Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  My father was angry after Florrie died. It was to do with Florrie’s will or the lack of it – I wasn’t allowed to know the details. ‘The only one who did a damned thing for Florrie,’ said Arthur, ‘and she gets nothing.’ My mother said she had neither expected nor wanted to inherit the little poor Florrie had, but while my father went on ranting away I noticed an expression of what I interpreted as a consciousness of her own virtue on her face. ‘The times you’ve gone down to Florrie’s,’ my father stormed, ‘in all weathers, making yourself bad with it, getting things for her, having her for Christmas, and for nothing, all of it. It’s always the same. They’ve a damned cheek, that’s what.’ Who ‘they’ were and what had been done that was ‘a damned cheek’ I could never discover. It was something to do with Florrie’s one-up, one-down little house. So far as I could make out, some very distant relative whom no one had even known existed had come forward and claimed the house and its contents. If there was any meeting with this person I missed it but the repercussions of what my father called a swindle lasted for months. We weren’t even allowed to walk down Florrie’s street now, the very paving-stones were tainted with ingratitude. But my mother put flowers on Florrie’s grave, which, as my father triumphantly noted, was more than ‘they’ did, and she was remembered and missed by her. It was one more family responsibility off her list yet for a while she was bereft.

  My mother seemed to need these female relatives to whom she was so kind but I could never work out why. Why she looked after all the aunts and cousins who became semi-dependent on her mystified me. Maybe I was wrong and she didn’t actually like the task. Maybe they wished themselves upon her and I hadn’t the wit to see the situation as it really was, but she never once voiced or indicated resentment. Aunt Jessie, my father’s aunt by marriage to his uncle, was another needy soul as Florrie had been, though not visited as frequently because she didn’t live in Carlisle. She lived in a remote cottage over the Scottish border near Eastriggs. When we went to see Aunt Jessie we went by bus, changing three times. My mother didn’t know how Jessie, a widow now, could live in her dark and cold cottage on this desolate Solway coast and shuddered every time she thought of her there alone with no family near by. She tried to persuade her to move to Carlisle to be near us so that she could be properly looked after, but Jessie stayed put. She came to us for Christmas but otherwise never left her cottage. When she in turn died, not long after Florrie, I expected similar outrage from my father, but to his astonishment Jessie had made a proper will and had left her cottage to my mother – no ‘they’ materialized to snatch it away, to cheat my mother of what he saw as her just reward for her devotion. The cottage was hard to sell but the four hundred pounds my mother eventually received seemed a huge amount. Once more, like my grandmother’s money, it was put in the bank for a rainy day and, spread over many years, it covered all kinds of expenses which otherwise would have been disastrous.

  Some of it was spent on what my mother always spent windfalls on: clothes. But by now I was old enough at thirteen not to want the clothes she tried to buy me so that I would look smart. Smart was the last thing I wanted to look. Our ideas on how a teenage girl should look naturally differed radically. My mother liked to see me in frocks, preferably in pale colours with full skirts, cap sleeves and Peter Pan collars. When, over a series of months, during which I’d saved Christmas and birthday present money, I bought a black polo-neck sweater, black trousers and a camel duffel jacket she was appalled. ‘I don’t know what you look like,’ she said, to which I replied, ‘I look how I want to look.’ But what did I want to look like? Different. Simple as that. Different from my mother, different from most girls and women in Carlisle then. Since to my mother clothes were serious, and certainly not anything as frivolous as an expression of personality, she had no sense of humour about my choice of garb. It hurt her, actually hurt her, to see me looking, she said, like a tramp.

