Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  The thought of having two hundred and fifty pounds in the bank ought to have made Lily happier but it didn’t. It seemed, somehow, to underline how much she lacked, to emphasize how many times over she could have spent that sum. She wanted both to feel financially secure and to know better days were ahead, but two hundred and fifty pounds in the bank didn’t give her either feeling. Arthur was lucky to be hanging on to his poorly paid job at which he worked so hard and it was impossible for him to advance. Not quite impossible, true. He came home one day towards the end of 1936 to say that some manager from the Metal Box Company of South Africa (formed in 1933) had been touring the works and had stopped to watch him mend a particularly complicated machine and then asked him if he’d like to come out to South Africa and work for him. Arthur snorted derisively when he related this tale – South Africa, it was absurd, the man must be barmy, imagining he’d leave Carlisle for South Africa! But Lily didn’t laugh. She questioned him closely and heard the salary would be three times what Arthur was getting in Carlisle’s Metal Box and there was a house thrown in. She didn’t want to go to an outlandish country like South Africa either, she was as attached to Carlisle as Arthur and as fearful of travel, but nevertheless it was an opportunity.

  The matter was never mentioned again, but Lily thought of what a new start in another country might have meant when she became pregnant again in 1937 – another mouth to feed and more workers laid off at Metal Box, though still not Arthur. But the five-day week was introduced, the 45-hour week with no overtime available at the moment. She felt she’d always be scrimping and saving and never have any of the things she wanted. Maybe it was wrong to want trivial things like new clothes but she couldn’t help it. She loved clothes and she hadn’t bought a single garment in the six years of married life. Her once-smart office clothes were almost threadbare and she didn’t even have the money to buy some material to make a new blouse at least (not that she would have made it very well, and Nan was too far away to help). She needed a new coat but coats were anything between four and six pounds and quite out of the question – the cheapest was twice Arthur’s wage and Gordon’s shoes were more important, he had to have them. She was ashamed of how she ogled a tweed coat at £4 10s. in the window of Bullough’s, of how she fingered the new artificial silk fabric in Binn’s at 5s. 11d. a yard. She was tired of buying cheap this and cheap that when once, when she had her own job, she could have what she wanted (within limits, but perfectly acceptable ones). It soured her soul, the penny-pinching. She couldn’t accept it the way Mother had always done.

  Mother’s money was badly needed in 1937. Gordon was ill so often and there were many doctor’s visits to pay for and medicines to buy. He fell ill easily, with all the common childhood diseases (always with complications in his case) and then the more rare ones, like diphtheria and pneumonia. Lily was terrified when Dr Stephenson said the five-year-old Gordon had pneumonia. She wouldn’t leave his side and when, the fever at its height, the child started to babble about angels she became hysterical and fell down on her knees and prayed and prayed, and in general, as Arthur put it, ‘carried on’. She didn’t, she said, want the baby she was carrying if Gordon was taken from her. Arthur didn’t know what to do with her. He wished Jean or Nan would come. In the end, though Gordon was actually recovering by the time she arrived, Nan did come.

  That was another shock. Nan was pregnant too, more pregnant than Lily herself, her baby due at the beginning of April, Lily’s at the end of May. ‘Are you…?’ Lily asked and Nan said no, she wasn’t married yet, and this time there were tears in her eyes and not tears of angry defiance. Thank God Mother was dead. There was a hope that Jack’s divorce would come through in time for them to marry before the baby was born, but his wife was still (according to him) proving a bitch. Jack had spent a fortune on legal fees, (according to Nan), and still this awful woman was being obstructive. She even told Lily – which horrified her sister – that Jack knew ‘a very eminent surgeon’ who would solve Nan’s little problem quite easily and painlessly for a certain sum of money which Jack was more than willing to pay but, to Lily’s relief, Nan didn’t want that. She was nearly thirty and after thinking she never wanted children – they were such a nuisance – she now longed for a baby, for Jack’s son. She wanted this baby and hoped that its birth would make Jack’s wife relent and give him a divorce. Poor Nan, after all, and perhaps poor Jack (though that rather stuck in the throat).

