The Potato Factory (4 page)

Bob Marley cast his eyes over Mary's firm breasts and trim waist, and in an unabashed voiced declared, 'What a corker! Care for a drop o' ruin?' He indicated the public house with a toss of his head. 'Come on then, I'll buy ya a taste o' whatever's yer fancy, gin is it, or a pint o' best beer?'

Mary, though sorely tempted, could not accept his invitation for fear of upsetting Mrs Hodge by being late and returning to the house with the smell of strong spirits on her breath. She was not accustomed to drink, though on the rare occasions when, on a public holiday, she'd ventured out with Mrs Hodge, she'd found gin left her very excited in a physical sort of way.

'I'll not be seen with a costermonger,' she said tartly, this seeming the best way to end a relationship where she was already beginning to feel at a distinct disadvantage. She noted too that her breasts were heaving and she was finding it difficult to breathe.

Bob Marley drew back with an exaggerated expression of hurt. Cocking his head to one side, his mouth turned down at the corner, he looked down at his chest as though closely examining his apparel. 'Costermonger? Not bleedin' likely, lovey.' He patted a velvet lapel. 'This is me disguise. I'm what ya might call an hoperator, I do a bit o' this and a bit o' that, finding' a bit 'ere and disposin' of it over there, if ya knows what I mean?'

'Oh, a tout?' Mary shot back, bringing her fingers to her lips as she tried to contain her laughter.

'Well not exactly that neiver, jus'... well... er,' he smiled his golden smile, 'an hoperator!' He seemed disinclined to further discuss the subject of his occupation.

'Well, what 'bout yer place, then?' Bob Marley said cheekily tugging on his watch chain and taking Mary by the elbow.

'Who do you think I am? I ain't no dollymop! Shame on you, Bob Marley!' Mary pulled her arm away from him. But then she laughed, enchanted by the young rogue standing beside her. 'You can walk me 'ome and no touchin', that's all I'll promise for now.'

By the time they reached the house in Chelsea Mary was completely smitten by the young rogue. She kept him waiting in the lane at the back of the house while she unlocked the stout door set into the kitchen garden wall, whereupon she went directly into the kitchen to deliver the sole to Mrs Hodge, who, predictably, scolded her for the time she had taken on her errand.

Mary's heart pounded in her breast as she returned down the garden path to open the garden door and let Bob Marley within the precincts of the kitchen garden. Quickly locking the door behind him, she led him into the laundry.

Now, with less than half an hour having passed, fat Mrs Hodge stood over Mary's half-naked body having hysterics and crying out in alarm at the astonishing gymnastics taking place on a pile of dirty linen at her feet.

Bob Marley was the first to react. Frantically pulling on his breeches and snatching up his embroidered boots, he jumped to his feet and fled the scene, knocking aside the stout cook with his shoulder and escaping into the kitchen garden. Not bothering to test the door set into the garden wall, he threw his boots over the top into the lane beyond and, quick as a rat up a drainpipe, scrambled after them, stubbing his toe badly in the process, pausing only long enough on the other side to retrieve his boots before making good his escape down the lane and into the Kings Road beyond.

Mary found herself dismissed from her place of employment without references or even the wages due to her. Not an hour after her interrupted dalliance with Bob Marley she stood in the lane outside the rear of the large Chelsea house, her sole possessions the small wicker basket at her feet and her precious abacus under her arm. She glanced up at the big house and observed the odious Nanny Smith looking down at her from a top window. When the old woman realised Mary had seen her she leaned further out of the window and commenced to hiss in much the same manner as Waterloo Smith had done.

'The pox on you, you old cow!' Mary shouted up at her and then, picking up her basket, she proceeded to cross the lane. Then turning once again to look up at Nanny Smith, she yelled, 'I pushed your bloody cat off the window sill with me broom, it done two somersaults before it splattered on the ground!'

