All My Mother's Secrets

by Beezy Marsh

  There was a fella standing there, completely soaked through, dressed in one of those blue uniforms she’d seen the soldiers from the hospital wearing at the Empire Day parade, with medals on his chest and an army cap on his head. His neatly clipped little moustache twitched a bit as he spoke but he kept looking past her, into the house: ‘Emma?’

  He had a kitbag at his feet, and Annie couldn’t help noticing that there was something unnaturally rigid about the way he was standing, as if he had a broomstick stuck down the back of his jacket, and his fingers were rubbing against each other, like a kind of itch on both hands that he couldn’t scratch.

  ‘Who is it?’ called Mum, making her way down the stairs. She was six months pregnant with her next and she had to steady herself with one hand on the wall as she descended, in case she tripped.

  Annie didn’t know what to say, so she pushed the door open wide; she didn’t want to be rude because the visitor knew her mum’s name. The man stood there, perfectly still and straight, his eyes staring through her, the rain running down his face. His fingers seemed to have developed a life of their own, rubbing frantically, so that his hands appeared to shake.

  Mum had reached the foot of the stairs now and a half-strangled sound came from the back of her throat as she looked at him and then she gasped: ‘Arthur!’

  Nanny Chick appeared in the hallway and she pushed Annie behind her skirts, before looking him up and down: ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

  Annie was shooed away upstairs and the scullery door was firmly closed but she sneaked back out of her bedroom, straining to hear what was happening.

  There was the sound of plates being laid on the table and then the man started talking, his voice carrying up through the floorboards, so she could make out the odd word or two. He spoke about ‘trenches’ and ‘gas attacks’ and then there was the unmistakable sound of sobbing. It wasn’t a woman crying, it was a man’s voice, which shocked her, because she’d never heard a man cry. There were great, heaving sobs, and they made him cough, which seemed to shake the whole house.

  Mum was saying, ‘Shhh’, and ‘Don’t upset yourself no more’, and then the scullery door opened and Annie had to crouch down low in case she was spotted. She heard footsteps and saw Nanny Chick pulling on her shawl and disappearing through the front door.

  The crying downstairs was more like a wailing sound now. Annie sneaked downstairs, one step at a time, avoiding the creakiest stairs, and stole along the hallway. Nanny had left the scullery door ajar and she peered through, to see the man slumped forwards onto the table and Mum with her arms around him, stroking his hair, saying, ‘It’s all right now, they can’t hurt you.’

  She held her breath, watching her mother tenderly holding the man and his hands were on her belly, and he was saying: ‘Oh, Emma, Emma, God forgive me, God help me.’

  Annie scampered away, back up the stairs to her hiding place on the landing, and waited for the crying to subside. It couldn’t have been more than half an hour later when Nanny reappeared, with Aunt Clara at her side, talking together in low whispers.

  Another ten minutes or so passed, and Annie’s toes started to tingle from being crouched down for so long, but she was rooted to the spot by the presence of this stranger in the house. Part of her wanted to see what Bill would have to say about it when he got back from the pub later, but she knew she’d be for it if he caught her out of bed. Then Aunt Clara came out of the scullery with the man beside her, with his cap in one hand and his bag in the other, as she bustled him off down the hallway and out through the front door.

  Bill eyed her carefully as he chewed his toast at breakfast the next morning.

  ‘Now, Annie,’ he said. ‘Your mother and me need to tell you something about the man who came here last night. It’s your Uncle Arthur.’

  Mum sat down beside her. Had Mum told Bill about how she’d been hugging Uncle Arthur? Annie couldn’t help wondering.

  Bill went on: ‘He’ll be staying with Aunt Clara for a while. He’s had a rough time of it in the war, so you’re not to bother him, do you understand?’

  For some reason, Annie felt tears prick her eyes then, as if it was all her fault that Uncle Arthur had got upset. ‘I only opened the door because he knocked on it.’

  ‘Don’t be smart with me,’ said Bill. ‘The man is not well in the head and he doesn’t need you . . .’

