Amelia (7 page)

A
melia hated the new house. It was a mean little house, dark and poky, with no garden, only a yard with an
outside
WC, a coal bunker and a lean-to shed with no door that was useless even for storing things in because everything got wet when the wind came from the west, which it often did. And at the front there was no garden either: the hall-door opened directly onto the pavement. Amelia was mortified the way people could see right into your hall every time you came in or out your own front door, and she had perfected a method of squeezing through the tiniest opening between the door and the jamb so that the house didn’t have to be thrown open to the neighbours.

Even Edmund, who was too young to bother much with his surroundings and lived most of the time in an imaginary train, noticed how mean and poky the house was. ‘Where’s the nursery?’ he asked in a puzzled voice. ‘There’s a nursery at home,’ he said, standing defiantly in the doorway of his tiny bedroom.

‘This is home now, Edmund dear,’ said Grandmama in a cheerful tone. At least, it sounded as if she meant it to be cheerful, but everyone knew she didn’t really feel cheerful at all.

‘No,’ said Edmund. ‘This isn’t home. Home has a garden
and a nursery and lots of grown-up rooms and ‘Melia’s
norngery
. This place is nasty. Where’s ‘Melia’s norngery gone?’

‘Now, Edmund,’ Grandmama began, and this time her voice sounded firm and patient, not pretend-cheerful any more, ‘we can’t live in our old house any more. You know that. We live here now. And we’re very lucky to have a roof over our heads at all.’

Of course it was true that they were luckier than some people. But they didn’t know any people who didn’t have a roof over their heads. They only knew people who lived in large houses and had lovely things, so it was hard to believe in this luck Grandmama spoke about.

‘Are we, Grandmama?’ asked Edmund, looking up at the old lady. ‘Why?’

‘Because we’re poor now, Edmund.’

‘Oh,’ said Edmund, considering this idea. Then he asked again: ‘Why, Grandmama?’

‘Because …’ Grandmama was stumped.

‘Because …’ she tried again.

‘Because,’ she said with some conviction at last, ‘we’ve been unfortunate.’ She pronounced the last word very slowly and deliberately.

‘Oh,’ said Edmund again. He shrugged his little shoulders and went into his room and shut the door. He didn’t really know what ‘unfortunate’ meant, but he knew when a grown-up had got the better of him. After a moment he opened his door and stuck his head out and called out: ‘I still want to go
home
!’

But of course they couldn’t go home, not now, not after what had happened. The Elders of the Meeting had come to the house in Kenilworth Square the evening after Amelia’s birthday and there had been long, grave discussions in the drawing room from which Papa emerged at intervals looking very pale and with black smudges under his eyes. Mama
sometimes sat in on the discussions, and sometimes she came out and sat with the children and Grandmama in the morning room.

It transpired that Papa had been forced to declare himself bankrupt. That was what he meant when he said he had lost everything. In the old days, Mama explained, the Society of Friends took a very poor view of bankruptcy, and people who went bankrupt might even be disowned by the Society.

‘But it’s no disgrace to be bankrupt nowadays,’ Mama said firmly. ‘And it doesn’t mean that your father has done
anything
dishonest or wrong or illegal. It just means that things have gone badly in his business.’

But Amelia knew it was a disgrace all the same. Being declared bankrupt was a very dreadful thing. It meant you had failed badly at your business, and let down all your employees and the people who had lent you money or given you credit.

‘In fact, we’re very lucky to be Quakers,’ Mama remarked. ‘The Friends are doing their best to help us.’

Amelia didn’t feel lucky to be a Quaker. She still hated going to Meeting, and she didn’t agree with Grandmama’s old-fashioned Quakerly views about ‘showiness’ and
expensive
living. But she grudgingly acknowledged that Mama had a point. At least the Friends would rally round, now they were in trouble.

Mama had gone on to say that the bailiffs would want to seize the family’s goods in order to meet Papa’s debts.

‘Oh!’ Amelia had cried. ‘Is that what happened to the motor-car?’

‘Yes, Amelia,’ Mama had agreed. ‘They took that first, because it is worth good money and is not really a necessity.’

Poor Papa, Amelia thought, and hated them for taking away the thing he loved best. They might have left it. It was mean to take it. Surely they could have taken something else!