Then, head held high and without further ado, Mary proceeded in the direction of Hyde Park, not knowing why she'd bothered to lie to the old crone and not even sure why she had chosen this direction from any other, thinking only that she would find a quiet spot under one of the giant old beech trees and try to sort things out in her head.

Mary's future lay in tatters. She found a bench beside the Serpentine adjacent to a willow which hid her presence from passers-by. But no sooner was she seated than a dozen small brown ducks glided towards her, their webbed feet paddling frantically below the surface to give their smooth little bodies the look of effortless gliding. It was clear that they anticipated food from the wicker basket.

When Mary saw the ducks, quacking and fussing at the edge of the water, she realised Mrs Hodge hadn't even offered her a morsel to eat. A stern Mr Bishop had bid her pack her things and had shown her the door in the kitchen garden. Then, to Mary's enormous surprise, just as he was closing the door behind her, Mr Bishop pressed a small parcel upon her and announced in a deeply injured tone, 'You are ruined, my girl, utterly and completely ruined!' He paused and then added in the same melancholy voice, 'Now I simply cannot propose marriage to you.'

The door had closed behind her before Mary could fully comprehend this curious protestation. Mr Bishop had never entered the smallest part of her amorous imaginings, nor had he, perhaps with the exception of the obtaining of books from the master's library, shown any inclination to be especially kind to her. She placed the squarish parcel absently within her basket.

Now hungry and with nowhere to go, Mary started to weep softly. Although truthfully her tears were more for the warmth and security of Mrs Hodge's kitchen and the steaming plates of food so regularly placed in front of her than they were for love's labour lost with Bob Marley or, for that matter, Mr Bishop.

After a while Mary wiped her nose and dried her reddened eyes. 'C'mon, girl, cryin' never got a day's work done,' she said to herself, repeating a phrase she had heard so often as a little girl coming from her overburdened and sad-faced mother. She thought then for the first time about the parcel the butler had handed to her. Removing it from her basket she removed the wrapping to reveal the book
Gulliver's Travels,
quite her favourite. She smiled, feeling somewhat better towards life and the clumsy man whose marriage prospects she had so inadvertently ruined. Picking up her abacus and wicker basket, she crossed the park in an easterly direction to St Giles, where she knew from bitter experience she could obtain cheap lodgings.

It would be nice to report that Mary's literacy skills and excellent penmanship, together with her wizardry with numbers, led to a new and fortunate life. Alas, these were not skills required of a woman at that time and most certainly not of a woman of her class. In the next six months she wore out a pair of stout boots in an effort to obtain employment as a clerk. She was always the lone woman in a long queue of applicants for a position advertised, and she soon became the butt of their cruel male jokes.

Furthermore, her abacus was the cause of much hilarity among the prospective clerks. Mary's persistent presence in the line of men would soon lead to her being known to them by the nickname Bloody Mary. This came about after an incident when a tall, very thin young man with a pale pinched face and sharp rodent teeth, wearing a battered top hat that resembled a somewhat misshapen chimney stack, snatched Mary's abacus from her. He held it in front of her face announcing to the men in the line, 'See, gentlemen, a monkey, a lovely little monkey in a cage playin' at being a clerk with pretty beads!'

It was a feeble enough joke but one which nevertheless brought some hilarity to the anxious line of unemployed men eager for any sort of distraction to alleviate the boredom. Mary snatched her abacus back from the ferret-faced clown and, lifting it, slammed it down upon the young comic's head, causing the top hat he wore to concertina over his eyes and halfway along his narrow snotty nose. This created a great deal more hilarity in all but the unfortunate owner of the hat who, upon removing the object of their mirth and pulling and bashing it back into some semblance of its original shape, placed it again upon his head, then delivered a vicious blow to Mary's nose before running from the scene.

Mary's nose had not yet stopped bleeding by the time it became her turn for an interview. The chief clerk, a coarsely corpulent man with a sanguine complexion and the remains of fiery red hair on the sides of a completely bald pate, looked at her with disapproval, shaking his head in a most melodramatic manner. 'What's the name, girl?' he asked.

