A Liverpool Lass (38 page)

So now Nellie and the other nurses stood in the cemetery on a clear February day and watched as the coffin was lowered into the ground. In Nellie’s head the words which had started this mad adventure replayed themselves.
Sometimes I want to get away so badly ... from John’s parents, from my own, even from Liverpool, because that’s where we were happy
. Poor Lucy, she had got away from everything, even life. Was it possible that, without even knowing it, she had found what she sought? Was she with her lover at last?

Rather to her own surprise, Lilac was happy in Rodney Street, with Polly as her favoured companion and Mrs Jenkins as a mother-substitute to them both. Her day began early, at five o’clock when it was still dark. The Mattesons were too posh to employ a knocker-upper, so it was not to the sound of a stick rattling on the windowpane that Lilac awoke, but to the buzzing whirr of Polly’s little alarm clock. It stood on the table between them and sometimes Polly would reach out in a daze and try to turn it off and push it onto the floor, where it would lie, ringing steadily, until one or other of them got up and silenced it.

Then Lilac’s day started. Not Polly’s, because she did not have to finish her work before school, she could lie in for another hour, almost. Lilac had to jump out of bed and have a cold water wash, always undertaken in a hurry, and then scurry quietly down to the kitchen. There, she riddled the stove, which was an all-night burner and kept the kitchen beautifully warm, and put fresh fuel on, shooting in coke from the long black hod onto the greying embers. After that she cleaned the stove with a damp cloth, which hissed and stuck as the metal heated up. Then she put the big, blackened kettle over the heat and scurried through to the family’s living rooms.

Here she lay and lit fires, cold despite the fact that she always put on her overcoat. She had a basket with paper, kindling and matches in it and in each room
there was a hearth-brush, a small shovel and bellows so that when the first coal caught she could encourage it to flame.

She raked out last night’s ashes, cleaned the grate and surround, lay the new fire, lit it, tended it through its first infantile splutterings until it was bravely flickering, then moved on to the next.

In this way an hour passed like lightning, and it was time to make a pot of tea for the rest of the staff. Mrs Jenkins, Polly, Martha who did the cooking, Emily who helped and Mr Jones, the butler, made up the staff. Mr Jones had been a fine figure of a man, famous for his kindliness to the staff and snootiness to visitors, but now he was old and wizened and had difficulty in crossing the hall at anything but a snail’s pace. Lilac, only there some of the time, scarcely counted, any more than Maudie did. Maudie came in three times a week to do the hard scrubbing, and there was a boy who polished shoes and lugged coal and kept the garden tidy.

‘I did the fires before you came, and I’ll do them again when you leave,’ Polly said resignedly, when Lilac asked who had done her work before. ‘That Joan could never seem to get the knack, some’ow.’

It was true that firelighting was a knack and one Lilac was glad she possessed. Not that she had been born with it, it had been taught her by Ruth, at the Coppners’, on a Saturday. How to place the paper, to make a wigwam of sticks, to balance small coals here and there. She had passed on her lovely job, with secret fears, to mucky Etty, but Art said Etty was that grateful, and the Coppners seemed pleased with her. Lilac thought rather unkindly that at least doing the fires was not likely to make Etty any dirtier, then felt bad when Art thanked her for thinking of his sister.

‘She’s cleaned ’erself up suffin wonderful,’ he said. ‘She ’as a little bit of soap what Ruth give ’er, an’ that blue dress of yourn; she looks a tidy sight better, I tell you.’

Other things were nice, too. Since she was used to leaving the court each morning with a piece of bread to eat as she hurried to school, and getting a drink of water from the tap in the yard when she arrived, Lilac had no expectations of the Matteson household feeding her before she left, and was astounded as well as delighted to find that Martha made her a big dish of porridge each morning and a mug of tea, too.

‘She even packs me carry-out,’ she told Art when they met during their dinner-hour. ‘Lovely bacon sarnies, or a bread roll with fish and mayonnaise, or hardboiled eggs and bread’n butter. And cake. And an orange, often.’

‘That’s good,’ Art said. He was growing taller every time Lilac saw him; he needed feeding, she thought anxiously, and told Martha about the friend who had saved her from Mr Jackson. After that Martha packed a bit extra for Art, and he was always glad of it.

