Elizabeth and Lily Read online

  ‘Thank goodness modern doctors approve the use of chloroform,’ Mrs Macfarlane agreed. ‘A baby for New Year’s Day. How excited you must be.’

  ‘I can only stay a few days longer,’ Mrs Warren said. ‘My poor husband is in a muddle without me. I must go home. I hope we’ll meet again before I go. I shall want to thank you properly for your help at this time of trial.’

  They did not meet again that time, as it happened, but three months later, at the baby’s christening at St John’s. Afterwards there was a tea party in the Armitages’ upstairs sitting room the downstairs rooms had been transformed into a surgery at the back, overlooking the garden, and a waiting room at the front. The small sitting room was well kept up and pleasantly furnished, with comfortable chairs, neat red plush curtains, a Turkish carpet, a piano, and a bright fire in the grate.

  Bella Armitage, pretty as a picture, sat in her low chair, holding the baby, which was swathed in a long lace dress and fine woolly shawl. Her husband waited on her all the while, bringing her cups of tea, a plate of cake, asking her if there was anything else she wanted. Old Mr Armitage, Henry Armitage’s widowed uncle, also fussed over Bella and the baby, whom he declared – not, it seemed to Mrs Macfarlane, much to Bella’s pleasure – to resemble his late wife. ‘In amiability too, I hope,’ he said.

  ‘She is a very good baby,’ said Bella, smiling up at the old gentleman.

  ‘Not a cry, even at the font,’ said Mr Jarrold, the vicar, encouragingly.

  ‘I’m sorry she’s not a great-nephew for you, to carry on the name,’ Bella said to Mr Armitage.

  ‘Never mind that,’ the old gentleman responded vigorously. ‘I don’t care about that old-fashioned nonsense. Make her a doctor or an engineer, a credit to her family, never mind names and all that tosh. We all came from Adam at the beginning, didn’t we, Mr Jarrold? In any case, there’s plenty of time for more, boys as well, aren’t I right?’

  Bella agreed, though she looked as if she thought the old man eccentric, or perhaps somewhat mad.

  Mrs Macfarlane, Mrs Warren and Lady Bleasdale, a relative of the Armitages, were talking in another corner. ‘Such a lovely name, Elizabeth. So historical,’ said Lady Bleasdale vaguely. ‘Who settled it?’

  ‘My daughter,’ said Mrs Warren distantly. Then, ‘Elizabeth,’ she repeated in a thoughtful tone.

  ‘You don’t like the name?’ enquired Mrs Macfarlane.

  ‘I do, as it happens,’ Mrs Warren said. ‘But not when the mother’s called Bella.’

  Mrs Macfarlane was baffled. Lady Bleasdale murmured, ‘Bella – I had a cousin called Bella.’

  Mr Armitage contradicted her: ‘No you didn’t.’ Had they all been at the whisky bottle? wondered Mrs Macfarlane.

  Mrs Warren hissed angrily in her ear: ‘My daughter was christened Muriel. Bella was the name she selected for herself when she was ten. She asked us to call her by that name, and we did so. She said it was more sweet-sounding. Well, no one could deny it. The name Bella is more sweet-sounding than Muriel. Mrs Macfarlane – do you think the name Elizabeth is sweet-sounding?’

  ‘It’s dignified,’ said Mrs Macfarlane, ‘but not, I suppose, sweet.’ She was, however, beginning to understand Mrs Warren’s drift.

  ‘Poor child,’ said Mrs Warren. ‘She’ll have red hair – so common, just like her father – and she’ll be too tall, in all probability, and if she’s unlucky she’ll get his nose as well. Now she’s been given the name of the Virgin Queen. What future is her mother proposing for her – quite without realising what she’s doing, of course?’ She concluded, gloomily, ‘Disaster beckons.’

  This seemed to Mrs Macfarlane an overdramatic way of putting the matter, though she took the point that the naming of infants often betrayed a good deal of the parents’ intentions for them. Stuck for a reply, she just nodded, and said, ‘Hm.’ At that point she was obliged to make her farewells, for she was due at a meeting of the parish council. As she departed she told Mrs Warren that she much looked forward to their next meeting. Later, she regretted leaving so soon – because she never saw Mrs Warren again.

