Crooked Pieces

I’d like to thank everyone who has put up with me during the long incubation of this novel and, most particularly, Professor Irving Benjamin for his invaluable information regarding force-feeding, and Kirsty Fowkes and Dr Andrew Palmer for all their advice and encouragement.

Well, we have been walking for close on an hour now, half across London, I reckon, and
she’s
not said a rotten word. No more have I. I am so…rankled. ‘Rankled.’ I am, truly. Much good it does, for if I said to her, ‘Ma, I am rankled with you,’ she would probably smile. Think I was grateful. She is so dull. She knows nothing. Except how to make a cabbage and a scrag of mutton feed six mouths, then seven, then eight. Seven again now, for she has shot herself of me. Just when Frank is coming home and with a present for me, for certain – a ribbon, maybe, or some carved wood thing. And now Lucy will get it. Once he brought an orange. Ma said it was too beautiful for eating and kept it from me for days and days till the skin withered all up like Mrs Carter’s from the laundry who’s dying.

Ma says, ‘Maggie, keep up. Do you want to be late your first day?’

I do, as a fact. In truth I do not want to go at all. Why must I act glad for something so…? Reverend Beckett told Ma I was the cleverest of any he had taught in Sunday School. I can read; I can write; I can say nine psalms off without failing once. ‘She is a clever girl, your Maggie. You
will be proud of her one day, I’m sure, Mrs Robins.’

‘I thank you, Reverend Beckett.’ Twitchy little smile. ‘I am proud of her now.’

So proud she has fixed me up for a skivvy, which you need no reading or writing for. Just bones like a brute to carry coal and lay fires and scrub and clean and polish till you fall down dead of weariness.

He will be angry that I am gone, Frank. I know that. I am his best girl. Better than all the shiny ones with skirts made of flowers and the yellow ones with feet smaller than a thimble,
and
the ones with two heads, one black and one white. He says so. ‘Maggie, you are my best girl and if I could I would marry you.’ I am glad he cannot. Being married is a fearsome thing.

‘Maggie, it’s not far now. Try to do well there. They are good people. This is such a chance for you.’

‘Chance for what?’

She is silent. ‘To get away.’

I say nothing – kick a stone with my newly polished boots so that Ma’s face goes all worried and unhappy. Now she knows what it’s like.

The house is mighty. There is a room for Mr and Mrs Roe and one for Miss Pankhurst and all her painting and foulness, then two more, one for eating and one for not eating, and a place for me of my very own that is mighty, with a bed and a shelf and my own candle. I have never slept in a bed by myself before. At first I was frightened and feared the Great Red-eyed Rat would come creeping in the bottom and gobble my feet, as Frank always says it will if I don’t lie right close to him, so I piled all my clothes and my best boots and the chamber-pot
on the cover so there was nowhere for it to get in. There is hardly room for me but that is not new, and I sleep a lot better for having company, though boots and a chamber-pot are not so warming as brothers and sisters.

Downstairs we may wash ourselves inside the house, and the kitchen has a great range and stone sink and next to it there is a ‘pantry’ where the food is kept – meat and sometimes a piece of silver shiny fish. Cook is horrid and makes me watch her doing the food and then to wash the pans after.

Mr and Mrs Roe are kind but very old and must surely die soon. Then what? For two such old people they eat prodigious much. Soup, then a dish of meat with nearly always potatoes and then some cheese or maybe a pudding of suet and currants. And this they do every day, with bread and eggs at breakfast and more bread with sugar sprinkled on it at four in the afternoon, and in the evening, a pie or cold bacon with some beer. Cook found me scraping off their leavings on my first day and chided me wicked. I thought she would tell the mistress and I should be sent home, but instead she sat me in the kitchen and put before me a great bowl of stew and bread, cut thicker than a fist and a mug of beer, all my own. I was so stuffed I feared my skin would split. ‘You’re nothing but bones, girl. Thin don’t make good workers.’ Well, if that be so she must be the finest worker ever, I fancy, for two grown men could not get their arms round her.

My work is hard but not so bad as I had feared. I must rise at six to lay a fire in the eating room, and then put water to boil for Cook to make the breakfast. In the morning I sweep right through the house and wash the steps and polish them. I wipe the furniture over with a cloth and on Mondays I help
with the washing. We boil a great tub of water and then Cook takes a bar of soap, thick as a brick, and rubs it on the dirty clothes and plunges them up and down till the water turns muddy. Then we mangle them. The handle is dreadful hard to move but Cook says I must keep at it to make my arms strong. I say they will fall off first, but she just laughs and if I do it well she gives me a great big spoonful of sugar.