  Nan went to Jean’s in Motherwell to have her baby – what a come-down, but she had nowhere else to go, no one to fall back on except family. Jack with his ever-ready habit of solving problems by spending money didn’t understand why Nan refused to go into a nursing home when she’d happily lived with him seven years pretending to be his wife anyway. Why couldn’t she just pretend in a maternity home? But Nan wouldn’t. She went to Jean’s and suffered the indignity of giving birth in the Buildings on 3 April 1938. It was a long, difficult birth – she had a far harder time than her sisters – but she was thrilled with her son, named Michael John Marshallsay. Except he was not legally entitled to his surname. On his birth certificate, in the box headed: Date and Place of Marriage (of the child’s parents), were written both Jack’s and Nan’s names, repeated in the next column with Father under Jack’s name and profession. There was no question of Michael’s parentage not being acknowledged. Once he was born, Nan’s attitude to the saga of Jack’s (non-existent) divorce proceedings hardened. She wanted her son to be legitimized for his sake not her own. So did Jack. He finally filed for divorce that month and though it took two years to be made absolute he could now assure Nan that his wife had relented and all would soon be well.

  Of the sisters, it was Nan who was most changed by motherhood. She was taken by surprise at the ferocity of her devotion to Michael and the depth of her love for him. It was equal to her love for Jack, something she had never expected. She wanted to breast-feed her son, even though it was unfashionable and neither of her sisters had engaged in such a peasant activity, but Jack was horrified. He told her he didn’t want her breasts to sag. Luckily, or unluckily, Michael failed to thrive on her milk and he was soon on the bottle. Jack was relieved. He was rather irritated by Nan’s reaction to being a mother. She wasn’t an instinctive mother though, and wished she was near Lily or nearer to Jean to give her confidence, instead of on her own in Glasgow. When Jack announced he had been offered a better job by Strother’s, an opticians in Carlisle, she was delighted. Once, a return to Carlisle, the home town she’d thought so dull and boring, would have dismayed her, but now it would bring her near to Lily and they could be mothers together. Jack had already rented a semi-detached house only ten minutes’ walk from Lily’s council estate. The Marshallsays were installed in Carlisle before Lily had her second baby.

  The last month of her pregnancy had been calm. Lily seemed more like her usual self now that Gordon was fully recovered and had started school. The weather that May was good and she sat in the garden, thinking about Mother. She desperately longed for a girl this time, because she didn’t intend to have any more children, a girl to be called Margaret, as planned before, as planned by all three sisters whenever they were pregnant – to one of them would fall the honour of being the first to have a daughter, the first to use Mother’s name. Arthur wanted a daughter too – his mother drove him barmy longing aloud for a granddaughter to make up for that daughter she had never had – but he was more interested in the actual date she would be born. At the Palace cinema a film was to be shown called Little Miss Somebody and the cinema was offering a Little Miss Somebody Prize to the first girl born in Carlisle after the start of the first performance at three-thirty on Monday, 23 May. The certificate of birth had to be brought to the cinema on Saturday, 28 May, when the prize would be awarded. Arthur had his hopes, being a gambling man, and when Lily went into labour in the front bedroom of 44 Orton Road early on the morning of 25 May, he felt he was in with a good chance.

  It was an easy birth, a matter of
only an hour long, with the midwife arriving just in time. To everyone’s joy, Lily had produced a girl, a pretty, delicately formed daughter with small, sweet features. No need to ask her name (though Ann was not included, in an attempt to give her some individuality). Alas, Arthur was pipped at the post. Another girl was born on 25 May only half an hour earlier and given the Palace cinema’s prize, though it was only a Little Miss Somebody cot, plus a photograph of Binkie Stuart, the four-year-old baby film star, tap-dancing on a piano, as she did in the film.

  Everyone was for a while happy. The longed-for girl was born, Lily was well, the summer of 1938 was a good one, and if everyone else in the country was convinced war was coming nobody at 44 Orton Road gave a damn – all that mattered was their own family life and they didn’t see it as threatened by what was said to be happening in Europe.

