The Women of Lilac Street

by Annie Murray

  ‘How peculiar,’ Phyllis said casually, handing them their cocoa. ‘What was she like?’

  ‘She was a hag,’ Rachel said. ‘Horrible. There was something threatening about her. As if she might . . . I don’t know what. It was just a feeling.’

  ‘She had funny hair, with a nasty yellow tinge, sort of sulphur colour and eyes like slits.’ Dolly was enjoying this now.

  It was her. Just how she’d been when Phyllis saw her: Ethel Sharp.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Phyllis said. But her heart was pounding and her corset had started to feel tight then, and she hadn’t been able to breathe properly since. ‘There’s all sorts of funny people about.’

  She didn’t think Rachel or Dolly had noticed anything, but since that evening she’d had no rest. Ethel Sharp was in her neighbourhood, or close, asking for her. Not by a name that anyone would recognize, but still. It might not take long. All the time now she was looking out, almost afraid to go to the shops, checking the street before she stepped out, jumping if anyone called her name.

  Ethel loomed in her mind, not as the real, dissipated old woman she obviously was, but as a fearful creature, symbolic of everything about the past, something squelching its way out of a dark swamp and lurching towards her, dripping ancient slime. The past was when she had been Hetty – another person who, with every fibre of herself, she had done her utmost to bury.

  And now Ethel Sharp was looking for her. She had come menacingly close. What did she want?

  Thirty-Six

  That first morning in the broken-down house in Coventry, Hetty woke to the sound of the babies crying with hunger. The room was so like the one she had once lived in with her brothers and sisters that when she opened her eyes she thought for a moment she was back there, all of them asleep on the floor round her. A pang went through her, of both longing and dread.

  She was on a hard, lumpy mattress that she could dimly remember collapsing on to the night before in her relief at being able to lie down. When she sat up, dizzily, she saw that at the foot of it the red-haired girl was crouched, watching her, and her heart began to pound hard. The girl seemed more animal than human. She was very thin, with prominent cheekbones pushing out her pallid skin and narrow, glinting eyes. She reminded Hetty of a rat. Her dress, barely big enough to stretch over her, was made of a rough, black material, and had stains all down the front. There was something severe and hard about her, her hair pulled loosely behind and tied with a scrap of rag.

  ‘Come on then, if you’re awake,’ she said, standing up to reveal puny ankles, the skin mottled. There was nothing on her feet, which were very dirty and defaced by sores and cuts.

  The sound of crying infants from downstairs had not abated at all and Hetty could also hear coughing. It sounded as if there was a woman down there.

  ‘Where’re we going?’ she said, struggling to her feet. A tight, clogged feeling resulted between her legs. She was caked in dried blood. ‘I want to wash.’

  ‘Ethel?’ A thin, nasal voice came up to them. ‘Get down ’ere and get ’em out before I finish the pair of ’em!’

  Ethel jerked her head to indicate that Hetty should follow and the two of them climbed carefully down the splintery stairs. Halfway down there was a jagged hole in one of the treads.

  In the downstairs room, Hetty was surprised to see a bed, which she had not noticed in the dark last night. It took up almost half the space and there were a couple of rough blankets on it, rumpled, as the woman was clearly not long out of it. She was perched on the edge of the one wooden chair, a sickly-looking creature in a dirty skirt, of a dark plum colour, and a grey blouse which may once have been white. Her mousey-brown hair was half piled on her head, half tumbling down, and against it her skin seemed tinged a sickly yellow and was marked with red, angry-looking blotches. She might have been quite pretty had she not looked so faded and sick. There was a stink of booze in the room, all too familiar to Hetty.

  By the dead fire sat the two distraught infants. Ethel went and picked up the younger one, whose head appeared too big for his body – if he was a boy. It was not easy to tell. Perched on Ethel’s skinny hip, he roared even more loudly. The older one, who clearly was a boy, got up and took Ethel’s hand.

  ‘Take ’em, for Christ’s sake,’ the woman said in a slurred voice. ‘You can make the fire up when you get back.’ She looked dully at Hetty. ‘She’ll have to earn ’er keep if she’s staying. ‘Ere . . .’ She reached down the front of her blouse and pulled out a twisted piece of rag. Hetty heard the chink of coins. Ethel went to her and the woman dropped something into her hand.