Miss Pankhurst is very plain. She has a beautiful name – Sylvia. I heard Mrs Roe call her so. It does not suit her. Her clothes are all brown and sloppy and soiled with paint which is very hard to get out. My fingers are raw from scrubbing at them. Her hair is brown, too, rusty and not at all neat. She has big sad eyes like a cow and always seems to be thinking. Cook says she is an artist and can draw anything in the world and you would swear it was real. I say, can she draw me a big bowl of sugar then, and I can swallow it straight? Cook just laughs and says I ‘will do’.

Miss Pankhurst eats with the Roes, but not so much. Sometimes there is quite half her food left when I am sent to clear. Cook says I must throw it out and am not to touch one bit of it, for don’t I get enough and more? This is true but it makes me very angry when I think what Ma would make from such wasting. Although she vexed me all the time when I was there I sometimes think Ma has more sense than all these fine folk, for she would never waste a morning putting flowers in a jar, as I have seen Mrs Roe do, or spend an evening pushing ivory figures round a board.

I have been here a month now and heard nothing from home. Frank will be gone again. I wonder how they are all going on without me. If Alfie is keeping up with his letters
now I am not there to help him. If little Evelyn is over the croup. If Will still wakes every night howling. How is my nan’s cough going along? Has Pa got work still? Does Ma still go singing round at the Black Prince on a Saturday night with that rotten tattered ribbon in her hair that made me die for shame? I remember when it was new. Blue like the sky. Now it is the colour of rat droppings but still she wears it. She was so beautiful then. When I was little. Plump and rosy and always laughing. Sometimes I wonder where that Ma went. Did she creep away one night and leave this Ma behind her? I wish, in a way, it was so, for rather that than see what she has become. And us the cause.

I wonder who watches the little ones now when she’s out? Not Lucy, for sure. Did Frank give Lucy my present? I’m sure he would not for she is not his best girl and anyway, too young for such things. He will be far away by now. With all his other girls. I shall be quite forgotten. Forgotten by everyone. Even my own ma. Well, her first of all, for it was she who sent me here. ‘To get away’. From what? From her? I know I was a trial to her sometimes when I would not speak, or fought with Lucy or spent the whole of dinner saying psalms. I would not do that now. I promise. Does she miss me at all, I wonder? And shall I ever be allowed to visit? I know I am better here, and ‘fortunate’ and ‘favoured’ as Reverend Beckett declared, but if I am never to see my family again it will be very hard. Even Lucy that I do not like.

Miss Pankhurst found me crying and spoke very kindly to me. She said her mother and sister live hundreds of miles from here and she misses them badly. We are to be friends, she says, so that we need not be lonely. I am to call her ‘Miss Sylvia’
which she likes a good deal better than ‘Miss Pankhurst’ and she is to let me look at her paintings on Saturday. She is not so plain as I thought for she has a lovely smile and no spots at all that I can see.

Mrs Roe says I may go home next Sunday and need not come back till night. She and the master are to visit her sister for their dinner and Cook has said she will manage very well alone, so I shall not be needed. I am so excited. I have two shillings that I have saved to give to Ma, and Mr Roe says I may take some apples from the tree, as many as I can carry. I told Miss Sylvia I was allowed to visit when I took her her clean linen. She gave a little nod as though she had known it all along. ‘And will you still come and look at my paintings tomorrow?’

‘I shall be honoured, miss.’

She laughed and said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I’m only a student, you know.’

I didn’t know what to say so I just laid the linen down and asked if I should close the curtains.

I have two spots now. It is so unfair. Just when I am going home and all the street will be out to look at me. Also my dress is very tight. I shall have to keep my shawl about me all day long and it is so hot it is bound to make my spots stand out on my head like a watchman’s beacon. Cook says I must put some vinegar on them and they will go. She says I must not keep eating sugar, but it is very hard. There is nothing so beautiful as sugar.

Miss Sylvia’s paintings are very fine. She has the skill to make a person look happy or sad or fat or thin – all with a brush. How can you do that? I wish I could. She asked me what I thought of her work. I could think of nothing worthy
of it, so I said, ‘It is wondrous as the feet of Sheba,’ and she looked at me very strangely then began to laugh. I was very ashamed. When she saw that she stopped at once and became serious again. ‘I am not laughing at you, Maggie,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever think I am laughing at you.’

