Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  The whole two weeks were wretched. The house seemed lifeless, barren, everything about it cold and dismal to the point of being utterly alien. Nothing had changed but because my mother was not there everything had changed. We were silent and unnaturally polite. I started having nightmares, dreaming that everything in the bedroom that was brown – bedstead, chest of drawers, the linoleum on the floor – was blood. My father, exhausted from his long hours in the factory, and hospital visiting afterwards, never heard me as I woke screaming and sobbing and gradually calmed myself. Once, coming out of my blood-filled nightmare, I was violently sick and vomited into the bath, imagining I’d eaten rice pudding. In the morning the sick had frozen, the night was so cold, and I had to boil kettles of water and take them upstairs and dissolve the mess before it would go down the plug hole. Oh, it was a miserable time, but when, in the second week, I was allowed to visit my mother in hospital I knew I must never tell her so.

  I went eager and excited but returned more scared and unhappy than ever. My mother looked dreadful. She was puffy-faced and a funny, yellowy-white colour and, though propped up on pillows, looked stiff and uncomfortable in the hospital bed. Everything about the ward she was in made me nervous – the antiseptic smells, the occasional moans from some patients, and even the nurses who, instead of being the gentle souls I’d imagined, drifting about smiling and soothing brows, were bustling and sharp and told me off for bringing dirt into the ward on my shoes. Settled on a chair that was much too low, I looked up at my mother beseechingly, wanting her to comfort me, but she needed comfort more than I did and I didn’t know how to give it. She was sad, tired, she had no energy. She asked how things were at home and I lied with spirit and conviction, painting such an exaggerated picture of domestic harmony that she managed a fleeting smile. Leaving the ward, I hardly dared to look to right or left. I didn’t want to register all these sick women. I couldn’t bear to think what had been done to them and that they were in pain. It made me feel weak and dizzy seeing them out of the corner of my eye. I just wanted to escape, escape from women and their operations, whatever they were.

  When my mother finally came home she took a long time to get back to normal, but just her presence was enough to give our home back its familiarity. I heard her telling Mrs Gillespie ‘the whole thing was now out’ and she was glad ‘to be rid of it’. So that was apparently good news. It had to be even if I didn’t understand it, but my mother didn’t act as if she were glad. She dragged herself about looking weak and grey and collapsed often on the bashed-up old settee in a way she had never done. My father was understanding. He wouldn’t let her get up first in the morning any more. He made her stay in bed the extra hour and took her tea before he left to cycle through the icy morning to work. His concern came out in a renewed attack on me for not helping enough in the house. He said I should be made to do more, but my mother said, ‘Oh leave her alone, her turn will come soon enough.’ What? I could hardly believe my ears. My turn? For what? Operations? For lying sick and weak in bed? No. I would not. I would simply refuse to take this turn of mine, I would refuse, somebody else could have it, not me.

  It was such a relief when my mother was back to doing the washing and singing hymns again, neat and bright in her pinny and turban, in control of the house and us. And then something unexpected happened. A letter came for her, from the Public Health Department. It was sixteen years since she had worked there, but as Uncle Len was always telling her she hadn’t been forgotten. She was being asked if she could come back just for three months to fill a sudden vacancy it was going to take time to find the right person for. My father was doubtful. He didn’t like the idea at all, when my mother had just recovered, when we’d just got back to normal. But my mother wanted to take this temporary job. She was attracted not only by the money, though that was certainly an attraction, holding out as it did the possible, just possible, prospect of being able to afford a week at Silloth next summer, but by the thought of doing something other than clean and cook. So she went back, worried she wasn’t smart enough, but looking transformed in some cast-offs of Nan’s hastily sent: a grey pleated skirt and cardigan and a pale pink blouse with a bow at the neck, a bow tied and retied twenty times before she finally set off. She loved that three months. We didn’t. I came home once more to an empty house and this time there was no excuse. I wanted to open the kitchen door to the smell of my mother’s baking and the sight of the fire burning and the knowledge I was going to be cherished from the moment I entered. I sulked, hung about pretending I hadn’t actually arrived home yet, did none of the small enough tasks I was supposed to help with. I let my mother come home to none of those comforts she regularly afforded me.

