A Child's Voice Calling Read online

  No sooner had Mabel, Albert and Alice crossed the threshold than their grandmother gave a suspicious sniff. ‘My word, Annie, I hope that horrid smell isn’t what I think it is, else yer neighbours’ll draw their own conclusions.’

  Annie sighed deeply and mumbled that there had been an outbreak at the school for which all the pupils had had to be treated. Mimi looked entirely unconvinced. She never lost an opportunity to criticise or contradict her daughter-in-law in front of Jack and the children, thereby implying that Annie was a poor manager.

  When it became apparent that another child was expected, Mimi had rolled up her eyes as if unable to believe that such carelessness was possible. ‘I’d’ve thought ye’d’ve had enough sense to wait a while after the last time, Annie – give yerself a chance to build up yer strength a bit.’

  Annie had answered her with unusual sharpness: ‘You’d better have a word with your son, then.’

  ‘Oh, shame on yer, Annie, in front o’ them innocent children! Whatever next?’ had come the shocked response, followed by a very pointed change of subject.

  They all trooped after her now into the living room, a veritable Aladdin’s cave to the children, being stuffed with furniture, pictures, ornaments and bric-a-brac of all kinds. A dining table was covered with a purple velvet tasselled cloth over which a white lace-edged one was spread. There was a sideboard, a sofa, a piano and a glass-fronted cabinet crammed full of china and crystalware. A minefield of footstools and pouffes littered the floor space, which delighted the children, but for Annie the room was full of potential trippings-up and breakages; she was on constant tenterhooks for fear of a disaster.

  ‘Well, then, Mabel, how’re yer getting on at school?’ asked Mimi Court condescendingly. ‘Yer mother seems to think ye’re uncommonly forward.’

  ‘Miss Thomas asked me to stand up and read from my exercise book to the whole class,’ answered Mabel promptly, catching her mother’s eye and smiling.

  ‘Did she indeed? And what was this masterpiece all about?’

  ‘Well, there was this Salvation Army meeting, y’see, and these two men came out o’ the public and they were shouting an’ making fun o’ the man who was speaking, see,’ said Mabel eagerly, warming to her subject. ‘Some o’ the people laughed, but the band picked up their, er, oompahs or whatever they’re called, and started to play this hymn, ever so loudly, “Onward Christian Soldiers” I think it was, an’ so these two men had to shout louder – and then some other men came along an’ told them to pack it in and clear off. “Shut yer great gob!” one of ’em said – “Stow it, Bill Wilkins, d’ye hear? Unless yer wants a clip round the—”’

  ‘That’s quite enough, thank yer very much,’ interrupted her grandmother with a pained air. ‘For a child o’ your age, Mabel ye’ve got far too much to say, an’ a most unfortunate way o’ sayin’ it.’ She looked reproachfully at Annie as she spoke.

  ‘Most unfortunate,’ mimicked Albert in a squeaky voice just loud enough for his grandmother to hear. She turned sharply and was struck once again by his resemblance to Jack at that age. She would have loved to make a fuss of him and favour him with little treats like the new silver threepenny piece in her purse or a chunk of her home-made toffee; but the boy was quite ridiculously attached to his elder sister and he was now whispering something into Mabel’s ear, holding up a not very clean hand to cover his mouth. Less than a year apart in age, they were as different in character as in looks, yet there had always been this special bond between them, which Mimi distrusted. As babies in the same pram, Albert had scowled while Mabel had smiled; as a toddling bundle of mischief he had crawled into every cupboard, pulled out drawers and pee’d into them, clutched at saucepans on the kitchen range and only escaped a scalding through Mabel’s prompt grabbing hold of him. Yet he always responded to her smiles or frowns; she alone could persuade him out of his sulks, while he never failed to tease her into laughter when she was downcast. In Mimi Court’s opinion, the pair had never learned their manners and she blamed Annie.

  Mabel caught her mother’s eye, adding to Mimi’s irritation.

  Alice saw her opportunity. ‘Please, Grandmother, may I play with Humpty-Dumpty?’ she begged in the sweet little good-girl voice she knew would contrast well with Albert’s unsatisfactory behaviour.

