Home for Christmas (4 page)

‘I’m going to show Lydia how easy it is to drive a motor car so I’ve invited her to Heathlands for Christmas. I’m sure she’ll enjoy it.’

Lydia looked at her in surprise. ‘I’m not sure I can.’

‘Of course you can.’

The gardener looked at her with one eye half closed as though in warning. ‘Children and women ain’t supposed to go messin’ wiv motor cars.’

Agnes laughed. ‘Don’t be silly, Mr Matthews. Why ever not?’

‘Because it’s so,’ replied the old man, the corners of his eyes wrinkling with amusement, the half-closed one now totally shut. ‘Though the way things are goin’ p’raps it won’t always be so. Not if you grows up like one of them suffragette women. Some of ’em even wears trousers so I ’ear.’

‘I shall wear trousers,’ Agnes exclaimed. ‘And I shall smoke and drink and I shall drive a motor car. I might even fly an aeroplane. You see if I don’t.’

The cracked face broke into deep wrinkles as he smiled, shook his head and went back to tending his fire.

‘We’ll go to the garage now,’ said Agnes, taking long strides whilst Lydia ran to keep up with her. Agnes, Lydia noticed, was about two inches shorter than she was but had longer legs.

Tossing her auburn hair, Agnes opened a stable-style door just a few inches and slid through the narrow opening. Lydia followed.

The building had clearly once housed the carriage horses and the hacks useful for riding along Rotten Row on favourable Sundays. The smell of hay, horse sweat and the lingering odour of manure still hung in the air, but the more pungent stink of oil and axle grease was slowly taking over.

A circular window was set high at one end. The overhead hayloft was as empty as the mangers still attached at regular intervals along the wall.

Agnes went round to the front of the bright yellow car sitting in the centre of the garage.

‘Sir Avis has two motor cars. There’s the one you came in and this one. It’s a Rolls-Royce.’

The car had shiny brass lamps and a horn made of rubber and brass, perched next to the windscreen. Lydia was amazed.

A man Lydia recognised as the chauffeur who had driven them to the house looked up from sweeping a hand brush over the running boards.

He had round eyes and stuck-out ears, which looked too big for his long face. His thin lips formed a tight, straight line. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth.

Without asking for permission, Agnes opened the car door, climbed up into the driver’s seat and spread her hands over the steering wheel.

‘Thompson, I’m going to drive to Brighton today. Lydia is coming with me. Climb in, Lydia.’

Lydia looked nervously at Thompson who just stood there, his big hands hanging at his side.

‘Well, come on!’ Agnes sounded impatient.

The man jerked his head, took the cigarette from the corner of his mouth and spat on the floor. ‘Go on. Best do as her ladyship tells you.’

After dislodging a scrap of tobacco from his lip, he stuck the cigarette back in position, grunted something about interruptions to his work, and then returned to what he was doing.

Lydia got in beside her new friend.

Agnes reeled off each part of the car whilst pointing with long, strong fingers.

‘Now this is the steering wheel. This is the brake. You have to squeeze the clutch tightly to ease it off. That thing there is a damper …’

‘Are you really going to earn a living driving a car?’ Lydia asked, her eyes shining with admiration.

Agnes eyed her haughtily. ‘This is the twentieth century. I can do whatever I want. I can be whatever I want. I had my first driving lesson when I was only nine years old. Thompson showed me how.’

‘He showed you?’ Lydia was now seriously awestruck.

‘Yes. I had a go.’

Thompson looked up at them from the job he was doing on the running board.

‘I told you not to tell.’ He sounded displeased.

‘Where did you drive?’

‘At Heathlands. Sir Avis’s country estate. We don’t just stay there for Christmas. We stay there at other times too. There’s a drive, a piece of road with no other traffic on it except for the odd farm cart. Acres and acres of grass to drive on if I wish, and there are deer and a lake.’

Lydia had visited the house owned by her mother’s family in the town of Wareham in Dorset, a stout building adjoining the shops they owned, but it was nothing like the house Agnes was describing. The main street was dusty during the summer and slick with rain or ice in the winter. The green hills surrounding Wareham were within walking distance and sometimes they had gone there for a picnic or taken the train to nearby Weymouth.

‘I’ve been to Weymouth,’ she exclaimed in an attempt to match Agnes’s experiences. ‘I saw the sea.’

Agnes was not to be outdone.

‘I’ve seen the sea too. Sir Avis also has a house in Brighton though we don’t go there now. Lady Julieta lives there.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘Sir Avis’s wife. They don’t like each other so they don’t live together.’

