All My Mother's Secrets

by Beezy Marsh

  The kettle was heating on the stove and it started to whistle. Annie watched as she selected a crochet hook from the work on the rocking chair and tipped boiling water over it before resting it on the side of a tin plate.

  ‘Take your underclothes off, dearie, and climb up on the table,’ the woman said to Vera, who obediently took off her shoes and put them neatly together by the sewing machine. She wriggled herself out of her cotton knickers and folded them over the arm of the rocking chair. Annie found herself blushing and looked away for a moment. It was all so personal.

  The woman took a blue and white striped teacup from the draining board by the sink and picked up a bottle of colourless liquid, yanking the cork out with her teeth. She sloshed a good deal of it into the cup. ‘This will hurt, I won’t lie, but the gin will take the edge off it,’ she said, handing the teacup to Vera. ‘Down the hatch, that’s right.’ Vera glugged the gin down in one go and then coughed so much that Annie had to slap her on the back.

  The seamstress turned and looked at Annie.

  ‘You’re Emma’s girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Annie.

  ‘You’re the image of her,’ she said. ‘Although I haven’t seen her since I delivered your little brother – oh, it will be more than ten years ago now.’

  Before she knew what she was saying, Annie blurted: ‘So, did you know my father?’

  The woman laughed. ‘No, I can’t say I did. Your mum was still back in Notting Hill when she had you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Annie. She’d always thought she was born here, in Acton, not in Notting Hill. And surely her father had been here in Acton when they moved, hadn’t he? This woman was a link to her past, the past she wanted to know more about. ‘So, when did my mum come over here to Acton, then?’

  ‘I’ve answered enough of your questions. If she hasn’t told you, I’m not going to. We haven’t got all day,’ said the seamstress, tutting. ‘We’d better get on.’

  Annie couldn’t argue with her; the reason they were here was to get Vera out of her predicament, but she couldn’t help being curious. It was as if her fingers were scrabbling away at the bottom of the sewing box again, looking for a buried secret.

  ‘Help me up, Annie,’ said Vera, climbing onto the table. Annie noticed that her friend’s legs were shaking. ‘Please hold my hand,’ Vera implored, as she lay back, resting her head on the pillow, suddenly looking much younger, and more afraid than Annie had ever seen her.

  The woman came over to the kitchen table, carrying the crochet hook. ‘Draw your knees up and just let them flop out to the side,’ she said. ‘Or I shan’t be able to see what I’m doing. It’s important that you just relax.’ She handed Vera a folded tea towel. ‘And I don’t want the police here, so, for the love of God, bite down on that and do not scream.’

  Annie knelt down next to her friend and stroked some hair back from her forehead as the woman’s hands disappeared between Vera’s shaking legs. Vera’s pale blue eyes were filled with panic but there was no going back. ‘That’s right, I’m in the right place now,’ said the woman, as Vera winced. ‘It will be very quickly over.’ She wriggled the hook between Vera’s thighs and Vera screamed into the tea towel, sobbing with the agony of it.

  ‘There we are,’ said the woman, matter-of-factly. ‘Now, just get yourself into the rocking chair and we will see if that has done the trick.’ She hummed to herself as she took the crochet hook, stained with blood, over to the sink, where she doused it with the remaining hot water from the kettle. Vera clutched her belly as she sat up and Annie helped her off the table. The woman put a wodge of old tea towels onto the chair and motioned for Vera to sit down.

  Vera started to moan, clutching her stomach.

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman, brusquely. ‘It will hurt, but it will soon be over, bear with it.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Vera moaned. ‘Annie, help me.’

  Blood started to run down Vera’s legs; a trickle at first and then huge clots of it appeared. The woman handed her a rag. ‘Wipe yourself up, now, that’s right.’ But the blood didn’t stop, it came in a big gush and splattered onto the floorboards.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, help me,’ whimpered Vera, looking at her fingers, which were stained red where she had tried to stem the flow.

  The seamstress’s attitude seemed to change. She stiffened and became even more businesslike, mopping up the blood and wringing it out of the cloth in the sink in the scullery. She passed Annie a heap of rags. ‘You can help too, just get it off my floor,’ she ordered.

