Helen Forrester - Yes, Mama

Elizabeth had written to Andrew and his wife, inviting them to the christening. She received no reply and, after the christening tea, she had retired to Florence’s privy and wept at the snub. She wondered if Mrs Crossing had even been shown the invitation.

As the long summer holiday progressed, Charles began to feel bored. He inquired of his mother when they would be taking their holiday in Wales. He was taken aback when Elizabeth snapped at him sharply that Papa was far too busy this year to think about holidays.

Feeling contrite about her peevishness, Elizabeth asked him if he would like to spend a few days with his Aunt Clara at West Kirby.

‘Not really, Mama,’ he replied. Though Aunt Clara lived by the sea, her many ailments did not make her appealing to him.

He began to accompany Polly when she wheeled Alicia in her pram through Princes Park. He liked Polly; she had never seen either shells or seaweed or even sand and had shown a most respectful interest when he had explained what they were.

In the park, she always paused for a little chat with a young gardener weeding the flower beds; he regularly managed to be working somewhere along the usual route of their walk, and Charles teased Polly about him.

In the course of one of their walks, Charles discovered that Polly could not read. He stopped in the middle of the sandy carriageway, and stared up at the handsome young woman. ‘Really?’

She smiled down at him mischievously. ‘Aye. I don’t know nothin’, ’cept lookin’ after Miss Alicia and a few things like that.’

He began walking again, kicking a stone along in front of him. ‘I’d have thought you would be able to read easily. Servants always know so much.’

‘I suppose they do – folks like Mrs Tibbs. But me? I only scrubbed doorsteps and cleaned brasses and helped me Mam sell fents in the market sometimes, afore I were married.’

‘What are fents?’

‘Bits of old or damaged cloth – for dusters, like.’

‘I see. I didn’t know you were married.’

‘I’m not no more …’ Her voice faltered. In the weeks since she had been with the Woodmans, she had wept fairly constantly, alone in her windowless garret. Her only comfort had been the delicious sensation of Alicia’s contented sucking at her breast. ‘Me oosband,’ she picked up again, ‘he were killed in the docks.’

‘How dreadful!’ Charles was genuinely shocked. He understood that to be a widow was very hard; even the Bible said that you had to look after the widowed and the fatherless.

‘It were proper awful,’ Polly confided to him. ‘And me baby died – so I come to look after Miss Alicia.’ She smiled sadly down at the sleeping child in the old basketware pram in which Charles himself had been wheeled as an infant.

‘Well, I’m glad you did come. These hols are boring enough. Say, would you like to learn to read? It’s easy, once you know how. I’ve still got my first books up in my bedroom – and I bet there are some girls’ books in Flo’s old bedroom. I could teach you in the evenings.’

So that summer Polly learned to read and discovered a wonderful dream world.

She also learned to sew better than she had previously done. Elizabeth sent up to the nursery loads of sheets and other household linens, demanding that they be neatly darned or patched; servants should be kept busy, according to Elizabeth.

At first, Polly had been appalled at the huge pile of mending, but Elizabeth had told Rosie to instruct her, particularly on how to patch and how to turn a sheet sides to middle , and they both spent long evening hours by Polly’s single candle carefully weaving their needles in and out of the heavy linen cloth.

When Alicia had acquired a pattern of sleep and it was fairly certain that she would continue to sleep for an hour or two, Polly took a piece of sewing down to the big basement kitchen and sat for a little while with Rosie and Mrs Tibbs round the roaring fire in the kitchen range. ‘I’ll go crackers if I don’t have a bit of a jangle with somebody,’ she told Mrs Tibbs, and Mrs Tibbs had agreed that a little gossip was necessary to one’s sanity. Except for minor squabbles, they got along together fairly well and they would talk about the neighbours and their servants, about the Woodman family and their own families, while Fanny toiled through the washing-up and the scouring of the big, soot-covered iron saucepans.

From these agreeable sessions, Polly began to learn how such a fine house was run, how you could acquire a few perks to take home, like a half-used tablet of soap, nearly finished bottles of wine or perfume, odds and ends like buttons, discarded in the wastepaper basket. In addition Mr Bittle, the gardener, according to Fanny, would sometimes provide a few windfall apples or pears or even a seedling geranium in a pot. ‘Me auntie were made up when I bring ’er a little geranium,’ she confided to Polly, as she sat down on a nursery chair to rest, after bringing up a hod of coal. ‘Mrs Tibbs makes quite a bit on the side, Rosie says. She’ll take a slice or two off a joint or a little bitty butter or cheese – not much, but it adds up to a meal or two by the time ’er day off come around. She takes it to ’er sister.’

Another time, she remarked, ‘Ould Woodie is a mingy master, a proper pinchpenny, so he’s askin’ for theft. I suppose the Missus is used to ’im being mean and pokin’ his nose into the housekeepin’ book. And him payin’ out for his fancy woman; the poor Missus must lose out because of her,’ she giggled knowingly.

Polly laughed. Then she said more soberly, ‘It’s hard when you’ve no man interested in yez.’

As Polly’s grief over Patrick diminished, she had begun to look for someone to replace him; she was young and strong and could not imagine life without a man in it. But she lived in a world of women domestics, and the valet of the Colonel who lived next door was, she soon found, not interested in females. ‘And he a fine lookin’ man,’ she tut-tutted to Fanny. Fanny’s reply was ribald in the extreme.

Every time Polly went home to see her parents, however, she was reminded how lucky she was. The stench of sewage and the lack of even a decent cup of tea had not bothered her in earlier days – she had taken hardship for granted; but not any longer.

The overcrowding had been lessened by the removal of her paternal aunt and her five children to another cellar, but she was grieved to see her struggling mother grow progressively wearier and her unemployed father more despairing. She gave them most of the two shillings a week she earned, and, after her few hours of freedom, she would return thankfully to the nursery, to have only the smell of the baby round her and to know that tea might not be a very large meal but it would certainly arrive.

Though not given to pondering on what the future held, she began to consider how she could continue working for the Woodmans after Alicia was weaned. As a possible alternative, she dreamed occasionally of the gardener in Princes Park. He had never asked her out but he always seemed glad to see her. If he were promoted, he might be given a tied cottage in the park; they were sometimes provided for more senior gardeners. There he might be able to keep a pig and grow some vegetables – and keep a wife.

Unlike Rosie, she did not meet the tradesmen who came to the house and lingered round the back door until they were sent packing by Mrs Tibbs or, in the case of the grocer, invited into her private bed-sitting room to discuss the week’s groceries.

In the darkness of the early morning, Rosie, the house-parlourmaid, used to scurry down the path in the back garden, to get a kiss and a quick fondle from the milkman, who was courting her. Then, trembling with desire, she would rush back into the house and tear upstairs to wash out the great bath with its mahogany surround, before Humphrey Woodman got up. She would lay out his cut-throat razor, his moustache scissors and his shaving cup on the bathroom dressing-table and wipe down his leather razor strop which hung on the wall beside the sink.