Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  Noticeably, my mother had no friends on the Raffles estate itself. She was perfectly neighbourly but not exactly a friend of any woman on our side of Orton Road, the demarcation line between council and private housing. She was a good neighbour though. By the time I was old enough to realize it, she had become the one sent for in every sort of emergency, births and deaths a speciality. Any woman who went into labour and was afraid the midwife or the ambulance wouldn’t come in time would send for Mrs Forster – quick, tell her to come – and my mother always answered the call. She delivered our next-door neighbour’s baby one memorable day, a day of such drama I could hardly bear the ordinariness of the day that followed it. The husband rushed into our back kitchen, just as we were getting ready for school, yelling that Mary was giving birth right there on the floor and no nurse had arrived, so my mother rushed back with him. I wished I could go with her but had to be content with eavesdropping, much later, on my mother’s account of the birth, and her part in it, as related to Mrs Gillespie. All she’d done, my mother said, was wash her hands and put a clean towel under Mary and a pillow under her head and then she’d concentrated on keeping her calm and urging her not to push and assuring her the doctor would be there soon. He wasn’t actually there soon but it didn’t matter because in spite of Mary trying not to push the baby was born quickly and easily and my mother held her up by her ankles and slapped her behind as she’d seen the midwife deal with her own babies and then she’d cleared her nose and mouth of mucus and wrapped her in another towel. My mother kept saying she’d done nothing, really, nothing, but she was the talk of the estate, the stories of what she’d done growing by the minute. It was the same with deaths. My mother laid people out. She was called in to put cotton wool in all the various orifices and to wash the bodies. For once, Arthur and Nan were in complete agreement. They were revolted and didn’t know how she could. Arthur said she was wearing herself out and doing such things was not good for her. But still people came in times of crisis and my mother always responded. At Christmas the tokens of appreciation were almost embarrassing – flowers, chocolates, cakes, all from grateful beneficiaries of Lily’s competence and kindness.

  Sometimes she was called upon to do something much more difficult than attend births or lay out bodies. Raffles, in the post-Second-World-War period, had become a different place. It was no longer spoken of in garden-city terms but as an estate getting rougher all the time for reasons no one understood. There were some problem families now living on it and some notoriously violent men. A child would come screaming to our back door or, worse still, a woman herself, a woman already bleeding from a smack in the mouth or blow to the nose. My father, if he was there, would instruct my mother to ignore the screams and the rattling of our latch – she should mind her own business, keep out of it – but she never did. She’d go off with the child or pull the woman into her kitchen and bathe her wounds and soothe her while I watched – though told sharply to go back into the living-room and close the door at once, please. I’d hear my father say, ‘Don’t get involved. Now I’ve warned you, Lily,’ but my mother didn’t bother replying. Eventually, the woman would stop sobbing and going over what had happened – I could never hear the details clearly enough, to my fury, and my mother would never repeat them – and then she’d start worrying about her children, whom she’d left at ‘his’ mercy in her panic, and my mother would go back with her. I offered to accompany her but my services were rejected and I’d be told once more, angrily, to go inside and stay there. When my mother came back she’d be very quiet and sad and look shaken. She wouldn’t answer any of my urgent questions – I wanted to know most of all why the woman had gone back to this man who’d hit her. My mother would only say that the woman had no money and nowhere to go and then I’d switch to asking why she hadn’t rung the police and had this brute put in prison. ‘You don’t understand,’ my mother would say wearily. I certainly didn’t.