  After ten minutes of mopping, Vera was still moaning and groaning, doubled over on the rocking chair, with a wad of blood-soaked towels underneath her.

  ‘Right,’ said the woman, ‘it’s time to leave now. I have done what you paid me to do but you can’t stay here any longer. Put your clothes back on, love.’ She folded some muslin cloths and handed them to Vera, who dutifully shoved them into her knickers and inched the undergarment up her white thighs, which were still trembling.

  She handed Vera’s coat to Annie, who was dumbstruck. ‘But what are we supposed to do? Where can we go? She’s still bleeding.’

  ‘That is not my problem, dearie,’ said the seamstress. ‘But don’t you dare breathe a word to anyone about coming here.’

  Out of nowhere, a fella who was about the same age as Ed the carman but twice as wide appeared in the doorway. He’d been in the front room, all along, it seemed. He stepped back to allow them to pass. Vera was doubled over but Annie looked at the floor in shame. How much had he heard?

  ‘If you tell anyone about tonight, he won’t be a gentleman about it. Remember that,’ said the seamstress, with a tight little smile. ‘We know where to find you.’ She herded them down the dark hallway, opened the front door and pushed them through it. As they stepped into the cool of the night air, Vera almost collapsed in Annie’s arms. ‘Please, Vera, please, don’t,’ Annie begged her friend.

  They staggered down the street together in the dark. Annie had made up her mind. She couldn’t go home to her house and there was no question of taking Vera back to her parents’ place.

  ‘Where are we going?’ moaned Vera. ‘My legs feel like jelly. I don’t think I can go much further.’

  Annie half dragged her friend up Acton Lane, across the High Street and into Churchfield Road, ignoring a wolf whistle from some blokes outside a pub: ‘Looks like you’re making a night of it, girls!’

  ‘There’s only one person who can help us now,’ said Annie.

  Annie hammered on Esther’s front door, praying that her friend wasn’t out at night school.

  The door swung open and Esther stood there, her hair in rollers. She looked older, more glamorous, somehow.

  ‘Annie!’ she said. ‘And Vera . . . whatever’s the matter?’ Vera was swaying from side to side, her head lolling back, and blood was running down her legs. ‘Oh my God!’ cried Esther. ‘Come inside.’

  Esther took hold of Vera’s arm and with Annie on the other side, they dragged her down the hallway and up the narrow staircase, leaving a trail of blood as they went.

  ‘I didn’t know where else to turn,’ said Annie, with tears in her eyes. ‘I didn’t know what to do. We’ve got to help her!’

  As they burst through the front door, Esther’s grandfather leaped up from the sofa where he was mending shoes. He motioned for them to lay Vera down. She was murmuring softly: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .’

  It was a split-second decision: tell the truth and risk getting everyone in trouble with the police, as well as that big lump of a bloke at the seamstress’s house who might hurt their families – or stick to the story. ‘We were in the cinema,’ said Annie. ‘And she started bleeding like this. I think she might have been . . .’

  ‘Pregnant?’ said Esther. ‘Oh my God. We need to get a doctor.’

  Esther’s grandad took his family’s special quilt, the one with all the woodland animals and birds on it, and laid it over Vera, who was shaking. Th
en he went over to the sideboard and produced a dark brown bottle. ‘It’s apple brandy,’ said Esther, watching him pour it into a tiny glass with flowers painted on the sides. ‘From his home.’ He took it to Vera and tilted her head up, to help her sip it.

  Annie stood there, frozen, watching the scene before her. Esther’s lips were moving but it was as if the words didn’t make any sense any more.

  ‘I’m going to get the doctor,’ she was saying. ‘She could bleed to death. How far along was she?’

  ‘Probably three months,’ Annie murmured. ‘Three months, that’s about right.’

  ‘What about her parents?’

  ‘No!’ cried Annie, grasping Esther’s arm so that her nails dug into her friend’s skin. ‘You cannot tell her parents. Her dad will kill her.’

