My Daughter, My Mother (21 page)

We do hope this letter reaches you all right. Lucy and I have not written to you sooner, partly because it took us quite some time and difficulty to obtain your full address, and also because we thought it wise to let you have some months to settle back into your home life. We hope very much that you have now done so and are feeling well adjusted and happy in your family home.

Your leaving of us was so sudden that I must confess I found it most upsetting and it has taken us quite some time to get over it. Dotty was lost without you, and I’m quite sure Rags and ‘the girls’ in the paddock missed your visits as well. All of them are well. Since your departure, and quite recently, Dotty, though far from being youthful herself, has mysteriously managed to find herself a suitor and is, as I write, expecting pups! That will mean a certain amount of disruption in the house, I’m sure, but we are now of course rather excited at the prospect.

Lucy and I are most interested to know how you are getting on, and we both hope very much that you will write us a few lines to tell us your news. We hope you are still progressing well in your lessons. You are a clever little girl, dear, and could go far. John and Patty are getting along well at school now they are back in Birmingham – I’m sure they would also be delighted to see you, Maggie dear, as would we, if a visit could ever be arranged. Their address is as follows. [There was an address in Sparkhill, and then the letter signed off with another entreaty for Margaret to write with her news.]

Yours affectionately,

Jenny Clairmont

Margaret had read the letter hundreds of times, and knew every sentence in it off by heart. She sat holding it, comforted by the good quality of the paper, which contrasted with the cheap, lined sheets she had to write on – when she could find any at all. Paper was in very short supply.

Still holding the letter, she stared down at her feet, which were clad in a pair of old black lace-ups, which Mrs Jennings had got for her from the rag market. They were a size too big, ‘But you’ll grow into them, bab,’ Mrs Jennings had said. She had then had the task of extracting the money for them from Ted Winters, who claimed to have no idea that children grew and had to be clothed and shod.

‘Why should I pay to dress your daughter?’ Dora demanded of him. ‘You do bugger-all else for her – the least you can do is keep her in shoe leather.’

Margaret thought of the nice pair of brown T-bar shoes that the sisters had bought for her when she was in Buckley, which had fitted her feet like soft gloves. They had been in the holdall that Ted Winters hurled over the gate that March morning. The morning he had thrown her life away.

This was supposedly her real life, but she felt like an outsider. The life she yearned for from the depths of her heart, and the place where she belonged – all this was in Buckley, where she was a real person. A girl called Maggie.

That freezing night when she and her father, Ted Winters, finally reached Birmingham and trudged the last mile from the railway station, the smells of the city rushed in to meet her. She had forgotten it. In more than four years she had become a country girl, breathing air flavoured with leaf mulch and wood smoke in winter, blossom and wheat in the warmer months. Stumbling along these murky, blacked-out streets, all the smells were of a manufacturing smokiness that was bitter and acrid.

On the main roads, by the dim lights of blacked-out buses, she caught glimpses of the bulky outline of her father. He had walked all day in silence, except to curse her and tell her to ‘Get on!’ Already she loathed him. At last, after a day that had seemed several eternities, they turned down the slimy entry in Upper Ridley Street, groping along in the darkness.

The house was as cold as a tomb. When Ted Winters struck a match and lit the gas mantle, Margaret giddily seized the back of a chair. She was already weak from hunger and exhaustion, but the sight of the room stunned her. She knew it so well, knew it the way a dream comes back to you in the morning. Was this real? Is this where she had come from? And of course she knew, with dread certainty, that it was. That last morning came rushing back into her mind: her mother coming round the door; the smell of the newly baked loaf . . .

‘Mom?’ she murmured. ‘Where’s my mom?’

Ted Winters was riddling the range, hoping to stir some last life into it. He barely turned his head.

‘I told yer – your mother passed on, years back. You won’t be seeing ’er again. You’re the one who’s gunna keep the ’ouse now.’

He did at least brew a cup of tea and gave Margaret some in a jam jar. There was just one cup in the house. She sank onto the rickety chair and found her feet could touch the ground. Last time she had sat on it, Tommy had lifted her up there.

‘Tommy?’ she said. Her forgotten family seemed to rush back to her. ‘Is Tommy coming back too?’

