Her Ladyship's Girl (21 page)

Behind the bar, we sold Martell brandy and Haig Scotch and Jameson Irish and Wood’s Old Navy Rum that looked and smelled like tar, and Beefeater London Dry Gin from the nearby Lambeth
distillery. The beers included Manns Brown Ale and Bass Stout and Double Allbright Barley Wine and Courage Old English and Watney’s Pale and Guinness and Oatmeal Stout for the ladies and
Rose’s Nut Brown and Brandon’s Rustic and Hammerton’s India Pale Ale. Some were on the pumps and others in bottles, depending on preference, and Kevin looked after the cellar and
ran the pipes through and kept the lines clean and the ruffians in check with his cudgel. Part of my job as last girl in was to light the fires and keep them tended, which I was well used to. I had
to clean the taps and the bar areas – both the big bar and the snug – wipe down the tables and polish the mirrors and the windows and keep everything spick and span. A cleaning woman
came in every day to scrub the toilets and sweep and spread sawdust in the big bar and wash out the salt-slimy spittoons in a trough in the cobbled yard.

The décor in the Duke’s Head was uncompromisingly Victorian, with grained woodwork and bareboard floors and ornamental mirrors behind the bar and tables covered in green linoleum.
Coarse voices and columns of cigarette smoke mixed with the fumes of the beer and the chinking of the glasses and the rattle of the cash register. In the evenings, the men played bar billiards and
darts and shove ha’penny and pitch penny. On a Sunday lunchtime there’d be the buzz of earnest conversation about things like the situation in Europe and the chances of another war, how
the whole system needed a revolution to make it right and, on a Saturday night, there’d be singsongs and knees-ups and Pearl kept a piano in one of the corners for anyone who had the
inclination to play it.

Pearl was the perfect landlady – she welcomed each and every customer in the same big-busted way. She was quick-witted and flirty with the more frisky fellows and opinionated and
knowledgeable with those who might want a debate. She could throw a dart as straight as any man and could sink six pints of best bitter in under an hour. She was good with the women too, able to
handle all their moods and humours, from the poorest dockworker’s wife to the streetwalking strumpet or the airs-and-graces tourist with her department store furs and artificial pearls. She
served an honest measure and, under the counter, she kept jugs of rough cider that came in from Essex, which she sold at thruppence a pint. A saucepan always stood by one of the fires for the
old-timers to mull their ale, and there was always a wink and an extra measure for the visiting policeman or campaigning politician.

Spring turned to summer and Lucy and I became the most inseparable of friends. On our days off, we’d go sightseeing round London – to the National Gallery and Madame Tussaud’s
and the Serpentine and Oxford Street and Battersea Park. Whenever we could get the time off from the pub in the evenings, we went dancing at the Palais or the Astoria or the Bag o’ Nails in
Soho. I sent my mother half-a-crown from the five shillings I had left every week after paying the rent and I was loving life as an approaching twenty-year-old. I got on well with Pearl and Kevin
and the other barmaids I crossed paths with from time to time. The customers liked me and I liked them. They were plain people, not rarefied and rude like the toffs in their big houses and country
estates – honest working people who came in the pub to take a little break from their hard and heavy lives. And I thought to myself, if the rich would only accept a little bit less, a bit
they wouldn’t even miss, then these people could have a little bit more – a bit that would mean the difference between life and death to some of them. But I was young back then, and
still full of naive vitality and joie de vivre.

As 1937 went on, the mood in the pub became more sombre. Now
all
the talk was about Europe and what Germany was doing. The Civil War was still raging in Spain and more and more people
were convinced there was going to be another Great War as well. And I thought, oh no, not so soon after the last one! Scarcely twenty years later and the country still hadn’t recovered, and
now they were rattling the bayonets again. As well read as I was, I didn’t really understand everything that was going on. I listened to the talk about the terrible hardship that was caused
by the first Great War, and the Wall Street crash had rippled itself across the Atlantic and every country in Europe was feeling the effects – though not so severely here in Britain, because
we didn’t experience the full belt of the roaring twenties boom that went before it. I heard the men talking in the pub, saying how democracy was being undermined by dictators who promised
the people a better way of life, and Germany, Italy and Russia had gone in for systems of government that violently put down all opposition. Some were communists who supported Stalin, but others
said Russian peasants were dying in the streets, and the arguments could get heated, until Kevin came with his cudgel and calmed them down. Germany, worst hit by the depression because of the
reparations it had to pay for the Great War, fell into the hands of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Italy was being run by the Fascists, led by Mussolini and, along with Germany, re-arming in a big way
and many people were afraid that war would be inevitable. But others said it was all blather and the Bosche wouldn’t start up again for fear they’d get another pasting, like the last
time.