  ‘All right,’ said Esther. ‘Let’s get the doctor here and he can decide what to do, but if I don’t get help now, she’s in real danger.’

  It was if the doctor knew, without Annie needing to say a word, exactly what had happened.

  He looked straight into Annie’s eyes as he said: ‘I will write it up as a miscarriage. We need to get her straight to hospital. Where are her parents? They need to be informed.’

  Annie gave him Vera’s address, wanting the ground to swallow her up. The doctor had known her family since she was a girl and now was looking at her in a different way, a way that said he had seen this once too often and Annie was that kind of girl. Of course, she wasn’t, but it didn’t matter, because the doctor thought she was.

  ‘But I don’t think they have any medical insurances,’ she said, pulling out her pay packet. ‘Please, take this. I will pay for your call-out tonight.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Esther, realizing that Annie was about to hand over all her money for the week. ‘Let me do it.’ She offered him a crisp ten-bob note.

  ‘Esther, you can’t,’ said Annie, trying to stop her friend, but Esther insisted.

  ‘Very well,’ said the doctor. ‘The Poor Law will make provision for her hospital care, I can send for the ambulance now. We need to examine her properly and she’ll be watched carefully over the next day or so, and then there is the risk of infection.’

  He muttered under his breath as he turned to go: ‘The trouble is, no one thinks about that, until it’s too late.’

  There was quite a bit of gossip among the laundrymaids about what had happened to Vera and why she was off work, until Bessie shut them up by giving them a clip round the ear. The ironers were a different matter. There were looks and glances in Annie’s direction until her mother let it be known that the next person who mentioned Vera would be dealing with her. Mum pulled Annie to one side in the ironing room: ‘People are talking, Annie, saying things about her trying to get rid of a baby. I need to know: were you involved in any way?’

  ‘No,’ Annie lied. ‘She started bleeding and she ended up in hospital. It happened after we left the cinema, just like I said, which is why we went to Esther’s house.’ She couldn’t tell her mum the truth, it would betray Vera and, in any case, it was too risky. That seamstress and her son, who was built like the door of the brick lavvy in the yard, would be out looking for her if she so much as breathed a word about what had happened in their kitchen. She hoped that would be the end of her mother’s questions. But she was dreading the arrival of the autumn, when she’d have some explaining to do about where her coat money had gone. Her main concern, though, was what was going to happen to her friend.

  Vera lay, pale as a ghost, in the Union infirmary in Isleworth, keeping up the pretence that she’d suffered a miscarriage. Her mother came to see her but her father sent word that she wasn’t welcome at home any more. Annie went to visit and Vera told her, through tears, that she’d suffered a perforation to her womb from the crochet hook and might never be able to have children. ‘I should have had the baby,’ she said, tears rolling down the sides of her face and onto the crisp white pillowcase. ‘I-I could have managed.’ They both knew that was an impossibility with Vera’s dad the way he was; she’d have been on the street and the baby taken away from her.

  ‘Shhhh,’ said Annie. ‘Don’t talk like that. You weren’t to know.’ None of them had known. None of them understood, until it was too late.

  The ward sister bustled past and gave them a hard stare. She didn’t like any fuss and nonsense, and visitors were supposed to keep the patients calm, not upset them. Plus, she must have known the real reason Vera was in here, and the way she looked at Annie made her feel as if she was guilty, as if she had stuck that crochet hook into Vera to end that baby’s life.

  Vera’s voice fell to a whisper: ‘Tell Ed . . . that I love him.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Annie, who feared that Ed must have picked up on the gossip about his girlfriend by now. Why hadn’t he come to see her?

  The General Strike ended the Wednesday after Vera’s botched abortion and all the laundry workers piled into the Railway Tavern for a booze-up. Annie went along too, just for a quick glass of sherry with Bessie and the others, although she didn’t feel much like celebrating. She couldn’t get the image of Vera’s shocked face out of her mind. That and the blood running down her legs – it was so awful.

  Ed was there in the pub, of course, linking arms with Ada the laundrymaid, as the pianist played some tunes. Annie tried to talk to him, to tell him about Vera, that she’d been pregnant with his child and was sick in hospital and needed to see him.

