by Susan Lewis
‘That’s because,’ she hisses, ‘you only ever think about yourself. I had to wait for you to finish your disgusting washing with all your scummy filth stinking the place out.’
‘You never, ever, do your washing before us older girls have done ours,’ Nina spits. She’s poking me in the shoulder, which hurts, and I’m afraid I might lose my balance and fall down in the water.
‘Tomorrow morning you’ll get up at first bell,’ Nina tells me, ‘and while Felicity’s downstairs doing her offices you will go to the house maids and do her washing. What’s more, you’ll use your own washing powder and soap. Have you got that?’
I nod, and sniff and shiver and try not to sob.
Eventually they say I can go back to bed, but they won’t let me dry my feet, or change my pyjamas, so I can’t get to sleep because I’m too wet and cold. I hope I catch flu and die. They’ll be sorry then, because they’ll be arrested for murder and put in an even worse prison than the one we’re in now, and it’ll serve them right!
Chapter Five
Eddie
OH BLIMEY, HERE comes Mrs Baines from over the back. They don’t call her Flirty Gertie for nothing. Quick as I can I drop what I’m doing and duck out of the kitchen into the passage to tuck myself out of view.
‘Eddie!’ she shouts, giving a manly rap on the door. ‘Are you in there, my old love?’
I’ve never been one for saying bad things about people, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Gertie’s voice is as shrill as a parrot’s, and her make-up’s as colourful. She’s been after me ever since Eddress passed, inviting me for a drink over the Anchor, or down to Made for Ever for a game of bingo, or round her house for a cup of char, as she calls it, with a wink and a nudge that never fails to make me blush. I really don’t want to hurt her feelings, but even if I was interested in meeting someone else, which I’m not, she’s not my type at all. I don’t want to say she’s a bit of a hussy, because that’s a dreadful thing to say about anyone, but she has a reputation with the blokes that, frankly, makes me slightly scared of her.
‘Eddie! Eddie!’ she squawks.
Oh my goodness, she’s banging on the kitchen window now. What am I going to do if she opens the door and comes in? She’s going to think I’m off my rocker if she finds me lurking about behind the door without answering. I look at the cupboard under the stairs. It’s where we keep the boots and shoes, some coats and the vacuum cleaner. It’s not big enough to stand up in, but if I get down on my hands and knees and close the door behind me …
I’m in here now, skulking in the pitch dark and praying she doesn’t come any further, because she’s only gone and let herself into the kitchen and if she finds me like this …
I swear I can hear Eddress laughing.
‘Eddie! Is everything all right?’ Gertie shouts. She’s standing at the bottom of the blooming stairs now, right outside my cupboard. I can smell her cigarette smoke, see it even, curling in through the cracks in the door like a detection device. ‘I saw your car outside. How come you’m not at work?’
She’s not really going to go up looking for me, is she? The answer’s yes, because I can hear the stairs creaking as she starts to climb.
I break out in a bit of a sweat, thankful I’m not in bed, or she’d likely jump right in with me.
‘Are you in there?’ she calls out from the landing.
It goes quiet then, and I can’t imagine what she’s doing – until it suddenly hits me and I start to panic. Please God she’s not undressing herself and getting into bed to wait for me to come back.
‘Everything all right, Gert?’
Blimey, Betty Williams has turned up from next door now.
‘I saw you come in. Where’s Eddie?’
‘I don’t know,’ Gertie answers, coming down the stairs. ‘I saw his car outside and wondered if he might be ill, but he’s not up there. Thought I’d make the bed for him while I was here, poor love. Can’t be easy having to manage on his own, can it, without a woman around the place?’
‘No,’ Betty agrees, ‘but he seems to be doing all right. And he knows he can always knock on our door if there’s anything he needs.’
‘So how come his car’s out there?’ Gert goes on. ‘Didn’t he go to work today?’
‘They’m on strike,’ Betty tells her. ‘I saw him come back from taking Gary to school, so I expect he’s popped round the shop, or summat … Or he’s out in the shed.’
