Two for Three Farthings

by Mary Jane Staples

  His train journey was a lonely one. He missed his companions of before, little Effel and talkative Orrice. It seemed ages before he found himself at last in Elderfield again. He walked through the little village and past the tiny shop, and on to the pair of cottages that lay beyond the street. He turned in at the gate of the first cottage, noted again the neat little front garden, and knocked at the door. Mrs Miller, his elderly grandmother, answered his knock. Her face, slightly rosy in the way of a countrywoman, expressed no surprise.

  ‘I thought as you might come again,’ she said.

  ‘I thought myself that I’d come when there was a chance of seeing you alone,’ said Jim with a smile.

  ‘You thought right.’ She opened the door wide. ‘I be happy to see you, Jim. My son’s at work, my daughter-in-law be up with the sheep and my husband be gone into town. Come in and welcome.’

  He stepped in. She looked up at him.

  ‘You’re my grandmother,’ he said, and kissed her smooth cheek. She took hold of his right arm and of his left arm, above the elbow stump, and she held him firmly for a second or so. Then she kissed him.

  ‘You be my sweet Betsy’s son, as I knowed when I saw you,’ she said. ‘Where shall we talk?’

  ‘In your kitchen,’ he said, ‘I like kitchens.’

  They seated themselves at the kitchen table, an iron kettle heating up on the range hob.

  ‘You’ll take tea?’ she said.

  ‘Any time of the day, Grandma.’

  ‘In a minute, then, when that old kettle boils. You be wanting to know about your mother, don’t you?’

  ‘I’d like to hear she was something like you.’

  Mrs Miller told him about Betsy, a good girl, a lovely girl, who could find no work in the village after she left school, but was offered a job in service later. Up to near London, which worried Mrs Miller a little, seeing so many tales were told about how London put the wrong kind of temptations in the way of a girl far from home. But her father, Mr Miller, said no harm would come to a girl as good and as sensible as their Betsy. Arthur scowled about it, being very fond of his sister and not liking her being away from home at all.

  ‘He really was fond of her?’ asked Jim.

  ‘That he were. It turned him bitter and sour when—’ Mrs Miller came to a painful stop.

  ‘When he knew she was going to have a child?’

  ‘It were hurtful to all of us, Jim.’

  ‘But Arthur wouldn’t let her come back home?’

  ‘He raged about.’ Mrs Miller got up and made the tea at this point. She placed the pot on the table, with a cosy over it. She poured milk into two cups. She sat down again. ‘Said he’d find the man and kill him. He took a train up to near London to talk to Betsy. Found out the man – your father – was a soldier, and in Africa. Servin’ with Lord Kitchener, that he was.’ Mrs Miller poured the tea. ‘That to your likin’, Jim?’ she said, as he took a refreshing sip.

  ‘First-class,’ said Jim, and she touched his shoulder and patted him. Affection was present.

  ‘Arthur told Betsy—’ Mrs Miller looked sad. ‘What he did tell her, all of it, I don’t know, but he was in a rage when he took the train and in a rage when he came back. Arthur be a man of strong moods, nor don’t hold back with his tongue when he’s angered. I only know he told Betsy never to come back home, and had a terrible blazing row with Betsy’s father about it. But your mother, my sweet Betsy, were a good girl, Jim, always. She were so pretty, so affectionate, and she give her affection, all of it, to your father. Perhaps she give it in the way she did because he was goin’ away to do his duty as a soldier of the Queen, and because it were true love, not because she were a girl who were loose and tarty. She were never that, never. Ah, you should have heard how she could laugh and make everyone else laugh too, but she never flirted or made eyes in her life. She had love for your father, Jim, a girl’s once and only love. She came here before you were born, when Arthur weren’t here, and she told me and her father of John Cooper, a soldier sergeant, and begged us never to think ill of her or him. After she’d gone and Arthur came home, my husband stood up to him, and there were another terrible row, though my husband be the mildest man and never given to fearsome quarrels. My poor dear Betsy, and you, Jim. There were a home here for you but for Arthur, and it be on my conscience always that my husband and me chose peace and quiet instead of you.’

