Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  It would have been a comfort to both Jean and Lily to have been able to say giving up their jobs had been worth it, but they’d inherited a habit of truthfulness from their mother and couldn’t. The further the two of them got into the life of a mother and a working-man’s wife the more alluring their past careers became. The only real compensation was their sons. They doted on them and if they had not given up their jobs, they could not have had them, could they? Jobs were traded for children and that was that. No good moaning, no good spending even a moment’s resentment wishing they could have kept the jobs and had the boys. That was not how the world worked, their world, the world for women in the 1930s. It was hard enough for men to keep their jobs, something Lily in particular constantly worried about, especially once she had a son’s future to think about. It frightened her, hearing the tales of how uncertain all employment was becoming. Men were laid off all the time and if Arthur was what on earth would they do? The thought of the dole, the mere thought, made her ill. Arthur wouldn’t have words like dole mentioned. He said not to talk about such things. He was a good worker, very experienced by now and well regarded by the management, and he didn’t think he would be laid off. Lily didn’t doubt his estimation of his own worth but she also knew Arthur had no paper qualifications and that younger men were coming up behind him who had studied engineering at college and that they might be given preference over the unqualified, if hardworking and technically experienced, Arthur. She didn’t see her husband having any protection from this kind of possible challenge. He wouldn’t have anything to do with trade unions even if he was supposedly a Labour supporter then – he feared unions, noting their activity in the factory anxiously, knowing they were pressing for an all-out strike. He didn’t want to strike. He feared victimization and couldn’t see how the unions could beat the management.

  At the back of her mind, Lily clung on to what Dr Beard had said when she left, which was that if ever she wanted to she could come back part-time, she was so highly thought of. She mentioned this to Arthur, in one of her if-the-worst-comes-to-the-worst moods, intending it to be a cheering thought, but he alarmed her with his vehement protest that he would not have his wife working, part-time or not. He wished Lily wouldn’t go on about it. He wished she would just let what would be, be. There was nothing that could be done. That was always his attitude, that nothing he could do made any difference to his future. He had no power over it and therefore the best thing was to keep his nose clean and continue to work hard and hope he’d be lucky. But it wasn’t Lily’s attitude, not then. She didn’t like Arthur’s fatalism. She feared that the consequence of it would mean they would stay poor for ever. She remembered her father and how his hard work had been backed by his enterprise and how he’d flourished and been able to benefit his family. Arthur couldn’t do that. She was married to a man who had skills and used them but whose prodigious hard, physical work would never bring him the rewards he deserved unless he looked out for ways of capitalizing on them, and as far as he was concerned, perhaps correctly, there were none. She was going to have to learn to be that man’s wife and not complain and meanwhile her own brains and talents were not being used.

  Margaret Ann, in the last few years of her life, never stopped worrying about Nan. Exactly where and how Nan was living was still not discussed back in Carlisle, though her mother and sisters had her address. The accepted version was that Nan was doing very well in the tailoring business and happily settled in the respectable boarding-house she’d described to her mother. She saw Jack Marshallsay ‘often’ but no, there was still no engagement – why should there be, why did her mother go on about it so? By now, Lily and Jean both knew Jack was married and reputedly trying for a divorce but they agreed that their mother could not be told this. Divorce was a terrible word, it would bring on an angina attack for sure. So would any open acknowledgement that, although Nan’s boarding-house was indeed respectable, it also accommodated Jack. The two of them were virtually living together, and in 1934 they moved into what Jack called a flat in Ashton Road, with Nan simply telling her mother she could now afford to rent a place of her own (though no invitation to visit was extended). This ‘flat’ was more of a bed-sitting room with a tiny kitchenette and not at all what Nan had had in mind, but Jack said it was only temporary. Once his divorce came through, once they were married, they would have a house.

