Down an English Lane (14 page)

‘Tim and I haven’t got very much,’ said Audrey. ‘Only a packet of crisps each and an apple. Mum’s expecting us back before tea.’

‘Nor have I,’ said Maisie. ‘Only some of me mum’s gingerbread and a bottle of lemonade; Mum made that as well.’ She lifted the bottle to her lips and took a drink. ‘Mmm…that’s good. Here, would you like some?’ She wiped the mouth of the bottle and handed it to Audrey. ‘Have a swig, you and Tim. It’ll be all right; I haven’t got a deadly disease.’

Audrey looked doubtful, but she took the bottle, wiping it again with a clean handkerchief before she took a gulp. ‘Mmm…it’s delicious,’ she agreed. ‘You have some, Tim. Wipe the top first…’ They drank with such relish that Maisie feared there might be none left for her, but it was a large bottle.

‘What about you, Bruce?’ she asked, rather shyly, when she had had another drink. ‘Would you like some? And… haven’t you brought anything to eat?’ He was sitting staring out at the distant landscape.

He shook his head. ‘No; I’ve had quite a decent lunch, and Mother will be cooking a meal this evening.’ He patted his stomach and grinned. ‘I have to keep fit, you know. Can’t afford to put on any extra weight in my job. But I’ll have a taste of your lemonade, please, if you don’t mind, Maisie.’

‘Have what’s left,’ she told him. She tried not to watch him too obviously as he tilted the bottle. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and his Adam’s apple moved visibly in his brown throat as he gulped at the remaining liquid.

‘Nectar for the gods,’ he said, smiling at her as he handed back the empty bottle. ‘Oh no…’ He glanced heavenwards and held out his arm. ‘I do believe… Yes, it’s raining.’

‘Well what did you expect?’ retorted Doris. ‘I told you so.’

‘Perhaps it will only be a shower,’ said Audrey hopefully.

Bruce grimaced. ‘I’m afraid we’re in for a real downpour.’ He stood looking thoughtfully up at the sky. ‘“Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day…”’ he murmured.

‘“And make me travel forth without my cloak,”’ added Maisie quietly, finishing the quotation that she knew. He looked at her and smiled, and once again the glance that they exchanged was full of meaning, or so it seemed to Maisie.

‘What the heck are you on about?’ asked Doris.

‘It’s a poem…’ said Maisie. ‘I remember hearing it at school.’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ said Doris. ‘We’re going to be caught in a flippin’ rainstorm, and you two stand around babbling poetry! Come on, let’s get going before we all get soaked.’

Quickly they gathered up their belongings,
clothed themselves as adequately as they were able and set off on the trek back to civilisation. The journey down took far less time than the upward one as they hurried and stumbled along the moorland path, over the bridge – instead of the treacherous stepping stones – alongside the river and through the wood, back to the lane near Nixons’ farm. By this time the five of them, and Prince, too, were drenched; but as they stood at the farm gate they laughed, able to see the funny side of it.

‘Ta-ra,’ called Doris, dashing in through the gate. ‘See you sometime, folks. Thanks for inviting me…’ She ran off with a cheery wave.

‘You’d better come home with me,’ said Bruce to the other three, ‘then you can have a rub down and my mother will make you a warm drink. We don’t want anyone catching a chill.’

‘We’ll be OK,’ said Audrey. ‘Actually, Mum might be rather worried about us.’

‘Then phone her from our house,’ said Bruce, ‘and you too, Maisie, and let them know you’re back safe and sound.’ Audrey and Maisie looked at one another and nodded. They didn’t need much persuading.

Maisie laughed. ‘We look like a couple of drowned rats,’ she said. The rain was still pelting down. It had got worse as they had made their descent and now it was a deluge.

‘Come on then; let’s run for it,’ said Bruce. The
four of them and the dog raced up the lane to Tremaine House.

Mrs Tremaine, neat and tidy as always in her pleated skirt and pale blue twin-set, was full of concern. The girls went to the bathroom and dried themselves with her big fluffy towels, then she lent them each a cardigan to replace their sodden ones. Then they sat by the Aga stove in the kitchen, with Bruce and Tim, feeling the comforting warmth and enjoying a cup of milky cocoa.

‘I’ve rung your mothers, all of you,’ said Rebecca Tremaine, coming to join them, ‘and I’ll ask Archie to run you home in a little while.’

