by Annie Murray
The Laurels guesthouse was in a side street off the main coast road. Turning to look as far as she could to the left, Molly could just see the sea with the last rays of the afternoon sun on it. She took a long, deep breath. Ahhh – that smell, all that billowing air, the smell of sea water and the wide-open view! Clacton was much quieter and more knocked about than she remembered, but just being here made her feel happier and full of expectation, like a child on holiday.
It had all been easier than she expected, even finding a job almost as soon as she arrived. She had not been walking all that long after coming out of the railway station, with her faithful old case collected from Euston, when she headed straight for Marine Parade, along the sea front. She could see that most of the guesthouses that had been requisitioned during the war were back in business, even though some were in poor repair. Many had signs in the window saying ‘Vacancies’, but turning up Vista Road, she had not gone very far when she saw a house part-shrouded with dark bushes and a sign saying, ‘Housekeeper-cook wanted’.
Cooking, Molly thought. Why did she always seem to end up flaming cooking, however hard she tried to get away from it? Still, there was nothing for it.
A small, neat lady answered the door of The Laurels, saying rather faintly, ‘Yes?’
Molly put on her best-spoken voice. ‘I’ve come about the notice – for a housekeeper and cook.’
The lady looked immediately anxious, her brow furrowing. Molly saw that despite the fact that she was dressed like someone rather older, in a floral frock that reached halfway down her shins, and wore her mousy hair in a bun, she was only in her early forties.
‘Well,’ she said, in a flustered way, flapping the door a little as if she wasn’t sure whether to open or close it. ‘You’d better . . . I mean, good, that’s very good. Yes . . .’ She gathered herself. ‘You’d better come in, dear.’
She showed Molly into the room immediately inside, which seemed to be a sitting room, though not a very comfortable one, with a large number of hard wooden chairs arranged in a circle as if they were waiting for a meeting. The walls were the colour of milky coffee and the floor was covered by a thin brown carpet. As a concession to cautious gaiety, there was a vase of faded paper flowers on a stand by the window.
‘My name is Mrs Lester.’ The lady indicated one of the chairs. ‘You’d better sit down.’ She sank thankfully onto another one herself. ‘I run this establishment with my husband, Mr Lester,’ she explained. Molly thought she had seldom seen anyone look so pale. The blue of Mrs Lester’s veins showed through at her temples and her skin looked clammy. ‘Unfortunately I am not always in the best of health, since those dreadful days of the war, and I am finding it all too much for me. The mornings are especially bad.’ She seemed to suppress a sob.
Molly began to feel as if the walls were closing in, though she did not feel dislike for the woman.
‘So my husband suggested that I should enlist some help. You see, some days I’m perfectly all right, and then on others . . . And today is not a good day – I find that I can scarcely get around. You look a good, strong girl,’ she commented, looking Molly up and down. She had a nervous way of blinking her eyes.
‘I s’pose I am, yes,’ Molly said. She had her hair up today, thick and blonde and piled up in a way that suited her, and she felt energetic and ready for anything.
‘Can you cook?’ This seemed to be the greatest source of anxiety. ‘I need help with generally running the house, of course – changing the beds is really too much for me, and now the summer is coming, there’ll be more visitors. People are so longing to get back on the sands, aren’t they?’ She smiled faintly. ‘Such a blessing, all that clean fresh air. But you see, it’s the cooking. We provide breakfast and an evening meal, and I do find it so hard to keep up. Breakfast is a struggle.’
‘I trained as an army cook,’ Molly said. ‘I know it’s not quite the same, but I’m sure I could manage.’
Mrs Lester’s eyes widened. ‘You were in the army? The ATS? How brave of you.’
‘I was on an ack-ack battery.’ Molly was anxious for her to know that she had not just done cooking. ‘In fact we were stationed here for a bit of the time. But I did start off as a cook.’
‘Well, that sounds suitable. I’m so pleased.’ To Molly’s astonishment, Mrs Lester suddenly reached out and grasped Molly’s hand. Hers felt very cold and froggy, as if her circulation was poor. Molly felt very large and robust in contrast to her. ‘Could you start straight away? You’d live in and have your board – I can’t pay you a great deal, but there’s a nice little room at the top of the house.’
