The Girl From Barefoot House
For Deidre and David
Barefoot House
MAUREEN LEE
Contents
Josie glanced at her watch. Half past eleven. It was time she was getting back, she had a plane to catch tomorrow. But she was reluctant to leave while the young man was there, which was crazy. He hadn’t even glanced in her direction. Did she intend to sit there in the hope that everyone would go except him, leaving
her
to be the object of his undivided attention?
She was already feeling dead peculiar, anyroad.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
had been a magical experience. Dusk had fallen over Central Park halfway through the performance, then night came, stars appeared. The grass on which the audience sprawled, mostly couples, felt cooler, and the scent of a million flowers was almost overpowering. As the sky grew dark the stage became brighter, the actors’ voices louder, more resonant, the audience more rapt. Something stirred in Josie, an acute awareness of the beauty and the clarity of her surroundings and the sheer brilliance of the lines the actors spoke. Then came something else, a longing to have someone with her. Not Lily, a man, a boyfriend, in whose arms she could lie as she watched the play draw to a close, and they would experience the beauty of the magical night together. Would she ever meet a man like that?
Then she’d come to Best Cellar, and there he was.
1938–1940
1
‘Hello, Petal. I’m home.’
‘Mam!’ Josie raised her arms and was lifted out of bed and hugged so hard she could scarcely breathe.
‘I see you drank your milk and ate your cream crackers like a good girl.’
‘Yes, Mam.’ She snuggled her head against Mam’s neck, into the curved space she thought of as especially hers.
‘I’ve missed you, Petal. Now, I’ve got a visitor, so you sit on the stairs for a little while. Take Mam’s cardy, and don’t forget Teddy. I’ll be out to get you in the twinkling of an eye. Then I’ll make us a cup of cocoa and a jam butty, like always.’
‘All right, Mam.’ Josie slithered obediently to the floor, and Mam gently placed the navy blue cardigan around her shoulders.
‘How old is she?’ The gruff voice came from a dark corner of the candlelit room, by the door. A man stepped forward, very tall, with a bent nose and black curly hair. His face was hard, but his eyes were troubled.
‘Three.’
‘Bit young to be left on her own all this time, isn’t she? It’s not safe.’
‘What do you mean, it’s not safe?’ Mam said tartly. She removed the long pearl pin from her brown felt hat. ‘There’s a fireguard, and I leave something to eat. She knows I’ll always come back. Anyroad, what’s it to you?’
‘Nowt. Just put her outside so I get what I’ve come for before you pass out. You’re stewed rotten, and I’ve been waiting all night long for this.’
‘It’s what I was about to do before you shoved your big oar in.’ The voice changed as she turned to her child. ‘Go on, luv,’ she said softly, shoving her through the door and on to the landing.
Josie sat at the top of the stairs and held Teddy up so that he could see the stars peeping down at them through the skylight and the filmy cobwebs floating eerily in the light of the moon. Then she wrapped the sleeves of the cardigan around her neck, and tried to tuck her bare feet inside the ribbed hem. It was cold in her nightie on the landing. Their attic was the warmest place in the house according to Mam, because heat rose, and they got the benefit of everyone’s fires, as well as their own. The attic was where the maids used to live a long time ago. It had a small iron fireplace and a triangular sink in the corner. There was a tiny window just below where the roof peaked.
The stairs in the tall house in Huskisson Street, a mere stone’s throw from the Protestant cathedral, had their own special smell, a mixture of all sorts of interesting things: of food – mainly boiled cabbage or fried onions – scent, smoke, dust, a peculiar smell that Mam said was dry rot. The house had once been very grand, having been owned by a man who imported rare spices from the Orient. The rooms used to be full of fine furniture; exquisite rugs and carpets had covered the floors. Everywhere, apart from the attic, had been wired for
electricity, which was very up to date, as not everyone could get light at the flick of a switch. Most people still used gas.
Mam spent ages describing how she imagined the place might have looked. ‘But now it’s gone to rack and ruin,’ she sighed. All that remained was the opulent wallpaper in the downstairs rooms. Even the bathroom had lost its grandeur: tiles had fallen off the walls, and the taps provided water at a trickle. The chain in the lavatory was just a piece of string, and no one could remember it having had a seat.
There was a party downstairs, lots of voices, music – someone was playing a mouth organ. Josie never seemed to be awake when the house was quiet. Perhaps it never was. Perhaps there were always people having parties, shouting and screaming, fighting or laughing, crying or singing. Sometimes the bobbies came, stamping through the house as if they owned the place, up and down the stairs, banging on doors, not waiting to be asked in. When this happened, Mam would sit Josie on her knee and be reading a story when a bobby barged in and demanded she come to the station.
‘How dare you!’ she would say in the frosty, dead posh voice she kept specially for such occasions. ‘I’m just sitting here, reading me little girl a story. Since when has reading been a crime?’
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ the bobby would say, touching his funny big dome of a hat, followed by something like, ‘I didn’t realise respectable women lived here.’
Mam would toss her great mane of brown hair and say, ‘Well, they do, see.’
On Sundays, after she and Mam and some of the girls had been to Mass, everyone would be in a great good humour and they would gather in one of the downstairs
rooms for a cup of tea and a jangle. There were six other girls besides Mam – fat Liz, tall Kate, buck-toothed Gladys, black Rita, Irish Rose and smelly Maude. Maude was much older than the others and going bald, but was still called a girl. She smoked a lot, and the fingers of her right hand were a funny orange colour. Mam was fondest most of Maude. Josie, in her best dress, would be in her element as she was made a desperate fuss of, passed from one knee to another and petted almost to death. The girls often bought her presents – a bar of chocolate, a hairslide or a little toy. It was Maude who’d given her Teddy for her first birthday.
