I was sent for by the assistant matron the following week, after the girl had given in her notice, and told she had left because I had said that I was doing the work and she was getting the money and it was quite unfair. Although I stated exactly what had transpired between us, and in no meek terms, I knew I wasn’t believed.
The assistant laundress whose place I had taken the previous year came back as manageress and I determined to get another post. This was only one of the reasons that made me decide on a move; I was very unhappy and there had scarcely been a night during the previous two years when I hadn’t, in some measure, cried myself to sleep – even while reading Lord Chesterfield. The trouble was that I was very much in love, and had been since I was fifteen, with the gentleman who wanted a lady. Although I had many other boyfriends this man was always prominent in my mind, and although I eventually kept company with him for nearly two years it was a painful and humiliating experience because I was aware that I was merely being used and hadn’t the strength of will to make a stand against it. When eventually I did, it was like performing an operation on myself without an anaesthetic, and although the wound healed the scar remained.
Kate was very kind and understanding to me at this period. When I was leaving after my visit home, having kissed me granda’s stubbly cheek and passed a last joke with him, she would accompany me to the front door, and there we would stand on the step and talk. Often as not the moon would be shining over the cornfield and should I make any reference to it she would invariably say, ‘Leave it alone, it’s not touching you.’ It was one of her jokes and she would laugh. But some nights we just stood saying nothing, until she would ask, ‘Got the blues, lass?’ and I would nod, for my heart would be sore and my throat full of tears, and she would say, ‘I’m not going to interfere with your life, lass, but you’ll never be happy with him. He’s not for you. You think he’s above you but he’s not. My God, you could leave him at the post; you’ve more brains in your little finger than he’s got in his big body . . . Handsome is as handsome does, lass. You know what the fathar was saying last night, he said, he’d rather see you take’ – she mentioned the name of a boy I’d been going with – ‘It’s true he wouldn’t be able to give you much more than sixpenn’orth of block ornaments’ – scraps of meat from the butcher’s block – ‘but he’d make you a damn sight happier than this one would.’
She was very comforting at times, was Kate.
So it was that in the spring of 1929 I left the North, sad yet hopeful; sad because I told myself I was never going back. I had finished with the North and all it stood for. Hopeful, because I was going to make something of myself. In my case I carried notes from Lord Chesterfield and a page torn from a cheap magazine. I think it was called The Happy Mag. I still have that page, and the words on it I learnt by heart.
I will succeed, I simply cannot fail,
he only obstacle is doubt.
There’s not a hill I cannot scale
Once fear is put to rout.
Don’t think defeat,
Don’t talk defeat,
The word will rob you of your strength.
I will succeed, this phrase repeat
Throughout the journey’s length.
The moment that I can’t is said,
You slam a door right in your face.
Why not exclaim I will instead,
Half won then is the race.
You close the door to your success
By entertaining one small fear.
Think happiness, talk happiness,
Watch joy then coming near.
These words I repeated daily with my prayers, and long afterwards when I stopped saying prayers I still said them.
I hadn’t heard of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help then, and the meaning of philosophy was yet to come, but these simple words were what I needed at the time.
The morning that I left 10 William Black Street for the last time is like an etching in miniature, every line is distinct, but I see it from a great distance. Kate was crying. We kissed and held each other tightly. I loved her deeply in that moment. Had I ever prayed she would die? It was unthinkable. I loved her so much and I could love her more and more now because I was being set free. Never would I again have to wonder if she was all right as I walked up the street, I wasn’t only saying goodbye to Kate, but to the sick, sick dread that had lived with me from my earliest memory.
‘Bye-bye, Kate. Bye-bye. Yes . . . yes, I’ll write twice a week.’
‘Bye-bye, my love. God bless you and take care of you.’
I wouldn’t let her come to the station with me, and she was too overcome to see me to the bottom of the street where I was to get the tram; or was she leaving it to me granda to escort me on his own? Did she have a feeling it would be the last time he would see me? Perhaps.
He kissed me. His chin as usual was rough. His eyes were wet.
‘Bye-bye, Granda.’
‘Bye-bye, hinny. Bye-bye, me lass . . . Bye-bye. God go with you. Bye-bye, me lass . . . Mind how you go. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, me bairn.’
PART THREE
LIFE EVERLASTING
Eleven
When I left the North it was to take up the post of Head Laundress in a workhouse which I understood was quite near Clacton-on-Sea but which I found was ten miles out. After eight lonely months there I got the post of laundry manageress in the workhouse at Hastings. Here I only intended to stay a year before moving on to a bigger and better post – if my fate was to work in a laundry then I would one day manage the biggest in the country.
It happened that almost from the time I left the North up to my fourth year in Hastings, I was pursued by married men. This state of affairs created in me another fear: Was the stamp of my birth evident in some way, that these types should think of me as easy bait? During these years I met five men, four of whom were introduced to me as single. One of these gentlemen introduced me to serious music. Night after night he would take me to hear the Municipal Orchestra in the White Rock Pavilion in Hastings. I was delighted about this, it was all part of the education plan. I liked this man – love did not enter into it but the night I discovered he was married I turned on him so wildly that one could imagine that I was again suffering the effects of a deep passion.