Ted Winters was crouched over the table, holding his cup up close to his stubbly chin.

‘Yer brother? Nah. Gone for good, ’e has. Yer won’t be seeing that one again. Good riddance. And you’re only ’ere ’cause yer’ve got a job to do. I’m not looking for another mouth to feed.’ He cocked his head towards the stairs. ‘Go on now – get up to bed. You can sleep in the attic.’

Sitting on the bed, as the victory celebrations went on outside, Margaret pressed the letter against her body, as she had done so many times, trying to find comfort in it. She knew she would not reply. She would never see the sisters again or go back to that life. It had been like a miraculous land at the parting of the sea, over which the waters had closed again, leaving her with a knowledge and a hunger that she would not otherwise have had. She was Margaret Winters, the boss-eyed daughter of a man called Ted Winters, a girl who skivvied and slaved without a word of thanks, who barely had a rag to call her own and whose father didn’t care if she lived or died, so long as she did his bidding. But that letter reminded her that, inside Margaret, there was a girl who knew how to speak differently, who had read and played in the fresh air, done sewing that wasn’t just darning the old man’s socks, ridden a pony and played with Dotty the dog. Inside was a girl called Maggie who knew how good life could be.

But now, that Maggie was dead and buried.

Twenty-Five

The morning after Ted Winters brought Margaret back to Birmingham, she woke up to hear him bawling up the stairs.

‘Wench! Get yerself down ’ere! You’re no sodding good to me lying around in bed.’

Margaret leapt up from sleep and sat hugging her knees, shivering with cold and gazing, bewildered, round the attic room. The floor was bare, rough boards, and the only furniture was a narrow cupboard and the iron bedstead on which she had slept. She had covered herself with one thin, yellowish blanket, which had an odd, brown stain up the middle. The dark cupboard had one of its hinges missing, so that its door hung drunkenly to one side. Margaret could see daylight through cracks around the window frame.

‘Where are yer?’ His voice hectored. ‘Get yerself down ’ere!’

Margaret badly needed to relieve herself and there was no sign of a chamber pot. She dimly remembered that the lavatories were up at the other end of the yard. She was still dressed in her clothes from yesterday, so she pushed her feet into her shoes and crept down the stairs. The Old Man was standing with his back to her in a singlet, shaving at the scullery sink, over which hung a small, rectangular mirror.

‘’Bout time. I dain’t bring you all the way back ’ere just to lie a-bed. You can get the fire going – and get some tea on,’ he ordered.

‘I need the lavatory,’ she said. That’s what they called it in Buckley.

‘Ew!’ He mocked. ‘
Lavatory!
Well, cowing well hurry up! It’s the lav round ’ere – and you need the key. Don’t you know anything?’

Hugging herself to try and keep warm, she stepped out into a yard paved with blue bricks, some of which had heaved up with all the damp, making it necessary to watch where you walked. In the middle of the yard was a lamp and, on the far wall, a tap. The dwellings around, which backed on to others opening onto the street, looked cramped and grimy after the beautiful house she had been used to.

Margaret had the strangest feeling walking across the yard. Everything about it – the walls and doors, the patterns of the bricks – felt almost as familiar as her own body, while at the same time it all felt strange and dirty and alien. Beyond the brewhouse, the communal wash house, were the lavatories.

She hesitated outside, nose wrinkling at the stench. She thought of the spotless privy at Orchard House. But she was so desperate, she knew she would have to go into the dark, cobwebby place. She did her business as fast as she could, not looking round in case there were spiders or roaches crawling towards her down the rough bricks, then fled back out into the yard.

It was quiet and she realized it was Sunday morning. The only person about was a boy close to her age in a long, stained shirt and seemingly not much else, who gawped at her with his mouth open. The next thing it occurred to him to do was to make a sneering grimace, then stick his tongue out as far as it would go. Margaret turned away. Her chest ached with the need to cry, but she could see already that she’d get no sympathy from any quarter here. She swallowed her tears and went indoors.

Ted Winters had gone to all the trouble of fetching Margaret home to number two, back of sixteen Upper Ridley Street, because he was short of a housekeeper. If it wasn’t for Dora Jennings next door, he wouldn’t have even let Margaret go to school.