‘Thank you very much, Mrs Tremaine,’ said Maisie, and the other two nodded their thanks, but nobody seemed to want to talk very much.

Maisie was wanting to ask Bruce when he would be returning to his camp, but she felt too shy to do so in front of everyone. It was Rebecca who told them he would be returning in three days’ time. ‘And we hope you will all be able to come to Bruce’s twenty-first celebration,’ she told them. ‘His father and I are planning to have a party for all the family and friends. It will be sometime near the end of November, we’re not quite sure when, but you will all be receiving invitations.’

‘It will depend on when – and if – I can get leave, Mother,’ said Bruce. He did not sound all that excited about it, thought Maisie. In fact it seemed as though he did not like the idea at all.

‘Oh, surely, for your twenty-first, dear…’ said Rebecca. ‘An important event like that. They’re sure to let you have leave.’

‘There’s nothing sure at all in the RAF,’ said Bruce. But that was the end of the discussion because Archie Tremaine came in at that moment from the fields, clad in his gumboots and oilskin coat. He agreed readily to take the three of them back home.

There had been no chance for her to say a special goodbye to Bruce, Maisie reflected later that evening. Neither had she had an opportunity to talk to him properly all day, but that had been her own decision, to keep her distance unless he chose to speak to her on her own. He had not done so, not that there had really been any opportunity…

Don’t kid yourself, you silly idiot… Once again she gave herself a severe talking to. Bruce had a girlfriend, a grown-up one, and she, Maisie, would have to try and forget him. The glances that they had exchanged had probably meant…nothing at all. As for the twenty-first birthday party, Maisie had a strange feeling that it might never take place; at least, not if Bruce had anything to do with it.

Chapter Eight

C
hristine Myerscough was in a reflective mood as she sat on the train which was taking her from Lincoln back to Bradford, the city of her birth. ‘I’ll show them,’ she told herself. ‘I’ll show them all that I can be somebody, a real somebody, not just a mill worker or an office girl. I’m on the way; I’m going to get there, and I shall surprise everyone…’

At least she had taken the first few steps; she had pulled herself up by her bootstraps, as the saying went. She was determined that there would be no more Lumm Lane or White Abbey Road for her; no more poverty or squalor or the depravity she had seen in her early years. No more of the shady and sordid goings on that had forced her, at the age of ten, to go and live with her maternal grandmother rather than suffer any longer the immorality of her own home. What she had told Bruce Tremaine, that her parents had both been killed in a car crash, had
been a lie. Myrtle and Fred Myerscough were both still very much alive and kicking. It had been a lie that was necessary, though, to assist her in her upward climb.

All the same it did not do to be too complacent. She still had not got the coveted ring upon her finger, but she hoped, once she had found a little place of her own, that it would not be very long before she achieved her aim; to marry Bruce, the squire’s son from Tremaine House. She had been a little surprised and disappointed to discover that he was not the sole heir to the property and land, but that the inheritance would be shared between Bruce and his two sisters, whom, as yet, she had not had the pleasure of meeting. All the same, beggars could not be choosers, and he was well worth cultivating; besides, she was really very fond of him. She knew that his parents were worth more than a bob or two, as Yorkshire folk said; neither did Bruce ever seem to be short of a bit of brass to spend. No; there would be no more scrimping and scratching around to make ends meet for Christine Myerscough, no more saving up like mad for the occasional treat or coveted item of clothing. But she knew that she had to play her cards right. And the first step, once she arrived back in Bradford, was to find a flat, or at least a couple of rooms where she could be on her own.

She had told Bruce that when her grandmother had died she had been left all on her own, with no
family and only a few friends; and that that was why she had joined the WAAF. It was true that her grandmother had died, but she had not joined up immediately. She had been invited by Sadie Gascoyne, a kind-hearted friend who worked in the office with her at the woollen mill, to go and live with her and her family.

The Gascoynes’ home in the district of Heaton was a far cry from the squalid mean streets of back-to-back houses in the White Abbey Road area where Christine, until then, had spent her days. Not that her grandmother had been a feckless or slovenly sort of woman. Far from it; she had kept her windows clean and her front step had been regularly donkey-stoned. Indeed, old Lizzie Walker’s house had stood out from the rest of the shabby and run-down houses in the row. Inside, too, she had always made an effort to be clean and tidy. Such furniture as she possessed had seen better days, dating mainly from the time of her marriage towards the end of the previous century; but she had dusted and polished it to within an inch of its life and had black-leaded the kitchen grate each week until you could see your face in its surface.

