‘Oh they’ll pay!’ Mum said grimly. ‘Bein’ it’s their rotten son.’
‘Let’s hope it works. You never know with these things. Sometimes they don’t do the trick.’
‘Don’t even say it, Maud.’
‘How far gone is she?’
‘She don’t know, silly girl. Leastways she says she don’t know.’
‘Is she showin’ yet?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a mercy.’
And at that point Baby shuffled her feet. The conversation stopped like an electric light being switched off. Both women looked up and became artificially bright and cheerful in an instant.
‘There you are!’ Mum said. ‘Ready for your tea, are you?’
It’s something terrible, Peggy thought. She’s hiding it just like she hid Dad’s illness. She never told us he was dying and he was, and now she’s not telling us what’s the matter with Joan, so it must be something really awful. ‘How’s Joan?’ she asked, her face taut with worry and determination. ‘Did you see her?’
‘She’s been a bad girl and lost her job,’ Mum said, still using that artificially cheerful voice. ‘She’s coming home on Wednesday.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘No, she’s not,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘It’ud be a darn sight better for her if she were. An’ that’s my opinion of it.’
‘Well we don’t need to go into all that, do we?’ Mum said, and this time her voice sounded as if she was giving Aunt Maud a warning. ‘I’ll make the tea.’
There was no sense in any of this. The more Peggy thought about it the less she could find. Joan was in trouble. That much seemed plain. But if she was in trouble, then being ill would make things worse not better. And if she’d gone somewhere she’d know where she’d gone. And what was it she was supposed to show? Well she won’t come home on Wednesday, she thought, because Mum said something was going to happen on Wednesday, first thing, so I’ll bet she’s going to court. People usually went to court when they got into trouble and then they got fined or sent to prison. Poor Joan. She’ll never be able to pay a fine, so I suppose they’ll send her to prison. I wonder what she’s done. Perhaps they put you in prison if you shout at people when you’re in service. But that didn’t seem probable, not really. She’d have liked to send her poor sister a letter but she knew Aunt Maud wouldn’t supply the stamp in her present acid mood. It was very worrying.
However on Wednesday morning it looked as though Joan would be coming home after all, for she and Baby were woken up early so that they could take their things next door to the Matthews’ house before they went to school.
‘Your sister’ll need the bed,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘It won’t be for long. An’ you see you behave yourselves when you’re next door. I don’t want complaints. Remember we’re in a tied cottage and we’re in enough trouble as it is.’
All day long, as the lessons droned interminably on, Peggy thought about Joan and wondered what she’d done and how she was getting on in court. When four o’clock came at last, she set off for home at once, dragging Baby by the hand, no matter how much she protested.
Mum and Aunt Maud and Grandpa were all in the kitchen but they weren’t speaking to each other and there was a really terrible atmosphere. Peggy didn’t dare ask if Joan was home or upstairs or anything, in case it made things worse or gave Mum an attack of the nerves.
The two girls ate their tea in an oppressive silence, and washed the dishes without a word being spoken. Then the three adults sat in their chairs and didn’t look at one another. Mum was busy with her mending and Aunt Maud was reading the Bible, which was a very bad sign, for she only read the good book when she was in a bad temper. And after a further hour’s endless silence Mum cleared her throat and told the girls it was time they went next door to bed.
And next door to bed they went, tiptoeing into the Matthews’ cottage as though they’d been told not to make a sound.
It was a double bed but an uncomfortable one with a very lumpy mattress so it took them a long time to settle in it. They were still awake when the shouting began. It came from Aunt Maud’s room on the other side of the wall and although they couldn’t hear what was being said, the anger in the voices was unmistakable. It was Aunt Maud and Mum and Grandpa and they were shouting abuse at Joan, who was crying terribly, on and on and on. Now and then a word would rise out of the bedlam, sharp as a scythe, ‘Slut!’ ‘Trollop!’ ‘Disgrace!’ and once Grandpa’s voice shouted, ‘… better dead!’ which made Peggy shiver with a sudden terrified cold.
The row went on for ages, but at last the door was slammed and the two listeners could hear angry feet stamping down the stairs and descending voices grumbling. But Joan went on crying.