  Arthur was not quite thirty-nine when war was declared in September 1939. When the First World War had broken out he’d been not quite fourteen and desperate to join up. He couldn’t wait to be old enough. In 1917 he ran away to Newcastle to enlist, giving a false name and age, but his father followed him and dragged him out of the recruiting office and thrashed him for being a fool. By 1939 he was no longer a fool. He had no desire to be a soldier and he didn’t have to be, not yet anyway. Instead, he was sent to Skelton, near Carlisle, to the power station, to work there maintaining essential services, and to various other places – factories producing plates for the framework inside Wellington bombers and machine-gun clips – in northern England. When he was at Skelton, ten miles away from his home, he cycled off on Monday morning and returned on Friday night, but when he was further away he went by train and wasn’t always allowed the fare to come home at weekends.

  It suited Lily very well to be on her own with her two children much of the time. Life was simpler, easier, unpunctuated by the homecomings of a man for his dinner and tea and without filthy overalls to wash. She wasn’t afraid because there was little feeling of being at war in Carlisle. As in the First World War, Carlisle was hardly touched. No bombs dropped on the city and hardly an air raid siren was heard. Its citizens became so complacent that in 1942, at the height of the war, only one in a hundred was found to be carrying the regulation gas mask (for which slackness the whole city was reprimanded by the War Office). Carlisle City Council had at least paid heed by spending £27,250 on trenches and shelters for schoolchildren but these were hardly used. Except for the inevitable absence of a great many men and the presence of evacuees, Carlisle women did not suffer from the horrors being endured to the north in Glasgow, to the south in Liverpool and to the east in Newcastle. Most of the evacuees came from Newcastle but Lily had none billeted on her since she had only two bedrooms and no parlour and had two children.

  Weekends when Arthur came home were difficult. He was always good with the children but they had to learn to share their mother with him and they’d protest, especially Margaret. Gordon was docile and biddable but Margaret even as a baby was neither. She was noisy and demanding and given to tantrums if she couldn’t get her own way, tantrums Arthur feared would have to be beaten out of her if they went on. It gradually dawned on him and Lily and the whole family that this Margaret, far from being like the saintly grandmother after whom she was named, was like Nan. Fiery, selfish, ambitious, just like Nan. She wasn’t turning out like either her grandmother or her mother except, like Lily, she was clever. She talked in long sentences at two and never stopped asking questions and wanting to try to read. It made everyone more nervous than proud, though they enjoyed listening to the infant Margaret reciting nursery rhymes and little poems as she stood on the living-room table looking adorable in a frock Nan had made for her, white double chiffon with red satin spots on it and a big sash. She was A Picture, the child, but also A Handful. Only Nan thought she was wonderful and wished she had a daughter just like her.

  But she only had Michael with no sign of any others, and her life was now not so different from her sisters’ even if once she’d sparkled like Lily’s little girl. She was much more comfortably off, she knew that, living in a pleasant, well-equipped and furnished house (though it was only rented) and with a car. Jack certainly earned very much more than either Dave or Arthur, working as he did at Strother’s – ‘If It’s Eyesight Bother Consult Mr Strother!’ – but all the same he was hardly the very rich man of Nan’s early dreams. She spent her time looking after Michael and the house (though she had a char for the rough work since Jack didn’t want her hands to get coarse any more than he had wanted her breasts to sag). Nan was frequently reminded by Arthur of her once-grandiose ideas, and how they had hardly been fulfilled, which she found maddening. She insisted that Jack would be rich, when the war was over. And there was another way Arthur needled her. Why hadn’t Jack joined up? Why wasn’t he a general by now with his officer-class accent? Instead he stayed in Carlisle, aged only thirty-four, and made a nice little income from operating within the black market. He offered Arthur whisky but Lily wouldn’t let him accept. She was outraged at Jack’s wickedness, and even Nan was embarrassed. She wanted Jack to be wealthy but not through any kind of cheating, however minor.