  ‘O’ course yer may, yer dear little soul,’ replied Mimi approvingly, taking down the painted wooden eggshell character from his shelf; he always landed the right way up, no matter how hard or how often he was pushed over. ‘Grandmother likes good children who mind their manners – doesn’t she, Georgie? Let yer little brother play with Humpty-Dumpty too, Alice – but Albert can keep his grubby hands orf. I can’t understand why yer don’t take that boy in hand, Annie.’

  Albert assumed an air of bored indifference and murmured something about babies’ rubbish, though Mabel burned with indignation and when tea was served she infuriatingly refused the fruit cake.

  ‘Why, what’s the matter with it, girl? Ye’ve always taken two slices before,’ snapped her grandmother. ‘If there’s anything I can’t abide it’s a child who sulks.’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you ladies to yer gossip,’ said Jack who had seen a couple of old drinking pals going past the window. Ignoring the tightness of his wife’s mouth he added, ‘If I’m not back by five, ye’d better get the Clapham omnibus from outside the new hospital down the road.’

  By which Annie knew that he would not be home till late.

  Autumn came in with cold, damp weather, bringing the Court children their share of coughs and colds. Annie grew more tired and depressed as the months went by and much as she disliked keeping Mabel away from school, she made the coughs and sneezes an excuse for demanding her elder daughter’s help on the dreaded washing days. Mondays were particularly miserable in wet weather when the sheets, towels and clothes hung draped over wooden ‘maidens’ in both kitchen and living room, keeping the air chill and moist. If the range fire was kept in all day it made the washing steam, causing the walls to stream with condensation. Even by getting up at six to light the copper to heat the water by seven and get the washing done by nine and mangled to flatness by ten, it would still not be properly dry until the next morning, sometimes not even then. With Mabel to mind Alice and Georgie, Annie was better able to get through a wet Monday, though she was exhausted by evening, and the coughs and running noses of the little ones sorely tried her nerves.

  ‘You’re my greatest comfort in the world, Mabel,’ she murmured as her daughter brewed a pot of tea for them both. These words were reward enough for Mabel, though her mind was on Albert who was due home from school.

  Annie stirred her tea and went on talking, or rather thinking aloud. ‘If Jack doesn’t come up with ten shillings by the end of the week, I don’t know how I’m going to feed us all.’

  Mabel was dismayed by the anxiety in her mother’s face and voice. The use of Jack’s name instead of ‘dad’ or ‘your father’ had the effect of distancing him while drawing her into sharing her mother’s troubles. ‘Don’t worry, Mum, we’ll manage,’ she said reassuringly, though with no idea of what could be done if the money was not forthcoming. She knew from things she had heard at school that there were poor children who had not enough to eat, and went ragged and barefoot, foraging for whatever they could find by begging or petty thieving; but this was usually because one or other of their parents had become ill, or perhaps had even died. Mabel shuddered involuntarily at the very thought of losing her mother, the loving centre of her world. As long as she was there to kiss and comfort them all, the family was surely safe. And yet here was that same mother talking of poverty and not having food enough to go round.

  They were drinking a second cup of tea when Albert arrived home from school, his trousers torn and his hair unkempt.

  ‘Albert! We told you to stay with Lily Finch and her brother,’ said Annie, horrified at his appearance.

  He stuck out his bottom lip. ‘She kept ’angin’ about wiv daft girls, an�
� Jimmy went to play football,’ he muttered in a surly tone.

  ‘Have yer been in a fight?’ demanded Mabel.

  He shuffled his feet. ‘Yeah, but I kicked ’em ’ard up the yer-know-what, an’ they let me go.’

  ‘Heavens, he talks like a guttersnipe,’ groaned Annie.

  ‘Why couldn’t you take me, Mabel?’ he asked reproachfully.

  Mother and daughter exchanged a guilty look; the washing hung damply and depressingly around them.

  ‘I’ll go over and see Lily Finch about this,’ said Mabel grimly.

  ‘But we didn’t pay her to take him, did we?’ Annie reminded her.

  ‘Yer won’t ’alf cop it from Miss Thomas for stayin’ away,’ added Albert with a meaning look at his sister. ‘She didn’t ’alf go on about it, worser ’n last week.’

