Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  Thomas Hind was proprietor of numbers 4 and 12 shambles, but whether he himself served at either of them she didn’t know when first she began patronizing his stall soon after she came to work for the Stephensons. The reason she bought meat at number 4, usually, was because this shambles was so clean. The carcasses didn’t drip blood, the meat on the counter did not lie in puddles of it, the bin for fat – cut off before purchase – wasn’t nauseatingly visible. The floor of Thomas Hind’s shambles always seemed freshly sawdusted, the aprons of the assistants were spotless and their heads always covered. But his prices were not the cheapest. Margaret Ann had reported this to Mrs Stephenson who sanctioned paying higher prices willingly, quite proudly, asserting that she was in agreement with her servant that cheapest was not always best, indeed not. There was always a queue at Thomas Hind’s, but Margaret Ann was a patient queuer. She never attempted to push herself forward but waited her turn calmly. She engaged in none of the banter other customers seemed to like. She stated her requirement and that was that beyond a please and a thank you.

  These were exactly the qualities which aroused Thomas Hind’s interest. He noticed her precisely because of her curious quality of stillness. He didn’t go in for banter either, though he was capable of it. He met dignity with dignity and hoped it would get him somewhere. In 1893, when Margaret Ann first began buying meat from him, he was thirty-five years old and unmarried. His father had been a butcher and so had his grandfather, and as the only son he was always expected to take over the family business. His father had died when Thomas was a child and his mother, Jane, had become a butcher herself in order to keep the business going for Thomas to inherit. His debt to her was strong and he acknowledged it by now supporting not just her but two of his three sisters (the third had married). He was prosperous enough by then to marry but as yet had given little thought to it. He was notoriously hard to satisfy and was teased about his high standards by his sisters who despaired of him ever approving of any girl. For four years he observed Margaret Ann quite contentedly, and then, when his mother died in 1897, decided the time had come for him to court her seriously. Nothing impetuous about Tom.

  He knew Margaret Ann was a servant to the Stephensons of Paternoster Row and that she was a regular attender at St Mary’s church to which his sisters also belonged, but beyond that he was surprised to find he could discover very little. No one seemed to know this quiet woman. There were Jordans in Caldewgate but he asked around and none of them knew her. She wasn’t claimed by any family, not even as a distant relative, which puzzled him, Carlisle being the place where everyone knew everyone else, or at least someone who did. So it was a slow affair, this courtship, three years of best boned-and-rolled sirloin, shoulder of lamb, leg of pork, three years of pounds of Cumberland sausage, best back bacon, ham on the bone. A lot of meat, a lot of pleasantries, a lot of cap-doffing on Tom’s part and head-inclining on Margaret Ann’s. He never went to Paternoster Row, he was never a gentleman caller. One Saturday, towards the end of the afternoon, when he himself was serving and there were no assistants to hear and smirk, no customer other than Margaret Ann to hear and speculate, he asked her if she would care to ride with him and his sisters out to Burgh marsh for a breath of sea air. He was very much afraid she would refuse, even be offended, but no, she smiled and said she knew his sisters from church and she would be glad to accompany them if she could get time off (knowing, of course, that she could, that Mrs Stephenson would gladly give permission).

  The four of them went in a pony and trap, quite a squeeze, with both Maggie Hind and Sarah Jane Hind being large women, and Tom himself over six foot and big with it. It was lucky Margaret Ann was so small and light. She had so rarely been driven anywhere that it was quite a thrill to bowl along through Caldewgate and out on to the Moorhouse Road into the country towards the coast. The Hind sisters were jolly and great pointers-out – sheep, trees, cottages, all called forth excited exclamations and their guest found it quite hard to sustain the level of enthusiasm they seemed to desire. They were also great eaters. Each had a bag of sweets in her lap into which she frequently dipped. It took a long time to get to Burgh marsh, some seven miles away, a place Margaret Ann had never been, but with which the Hinds were familiar since their grandmother came from Burgh. She was surprised to find the sea so hard to glimpse, with such great expanses of marsh between it and the road, and felt a slight sense of disappointment, quickly suppressed. They went on to Port Carlisle – just a few houses, a shop, two pubs, strung out along the marsh road – and here they got down.