‘Yes,’ Molly said, her spirits soaring. Fancy her getting a job so quickly!
‘Until my husband gets back later, I can’t give you the final say-so. He is the head of the household at The Laurels, after all. But I have a strong feeling it will be all right. May I ask you one thing?’
‘I can show you my discharge letter, if you like,’ Molly said quickly. ‘I don’t have any references as such – not for cooking, I mean . . .’
‘No, that won’t be necessary. That wasn’t it – it was just to ask something much more pressing. Are you a Christian, dear?’
‘Um . . .’ Molly stuttered. She’d got no idea of religion except for army church parades. ‘Well, I s’pose I’m sort of Church of England.’
Mrs Lester blinked rather sorrowfully at her for a moment, then said, ‘I think that will be all right. My husband is rather a devout man, you see. He likes certain standards met. We have our little meetings here, of course . . .’ She indicated the chairs. So they were indeed set up for a meeting. ‘On Tuesday evenings.’
Within minutes, Molly was in the attic room, settling in, before Mrs Lester showed her her duties. It had all been so easy! She was feeling quite high as she looked out of the window. She associated the coast with happy times, an open landscape where you could see out. All things seemed possible.
Molly soon realized that the cooking that was expected of her was going to be rather different from that in the army. She was used to cooking mountainous quantities of stodgy, if not necessarily palatable food for hordes of young active people. Despite food shortages, the army had been a priority and they had taken their rations more or less for granted. Now she was out in the civilian world of making do, eking out and watering down.
Once she had settled into her room, feeling quite hopeful, Molly went down, as Mrs Lester had requested, to see her in the kitchen. She found her stirring a pot of some sort of watery stew.
‘We’ve one couple staying,’ Mrs Lester said, her eyes blinking nervously. ‘So we’ve got an extra bit of beef on their points. I believe they’re on their honeymoon.’ She gave a shrill little laugh, then stopped herself with her hand over her mouth as if this was naughty.
‘I’m afraid I do add a little water to the jam,’ Mrs Lester said later, when telling Molly about breakfast. ‘And of course now there’s such a shortage of bread – of everything . . . Mr Lester does most of the shopping . . .’ Her voice faded again as if all was hopeless. ‘Now I do undertake what I can. We shall just have to take it day by day and work together. All we can do is keep going and trust in the Lord: that’s true of all of life, isn’t it?’ Molly thought it best to nod. ‘I hope that suits – it sounds a little vague? Mr Lester doesn’t like me being vague. He’s always so precise.’
Molly felt she could rise to the challenge of watery gravy and stews padded out with vegetables. She realized that she was better fed, and her nerves in a less frayed state, than many people who had been civilians. When Mrs Lester showed Molly her other housekeeping duties, most of which consisted of cleaning and laundry, she felt well able to take them on. She wondered quite what it was that exhausted Mrs Lester so much.
When she met Mr Lester, she began to find out. He was back in the house before the evening meal and came into the kitchen.
‘Ah, you’re back, dear!’ Mrs Lester exclaimed.
Mr Lester gave a cur
t nod and Molly felt immediately unsure of him. He was quite a small man and, Molly realized, a good few years older than his wife. He had taken off his hat to reveal his balding pate, with strands of grey hair combed neatly over it, which the hat had apparently not even slightly disturbed, and he was still wearing a sandy brown mackintosh. Molly saw his gaze move to her and he nodded commandingly at his wife, as if to say, ‘Well, who’s that?’
‘We’ve had such a stroke of good luck this afternoon!’ Mrs Lester exclaimed, clapping her hands together and holding them clasped under her chin as if in prayer. ‘This is Molly – she’s an experienced cook and, as you can see, good and strong. Isn’t she just what The Laurels needs, dear? I think she’ll be a godsend!’
Molly shook hands with her new employer, saying, ‘How d’you do.’ There was not much response. All he did was nod at her again, not looking especially pleased. He seemed to be examining her carefully. His hand felt small and dry.