  The wonder to her sisters was how Nan could go on fooling herself, never mind Mother. She still acted like a queen, still thought herself more than a cut above other women, and most irritating of all would not face the reality of her situation. She was defiant about it, she saw herself as a heroine risking everything for love. Women who had to have weddings and rings before they ‘gave themselves’ to a man knew nothing of true love. What was the point of keeping the man she loved at a distance until he could marry her? Lily and Jean hardly dared to mention that there was surely something fishy about the length of time Jack’s divorce was taking. He’d been getting it for six years now, six years. The sisters knew nothing of the law but they suspected no divorce however complicated could take that long. Then there was another matter. So far, Nan had been lucky, she hadn’t ‘fallen’, but if she were to ‘fall’ and have a child… it would kill Mother. Nan scorned such mutterings. Jack was a responsible man, he knew how to take care.

  He no longer travelled in ladies’ costumes. Jack was now a fully qualified optician but he also had a sideline. He was a magician, no other than ‘the celebrated magical entertainer Anthony Marsh’, as his self-produced publicity leaflet proclaimed. This was ‘Magic in its most polished form… a Cavalcade of Modern Mystery’, suitable for concerts, dinners and cabaret parties. Distance was no object – the incredibly good-looking (photograph as proof) Anthony Marsh would go anywhere, immaculate in his tails, and with him went Zara, his assistant. Nan loved being Zara, loved the glamour of her costume – a white satin gown, cut on the bias, with silver stars sewn into it, and a white feather headband – and loved the stages upon which Jack alias Anthony performed (though from the list of some of the venues many were less than impressive). Life with Jack was such fun, married or not, and she pitied her sisters and her mother who had never known the exciting existence she enjoyed. She was never going back to dull old Carlisle.

  Recognizing this, her mother decided by the end of 1935 that the Bowman Street house was too big for her. The time had come to leave it, but where would she go? Somewhere smaller? Or to live with one of her daughters? This was what she had always imagined she would do, was what mothers did in their old age, surely. She had no pattern of her own to follow, never having known her mother, but it was one she saw around her and it seemed right and proper. What would have suited her best was for one of her married daughters to have moved in with her – she had three bedrooms and a parlour and neither Lily nor Jean did. But Dave Wallace had his job in Motherwell and couldn’t just find the equivalent in Carlisle. It was impossible with the job situation being as it was, and anyway he was a Scot and wanted to stay in Scotland. Arthur worked in Carlisle, so he and Lily and their son could have moved into Bowman Street but he didn’t fancy it, he liked his own home. So she decided to put her house up for sale and go to live with Jean.

  It was a strange decision which surprised everyone, most of all Jean. Her mother had never liked the Buildings or Motherwell and there wasn’t really room for her. Dave put another bed-in-the-wall in the living-room, where there already was one. (This is how these beds were referred to – beds-in-the-wall – though in fact they were not in the wall at all but consisted of double mattresses laid on broad planks, fitting large alcoves, with curtains in front.) The second room was now given over to Margaret Ann and her trappings. Arthur brought her through in a borrowed car and when he returned told Lily he didn’t think it would work out. His own small council house seemed spacious compared to the Wallaces’ two cramped rooms in one of which all four of them were going to have to live and sleep since Margaret Ann had the other. Arthur sai
d he didn’t see how his mother-in-law could manage all the steps either but she would have to, to get to the lavatory outside. He was right. She couldn’t cope and within six weeks was writing to Lily asking if Arthur could come to collect her and let her stay with them until she decided what to do. Her Bowman Street house hadn’t been sold yet, there was time to rethink.

  She seemed depressed, when she arrived, about the Motherwell experience but she didn’t talk about it. Jean for her part wrote to Lily that she was upset. She didn’t know what had gone wrong, she’d done her best. Tactfully, Lily wrote back saying their mother’s inability to settle with Jean had been due to missing Carlisle – Mother had been perfectly happy with her but was homesick for Carlisle. But, though back in Carlisle, she still seemed low. One month went by, then two. The first sale of her house fell through but there was another offer. She floated the suggestion to Lily and Arthur that she should buy another house, of their choice, and they could all live together. She would leave them any new house she bought and while living in it make a contribution to expenses. Lily was tempted. There were lovely houses going up across the road, a new private estate, but Arthur was emphatic, he didn’t want ‘to start that’. Start what, Lily wondered, but Arthur, as always when he couldn’t articulate his feelings, took refuge in further enigmatic statements. Time went on and so delicate was the topic it was never openly discussed. Margaret Ann never asked for a decision (never having directly made the offer) and Lily and Arthur never gave one.