'Mary, sir, Mary Klerk.'

'Bloody Mary, more like!' The men in the queue laughed uproariously at this joke. 'G'warn scarper! Be off with you, girl. 'Aven't you been told, clerkin's a man's job!'

The men clapped and cheered him mightily and pleased with their response the chief clerk played further to the crowd, for he'd witnessed the earlier incident with the clown in the top hat. 'What's to become of us if we allow a monkey on our backs?'

There is precious little charity in a queue of starving men, most of whom had a wife and young ones to feed, and soon upon Mary's arrival in any employment queue, a familiar chant would go up:

Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary

Who does her sums on bead and rack

Go away, you're too contrary

You're the monkey, the bloody monkey

You're the monkey on our back!

The chant was to become such an aggravation that few prospective employers were prepared to even grant her an interview for fear of angering the men. The men, in turn, found it impossible to understand why a woman with a trim figure, of Mary's young age and class, could not make a perfectly good living on her back. More and more they came to regard it as entirely reprehensible that she should attempt to steal the bread from their mouths and allow their children to starve and, moreover, that she should attempt to do so with the help of a foreign and heathen contraption made of wood, wire and beads. They told themselves that a screen that quivered and rattled and ended up doing sums had a distinct smell of witchcraft about it.

As the weather turned colder and the queue more desperate, the resentment against Mary grew out of all proportion. In the fevered imaginations of the unemployed clerks Bloody Mary's presence in a job queue soon took on all the aspects of a bad omen. When they returned home empty-handed to their ragged and starving families they had come to believe that her presence had 'soured the queue', so the luck they all felt they needed to gain a position had gone elsewhere.

Mary's face had grown gaunt for lack of sufficient nourishment and, in truth, there began to be a somewhat simian look about her. With her large green anxious eyes darting about and her head turning nervously this way and that, expecting danger from every corner, the men began to believe increasingly that she was an incarnation of some evil monkey spirit.

Her dress too began to be much the worse for wear and hung upon her thin frame to give Mary an altogether morbid appearance, her black cotton skirt and blouse, and modest bonnet and shawl, together with her worn boots peeping below the frayed edges of her skirt, all showed the wear and tear of the long hours spent standing patiently in every kind of inclement weather.

While there were tens of thousands of women in a similar state of dress, their own wives being of much the same appearance, they saw in Mary's forlorn and ragged clothing the black cloth of a witch's weeds. The monkey chant, as it became known, grew increasingly threatening in tone and it took the utmost stubbornness and will for Mary to present herself at an advertised location for a job interview.

Yet Mary persisted well beyond the dictates of commonsense and into the province of foolishness. The long hours spent at reading and writing and the childhood application she had demonstrated with the complexities of mathematics had somehow convinced her that within her capacity lay a destiny beyond her humble beginnings. Mary's father had told her almost from infancy that her abacus would be her salvation and she could not believe that she might end up like her consumptive silkweaver mother or the sad, destitute and drunken shipping clerk she knew as her father. She saw herself achieving something well beyond the modest expectations of a laundry maid, though quite what this could be was past anything she could imagine. She felt certain that this destiny would all begin, if only she could obtain a position as a clerk.

After six months Mary had used up most of her savings and had repeatedly changed her place of residence, on each occasion moving to a cheaper lodging house, until she ended up sharing a foul room with a family of five in the very cheapest of netherkens in Shoe Lane.

She would wake at dawn each morning and, with no more than a drink of water and without allowing herself to think, set out to seek employment, fearful that, should she pause to contemplate her increasingly desperate position, she would give up altogether and take herself to Waterloo Bridge and commit herself to the dark, foul river.

One bitterly cold morning she left her miserable lodgings at dawn to be the first in line for a clerk's position advertised in a warehouse on the south bank of the Thames at Saviour's Dock. This was one of the vilest slums in London, and the mist lay thick on the river, and the streets were dimmed to near blindness by the sulphurous-coloured smog from the first of the winter fires.