Lizzie had also tried to instil in her granddaughter the idea that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’. Christine had not been too sure of the godliness part, although she had gone dutifully to Sunday school each week as her gran had insisted she should do, something which her mother had
never bothered about. But from an early age she had wanted to keep herself clean and tidy and as pretty as she could possibly make herself. A weekly soak in the zinc bath in front of the fire, and the washing of her fair hair, had been a ritual even when she had lived at her parents’ home – no one could accuse Myrtle Myerscough of being dirty; that was not one of her failings – and it had continued all the time she had lived with her grandmother. But how she had longed for a house with a proper bathroom upstairs and an indoor lavatory, not a stinking privy at the end of the backyard. There again, Lizzie Walker had done her utmost to keep it clean, but she had been fighting a losing battle against her less particular neighbours.

Christine knew that she had had a good start as far as looks were concerned, having inherited the blonde, naturally wavy, hair and clear silver-grey eyes of her mother. Myrtle’s hair had darkened considerably though, now, and maintained its brassy blonde colour only by regular treatments with the peroxide bottle.

‘Yer mother’s a tart,’ Lizzie Walker, who did not believe in mincing her words, had told her granddaughter, when she thought she was old enough to understand. ‘To think that a daughter of mine should sink so low. I’m ashamed of her; in fact I’ve disowned her and I don’t care who knows it.’ Indeed, folks did know about Myrtle Myerscough; they knew about the visitors to the house and the
reason why she was able to afford silk stockings and a fox fur and flashy jewellery.

‘Of course she always fancied herself did yer ma; thought she was a cut above the folks round here. Happen we spoiled her, Charlie and me, with her being the youngest, like.’ Lizzie’s husband had died when Christine was a small girl, and her two sons, several years older than Myrtle, had long since married and moved away. ‘But the rot really set in when she married him, Fred Myerscough. We told her he was no good, but she wouldn’t listen… Oh aye, I know he’s yer dad, and she’s yer mam and she reckons that she loves you. And if she wants to see you now and again it’s not for me to say she can’t. But it’s a rum sort o’ love to me. An’ I had to get you away from it all, Chrissie love; it weren’t right. It weren’t right at all that a child should see such goings-on.’

Christine had been only vaguely aware, until she was eight or nine years old, of what was happening in the house where she lived on Lumm Lane, only a few streets away from her grandmother’s home where, later, she was taken to live. Her mother worked at a nearby woollen mill, starting early in the morning and not returning until well after the time that Christine finished school, so the child was often left to her own devices. She let herself in with a latch key and then set about the task of peeling the potatoes and setting the table, as her mother had told her she must do, before Myrtle returned
from the mill. Her father was a lorry driver, delivering machinery, sometimes to distant parts of the country, and he was often away all night. It was then that the men started to visit the house, and on the evenings that Myrtle entertained her ‘gentlemen friends’, as she described them to Christine, the child was sent to bed extra early.

She recalled an almighty row one night when her father had returned home unexpectedly; loud shouts and screams and the sound of crockery being thrown around, and she had hidden her head beneath the bedclothes until the furore had died down. Her mother had had a black eye the following morning, but she had gone to work as usual, and Christine had been told nothing of what had gone on. Strangely, though, the visits of the gentlemen had not stopped. Moreover, it seemed as though her father knew about them and did not say anything so long as he was away from home at the time.

Christine knew that her mother was a pretty woman, and very clean and tidy, unlike a lot of the other mill workers, some of them mothers of her schoolfriends, who looked poor and shabby and wore shawls instead of coats, something that Myrtle had never done. She was not neglected, not in the material sense; there was always enough food to eat and adequate warm clothing, mainly bought from second-hand shops or jumble sales. But the child was starved of real affection. She was an only
child and, therefore, might easily have been indulged and made much of; but she had begun to realise, especially after she had left her parents and had started to work things out for herself, that she had been an unwanted child, possibly a mistake that was not intended to happen, considering the lifestyle of her mother and father.

Myrtle and Fred had moved soon after their daughter had left, leaving behind their rented property and buying a small house on the road to Shipley. Her mother no longer worked at the mill. She became a barmaid, as well as pursuing her other occupation; and Fred, as well as being a lorry driver, became known as a petty thief. He had already had one or two convictions and stretches inside. Christine, over the years, had visited them only irregularly. She had not seen them since she had joined the WAAF two years ago.