  In May came the news that Amy Warren and her husband had both been killed in a fire at their house on the Cornish coast. Mrs Macfarlane’s regret about Mrs Warren’s death was not just for the woman herself but, in some way, for her granddaughter Elizabeth. She saw a child’s grandparents as a bulwark against disaster, people who could be relied on to pick up the pieces if things went wrong. This aspect of things might not have occurred to her if the child’s mother had possessed what Christina Macfarlane called ‘more character’. Bella, the younger child of the family, and the only girl, had been brought up under the conventional system which asked of a girl only that she be pretty, if possible; and charming and obedient even if she were not pretty. Bella was all three, a triumph of the system. Mrs Macfarlane, though, had always felt that the system itself had some shortcomings. Mrs Warren’s death, she thought, had robbed both daughter and baby granddaughter of an invaluable ally.

  But this bereavement was not to be the last, or the most serious, of Elizabeth Armitage’s childhood losses.

  Chapter Three

  1891

  Elizabeth Armitage grew up strong and healthy, though, as Mrs Warren had predicted, too tall. That is to say, from the moment when, at four years old, she entered Ferndene Hall, which was presided over by the squat and resolute Mrs Hamilton, Elizabeth was always almost a head taller than the next tallest child in the class, and maintained this lead throughout her school career, though of course, after the age of nine the children at the school were all girls, the boys moving on to more serious, academic institutions. Apart from her height, her hair, also according to Mrs Warren’s predictions, remained resolutely, commonly red. Being so conspicuous, she was always blamed if she’d done something wrong and often if she had not, since red-headed children always get the blame. But her father loved her dearly, and her mother only a little less. Bella Armitage, slightly silly and vain, would have loved a son better; on the other hand, she would have loved a prettier daughter less than she loved Elizabeth.

  ‘Her father’s girl,’ Bella would tell those who spotted Elizabeth waiting for her father in the hall at the side door of the surgery until his consulting hours were over, or sitting with him in the carriage on visits to patients. She was also, Bella told people in some wonderment, as if talking of an intelligent dog, ‘clever at school’.

  In general, matters went on placidly at 53 Linden Grove. Dolly Gage stayed on and ran the house excellently. Bella had a group of like-minded friends. Dr Armitage’s practice increased. His main rival in the neighbourhood, charming Dr Cuthbert, was one of the old school, overtolerant of tightly corseted pregnant women, maintaining a healthy scepticism about the actual existence of germs, and given to slamming windows in sickrooms. He was also handy with his scalpel, enjoying the drama of cutting and, often, the extra fees involved. Slowly the younger element in the neighbourhood came to prefer conscientious, modern-minded Dr Armitage. It was a tragedy that when Elizabeth was only just ten, Dr Armitage went down with that physician’s scourge, blood poisoning. He never recovered.

  Two days after his death, his widow, only thirty herself, became hysterical and tried to kill herself with an overdose of valerian. As Dr Cuthbert and a nurse fought for her life that day in the same bedroom where Dr Armitage had died, no one had time for their daughter, sobbing alone in her cold room.

  Next day the child got up and dressed herself in her black dress and white apron, fastened her black stockings crookedly, laced up her boots and put on her coat and tam-o’-shanter. She left the house and began to walk to school. It was the elderly widow across the street, now sixty and a little arthritic, who, still at her window, spotted Elizabeth and sent a servant after her to bring her back. She put her by the fire and heated warm milk on a little griddle. The child sat, stunned, looking like a ghost, holding her cup.

  ‘Elizabeth!’ Mrs Macfarlane exclaimed. ‘What can you have been thinkin
g of, going to school on this day? Did no one stop you?’

  ‘I thought I had to,’ Elizabeth said humbly.

  Mrs Macfarlane, feeling her age, sighed and went over the road to number 53. She saw a nurse in the hall. The housekeeper, Dolly Gage, invited her in, apologetically, and told her about Mrs Armitage’s attempted suicide. Mrs Macfarlane sighed again. ‘It’s terribly sad,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll keep the child for a bit. She might be better off away from here for a while. But,’ she asked bluntly, ‘what will happen? Is there any money? And what are your own plans?’

  Dolly Gage was shocked by these direct questions. But it was well known the Scotch were different. She answered only, ‘Mr Robert – Mr Robert Warren, Mrs Armitage’s brother – and his wife are coming here today to discuss matters.’