He had been away for the weekend and had not told me where he was going, but on the Sunday evening he called at my lodgings in an excited state. He had something to tell me, so we went for a walk over the East Hill. We were actually walking along the edge of the cliff when he told me he had been to see his wife with regard to getting a divorce because he wanted to marry me. What prevented me from pushing him over the cliff I never knew. He was number three on the list.
It would appear that I was only attractive to married men, in fact, when I had the same experience again I really became afraid. It was as if the scales were tipped too heavily against me. What was I to do? I had a great deal of Kate in me – I had a warm nature. After all my striving to be different was it going to be a hole-and-corner affair with a married man? No. Definitely no. I came to the sad decision – I would never marry.
Meanwhile I became the owner of the house of my imagination. The Hurst, Hoads Wood Road – a fifteen-roomed gentleman’s residence.
You might wonder how a laundry manageress earning £3 a week – although this was a big wage in 1930 for a girl of twenty-three – could buy a fifteen-roomed house, but I had been preparing for this from the days when I had carried the grey hen instead of taking the tram, and so saved a ha’penny. This was hidden in the rafters of the lavatory where the plaster was broken, and if Kate knew about it she never raided my bank, although if she were very hard up she might say, ‘Eeh! I don’t know what Aa’m going to do, Aa haven’t a penny for the gas,’ and she would shake her head and then ask, ‘Have you anything, hinny?’
My reply was nearly always the same, ‘Mind, I want it back, our Kate,’ and I usually got it back.
Although I was a saver I was never mean. Once I gave
two shillings to Tommy Richardson – I was ten at the time. The first Kate knew about it was when Mrs Richardson came to the door.
‘Did you know that your Katie has given our Tommy two shillings?’
‘No,’ said Kate. ‘But if she has it’s her own money that she’s saved, it’s not mine so you needn’t worry.’
I liked our Kate that day.
‘Why did you give him two shillings?’ she asked me later.
‘’Cos I was sorry for him,’ I said. ‘He never gets to The Crown.’
‘But you can get in The Crown for a penny.’
‘I know,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘Have you any coppers left?’ she asked.
I stared at her: ‘I gave him the lot.’
When I first went into service and received ten shillings a week I would turn it up to Kate and she would give me two shillings back, which was quite generous pocket money. That she wanted to borrow a shilling on the Monday didn’t matter, I could have spent it all on the Saturday. And when I started my pen-painting business and made a profit of nine and sixpence a week I managed to save enough to put down for a bike. This, too, I eventually paid for. I’ve always had a horror of debt and I can remember fighting with her when the installment was due and she wanted me to let it slide. I never knew any peace until that bike was paid for.
But I didn’t start to save properly until I went into Harton Institution. And I knew then I had to save for a purpose. Me granda was now becoming an old man and I was well aware that when he died there would be no money to bury him, so I put five shillings a month into a South Shields Building Society; I also insured Kate in the Prudential at a penny a week.
Taking all things into consideration, Kate was very lenient with me with regard to money. She must have remembered what it felt like always to have to tip her pay up, and never once did she enforce this on me. But nearly every pay day, on the last day of the month, she asked if I could lend her a pound, almost half my wages. Sometimes I stuck out because I knew what would happen to it. At such times she would get me granda to appeal to me, and somehow I could never refuse him anything he asked for, for he never asked much of me. If I hadn’t been sure that what I gave them would go mostly on filling the grey hen and getting a drop of hard I would have willingly turned up the whole of my pay, and have been happy to do so, feeling their need of me.
When I left Harton Institution in 1929 I took out my first big insurance. This was a tricky affair because I thought I could not produce a birth certificate. Being illegitimate I was under the impression that either I wouldn’t have one, or, if I had, it would state the true nature of my birth. I couldn’t ask anyone about this, least of all Kate, so there was a lien put on the certificate in case I should die from some congenital disease. When I arrived in Hastings I raised the insurance to a thousand pounds. And I met the added weight of the premiums by taking the bonuses as they fell due.
I remember going for an examination to a doctor in Hastings who was acting on behalf of the insurance company and he, looking at me very funnily, said, ‘What does a young girl like you want to take out such big policies for? Are you thinking of committing suicide? Or if you’re saving what are you saving for?’ In answer to this I could have told him that I was now under the impression that in my position I would never meet the kind of man who would be able to give me the way of life and the things I craved, so I was saving to supply my own needs.