‘They’re dead envious because I’ve got you,’ Mam would whisper. ‘They’d all like a little girl like my Petal, though they’d never admit it. At nineteen, Mam was the next to youngest there, but the only one a mother. This made her very proud, as if she had one up on the others.
Josie was quite definitely not a burden or a cross to bear, as some of the girls suggested. Okay, she could have earned two or three times as much if she had been on her own, but she made enough to keep body and soul together, thanks very much. The Sunday before last, when the subject had come up again, Mam lost her temper when Kate said, ‘Let’s face it, Mabel, someone in our line of work would be far better off without a kiddie.’
‘Cobblers!’ Mam flashed angrily. ‘You’re only saying that because you’re jealous. Our Josie’s more important to me than anything in the world.’
‘Why should I be jealous when I got rid of two of me own?’ Kate countered. ‘If you cared about your Josie all that much, you wouldn’t be here. This is no place to raise a kid. You had a proper education, not like us lot. You’re always on about that chemist’s shop where you
used to work. If you put your mind to it, you could get a decent job like a shot.’
Like much of the conversation that she overheard, this went completely over Josie’s head, but she noticed Mam’s rosy cheeks turn white. ‘No, I couldn’t,’ she whispered. ‘Not while I’m stuck on the booze.’
The door to the attic opened and the man with the crooked nose came out. He said kindly, ‘C’mon, kid. I’ll take you back in.’ He scooped Josie up, carried her into the room and sat her on the bed. Mam was in her pink nightie, twisting her long hair into a plait, which made her look like a beautiful saint. She swayed and nearly fell.
‘You may well be a good screw,’ the man snapped, ‘but you’re a lousy ma. If you’re not careful, one of these days the kid’ll be taken off you.’
‘You bugger off, you,’ Mam said in a slurred, trembly voice. ‘You’d go a long road before you’d find a bonnier child. And, anyroad, she’ll be four in May.’ She sat on the bed and put her arm around Josie’s shoulders. ‘You’re happy, aren’t you, luv?’
Josie looked up from tucking Teddy under the bedclothes so that just his head and arms showed. ‘Oh, yes, Mam.’
‘See!’ Mam said challengingly.
‘She looks fit,’ the man conceded grudgingly. ‘As to being happy, well, she don’t know any better, does she? She probably don’t know what happy means.’
After he’d gone, Mam filled the kettle from the sink in the corner and put it on the hob to boil, talking to herself all the while. ‘I wonder if we should move, find somewhere else?’ she muttered. ‘Though I like it here, the girls are a scream, well mostly, and the landlord’s more or less decent. But I’ll have to start using a different
pub. I don’t want to come across that geezer tonight a second time, nosy-poke bugger that he was. I’ll have a word with Maude, see what she thinks.’ She suddenly flew across the room and seized Josie in her slim arms. ‘I couldn’t live without you, Petal. I’d kill us both before I’d let them take you away.’
‘Yes, Mam,’ Josie answered. She had no idea what Mam was on about, though she knew what being happy meant. She sat on the big bed, watching the candle send flickering shadows on to the sloping wooden rafters and the bare brick walls. Mam took some clothes off the line strung between rafters and put them over the fireguard. They began to steam and give off a warm, familiar smell. Then her mother mixed the cocoa, cut and margarined the bread, spread the jam, and Josie thought it would be impossible to be happier than she was now. In a minute, Mam would bring the butties to bed with her, leaving the cocoa on the floor for now, and they would eat them sitting up, leaning against each other.
‘What is it we need, Petal?’ Mam said, coming over with the butties on a cracked plate.
‘A tray,’ Josie said promptly. Every night without fail Mam brought up their desperate need of a tray.
‘That’s right. We could prop it on our knees, like a little table. Tell you what, we’ll walk into town tomorrow, see if there’s any trays going cheap in Blackler’s bargain basement. We’ll make a day of it, wear our bezzie clothes. We’ll finish off with a cup of tea in Lyon’s.’
‘Yes, Mam,’ Josie said blissfully. Mam turned every day into an adventure. Depending on the weather, they would go to the swings in Princes Park, or for a ride on the ferry to Birkenhead or Seacome – sometimes they even went as far as New Brighton, and if Mam was flush
they’d go on the waltzer and the bobby horses. If it were raining, they would wander around St John’s Market, or the big posh shops like George Henry Lee’s and Bon Marché.
As Mam climbed into bed beside her, she said, ‘We used to have a lovely black lacquered tray at home – you should have seen it, Petal.’
‘Tell us about home,’ Josie murmured.
‘Again? You’d think I’d lived in Buckingham Palace, not an ordinary house off Penny Lane.’
‘’S interesting.’
Mam laughed. ‘Interesting! That’s a big word for a little girl not long off four.’
‘Well, it is. What was the tray like?’ Josie took a butty and snuggled into the crook of Mam’s arm, careful not to disturb Teddy, who had gone fast asleep.
‘I told you, black lacquered. It sort of shone, and had flowers, like orchids, painted on it. Orange and pink they were, with long, green leaves. Me dad brought it back from Japan, I think it was. Our house in Machin Street was full of lovely things me dad brought from all over the world. The best tray was only brought out on Sundays. Weekdays, we used the horrible wooden one. Mind you, I won’t turn up me nose if wooden’s all they’ve got in Blackler’s basement tomorrow.’
‘What did your dad look like, Mam?’
‘You know as much about him as I know meself, and what’s more, you know you know.’ Mam tickled her tummy, and Josie collapsed, giggling. ‘He was an Irishman from County Kildare, a captain in the merchant navy, and he died in the last year of the Great War, though it was the weather, a terrible storm, that killed him, not the fighting. I was only a month old, so I never
saw him, and he never saw me. Ne’er did the twain meet, as the saying goes.’