  Sometimes Lily would accept eggs and butter from Nan, who claimed to have a surplus, even though she knew really that such largesse in wartime implied sleight of hand. Nan was generous and Lily did not like to spurn this sisterly generosity. Besides, she needed the extra food. She was a good manager but Arthur’s wage was difficult to manage on now she had two rapidly growing children and was in permanent fear of having more. Being sensible Lily, she tried to be sensible about this problem, but contraceptive advice even for married women was virtually non-existent in Carlisle in the mid thirties. No good knowing Marie Stopes had opened a birth control clinic in London in 1921, or that a National Birth Control Council had been founded in 1920, or even that in 1939, the year after Lily had her second child, a Family Planning Association had been formed – nonsense to imagine the country immediately covered with Family Planning Clinics. In Carlisle, as in most other cities, there was only a Babies’ Welfare Centre where babies were weighed and ‘appropriate advice given to the mothers, who are served with a cup of tea and a biscuit for one penny’. The appropriate advice didn’t extend to the limitation of families – with the tea and biscuit went just the advice to keep windows in the house open and drink plenty of water.

  The only recourse any young mother had was the family doctor. Lily’s was Dr Stephenson, her parents-in-law’s family doctor. She disliked him intensely and didn’t know why she’d allowed herself to be persuaded to register with him. He was a big, fat, red-faced man, very gruff, totally lacking in any bedside manner. It was acutely embarrassing to go to him. The whole business of birth control upset Lily, but then so did the whole business of sex. But she tried to be brave and after a visit to the dreaded doctor had produced no enlightenment, beyond being told it was her husband’s business to take care, she felt there was nothing she could do except try to limit intercourse. She got into the habit, when Arthur was ready to go to bed, of staying up, saying she would just finish the darning. Then she would sit close to the fire and darn and wait and listen and hope to hear him snoring when she would at last join him, slipping between the covers with the greatest caution.

  It didn’t always work. By October 1940 she knew she was pregnant again and was distraught, in floods of tears. ‘It can’t be helped,’ said the fatalistic Arthur, but she thought it should have been helped. How were they to manage? How could she give three children the kind of upbringing she couldn’t even give two? The level of her distress and resentment made her ill. She could hardly cope with the boisterous Margaret who wanted to be on the go all the time. Nan saw a solution. She and Jack were at last married – in May that year, five days before Nan’s thirty-third birthday, an extremely quiet register office affair with Michael not present – and she wanted another baby but so far had failed to become pregnant. She would adopt Lily’s baby. What could be simpler? But Arthur was o
utraged and so really was Lily, in spite of her general misery – it was their baby, they would keep it, they were married and respectable and, however hard up, not so poverty-stricken that they had to give in to such an extreme solution. No. Nan could not have their baby. Dr Stephenson gave Lily a tonic to buck her up, and kindly pointed out that this was only her third baby not her thirteenth. This didn’t console her. She was listless, mournful. She went through all the motions of looking after her family, never defaulting on the cooking, the washing, the cleaning, but her unhappiness was a blight.

  Nan was concerned and tried to be positive. Jack was doing well and money was not short in the Marshallsay household, so she insisted that when Lily’s time came she should go into a private maternity home in Stanwix, Carlisle’s poshest area, to have her baby, and she would pay. More objections from Arthur who didn’t want anyone’s charity but Nan tore into him, said this was her sister, this was family, there was no question of charity for heaven’s sake. And Lily was ill, she needed to be cared for. How could she rest if she had the baby at home with Gordon and especially that demanding child Margaret around? Nan threatened Arthur with Lily’s total collapse and finally, grudgingly, feeling bitter he could not afford to pay himself, he relented. Lily gave birth to another daughter in the privacy of a home on 22 May 1941. Nan, who took her in and stayed with her, could hardly bear it – another sweet little girl (and maybe this one would stay sweet). Once Lily saw her baby, her resentment vanished. She was still low and worried but the baby wasn’t blamed, she was quite forgiven. Nan named her. She suggested the name Rosemary in front of Arthur who immediately vetoed it because it came from her and because it was ‘fancy’. He wanted Eileen. Nan then put up Pauline, only this time to Lily first, who then suggested it to Arthur as her own. So Pauline it was, with the fancy Rosemary in the middle, as a sop to Nan, who was triumphant at having pulled a fast one on Arthur.