  Nanny Chick came over from the sink, where she’d been washing up, and cut him short. ‘I’ll handle this,’ she said, firmly. ‘He’s seen things, terrible things, in the war and he just needs peace and quiet, which is why he’s at Aunt Clara’s for now. But it’s best to stay out of his way, that’s all. Do you promise me?’

  ‘I promise,’ said Annie, not really understanding what she was promising to do or why; but she thought of Vera’s dad putting his hands around his own daughter’s throat, and she was very glad that Uncle Arthur was not staying under their roof.

  Life carried on, with Mum getting bigger with every passing week, and Annie stopped popping in to see her Aunt Clara on the way home from work, in case she bumped into her strange Uncle Arthur. Nobody spoke about him in front of her but she overheard Mum and Nanny talking often enough.

  ‘He barely utters a word,’ said Nanny Chick, tutting to herself. ‘Not even to say “please” and “thank you” to Clara!’

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ Mum replied. ‘His nerves are shattered and the gas has ruined his lungs. We need to be kind.’

  ‘But what about Clara? She’s barely slept a wink because he keeps getting up in the night and shouting and walking up and down the hallway. The neighbours upstairs will complain if it keeps up. And Dora told me he takes all his meals in his room and he doesn’t wash for days on end. And when she went in there to change his sheets, the bed hadn’t been slept in – he’d been lying down on the bare boards underneath it, with his kitbag for a pillow, if you please!’

  ‘Mum,’ said Emma, with a sigh. ‘We can’t possibly imagine what he’s been through, and he’s still family . . .’

  ‘He’s no blood relative of mine,’ said Nanny curtly, but then the conversation stopped because Mum called out: ‘Annie is that you?’ And she had to run back up the hallway and pretend she hadn’t been eavesdropping.

  Having this stranger lurking around the fringes of her family made things even more tense than usual in the house, particularly with Bill, who could barely hear Uncle Arthur’s name mentioned without throwing down his newspaper and storming off to the lavvy. So, Annie took refuge in the bustle of work, and all the excitement about the new steam-powered calender press which the Missus was having installed.

  The Missus had employed a couple of sweary bricklayers from Stirling Road to build a new boiler house, and by that autumn, Hope Cottage was more like a building site than a laundry. To make matters worse, Bill had been put in charge of overseeing the whole project, as well as maintaining the new machinery, which made him strut about with an air of self-importance.

  He’d even taken to sporting a pristine handkerchief in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, like a proper gentleman, and Annie had overheard him trying to speak posh when he took delivery of the new boiler from Townend’s Machinery Company.

  Annie had got her impersonation of him down to a T, much to Vera’s amusement. Whenever they had to shake a few nets of hankies out of the washtubs, Annie would snatch a handkerchief and waft it about in the air as she strutted across the wash house floor: ‘Hi say, my good fella, put that new boil-ahh over theyah and h’I’ll be orf to have my tea!’

  Even Bessie got in on the act, innocently asking Bill how the new ‘boil-ahh’ was doing, while giving Annie and Vera a wink, setting them off in fits of giggles.

  ‘What are you dozy moos laughing about now?’ Bill would mutter to himself as he swaggered off to do more important managerial tasks, such as checking the level of the beer in the barrel under the stairs.

  The calender press itself was a sight to behold. It was driven by
pulleys which were steam-powered through a series of rods feeding through into the boiler house next door. It took a bit of getting used to, and the dangers were similar to the box mangle, in that Annie had to ‘feed’ the sheets through the large heated rollers to press them. As she did so, each sheet would give off a great swoosh of steam. It had the advantage of getting the sheets dry enough for ironing, which was a real bonus on rainy days.

  Annie was carefully pushing some sheets through the press on one of those autumn days when the rain was coming down like stair-rods, when Vera ran in and said there was a bit of a kerfuffle upstairs in the ironing room.

  ‘It’s your ma,’ she gasped. ‘She says she’s having the baby!’

  The Missus came running in: ‘Your mum says you are to go and fetch your Aunt Clara and meet her back at home. With any luck, it’ll be just like shelling peas with this one and she’ll be back at work nice and quickly.’ She gave Annie’s shoulder a little squeeze: ‘Good luck to her, but don’t you be too long on your errand. I want you back here finishing them sheets off. Your Aunt Clara and your nan will see she’s all right.’