  ‘I’ll tell the child,’ Mrs Macfarlane said, getting up.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think—’ Mrs Gage said in alarm.

  ‘I do,’ said Mrs Macfarlane. ‘She needs to be told something. She’s an intelligent girl.’

  Back in her own home, Mrs Macfarlane informed Elizabeth, who had been crying again, that her mother was ill but getting better, and that her uncle and aunt were coming to discuss the future. The child looked quite blank. ‘I don’t really want to know about the future. I wish I could be in the carriage with Father again.’

  Mrs Macfarlane shuddered. She sensed that Elizabeth Armitage, though only ten, would have to pull herself together. She said firmly, ‘Of course you would like to turn back the clock. But the future comes to all of us, and we have to accept it, hard though it may be.’ She shook her head slightly and said, as if to herself, ‘I fear your life’s journey will never be in calm waters.’

  The girl ignored this. ‘I hope they don’t bring Frannie and Cora.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘My cousins.’

  ‘You are not fond of them?’

  She hesitated. ‘They are not fond of me. They tease me. They call me Beanpole.’

  ‘And Carrots, no doubt.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Carrots, certainly.’

  Mrs Macfarlane said, ‘Well then. We’ll go to the kitchen and you will tell me what your favourite pudding is, and then we shall make it.’

  ‘Won’t the cook mind?’ asked Elizabeth.

  ‘Cooks always do,’ said Mrs Macfarlane. ‘But there are two of us, and only one of her.’

  Later, while Elizabeth was chopping suet on a wooden board, and Mrs Macfarlane, in spectacles, was pulling stalks from raisins and putting them in a blue and white striped bowl, Elizabeth asked the old woman, ‘Do you think we will have to go and live with Uncle Robert and Aunt Harriet?’

  ‘Perhaps. I don’t know,’ responded Mrs Macfarlane.

  ‘I would rather live just with Mother,’ she said.

  ‘They will do what is best, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Macfarlane, pretending confidence. Then, feeling that she owed the girl some truth, she added, ‘Questions of finance may enter into it. Your father’s death may have left your mother with less money than you had formerly. That will be a consideration when plans are decided.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Ladies cannot earn money.’

  ‘Sadly, no, they cannot,’ said Mrs Macfarlane.

  ‘I wonder why not?’

  ‘Their sphere,’ Mrs Macfarlane said, ‘is the home. It is held that ladies are not fit for the professions. Their bodies and minds are not strong enough. Though I must own that in my life I have seen females show remarkable strength in many ways.’

  ‘Florence Nightingale is a lady.’

  ‘She was indeed.’

  They made the pudding in a big brown bowl and tied it in a cloth for steaming.

  After dinner, they both peered out from behind the curtain, and saw Robert and Harriet Warren, a couple in their thirties, descend from their cab and go into number 53. Robert Warren, in a top hat and long black coat, was a large, dark man; his wife, in a blue coat with a fur pelisse at her shoulders, and a black hat with a feather in it, was small and fair-haired. She moved with quick, nervous movements. As they left the cab she looked up at the front of the house speculatively, like a would-be purchaser. Mrs Macfarlane wondered if the plan was for the Warrens to move into the Armitages’ house, with the widow and orphan. If so, she hoped, for both their sakes, that this would be a happy arrangement.

  Chapter Four

  The year following Eddie’s death passed slowly, and one September morning, Lily, scrubbed and polished, set off clutching Queenie’s hand. They were bound for the tall iron gates of St Jude’s School, which lay near the dye works off Whitechapel High Street.

  Lily knew much about this fearful place. She had heard about it from John and James Barrington, for the Barringtons had moved next door to the Strugnells in French Street, and the two bigger boys would sometimes help her over the wall separating their back yard from hers, to play with their rabbits, have a game of five stones or share a few sweets, especially if they were hers. She discovered that one way to get the coveted invitation to stand on a box on her side of the wall and be hauled over scrabbling by James or John – who, in turn, would stand on a box on their side of the wall – was to offer to sing and dance. The offer was sometimes refused, but often enough accepted, for Lily was quick to pick up tunes heard on a barrel organ in their street, or from other sources, and would make up her own words if she did not know them and compose little step dances to match the music. So James or John would frequently agree to watch her performance, and Lily would be pulled over to join the boys on their side of the wall, leaving a wailing Rose on the other. Then she would give them a private performance of anything from the William Tell overture, courtesy of the local organ-grinder, to ‘Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus’, learned from the Salvation Army band, words entirely, or mostly, composed by Lily Strugnell, with accompanying dance.