‘Poor Joan!’ Baby whispered.
‘You stay there,’ Peggy whispered back, easing herself out of the bed.
‘What you going to do, our Peggy?’
‘Send her a message,’ Peggy whispered. With her ears strained for any sound of movement from Mrs Matthews in the kitchen below, she crept quietly across the room to the dividing wall and tapped on it with her knuckles, once, twice, three times. ‘I wish they’d learnt us morse code at school.’
The sobbing stopped. Peggy tapped again. Both girls listened and waited. And then to their delight, their sister tapped an answer, faint through the plaster of the partition, once, twice, three times. It was a little triumph.
‘Now we can all go to sleep,’ Peggy said, when she’d crept back to bed again. ‘She knows we’re here an’ she can knock if she needs us.’
‘Are they going to send her to prison, our Peggy?’
‘No,’ Peggy said. Now that she’d sent her message she felt pretty sure of it. ‘They’re not. I ‘spect we shall see her in the morning.’
But they didn’t. And she didn’t come down to supper in the evening either, although after Grandpa had gone off to the pub, Mum took a tray upstairs for her, which Peggy was relieved to see.
Aunt Maud was combing her hair ready for her prayer meeting. ‘I’m off,’ she said, when Mum came downstairs again. ‘Time these children were next door.’
‘I’ll take ’em when I’ve done the dishes,’ Mum said.
‘I’ll do the dishes if you like,’ Peggy offered, feeling quite amazed at how artful she was being. ‘Baby’s tired. Aren’t you, Baby? She ought to go to bed straight away.’
For once in her life Baby had the sense to join in the plot, and even though the yawn she gave was too enormous to be credible, Mum believed her. The minute they were out of the door Peggy took off her sandals and ran up the stairs.
Joan was in the single bed, lying on her side with the covers pulled over her shoulders. Her face was very pale and her hair hadn’t been combed and there were mauve shadows under her brown eyes. ‘Oh Peggy!’ she said, and burst into tears.
Peggy was across the room in two barefooted strides, pushing the dangling clothing aside with both hands, and then she had her sister cuddled in her arms and was patting her back and kissing her cheeks. ‘You’re all right,’ she said. ‘You’re home now. You’re all right.’
‘I shall never be all right again,’ Joan sobbed. ‘Never ever.’
‘You will. You will.’
‘No, no. I won’t. I’m ruined. You don’t know what I’ve done.’
‘I don’t care what you’ve done,’ Peggy said stoutly. ‘You’re my sister and I love you and I think they were hateful to shout at you like that.’
‘I been dismissed without a character,’ Joan confessed into Peggy’s shoulder.
‘That just shows how hateful they were an’ all.’
Joan sat up in the bed and moved her body away from Peggy’s embrace so that they could look at one another. ‘You won’t say that when you know what I done,’ she said.
‘I shall.’
‘You won’t, Peggy.’
‘Tell me an’ see.’
It took a visible effort of will for Joan to say the next words and the shame on her face
was painful to see. ‘I let them kill my baby, Peg. I was going to have a baby. I shouldn’t have been. It was wrong. Only he said he loved me. An’ they sent for Mum. It was awful, Peg. Awful. An’ in the end I let them kill it. How could anyone forgive me for doing that?’ There was no hope for her. She was ruined just like Mum said.
Why it’s like the kittens, Peggy thought, affection and pity for her poor tear-stained sister rising in a flood of warmth to redden her cheeks and make her eyes blaze. ‘Oh you poor thing,’ she said. ‘What an awful thing. Did they put it in a bucket?’
‘What?’ Joan said, stunned by the question. She was still aching and shocked from the brutality of yesterday morning’s medical assault, the long hours of guilty pain that had torn her and the afternoon apart, the searing accusations that had left her weak and wretched all night. Oh if only she’d known all this was going to happen she’d never have let him lay a finger on her. Never. ‘What?’
‘In a bucket,’ Peggy explained. ‘Like the kittens.’
But she could see it was the wrong thing to say while the words were still on her tongue. It made poor Joan cry worse than ever.
‘Never you mind,’ she said, cuddling her furiously. ‘You can have another baby an’ I’ll look after you, an’ we won’t let them kill that one, I promise.’