  Annie put her head between her hands. ‘You’ll have to go to school next Monday, Mabel. It isn’t right for you to fall behind with your lessons. I’ll just have to get through it, that’s all – other women have to manage.’

  But the sight of her mother’s weariness and knowing her worries about money had made a deep impression on Mabel, and she began to form a plan to earn some money and keep the family supplied with whatever cheap food she could find. Her small face hardened as she summoned up the necessary determination to carry it through.

  First she needed a few pence to get started, and an idea came through seeing one of her classmates taking and fetching a neighbour’s two young children to and from school every day. She had to take care of Albert, so why not another one or two? She began to look out for an opportunity to offer her services and a few days later she found one.

  One of Albert’s classmates and his five-year-old sister had been brought to school by a neighbour because their mother was about to give birth to a baby. On the way home Mabel called with Albert at their house in Darnel Street to find the household in chaos. The baby had been born but the mother was very poorly, so the neighbour who was preparing the tea said. Mabel’s offer was accepted and it was arranged that she should call the next morning at half past eight to take the two children to school, returning them in the afternoon, for which she would be paid two pence per day. It meant that she and Albert would have to leave home a quarter of an hour earlier, arriving back that much later in the afternoon, and on this particular Tuesday Mabel was only just in time for her piano lesson; but after earning her first two pence on the Wednesday, she was ready to put the second part of her plan into action.

  She had heard from some of the poorer children at school that their mothers or older brothers or sisters got up early and lined up outside certain shops which sold perishable goods cheaply before the official opening time. So on Thursday morning she quietly got up at six and hurried through the dark streets to the bakehouse on Wandsworth Road. The first batch of loaves was just being taken from the ovens, and one of Mabel’s pennies bought two stale loaves from the previous day. She then crossed the street into Victoria Rise where a shabby queue of women and older children were standing outside the butcher’s, waiting for him to take down the shutters. They were after the ‘trimmings’, the beef and mutton scraps that could be stewed with onions and potatoes to make a meal. Mabel took her place behind them and her other penny bought a bagful.

  Of course this new regime had to be carefully presented to her mother and a few little white lies told; for example, that she had been specially asked by the family in Darnel Street to take the little boy and girl to and from school while their mother was recovering from the birth. As for the bread and meat, Mabel put them down on the table with such a flourish that Annie could not possibly object to the early shopping trip, though she shed a few tears in private at the thought of Mabel feeling so responsible for the whole family. The food was put to good use and if Annie half regretted burdening her little daughter by speaking her fears aloud, she was touched beyond measure by Mabel’s response.

  ‘Oh, Mabel, dear, to have a daughter like you makes up for everything,’ she said as she hugged her close; but when the girl had gone to school, and Alice and Georgie were playing on the rag rug, she whispered to the empty air that Mabel deserved a better life than this. How different life would have been in the healthy country air of Belhampton . . . She remembered Eric’s words on the train: ‘I would have married you, Anna-Maria. I would have married you and called the child mine.’ Her beautiful, fair-haired daughter could have been Mabel Drummond.

  Yet Annie Court could not imagine her life without Albert, Alice and Georgie, her children who were the reason why she carried on the day-to-day struggle to bring up her family respectably while living on the poverty line. They helped her to repress her memories of the past, that other life which was now never spoken of because of what had happened to her poor papa and the unforgiveness of her sisters.

  Encouraged by her success at early morning shopping, Mabel next decided to try her luck at the Friday night stalls in Nine Elms Lane. Albert begged to come with her and so, with Thursday’s and Friday’s earnings in her pocket, and promising her mother that they would come straight home, they set off to walk over the railway bridge and along Battersea Park Road to the line-up of stalls and costers’ barrows beneath the gas lamps in the late October dusk. A mist curled up from the river, which mixing with the pall of chimney smoke gave a greenish tinge to the lights. A barrel organ was playing on the corner of Tideway Walk, and a crowd of rough-looking children had gathered to listen and caper to the music while workers from Price’s candles and Doulton’s pottery had come over to spend their pay, rubbing shoulders with gasworkers, laundrywomen and clerks. Newsboys shouted the headlines and racing results, and flower girls eyed the better-dressed men strolling between the stalls.

  Holding tightly to Albert’s dragging hand, Mabel surveyed the busy scene, though with so many street sellers competing for trade she wished she had somebody to advise her on how best to spend her four pennies.