  The Misses Hind were tactful. They claimed not to have the energy to walk about and encouraged Margaret Ann to take a walk, if she felt so inclined, with their brother. The two of them strolled off, not far but far enough to be out of earshot. They stood admiring the vague outline of the Scottish coast and made polite conversation. Tom asked Margaret Ann if she was happy with the Stephensons and she said she was. Then he asked her if she saw much of her family and immediately there was a stiffness on her part as she said she had no known family which warned him off. She seemed to find it a painful topic so he tried to joke about his own family, saying how overwhelming they were, how he wouldn’t mind a bit of a separation from them without wishing them ill. There was no response. Hurriedly he turned to talking about bowls. He played bowls for the Turf Club and was quite a champion, without wanting to boast. Would she care to come to watch some evening? She said she would.

  It was certainly preferable to meeting over meat. All summer of 1898 Margaret Ann went regularly to watch Tom Hind bowl. She wasn’t at all interested in the game, couldn’t see the point, but she loved the lush smoothness of the bowling green and the white coats of the players and even the bowls themselves, so satisfyingly heavy and solid, making such a dramatic click as they knocked against each other. She enjoyed being in the fresh air, sitting on a comfortable chair Tom had fetched out of the clubhouse for her. He brought her tea and was in every way attentive. She told Annie Stephenson about his attentiveness only because Annie saw her being escorted home and was half mad with curiosity. ‘Will he propose, do you think?’ Annie asked breathlessly. ‘And will you accept if he does?’ Margaret Ann was silent. She gave nothing away. ‘Promise,’ Annie pleaded, ‘that if you do marry I can be your bridesmaid?’ She dreaded Margaret Ann leaving and told her so, even though she wanted her to marry happily. Mr Stephenson had just died and Annie dreaded being left to cope with her mother’s distress and depression – Margaret Ann could do this so much better. So a double promise was given: Annie could be at any wedding of Margaret Ann’s (though not as bridesmaid, she didn’t see herself having bridesmaids) and Margaret Ann would not leave the grieving widow until she was more reconciled and settled.

  Finally, on Thursday, 14 September 1899, Margaret Ann Jordan married Thomas Hind, according to the rites and ceremonies of the Established Church, in St Mary’s. Thomas gave his age as forty, though he wasn’t forty until December, and Margaret Ann gave hers as twenty-eight, though she was twenty-nine. Under Father’s Name, Surname and Profession Margaret Ann drew a line. The marriage was announced in the appropriate column of the Carlisle Journal, a perfectly conventional notice except for one curious thing: Margaret Ann styled herself ‘granddaughter of the late Thomas Jordan’. Most unusual to refer to oneself as granddaughter rather than daughter, and in her case rather a nonsense, for if her father was unknown – hence the blank first on her birth certificate and now on her marriage certificate – how did she know Thomas Jordan had been her grandfather? And why did she wish to draw attention to this? This grandfather died when she was fifteen. Had she lived with him those fifteen years? Not according to any census return nor according to her own later assertion that she was from the Newcastle area. It was a strange and perhaps significant little proclamation, a desperate-looking desire to claim some family, at least at the time of her marriage.

  September 1899 to September 1915, almost sixteen years to the day. The best years of Margaret Ann’s
life. She was mistress of her own house, though it was rented not bought: 29 Corporation Road. Not an elegant house like Paternoster Row but her first real home. It was very small, a living-room and kitchen and scullery downstairs, two bedrooms (though no fixed bath, no indoor lavatory) upstairs, but a neat, compact, well-built workman’s house with a yard at the back and opening straight on to the cobbled street in front. It was one in a terrace, near to the Sands where the cattle auctions were held and very near to the market, highly convenient for Tom’s work. The river Eden was only yards away and so was the park where, later, God willing, children could play. Looking after this house was easy compared with looking after 4 Paternoster Row. There were only a few stairs, no passages, no fine furniture to polish and only Tom and herself to cook and wash for.