  ‘Could have been anyone’s, couldn’t it?’ he said, drinking deeply from his pint. ‘Although it’s a shame because she does have a very pretty face, does Vera, and I bet her baby would have been a good-looking sort.’

  The pianist hammered out another song which made everyone roar with laughter. ‘Your baby has gorn dahn the plughole,’ he sang, as beer sloshed over the brims of glasses and the singing grew rowdier. ‘Your baby has gorn dahn the plug. The poor little thing was so skinny and thin, it should have been bathed in a ju-ug!’

  Ed joined in, hugging Ada around the waist. ‘Your baby is terribly ’appy, he won’t need no bathing no more, your baby has gorn dahn the plughole, not lost, just gorn before. Just gorn be-fore!’

  13

  March 1934

  The first daffodils of spring brought a burst of colour to Gunnersbury Park.

  Annie loved her Saturday afternoon walks there, as she’d often catch up with Esther taking her new baby, Leonard, for a stroll in his pram.

  She couldn’t wait to show Esther her new hat. Now Annie was earning more than a pound a week as a qualified laundress, Mum had insisted she put some money aside to spend on herself. She’d spent ages window-shopping up at the big department store on Ealing Broadway before choosing a bottle-green felt cloche hat with a black grosgrain ribbon around it.

  Annie had never been one to follow fashions; until now, she simply couldn’t afford to. But with her new hat and a coat she’d picked up second-hand at the market and put some new buttons on, she had to admit, she really did feel quite smart.

  Esther was waiting for her, ready to soak up any gossip Annie had from the laundry, like a sponge. She had her hands full being a home-maker now, after her boyfriend, Paul, who worked at Wilkinson’s Sword factory down the Vale, had popped the question. Although she’d only admit it to Annie, she was wondering what on earth she’d spent all that time bettering herself with exams for.

  The laundry business was one place where married women could go back to work, not like working in factories or shops, but people still frowned on it, and if you could afford to stay home, like Esther, then you did.

  ‘I miss working, Annie,’ she confided. ‘I know I shouldn’t say it because I love being married, but I hardly see anyone all day and now he wants another one. He thinks it’ll make me happier.’

  ‘But Leonard is beautiful,’ said Annie, gazing at the cherubic baby, sleeping soundly, tucked up in the pram. ‘Of course you will have another, won’t you?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Esther, with a sigh.
‘But what about you? Why don’t you find yourself a nice man and settle down?’

  ‘Oh, I just haven’t had the time to meet anyone yet,’ said Annie, who had steered clear of any romantic involvement at work after what had happened to Vera; the last thing she wanted was to get herself into any kind of trouble or find herself forced into walking up the aisle too soon and then regretting it. ‘Mum and Bill rely on me so much to look after the girls, I just don’t think it would be right. My family needs me to be living with them to help out with the rent and running the house.’

  Esther gave a little nod, as if she didn’t quite believe her friend. ‘But if the right man came along . . .’

  ‘Well, he hasn’t so far, has he?’ said Annie, rather too quickly. She’d got used to catching the bouquet at other people’s weddings, always being the one without a partner when they went on work outings. She felt sad about it, of course she did, but then she’d catch Ed the carman chatting up some unsuspecting laundrymaid and she’d feel sick to the pit of her stomach. He had sowed a seed of mistrust about men, a secret flower that she nurtured every night as she lay in bed, thinking about her life. It blossomed in the darkness and she fed it on her heartache.

  It was a constant source of amazement to Annie how much dust could gather under the beds.

  She was giving the bedroom a thorough spring clean, with her hair tied up in a headscarf and a feather duster in her hand, while her sisters Elsie and Ivy got to work cleaning the windows downstairs.

  Annie sang to herself as she got into all the nooks and crannies, imagining she was one of the Hollywood movie stars she’d seen in the talkies, singing and having fun as she went about her chores. She pulled open the top drawer of the chest in the corner to give it a tidy and carefully took out her few things; some woollen stockings, a chemise and some handkerchiefs.