But there was worse to come. Mama went on to explain in a low voice that the bailiffs would want to seize the house and furniture, if the debts weren’t paid. Amelia gasped. But, Mama went on, her tone steady and even, they would give the family time to find somewhere new to live and wouldn’t take the things they needed for day-to-day living – at least not yet.

‘But …’ Amelia was horrified. She couldn’t finish her
sentence
. She put out a hand and stroked the morning-room curtains, as if they were beloved pets that somebody was going to take away from her. She looked at the familiar
furniture
she had grown up with, and she felt about the chairs and tables and sideboards and cabinets almost as if they were
living
things that she couldn’t bear to be parted from.

But there was no help for it. The house and furniture would have to be sold as quickly as possible, to get money to pay the people Papa owed – and all because Papa had made a few unwise investments. There was something about a ship being lost at sea, too, which Amelia could understand a bit, because of reading
The Merchant of Venice
at school.

‘If only that wretched ship hadn’t gone down!’ Papa declared daily. ‘There were enough goods on that boat to redeem all my debts and still leave enough to invest in the next shipload.’

Mama always sighed when he said this. She said there was no point in crying over spilt milk. Papa would argue with her then. Every day, the value of the goods on the famous ship seemed to get greater. Before long, Papa was saying that there were enough goods on that boat to keep them all in comfort for the rest of their lives.

‘No, Charles, you know that’s just not so,’ Mama persisted, trying to reason with him. ‘It was unfortunate that the ship went down, but you know in your heart that even if she had come to harbour, it would only have staved off the evil day.
In another month there would have been more, bigger debts. It would take a good deal more than a single shipload to sort out our problems.’

But Papa got angry with her when she said this sort of thing.

‘Really, Roberta,’ Amelia overheard him say one day, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about, my dear. But how could you? What do you know about business?’

Amelia couldn’t hear Mama’s murmured reply, but Papa’s riposte came loud and clear: ‘Nonsense! That ship would have been the making of us. Oh, Roberta, I counted on it. I counted on it. It would have been, I tell you, it would have been the making of the business. I would have been a wealthy man, Roberta. I would, I would … oh, oh!’

And then came some heartbreaking sounds, as if Papa were – surely he couldn’t be – sobbing.

Amelia wanted to believe Papa, that it had all been just a piece of rotten luck. But try as she would to take Papa’s side in these arguments, she had to admit that what Mama said seemed to make more sense. Still, that didn’t make it any
easier
for poor Papa, living in this poky little house that the Friends had found for the family at a low rent, and plodding off to work every day to the miserable, lowly little job in a Quaker firm that he had managed to get.

Things gradually began to clarify in Amelia’s mind. She recalled that Mama had not been entirely whole-hearted about the motor-car. She had been half-pleased the day Papa had bought it, but worried at the same time. She must have known that things were sliding downhill in Papa’s business already and that buying a car wasn’t a good idea. And it was the same with the gold watch that Amelia had so carelessly lost. Mama had been quite taken aback when Papa had given it to Amelia. Amelia wished she still had that watch. If the bailiffs hadn’t seized it maybe she could have sold it to
make a bit of extra money. But it was too late to think of that now.

Everyone in the family was very shaken by the change in their fortunes, but Papa was easily the most affected. His fair hair had lost its sheen, his brown face was now pale and drawn, his eyes looked dank and listless, and he never sang or whistled or called Amelia his princess any more. And he’d started to drink beer. He never used to before, and Amelia thought it odd that now they had less money he had found a new thing to spend it on.

And a very unpleasant thing it was too, she thought, with a nasty smell that got even nastier with the passage of time, for Papa often smelt quite disgusting in the morning after he had been drinking, and the smell of stale, spilt beer in the kitchen was suffocating. After he’d left for work, Amelia would go sniffing around till she’d found the spillage and then mop it up with water and carbolic soap. She had always hated the smell of carbolic, but now she had begun almost to like it. At least it was a clean smell, and it did a good job of abolishing the sickly-sweet, stale yeasty smell of the beer. It wasn’t a case of crying over spilt milk, Amelia thought bitterly. It was crying over spilt beer that Papa had begun to make a habit of.