  But to balance this less gruelling life as a housewife there was the butchery business to help with. Margaret Ann never wanted Tom to know how much she hated this helping. It would have been ungrateful to let him realize her loathing of meat and everything to do with the butchering of it when their prosperity depended on the trade. She forced herself to seem eager to aid him and he was pleased. At the end of every day she helped to scrub down the shambles in the market, remembering how the very reason she’d bought Tom’s meat in the first place was because of the cleanliness of his stalls. Now she learned the cost of such pristine conditions. Buckets and buckets of water it took to swab the place down, carried in heavy metal buckets from the communal tap to the stalls and flung over ground and shelf and walls and counters, and then scrubbing, while the water was still running, running red, running fainter pink, scrubbing with big, hard bristle brushes that took strength and ingenuity to lift and manoeuvre. The water ran into a gully at the front and the gully had to be cleaned of the bits of bone and gristle which could block it, a hateful job, scooping it out, making sure the water ran freely. It took an hour, all of them working together, the assistants inspired, or at least encouraged, by Mrs Hind’s example.

  A small price to pay, though, for her own home and husband. Tom was doing well. He took on a third shambles in partnership with another butcher and between them they were the most important in the meat market. Tom was saving to buy their own house, but there was enough to spare for his wife to have new clothes which she made herself on the sewing-machine the Stephensons gave her as a wedding present. She still made clothes for Annie and Mrs Stephenson but now they paid her and she put the money into Tom’s bank, proud to be able to do so. Tom joked that at this rate their sons would inherit a fortune as well as a butchery business.

  But there were no sons. On 14 September 1901, their second wedding anniversary, Margaret Ann gave birth to a daughter, named Lilian. Tom said he didn’t mind a lass coming first, she could help look after the lads that came after. He loved his Lily – Margaret Ann always called her Lilian, but Tom and everyone else called her Lily – who was a pretty, quiet baby with her mother’s blue-grey eyes and her father’s fair hair and complexion (though the hair quickly turned dark, like Margaret Ann’s). He was old to be a father for the first time but he relished the role and just hoped he wouldn’t have long to wait before his son arrived and he could train him as the butcher he was destined to be. On 28 June 1904 another girl was born and christened Jane. This time Tom was not so delighted and Margaret Ann felt a failure. Jane was not as docile as Lily. From the start she was fractious, as if she was protesting against the disappointment she knew herself to be. Not as big a disappointment as Annie, though, the third and last child, the last hope, with Margaret Ann almost forty. Annie was born on 23 May 1908 and that, said a resigned Tom, would be that.

  Three daughters, admirably spaced (Tom was always known as a considerate man). They were all bright, though Lily was the brightest, all sound in wind and limb, all pretty, though Jane, when young, not as obviously pretty as the other two. Annie was the prettiest, with enormous blue eyes (which, however, turned out to be short-sighted) and beautiful blonde silky hair, but she was the most trouble, more trouble than the already troublesome Jane. Lily was the good, the dependable one and her mother thanked heaven for her every day. Give Lily a task to do and it would be perfectly executed without complaint. She liked to please. For a child she had a highly developed sense of duty; too highly developed her father often thought and said so. ‘Go and play, Lily,’ he’d urge her, but Lily didn’t seem to understand the concept of play. She had no playmates. Tom worried about this and said he’d have to have a playmate specially made for her. Jane and Annie played out in the street the whole day long, played like urchins with hoops and balls and skipping ropes, always running around shrieking and laughing with other children, while Lily watched from the window. She was always usefully employed helping her mother. Once she began school she became the teacher’s darling, good at every lesson, top in every test. ‘We’ve got a professor here,’ said Tom, and ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with our Lily. She’s too smart for a lass.’