  Annie nodded and ran, as fast as she could, down Antrobus Road, avoiding the worst of the potholes, which were filling up with rainwater. She was drenched by the time she got to Aunt Clara’s house but she hesitated outside the front door. In the past, she’d just push it open and walk in but now, with Uncle Arthur staying, she didn’t dare. She knocked timidly.

  There was the sound of someone shuffling down the hallway and then the door opened. He was standing behind it, unshaven, in a nightshirt, his moustache all overgrown and his cheeks sallow from lack of daylight.

  He stared at her and started rubbing with his fingers, so he looked as if he was itching on the inside.

  ‘Is Aunt Clara there?’ said Annie, doing her level best to be polite. His legs were all hairy, sticking out of the bottom of his nightshirt, and she’d never seen a man dressed like that before. Nanny would say it wasn’t decent. ‘It’s Mum, she’s having the baby.’

  ‘Baby?’ he said. His head started to shake and his arms went rigid. ‘No, no. It’s not safe. What time is it?’ He looked wildly around him, as if someone had just tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘It’s not lunchtime yet. Where’s Aunt Clara?’ said Annie. ‘Please?’

  ‘No, it’s not safe. She’s out,’ he said. ‘Go away.’ He slammed the door in her face and let out a yell, which made her jump out of her skin, sending her running away down the road, as fast as her legs would carry her.

  Panic was rising in her chest. She couldn’t go home without Aunt Clara, so she ran up Acton Lane to see if she could find her in any of the shops. Her palms were sweating despite the chill of the damp air, and she’d almost given up hope, running up and down, peering in shop windows, when she bumped into her aunt coming out of the butcher’s.

  Annie almost fell into her arms: ‘Mum’s having the baby, I tried to find you and I think I might have upset Uncle Arthur,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Slow down, Annie,’ said Aunt Clara, smoothing Annie’s soaking wet hair out of her face. ‘I’m sure you haven’t done anything wrong. Let’s get home to your mum and you can tell me about it on the way.’

  As they walked back down Acton Lane, Annie started to calm down. ‘He seemed upset that I’d disturbed him, that’s all,’ she said. ‘I was just trying to find you because the baby is coming and Mum needs you and I’ll be for it if I don’t get back to work too.’

  Her aunt turned to her: ‘There’s no harm done. Arthur is still very jumpy about loud noises because of the shelling at the Front during the war. But deep down, he loves you because he is your uncle, so you must forgive him if his behaviour seems strange. He will get better in time, I’m sure of it.’

  By the time they got home, the cries of a newborn baby filled the house and Annie rushed upstairs to see her little sister Elsie for the first time. She was all pink with a perfectly pudgy little baby face.

  As Nanny Chick fussed around Mum, who was resting in bed, Annie held the baby and pushed all the thoughts about the man a few streets away, still stuck in the horrors of the war, to the back of her mind.

  8

  November 1925

  ‘You’ll catch your death of cold going out like that!’

  Annie had spent ages painstakingly taking up the hem of her skirt, so that it hung just below her knees, like the women she’d seen in the cinema up at Shepherd’s Bush the other weekend. Nanny Chick was not impressed. In fact, it was fair to say, she was scandalized: ‘It ain’t decent flashing that much leg, Annie! You’ll give fellas the wrong idea.’

  ‘All the girls at the laundry are wearing their hems this short now, Nan,’ said Annie, smoothing it down, feeling a bit daring, as she stepped out of the front door to go to work.

  Mum didn’t mind but she had drawn the line at Annie getting herself a corselette, like the film stars wore, to flatten her bust. Besides, she didn’t really have much of a bust to flatten; she still wore a cotton chemise with a liberty bodice over the top. Mum wouldn’t be parted from her whalebone corset, which nipped her in at the waist, even after four kids. Nanny Chick was the same; it was something that all the older ladies still saw as part of the ritual of getting dressed.