  ‘My mother had a friend when she was in service, a woman called Lily Downes, who told me many things about her and swore she was a lovely person. I was never sure if she spoke out of loyalty and friendship, if she gilded her memory of my mother. She called here once.’

  ‘Yes. Arthur sent the poor lady packing. Roared at her to take herself off.’

  ‘I feel sorry for Arthur,’ said Jim.

  ‘You be like your mother, then. She were sorry for his rages and his senselessness. But you be my grandson, all the same, and you be dear to me and my husband, because of our Betsy. You fought in the war and lost an arm, but you bear no bitterness because of that or because of Arthur. Jim, you be our Betsy’s son all right. And you look like your father.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’ asked Jim.

  ‘We have things of Betsy’s, sent to us after she were killed, poor sweet.’

  ‘I came because I wanted you to talk to me about her,’ said Jim. ‘I wanted to hear about her from your lips, and I wanted to know if there were things of hers.’

  ‘There are, to be sure,’ said Mrs Miller, ‘letters to her from your father, her engagement ring, a photograph of your father, a little photograph of you when you were two, and some beads and a brooch. I kept them from Arthur when they were sent to me and my husband, being afraid Arthur would burn the letters and photograph. They be yours if you want, Jim, seeing I think they belong to you more than to us, and seeing they’d be safer with you than with us.’

  ‘I’d very much like to have them,’ said Jim, ‘but is there a photograph of her? I didn’t see one in your parlour when I called before.’

  ‘There be one, Jim. A postcard photo taken when she were seventeen, before she went up London ways to go into service. I kept that hidden too, because of Arthur. You stay sittin’ for a minute and I’ll get them.’ Mrs Miller left the kitchen. Jim heard her climbing the stairs. He looked at the vegetable patch, seen through the window, and at the fields beyond, fields bordered by woods. Here was where his mother had grown up, in the heart of rural Hampshire, a girl of laughter according to her own mother. He could imagine her, a young girl, in a white frock and a large white country sun-bonnet, such as all young girls wore in the late Victorian period, running through those fields and picking primroses and wild flowers in the woods. It was, of course, how he wanted to imagine her, to know her innocent and enchanting in her growing-up years, and without fault.

  Mrs Miller returned. She placed a decorated wooden box with a curved lid on the kitchen table.

  ‘Everything’s in this box, Grandma?’

  ‘It all be yours, Jim, to take away. The box were hers too. See?’ She lifted the lid. A piece of thin white cardboard had been glued to the curved inside of the lid. Coloured crayons had been used to decorate the margins with flower chains and to make a frame for printed letters in different colours.

  ‘MY TREASURE CHEST BETSY JANE MILLER 1878 AGED 7’

  Inside the box were beads, a brooch, a ring, letters and an envelope containing photographs. He picked the envelope out, and extracted the photographs. He looked at the postcard print of his mother as a girl of seventeen. It was a sepia print. The strangest emotions sent his heart tumbling, and made a weakness of his body. There she was, in portrait, with a mass of long, curling hair that even in the inanimate photograph seemed to be lightly dancing on her shoulders.

  ‘Her hair were brown, Jim, her eyes too.’

  Jim was looking at a girl quite lovely, a girl whose smile showed the glimmer of healthy white teeth and which was so much in her eyes that one knew she had been close to laught
er because some girls always thought that being photographed was a giggle. It was a portrait of a girl in love with life. He saw the brooch, a cameo brooch, pinned to the high neck of her blouse. That brooch was the one in the box.

  This was his mother, this girl who loved life and whose laughter came alive for him in the photograph. He knew then that Lily in her loyalty had not gilded the picture. He could be proud of his mother, still a young woman when she had been tragically killed running across a road, and whom he could not remember. He turned the postcard print over, Mrs Miller watching him silently and with great sympathy. On the back of the print, faded but still readable, were pencilled words.

  ‘Watch the birdie, count to three,

  Think of sitting in a tree,

  Open eyes, what do you see?

  Goodness gracious, this is me?’