  Lowther Street Infants, where Lily started school in 1905, was not a good school. It was one of the Board Schools opened after the Education Act of 1870, when local authorities were instructed to take on the task of educating the children of the city and pay for it out of the rates. The Board School style of architecture in Carlisle tended towards the Gothic – classrooms were enormous, with high ceilings, and interconnected, separated by sliding partitions. The floors rose in tiers and pupils sat at long desks with sloping lids. His Majesty’s Inspectors were extremely critical of this Lowther Street School (Infants and Mixed) during the period Lily was there, though they acknowledged ‘the children come from very poor and neglected homes’ and therefore admitted teaching was difficult. Lily’s own home wasn’t neglected or particularly poor but it was true that Corporation Road, while respectable in itself, was on the edge of Rickergate, Carlisle’s worst slum area.

  The HMI report in 1909 was damning. The whole school was said not to reach a very high level of proficiency and the teaching was criticized as far too restrictive and ill-prepared. A Mr Bolt had broken a cane, as well as regulations, in caning two girls with unnecessary vigour, for which he expressed regret (though whether for breaking the cane or beating the girls was not made clear). Violence was the only kind of discipline and the Inspectors sound most enlightened in their condemnation of this régime of terror. They pointed out in their detailed report that violence did not work because even with it there was ‘in no class the order that could be desired’. In general they were in despair about Lowther Street where ‘there is an absence of that bright and sympathetic treatment under which young children best develop their natural activities of mind and body’. Quite.

  After this verdict a few heads rolled – Mr Bolt’s for one – and by 1912 things were a bit better for eleven-year-old Lily and her contemporaries. But HMI came down in favour of the boys and against the girls, suggesting to the teachers that the sexes should be separate ‘so that the girls do not hold back the boys who, as a whole, show more interest and power’. Their advice was not acted upon and the following year this decision was vindicated: of fourteen pupils put in for the Merit (an examination held to determine which sixteen pupils in the whole of Carlisle should have free places at the new Higher Grade School) only two were selected and both were girls. One was Lily. Tom was bursting with pride – ‘Our Lily beat all the lads’ – and very much in favour of the Higher Grade. It was a school specially designed to provide an extended and better education for clever working-class children leaving the Board Schools at thirteen and not having the means to go on to the boys’ Grammar School or girls’ High School, both of which had their own entrance exams and were fee-paying (fifteen pounds a year at the High School as opposed to a pound a year for paying pupils at the Higher Grade). The new school had opened in 1899 and was an instant success. By the time Lily won her free place there its premises had moved from a church hall to the top part of Lowther Street Board School, after a plan to build a completely new school had failed. Conditions were fa
r from ideal – ventilation and acoustics were both poor – but they didn’t seem to matter. HMI were in raptures over ‘the spirit of industry which pervades the school… the pupils benefit to an extraordinary degree’.

  Lily loved the Higher Grade. There was no need for caning or any kind of brutality there. Discipline was no problem in spite of the hopelessly inadequate classroom arrangements (with three classes often sharing one room). The peace and quiet after the hurly-burly of the Board School were bliss and she made rapid progress. Her reports show that she was good at everything, consistently top in History, English and Geography with marks in the high eighties and scoring 100 per cent for Arithmetic term after term. At the end of her first year she was the only girl in Form 1 to win a prize. She was much too clever and industrious for the Higher Grade, yet no one ever appears to have suggested she should try for a scholarship to the far superior High School which, since 1909, had been under the jurisdiction of the Cumberland Education Authority and, since 1914, jointly under the Carlisle City Education Department. The High School was indisputably the best school for girls in the whole area and a certain number of places were set aside for scholarship girls. Lily never applied, perhaps for the very reason that the High School was superior – it was no place for a working-class girl, however clever. Better to go to the Higher Grade and learn shorthand than go to the High School and learn Latin. Then, one had a future, one’s aspirations were quite high enough.