All My Mother's Secrets

by Beezy Marsh

  He relaxed his grip and patted her arm. ‘Your Aunt Clara was little more than a girl back then and she didn’t know the half of it,’ said Charlie. ‘No more hollering, either. I don’t want any of Felstone’s men breathing down my neck, wondering what a pretty little thing like you might want, talking to the likes of me. Clear?’

  He pushed the glass of port and lemon towards her and steered her to a table in the corner. ‘Take a drink of that, you’ll need it.’

  ‘I was boss of these streets back around the turn of the century, had a nice little earner going with my stables and the hansom cabs and a bit of looking after the pubs round here on behalf of Mr Felstone,’ said Charlie. His face lit up as he remembered his glory days. ‘He owned the houses and the horses, but I was his eyes and ears – at least, that was how it was at first, but business got bigger and he got more respectable and needed more people keeping an eye on his interests. That was when the real trouble started.

  ‘I didn’t like ’em, fellas from Kensal Town. They’d hit you first and ask questions later, which wasn’t my way of doing things. I knew people round here would pay eventually, you just had to give them time. It was like a family business, the debt collecting, so when Will got himself in deep, I told Mr Felstone he’d pay in time and made it clear I didn’t want that lot bothering him, not on my manor.

  ‘Henry was head over heels with your mum, he’d have done anything for her, so he was working all hours to try to clear the debt and, to be fair, he was meeting his payments at first, but then the work started to dry up.’

  ‘Why was that?’ said Annie, sipping her drink and feeling the port warming her from the inside.

  ‘People just stopped using hansom cabs as much,’ said Charlie D, tracing a finger around the rim of his beer glass. ‘They were on the omnibuses or the tuppenny tube, or the trams. Things started changing so much that, by the time you were born, it was like a different world and London went from being a city of horses to a city of motor cars. We were all feeling the pinch at the stables and with a new mouth to feed and Will gone, Henry missed a couple of payments.

  ‘I told him I’d talk to Mr Felstone about it, but I never got the chance.’ Charlie stopped and took a large glug of his pint and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

  ‘Why?’ said Annie, ‘I thought Mr Felstone listened to you.’

  ‘The Kensal Town mob waited until I’d gone out on some business one morning and they came into the stables to find Henry,’ he said. ‘He was in the stall, tacking Nell up, when they caught up with him . . .’

  ‘What did they do to him?’ said Annie, her voice a whisper. She could hardly bear to listen to what Charlie was saying, but she’d come this far . . .

  ‘One of my stable lads heard the shouting and came to see what was going on. He was given a thick ear for his trouble, but he saw it all. They were roughing Henry up and he was fighting back. He had the whip in his hand and whacked one of them round the face with it, good and proper, but there was three of them to one of him and they got him in the corner and knocked him down. It weren’t a fair fight.

  ‘He stood up, fists at the ready, but that was when Nell panicked and bucked. She didn’t mean to, I know she didn’t, but she kicked him right in the chest and he went down hard on that stable floor . . .’

  Tears started to roll silently down Annie’s face.

  ‘I came running as soon as I heard about the commotion,’ said Charlie. ‘We picked him up and got him in a cab and I rode like the clappers down to Paddington to the hospital, with him moaning and groaning in the back. But by the time I got there, it was too late.’

  ‘Too late?’ said Annie.

  ‘Doctors said his heart had given out. He’d gone.’

  There was a moment’s silence as Annie took in what Charlie had just told her.

  ‘What about my mum?’ she asked. ‘Did she see what happened?’

  ‘No, love, thank God she didn’t, but we sent word to the laundry and she came to the hospital as quick as she could. Of course, he was dead as a doornail by then. She practically screamed the place down, calling for him. She wouldn’t believe it until the nurses let her see the body and then she didn’t want to be parted from him.’

  All the colour had drained from Annie’s face. It was such a waste of her father’s life, dying in a fight like that, and everything she had been told since she was a baby, her whole life, had been founded on a complete and utter lie. Her heart was racing and so many thoughts were flitting around her mind that she couldn’t quite get close enough to grasp them. She needed to know more: ‘But why didn’t Nan or my mum tell me what had happened? I thought he was working here in London all the years I was away in Suffolk.’

