Amelia

by Siobhán Parkinson

  Amelia didn’t feel lucky to be a Quaker. She still hated going to Meeting, and she didn’t agree with Grandmama’s old-fashioned Quakerly views about ‘showiness’ and expensive living. But she grudgingly acknowledged that Mama had a point. At least the Friends would rally round, now they were in trouble.

  Mama had gone on to say that the bailiffs would want to seize the family’s goods in order to meet Papa’s debts.

  ‘Oh!’ Amelia had cried. ‘Is that what happened to the motor-car?’

  ‘Yes, Amelia,’ Mama had agreed. ‘They took that first, because it is worth good money and is not really a necessity.’

  Poor Papa, Amelia thought, and hated them for taking away the thing he loved best. They might have left it. It was mean to take it. Surely they could have taken something else!

  But there was worse to come. Mama went on to explain in a low voice that the bailiffs would want to seize the house and furniture, if the debts weren’t paid. Amelia gasped. But, Mama went on, her tone steady and even, they would give the family time to find somewhere new to live and wouldn’t take the things they needed for day-to-day living – at least not yet.

  ‘But …’ Amelia was horrified. She couldn’t finish her sentence. She put out a hand and stroked the morning-room curtains, as if they were beloved pets that somebody was going to take away from her. She looked at the familiar furniture she had grown up with, and she felt about the chairs and tables and sideboards and cabinets almost as if they were living things that she couldn’t bear to be parted from.

  But there was no help for it. The house and furniture would have to be sold as quickly as possible, to get money to pay the people Papa owed – and all because Papa had made a few unwise investments. There was something about a ship being lost at sea, too, which Amelia could understand a bit, because of reading The Merchant of Venice at school.

  ‘If only that wretched ship hadn’t gone down!’ Papa declared daily. ‘There were enough goods on that boat to redeem all my debts and still leave enough to invest in the next shipload.’

  Mama always sighed when he said this. She said there was no point in crying over spilt milk. Papa would argue with her then. Every day, the value of the goods on the famous ship seemed to get greater. Before long, Papa was saying that there were enough goods on that boat to keep them all in comfort for the rest of their lives.

  ‘No, Charles, you know that’s just not so,’ Mama persisted, trying to reason with him. ‘It was unfortunate that the ship went down, but you know in your heart that even if she had come to harbour, it would only have staved off the evil day. In another month there would have been more, bigger debts. It would take a good deal more than a single shipload to sort out our problems.’

  But Papa got angry with her when she said this sort of thing.

  ‘Really, Roberta,’ Amelia overheard him say one day, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about, my dear. But how could you? What do you know about business?’

  Amelia couldn’t hear Mama’s murmured reply, but Papa’s riposte came loud and clear: ‘Nonsense! That ship would have been the making of us. Oh, Roberta, I counted on it. I counted on it. It would have been, I tell you, it would have been the making of the business. I would have been a wealthy man, Roberta. I would, I would … oh, oh!’

  And then came some heartbreaking sounds, as if Papa were – surely he couldn’t be – sobbing.

  Amelia wanted to believe Papa, that it had all been just a piece of rotten luck. But try as she would to take Papa’s side in these arguments, she had to admit that what Mama said seemed to make more sense. Still, that didn’t make it any easier for poor Papa, living in this poky little house that the Friends had found for the family at a low rent, and plodding off to work every day to the miserable, lowly little job in a Quaker firm that he had managed to get.

  Things gradually began to clarify in Amelia’s mind. She recalled that Mama had not been entirely whole-hearted about the motor-car. She had been half-pleased the day Papa had bought it, but worried at the same time. She must have known that things were sliding downhill in Papa’s business already and that buying a car wasn’t a good idea. And it was the same with the gold watch that Amelia had so carelessly lost. Mama had been quite taken aback when Papa had given it to Amelia. Amelia wished she still had that watch. If the bailiffs hadn’t seized it maybe she could have sold it to make a bit of extra money. But it was too late to think of that now.