‘She’s got to go, Ted,’ Dora insisted. ‘It’s the law – and if they don’t find out for themselves that you’re keeping her back, I’ll set them on you. It’s not fair on her, making her do all your dirty work.’

Dora was the one person who seemed pleased to see Margaret and bothered with her. Over the next days, though hard-pressed herself, she helped Margaret by teaching her how to do things in the house: getting the range lit, black-leading it, cleaning and cooking. And, as they worked, she talked to Margaret about her family and what had happened to them.

‘Your mother only lasted a couple of days after you and Tommy went away,’ she said as they swept the neglected floor of a sneeze-making accumulation of dust and soot. ‘Oh, it broke her heart, poor lamb, seeing you both off. But she was so ill already, she could never’ve looked after you – you remember that, don’t you, bab?’

Margaret nodded. She was full of an ache, all the time, her whole body hurting. Now she was back here, she was remembering her mother and grieving for her. She had been a gentle, put-upon woman who had done her best for her children in often desperate circumstances.

‘Poor soul,’ Dora went on. ‘Both your brothers – half-brothers I should say, Edwin and Cyril – joined up as soon as they could, so they were gone. No one’s heard from them; we don’t know where they are. Anyroad – that’s it, bab, we’ll scoop it up into that bucket and take it down the bottom of the yard . . . Now Elsie – your half-sister – you remember her, don’t you?’

Margaret nodded, hopefully. Of her half-siblings, Elsie had been the nicest.

‘Course yer do. Well, she’s married: living over Digbeth way, and she’s got her hands full with two babbies. But we’ll go and see her one day, shall we? Anyway, about yer dad, the thing about him is, he can spruce up and he’s got the gift of the gab. He can charm the birds out of the trees when he’s of a mind to, and of course he’s not bad-looking, with a bit of help from a razor and a lick of soap. That’s how he hooked up with your poor mother, desperate as she was, on her own with three babbies. He soon found another hopeless case to come and keep house for him. Gladys her name was. He never even married her, neither. A poor thing she was – not much to ’er. But even she took off, only a month ago. And what with the war, he’s had to shift hisself and do a bit of work – they caught up with him, packed him off into munitions. Even then he drank all his wages away. That Gladys found out in the end what an idle, boozing sod he is . . . Sorry for coming out with it like that, Margaret, but we all know what ’e’s like, don’t we?’

Margaret was certainly finding out. He never had a word for her except to grunt orders, and he was always out, asleep or in a drunken stupor. She had quickly realized that for him she was not a person. She was an object, a slave to do his bidding.

Buying food was very hard for Margaret, because if she left it until after school there was nothing left in the shops, and there were the ration books to contend with. Dora helped as much as she could, and took Margaret to get a new ration book for herself. But Margaret often had to skip school days, or was caned for being late. The rest of her time was spent cleaning and cooking, and she never was very good at either.

She dreaded the moment he came home after work. She was expected to have a meal ready. He would loom dark in the doorway.

‘Where’s my tea then?’ As often as not it was some sort of stew, the tiny meat ration eked out with vegetables.

‘What d’you call this slop? I’m a working man: d’you expect me to eat this?’

Once or twice he threw the plate at her, smashing it on the range. The first time Margaret burst into tears at the sight of the concoction, which she had been anxiously stirring in the old saucepan, seeping down the front of the range to the floor.

‘No more than pigswill!’ he was bawling. ‘What bloody good are you to anyone, yer stupid wench! At least your mother could cook.’

Dora, hearing the crash and the shouting, ran in from next door to find Margaret cowering by the range, hands over her face.

‘What’s going on in ’ere?’ She was barely five foot, but her energy and flashing eyes made her fearsome. ‘What’re you doing, Ted Winters? Oh, I see – so you’ve thrown yer plate over, have yer? Well, what’re you going to eat now then, eh? You’ve got to give her a chance to learn, Ted. She’s only young! And while we’re about it, she’s only got the clothes she’s standing up in, thanks to you throwing everything away.’

‘Well, what am I s’posed to do about it?’ Ted retorted. ‘I don’t know about anything like that.’