Nancy Carson - A Family Affair

‘Mrs Beckitt, how lovely to see you again,’ Bessie Roberts greeted obsequiously in her thin voice that was incongruous with her size. ‘How long’s it been?’

‘A year or two, Mrs Roberts, by anybody’s reckoning. Our Clover here wants a new frock. Suitable for a wedding.’

Bessie looked Clover up and down with a well-practised look of admiration. ‘Oh, a wedding dress, eh?’ She smiled professionally. ‘Very nice. Oh, she’ll make a lovely bride and no mistake. I reckon I’ve got the very thing.’

‘It’s me that’s getting married, Mrs Roberts, not our Clover,’ Mary Ann pronounced self-righteously. ‘And I know what I’m gunna be wearing. Like I said, it’s me daughter as wants the frock.’

‘Forgive me, forgive me, Mrs Beckitt. I naturally thought…Well, fancy…that’s nice as you’m getting wed again. Let me congratulate you. Shall you be staying on at the Jolly Collier?’

‘Oh, yes, we shan’t be going nowhere. So what have you got in the way of material, Mrs Roberts? Something blue or green, I fancy.’

‘Oh, blue to match your daughter’s eyes,’ Bessie Roberts affirmed. ‘I reckon I’ve got the very thing.’ She hunted beneath her counter and flopped a roll of azure-blue satin material on top. ‘This is beautiful stuff, Mrs Beckitt. Just feel…And the colour would contrast beautifully with her lovely dark hair…Don’t you think?’

‘Have you got e’er a pattern what I can look at? The fashion seems more for fitted bodices and skirts these days from what I can see of it.’

‘I’ve got the very thing, Mrs Beckitt.’ She hunted again in a cardboard box. ‘When is the happy day, Mrs Beckitt?’

‘A week on Saturday.’

‘Good Lord! So soon?’

‘Yes, we’ll all have to get our skates on, I’m a-thinking. I take it as read that you can accommodate we, Mrs Roberts?’

‘It’ll be a bit of a rush but, yes. Ah…Here we are…’

Mrs Roberts placed the printed sketch of the dress on top of the roll of material.

‘I like it,’ Clover said, taking the first available opportunity to get a word in. ‘I think it’s perfect.’ She looked at Mary Ann for consent. Mary Ann nodded and, without further ado, the decision was made.

‘I’d better take some measurements, young Clover. Would you like to slip into the back room with me and take your dress off? I like to take an accurate measurement.’

The three women trooped into the tiny back room. Clover took off her dress and stood in her clean underwear while Bessie Roberts produced her measuring-tape from her apron pocket.

‘Such a lovely figure you’ve got, Clover,’ Bessie commented. ‘Doesn’t she, Mrs Beckitt? It takes me back to when I was as slender…Just lift your arms a little bit, please…That’s it. Now your waist…I see you don’t wear a corset, Clover.’

Clover thought she detected disapproval in Bessie’s tone. ‘I don’t need to, Mrs Roberts.’

‘It’s one thing we can never agree on, Mrs Roberts,’ Mary Ann complained. ‘I’m a firm believer that all women should wear a corset.’

Clover smiled secretly as she alone caught the unintended humour in her mother’s words.

‘Oh, as you say, Mrs Beckitt, but your daughter’s very trim.’ She gently prodded Clover’s belly. ‘Just look…I wish my belly was as flat…Can you hold the end of the tape for me, Clover?…At your waist…while I get the length?…That’s lovely.’

It was half an hour later when they left. Mary Ann had paid a deposit on the dress which would be ready on Good Friday, provided Clover could come for a fitting about the same time next Wednesday.

When they returned to the Jolly Collier Mary Ann placed two plated dinners in the oven to be reheated. The meal had been cooked earlier by Zillah Bache.

‘Are you marrying for love, Mother, or convenience?’ Clover asked pointedly as she sat down in front of the coal fire. The question had been troubling her.

Mary Ann shut the oven door of the cast-iron grate using a rag and stood upright. ‘Do I seem the sentimental sort, our Clover?’

‘That’ll be the day.’ Clover scrutinised her mother’s expression, looking in her eyes for a clue as to her true feelings. ‘I just wondered. It’s all so sudden. It’s such a shock.’

Mary Ann pulled a chair from under the scrubbed wooden table. She sat down opposite her daughter and sighed. ‘Ever since your father passed away fifteen years ago next November I’ve run this place on me own, pub and brewery. I’ve tried to bring you up to the best of me ability and all, but it ain’t bin easy. I had to take Zillah on to help in the house and look after you. But folk cost money to employ and money’s scarce, Clover. It’s always bin scarce.’

‘Our beer’s still as good as ever it was,’ Clover encouraged.

‘Because I know what I’m a-doing when I brew it and because it has to be, else we’d sell none. By this time last year though, our Clover, I’d had enough. I know I never said nothing to you but I was ready to pack it all in. I’d been working me fingers to the bone eighteen hours a day. And for what? What with a mortgage on this place to pay off, bills for malt and hops, for coal to heat the copper and the mash tun, the excise man to pay, as well as Zillah and Job Smith, that bone-idle cellarman. And God knows who else. It’s no wonder I insisted you went out to work. We’ve needed the money, Clover.’

‘And it’s not every girl’s dream, working in a foundry,’ Clover commented as one of the cats, Malcolm, came in and rubbed itself gently against her shins, a sensation she enjoyed.

‘Anyway, when I thought about it hard, our Clover, I had to admit to meself that the only way we could live in anything like comfort and peace of mind would be for me to marry, cause there’s no sign of you getting wed.’

Clover peered through the window onto the back yard and saw that it was raining. ‘Well, that’s not my fault. When have I ever been given the chance to do any courting?’ she said, throwing right back in her mother’s face the prejudice she instinctively held against any of Clover’s likely suitors. ‘You’ve never allowed me to go out with lads.’

‘It’s been for your own good,’ Mary Ann said soberly, picking her fingernails. ‘I never wanted you getting mixed up with any damned scruff. I always wanted you to wait till the right chap came along.’

Clover shrugged off the subject. Her mother knew her feelings well enough. ‘So did you ask Jake Tandy to marry you?’

‘Me ask him? As if I would.’ A hint of a smile teetered on the brink of Mary Ann’s eyes at that. ‘I didn’t have to, thank the Lord. He asked me. I’ve got to know him over the six months he’s been a regular here. He’s had a stall on Dudley Market and he ain’t short of a bob or two. He’ll have a house to sell as well. He wants to put money into the brewing, to expand that side of the business. He reckons we can sell our beer to free houses and off-licences. Not only that, he reckons them as owns the pits and the ironworks will buy barrels of the stuff off us. As he says, a hammer driver in a forge can sink twenty pints or more on a hot day. For every worker that amounts to a tidy lot of beer, our Clover.’

‘So tell me about Jake, Mother. I hardly know him.’

‘He’s younger than me – by four years…’

‘So he’s what? Thirty-eight?’

Mary Ann nodded, either ignoring or failing to recognise the trace of disapproval in Clover’s voice.

‘And he’s never been married?’

‘Oh, he’s been married afore, Clover. He’s a widower.’

‘A widower? Does he have children then? Children who are coming to live here?’

‘Just a daughter. Seventeen. Two years younger than you.’