“Yes – I expect you must,” he said. Then he bent down and gave her a brief, dry kiss on the cheek. “Run along now,” he said.
And Mary ran off, calling out “Goodbye,” as she ran. When she reached the corner she turned, quickly, to get another look at him but he had disappeared. Perhaps he had backed into the shadows. Perhaps he had walked quickly off in the other direction. Perhaps he was just moving in the darkness between two lamps. Mary ran back to the party and found Ivy leaning over the piano, singing, “There’ll be blue skies over, the white cliffs of Dover –” and she pulled at Ivy’s hand saying, “Please – can I go to bed now?”
“‘Course, love,” said Ivy. “Shirley’s been tucked up for a long time.” Ivy took her hand and led her back to number 19. After a hasty wash with a flannel and a rummage through her case to find her little rose-sprigged nightdress, Mary was in her little iron bedstead, next to Shirley, who was fast asleep. Her eyes were shutting as Ivy left and went back to the street. Mary, wondering vaguely how the man in the black suit had known her name, grew dozier and dozier. And so, as Meakin Street sang “Keep the Home Fires Burning” under her window, Mary Waterhouse fell into a dreamless sleep on her first night back in London.
It was only years later that my father confessed to me about the visit he had paid to Mary in Meakin Street on VE Night. Of course, he knew he should not have gone and sought her out, or drawn himself so obviously to her attention. He said he thought that his visit would be overlooked in the confusion and that he had not, in any case, meant to speak to her. He was leaving, after having watched her for a little while from the end of the street, when he saw her peeping round the corner at him. The temptation to get a better look at her and say a few words of encouragement evidently proved too strong. In fact all this was rather uncharacteristic of my father’s ordinary behaviour which was, above all, correct – too much so, perhaps. He told me that he was standing on a terrace, overlooking a carefully cultivated London garden and hearing, in the distance, the hooters, the car horns blaring, the singing and the cheering, when he suddenly felt that he must go and observe his little charge and see how she was managing in her new surroundings. An ounce of information gained by personal observation was often worth a pound gathered from documents. But I still believe that on that night of high emotion my father gave way to an impulse. He told me that what he saw that night disturbed him. He even partly foresaw what was going to happen – although, as he said, it would have taken a playwright to imagine the full extent of the disaster. After his visit to Meakin Street that night he made the most earnest representations to those involved, urging them strongly to remedy Mary’s situation without delay. He said that such a child, with evident intelligence and courage, and the promise of beauty, could not be rescued soon enough from that mean street. He saw clearly that in that context the lack of attributes like brains or looks might be better for her – would probably give her a more peaceful life, keep her out of trouble. But for all his urgings it was decided not to interfere. He had to submit. Of course what happened proved him perfectly right – perhaps it was a mercy that he did not live long enough to see exactly how right he had been. Nevertheless, he told me that the spectacle of that child, in the fresh dress so carefully put on her by Mrs Gates at Framlingham, standing in a bleak London street, alone, at almost eleven o’clock, with a smear of dirt on one cheek and of jam on the other, not knowing the extent of her own bewilderment, was very upsetting. He even confessed to a strong desire to kidnap her then and there.
He knew the lives of the workers on his own estates, of course, but that was completely different. I imagine that Meakin Street, out in force for a celebration, must have startled him. The idea of Mary, child of the gentry, suddenly dumped down there horrified him.
I’m forced to say, though, that just as he had no idea of the way the country was about to go, so he had no idea about the sort of conditions which help a growing child to become whole. In his day parents barely saw their children and fathers were particularly cut off from their own progeny. My father could comprehend the immediate social aspects of Mary’s removal from Framlingham to Meakin Street, but he could not understand that there might be ways in which Mary would be better off as part of a poor, but sane, family, than trapped in the frozen web at Framlingham. However this is speculative. No one could have anticipated the real consequences of leaving her in Meakin Street. In the event it was a grave mistake.