  The strange thing was that she didn’t seem to mind or even notice, she was so happy being back at work. We were all jealous, quite plainly so. We’d growl and stop her telling us about her day, taking no pleasure in her pleasure. Watching her spend her own money was a pleasure we were willing to share, though. She went to a little shop in Botchergate, but at least it wasn’t the Co-op. I suggested Bullough’s or Binn’s for this exciting shopping expedition, but then I would with my Nan-like notions. The little shop was fine. My mother bought a new skirt, a deep blue, her favourite colour, and a twinset of almost the same colour, just slightly paler, and a silk slip to go underneath. She longed for a coat but having a big item like a winter coat would have ruled out everything else, so she made her old one do. I watched her finger the silk of the ivory-coloured slip and smile, and I saw her look at herself, wearing the whole new outfit, in the shop’s mirror and smile even more at how attractive and suddenly younger she looked. The next month it was shoes, bought at K Shoes, black court shoes, very smart, and a pair of fur-lined boots (though those were bought from a stall in the market). My mother had good legs and fine ankles and in her new shoes and blue skirt looked elegant. Her final purchase was a hat, in blue felt with a feather at one side. Then it was over, the extra money spent and the miracle was that it had been spent on herself and neither saved (the Silloth week idea abandoned as unrealistic) nor spent on us.

  She was offered a permanent part-time job – times had changed and married women were allowed to continue part-time – but she didn’t accept it. It was too much to take on, when she had a house and husband and children to care for, for more than a short time. It was all right to neglect her duties for three months but not for ever. Arthur wasn’t happy with her working, anyway. He still thought it wasn’t right when she was a wife and mother. I heard her explaining this to Mrs Gillespie and others and never once did she mention her own real feelings, that she wanted to work because she liked it. She seemed to put up no fight. Then just at this time Arthur was once more offered another job at a higher wage and with a house. Joy? No. It was in this country this time but in Liverpool. He was no more tempted than he had been before by South Africa. Liverpool? But it wasn’t Carlisle, why would he want to go there? Why would he want to uproot his wife and family? Unthinkable.

  My mother soon felt great guilt because she’d been ‘selfish’ and spent her own money on herself and not on us, on my sister and me. It upset her dreadfully that we were not, that year, going to be dressed for Easter. ‘Getting dressed for Easter’ was a ritual in Raffles, conferring instant status which is what this emphasis on clothes partly was – but only partly. My mother still loved clothes for their own sake – they made her feel so much better – but it was true she also thought they were actually important. They showed the world you respected yourself and had made the effort to be as immaculate as possible. They showed that however hard your circumstances, you could rise above them. Easter was the time this was most true. If your children did not have brand-new clothes to wear to church on Easter Sunday, if they were not ‘dressed for Easter’, then you lost face. ‘Are you getting dressed for Easter?’ we asked each other at school and great was the satisfaction if the answer was yes.

  That Easter, the Easter following the purchase of her own new clothes,
the clothes that made her feel nothing was quite as bleak and disappointing any more, my mother took me aside and with the most solemn of expressions broke the news that Pauline and I would not be dressed for Easter unless some money our grandmother had put in the Trustee Savings Bank for us was used to buy new clothes. She said she wished she could afford to buy us the clothes but she couldn’t and so we’d have to give permission for grandma’s money, intended for our future, to be broken into. It was only a case of taking twenty pounds out of a hundred pounds, but she stressed the choice was mine. I agreed at once. I couldn’t see why she was so hesitant and anxious about this trifling matter. I went to the Trustees Savings Bank with her and we were both completely cowed by the necessary form signings and negotiations before two ten pound notes were delivered to us. The moment we were out of the bank my mother said, ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ as though we’d just robbed it, but soon, aided and abetted by my excitement, she perked up and we started on the spending. We bought yards of fine grey flannel to be made into costumes for Pauline and me by a dressmaker Nan had recommended from her old days in Carlisle, and pink silk blouses with little pearl buttons and straw hats with artificial flowers, pink and white rosebuds, wreathed round them, and new black patent leather shoes, the sort with one thin strap over the foot. Heavens, the pleasure, my mother’s and ours. How we strutted to church on Easter Sunday, the ‘best-dressed for Easter’ girls on the whole estate.