  Meanwhile, these last months of Margaret Ann’s were not happy. She’d come so far from her unfortunate start as an illegitimate child, as an orphan with no settled loving home and family but, though she knew she was much loved as a mother and would never again be outcast, there was a hint of that same sort of insecurity about her final months. The woman in the car visited and destroyed whatever peace of mind she had. Gordon, her four-year-old grandson, was her greatest pleasure and comfort. She liked to be with him, playing with him, watching over him, and it pleased her to feel that by doing so she helped Lily who was pregnant again. This time, she would be with Lily for the birth and everyone was hoping for a girl, to be called after her.

  But she died before any baby was born and then Lily miscarried and there was no baby to name after her. Margaret Ann’s sudden death, at sixty-six, solved the problem of what she was to do in the most brutal way. She had had nothing more to expect out of life. She’d made of it more than she had ever dared to expect even if, at this distance of time, that does not seem so very much.

  There remains the problem of Alice and how my grandmother appears to have treated her. If Alice had had a daughter of her own then perhaps there would still be some chance of discovering the truth but she didn’t. Alice had no children. She was on her own, apart from her husband William who, mercifully, appears to have been devoted. After her outburst, and the cruel rejection of her, at my grandmother’s funeral Alice kept her bitterness to herself. She vanished from my family history never having been recognized as having any part in it in the first place. She was an untouchable. Why?

  Theories, informed speculative ideas, play a part in all biography but, in the case of the Alices of this world, there is virtually nothing else left after the meagre official records have been scrutinized. The more I think about it, the clearer it seems that Alice’s existence was associated with such horror in my grandmother’s mind that she could not tolerate the sight or mention of her. Once born, once given a decent Christian baptism as the very least that could be done for her, Alice had to be banished. This suggests the conception of Alice may have been violent, the result of rape perhaps. My grandmother wanted her out of her sight for ever, an understandable and common enough reaction in such circumstances, if pitifully unfair to the children. But in that case why did my grandfather stand as witness to Alice’s marriage? Did he do so of his own volition or as Margaret Ann’s representative? Am I wrong? Was he after all Alice’s father?

  Then there is that puzzling visit by the woman who came in the car… Surely it indicates another reason why Alice was a source of anguish. I jump too easily to the theory that this first child of my grandmother’s was the consequence of violation, of an act too horrible for her to acknowledge and for which Alice paid the price. Maybe there was no horror. Maybe Alice was a love-child. Maybe, in that Newcastle area Margaret Ann was so used to mentioning, she had become pregnant by someone she loved who did not stand by her. Maybe the woman who came in 1936 to tell her news that distressed her unbearably was a relative of this one-time lover, who had just died but not without making some deathbed act of contrition. The woman was in deep mourning – all that black she wore was noted – and her news most likely to be of a death. But it was a death my grandmother could neither name nor speak of to her daughter, the death of a person whom she did not wish to identify.

  So now the story would change. It would be more likely Margaret Ann would want to keep Alice instead of spurning her. Unless, because Alice’s father had been the love of her life, every look at the child reminded her of him. Perhaps she hated him, though, lover or not; perhaps she fled from the place where she had known him, from that Newcastle area, once he had been told of her pregnancy and rejected her, and she never wanted to see him again. Or was it a far, far better thing she thought she was doing, leaving this lover, knowing he could not marry her, making the decision for both of them to conceal Alice’s birth? So who was the woman in black in that case? Someone Margaret Ann had trusted? Another servant, the only one who had known why my grandmother left her place in the Newcastle area, so suddenly, without leaving any address? And come to tell her that her lover – the master, the young master – was dead all the same. Did Margaret Ann weep because she still loved him? Did she weep at the memory of that wretched time? Or did she weep for how she had abandoned Alice, how she had denied Alice any kind of father?