  And there was her name again. ‘Betsy Jane Miller 1888 aged 17.’

  He had been born three years later, in 1891, when she was twenty. He felt a great wave of love for her.

  ‘She were a lovely girl, Jim,’ said Mrs Miller, ‘mischievous when she were young, and a tease, but never unkind, and eager to get out into the world when she were seventeen. She always said her Mr Right were out there waitin’ for her, and she’d know him soon as she met him. With your father, love at first sight I think it were. There, that’s him, that photograph.’

  Another sepia postcard print, another portrait, this time of a man in uniform, smiling beneath his khaki cap, a natural and cheerful smile, and Jim thought he might have been looking at a portrait of himself during his own time in the Army. So this was his father, the man his mother had loved and given herself to. Had she found her Mr Right in him because he looked, perhaps, as if he could match her sense of fun? On the back was written, ‘With love to my own Betsy.’

  ‘I think I’m like him, Grandma.’

  ‘That you are, Jim, he be your father all right, and our Betsy’s love.’

  The third photograph was of himself as a two-year-old, clad in a little sailor outfit, and standing beside a studio chair. He looked very grave, very puzzled, very small. He turned it over.

  ‘My darling boy James John at two.’ They were his father’s names in reverse.

  How hard it must have been for her, facing the world alone with her illegitimate son. He felt an intense longing to have known her, to have his own true pictures of her, but his memory could not take him back to when he was three, when he had lost her.

  ‘Jim, there be over twenty letters in there, from your father to her.’

  ‘You’ve read them?’

  ‘All of them. My husband too. Your father had a good man’s love for your mother, a fine soldier’s love. Betsy were dear to him. Jim, there be no shame in how and why you were born, and it would be a gladness for me and my husband to know you don’t hold no shame in yourself or your mother and father, though we be guilty ourselves of the shame of leaving you in an orphanage, my husband and me.’

  ‘There’s no shame,’ said Jim, ‘not in anyone. There’s just two people who didn’t live as long as they deserved to. Frankly, old lady, I can never make head or tail of our Creator’s great design, how it was all arrived at and if there’s some profound reason for shortening the lives of the deserving instead of the undeserving.’

  ‘What’s a profound reason?’ asked Mrs Miller.

  ‘I suppose a reason people like you and me can’t understand,’ said Jim. He replaced the photographs in the envelope. He fingered his mother’s brooch and her engagement ring, then looked at the tied packet of letters in the box.

  ‘Read them somewhere quiet, Jim,’ said Mrs Miller. ‘I’d ask you to stay for a bite, but Arthur always comes home from his work to his midday dinner, he’ll be in a bit after one. I won’t say he’s not a good son, he works hard, he’s a providing man to his wife and all of us, but I’m thinkin’ he’s likely to go to his grave without ever forgivin’ Betsy.’

  ‘How can I keep in touch with you?’

  His grandmother lightly pressed his hand.

  ‘Write to my husband, George Miller, your grandfather. Arthur might look hard at a letter with my name on it and in writin’ he can’t recognize, but he’ll leave letters to his father alone. My husband and me will write back, and maybe, sometimes, if you can come again, like you have today, when Arthur be at work—’ Mrs Miller’s smile was of sensitive affection. ‘Well, it would pleasure me, Jim. You take those things of Betsy’s now, you keep them for your own, and whenever you think of her you need be in no shame, like I said.’

  ‘I like you, Grandma,’ said Jim, ‘I like it that you were my mother’s mother. I’ve no wife as yet, but I’ve two wards, a boy and a girl. I’ll bring them to see you during their school holidays. Bless you.’

  His father’s letters to his mother kept him company and kept him absorbed on the train back to Waterloo. He read all of them, every one, and there were twenty-five of them, written in a good hand and in simple style. They were cheerful and optimistic, unfailingly affectionate and in some places a man’s deep love for a woman broke through. The words then were very private, making Jim feel they belonged only to his mother.