  We were never again garbed so finely, but one year two ‘new’ dresses appeared. Since we hadn’t shopped for them, they’d just appeared, laid out on our bed, I was surprised. They fitted each of us perfectly. I examined mine carefully. It was new but somehow not new enough. It didn’t quite feel how new usually felt. I said so to my mother who immediately blushed and confessed the dresses had come from a second-hand shop in Globe Lane, a very clean second-hand shop. There was no other way of providing us with new clothes, she said, voice trembling, she was sorry. I was furious, I couldn’t bear her regret – to be so upset just because we had to resort to second-hand clothes, as if it mattered. But they did, to her, and I had to struggle not to let them matter to me, because of how she’d made me think of clothes. It wasn’t snobbery either. It was this conviction that clothes revealed character. They showed the world what you were, and we were decidedly not a hard-up family living on a council estate. My God no, we were always incredibly well turned out and proud of it, especially the women. My mother might not be able to indulge her love of clothes but clothes were her way of pretending life was not how it was. Women like her had to delude themselves through disguising realities and clothes were one way to do it.

  Another lesson I didn’t want to learn.

  An important part of being a daughter was shopping. A son might be sent on messages but that was not to be confused with going ‘up street’ to shop which a daughter was expected to do as a matter of course. Going up street shopping always felt exciting, an event. We had to be dressed properly, we had to look as smart as possible (clothes again). It was a case of ‘Go and put on your other skirt and clean socks and wash your hands and face and brush your hair, or you’re not going.’ We caught a double-decker Ribble bus from just outside our house. Each of us carried a bag, my mother and sister and I. I wished I had a wicker basket, baskets were so much prettier, but though she used one for local shopping, my mother would not sanction baskets for the serious stuff. She had a large leather bag, for carrying heavy-duty goods in, and ours were string bags, flimsy things which opened out to reveal themselves as surprisingly capacious but could only bear the weight of light articles.

  The bus stopped at the Town Hall. Our shopping began in the covered market as shopping always had done all my mother’s life and her mother’s before her. We went through the big double doors and down the little cobbled hill and patronized the butchers’ stalls just as my grandmother had done. We bought the same kind of Cumberland sausage and potted meat and black pudding, which I hated to eat. The rest of the family loved these delicacies, especially potted meat, which was spread on buttered bread, the jelly part soaking right through. After this meat-buying ordeal, things improved. I liked the fruit and vegetable stalls, full of produce not very artistically arranged but absolutely fresh, brought in every morning from the surrounding countryside. Nothing exotic, no pineapples or melons – I hadn’t yet seen such fruits – and no fancy foreign vegetables, just huge cabbages and cauliflowers and leeks and onions and millions of potatoes, millions. My father grew most of our vegetables in his allotment but we bought tomatoes after his greenhouse was smashed in a storm. The last port of call was to the butter women who sat behind trestle tables, their butter and cheese arranged in front of them, the butter pats each with an individual crest. As in every aspect of our lives shopping in the market was carefully structured, the route between the stalls never varying – butchers, greengrocers, butter women. Progress was very slow. Plenty of time, while goods were selected, talked over, paid for, for me to stare up at the glass roof where pigeons flew about and to be aware of the echoes in that cavernous space. It was always cold, since there was no heating and doors opened on each side to the streets beyond, and the stallholders would often have a struggle weighing things with hands wrapped in two pairs of fingerless mittens and scarves dropping down and getting in their way. On the many wet days rain would sweep in and trickle down the main cobbled entrance until it became a veritable stream and puddles were hard to avoid. How I longed to get out of the market and into the warm shops.