  ‘There’s plenty of things children don’t need to know,’ said Charlie. ‘Perhaps they told you a little story to make you feel better. And in any case, with Henry gone, your family still owed money to Mr Felstone, see?’

  ‘So how did they pay it off?’

  Charlie sucked in his paunch and sat up tall.

  ‘The truth is, they didn’t.’

  ‘What? The money is still owing?’ said Annie.

  Charlie D shifted uncomfortably and lowered his voice. ‘Yes, it is. Folks round here are dirt poor, but we look after our own, Annie, and when it came to it, Henry was one of ours and I didn’t like the way things had got out of hand on my turf. Without Henry, there was no way the debt could be paid – your mum and your nan both knew that.’

  ‘Didn’t someone tell the police? To get them on to Felstone?’

  ‘The cozzers?’ said Charlie. ‘Oh, you have got a lot to learn, my girl. Mr Felstone was untouchable then and he still is now. All the top brass are his mates. Besides, no one round here breathed a word about what had happened in the stables that day. If anyone official had come around here we’d all have said it was just an accident with the horse getting spooked and poor old Henry being in the wrong place. A tragedy, if you like.

  ‘But once he was buried, it wouldn’t take long for the Kensal Town boys to come back and start asking for the cash, would it? They knew where your mum lived, for starters.’

  ‘So, how did they get out of it?’ said Annie, who was desperate to know more.

  ‘Well, I may have had a hand in it . . .’ said Charlie. ‘Although, God knows, Felstone couldn’t prove it and if he thought I had, even now, he’d make my life difficult.’

  ‘I won’t tell a soul,’ said Annie. ‘I promise.’

  ‘I’m counting on that, Annie, because I have a long memory and I bear grudges,’ said Charlie, looming over the table towards her, so that she caught a whiff of his foul breath.

  He smiled and went on: ‘It was your Aunt Kiziah’s idea, really, to get away to Soapsud Island. She was always a clever one. Your mum weren’t thinking straight, she was barely eating enough to feed a fly, and your nan was holding everything together, making sure you were looked after. Girls at the laundry took it in turns to mind you, but your nan knew it made sense to get away somewhere else, somewhere safe.

  ‘It can’t have been more than a few days after the funeral and I remember it was winter because it was still freezing cold and the horse didn’t want to come out of her stable,’ he said, chuckling to himself. ‘Oh, I had to whisper sweet nothings in Old Nell’s earhole that night to get her out of that stall. She weren’t right after Henry went, it was like she’d lost the will to work, the old nag, but once I got the harness on her and into the shafts of one of my wagons, it was as if she knew what she had to do. She was as sprightly as a foal by the time we got to Manchester Road.

  ‘Your nan had packed up everything they owned – lock, stock and barrel – and we piled it onto my carts. The neighbours helped. It was pitch black and a pea-souper to boot. You were tucked up safely next to your mum in a blanket. Oh, and then she ran back into the house because she almost forgot some dolly or other your dad had bought you as a baby. Then off we went, in a moonlight flit, as they call it.’

 
‘What about Felstone’s men?’

  ‘Oh, they came calling, ’course they did, but you were all long gone by then. And if anyone did know where you were, they weren’t going to tell the Kensal Town boys. There was a lot of bad feeling about the way Henry died.’

  Annie swilled the last of her port around her glass, trying to take in everything that Charlie D had told her.

  His face softened. ‘I always knew your nan was a strong woman, Annie, putting up with her old man Will the way she did all those years, but I only really saw the mettle in her that night. She got hold of your mum and told her: “This is the hand that life has dealt us, so for God’s sake, stop crying now, for the sake of the baby. There’s only one way out of this mess, Emma, and that is sheer bloody hard work.”’

  21

  May 1934

  ‘Well, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!’

  Vera stood, stick thin, with bony arms outstretched, on the doorstep at Stirling Road.