  What I did understand, though, was that my mother’s life seemed one of complete self-abnegation. And I was beginning to understand something else: I wasn’t going to be like her. Everything Lily did was not only for the good and comfort of others but actually went against her own interests. It had crossed her mind sometimes, she’d admit, that she should have been a nurse. She would like to have ministered to the sick properly, to have had some proper training. Too late by the time she realized this caring instinct was so strong in her and needed a more structured and satisfying outlet. She’d made her choice and that choice was to have a home and children and a husband, and it was no good pining after alternative careers. The little bouts of being an Angel of Mercy were a relief from the drudgery of her routine. No woman exists who wants to start the day off standing in a freezing cold wash-house supervising a monstrous boiler, but my mother more than most was made wretched by this kind of hard work as a housewife. All around her, on the Raffles estate in the 1940s, women were doing precisely the same, not a washing-machine between them, but none can have felt any more disappointed to be doing it than my mother. She’d been brought up to accept her lot by Margaret Ann, but she couldn’t, she just could not. She still had expectations of something else, something better in life, and she wanted it so badly. I saw – no, I felt – that wanting. I tried to work out why a woman as beautiful (to me) and clever and good and kind didn’t have what she wanted even if I didn’t know what it was she did want. How had this state of affairs come about? I decided it was because she had made one fatal mistake: she’d got married. Simple. She’d got married and then had children, all part of being married and inevitable, I thought, and trapped herself. The very thing that had released my grandmother (though I didn’t know this then) had trapped my mother. The conclusion was obvious. I would not marry and therefore would not have children. I would keep out of the trap and I’d be safe. I hadn’t it in me to be a selfless wife and mother and carer. I’d escape. To where? I’d no idea, but quite early I sensed I might do it through school. I felt that somehow the secret was to stay in the school world and cut myself off from this other world my mother was so unhappy in, the home world. The circumstances of my mother’s life and her unhappiness were the spur to make my own life into something different. I would not and could not be like her and nor, really, did I want to be, even if I thought she was so admirable.

  As if my mother wasn’t already doing enough, a great deal of her time towards the end of the forties became taken up with looking after Agnes, her mother-in-law. Agnes was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. She was crippled with it. First her fingers grew gnarled and twisted until they bent right back and she couldn’t use them and then her hips were afflicted and she couldn’t walk. She lay in a bed set up in a corner of the living-room at the back of her house. It was beside a window but all she could see through it, if she could make out anything through the net curtain, was the narrow concrete yard, the brick walls, the two doors going into lavatory and wash-house. She lay in that bed propped up by pillows under the devoted and constant but far from tender care of her husband George. He fed Agnes, washed her, helped her on and off the commode (roughly, he was clumsy by nature). My mother visited every other afternoon, taking my sister and me after school. She brought cakes and scones she’d baked, and magazines – the parish magazine mostly – and she tried to make Agnes more comfortable. She took the sheets home and the nightdresses and returned them with bunches of lilac and stock and sweet-smelling roses.

  They were part of the battle against the general smell in Agnes’s room. It was dreadful, a stink not a smell. The window was never opened, the fire always on (Agnes was always cold) and the commode was never emptied regularly enough. My mother stayed an hour at least and tried to ease her mother-in-law’s pain. She brushed her hair gently, rubbed various ointments on her wasted limbs, changed her nightdress and bedjacket, and talked to her while George took a break in his allotment. Agnes confided in Lily, she wept, she voiced her misery and despair, and my mother listened and sometimes cried herself. I could h
ardly stand these visits. Agnes loved to see us, her granddaughters, but we did not love to see her. We hated it. She frightened us. She was like a witch with her poor hands and dreadful pallor and moans and smells. I even found it a strain to be in the same room as her at all – there was neither pity nor sympathy coming from me for her, only horror. I’d hear Agnes call Lily an angel and bless the day Arthur married her. She was an angel, a saint. It was her role and she filled it ungrudgingly, but I was not going to do the same, never, never. It appalled me.

  On Sundays my father took his turn at visiting his mother, taking my sister and me yet again. (Gordon never seemed to be included – he was nearly always off at Scout camp.) We walked the mile to Richardson Street, dressed in our best, and sat in the back room for precisely half an hour: another ordeal, more torment, much harder to endure without our mother. George gave us tests, mental arithmetic tests. I snapped out the answers and soon Pauline was just as quick and we’d get a penny for every correct answer. At the end of the half hour, depending on how well we’d behaved, we’d get either two shillings or a tin of John West salmon. George had hoarded it in preparation for the war; he had a cupboard full of it. If we’d been ‘bad’, we got nothing. Being ‘bad’ meant we’d fidgeted, asked too often if it was time to go yet, held our noses against the smell, not smiled, not recited poems when asked, touched the piano or the china in the parlour next door when we wandered into it. I never touched the piano but Pauline did. She longed to learn how to play it but we had no piano at home and our grandparents wouldn’t let her play this one because it was too precious. When she could play properly, like her mother Lily, then she could come and play it (but how was she to learn without access to a piano – it was a puzzle).