  ‘’Ad a good look, ’ave yer? I’ll turn rahnd, so’s yer can see me backside an’ all.’

  Mabel started, realising that she had been staring at the ragged girl who had just spoken. She was wrapped in a long, grimy shawl which she drew around herself and the baby she carried in her arms. Her features were sharp, her hair lanky and uncombed, and her toes stuck out of her worn shoes. She was about the same size and height as Mabel, though her face appeared older and in better circumstances she might have been quite pretty. Jostled by the crowd, the two girls found themselves standing next to each other and Mabel was unpleasantly conscious of the smell of the girl’s unwashed clothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’

  The girl nodded towards Albert. ‘’Im yer bruvver?’

  ‘Yes – and is that your baby brother or sister?’ asked Mabel, just to show that she too could ask questions of a stranger.

  ‘Yeah, bruvver. Bleedin’ ’eavy ’e is, too. Got any more at ’ome, ’ave yer?’

  ‘A sister younger ’n me, and another brother. What about you?’

  ‘We’ve ’ad two bruvvers an’ a sister kick the bucket – only me ’n’ Teddy left.’

  Mabel was so horrified by this that she had no answer and the girl shrugged. ‘Yer from rahnd ’ere, then?’

  Mabel nodded. ‘Are you?’

  The girl gestured with her head. ‘Over Vaux’all way.’ She looked curiously at Mabel. ‘Don’t s’pose yer got a spare copper on yer?’

  Mabel’s fingers curled protectively round the coins in her pocket. ‘Not to spare,’ she said very definitely.

  ‘What yer after, then – cheap grub? If I wasn’t weighted dan wiv this ’un, I’d soon be under some o’ them stalls, not ’alf I wouldn’t! ’Ere, come an’ ’ave a gander.’

  She led Mabel to a greengrocer’s barrow and advised buying one pennyworth of speckly apples and another of four squashy oranges, both items being sold off at half price; potatoes cost another three halfpence and then, moving on to the roast chestnut man’s glowing brazi
er, Mabel spent her remaining halfpenny on as many as he would let her have. Turning to the girl she offered her a chestnut and a choice of an apple or orange.

  ‘Cor, ye’re a lidy – I’ll ’ave the orange, ta! Orf ’ome now, are yer?’

  ‘Yes, my mother’ll be waiting for us. My father’ll be home later tonight,’ added Mabel, hoping that this week’s business would have made him a decent profit and put him in a good mood.

  The girl grimaced. ‘So’ll mine, drunk as a pig an’ nasty wiv it. That’s why Ma sends us out o’ the way Friday nights.’

  ‘Oh, how awful for yer!’ exclaimed Mabel, who had absorbed much of her mother’s horror of drunkenness, not without reason; sometimes Dad had to be helped to bed when he came home from the public, which was no joke for Mum, who always seemed to be tired these days. ‘And when . . . when will yer be able to go home, then?’

  ‘After ’e’s ’ad a good knock arahnd an’ passed out on the floor, most like. Then Ma’ll go frough ’is pockets an’ take what ain’t bin taken orf ’im already.’

  Mabel had heard terrible stories of men who beat their wives and ill-treated their children, but not at first hand. Not until now. ‘Can’t yer mother take you an’ yer brother to go an’ live somewhere else away from the man?’ she asked.

  ‘Cor! Couldn’t we jus’ grow wings an’ fly, eh? Where to – the work’ouse? Fanks for the orange, anyway. What’s yer name, ’case we meets up agin?’

  ‘Mabel Court – and my brother Albert.’

  ‘Maudie Ling – an’ my bruvver Teddy.’

  ‘Goodbye, Maudie – an’ good luck when yer get home.’

  And so began a friendship that was to outlast many changes in both their lives.

  That evening ended on a high note for when Jack Court arrived home he was in a good humour and, as he himself said, quids in. Business had taken him to Epsom, where his natural flair had stood him in good stead. Having long discarded his hopes of a career in photo-portraiture, Mabel now gathered that he was considering going into books; there was a fortune just waiting to be picked up if he made his own book, or so he eagerly told them, kissing Annie and chucking Alice under the chin.