  Ethel jerked her head again. ‘C’mon.’

  ‘Go on – get out,’ the woman said, without energy. They left, to the sound of her coughing. Hetty had a strange, floating feeling in her head and she felt cut off from things. She didn’t even bother to ask where they were going. The baby quietened for a time when they got outside, distracted by the change of scene. The other child walked silently, as if he already knew that crying would not gain him anything. A woman along the street darted them a hard, hostile stare as they walked past. Looking round, Hetty realized, with a force that hit her hard, that she was in a familiar place. Somewhere in the surrounding streets was the house in which she had first grown up. But they were long gone, her family, she knew that. The one person she ached to see was Nancy: the rest of them seemed to have faded from her mind. But she wouldn’t think about it. She pushed away all thoughts of them.

  They came to a tall, imposing brick building, and from an arched side entrance they could see a queue assembled along the building’s flank. It seemed made up all of children, rather subdued in manner, some in hats and caps, others bareheaded in the drizzle, some with boots and others barefoot, and most looking unkempt and dirty. As they waited, they stared without curiosity at the newcomers.

  When Hetty and Ethel had been in the queue for a couple of minutes, two ladies appeared through the doorway, wearing long navy blue skirts and bonnets tied under their chins in a big bow. Each of them had their fingers threaded through the handles of a number of white china cups. With a kindly but brisk and distant air they came along the line.

  ‘Here’s your cup. Have you got your farthing?’

  Hetty saw Ethel nod to these questions. She and Hetty were given a cup and as she gave Ethel hers, the woman leaned closer to her and murmured, ‘How is she? Any better?’

  Ethel looked back distrustfully and gave no answer. The woman moved back a fraction and patted the younger of the boys on the head.

  ‘How’re your little brothers?’

  Ethel made a small sound but still said nothing and the woman moved on, seeing she was not going to get a reply.

  ‘Are they your brothers, then?’ Hetty hissed.

  ‘Course they ain’t – but she don’t need to know that,’ Ethel said, her voice hard and aggressive.

  The queue moved slowly into a big room in the building where there was a long table and they were given sweet tea and a chunk of white bread each, after they had handed over their money. One of the ladies stood making sure that no one took more than their fair share. Ethel handed over the coins and was given four pieces of bread, one of which she put in her pocket. The other three she shared between the four of them, softening little pieces in the tea to feed to the baby. The other boy ate eagerly and solemnly. The tea and bread brought Hetty round a bit and she started to feel better.

  ‘I want to wash,’ she insisted again, feeling very uncomfortable.

  Ethel scowled at her. ‘Well, you’ll ’ave to ’ang on a bit. We got to go back first – and we’ve got to get to work.’

  At the house, they boiled water and at last Hetty was able to have a proper wash. She took a bucket upstairs and stripped off. But even as she rubbed herself over with a rag, feeling cleaner than she had in days, she was very uneasy. From downstairs she could hear one of the children crying. She had learned that the worn-out looking woman whose house they were in was called Ada. As Hetty and
Ethel waited for the water to boil, Ada sat listlessly on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Ask ’er how old she is,’ she said suddenly, in no one in particular’s direction. She had an odd way of talking, not looking at the person she was talking to but turning her head from side to side, looking out of the window, or anywhere, her fingers restlessly moving in her lap.

  ‘How old’re you then?’ Ethel said, from where she was squatting by the range, holding Alf, the younger boy. The other, Eddie, sat beside her, staring at Hetty.

  ‘Fifteen,’ Hetty told her.

  ‘You look more,’ Ethel said. ‘You’re the same as me.’

  ‘You’re not very big,’ Hetty said, disbelieving. ‘Bet you aren’t really fifteen.’

  Ethel gave her a sly look. ‘I say I am. That’s how I got out of the reformatory – I told them a few fibs when they took me in. Changed my age, no home to go to, all that . . .’ She put her head on one side. ‘Where’s your mom and yer old man then? Passed on?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hetty couldn’t think what else to say.

  When the water boiled she filled the bucket and went upstairs, grateful to be alone for a few minutes.