‘I’ll go and have a look,’ Gertie decides, and off she trundles, stuck on her mission to find me, while I sit cooped up here like a flaming troglodyte, getting cramp in my backside and hardly daring to breathe.
‘No, no sign of him,’ Gertie confirms a couple of minutes later. ‘You’re right, he must have gone round the shop. I’ll put the kettle on, shall I, have a nice cup of tea waiting for when he comes back.’
Please don’t let me have heard that right!
‘Yeah, you do that, and I’ll make a start on this washing up,’ Betty says. ‘The home help’s on holiday this week, so he’s having to do it all himself.’
‘There we are, gas all lit,’ Gertie declares. ‘I’ll do the drying up, then I might have a quick go round with the vacuum. Do you know where he keeps it?’
Bugger!
‘It used to be under the stairs,’ Betty helpfully informs her.
Bugger! Bugger!
‘There’s no hot water so we’ll have to use that kettle for the washing up,’ Betty says.
‘What’s this?’ Gertie asks.
‘God knows,’ Betty answers.
What are they looking at?
‘It’s got a shoe on it,’ Gertie says. ‘One of Gary’s, by the look of it.’
‘Oh, that’s one of them mending things, what the cobbler uses,’ Betty realises. ‘He must be trying to repair Gary’s shoes. He can be quite handy sometimes, can Eddie. Eddress always used to say that about him. Whatever needed doing, he’d get a book on it and find out how to do it.’
‘Him and his books. If you ask me, it’s not doing him any good, burying himself away the way he does, always reading and doing all that writing. You should see how many books he’s got up there in the bedroom. I bet Eddress wouldn’t have allowed it, taking up all that room and gathering dust the way they do.’
‘Oh, she never minded about his books. I think she used to like how well read he was, made him seem a cut above most of the blokes round here.’
‘Oh, he’s that all right,’ Gertie agrees. ‘A proper gentleman, is what I always say about him. He needs a good woman though, if you ask me. It’s not right him living on his own, the way he does, trying to bring up a boy of Gary’s age without a mother. I hear Susan’s not very happy at her school. Poor love, locked away like that. What good’s an education if it’s making you miserable, is what I want to know?’
‘She’s at her dad all the time to let her come home,’ Betty says, ‘but it’s better for her, where she is. He can’t manage a girl her age on his own, and I can’t see him getting married again, not for a long time yet.’
‘It’s going to be two years come next May since Eddress went,’ Gertie sighs, ‘and it’s not right for a man to, you know, be without a woman, the way he is. It’s not natural.’
‘I reckon that’s for him to decide, and he was very close with Eddress, you have to remember that.’
I feel a surge of affection towards Betty for that.
‘Oh, there’s the kettle whistling,’ Gertie says, ‘stand back while I pour some hot water over those dishes.’
I’m not a bit comfortable, on any level. My legs have gone dead, and I’ve got an itch in the middle of my back that’s getting more urgent by the minute. Ten times worse though is listening to myself being talked about. I’m dreading what they’re going to say next, but they’ll think I’ve gone completely cuckoo if I come out of the cupboard now. And what am I going to tell them I’ve been doing in here?
‘So did Susan come home for half-term?’ Gertie c
hatters on. ‘I can’t say I saw her.’
‘She was up her gran’s every day, with Gary, while Eddie was at work.’
‘How is Florrie, these days? Haven’t seen her down the bingo lately.’
‘I think her legs is playing her up again, so she’s not getting out all that much. I popped in to see her when I was up our Elsie’s the other day. We had a nice cup of tea and a chat. She told me Susan’s been writing to all her relations begging them to ask her father to bring her home. Poor Eddie, it can’t be easy for him knowing she’s unhappy, but I still say the same as he does, she’ll be glad of it in the long run.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right. Do you know what he’s intending to do with Gary? Will he go to a boarding school too? I don’t know how Eddie affords it, meself. They can’t be cheap, those places.’