To make matters worse, Edmund’s wretched cough just wouldn’t improve. He hacked and wheezed in the night, and Amelia could hear Mama getting up to go to him. Amelia would lie in the dark and listen to the muffled choking sounds, and then the creak of a door and the rustle of Mama’s dressing gown on the landing followed by the soft crooning sound of her voice as she soothed the little boy. Although Amelia felt sorry for her small brother, she wished sometimes that Mama would come with soothing sounds to her in the night.

But the very worst part about having fallen on hard times,
as Amelia liked to put it poetically to herself, was not having any servants any more. Amelia had always considered they’d had far too few, with just Cook and a maid and an outdoor man, and she couldn’t imagine how they were going to
manage
with none at all. Cook had had no difficulty in finding a new situation. Good plain cooks with reliable references were hard to get, and there were always families on the look-out for a gem such as Cook. Mick Moriarty had taken the opportunity to go back to County Clare, where he came from, to live with his sister.

That left Mary Ann. Amelia had hoped and hoped until the very last minute that they would be able to keep Mary Ann on, even though she knew that they couldn’t afford her wages, and in any case there was nowhere for a servant to sleep in the horrid new house.

‘What about the attic?’ Amelia suggested desperately. ‘Couldn’t Mary Ann sleep there?’

‘Don’t be absurd, Amelia,’ said Papa, rather unkindly, Amelia thought. ‘The attic hasn’t even got a floor, not to mind a window.’

‘Well then, she can share my bedroom,’ she offered.

‘No, Amelia,’ said Mama. ‘You’ll have to share with
Grandmama
. There are only three bedrooms, and there are five in the family. The arithmetic just doesn’t work out. Edmund shall have the very small room at the back.’

So Mary Ann had had to go. Mama helped her to find a situation as a tweeny, which was the very worst sort of
servant
to be, in a large household in Glasnevin, on the other side of the city. Amelia and she wished each other a tearful goodbye on the last day at Kenilworth Square. At least
Amelia
was tearful, but Mary Ann just sniffed a bit and poked Amelia in the ribs with her elbow.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’ll still be friends. I’ll train a
carrier
pigeon to take messages to you. Or we could learn
Morse code and send smoke signals.’

Amelia said: ‘I don’t think you can do that. Morse code and smoke signals are completely different things.’

‘Oh lord, Amelia, where’s your sense of humour? I’m warning you, if you take everything people say seriously like that you are in danger of growing up poker-faced!’

That was the last thing Mary Ann said to Amelia. But although the words were cross, she said them in a friendly tone, and Amelia knew it was her way of being kind. But with all the joking about carrier pigeons and smoke signals they didn’t think of the most obvious thing – the post. Mary Ann didn’t leave her new address with Amelia – to tell the truth she didn’t really know the exact address in any case – and Amelia never thought of giving Mary Ann hers.

And so now the family had to struggle on as best they could without any help in the house, having lost their
servants
, as well as their fine house and their precious things. Most of the work fell on Mama’s shoulders. She got up early in the mornings to riddle out the range. She took the hot, fuming ashes out to the yard to cool, in a metal bucket, and she brought in coke to stoke up the range again. She would pile the little round scrunchy black balls of coke into the
circular
fuel feed, and put the lid back on, and then she’d poke the bellows into the grid at the bottom and work the bellows good and hard to get the fire going for the breakfast. There was no point in putting a kettle or a pan onto the range until the coke was glowing bright orange.

While the range was warming up, Mama would go to the parlour and clean out that grate too, so that there’d be a little fire there for Grandmama later – Grandmama didn’t move about much, and she got cold sitting still if there wasn’t a fire, even in the summertime. So it was out to the yard again with the ash-bucket, and in again with the fuel. They burnt turf in the parlour fire, which smelt warm and sharp and left a soft,
fine ash that created a lot of dust.

Then she’d make the breakfast. If there was milk to pour over it, she’d cook a pot of porridge. If they were short of money, and milk, she’d cut some slices of yesterday’s bread and fry them in lard on a smoky hot pan. There’d be tea with the porridge or fried bread, usually with milk, sometimes black. Coffee was a thing of the past, a fragrance Amelia missed in the house at breakfast time. Tea was much cheaper, even though they had to buy it now, along with their other groceries. Papa missed the coffee too. Every morning he’d look into his breakfast cup of tea and sigh, and every time he did that, Mama winced, knowing that he was wishing it was coffee. But what could she do? It wasn’t her fault they couldn’t afford coffee. Nobody said anything about it, just sighed and winced.