‘Of course I wouldn’t just take her on without your say-so,’ Mrs Lester went on. ‘I thought perhaps we should have her for a trial period . . .’
Mr Lester made a sound rather like a cough, nodded abruptly and then smartly left the room.
Molly tried not to let her face show what she was thinking: Well, he’s a queer so-and-so, and flaming rude with it.
But Mrs Lester waited until her husband was out of earshot and came closer to Molly. ‘I should have explained,’ she whispered apologetically. ‘I forget that people don’t know . . . You see, Mr Lester is not quite as other men. He has a difficulty with his speech, so he is a person of rather few words. He has a deformity to the roof of his mouth. It’s the cross he has to bear.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Molly said. This seemed very sad and made him less forbidding. But, she couldn’t help wondering, how did Mr and Mrs Lester talk to each other? How did they even get to know each other?
‘He does compensate so well in other ways,’ Mrs Lester added.
It didn’t become fully apparent what this meant until the next morning. Molly helped Mrs Lester serve the young couple who had come down from London straight from their wedding. The woman was buxom with thick, honey-blonde hair and a big toothy smile, the lad thin and sweet-looking, and apparently scarcely able to believe his luck.
Breakfast involved scrambling powdered egg. It also, as it turned out, involved hymn-singing and prayers led by Mr Lester. Molly had just come into the dining room from the kitchen holding a small milk jug when he appeared from the hall, and before she could even reach the table to deliver the milk, he was handing his customers a sheaf of typed papers, fastened together, which were evidently a home-made hymnal. The young couple, who were not necessarily prepared for this eventuality, looked politely bewildered. To Molly’s surprise, a white-faced Mrs Lester then appeared. Molly put the milk on the couple’s table and started to retreat.
‘Good morning,’ she heard Mrs Lester say. Molly stood by the door in her apron, not sure if she was supposed to be involved. ‘We like to begin our day by giving thanks to the Lord for all he has given us. If you’d turn to number ten?’
The hymn was ‘Lead us, heavenly father, lead us . . .’ Mr Lester then erupted into song, with Mrs Lester warbling behind him. It became very obvious, within seconds, that he was capable only of pronouncing vowels, but very little in the way of consonants, so that what came out was a loud, quite tuneful, but completely incomprehensible series of noises, while Mrs Lester sang along determinedly beside him in accompaniment. Molly, herself astonished, and embarrassed by his handicap, saw the face of the young bride in front of her turn from shock to incredulity and quickly to an overpowering urge to laugh. She turned her face to the wall, curtaining it with her long hair while her husband gamely joined in with the singing, obviously ill at ease, but too kindly to refuse. Within a few seconds Molly could see the young woman’s shoulders shaking with silent laughter. By midway through the second verse, Molly’s own rising hysteria was almost as bad as the other young woman’s. Mr Lester’s expression was so pompous, his efforts to deliver the singing so earnest, while the sounds he was making were so tortured, that all she could think was: Oh, my goodness, this is awful. Why doesn’t he just shut up and spare all of us?
As the third verse ground towards its merciful close, the young blonde woman glanced round desperately as if looking for a way out, and she and Molly caught each other’s eye. The girl had tears of mirth running down her face, and Molly could see she was on the point of exploding. And then the prayers began. Molly did the only thing she could think of and crept from the room, leaving the blonde woman to her fate while she tore along the hall to the stairs and burst into gusts of laughter. It seemed so bad laughing at someone else’s misfortune like that, but why – of all things, she asked herself, shaking with laughter – did he have to sing hymns?
She imagined telling Cath about it, and Em, and the thought of how it would have been if they’d been there made her giggle even more. Was this going to happen every day? How on earth would she manage?
By the time the religious part of the proceedings was over she managed to compose herself, wiping her eyes and going to serve the eggs and toast. She avoided looking at the young woman too directly. She didn’t want to get the sack on her first day.
As they were clearing up the breakfast, though, Mrs Lester took Molly aside.