Yet this was not the sole reason I took out the policies. When I was eleven and making my first train journey alone from Tyne Dock to Birtley I insured my life at the booking office – I think it cost tuppence for a fifty-pound insurance – because I always felt that I wanted our Kate to have something of her own. This would appear to be in complete variance with the feeling that I was only happy when there was no money in the house to buy drink, but I worked it out in those far-off days in a very unchildish way: if I were dead I wouldn’t feel about her drinking, would I? But when she got the money she would know that I thought about her – I didn’t phrase it: she would know that I loved her. So, with the larger policy as with that first one, I made it over to her in the event of anything happening to me. And it did occur to me on this occasion that she would drink herself to death. The mind is a strange mixture of contradictions.
But that is how I came to have the securities to offer a building society in return for the gentleman’s residence, which was, even in those days, dropping to bits with dry rot and woodworm.
Why did I want this house? Well again there were two main reasons; one concerned Kate, the other is evident in all I have written. This was the goal I’d aimed at for years. This was the picture come down from the wall, the picture that housed the ladies and gentlemen. This was the other way of life.
Also I realised that I wanted this house because of the piece of ground on which it stood as much as anything else. I never wanted to walk in public parks or through someone else’s wood, I wanted a square of ground, shall we say, leasehold from God. Outside my square, nations could rage, governments could fall, but nothing would be able to touch me. It was a sort of faith with me that once I had acquired a piece of ground for myself I’d know happiness.
My experience of living in a number of furnished rooms – I seemed to be unfortunate in picking landladies who had a way with orange boxes and could convert them into dressing tables and cupboards – I decided was a poor exchange for what I had left in the North. During a sojourn with one such orange-box landlady, I lived for a time in the Institution, taking the Assistant Matron’s place in an emergency during a flu epidemic, and I found that the good lady was letting my room while still drawing the money for it. This decided me to follow the advice of a friend and take a flat.
The flat was in Westhill House and had one large room and a kitchen-cum-bathroom.
Having been brought up among old furniture, everything being second, third or fourth-hand, I determined I was going to have everything in my flat new. The room cost me a hundred pounds to furnish – I did it on the installment plan – and the result was something that I have never been able to achieve since. When describing it now it sounds awful, even to me; it had to be seen to be appreciated. The walls were papered with a dark blue paper, the woodwork was black. On the long window I draped dull pink satin curtains; in front of them were two jewel boxes, on each of which stood an eighteen-inch figure of a snow-white octaroon, these were the only second-hand things I bought. The carpet was in Chinese design, being plain grey with a black spray. The Put-U-Up suite was in another shade of blue, and there was one picture entitled ‘The First Piano Lesson’.
I loved this flat and was so proud of it – but not proud of the job that provided the money for it.
I think I felt ashamed of working in a laundry from my first week in Hastings. Although I was managing and had an assistant and ten outdoor staff, besides being in charge of any number up to twenty-five mentally defective inmates, and two to four different men every day from the casual ward, I felt it was an inferior type of work and inwardly resented the fact that I was wasting my brains and energy on it, for as always I gave everything I had to the job in hand. It was not up to the standard of the two previous laundries I had worked in, yet everything outside it seemed to be on a much higher level. I remember being shown old Hastings – and the slums. Slums? Where were the slums? There didn’t at that time seem to be any real poor in this town. The conditions of living were far above those which I had left, not in the New Buildings – these remained static throughout the years – but in Shields and Jarrow, and Hebburn, and Pelaw and all the towns along the Tyne, and far inland too into mining districts. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of this town that was swept so closely by the sea breezes and where everything appeared so clean which helped with the higher level impression. Yet I remember Kate remarking during her first holiday, as she pointed to some litter lying in the High Street around seven o’clock in the morning – we were on our way to watch the sun rising from the East Hill –
‘By, this wouldn’t happen in the North, the streets would have been clean before this time in the morning.’
In spite of this feeling of being ashamed of my work, when I was asked out by what seemed to me in those days the better-class people, I lost no time in telling them where I was employed. I didn’t want to pass under false pretences.
I remember one old lady asking me how I had become educated since I had apparently been working from an early age and was now working in a laundry. I was flattered that she should think that I was educated, and replied that I had been taught privately. Well, was not Lord Chesterfield my tutor?
This particular old lady was known as a gentlewoman. She had run a tiny house-school and was not only without a degree of any kind but had had no education that qualified her for teaching. Her only accomplishment as far as I could gather was a natural refinement of manner.
It is hard to believe now but up to a few short years ago a town such as this had many such schools, and the pupils left them with the privilege of looking down their noses at the lesser female world, and very little else. In those days I envied the ladylike veneer that covered their ignorance, and wished that I could have attended such an establishment.
It was when I first came to Hastings that I learned too that doctors, like priests, didn’t know everything. I had been brought up with the idea that they did. Doctor McHaffie was a very clever man, me granda said so; and then there was Doctor Shanley in Harton Institution. The verdict on Doctor Shanley was ‘He’s ever so nice’ and ‘He’ll put you right’. But from the first doctor I met in Hastings – an eye specialist, to be correct – I learned they weren’t infallible; nevertheless it was from this man I also learned how I appeared to other people.
Our Kate Page 20