  Annie had cried all the way home on the tram back from Notting Hill – so much so, she’d almost missed her stop, so she probably did look a complete sight.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around earlier, Vee,’ said Annie, almost falling into her friend’s arms. ‘I wanted to be sure I was clear of the fever and then Mum needed me to go out and look for work.’

  ‘It looks like it’s knocked the stuffing right out of you, there’s barely a picking on you these days!’ Vera cried, swaying slightly. ‘You could do with a drink, I bet?’ She started to pull her friend up the staircase before she could refuse her offer.

  A woman in a flowery housecoat appeared in the hallway below them. ‘All right, Mrs Smith, I’m not sneaking a fella in,’ said Vera, poking her tongue out at her landlady’s back as it disappeared into the scullery. ‘Honestly, the old bag, she’s like a rat up a bleeding drainpipe every time the front door goes.’

  She muttered under her breath: ‘Thinks it’s a knocking shop up here, probably ’cos she ain’t getting any!’ She’d moved out of Bessie’s when life with the Nosy Parkers downstairs became unbearable, but her new place didn’t seem any better.

  Vera pushed open the door to her room, which had a bed against one wall, a wooden chair with a bottle of sherry open on it and a small rag rug on the bare floorboards.

  Vera grabbed a chipped teacup, poured some sherry into it and handed it to Annie. She then raised the bottle to her lips and threw her head back: ‘Down the hatch!’

  Annie hesitated. She hadn’t eaten all day, and drink was the last thing on her mind after her time in the Black Bull pub with Charlie D.

  ‘Come on, Annie,’ said Vera. ‘It will do you good and we’ve got a lot to catch up on, ain’t we?’

  Annie sat down on the bed and drank a little as Vera plonked herself down next to her. She’d missed her friend.

  ‘I’m just sorry I wasn’t there for you when you buried Evangeline . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry yourself about that now,’ said Vera. ‘You were really sick. Everyone was worried we were going to lose you, but I knew you’d fight.’

  ‘But did you get to say goodbye to her?’ Annie knew how difficult things were for Vera indoors.

  ‘Well, my dad tried to say I couldn’t go but my mum wasn’t having any of it, so he had to let me come. And anyway, he was dead drunk, he could have done us all a favour by falling into the grave himself, and then at least we’d be rid of him, the miserable old git.’ She clutched her sides, as if she’d told the funniest joke ever, but Annie couldn’t muster a laugh.

  ‘How’s your mum coping?’

  Vera stopped for a second and then took another swig of sherry. ‘She’s got her hands full, hasn’t she, with the twins, so I don’t think it’s hit her so hard as me. I’ve got time on my hands.’

  ‘Aren’t you still working up at the nursery?’

  ‘Let me go, didn’t they?’ said Vera, staring at the wall. ‘Said I wasn’t right to be around the kids no more because someone had seen me round the back of the Railway Tavern with a fella. Well, so what if I did? None of their bleeding business, is it?’

  ‘No,’ said Annie, who had a horrible, sinking feeling about how Vera was scraping a living these days.

  ‘Means we are in the same boat, both looking for work,’ said Vera, tipping a drop more sherry into Annie’s cup. ‘So, how far did you go on the tram today? Bessie said they’re not hiring even up round Shepherd’s Bush now. Three girls for every one job in the wash houses round there! Can you imagine?’

  ‘I went up Notting Hill way,’ said Annie, who was not sure why she was even telling Vera this – her friend was probably too plastered to make sense of it all. ‘I went to where my mum and dad used to live, where I was born.’

  ‘Gawd, it’s rough as houses round there, Annie,’ said Vera. ‘No wonder you came back looking like the wreck of the Hesperus.’

  ‘Well, I found out something while I was there too.’

  ‘Come on, spill the beans,’ said Vera.

  ‘You know I was always wondering why my mum didn’t have my dad’s war medals or a picture of him in his uniform when he’d died in the Great War, like Bessie’s boy?’

  Vera nodded.