1952
Wyckender Street, in mid-February, is deserted. For a long, straight half mile the street lights throw pools of light at intervals on to the frosty pavements and over the ends of small neglected front gardens. There, uneven paths lead up to little houses with darkened windows. In some places there are weedy, brickstrewn gaps, where houses once stood. That is one side of the street. On the other runs a tall, brick wall, nine feet high, which hides the railway sidings where unseen trains clank their couplings restlessly. Occasionally a train rushes through the sidings. Occasionally there is a melancholy, muffled whistle from behind the wall. Now, a cutting, icy wind blows up Wyckender Street, past the wall on one side and the houses, shabby with post-war neglect, on the other.
Up the cold and treeless street come three girls, high heels ringing on the icy pavement. They are huddled in big coats and they turn round sometimes to giggle or shout a remark to the three boys mooching along behind them.
“Come on, Joe. ’Ave a go,” cries out the boldest girl in a mocking voice. She stops deliberately under a broken street light on the pavement by the bleak line of the brick wall. Hard light from the unprotected lamp falls on bright, fair hair. The other two girls walk on, a little faster than before. “Well –” says one in a shocked voice, glancing back at the figure under the street light.
“She’s getting a thoroughly bad name for herself in our street,” says the other. “She’s out till all hours with Jim Flanders. Her mum can’t do nothing about it.” The speaker is Cissie Messiter. Heavy pancake make-up, black mascara and bright lipstick do not quite disguise her starveling’s face. Her sparrow’s legs are a little bowed and she walks with a short tripping step to keep her shoes on. She buys them from a stall in the market and they are usually too wide for her narrow feet.
Behind them, the other two boys pass the couple under the lamp, who are pressed together, kissing. “Aye, aye,” they call. They start whistling. The boy, Jim Flanders, lets the girl go. “Take no notice, Jim,” says the girl. Her coat is open. Underneath it she is wearing a pencil-slim black skirt and a tight red sweater. Her head, now thrown back slightly, is covered in little golden curls. Her face, heavily powdered, is rather pale under the street lamp, and her eyes are very wide, fringed with curly brown lashes. Her mouth is wide, soft and, at this moment, parted in pleasure and delight. There is practically no future at the laboratory, the steel foundry or in the lecture room for girls who look like this one. All these places are run by men and no man looking at a girl like this will be able to treat her the way he treats everyone else. She does not really understand, as she clutches Jim Flanders under a lamp in Wyckender Street, freezing in her tight sweater and skirt from C and A Modes and her thin, but voluminous coat, that her face and figure will make her future. But they will.
“Oh, Jim. I do love you,” says Mary Waterhouse.
“I love you, Mary,” says Jim. The heels of the others have ceased to sound on the pavement now. Jim and Mary are alone in the street.
“Let’s go over there,” Jim says, nodding at the other side of the street.
“All right,” says Mary without hesitation. Other girls might argue, or pretend resistance, have to be half-dragged across the street – but not her. So hand in hand they cross the street, Jim, a tall and well setup lad with his brown hair slicked down on his head, and Mary, tall, energetic and shapely. They go into the gap where two houses once stood. Spring surges through their bodies, even on this cold night.
Mary lies, half under Jim, on the bomb site. They are right up against the b
ack wall of the garden which once belonged to the shattered house. He can still see her face dimly in the light from the street. Her mouth is soft, the corners slightly lifted. Her eyes are dimmed and blurry with pleasure. Although she is lying in a small hollow where cold earth and frozen grass cover the remains of an air raid shelter, she might model for a cameo of an early nineteenth-century beauty.
“Oh, Jim,” she breathes out. She is helpless.
They do not know it, as they embrace, but underneath them in the remains of a fur coat, with a small string of seed pearls round her skeleton throat, lies Mrs Thompson’s body, entombed permanently in her own air raid shelter. The rescue team thought she was in Bournemouth so they did not bother to look for her.