‘Oh Peggy!’ Joan said between sobs. ‘You are lovely!’
‘I’d better go down now,’ Peggy said. ‘I’ve got the washing-up to do. I’ll knock on the wall when I’m next door.’
‘Don’t tell Baby what I told you, will you?’
‘No,’ Peggy said standing up to go. ‘Course not. How long have you got to stay up here?’
‘A week I think,’ Joan said wearily. ‘That’s what Mum said anyway.’
It was a week, which was the sort of time Peggy told Baby she’d expect for a punishment.
‘What’s she done?’ Baby asked as they walked to school on the following Wednesday.
‘Shouted at someone,’ Peggy lied, ‘so they sent her home without a character.’
‘Gosh!’ Baby said in surprise, for her instincts were telling her it was something a great deal worse. ‘She must have shouted jolly loud.’
‘Well just don’t mention it when she comes down tomorrow, that’s all,’ Peggy said.
‘No,’ Baby said earnestly. ‘I won’t.’
It was the last week of term. In three more days it would be the summer holidays and harvest time. And a jolly good job too, Peggy thought, for if Mum and Aunt Maud and Grandpa were all hard at work in the fields they wouldn’t have the energy for shouting at Joan.
Unfortunately the corn wasn’t quite ripe enough. She walked out into the fields to examine it every day and it was very slow. All that sun, she thought, squinting up at it, and it can’t ripen one field. But at least life in the cottage was quiet now and more or less back to normal. She and Joan took it in turns to sleep on the floor the way they had before Joan went into service, and they helped Mum cook the meals and washed the dishes and scrubbed floors, and Joan worked with the rest of them, and nobody said anything much. In fact there wasn’t any conversation at all, only an awful sense of brooding as though something terrible was going to happen, and that went on and on getting worse and worse until Thursday afternoon.
Mum had gone off to the pictures in Guildford as usual, Aunt Maud was visiting a neighbour on the other side of the seven acre field, and the three girls were sitting on Grandpa’s little bit of grass in front of the cottage, Baby playing with her doll and Joan and Peggy mending a long tear in Aunt Maud’s patchwork bedspread, when a shadow rose between them and the sun.
It was Grandpa, standing belligerently before them, mud-caked and disagreeable, his legs astride and his field hat pulled right down over his eyebrows like a helmet.
‘Leave that,’ he commanded brusquely. ‘I got somethin’ to show you.’ And the words were as threatening as his appearance.
They followed him the half mile down to Tillingbourne in anxious silence. There was a blackbird singing with tremulous passion in the hawthorn hedge, and the sky was a beautiful, unclouded blue, diffusing sunshine without discrimination on placid sheep, green corn, Joan’s misery and Grandpa’s anger. What was he going to show them? Peggy worried as she followed his furious spine. It’ud be something nasty as sure as eggs were eggs.
He led them to the church, which comforted her a little, for it couldn’t be too nasty, could it, if it was in a church? But they didn’t go into the church, they walked round it instead, past the porch and then along the east wall until they reached the buttress that marked the division between the aisle and the chancel, and there the three girls stood in a line and waited, Joan pale-faced and drooping with fatigue, Baby close to tears, Peggy watchful and worried.
‘Look at that,’ Grandpa said, squinting their attention towards the wall.
They looked.
‘Don’t know what you’re looking at though, do you?’ he said, and his eyes were sharp with mockery.
Joan answered for all of them even though she felt ill. ‘No,’ she said, speaking quietly to deflect his anger.
‘No, you don’t,’ he agreed. ‘So I’ll tell you. High time you was told. That’s the wall of a cell, that is. A cell for a wicked girl’.
Now they could see that there was a shape outlined in brick in the fabric of the wall. It looked like a door that had long since been blocked in, and a very low door too, not much taller than Grandpa.
‘And that,’ pointing to an oblong opening in the middle of the shape, ‘that’s a squint.’
It looked like a letter-box, only bigger.