Ma is with child again. I knew it would be so, for when she came with me first to Park Walk her eyes were bruised like a rotten potato, all purple and yellow. I am thirteen now and should know what life is about, but if the getting of babies is done always with pain and fighting, I do not understand how there are so many. Reverend Beckett said the last queen had nine children. Surely, if she was wed to a prince, he would not keep hitting her for royal people should not go on like that? I only know every time Ma has a cut face or an arm she cannot lift, there is another on the way. I will have no children. Frank says they grow inside your belly and only men can put them there. He told me once that he had put one in me while I slept and that it would grow bigger and bigger till it burst out of my front, dragging my heart behind it. I screamed and screamed for terror and Pa came running down the stairs. Frank said it was just a game we were playing so Pa gave him a clout for waking him up. After, Frank said he would pull the baby out again if I lay still and left off crying. He did it with his finger. I didn’t like it.

It took me above an hour to walk to my street. I was so warm with my shawl that I nearly put it by, but then I saw Joe Rice who drives the ragman’s cart and I was afraid he would mark how tight my dress was, so I carried on. I don’t think he knew me till I was right by him, for he made to tip his hat, but when
he saw who it was he just sort of gaped like the great donkey he is.

When Ma caught sight of me she just gazed like she had never seen me before. She was standing in the kitchen, stirring the dinner with Will under her arm and him trying to pull her hair. I said, ‘How are you, Ma?’ and she just sort of opened her mouth and closed it again, and then she set Will down so he straightway started yelling and said, ‘Oh, Maggie. It’s only broth’. And I thought she would start out crying too, for a moment, but Ma never cries – not like Mrs Carter who’s dying, and half the other women in the street who are not.

I said, ‘Well, it will be better than that, Ma, for I have brought you this.’ And I reached in my pocket and gave her the two shillings, and she just stared at them there in her hand as though they were sovereigns not shillings, and then she said, ‘Well, hang up your shawl, and go and fetch Evelyn from the yard, and if Lucy’s there you can send her down to the alehouse to tell your Pa you’re home. And then you can help me with your nan. She can’t get out of bed just now and the nurse says she must be turned every hour.’

‘That’s not all I’ve brought.’ Then I showed her the apples which had nearly weighed me to my knees I’d picked so many, and best of all, a loaf of currant bread which Cook gave me just as I was leaving. ‘You might as well take this. ‘’Twill be stale by tomorrow and I can’t eat it on my own.’ That’s what Cook’s like. She always acts as though she don’t care and it’s nothing to her, but I think inside she has quite a good heart. Ma took it from me and said, ‘Oh, that looks nice,’ and put it at the back of the cupboard as though every day she got given a currant loaf and apples.

‘Where’s Alfie?’

‘He’s gone off wandering. Comes back soon enough when he’s hungry.’

‘Is he working at his letters like I told him?’

Ma sighed. ‘He… Maggie, your brother will never…’ Then she sighed again and said, ‘He’s a good boy. Now go and find Evelyn for me. I need to wash her hands.’ And I thought, it’s just like I’ve never been away, but when Pa saw me he gave me a great big kiss and said, ‘Lord, Maggie, you’re a fine sight. More like a woman than a girl, I’d say. Isn’t she, Ma?’

Ma shrugged. ‘She looks well enough, that’s true.’ Lucy, of course, had to spoil it by pointing out my spots. ‘What’s that on Maggie’s forehead, Ma? Are they boils like Mr Hill has on his nose?’

Ma said they were not and would very likely be gone by the morning.

‘I’m glad I don’t get them.’

‘You will if you live to be as old as I am.’ I don’t know why I said that. I was just so vexed. Anyway, there was nothing wrong in it, but Ma’s face creased up as though someone had stuck a knife through her. Just then Alfie came in, very muddy. He was so joyful to see me and gave me a big hug which put mud all over my sleeve, but I didn’t mind for I know how to get mud off and it’s easier than paint, for sure.

Pa let me hand round the apples so I made sure Lucy got the smallest. Evelyn was so excited she choked on hers and had to be held upside down and shaken. But she still ate it. Will got none as he has no teeth. He cried mightily so Ma gave him a little crumb of hers and he put it in his ear, which was a waste. Nan couldn’t manage hers. I don’t think she knew what it
was. She kept turning her mouth away, even though I cut it up real small for her, so I gave it to Alfie which meant he had two although he thought he had ten because of the pieces.