Joe runs his hand up under Mary’s sweater and feels her breast, in its tight, uplift bra. They kiss, bruising their lips against each other. Mary’s hand, clutched in Jim’s hair, pulls. Her other hand, tugging out his shirt, runs up his back. As they strain there on the ground, first fighting, then exhausted, panting and staring into each other’s faces, muttering, fighting again to find more of each other, as the tide rises again, they are like two animals locked in a death struggle. Jim puts Mary’s hand on his trousers, where his hard cock lies. He groans, “Mary – Mary.” His hand runs up her leg, past her stocking top to between her legs, feeling the wetness of her knickers. “Ah,” she says. Mary unbuttons his fly, and with their hands in each other’s secret places they withdraw a little, chilled, frightened, and then return to kissing again, kissing each other’s mouths, eyes, cheeks, breathing sobbing, misty breaths into each other’s faces. But they, themselves, are not cold now. Across the road carriages are shunted noisily into position and joined together. In an upper window, at the house next to the bomb site, a light goes on. Mary and Jim do not hear the noise of the trains, or see the light shining into the next door garden.
“Somebody down there on the bomb site again,” says a fat man in striped pyjamas at the window, to the hump under the blankets which is his wife.
“They ought to fence it off – I’ve told them,” says her sleepy voice. A surge of mixed resentments goes through her sleep-fogged brain.
“Some poor, silly bitch getting herself into trouble,” says the man.
“He’s enjoying it,” thinks his wife. “Beast. Peeping Tom.” She mutters, “No business of yours.”
“They ought to fence it off,” he says and crosses the floor, getting back into the bed and making it creak.
His wife, feeling the bed lurch like a ship at sea, rolls over, turning her back on him.
Behind the wall a train whistles and goes by.
Mary’s hand is round Jim’s hard cock, now, inside his underpants. “I love you so much, Jim,” she says.
“It’s up to her to stop me,” is the thought which goes through his mind. “A man can’t help himself.” But Mary will not stop and so, wrestling with their clothes, Mary’s skirt, which will not go up over her hips because it is so tight, and Jim’s pants and trousers, which will not go down without a struggle, and with many breaks and pauses, to fumble with clothing, to kiss and mutter and continue again, the scene continues. All the pauses, breaks, mutters, are points where Mary should make a choice. They are the intervals at which she should decide to call a halt but, after so many embraces at the back of the dance hall, in doorways, on this very bomb site on the way home, Mary is not going to stop. She is tired of partial satisfactions, of encounters which sometimes left Jim spent and gasping while she was still unsatisfied. Without making a conscious decision, she is going on.
And so, finally, Jim enters her. Gasping with shock and pleasure her eyes open and she sees what she will never forget – the bricks of the wall they lie near, the lines of cement criss-crossing the bricks, the jagged crack in the wall, running from top to bottom. Jim takes her as she lies there, sobbing in pain and delight.
When he has finished they lie still and then, slowly, feel the cold around their bodies. Mary grows conscious of rough ground under her bottom, a piece of stone sticking into her back.
They stare at each other in the dimness. “Oh – that was lovely, Mare,” Jim murmurs. Mary smiles at him. “Oh – we shouldn’t have,” he tells her.
“Never mind,” she says. “It was lovely.” Even at that moment Jim knows it should have been Mary, expressing the regret.
“We shouldn’t have,” he says again. “Did it hurt?”
“Not much,” she says. “But it does now. The ground’s hard.” Then, totally belying what she had just said, her hand comes round his cock again.
“Better go, Mary,” he says.
“All right, then,” she says.
They struggle into their clothes and walk off the bomb site, hand in hand, in silence. Now they seem strangers to each other. The act has emphasized their differences. Moreover, they have to part now. Jim has to go to his house. Mary has to go to hers. They reach the end of Wyckender Street. “I’d better tidy myself up before I go in,” Mary says. “Ivy’ll kill me if I turn up like this.” She begins to straighten her stocking seams and pat at her hair. Suddenly she feels awful. She wants Jim to say something loving to her, but somehow he will not, or cannot. What he says is, “Be in bed, won’t they?”
“Most likely,” Mary says, “but they’ve got the TV now.”
“Keeps them out of bed, I suppose,” Jim says. And Mary replies glumly, “It’s the novelty of it.”
They walk up Meakin Street in silence. On the step Jim says, “Oh, Mary. I love you, you know.”
“I love you, too, Jim,” Mary says.
“Come round for you after work?” he asks.
“Oh, yes,” she says. They embrace and he goes off down the silent street. At the bottom of the street, rounding the corner, he waves to her.