  ‘Well, she never had them because he never went to the war. He died ten years before that, when I was still a baby, after a fight in Notting Hill, and they kept it secret from me, all these years.’ A spark of something had ignited inside her as she spoke. ‘My mum and my nan and my Aunt Clara told me a pack of lies from the moment I could crawl, letting me believe in him as a war hero when he was nothing of the sort,’ she spat.

  ‘That’s awful, Annie,’ said Vera, holding her friend’s hand. ‘But there must be a reason for it, mustn’t there?’

  ‘I think they were trying to protect me from the upset of it, of him dying so young,’ said Annie, who didn’t want to mention the gambling debt nor the fact that her family still owed money to the Felstones. She’d promised Charlie D not to talk about it to anyone; in any case, it was shameful to have to admit to it. ‘But it makes me feel that my whole life has been a lie. I used to dream about him fighting in the trenches – it made it better somehow, especially with Mum marrying Bill.’

  ‘But, hang on a minute,’ said Vera, scratching her head, as if the fug of alcohol was clearing. ‘If your dad died when you were a baby, what about your brother George?’

  She really had opened a can of worms by seeking the truth about her father.

  Annie didn’t take much convincing to have another stiff drink, and then another, while she and Vera picked over the bones of her mother’s deceit.

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ said Vera, shaking her head. ‘She must have done it to cover the fact that she’d got knocked up when your dad had gone all them years before. But George don’t look anything like old Bill, does he? Far too good-looking, if you ask me!’ Vera cackled to herself.

  ‘I just can’t believe it,’ said Annie, over and over. ‘She lied through her teeth. Took me for a fool, good and proper. Why didn’t she just tell me the truth?’

  Her head was reeling by the time she left Vera’s, and not just from the drink; and as she rounded the corner to home, she went hot and cold and then felt vomit rising in her throat. She held on to the lamppost, and – to her shame – threw up in the gutter. Glancing around to check that the neighbours hadn’t spotted her, she wiped the flecks of vomit away from her mouth with her handkerchief, straightened herself up and tried to sneak into the house without Mum or Bill noticing. That plan went awry when she bumped into one of the wooden chairs in the scullery and knocked it flying; it was as if the world was spinning.

  Mum appeared in the doorway: ‘Where on earth have you been, Annie? I’ve been worried sick!’ She took one look at her daughter and, leaning in closer, said, ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘I just popped in to see Vera and she got some sherry out to celebrate me getting better, that’s all,’ said Annie, with a note of defiance in her voice. All the while she
looked at her mother, she was thinking, ‘Liar!’

  ‘And meanwhile we were sitting here thinking you’d fallen ill again and were lying in the gutter somewhere! You could at least have let us know you were safely back from Notting Hill, Annie.’

  Something snapped; all the years she’d done what she was told, been good, put up with Bill, slaved away in the laundry for pennies without question and waited and waited to see a father who was never coming home. ‘I’m not a child!’ she shouted. ‘You can’t expect me to tell you everything any more!’ And she stormed off upstairs.

  ‘I don’t know what got into you last night, but I don’t expect to see a repeat of it!’ Mum scolded, as Annie sat, with a thumping headache, at the breakfast table.

  She served Annie a piece of bread and marg and a steaming mug of strong tea: ‘You’d better drink that.’ And as she turned her back and bustled off to the sink, Mum muttered, ‘Sherry, indeed!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Annie, to keep the peace. She was sorry but only up to a point. Mum had made her question everything in her world. The one certainty in her life had been taken away from her. She’d always taken such comfort in the fact that she and George had both lost their dad in the war, and George had been there before Bill came into their lives.

  Yes, she adored her sisters, but she’d always imagined that her dad would have been so proud of George and now it turned out that her dad couldn’t possibly have fathered her brother because he was six feet under at the time. It was as if life had given her back her father, with what Charlie D had told her, but snatched her brother away from her somehow.

  There was a heavy footfall on the staircase and then Elsie appeared at the table, with Ivy following close behind. Ivy was smiling cheekily and holding her hands behind her back.

  ‘What you got there, Ivy?’ said Mum, pouring them both a cuppa before they headed off to school.