She had loved her grandmother dearly, and she had known, for the first time in her life, that she was really loved too. She remembered the row that had gone on between her mother and grandmother before she was taken away to live with Gran. She had been told to go upstairs to her bedroom, but she had been unable to help hearing some of what was being said, or rather, shouted.

‘You’re not fit to have a child, you shameless hussy…’

‘…none of your business. I’ve never neglected her and neither has Fred.’

‘…that good-for-nothing! You’re just as bad as one another. I’m taking the child to live with me.’ By this time Christine had been listening quite openly.

‘Who says?’

‘I say! Try to stop me an’ I’ll report you to the cruelty people.’

‘Cruelty! You interfering old…’ Her mother had let fly with such a tirade of dreadful words that Christine had seldom heard before, certainly not from her mother’s lips. It was not cruelty, she raged. The child was well fed and well clothed and she was coming to no harm.

‘No harm? You’re harming her morally,’ said her grandmother, but Christine had not understood fully at the time what she had meant. ‘What you’re doing is immoral, and if that’s not cruelty, then I’d like to know what is… I’m telling you, Myrtle, if you don’t let her go with me, then she’ll be taken away from you forcibly by them cruelty folk. And I’m not going to stand by and see that happen to a granddaughter of mine…’

It had all gone quiet then. She did not hear her mother say any more. Maybe Myrtle had decided that it was for the best after all, that she, Christine, would be happier with her gran, or maybe her mother had decided that she simply did not want her… She had never known why her mother had given in without a struggle, but it seemed as though that was what had happened.
Myrtle told her the next day, quite kindly and gently, that she was going to live with her grandmother ‘for a little while’. Gran was lonely and she, Myrtle, was busy working at the mill, and her father was seldom there to look after her… So the child had packed up all her belongings and walked off with her gran with scarcely a backward glance. The ‘little while’ had lasted more than ten years.

In some ways – material ways – life was harder now for the little girl. Lizzie Walker was by no means well off and would not accept so much as a penny from ‘those two’ for caring for their child. There was always enough to eat, although Lizzie had to buy the cheaper cuts of meat, and often scoured the market stalls at the end of the afternoon to purchase the leftover fruit and vegetables for a much cheaper price. There were few luxuries like shop-bought cakes – Gran did all her own baking – or ice-cream, which her mother had quite often bought. Christine was taught to save up out of her ‘Saturday pennies’ to buy the things she coveted. It was very seldom that her gran was able to buy her treats.

She was a clever girl, but as a Grammar school education would have been out of the question – even if she had been granted a free place they would have been unable to afford the uniform and the extras – Christine had left school at the age of fourteen and had gone to work at the mill; not the
one nearby where her mother had worked but one further afield which involved taking a trolleybus there and back each day.

She hated the clamour and the clatter of the machines and the boring nature of the work, but she stuck it out diligently for three years. It was then that she heard of a vacancy in the office and decided to apply for it. To her amazement – and to the gall of some of her colleagues in the weaving shed who considered she was already too big for her boots – she was told that the job of office junior would be hers provided she took lessons in shorthand and typing. Her grandmother was proud of her, and night school tuition soon brought her up to the required standard.

The girls she met in the office were more on her wavelength than her former work mates, whom she began to think of as common-or-garden mill girls. She, Christine Myerscough, was definitely a cut above them; she had always known that she was. In some ways she was her mother’s daughter, but she would never be tempted to sink to the depths her mother had done to make a better life for herself. The payment for her work as a wages’ clerk, which she eventually became, was quite adequate, and she was able to pay her gran a satisfactory sum each week. To her credit, she knew that the old lady more than deserved it for looking after her all those years.

Her new friends in the office, Sadie Gascoyne –
her special friend – and Daphne and Vera, knew very little of her background. She had told them that she lived with her grandmother, and she supposed they knew, from the direction of the trolleybus which took her to and from the mill, that she lived in a rather less affluent area of the city than they did. But she did not see the harm in telling what she thought of as a white lie or two; and soon she almost began to convince herself that what she told them was true; that her parents had been killed when she was ten years old and that that was why she lived with her gran. And as she did not invite her friends to her home there was no likelihood that they would discover the truth. They seemed to understand the reason she gave; that her grandmother was old and frail and that company of any kind wearied her.