  Everyone in the family was very shaken by the change in their fortunes, but Papa was easily the most affected. His fair hair had lost its sheen, his brown face was now pale and drawn, his eyes looked dank and listless, and he never sang or whistled or called Amelia his princess any more. And he’d started to drink beer. He never used to before, and Amelia thought it odd that now they had less money he had found a new thing to spend it on.

  And a very unpleasant thing it was too, she thought, with a nasty smell that got even nastier with the passage of time, for Papa often smelt quite disgusting in the morning after he had been drinking, and the smell of stale, spilt beer in the kitchen was suffocating. After he’d left for work, Amelia would go sniffing around till she’d found the spillage and then mop it up with water and carbolic soap. She had always hated the smell of carbolic, but now she had begun almost to like it. At least it was a clean smell, and it did a good job of abolishing the sickly-sweet, stale yeasty smell of the beer. It wasn’t a case of crying over spilt milk, Amelia thought bitterly. It was crying over spilt beer that Papa had begun to make a habit of.

  To make matters worse, Edmund’s wretched cough just wouldn’t improve. He hacked and wheezed in the night, and Amelia could hear Mama getting up to go to him. Amelia would lie in the dark and listen to the muffled choking sounds, and then the creak of a door and the rustle of Mama’s dressing gown on the landing followed by the soft crooning sound of her voice as she soothed the little boy. Although Amelia felt sorry for her small brother, she wished sometimes that Mama would come with soothing sounds to her in the night.

  But the very worst part about having fallen on hard times, as Amelia liked to put it poetically to herself, was not having any servants any more. Amelia had always considered they’d had far too few, with just Cook and a maid and an outdoor man, and she couldn’t imagine how they were going to manage with none at all. Cook had had no difficulty in finding a new situation. Good plain cooks with reliable references were hard to get, and there were always families on the look-out for a gem such as Cook. Mick Moriarty had taken the opportunity to go back to County Clare, where he came from, to live with his sister.

  That left Mary Ann. Amelia had hoped and hoped until the very last minute that they would be able to keep Mary Ann on, even though she knew that they couldn’t afford her wages, and in any case there was nowhere for a servant to sleep in the horrid new house.

  ‘What about the attic?’ Amelia suggested desperately. ‘Couldn’t Mary Ann sleep there?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Amelia,’ said Papa, rather unkindly, Amelia thought. ‘The attic hasn’t even got a floor, not to mind a window.’

  ‘Well then, she can share my bedroom,’ she offered.

  ‘No, Amelia,’ said Mama. ‘You’ll have to share with Grandmama. There are only three bedrooms, and there are five in the family. The arithmetic just doesn’t work out. Edmund shall have the very small room at the back.’

  So Mary Ann had had to go. Mama helped her to find a situation as a tweeny, which was the very worst sort of servant to be, in a large household in Glasnevin, on the other side of the city. Amelia and she wished each other a tearful goodbye on the last day at Kenilworth Square. At least Amelia was tearful, but Mary Ann just sniffed a bit and poked Amelia in the ribs with her elbow.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’ll still be friends. I’ll train a carrier pigeon to take messages to you. Or we could learn Morse code and send smoke signals.’

  Amelia said: ‘I don’t think you can do that. Morse code and smoke signals are completely di
fferent things.’

  ‘Oh lord, Amelia, where’s your sense of humour? I’m warning you, if you take everything people say seriously like that you are in danger of growing up poker-faced!’

  That was the last thing Mary Ann said to Amelia. But although the words were cross, she said them in a friendly tone, and Amelia knew it was her way of being kind. But with all the joking about carrier pigeons and smoke signals they didn’t think of the most obvious thing – the post. Mary Ann didn’t leave her new address with Amelia – to tell the truth she didn’t really know the exact address in any case – and Amelia never thought of giving Mary Ann hers.

  And so now the family had to struggle on as best they could without any help in the house, having lost their servants, as well as their fine house and their precious things. Most of the work fell on Mama’s shoulders. She got up early in the mornings to riddle out the range. She took the hot, fuming ashes out to the yard to cool, in a metal bucket, and she brought in coke to stoke up the range again. She would pile the little round scrunchy black balls of coke into the circular fuel feed, and put the lid back on, and then she’d poke the bellows into the grid at the bottom and work the bellows good and hard to get the fire going for the breakfast. There was no point in putting a kettle or a pan onto the range until the coke was glowing bright orange.