When Lilac got home from school there was always time for a piece of cake and a drink before she was scurrying round once more. Cleaning, with Polly to show her how to polish brasses, get the soot off gas mantles, bring a shine to the long mirrors in the bedrooms. Dusting, she doing the bannisters and table-tops, Polly doing the bannister rails and table legs, being as she was smaller, she explained.

Martha cooked the dinner and Mrs Jenkins and Polly served it, with Lilac serving them – seeing that the dishes were ready for them, that plates were hot, water iced, vegetables served with a little pat of butter melting amongst the peas, or carrots, or new potatoes.
Emily washed up and cleared away, with help from anyone who could be spared.

Then it was staff supper, always something good, then Lilac did her homework until it was time to rush upstairs, light a fire in the master bedroom, turn down the bed, bring up hot water ... by the time they had finished for the day she was always glad to reach her attic and she had no trouble sleeping.

‘I could sleep on a clothes line, like they did in Waytes’s lodging house before the war,’ she used to declare, and she told Polly the story of the lodgers who could not afford a tanner for a bed being accommodated on a clothes line for a ha’penny, or so the story went.

‘But Nellie says they never slept on the clothes line, they slept on the floor, the line just marked out where their bit of floor was,’ she told Polly. ‘I’ve been past Waytes’s on the tram and you can see the dozens and dozens of old mattresses through the window. But no clothes lines.’

She did not see much of the Mattesons, not at first. They were childless and seemed old to Lilac, she in her forties, he perhaps fifty. Polly told Lilac that Mrs Matteson had been the daughter of an important man, a lord, and was thought to have married beneath her, but since she and the master had been deep in love and were still very fond, perhaps that did not matter much after all.

Once Mrs Matteson had had a lady’s maid though, and sometimes, when she saw Lilac cleaning upstairs, she called her into her room to tie ribbons, do up buttons down the back of a dress, or simply to fetch some small item of clothing which had been recently washed and ironed and was still downstairs in the scullery.

She was a handsome woman. Her thickly curling, mid-brown hair was streaked with white and her skin was soft and paper-pale but she had large, dark eyes which were alight with interest in the human race and her sweet expression soon drew people to her. Although at first Lilac was very shy, she gradually thawed under the warmth of the older woman’s personality and was soon looking forward to their encounters. And one day, amused by a small happening at school, she told Mrs Matteson the story and was rewarded by her mistress’s interest.

After that, their relationship became very much warmer and closer. Lilac saved up little anecdotes to relate and Mrs Matteson, more practically, saved small articles of clothing and bits of trimming which she thought Lilac might be able to wear or use. Mrs Matteson formed the habit of ringing for Lilac when she went to her room to get ready for dinner, and though often there was little that Lilac could do to be of practical help, the two of them, so different on the face of it, chattered happily of their lives like two old friends. Or, as Polly remarked, like mother and daughter.

‘She had a little daughter once,’ Mrs Jenkins told them as they wiped up the dinner dishes. ‘A dear little soul. Died of scarlet fever when she was ten ... she was fair-haired. It wouldn’t surprise me if the mistress didn’t fancy she saw a likeness.’

Time began to pass very quickly now, with Lilac enjoying both her work and her leisure. Polly and Lilac, sharing a room and their work, were good friends. Lilac could always make Polly laugh with tales about the Culler when she was small, or by relating stories which Nellie told in her letters.

And in return, Polly told her stories about the houses in Rodney Street and the people who lived there.

She chose quiet times, when the two of them were cleaning silver, polishing brass, or hemming dishcloths, and usually she told her stories when the older members of staff were out of the way, for they would have called such innocent talk gossip, a pastime of which they strongly disapproved.

‘Up the road, quite near the Culler, there used to be a family called Harrison,’ Polly said one day, when the two of them were energetically cleaning all the brass hearth instruments, sitting in the kitchen by the fire whilst the older servants had what they described as forty winks. ‘Awful snooty they was ... their noses was so ’igh in the air they tripped over their own feet! But there was a son of the ’ouse, Albert ’is name was, and ’e seemed different as different from ’is Ma and Pa. He ’ad lovely golden ’air an’ blue eyes, and ’e always gave you a smile and a lift of the ’at, no matter that you were only a Culler kid, and ’e’d stop to chat with the older girls an’ all. We thought that was so kind, see, we used to call ’im Bertie the beauty, or Harry the gent, until we found out ’e weren’t no gent at all, but a right villain.’