  There was nowhere in Carlisle in the early fifties that stocked the sort of clothes I wanted. Teenage boutiques didn’t exist nor did street markets and we were even woefully short of chain stores which catered for the would-be trendy. So I pored over pattern books in Binn’s, page after seductive and misleading page of Simplicity and McCalls, and selected things I liked the finished look of, then bought material, from a limited selection, to make up the patterns. Disaster. My mother looked on in horror as I butchered yards of black poplin and then screamed and roared at my own mistakes. ‘You’re like me,’ she said helpfully, ‘useless at sewing, not like Nan, not like your grandmother.’ I hated her saying that. It made my fury at my own ineptitude worse. So I struggled on, determined not to be beaten, yet never achieving the knack of pinning the fragile tissue-paper pattern on to the material, never mind learning how to sew the stuff properly. All those stupid little black darts, meant to indicate where a cut should be made outwards and I always cut straight across, so that there was then nothing to match one side with another. I couldn’t work the sewing-machine either. It had been my grandmother’s (not the one Mrs Stephenson gave her when she married, but a later model). Even threading the wretched needle was a job I found difficult enough and then, when I did get started, ramming the material under the cruel little needle, I jammed it within seconds. When finally I’d managed to free the garment I was trying to stitch and proceeded slowly and carefully along a seam, my stitching was always hopelessly zig-zag. ‘Good job you don’t have to earn your living this way,’ my mother said.

  My latest ambition was to be an actress. How did one become an actress though? Was it a living? Who knew? None of us. It was totally outside our experience. But we went to Her Majesty’s Theatre in Lowther Street and saw a repertory company called the Salisbury Players, presumably earning its living, so why could I not become one of them? I was good at acting. I’d already appeared in school plays. My mother couldn’t understand it. Acting wasn’t in the family. Where had it come from, this dubious exhibitionism? It was pure showing-off and therefore not to be encouraged. In her opinion going to the cinema, as well as the theatre, only made me worse. Forget the Salisbury Players, why could I not be a film star? Margaret O’Brien – I could easily be her. That, at least, made my mother laugh. ‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed, ‘be a film star and go to Hollywood.’ I didn’t see why not. Week after week I queued to get into one of Carlisle’s five booming cinemas and week after week had a greater love for motion pictures. In the smoky, pitch-black anonymity of the cinema it was possible to escape from myself, my home, my town, completely and to be sucked into whatever world was up there on the screen. I had to have the money to pay for the ticket, but I was good at handling my pocket money and any other money I earned or was given. My mother, naturally, had never had this newfangled thing called pocket money – the idea of children having a regular sum of money given to them for nothing, to spend on themselves, was fairly outrageous, and my father, from whom this money had to come, was not ever going to allow pocket money as a right. Sometimes he agreed to give it, sometimes not. But mostly he did, though he had little enough of his own. We were fortunate though, in that our grandfather also gave us a weekly sum, just as long as we answered his mental arithmetic questions, and on top of that I did messages for a woman across the road. I went shopping for her, with a list, and got a shilling in return. Then there were presents from relatives, not just at the usual times but whenever they came to the house – giving children a couple of shillings was part of the visiting pattern. I saved my money diligently, never buying sweets (as long as rationing lasted I’d sold my sweet coupons), and then I worked out how I could spend it. The cinema came first, the shilling for that automatically set aside, and always every week a certain amount also set aside to accumulate until there was enough to buy my mother a present.

  I had always loved, all my childhood, buying her presents. It wasn’t the self-sacrifice that appealed (though in my religious phase it did) so much as the hope of delighting her by giving her something I’d heard her yearn after. Pearls. She lon
ged for pearls. Nan had pearls, she had never had pearls, so pearls it would be. I once saved every penny, even my cinema pennies, for three months so that I could buy her a pearl necklace for her birthday. I was intimidated by the mere sight of the jeweller’s shop windows but for my mother I was brave enough to do anything. I went in and asked the price of a pearl necklace. The assistants were kind, probably amused, but even kindness could not bring a pearl necklace down to the thirty shillings I had. Seeing my face, it was suggested I should try the market where there were some very nice, really remarkably pretty, artificial pearls and these days everyone was wearing them, it was so hard to tell them apart from the real thing… I went to the market where thirty shillings was ample to buy a pearl necklace. The stallholder gave me a box lined with blue velvet to put them in. I gave them to my mother on her birthday in an ecstasy of pleasure and watched her open the box. Her expression remained composed, though she smiled and said the necklace was lovely. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said, ‘it’s too much.’ But she seemed so sad. My pleasure somehow was not matched by hers.