‘Between us, I think he is feeling the pinch, especially with all these strikes they keep going on. They loses their pay if they don’t go in, and my Don says the management down where Eddie works isn’t very likely to give them the rise they’m after.’
‘Eddie’s always been a bit of a union man, hasn’t he? My Pete was like that. Still is, I s’pose, wherever he is with his little tart.’
Gertie’s husband, Pete, got a seventeen-year-old girl pregnant back around the time Eddress went, and ended up running off with her. I don’t know if Gertie’s divorced now, but from the sound of it, she doesn’t ever see him.
‘These days it’d be legal for that kid to have an abortion,’ Betty points out. ‘Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to, doesn’t it? Never mind abortion, they shouldn’t be having sex before marriage in the first place, is what I say. We never did.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Gertie tells her. ‘And I think it’s a good thing they’ve legalised abortion. It was terrible, the way all those poor girls was having to go to backstreet butchers. Some of them actually died.’
‘It wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t had sex,’ Betty snaps, and gives a sigh. ‘I don’t know, all this free love and flower-power stuff going on these days … It’s not right, I’m telling you. And the length the young girls are wearing their skirts, it’s not decent. I saw that Linda Watkins over on Dawn Rise the other day with a hemline right up around her backside. I swear you could see next week’s washing when she walked. Makes me thankful I’ve got boys, it does.’
‘Mm, me too,’ Gertie agrees. ‘Girls is a lot of work, God bless ’em.’
‘And it’s only going to get worse now there’s all this women’s lib and burning your brassieres coming in. Not that I’m against women having rights, mind you, but I wouldn’t want to be seeing youngsters going on this pill they’m all talking about. It should be for women who are married and don’t want to have any more kids. Or girls over twenty-one who’m going steady. It’ll all end in tears if they don’t keep a rein on it, you mark my words.’
It’s interesting what you can learn when you’re in a cupboard under the stairs. I wish I had my notebook with me, and a spot of light so I could jot it all down. Turns out Gertie Baines, who everyone says has had more blokes than hot dinners, might be a bit more conservative than I thought – or responsible, is probably a better word. I’m not all that surprised by Betty’s views though, because she’s always been a decent, God-fearing sort of woman who keeps herself to herself and does what she can to make a good home for Don and the boys. Pity Gertie’s husband left her the way he did, must have been hard for her, poor soul, and I expect she gets lonely, so that’s why she goes with other men. It’s still not right though, because marriage is the only proper place for sex, and listening to them now makes me doubly grateful that our Susan’s where she is, out of harm’s way. No birth pills, no miniskirts, no flower power, and thank goodness, no boys. She’s already well developed for her age compared to some of the girls round here, with her bust starting to show quite a lot now, and talk about having a mind of her own! I wonder how many letters she’s going to write to Eddress’s family this week, asking them to persuade me to let her come home. She’s even written to Canon Radford, up Kingswood church, the little madam. It’s a good job I see for myself how well she gets on with her friends when I’m at the school on Sundays, or I’d still be worried out of my mind.
‘Look at this tea towel,’ Gertie remarks. ‘It could do with a blooming good wash. I’ll take it home with me and give it a boil along with mine.’
‘Eddie’s got a washing machine,’ Betty reminds her. ‘They bought it when Eddress was ill, to help her out.’
‘Oh yeah, I forgot about that. So where does he keep it?’
‘That’s it there, in the corner,’ Betty tells her. ‘Makes a heck of a racket when it’s going, but it seems to do a good job.’
‘Not if this tea towel’s anything to go by,’ Gertie retorts. ‘I’ve never wanted one of those new-fangled machines meself, I don’t trust ’em. Much better to give everything a bloody good scrub with a bit of soap and elbow grease, then put it through the mangle. You know where you are then.’