  Vera said she was saving up for a corselette like she’d seen in Derry and Tom’s down on Kensington High Street, and a drop-waisted dress too. Annie was secretly envious of her friend’s curves; she’d seen the way that some of the laundry hands looked at Vera these days. She was more striking than ever, tall and fair, with her hair cut into a fashionable bob which seemed to have given it bounce and curl, as if it had a life of its own. The Missus wouldn’t stand for any nonsense, but old Chas had been known to throw a sheet on the floor of the sorting room and call out to Vera to ‘come on in here and get a cuddle’. The girls laughed themselves silly about that because Chas only had one good eye; the other one had a terrible squint. ‘I was in there earlier, Chas,’ Vera would yell back to him. ‘You didn’t even bleeding well see me!’

  It was a fine late autumn day, with a nice breeze blowing, so by the time Annie got to Hope Cottage, Mum was training up a new intake of laundry girls how to peg clothes out properly in the back yard.

  As she got on with sorting through the latest batch of dirty clothes, Annie could hear her mum explaining things to them out in the back yard: ‘Right, girls, you hang the clothes wrong side out and with the wind. Nightdresses go by one side of the lower hem, and corset covers can be thrown over the line and pinned at the middle seam at the back.’

  No matter that she had got her hands full at home with little Elsie and Ivy, who were a right pair of pickles, and George, as well as Nanny Chick, who was getting doddery; Mum still found it in her to be kind to the new laundrymaids, even if some of them couldn’t tell their left from their right.

  Annie sighed to herself as she picked up a pile of underclothes from the big houses up in Holland Park and began to sort through them. A slip of the finest cream silk slid between her fingers. She couldn’t imagine wearing something like that, it was so soft. There were silk bloomers too, but when Annie checked them, they were stained with blood. Posh women bled every month, just like she did, but she didn’t have anyone to get the stains out of her drawers. Mum kept a bucket with a lid on under the sink in the scullery and she put rags in there to soak when she had her time of the month. No one spoke about it, she just got on with it, and on washdays at home she’d bung them in the copper after everything else had been boiled. Annie put the knickers into a zinc bath of cold water and tipped some salt on the top and began to work it into the bloodstain. The water started to turn reddish brown as the blood started to come out, which was a relief. It wasn’t that she hated dealing with bloodstains, it was just the responsibility of getting them out of such beautiful clothes. She held the bloomers up to the light, to be sure they were clean.

  ‘They’ve got some fancy drawers, those Kensington
girls, don’t they?’

  Annie spun around. Ed the carman was leaning on the wash house door, watching her intently. He held a roll-up cigarette between his long fingers and there was something about the way he smiled at her which made Annie’s knees go weak.

  ‘Don’t be so daft,’ she managed, her voice quavering as she felt herself blushing scarlet. ‘Shouldn’t you be out collecting, in any case?’

  Things had got quite busy at the laundry, and that meant Hope Cottage took two deliveries of dirty clothes in, on a Monday and Wednesday, and deliveries went out Fridays and Saturdays. Ed the carman, with his sandy-blond hair and wolfish grin, was around a lot more these days. He still stood there, hands in his pockets, ciggie dangling from the corner of his lips, but he had grown taller and he wasn’t just a teenage boy doing a man’s job any more. Annie still managed to sneak out to feed Moses the horse as he stood patiently outside in the street, but she’d started to look forward to the chats with Ed a bit more than she’d let on to anybody. She hoped he hadn’t noticed.

  ‘I’m a man down this week, Annie,’ he said. ‘Jack’s off with the measles, which is going to make getting the laundry in a bit of a poser. I need someone to mind the horse and cart for me who isn’t going to run off screaming like some scaredy-cat every time he whinnies.’ Bill glanced up from the washtub, where he was possing some blankets half to death, by the look of it, with a big stick.

  ‘Or nip off into the pub to wet his whistle every five minutes,’ whispered Ed.

  The time Bill used to drive the horse and cart had become something of a laundry legend. The Missus got suspicious about why the deliveries were taking so long, so one day she’d gone along too. ‘And blow me down,’ she told Mum when she got back to Hope Cottage, ‘if that damn horse didn’t stop at every pub between here and Shepherd’s Bush along the way.’ And that was the end of that little jaunt for Bill.

  The Missus bustled in. Anyone would think she’d been eavesdropping.