‘They cut that,’ Grandpa went on, ‘so’s she could see the priest taking communion. Which was all the light she had. Jest that one little hole. There weren’t another openin’ nowhere, not a door, not a windy, nothin’, just the four bare walls of her cell. Come out to about here it did,’ walking the six short feet to the edge of the buttress, ‘an’ that’s all the space she had. Jest enough for a bed an’ a few paces up an’ down. Yes, that’s where she was bricked up.’
Oh how terrible! Peggy thought, staring at the little space where the cell would have been. Bricked up alive. The words snagged her mind with horror, filling her imagination with terrifying images, bricks and plaster being pushed towards her eyes, crushing against her chest, inches from her unprotected head, the airless space full of brick dust and falling debris, the weight of masonry an oppressive force all round her. Bricked up alive. ‘Poor thing!’ she said.
‘Thirteen she was, when they bricked her in.’ Grandpa said. They reckon she wanted to be a saint, put right away from temptation an’ all that sort a’ thing. Saint my eye. I don’t reckon much to that line a’ thinkin’. Nothing saintly about that girl, I can tell you. Oh no! Nothing saintly. She was a slut, that’s what she was. A slut and she knew it. Thirteen years old, Joan Furnivall, and a slut like someone else we know. What’ve you got to say about that?’
Joan stood before him, her head bowed and her cheeks burning, and Peggy noticed with a rush of affectionate pity that her legs were trembling. Oh this was awful. Hadn’t she been punished enough? How could she stop him?
‘Can we go home now, Grandpa?’ she tried. ‘I don’t think Joan’s feeling very well.’
‘No I don’t suppose she is,’ Grandpa said gloating over it. ‘She don’t deserve to feel well, and she’ll feel a lot worse when she’s heard what I’ve got to tell her. There’s worse to come.’
Worse, Peggy thought weakly. How could there be? What could be worse than being bricked up alive?
‘Hadn’t been there more’n a year or two before she up and changed her mind,’ Grandpa said. ‘Which she’d got no business doing, not once she was enclosed. But she did, so you see the sort a’ girl she was. And then do you know what she done? She set to with her bare hands an’ she picked her way out, day by day, week by week, till she made a hole just big enough to squeeze through, and out she come and run off home to her father.’
I’d have done the same, Peggy thought, admiring the tenacity and good sense of the poor little prisoner. It filled her with relief to think of such a sensible escape. I’d have done just the same.
‘Her father,’ Grandpa said, gloating again, ‘he weren’t none too pleased to see her when they all thought she’d been settled once and for all. Her father, well he naturally thought of all the shame she’d bring down on his head, the little slut. He didn’t want the bailiff coming down to see him, did he? So d’you know what he done? I’ll tell you what he done. He took her straight back to the priest and had her bricked up all over again. And quite right too. That’s what ought to happen to all sluts, didn’t it, Joan Furnivall?’
Joan licked her lips. Her eyes were bolting with distress and there was no colour in her face at all. ‘What happened to her then?’ she whispered.
‘You may well ask,’ Grandpa said, stepping towards her until his face was no more than six inches away from hers. ‘She went mad, Joan Furnivall. She went mad and died.’
‘Oh please,’ Joan whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to … I didn’t know all – this – would happen. I’m not a slut, Grandpa.’
‘Oh yes you are,’ Grandpa said, bullying her with his face. ‘You’re a dirty, filthy, shameless little slut. You brought shame on this family and the bailiff down on my head an’ all. If I had my way I’d …’
But none of them ever heard what he would do because Joan slumped to the ground in a dead faint.
Then several things happened in rapid succession. Baby began to howl, Peggy dropped to her knees beside her sister and tried to lift her poor groaning head from the gravel, there was a swish of long skirts approaching along the path, and Grandpa disappeared like a rabbit into a hole.
‘If you will allow me to lift her up a little, we can put her head between her knees and that will bring her round,’ Reverend Beaumont said.
Peggy was limp with relief to see his good honest face looking down so kindly at them. ‘She’s not very well,’ she said.
‘No,’ Reverend Beaumont said, as Joan groaned and opened her eyes. ‘I can see that. It’s lucky my car is in the road.’ And he picked Joan up in his arms as if she were a baby and strode off with her towards the road, his cassock swinging.
London Pride Page 11