  I preferred to touch the china. A set of a dozen of everything, fine bone china, kept locked away in a huge glass-fronted cabinet. But I knew where the key was kept and I’d take it out of the Toby jug on the mantelpiece and open the cabinet and finger the china, heart pounding in case it broke. I liked the colours – deep burnt orange and dark blue and gold – and the way I could see light through the cups when I daringly held them up. Agnes had said I could have it all when I married, but since I was never going to marry, not even to gain the Crown Derby, that wasn’t much use. Repeatedly I’d remind myself I wasn’t going to be like my mother. There she was, answering everyone’s demands – Agnes’s, her husband’s, her children’s, her neighbours’, her church’s – and getting nothing in return. Nobody, so far as I could see, lavished the same kind of care on my mother as she lavished on them. Her very goodness maddened me. It made me cross and resentful but I didn’t know why. Why didn’t I want to emulate her? When I tried I was a failure, to my mother’s sorrow.

  One way I tried was by agreeing to go alone to my grandmother’s on Saturday afternoons and read to her. I made enough fuss about it but I went, to please my mother and not in the least to be kind to my grandmother. What I read to her was The People’s Friend. I liked to read anything but even so found The People’s Friend dreary. There was nothing attractive about this magazine to an eight-year-old – the age I started this reading aloud – but Agnes liked it read literally cover to cover, starting with the advertisement for soap on the front. I’d drone through not only the stories (her favourites were those by Annie S. Swan, scores of them) but instructions as to How to Knit Fluffy Mitts For the Cold-Fingered Brigade (though her hands were so crippled she would not knit again), or how to make new frocks ‘and cheer the gloom away’. There were always uplifting letters in each issue and a special corner for children which I was supposed to find entertaining and never did. The whole magazine was written in tiny print, three columns to a page, single spacing. I used to try to persuade my grandfather to buy Picture Post for me to read aloud instead, but he wouldn’t. Picture Post was twice the price of The People’s Friend and anyway he was only going to buy what my grandmother had herself once regularly bought, no newfangled, expensive magazines. But sometimes my mother would buy, and send me with, Picture Post and I’d read that far more enthusiastically, though what I wanted it for was the pictures of the film stars it usually had in it. There was actually a fair amount of reading matter too, long and serious articles, and my grandfather would take a malicious delight in making me read every word knowing I could make little sense of screeds on Russian foreign policy or discussions on the H-bomb. When I stumbled, he’d laugh and tell me to get back to The People’s Friend and stop trying to be something I wasn’t.

  What I knew I wasn’t, apart from clever enough to understand these articles, was a nice little girl which is what my mother wanted me to be. I still looked nice, true. I had long, thick, fair hair and a beautiful complexion and I was tall for my age, but I wasn’t nice. I was by then already difficult, moody. I’d left behind that pretty little dear they’d all drooled over, even when I reminded them of Nan. Once I tried to strangle another girl, or so she and her mother alleged. I was scornful. I explained that I’d only been showing Angela how to strangle someone if she should so desire and what if there were bruises all round her neck? But my mother was shocked. She looked aghast and then sorrowful and said how upset she was. Nice little girls did not act like this, and God would be upset too. I know I laughed when she expected me to cry. But I was furious. It was stupid of her to think I’d really tried to strangle silly old Angela. If my mother wanted to believe that nonsense then I was determined to let her. ‘I wish I had strangled her,’ I boasted, ‘then I could go to prison and get away from here.’ My mother said she didn’t know what to do with me, she couldn’t imagine what would become of me. She said all she had ever wanted to do was please her own mother and help her. All I seemed to want to do was cause trouble.