  These theories, the romantic, the melodramatic, the sordid, all of them can be made to work but none of them can ever be proved. Round and round it goes, this circle of questions with no answers. Why do answers matter when it is all so trivial, when Margaret Ann and Alice were nobodies and it was so long ago? Because, somehow, my grandmother, in not recognizing Alice, in keeping her a secret from her other three daughters, was part of a pattern. Secrecy and suppression were part of the fabric of life for women who had illegitimate children then, and not to be able to know precisely why such secrecy was so vital robs me of the kind of understanding I want to have. There is so much suffering there – my grandmother’s, Alice’s – and it hangs, threatening and stifling, always unresolved, over what was to follow.

  LILIAN 1901–1981

  VI

  After Margaret Ann died, and her will had been found, her house was duly emptied of its possessions. None of her daughters had the space to take her furniture, so they each took small mementoes. Lilian found handling any of Mother’s things unbearably distressing – she left most of the clearing to Jean – but she took a small white china jug with an intricate double handle which her mother had used for flowers, and her rolling pin and a brooch, pathetic enough items all of them. She wasn’t well enough even to think about what to do with the contents of Bowman Street and never wanted to enter the house again after the funeral. She was ill in any case. She miscarried the next week and felt nervy and tearful and depressed. Memories of her father’s death haunted her and though this time there was no question of locking herself in any cupboard, or the equivalent, she felt the same panic and despair.

  Church helped, going to church and praying and being comforted by the thought of Mother at peace. Throughout the previous spring she and Margaret Ann had watched the new church in Raffles being built and now that it had been consecrated, in June 1936, the month before Mother died, she went to a service there, curious to see what this church was like. Later, a Book of Prayers for the Dead was opened and she wrote her parents’ names in it: Thomas and Margaret Ann Hind, the first names in the whole book. The church was called St
Barnabas’s and it wasn’t like a real church like St Mary’s, or St Paul’s, at all. A real church should be old and built of stone and have a spire and stained glass windows. This one looked more like an hotel with its flat front and its rendered cement walls – it lacked dignity, it was flashy. It was meant to have a fresh, original look, in keeping with the garden-city image behind the whole concept of Raffles, but to Lily and many others the stark design and the glare of the scraped ivory-white cement was too brutal. The newness of everything about St Barnabas’s was disconcerting, inside as well as out. It didn’t smell like a church, it wasn’t hushed and holy. There was certain pleasure in the absolute cleanliness of everything – the new, light oak wood was so smooth to touch, the shiny hymn books creaked with newness when opened – but it was not conducive to prayer. The vicar, the Reverend Bouch, realizing this, told his congregation it was exciting to be at the beginning of the life of a new church and it was up to them to make of it a place dedicated to the greater glory of God. St Barnabas’s gave them the chance to make a new start in their spiritual lives just as the new houses they now lived in had given them a new start in their temporal lives. Listening, Lily was resolved to give St Barnabas’s her backing. A new start was what she must try to make, for the sake of her child and children to come. Everything Mother had done had been for her daughters and her example was there to follow: for the sake of the family every woman must do her best.

  The money from the sale of Bowman Street was split between the three daughters, enough for each of them to put a sizeable deposit on a new house if they wished. It was a great opportunity, but Lily and Arthur missed it. The houses on the private estate opposite them, the very ones Margaret Ann had suggested buying, were finished and for sale at five hundred pounds. Lily ached to have one of them. She went and looked round Inglewood Crescent and admired the modern kitchens and especially the all-tiled bathrooms and the space two living-rooms offered, and the temptation to put down all Mother’s money, which would come to half the price, was strong. But no. It would be folly. Arthur might lose his job at any moment and then where would they be? In debt. It was better to put the money in the bank for that rainy day which sometimes felt it had already arrived. It would be there to fall back on, to keep terror at bay, since true terror was very much to do with having no money, the consequence of losing one’s job.