The house is dark when she gets in. She can see through the open doorway of the front room that Jack has not come in. He now sleeps on the front room settee as there is no room for him upstairs. As she gets to the landing Ivy’s voice calls sleepily from the other bedroom, “You in, Mary?”
“Yes, mum,” she calls back.
Mary undresses in the cold, pulls on her nightdress and gets into bed. Shirley, three feet away, in the other bed, does not stir. She is very tired, Mary, as she lies there, feeling the stickiness on the inside of her thighs, and gazing through her little cold window pane at the hazy stars in the hazy London sky. She wishes Jim were there beside her, warm in bed. But she is happy, just the same.
“So that’s it,” she thinks languidly. “It’s lovely, really. Easy. Natural. So that’s what they all go on about. Better keep it from Ivy.” Then she thinks, “I do love Jim. I really do.” Feeling contented, happy and safe, Mary Waterhouse falls asleep.
“She hated her wedding – got stinking drunk on a big glass of sherry the night before,” reports Ivy, standing in the street, with her shopping bag, to her friend, Lil Messiter.
“I loved mine,” says Lil. “Thought I was the Queen of England. I soon found out otherwise,” she adds, looking down at the bulge below her waist. Ivy’s eye follows hers. Neither woman says anything. A fifth child at the age of thirty-eight is no good for a woman, especially one in Lil Messiter’s state of health. It is so bad, in fact, that you can’t say anything about it. Even in 1952, with better medical treatment and care for everyone under the National Health Scheme, an exhausted and slightly undernourished woman can still have a bad time, even die, in childbirth and both the women know it. Ivy reflects, standing in the hot, dusty street, that in Lil’s shoes she would have got rid of the kid, no matter what the cost, just like she did before once, after Jack and before Shirley. In fact she would not have become pregnant in the first place. There is free contraceptive advice nowadays and Ivy takes it. She has got herself a job in a breadshop, and she is buying a television on the instalment plan. But this is not the time or the place to state her attitudes or point out her own, luckier, position. All she says is, “Who’d be a woman?”
“Well,” s
ays Lil, shifting her shopping bag from one thin hand to the other, to take the weight off one arm, “your Mary should be all right in that way, at her age. Does the hospital say she’s all right?”
“Yes,” says Ivy. “She’s healthy enough, so I suppose that’s something to be thankful for. Silly cow – I told her to stop messing about with Jim Flanders. Now she’s having a kid, at sixteen years of age.”
“They don’t listen to you,” says Lil. “Oh, Gawd. I’d better go. They’ll be back from school soon, wanting their tea.”
Ivy watches her friend, very gaunt, moving up the road in an old, bulging, black skirt and faded blouse. She herself is wearing a new, bottle green rayon suit with the skirt at a long and fashionable length. Her hair is still blonde and her lips are still red. She walks up to number 3 Meakin Street, next to the pub, and knocks twice on the door. After a pause there are feet on the stairs and her daughter, Mary, opens the door. She is wearing a narrow black skirt and a maternity smock covered in red roses. Her hair is still short but the cunning bubble cut is growing out. She is pale, and a little puffy in the face, like a flower which has half-opened and now is beginning to droop.
“Come in and have a cup of tea, Mum,” she says, glad of the break.
“Thought you might like a few oranges – they’re good for you,” says Ivy, following her up the stairs to the two rooms in which Mary and her husband, Jim, now live. In the room they go into there is an old, plum-coloured moquette suite of a sofa and two armchairs and that, apart from a small table, is all. The small window looks out on to the backs of the other houses. Mary makes a pot of tea in the little kitchen opposite this room. She brings it in and puts it on the table. Her mother goes and fetches the cups, the milk and the sugar. The kitchen, with its ancient gas stove, small sink and second-hand kitchen cupboard, is clean enough for a hospital but the whole flat, Ivy thinks suddenly, looks bare, as if it had been got ready for letting. There is not an ornament, not a bit of knitting, not a pair of shoes lying about to convince a stranger that anyone actually lives there. It looks unnatural, thinks Ivy.
All The Days of My Life Page 12