  He realized he was no longer a solitary man. He had Orrice and Effel, and he had grandparents. He had a grandmother in the mould of a gentle woman, an elderly lady of country grace. And he had things that had been precious to his mother. He had her photograph. He knew at last what she looked like.

  He framed the photograph, and that of his father, and placed them on the mantelpiece in his living-room. They enabled him to introduce Orrice and Effel to his parents, and their interest, particularly Effel’s, surprised him. They asked questions, and he told them as much as he could of what he knew, and used his imagination to tell them more. From the letters he had discovered his father came from Dorset, and he painted a few pictures of Dorset life for Orrice and Effel. He did not, however, tell them his mother had not been married to his father, but he did say they had died when he was very young.

  Orrice said he was awful sorry about that. Effel, gazing again at the photograph of a seventeen-year-old country girl, gulped.

  ‘Well, one thing’s for sure,’ said Jim with forced cheer, ‘we all need each other, don’t we?’

  The photograph was missing from the mantelpiece the next day. Jim found it in Effel’s bedroom, on her mantelpiece. He waited for her to say why she had put it there. He waited in vain. Effel said nothing. He left it in her room. He thought perhaps it represented a memory of her own mother.

  Miss Pilgrim, changing the bed linen the following Monday, saw the framed photograph, and asked Jim that evening if it was of the children’s mother.

  ‘No, mine.’

  ‘Yours? When she was young, Mr Cooper?’

  ‘Taken when she was seventeen.’

  ‘Such a fresh-faced, lovely girl,’ said Miss Pilgrim.

  ‘She was only twenty-three when she died, and my father, killed when serving with Kitchener, wasn’t yet thirty.’

  Miss Pilgrim’s blue eyes darkened.

  ‘I’m sorrier than I can ever say, Mr Cooper. Marriage is an institution blessed by God, especially when there are children, and it was cruel that the marriage of your parents was so brief and fleeting.’

  ‘As I said to my maternal grandmother, I fail sometimes to understand the ways of our Creator.’

  ‘Yes, one does ask questions sometimes, Mr Cooper, but we shouldn’t let our faith be weakened.’

  ‘You’ve never sought the blessing of marriage yourself,’ smiled Jim.

  ‘I devoted myself to my parents. There was fulfilment in that. I shan’t ask why you have never married.’

  ‘Oh, I’m no catch,’ said Jim.

  Miss Pilgrim folded a freshly-ironed sheet.

  ‘Your predilection for speaking nonsense is not your most sensible virtue, Mr Cooper.’

  ‘Well, there’s hope for both of us still, Miss Pilgrim.’

  ‘Hope for what?’ she asked, folding another
sheet.

  ‘Your Mr Right may still be out there, waiting for you, and my Miss Right may be just round the corner.’

  Miss Pilgrim carefully placed the folded sheets together. Her hands, he noticed, did not have the work-worn look of most Walworth women. Her fingers were long and fine. He supposed she took great care of them because she liked to keep herself immaculate.

  ‘I think your need is greater than mine, Mr Cooper,’ she said. ‘I am self-sufficient, but you are a man with two wards.’

  ‘My diffidence is against me,’ said Jim.

  ‘Diffidence?’ Miss Pilgrim sounded a little sarcastic. ‘I have never met any man with less diffidence than you.’

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ said Jim. ‘In any case, I doubt if Molly Keating, the manager’s daughter, for whom I’ve got a soft spot, would take on a man and two wards all at once and at the same time.’

  Miss Pilgrim picked up a pillow slip and eyed it critically.

  ‘But you’re courting her?’ she said.

  ‘Saints alive, no. I really am no catch, Miss Pilgrim.’

  ‘But you care for her?’

  ‘Molly’s a charming and warm-hearted young lady, and deserves a man better and more affluent than I am.’

  ‘Utter nonsense,’ said Miss Pilgrim crisply.

  ‘We’ll leave it at that,’ said Jim. ‘By the way, I’m taking Ethel and Horace to school tomorrow. I’ll be a little late for my work, but can make it up with a short lunch hour. I thought I’d catch Alice and invite her to Sunday tea around our table. It’s fair to reciprocate, isn’t it?’