This was the kind of conversation I’d hear every day in the Duke’s Head and, although I listened to that talk, which swung from brooding despondency to careless self-deception, life
in London was still gay for a girl like me. I went dancing with Lucy and exploring the sights and sounds of the city and kept myself at arm’s length from the men who came mooching round,
looking for what they could get.

It was September when the fight happened – a Saturday night. The pub was crowded when a group of Oswald Mosley’s men came in. Like I said, many of the dockers were Communists and a
heated argument started about Spain and what was going to happen here when the Fascists took over. It wasn’t long before the first punch was thrown and it all quickly descended into chaos and
violent confusion after that. Kevin wasn’t able to control things with his cudgel and bottles and glasses soon started flying in all directions. I was out collecting empties at the time and
Lucy screamed at me to get back behind the bar. I tripped as I ran towards the hatch and lost my left shoe in the confusion. After I got back on my feet, I stepped on a broken glass that had landed
base down with a long shard sticking up, and it sliced open my foot.

The police came and cleared the pub, but I was losing a lot of blood and they allowed someone to drive me to one of the hospitals in south-east London. Nobody was able to come with me because
Lucy and Pearl and all the others had to stay behind to give statements to the police. I can’t remember who drove me, but it was in the cab of a lorry and the blood was coming through the rag
tied round my foot. They left me just inside the hospital door and drove away. The health service before the NHS was ramshackle and chaotic and everybody was afraid of falling ill, unless you could
afford it. A nurse came and found me a wheelchair and tried to stop the bleeding so she could see what damage had been done. I was getting weak and thought I was going to faint, but the nurse kept
shaking me and telling me to stay awake. I finally lapsed into unconsciousness, despite the nurse shaking me and slapping my face.

When I woke up again, it was a day and a half later and I was in a room with a lot of other injured people. My left foot was heavily bandaged and set in a pointed position, but at least the
bleeding had stopped. After a few hours, a nurse came to see me.

‘You’re a lucky girl, the doctor managed to stop the bleeding.’

‘Can I go home?’

‘Can you pay?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then you’ll have to go home. But you mustn’t stand on that foot.’

‘I have to work.’

‘Out of the question!’

Then she walked away and left me in the room full of baleful moans and the sickly smell of anaesthetic.

Lucy turned up in the afternoon and I asked her to try and find out what the extent of the damage was. She went away and came back with a young doctor sporting an aloof and superior manner.

‘Your name is Anwyn Moyle?’

‘Yes.’

‘I understand you have no means?’

‘No means?’

‘To pay for your treatment.’

‘I’m a barmaid. I earn five shillings a week.’

His undisguised contempt smiled down at my naivety. Then he told me the glass had pivoted up through the back of my heel and badly damaged the Achilles tendon and opened my ankle to the bone. I
went into shock from loss of blood. I would have to keep my foot tightly bandaged for four months, initially in a pointed position to keep the ends of the tendon together, and gradually the foot
should be brought upwards before re-bandaging. I would be unable to walk without a stick, even when the injury healed.

They gave me a makeshift crutch and Lucy helped me into a car sent down by Pearl. I went back to the Duke’s Head and lay on the bed in my room for two days, with only the crutch to help me
go back and forth to the bathroom. Pearl and Lucy were good to me, taking turns to bring me food and cups of tea and to sit with me and keep me company. But they both had to work and I knew Pearl
would need the room for a new girl, even though she didn’t say so.