  While the range was warming up, Mama would go to the parlour and clean out that grate too, so that there’d be a little fire there for Grandmama later – Grandmama didn’t move about much, and she got cold sitting still if there wasn’t a fire, even in the summertime. So it was out to the yard again with the ash-bucket, and in again with the fuel. They burnt turf in the parlour fire, which smelt warm and sharp and left a soft, fine ash that created a lot of dust.

  Then she’d make the breakfast. If there was milk to pour over it, she’d cook a pot of porridge. If they were short of money, and milk, she’d cut some slices of yesterday’s bread and fry them in lard on a smoky hot pan. There’d be tea with the porridge or fried bread, usually with milk, sometimes black. Coffee was a thing of the past, a fragrance Amelia missed in the house at breakfast time. Tea was much cheaper, even though they had to buy it now, along with their other groceries. Papa missed the coffee too. Every morning he’d look into his breakfast cup of tea and sigh, and every time he did that, Mama winced, knowing that he was wishing it was coffee. But what could she do? It wasn’t her fault they couldn’t afford coffee. Nobody said anything about it, just sighed and winced.

  After clearing away the breakfast there’d be more chores. On Mondays, Mama put the big tin hip-bath on the range and half-filled it with water, using buckets. She put it on before she started her breakfast, and it would take ages to boil up. Then she’d get Amelia to help her to lift it down onto a makeshift stand she made with two kitchen chairs, a hot and dangerous job. Then she’d add some bucketfuls of cold water, until the water was hand-hot – which meant unbearably hot, but not hot enough actually to bring your skin out in blisters – get the washboard out from under the sink and set to washing the family laundry. That was a long, arduous job, soaping and scrubbing and soaping and rubbing.

  She rinsed everything in cold running water under the tap in the big white china sink and then took the dripping heaps of clothes out to the yard, where she fed them through the rollers of the wringer. It was hard work, turning the big cranking handle, and keeping your feet out of the way so they didn’t get wet when the water came gushing out as the cloth went squeezing through. After that she had to hang them all out on the washing line and prop it up so the clothes hung high in the air where they could get a good flap.

  Though he was six now and really old enough to be at school, Mama kept Edmund at home, because she thought him too delicate for the long walk there and back. That meant he was under Mama’s feet all day. She tried to encourage him to stay indoors with Grandmama, but it wasn’t much fun for a small boy playing quietly under the supervision of an old lady. He preferred to run under the washing line on windy days, trying to avoid the sheets that were heavy and cold with water. He laughed out loud if he got slapped by a great sopping sail of cloth, but Mama cried out crossly to him, worried on the one hand that his clothes would get damp, and on the other that contact with her son’s grubby little body would streak and smudge the clean white expanses of linen and all her hard work be set at nought.

  Then Mama, yelling warnings to Edmund to stand back, would pour all the filthy grey water down the drain, rinse out the bath, and begin all over again, this time boiling up Papa’s shirts and the smalls. The kitchen would reek of soap and steam all day, and there’d be a slithery, soapy film on all the cold surfaces – the window-panes, the tap, the sink, even the water pipes.

  ‘It’s all slimy!’ Edmund would squawk, turning up his nose in disgust when he came into the damp kitchen.

  ‘You shouldn’t be in here, Edmund,’ Mama would retort. ‘And you shouldn’t be out in the back yard either. You should stay in the parlour with Grandmama, where it’s warm and dry. How often do I have to tell you to keep out of my way when I’m washing?’

  Edmund’s nose would wrinkle up again, this time in dismay at being spoken to like this by his darling mama. Then Mama would bend down to him and scoop him up for a kiss and murmur soft apologies in his ear. She didn’t know whether she was more irritated by Edmund’s trailing under her feet in the tiny kitchen and yard, or worried about his chest and his persistent cough.