  Later on, it became easier to please her. My sister and I, when we were thirteen and ten, used to take her to the cinema on the last day of the holidays and then to Binn’s for tea, paying for everything ourselves. We went to see pictures like The Blue Lagoon, which she loved, and then for tea she had a waffle, drenched in syrup. We sat in the window of Binn’s café on the top floor, feeling so exalted as we looked down on English Street. There was a white tablecloth on the table and proper napkins and white china with gold rims round the plates and heavy silver cutlery – it was very grand. My mother loved this treat from the moment we stepped out of the lift and threaded our way past the ornate hatstands across the red patterned carpet to the choicest table – she was regal, gracious, with her two daughters, one either side. Once seated, she’d invariably recall her own mother and shiver as she remembered her working here, when Binn’s was Robinson’s, and say how times had changed. But she didn’t allow herself to become depressed by the thought of her mother’s hard times. Instead, she tucked into her waffle and wiped her fingers and mouth daintily afterwards. She liked sweet things. She’d deny it sometimes – she somehow felt it was sinful to like sweet things – but never very strongly. Her love of anything sweet was on a par with her love of clothes – eating a waffle, stroking the silk of a new garment, I’d see a spark of buried sensuality otherwise never visible or believable. Watching her eat a chocolate eclair oozing cream, or spread Cumberland rum butter on a hot scone, I’d see her face momentarily lose her Quaker look. Her eyes would narrow, a languor would steal over her, a little moan of satisfaction escape her lips… heaven. This love of cakes and pastries made her a good baker but not a good cook. Her day-to-day cooking was bland (though of course heavily circumscribed by the lack of money to buy good ingredients).

  I liked Nan’s food best. Jean’s was like my mother’s. Her griddle scones were sublime, but for the rest very ordinary, mostly potatoes, chipped and mashed and baked and roasted (once a week with the precious joint). Nan, on the other hand, didn’t like baking. It wasn’t good for the figure to eat all those cakes and scones, and she and Jack always watched their figures. But otherwise she cooked well. She had the money, the time, the interest, and the experience of eating in hotels and restaurants, which her sisters didn’t have, and her food was different as a consequence. She served fish I’d never heard of, like halibut, cooked in a way which seemed exotic (wrapped in tinfoil and baked in the oven with herbs and butter). Her vegetables didn’t have the hell boiled out of them, and at Nan’s I found a salad didn’t necessarily mean a lettuce leaf, half a tomato and a piece of beetroot. The best food of all was her cheese. I loved cheese but only knew Cheddar. At Nan’s I tasted Stilton and adored it. (‘Do you know how much it is a pound?’ my mother asked when I suggested putting it on our Co-op order.) The rest of the family, when they stayed with Nan, always complained of being hungry afterwards but the Marshallsay fare suited me fine.

  I was always glad to get home though. It puzzled me. I loved the way Nan lived but still I was glad to get home, back to the shabbiness, to the cramped conditions, and all because of my mother. There was nothing motherly about Nan, or what I thought of as motherly. My mother was thoroughly maternal and I was proud of this. She never shouted or lost her temper as Nan did, and even more important, she always put us, her children, first. Everything she did was for us without consideration for her own needs. Nan, on the other hand, frequently put herself first, much as she adored her only son Michael. What she wanted often mattered more than what any child wanted. No wonder Michael loved to come to stay with us. My mother and indeed my father put him first all the time, throughout his whole stay, and he naturally lapped it up. His Aunt Lily had infinite tenderness for this nephew with his disfigured lip and bronchial wheeziness and a father who seemed permanently irritated by him. Her strong maternal instincts went out to him and I watched, satisfied, knowing my mother was what a mother should be and never once stopping to query this belief.

  XII

  Everything to do with money in our family was handled by my mother. She paid the bills, she did the budgeting, she decreed when money could be spent and on what. My father earned the money and gave it to her (always excepting that ever-undivulged small amount he kept back so that his exact wage would not be known), but she said what could be afforded. Answer: very little. Certainly not a new bicycle for me. It was out of the question and I knew it. Every Saturday I’d torture myself by going down to T.P. Bell’s, the bike shop in Abbey Street, just round the corner from where my grandmother had worked for the Stephensons, and looking at bikes. I felt my desire to have a conventional black Raleigh was modest – nothing flash, no yearning after a sports model with dropped handlebars.