  We went next to Lipton’s for tea and for sliced cooked ham, two different counters in the same shop, two different queues. I’d be put into one, my mother and sister would stand in the other. Such patience we had, fully expecting each transaction to take the ages it did. Everyone watched to see what others bought and whether any preferential treatment was being given by the assistants. These assistants had white hats on and were very quick which made all the waiting hard to understand. It was the paying which took the time, the system of putting the money in cans which whizzed overhead to the central cash desk and then back again with the change wrapped in the bill. Binn’s had just abolished this method. In Binn’s each assistant dealt on the spot with the money, but then Binn’s and Bullough’s were a cut above the rest and going into either of those large (for Carlisle) department stores was the best part of shopping.

  Going into them was an indulgence, a treat. We only bought small items there, things my mother knew were the same price everywhere. Reels of thread, press-studs, sometimes stationery, never anything expensive. The whole point was just to have a reason for going into Binn’s and savouring its graciousness. We never bought even the cheapest item of clothing there. Clothes meant the Co-op, where else? A long walk from Binn’s down English Street, wide and elegant with its seventeenth-century Town Hall at one end, and past the splendid Victorian station and into Botchergate, a long, noisy, narrow thoroughfare with ugly shops, only worth venturing into for its two cinemas. The city suddenly felt claustrophobic and dreary the moment Botchergate was entered. I didn’t know a thing about architecture but I knew the buildings were different, the atmosphere something to do with the layout of the street.

  Nothing was more depressing than the Co-op. It was halfway down Botchergate, set back, an enormous building with a central square inside round which balconies ran at every one of the three levels. These were reached by stone staircases which took ages to clamber up and made my mother’s legs ache. The goods seemed drab and were badly displayed – no thought or care was given to any kind of arrangement since economy and value for money were the Co-op’s most worthy criteria. The lighting was minimal and poor, the assistants on the whole elderly and downtrodden. The experience of shopping at the Co-op was dismal and there was no joy in our actual essential purchases – vests, knickers, socks and liberty bodices. The Co-op specialized in a particular kind of fleece-lined liberty bodice, a sort of waistcoat, worn over a vest, which did up with cloth buttons at the front and some
times had tabs hanging down so that suspenders could be attached if desired. Liberty bodices were worn tight, that was the point of them, and though the material they were made of was soft, they were akin to a corset for the young. Washing them was laborious. They weren’t really meant to be washed and hardly ever were. Washing made them shrink, however carefully it was done. But my mother placed great faith in the protective values, against cold, of liberty bodices. She had us in them all winter and half the summer and if we did develop colds it could only be because our liberty bodices had worn thin and we must get new ones from the Co-op as soon as possible. I hated mine. ‘Why is it called a liberty bodice?’ I’d ask, aggrieved. I knew what the word liberty meant and there was no feeling of freedom in this garment. My mother didn’t know and saw no need to know. It wasn’t important.

  Last stop was for bread and, occasionally, as a reward for enduring the Co-op, cream doughnuts or chocolate eclairs. We walked back up and out of Botchergate and round the crescent and into Lowther Street, where my mother had gone to school, which was spacious if not as impressive as English Street. There was a small baker’s shop halfway along where we bought a special kind of treacle loaf and delicious teacakes (round, soft roll-like bread, plain or sweet, with or without currants, and coming in three sizes). Then we cut through one of the medieval lanes and got the bus again at the Town Hall. That was it for another week. We’d been ‘up street’ and my mother was exhausted, mainly with the stress caused by seeing so many things she wanted and couldn’t afford to buy. She would sigh as she put her bag down and then, still in her coat, sit down and close her eyes for a moment or two before she made a cup of tea. That was her way of attempting to relax. Reading was not an aid to relaxation; she never picked up the newspaper. She was on her feet again too quickly to read anything.