your hands in cold water when you’re like that, and as for the other thing, well you don’t need to know owt about that for years yet. Just never allow a boy any liberties, that’s all. All men have a nasty side to them. It’s best to remember that.’
‘What liberties?’ Maggie had wanted to know, but Clara, her duty done, had pretended not to hear.
Maggie handed a cup of tea to Clara, then passed over the sugar basin.
‘My father used to be able to recognize the call of birds, and he used to take me for walks and go so far that he had to carry me back on his shoulders. You wouldn’t have known him in those days, Clara. I can only just remember him when he was different, but I know he was a lovely man.’
Maggie unhooked the wool-stitched holder from its nail on the wall, and bending down to the hearth, filled up the tea-pot. When she straightened up her face was flushed from the heat of the fire, and silky brown wisps of hair curled down her neck from the tight bun on top of her head.
Suddenly Clara felt inexplicable anger rise up sour in her throat, and without knowing why she was cross, said in a loud voice:
‘If you’d rub your hands on the soap, then smooth them down over your hair, you’d find it wouldn’t come down like that. And you need a new blouse, Maggie Craig. You’re all busting out of that one, and it doesn’t look nice.’
Then, as Maggie clutched at the offending button-trim of her blue blouse, Clara relented.
‘If you like I’ll show you how to make a tuck across your bust-bodices, so that your front won’t show as two. It’s showing two what makes it disgusting.’ She patted her own bolster-shaped one-piece bosom.
‘If you bring me one of your bodices down and find me a bit of thread and a needle, I’ll do it now while your dad is out of the way.’
Maggie nodded. ‘It is good of you, Clara.’
‘I shall pass through this world but once,’ said Clara surprisingly as her face creased into its squashed and joyless smile.
‘Fancy Clara knowing that,’ Maggie thought as she ran quickly up the steep dark stairs, then she peeped into her father’s room and saw that he was lying on his bed facing the wall.
In her own room she sat down on her bed for a moment and worried about him, then she worried about her shape. She wished she wasn’t growing into such a rude shape. But why was it rude?
Of one thing she was certain. She could never ask Clara to explain some of the things the girls talked about at the mill. Not with Clara’s father being the Sunday School Superintendent at the Chapel, and with her mother having wanted to be a missionary before she got married.
She took a clean white bust-bodice from the top drawer, and stared at it, then lifting her eyes, she saw her reflection in the swing mirror, and the way she was indeed busting out of her blouse.
Suddenly, without warning, she felt an almost paralysing wave of longing for her mother. For Hannah, the mother she vaguely remembered swishing her round the School House kitchen, skirts billowing out as she moved with quick decisive movements from fire to table, then table to fire.
‘Feeling sorry for yourself will get you nowhere fast, Maggie Craig!’ she said, putting her tongue out at her reflection. Then she ran downstairs to find that Clara was pouring herself yet another cup of tea.
2
‘OH FOR A man . . . oh for a man . . . oh for a mansion in the sky,’ Maggie sang at the top of her clear tuneful voice.
It was the week before her seventeenth birthday, and although her father had deteriorated over the past three years, he was still alive. And the sun was shining outside the mill, even if its rays were filtered down through a maze of tall mill chimneys. Maggie had three looms to tend now, and well, if her father wasn’t any better, she told herself that he could certainly have been a lot worse.
‘Being happy is a state of mind, not a matter of circumstance,’ she had explained seriously to one of the loom sweepers only that morning as they waited in line to brew up their breakfast mug of tea.
Then they had both burst out laughing, the nineteen-year-old boy, and the girl who was giving him what he called her ‘bossy teacher’s lecture’.
Joe Barton reckoned he was the only person in the tall grey cotton mill who could tumble Maggie Craig down off her high horse. Joe thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and in the six months since he had come to know her, she had brought a colour and a gaiety into his life he had never known before.
They weren’t courting, heaven’s sakes not that, as Maggie said herself, but she did concede that they were a little bit more than friends. She caught Joe’s eye as he walked past her looms, and when he winked at her she winked back. There was no trace of shyness in the cheeky wink. Being brought up with three older brothers had knocked that sort of daftness out of her early on, and privately she thought the other girl weavers were stupid the way they blushed and giggled if a boy as much as spoke to them.
But oh no, she certainly wasn’t courting. Keeping company with a boy meant you were thinking of getting married, then either living with his family or yours till you could find a house with a
rent you could afford, and enough furniture to start you off. Then it was him coming home for his tea, then off to the pub every night with his mates, and you stopping at home and having babies one after the other. It was him going to the football match every Saturday afternoon, and continual arguments about money and the lack of it. An’ all the fun in your life finished before you’d had any.
Maggie’s fingers moved busily as she sang at the top of her voice. She was enjoying the freedom of singing her heart out against the deafening clatter of the machinery in the weaving shed. Although the stone floor ran damp beneath her feet she could sing and she could work and let her thoughts run free. As free as the birds her father used to love to watch. But by the gum it was hot! She ran a finger round the band at the throat of her striped blouse, then undid the top two buttons.
Life was strange. Look at the packet she’d had for the past three years. Solely responsible for a man aged into near senility by self-pity, no time for girl friends her own age, because let’s face it, they were still having their hair-ribbons tied on by their mothers when she was chief cook and bottle-washer.
Maggie started on another rousing chorus: Oh aye, life was strange all right, and until she had met Joe Barton and walked in the park with him of a summer and laughed at nowt with him as they snuggled close together in a doorway of a dark night, there hadn’t been much to laugh at really. But then you accepted what happened day by day if you had any gumption. She’d tried to tell Joe Barton that when he’d grumbled about the way the overlooker kept constant tabs on them.
‘If you argue with the likes of him, you only come the worst off.’
Joe had grinned and put up his fists in a mock fight.
‘If he docks any more of me money off I’ll knock his block off,’ he’d said. ‘His bloody block off,’ he had added, just to show Maggie that she hadn’t bossed him out of swearing, not quite.