  She didn’t feel at ease with Ethel, and Ada was a strange, unsettling presence. But where else was she supposed to go?

  Thirty-Seven

  Hetty soon began to make sense of the strange household she had come into, and what ‘work’ meant. Ethel, having got out of the reformatory (into which she said she had been consigned, aged eleven, for ‘thieving’), had met Ada one day in town. Ada had given her a roof over her head in return for help with the babies, and so long as Ethel earned her keep.

  By the first afternoon, it all became clear. There came a rap at the door and Ada suddenly sprang into life and ordered Ethel and Hetty upstairs with the boys.

  ‘And keep ’em quiet,’ she hissed from the bottom of the stairs. ‘’Ere – take these.’

  Hetty, nearest the bottom, reached out and found that Ada had put four sugar lumps in her hand for pacifying the little boys.

  ‘We ’ave to keep ’em out of the way while she’s with the punters,’ Ethel said matter-of-factly. ‘Most of ’em come at night time but there’s one or two turn up afternoons, if it takes their fancy.’

  They heard a male voice downstairs, followed by other sounds. Hetty tightened with dread. It was Mr Gordon all over again. It brought back the night, only a few weeks ago, when she was lying on Mrs Dickins’s table as she did away with the baby. She tried and tried not to think of it, even though the bleeding had not even stopped completely. The memory was so raw, of the pain, the horror. Never, ever was she going to have that happen again.

  But Ethel was looking at her strangely. ‘You can’t just live ’ere and do nothing, yer know. Some of ’em like young meat.’

  ‘No!’ The word sprang out of Hetty’s mouth before she could think at all. ‘I ain’t doing that – not ever again!’

  A sly look came over Ethel’s face. In a soft, sneaking voice she said, ‘Oh, so you’ve been on the game before then, ’ave yer?’

  ‘No. No! ’ Hetty was appalled. That hadn’t been it! She wasn’t one of those women! It had all been in a respectable house.

  ‘Well – what then?’ Ethel said avidly, quietening the boys with their second sugar lump, which they sucked on hungrily.

  ‘It wasn’t like that. I was a maid in the house. But the master, Mr Gordon . . .’ Hetty stuttered out what had happened, all of it. ‘And I never told him I was bleeding and . . .’ For the first time, tears began to run down her face and she was sobbing, unable to stop the memories that were washing through her. ‘He . . . I . . . It was just last month . . . I had to do away with it.’

  ‘Blimey –’ Ethel’s eyes were wide with surprise, and a nasty kind of triumph, as if she was seeing Hetty through quite new eyes. ‘I thought you was new to all this! Well – Ada will be keen on yer! Give ’er a bit of a rest!’

  ‘No!’ Hetty pleaded. ‘I’ll do anything. I’ll earn my keep somehow. But don’t make me do that!’

  Ethel looked dispassionately at her. ‘Well, we all ’ave to take our turn or she ain’t going to want you ’ere. If they ask for a young ’un, you’ll ’ave to do what Ada says.’

  They never knew exactly when the men were going to come. There was one who turned up after work, twice a week, regular as a factory bull blaring out. But sometimes one would arrive first thing, straight out of bed. They’d hear a knock at the door, Ada would roll her eyes and if they had already come down, she’d hiss, ‘Get upstairs, all of you – quick.’

  Hetty and Ethel would each seize hold of Eddie or Alf and go up to the attic where they had to try and pretend that none of them existed. It was a hard task with two infants to be entertained, especially early in the morning when they were hungry. The older boy, Eddie, was very quiet anyway. He would sit staring with wide eyes and at any sound he ran to one or other of the girls and buried his face against them. Alf was more difficult; he cried a lot and was hard to pacify.

  The girls would hear the deep rumble of a male voice through the floorboards, and Ada saying things back faintly, then those other noises, grunts and shouts, all the men, nothing from Ada except now and then – and this made Hetty’s heart pound in horror – a shriek of pain, her crying out and moaning. There was one man who came who she was very frightened of, a Mr Lavender. They never knew his other name. He always came late and the worse for drink and Hetty never once saw him. He blacked Ada’s eyes and sometimes there were rings of bruising on her thin, sallow arms. Hetty would lie, tensed, horrified when they knew he was there. Hetty was surprised how agitated it made Ethel. She would lie, writhing, cursing. ‘The bastard, the filthy . . .’ But at least he came late enough so that it was very unusual for Eddie and Alf to be still awake. If a punter came when the boys were still up, they struggled to keep Eddie happy with little games, tickling his tummy and making faces. But if Alf started crying there was a terrible ordeal of pacing the floor with him, trying to distract him and stifle his cries.