There was nothing else for it – I’d have to go home to Wales. In those days, very few people were entitled to free medical aid. Under the 1911 National Insurance Act, access to a
doctor was only given free to male workers who earned less than £2 a week – and that didn’t cover their wives or children. Hospitals charged for services, which most people
couldn’t afford, so they didn’t go there, and many people, especially children, died through lack of simple care. Everybody tried to heal things themselves and they all had a folk
remedy for something – turpentine for lice, and tomatoes for hair loss, and onions for colic, and urine for chilblains, and cloves for toothache, and dock leaves for stings, and enemas and
Epsom salts and poultices. Doctors were aggressive and snappy with the poor, believing that it would be better for most of them to die than to waste resources on being treated.

So, there was no way I could stay lying on my back in London for four months, and then hobble about on a crutch for the rest of my life after that. I had to go home – at least I’d be
with my family who loved me and would take care of me. I wrote to my mother and explained what had happened. She wrote back and said coming home was the right thing to do. My brother Walter would
come down to London on the following weekend and collect me and take me back to Llangynwyd – probably for the last time in my life.

On Sunday 26 September 1937, Walter arrived at the Duke’s Head. I was dressed and packed and waiting for him with the makeshift crutch the hospital gave me. Lucy cried and hugged me and
even Pearl had a tear in her eye. She gave me a bag with £5 in it that the customers had collected between them to see me on my way – and I was deeply touched. People who could barely
afford to feed their children had contributed to this gentle gift, while those who could afford the obscenity of indecent extravagance thought hard over giving their workers a shilling for
Christmas.

Pearl provided a car to take us to Paddington station and Walter helped me to board the train for the journey home. We sat in silence for most of the way, except when he unpacked some food and a
bottle of milk, and we ate and talked about the family and how my father’s lungs were getting worse and my mother was tired from working and looked older than her years. But Gwyneth had
already left school and Bronwyn would be leaving next year and they’d both be able to get jobs and help out with the family finances. And I resolved there and then to get the better of this
injury. I would
not
be a cripple and a burden on my family for the rest of my life.

I would
not
!

M
y mother and sisters were so glad to see me and fussed about me and made me sit and put my foot up out of harm’s way. But my father’s
broncho-pneumonia had turned into emphysema. His condition was worsening all the time and he could hardly breathe without coughing up blood and bile. The little house was like an infirmary, with me
laid up and bandaged and my father choking and my mother tired from the hardship of her whole life.

The local doctor came round and re-bandaged my foot to stop it getting infected and, although my father got the free medical aid, it didn’t cover me and I had to pay him 2s/6d each time. I
gave my mother the five pounds the customers collected for me in the Duke’s Head and I had a few shillings from my wages – though not much because I spent it as I earned it, dancing and
dawdling round London with Lucy.

The autumn of 1937 was setting in and it was wild and wet and windy in South Wales. It was difficult for me to go anywhere with the crutch, in case I got the bandages damp or dirty with coal
dust and had to have them changed again for another 2s/6d. After a few weeks, my mother started changing the bandages herself. She’d wash and dry one lot, then alternate them with the
dressing that was already on my foot when that got dirty. I was in a lot of pain, but I didn’t like to complain because everyone was doing their best, and I didn’t want to be any more
of a burden than I already was. My sisters rigged up a makeshift wheelchair for me with a wooden seat and the handle and wheels off an old pram, and they pushed me around in it when the weather was
kind enough and Gwyneth wasn’t working and Bronwyn wasn’t at school. Gwyneth was coming up to sixteen and she was doing what I was doing at that age, working at whatever part-time job
she could get to help ease the burden on my mother and brother – and Bronwyn was too young to be pulling and pushing a lump like me around on her own.

The snow came early to the village that year and then I couldn’t get out at all. By late November I’d read every book I could lay my hands on twice over and it was still only two
months since the accident. Then, one day, I was sitting looking out the top window at the people trudging past in the black and white street when this Wolseley car pulled up outside our house. I
drew back quickly from the window when I saw Mrs Reynolds get out. I thought she must be angry because I’d left the Morgan family after she was good enough to get me the job. I kept peeping
from my secluded position as she approached the door and knocked on it vigorously. My mother answered.