  Except at school. At school I was bright-faced, eager, absolutely desperate to please. Whenever my mother went there – not often, parents were rarely invited in – she’d be astonished by the paean of praise for both my ability and behaviour. Here, at least, I was like her. But she always emphasized that, though she was pleased, I mustn’t think being clever was as important as being nice and good. She wanted a sweet, kind, thoughtful, willing-to-help daughter ready to follow in her footsteps in that respect. Instead, I was already walking away from this calling. I didn’t want to learn to be any kind of carer. I wouldn’t accept that my role as a female was to serve on the domestic front. My father raged against my disobedience. I wouldn’t wash dishes, set and clear tables, bring the coal in, or in any other ways help my mother. He slapped me but I withstood these not-very-hard slaps easily, so he bought a leather strap with thin thongs at the end and used that on the back of my legs when I goaded him, and goading was exactly what I did. Soon, in efforts not to help in the house, I was trying to stay out all the time, mainly by going to the Gillespies. If I had to be at home I read my library books. I’d sit absorbed, hearing nothing, until my father would snatch the book away and shout, ‘Get your nose out of that book and help your mam, or else!’

  IX

  Towards the end of 1948 ‘or else’ took on a more sinister meaning. My mother was going into hospital. The announcement was made in doom-laden tones – ‘Your mam has to go into the City General’ – by my father. I didn’t ask him why. I didn’t want to give him what I felt was the satisfaction of realizing how afraid I was, that for once I wasn’t going to say pertly, ‘Couldn’t care less.’ I asked her, later. The answer was, ‘For an operation.’ What was an operation? My mother seemed so evasive, almost shifty, that I couldn’t embarrass her by asking more questions. An operation. In the City General. People died in hospitals sometimes. If my mother died, what would I do? A mother was essential to life, or at least my mother to my life. It wasn’t just self-interest which made the thought of my mother possibly dying so terrifying, it was because I loved her then so passionately. My poor mother, all that caring for other people and now in return an operation.

  Yet on the Sunday before the Monday she was to go into hospital I was particularly difficult and objectiona
ble. On Sundays we often had rice pudding, my father’s only taste in puddings (except for ice-cream). I hated it. On that Sunday we had it, all glutinous in its oblong enamel dish, the edges of the white mess slightly burned, just as my father liked it. My mother knew she couldn’t miss me out entirely, in spite of my loathing of this pudding, because my father would insist, for obscure reasons of his own, mostly to do with ‘taming’ me, that I had to eat some. She gave me a very small portion but even so my stomach heaved at the sight of the slippy-sloppy contents of my bowl (such a pity I’d never heard of ‘Whatever’s the matter with Mary Jane?/It’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again’). My father ate his with enormous noisy relish and still I hadn’t touched my spoonful. The usual battle commenced. He glared at me and ordered me to eat up. I glared at the rice pudding and stirred it round and round. He ordered me to stop messing about. I closed my eyes. My mother said, ‘Please, Arthur, she doesn’t like it.’ ‘She’ll like what’s put in front of her,’ my father said. ‘Wasting good food. She’s spoiled.’ ‘Please, Margaret,’ my mother pleaded, ‘just one spoonful.’ I shook my head. We all sat there half an hour, an hour, long enough for the rice pudding to be quite cold and even more nauseating. Finally, my father lost his temper and yelled, ‘You’re making your mam ill, you are! And it’s her operation tomorrow. You’d better eat that damned pudding, or else! You’d better hope she comes back!’

  Rice pudding – operation – not coming back. The impact of this curious logic was tremendous. It made perfect sense. I ran out of the house, heart thudding, my mother’s death owing to my failure to consume rice pudding already a fact. When I had to return home, after hours of demented wandering round the estate, I tried hard to be quiet and helpful. So did my father. He’d obviously been told off by my mother and rice pudding wasn’t mentioned. The evening was spent with us being given instructions as to how to manage during the next two weeks. Mrs Gillespie would come over each morning and plait my hair. Gordon, who had just started work in a chemist’s shop, would leave just before Mrs Gillespie came and in between Pauline and I would organize our own bowls of Weetabix, heating the milk for them and taking great care with the lighting of the gas cooker. After school, we would make our own tea, just sandwiches, taking great care with the bread knife, and Mrs Gillespie would pop in around five, though it was not exactly clear why. We went through it all several times, together with other instructions to do with washing and changing our clothes and saying our prayers and closing the back door properly.