‘Eddie’s sister, Nance, says the same. Her and Doreen come here every Wednesday to change the beds and do the washing, but they’d rather do it by hand too. Meself, I wouldn’t mind giving it a go, because Eddress got on all right with it. Put the willies up her sometimes though, the way it shudders and jumps about. I was in here once when it was going, and we ended up running out the back door it scared us so much. We had a good laugh about it after, but at the time it was like the whole bloody house was going off into space.’
Gertie gives one of her raucous chuckles, and I have a smile too. I remember the day that happened, and how Eddress declared she wouldn’t have any more to do with the bloody thing after that. ‘It’s going to finish me off quicker than anything else,’ she told me when I got home that night. So we dug out the instruction book again, read it from cover to cover and realised she was putting too much in, and not spreading it around enough to even out the load. After that, it was fine.
‘Ah, there’s the kettle boiling again,’ Betty says. ‘I wonder what’s keeping Eddie. He must have run into someone round Lloyds. Or he might have gone up the union.’
‘But his car’s out there.’
‘It might not be working, because he walked to school with Gary, so maybe he’s walked up the road to the union offices.’
‘Mm,’ Gertie grunts. ‘He won’t be back for ages if he has, so maybe there’s no point making him a cup of tea.’
‘We can still have one though. He won’t mind, and if we give the place a bit of a clean-up before we go, I expect he’ll be really pleased to find it all spick and span when he comes back.’
Oh no!
‘All right, if you brew the tea, I’ll go and find the vac. Where did you say it was, under the stairs?’
‘That’s right. We should probably give this floor a bit of a wash too. Dearie me, when I think of how spotless Eddress always used to keep the place … Like you said, it’s too much for a man. They’m better off going out earning the money and leaving the housework to us women. It gets done proper then. The home help does her best, but you never used to see fingerprints on the door knocker when Eddress was alive.’
God save me from well-meaning housewives, is what I’m thinking when the cupboard door opens and Gertie’s face looms into view. I hardly have a chance to say boo before she screams.
‘It’s all right. It’s only me,’ I tell her, as she looks about to faint.
‘Bloody hell, Eddie. What the dickens are you doing in there? You gave me the fright of my life. Oh, gorblimey, I think I’ll have to sit down.’
‘What’s going on?’ Betty demands, squeezing round the cupboard door to come and join us. She does a double take. ‘Eddie? Is that you under there?’
‘Yes, it’s me,’ I say cheerily. Always best to put a smile on things. ‘I was, er, putting a couple of bob in the gas meter when I dropped it. Funny, I thought I heard voices. It must have been you two.’
‘How long have
you been under there?’ Gertie asks.
She and Betty are on their knees now, affording me no dignified way out of here – were such a thing possible, which, in the circumstances, I have to accept it isn’t.
‘Oh, not long,’ I assure her. ‘I had a job to see what I was doing … And it’s that dark, I must have nodded off for a couple of minutes.’ Probably better not to let them know I heard what they were saying, it’ll only make things more complicated than they already are.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Betty asks.
‘Can we get you something?’ Gertie offers.
‘No need to bother,’ I smile. ‘I’ll just pop out to the shed for a torch, then I should be able to find the two-bob bit.’
Realising they’re blocking my exit, they start to get up and I look away so I can’t see up their skirts.
‘The kettle’s just boiled,’ Betty says. ‘Shall I make a cuppa?’
‘Oh, you can go on home now, if you like,’ Gertie tells her. ‘I’ll look after the tea, and the hoovering.’
‘No, no, don’t you go worrying about all that,’ I try to insist. ‘I can manage. I’ve got the day off, so there’s plenty of time.’
She gives me one of her saucy winks. ‘Why don’t I stay and give you a hand?’ she offers.
Feeling the colour rush to my cheeks, I say, No need. I can manage, honest, and our Nance’ll be here any minute.’ It’s not true, but I have to say something to try and make her leave.
‘Oh, is that right,’ Gertie replies, either not sure whether to believe me, or not keen to see our Nance. Probably a bit of both, because they’ve never got on.
‘Any minute,’ I repeat. ‘She’s going to do the hoovering, and put the washing machine on.’