  ‘Them aren’t the right words,’ James and John would occasionally protest.

  ‘Them’s my words,’ the infant Lily would proclaim, continuing to dance round the yard, skirts held up, knickers well on display, little black boots prancing, curls tossing, as she sang to the tune of ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ a song which went, ‘I’ve got a friend in ‘Oxton, ’e is very nice to me, ’e gives me lots and lots of sweeties. And invites me round to tea.’

  In between the games of knucklebones, the amateur theatrical performances and the quarrels over who had spent too long sucking the gobstopper and so must have a shorter turn next time, James and John provided her with much wisdom, such as ‘Never tell anythink to copper, whatever ’e arsks yer’ and ‘If you swallow a cherry stone a tree grows inside yer.’ There was an inaccurate version of the facts of life: ‘First your dad puts his thing in yer mum’s bum, then a little tiny baby gets bigger and bigger inside her, then it comes out alive one day.’ They also imparted a dismal account of life for the pupils at St Jude’s. The twins, now eight, had been moved from Mixed Infants to Boys. The regime at St Jude’s, according to them, was severe: all ticks and crosses, inspections for dirty hands and bitten nails, and canings and slappings with metal rulers. There was a thing called a register, a mysterious ‘blackboard’, teachers and a headmaster.

  ‘Shan’t go then,’ Lily declared one day.

  ‘You got to,’ she was told, ‘or a policeman comes round and puts your dad in gaol.’

  However, Lily was an optimist at heart. As soon as she entered St Jude’s Mixed Infants she was abandoned by Queenie, who said in parting, ‘Don’t get dirty now.’ Lily found herself in a large hall with almost forty five-year-olds, some bewildered, some philosophical, some weeping. Some, she noticed with disapproval, were barefoot and ragged. A tall woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a navy-blue dress, said, ‘Gather round me, children. My name is Miss Garton. I will read your names out from this list I have here. When you hear your name, say “Yes, Miss Garton”.’ Confusion ensued. While some responded to names not their own, others did not respond even when the name read out was
theirs; others still, hearing their names, embarked on statements and questions: ‘My brother’s in the Boys’ School’, ‘Can I go home now?’, ‘When’s dinner-time?’, ‘I’m going to get a doll tomorrow’. One little girl, hearing the name Amy Grieves read out, remarked, ‘I’m delicate.’

  ‘Are you Amy Grieves?’ Miss Garton said in a level tone. ‘If you are, say “Yes, Miss Garton”. Are you Amy Grieves?’

  ‘I’m delicate,’ said the child. ‘I’ve had measles, chicken pox and diphtheria.’

  ‘Are you Amy Grieves?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then say “Yes, Miss Garton”. Nothing more,’ said Miss Garton. ‘Are you Amy Grieves?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl, and before she could say more the patient Miss Garton continued, ‘Alice Hart… Is Alice Hart here?’

  ‘They had to cut a hole in my throat to let the pus out,’ Amy Grieves persisted clearly. But the roll-call moved on. The children of the East End were getting organised.

  Lily, having passed the roll-call test with flying colours, began to breathe more freely. No cane was visible. No mention of a cane had yet been made. She studied the other children and the teacher, admiring Miss Garton’s confident air and sparkling cleanliness. Not a speck on her, she thought, from her highly polished black shoes to the crown of her tidily arranged head. She was still staring around her when Miss Garton marched them down a corridor to their classroom.

  ‘Big – just like Church, ain’t it?’ remarked a small boy next to her. But Lily, who’d only been in a church twice, when Eddie and then Rose were christened, and had forgotten both occasions, thought she had never been in such a large building. She was overawed by the huge rooms and high ceilings. They entered a large room with big windows. A stove stood in the middle, behind which was the teacher’s desk and a blackboard. In front were benches and desks. Girls were ordered to the left of the aisle, boys to the right.