‘Now, you’ve seen our morning routine, dear. It’s very important to Mr Lester that we preserve a Christian atmosphere in our establishment. You never know when a lost and searching soul might hear the message of the Lord Jesus. As I told you, I don’t do well in the mornings, so from now on I’d like you to take over. I shall rest until a little later – at least while things are quiet. But you will have to assist Mr Lester with our morning devotions.’
Molly stared at her, speechless. Mrs Lester put a hand on her arm. ‘A number of our guests have been helped, dear.’
‘I . . .’ Molly gulped. ‘I don’t think I know the hymns.’
Mrs Lester smiled gently. ‘Oh, you’ll soon learn, dear. I can help you. And Mr Lester is a very patient teacher. He’s a good-hearted man when you get to know him.’
Twenty-Six
For someone who could not speak, Mr Lester managed to communicate a powerful sense of his personality. There was something about his bearing – very upright, always dressed in a poorly fitting grey flannel suit, a little too short in the leg so that his brown socks were exposed – and his intense stare through his watery blue eyes, a stare that suggested a furnace of feeling within him, which made Molly nervous.
She stood beside him at breakfast the next morning, with the dog-eared collection of hymn sheets that someone – probably Mr Lester – had taken the trouble to type out. He was not the best of typists and there were a lot of overtypes and XXXXX-ings out. Mrs Lester had called Molly to her the previous night and sat her down in the brown front room.
‘I wanted us to choose a hymn for the morning,’ she said, with the faintest air of apology. ‘Now you look through, dear, and see which ones you know.’
‘I’m not really a church-goer,’ Molly said, shrinking with dread inside. To her, church was just something you did with the army, like PT or drill. It meant nothing to her beyond its form. But there was something about Mrs Lester that was so put-upon and actually sweet-natured that Molly found herself not wanting to offend her. She also wanted to keep her job. Leafing through the worn sheets of paper, she dimly recognized a few of the hymns, but there were none that she could have sung through – except for one.
‘I think I know that,’ she said, pointing at ‘Fight the Good Fight’. They had sung it on Church Parade a number of times.
‘Oh, thank goodness!’ Mrs Lester said, laying a hand over her heart. ‘And that’s one of Bernard’s favourites. I can certainly teach you some of the others. I can’t tell you what it means to me to be able to lie a little longer in bed in the mornings. I know it looks like idleness . . .’ Her eyes blinked in that nervous way she had.
‘But I do wake feeling so very unwell . . .’
So here was Molly – who had been having nightmares for half the night about singing hymns to Bert, her dead brother, in a prison cell – standing trembling beside Mr Lester, amid the smells of porridge and burnt toast. With a sinking heart she saw that there was still only the same couple staying in the guesthouse. Why must Mr Lester force this on them? Molly wondered. They obviously didn’t want to know. Even before she’d started singing, she thought mutinously: I’m never, ever doing this again. I’m going to look for a new job!
The buxom young bride was wearing a tight, pink frock. Molly carefully avoided her eye. If they looked at each other, she was done for. All she could do was to get through this somehow. She’d hardly ever felt such a fool in her life before, standing with this overbearing, fanatical man. Mr Lester swivelled his head and looked meaningfully at her and Molly, using the words that Mrs Lester had taught her, said, ‘We will now sing hymn number twenty-two.’
Mr Lester was off almost before she’d got the words out of her mouth and she had to tune in with him: ‘Christ is thy strength and Christ thy right!’ She found a surprisingly strong voice coming out of her mouth and, to her surprise, quite enjoyed it, apart from the sheer embarrassment of it all. Mr Lester insisted on reading the prayer, which was a scrambled agony, though Molly realized that if you tuned in hard enough, you could just about make out what he was saying.
At last Molly was freed to serve the breakfast.
‘You’ve got a very nice voice,’ the young husband said to her. Though his wife was smirking a bit, she was not in anything like the state she had been the day before. Molly wondered if her kindly looking husband had told her that she should behave better.
‘Oh – thanks!’ Molly said, surprised. ‘I’ve never done this sort of thing before.’ She was anxious for them to know that.