  I didn’t blame my parents for not being able, as the parents of my new friends at the High School were able, to buy me a bike. I knew they would have done if they could and never once mentioned the subject. But I didn’t have to. It was apparent when they saw me eyeing the bikes of others and swearing I’d rather walk than cycle any day. Then my father suddenly suggested I could buy a bike on HP. What was HP? ‘It’s wicked,’ my mother pronounced immediately and, to my father, ‘Don’t go putting ideas like that in her head. It’s scandalous. HP indeed! That’s for fools wanting to get themselves into debt and for a bike, ridiculous. You should be ashamed.’ But my father wasn’t in the least ashamed. He was quite prepared to stick up for this wonderful thing called HP and explain it to me. It was Hire Purchase, generally known as the never-never. ‘And rightly,’ as my mother was quick to point out. If I signed an HP agreement with T.P. Bell I could have a new bike there and then. They’d give me a card and every week I’d go and pay five shillings until the bike was paid for. There would be a deposit of £2 10s., which I already had, and then I could manage the weekly payment if I gave all my pocket money plus the extra I earned from doing messages and any birthday and Christmas money I was given, usually a fair amount.

  It seemed a brilliant idea to me, until my mother pointed out scornfully that in the end I would have paid very nearly twice what the bike cost originally and also that if I defaulted on the weekly payments T.P. Bell could claim the bike back and wouldn’t have to refund the money already paid. It was how people got into a mess, my sensible mother said, and she would have nothing to do with such schemes. But the temptation was irresistible. My father went with me to T.P. Bell’s and the dastardly deed was done. I rode the gleaming new Raleigh home hardly able to balance on the seat for excitement. Every Saturday, without fail, I went to the shop and paid my dues and never once regretted the long time it took until the debt was paid off. I loved that bike. My mother, who had never owned a bike, couldn’t understand what it meant to me. It transformed weekends and holidays, meant I could roam all over Cumberland, to the sea, to the lakes, huge bike rides of thirty miles and more. ‘She’s getting her money’s worth,’ my father would say, pleased. To which my mo
ther would riposte, ‘She’ll need to, the price she’s paying.’ She was so afraid he’d started me off on the road to ruin, given me the idea I could have anything I wanted on demand and pay later. But he hadn’t. The weekly trips to T.P. Bell’s rubbed the economic lesson in efficiently. I knew quite well what I was doing. There was no danger of the experience turning me into a spendthrift.

  My father longed for a car as much as I had longed for a bike, but there was no hope of that. He didn’t dare suggest getting a car on HP. My mother would have had a fit at such a crippling debt. So he filled the football pools in every week and hoped and hoped, and we hoped with him. She hated those Littlewoods coupons, hated the intensity with which the football results were listened to on Sports Report, hated the despondency that followed. ‘A mug’s game,’ she’d mutter. My father ignored her and shouted at us if we made the slightest noise while he was checking his coupon. He believed in luck the way she believed in God, and for both of them there was no alternative. All over the Raffles estate there were women terrified their men would lose what money they had on some form of gambling – football pools, horses, dogs, whatever. My father had a fling on them all in a very modest way. He was best on horses. Carlisle had regular race meetings and when Jack came through he’d drive my father there and they’d bet together, Jack depending on Arthur’s expertise. Jack would put twenty pounds on a horse, my father two shillings. My mother was furious with Jack for encouraging my father and even more angry with Nan for condoning this betting. Nan actually went with the men sometimes, enjoying the dressing-up and social side of it, but my mother never set foot on a racecourse. She loathed everything that went with any kind of gambling – the excitement, the tension, the euphoria of winning, just as much as the depression of losing. But my father always played his best card when she raised her regular objections. ‘The Queen gambles,’ he’d say, ‘and the Princess gambles, thinks the world of her racehorses. What’s good enough for the Royal Family is good enough for me.’