  As they never saw the men, except in small glimpses as they hurried up the stairs, the only way they could tell them apart was by the time they turned up and sometimes the tone of their voices. Ada didn’t say much about most of them. It was as if once they had disappeared through the door they were shut out of her mind. Only occasionally did she make passing comments. When the girls came down once after terrible sounds the night before, Ada was sitting with a bowl of water, dabbing at her face with a piece of rag. There were bloody, swollen cuts across her left eyebrow, her lips were thickened and gashed. For the first time Hetty saw in Ethel a moment of real emotion, of vulnerability, and that there was some sort of bond of pity between Ethel and Ada. She stood in front of Ada, hands on her hips, and as well as her raw fury, there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Which of those bastards did that?’ she demanded in a tight voice.

  Ada looked up, the bloody rag pressed to her eyebrow. Her eye was half shut. ‘Mr Lavender,’ was all she said.

  Otherwise they only heard the regular comings and goings of the noisier men, and Ada mentioned a ‘very quiet gentleman’ who would appear now and then with no warning, usually in the early afternoon when the girls often took the little boys out.

  Ada said little most of the time. She almost never ventured out of her wretched little house. Sometimes she grew agitated and quarrelsome, but a lot of the time she spent lying on the bed in a limp, listless state.

  Hetty guessed that Ada was about thirty, though she looked older and worn out. Her brown hair was thin and lank, though she did her best to pin it up and smarten herself. Her face was yellow and sunken. If Hetty asked Ethel about her, Ethel would shrug.

  ‘Where did you meet her?’ she asked, and Ethel said, ‘Oh, round the back of the market. ’Er wanted help getting some stuff home so I went with her.’

  Somehow this arrangement had come about and Hetty could see that it suited them both. Ada was saved the effort and shame of go
ing out and Ethel had a roof over her head as she did now, herself.

  Once in a while it was Ethel they wanted. Ada would call up the stairs for her. When she came back, Ethel would fling herself down on the mattress, curled up with her face to the wall. Later she would get up and carry on. She never said anything about it. How the men knew where to come, Hetty never knew. Ethel just said, ‘I dunno. I s’pose they sniff it out, like dogs.’ The last time it had happened, she looked at Hetty and said, ‘Next time, it’s your turn.’

  No, Hetty thought. Not me – never.

  Hetty immediately told Ada she was going out to get a job – that she would bring in money that way. She soon found work in a laundry. At first Ada seemed pleased.

  ‘Well, I s’pose you’ll bring in a wage,’ she said. She couldn’t spare Ethel to go out and work because of the boys. And Ethel seemed to thrive on a life of ducking and diving. When she did go out it was usually to hang around the markets, to see what she could pick up or steal in the way of odds and ends of food. But Hetty would bring in some actual, regular money.

  As it was the summer, the laundry was a horrible place to work because of all the steam and the heat when you were ironing with a heavy flat iron or hauling on the handle of the huge mangle. But it was work. She at least learned how to do something. When Ethel talked about the reformatory, pouring scorn on all the things they had been forced to do, learning about domestic chores, sewing, cooking and laundry, she felt almost envious. If I’d been in there, she thought, I’d have learned everything, and got out and got a decent job somewhere. At least she had been taught things by Mrs Gordon and had some idea how to cook. Sometimes a powerful longing filled her to be someone, to have a better life. She could see what Ada was and that Ethel was destined for that as well. That life was so close to her, sucking at her. The thought of it filled her with dread.

  Sometimes at night she lay beside Ethel and the boys in the poky upstairs room and wondered why she stayed there, with the sordid sounds from downstairs. In her head she made plans. She had lied to Ada about how much she earned, keeping a bit back. She would save the remainder, which she kept on her at all times. As soon as she felt she had enough, she would get out of here.