  The next day, with a bit of luck, the clothes would all be ready for ironing. That was another day’s work. First, Mama put the heavy triangular iron on to the stove to heat. Then she spread a thick, scorch-marked woollen blanket, folded over two or three times to make a heat-proof pad, on the kitchen table. When the iron smelt ready, Mama picked it up and spat on it; if the spit hissed, it was hot enough. This bit always made Edmund giggle, because he knew it was naughty to spit, and Mama would smile when he showed his shocked delight, forgiving him for having been a nuisance on wash-day.

  Then it was iron, iron, as fast as she could, while the iron was hot; then put it back on the stove and wait, wait till it was hot enough to start again. She always started with a freshly heated iron on one of Papa’s shirts, for these were the most important things to have perfectly smooth and with creases in the right places.

  And that was only Monday’s and Tuesday’s work. Then there was shopping and baking – Mama was a terrible baker, and they all tried very hard to persuade her to buy shop-bread, but she would persist – and dusting and sweeping and polishing and cleaning. At least she didn’t have to do the mending. Grandmama did that, and a very neat job she made of it too.

  In the evenings, Mama would flop into a chair with a sigh and Amelia would make her a cup of tea and rub her shoulders, which were stiff and sore from work. All in all, poor Mama was looking the worse for wear. In the old days, she spent so much time on her projects and campaigns that she hardly had time to pay any attention to what she looked like, but nowadays she looked even worse, with her hands and wrists reddened and chapped from being constantly plunged in water, her nails cut short, her fingers nicked and scarred from sharp kitchen knives and vegetable peelers, and her hair dry and brittle from exposure to steam and kitchen dankness. Amelia was torn between guilty feelings that she ought to be helping Mama more about the house and concern for her own creamy skin and dainty hands.

  She did try to do her bit now and again, and one thing she’d found she was quite good at was cooking. This was a great discovery, as Mama, though a hard worker, was a dreadful cook. Amelia said that was because she had no feeling for food. Mama would argue that of course she hadn’t. How could anyone have a feeling for food – it was just, well, food, wasn’t it? This wasn’t how Amelia saw it at all, and the rest of the family, whether they had a feeling for food or not, agreed that, however poor the fare might be, Amelia was certainly the better cook. Papa and Edmund would ask anxiously who’d cooked a dish before they ventured to eat it.

  ‘Amelia did,
’ Mama would always say, with a wink to Amelia, even if she’d cooked it herself, hoping they’d believe her and say the food was delicious.

  ‘Amelia never cooked stew like this!’ Papa would say, to Amelia’s secret delight, pushing his plate away, and Grandmama would purse her lips, because she didn’t approve of untruths, and she didn’t approve of people who didn’t eat their dinners either.

  Fairweather Friends

  After the fiasco the birthday party had turned into, all Amelia’s friends were full of curiosity about what could have befallen the Pim family so that they neglected their party guests and had the maid send them all packing. Amelia concocted a complicated lie the next day, about Papa having been taken ill, and not being able to drive any more because of it. That was how she explained the loss of the car.

  When they moved house very shortly afterwards, she tried to tell her friends that it was because Papa wanted to live nearer to his business. But these stories didn’t hold water for very long. Many of the girls at school came from Quaker families, and although gossiping was frowned on, it was impossible for such a big piece of news as the Pim family’s financial collapse to remain a secret for long. When it emerged that Amelia Pim’s father now worked for Mary Webb’s father, Amelia’s disgrace was complete. Everyone knew what an important businessman Charles Pim had been; it was unthinkable that he should take a paid position in someone else’s firm unless something had gone seriously wrong – unless, in short, there was some truth in the rumours the young ladies of the Grosvenor Academy were imbibing with their breakfast tea.

  ‘’Melia Pim’s papa stole a lot of money and was only saved from gaol by Mary Webb’s father vouching for him,’ they said.

  ‘’Melia Pim’s papa has taken to the drink, because he can’t pay his debts and his creditors are out to get him,’ they hissed.

  ‘Miss Prim-Pim, with her silk dress and her gold watch – who says that gold watch got lost? Probably pawned it to pay for the party food,’ they sniggered.