‘Why? What did he do?’ Lilac asked idly. She held up the brass shovel she had just polished and pulled a villainous face at her reflection, then grinned at Polly’s expression. ‘Sorry! Go on, so Harry was a right villain. What did he do?’

‘It ain’t funny, young Lilac. He’d always had an eye to the gels, we knew that, but the family took on a maid from the Culler and rumours flew; they said ’e’d persuaded ’is ole man to employ the gel because ’e was already sweet on ’er. Then one day young Bertie did a moonlight. Yes, for all ’e came from a good family an’ that, ’e flitted. The Harrisons advertised an’ all, not just in the
Echo
but in the big dailies. It were ... let me see, 1904 or 1905 it musta been, but they never saw ’im
again, or they ’aven’t so far, an’ it must be fifteen year since ’e went.’

‘What happened to the girl who went to be a maid there? Did he take her with him?’ Lilac asked hopefully. A runaway love-match between a Culler girl and a young toff would be just the sort of story she liked.

‘Nah! She were a nice gal, not more’n fifteen or so, called Maeve Malone. That golden-’aired boy took advantage of ’er something shameful; they threw ’er out after six month. She went into the work’ouse, ’cos no one else would ’ave her, see? Then when the babby were born they took it away and poor Maeve went funny in the ’ead. She’s still in the work’ouse, poor bugger.’

‘They took the baby away? Why, Polly, it might have been me,’ Lilac said, much struck by the story. ‘No one knows who my mother and father are ... oh, but I wouldn’t like to think I was a workhouse brat!’

‘No, chuck, it couldn’t be you! Mind, the timing would be about right, but they don’t put work’ouse brats on doorsteps, they ’and ’em over to the orphan asylums, names an’ all. Official, it is. I reckon the asylum gets a grant from the work’ouse or something like that.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Lilac said, much relieved. ‘Do you know who your mam and dad were, Poll?’

‘Yes, course I does! They died when I was a nipper, that’s ’ow I come to be in the Culler. They was Bert and Mary Clark an’ I ’ad a dozen brothers an’ sisters. Some of ’em were old enough to fend for theirselves when Mam and Dad died, but the rest of us went into orphan asylums. We don’t keep in touch, though,’ she added regretfully. ‘Too difficult, once you’ve been years apart.’

‘Well, I could be
anyone’s
child,’ Lilac said, polishing
vigorously. ‘But I have a strong feeling that my mother was very rich and beautiful and definitely wasn’t in a workhouse. Besides, I wouldn’t want a father who ran away when he knew I was coming ... was that the way of it, Poll?’

Polly admitted that it had probably been the case and after that they talked of other things, but it was this conversation more than anything else which set Lilac to wondering about her parentage. She was writing regularly to Nellie, who had now recovered from her ’flu and talked rather desperately of having to stay until most of the wounded had been shipped out. As she said, it was first in, last out, and she and her friends had not travelled to France until early 1917 so of course they must do their bit and take care of the wounded whilst they were needed. But Lilac could tell that Nellie was longing to get back to Blighty herself, now that the fighting was over.

So now when she wrote, Lilac told Nellie that she would like to find out who her mother was. Nellie wrote back, saying it was very unlikely that anyone would own up to dumping a child, but Lilac was sure there must be a way of finding out. Only she decided that if her mother turned out to be some backstreet slut she would keep such knowledge to herself.

‘You might not be able to, chuck,’ Polly said feelingly when Lilac confided how she would act. ‘Backstreet sluts ’ave a way of pushin’ their noses in where they ain’t wanted. Why don’t you leave it, eh?’

But Lilac was curious and determined. She began to examine the smart ladies who came to the house, wondering, wondering. There was one very beautiful woman, Mrs Thomas Manders, who could have been her mother if fair hair and blue eyes had anything to do with it and another, Mrs James Prescott, who Lilac
fancied as a parent because she was so kind and pretty, known to speak to the girl who opened the door or took her coat just as if they were members of the family. Of course in the old days it would have been Mr Jones who opened the door, but because he was so slow the girls were usually ahead of him, though Mr Jones took over as soon as he panted up to them, and led the ladies or gentlemen up to the drawing room with great dignity, if slowly.