‘I see.’ Lydia nodded solemnly as though the fact that two married people lived apart was perfectly understandable.

‘If you like you can come to Heathlands in the summer too – that’s if you like it at Christmas. I can show you how to drive a motor car; perhaps not for Christmas, but at some other time. Sir Avis often has friends and family to stay – mostly friends. He only invites those members of the family that he’s on speaking terms with. He prefers servants and friends rather than family. Some people call him eccentric because of that. But he’s not. He’s just a humanist. That is how he describes himself. A humanist.’

Lydia nodded. ‘A humanist,’ she repeated, as though that too was as understandable as not living with a despised spouse.

‘I’m hungry,’ Agnes said suddenly. ‘Let’s see if there’s some sliced ham in the kitchen. I’ll make sandwiches. With pickle. Do you like pickle?’

It seemed rude to say that pickle upset her, so Lydia nodded and said yes, she was quite fond of it, though not too much please.

The garage had been warm and cosy; outside the air had turned sharp.

‘Frost tonight,’ shouted the old gardener as they made their way past the shed where he kept his tools.

‘Good for the parsnips,’ shouted Agnes. ‘He always says that, so I’ve said it for him,’ she giggled.

Lydia giggled with her.

‘You’ve quite a way with you, Agnes Stacey.’

The two girls hurried back to the kitchen, Lydia hampered by her hobble skirt, Agnes striding as though she had no skirt on at all, though she did; a navy blue one that billowed like a tent around her. The maid who answered the door was wearing something similar, Lydia noticed.

Back in the garage, Thompson straightened and rolled his shoulders before standing back and eyeing the car’s bodywork.

‘Bloody lovely,’ he exclaimed, his smile threatening to split his face in half.

He was in the process of lighting another cigarette, when the door in the far corner of the garage opened and attracted his attention. He smiled as Megan Rogers brushed the damp from her shoulders and shook her umbrella.

He grinned at her and held his arms open. ‘Give us a kiss.’

Megan tossed her head. ‘You might not deserve one.’ She was always ready to tease him.

‘Why might that be?’ he asked. He ran his fingers through his wiry light brown hair, his legs apart, waiting for her to come to him.

‘You’ve been entertaining other women. I know you have. I heard them.’

Her tone condemned but her lips were smiling.

‘Lady Agnes has found herself a friend.’

‘Shhh!’ Megan hissed, her finger held in front of her lips. ‘You know you shouldn’t say that. What if somebody hears?’

He shrugged. ‘What if they do? We all know that she’s the old man’s kid.’

‘She’s the cook’s daughter. She don’t know the way things is herself. So you watch it, Ted Thompson. You just watch what you say.’

It was Sarah Stacey’s habit to visit her mother on the other side of London two weeks before Christmas. After that there was too much to do at Heathlands what with all the guests Sir Avis invited. Even with a household of experienced domestic servants, plus Agnes, she would be too busy.

Agnes was the biggest problem, the sulkiest kitchen maid ever to don an apron.

‘I don’t want to go into service. I want to fly, or drive, or make useful things. I don’t want to wait on people.’

‘So, if you wish to make things, how about being a milliner?’

Agnes’s sulky expression turned even sulkier. ‘I don’t mean hats. I mean useful inventions.’

Sarah rolled her eyes, sighed and hustled her daughter out of the door and into the car. Thompson was driving them to Myrtle Street. Once the visit was over, a few days later, they would get a cab and a train to Heathlands, Thompson picking them up the other end.

Sarah’s mother Ellen Proctor lived in a red brick terraced house in Myrtle Street, not far from the docks in the East End of London. Originally built for rope makers, coopers and carpenters in the days when sailing ships had been made of wood, the houses were flat fronted and basic. They had a door at the front, one sash window on the ground floor and one above it. There were two bedrooms, a living room and scullery plus an outside privy at the end of the garden. Most of the people who lived there had poorly paid jobs, or in some instances, none at all.

The terraced street was one of many arranged in lines along cobbled streets where kids played, women gossiped and the sound of cranes swinging from ship to shore screeched and clanged for most of the day.

Agnes’s mood was still on her when they were offloaded in a deserted street some way from the house in Myrtle Street. Sarah did not like being dropped off at the door in case the neighbours would accuse her of being snooty.

‘You should consider yourself lucky, my girl,’ snapped Sarah Stacey to her daughter. ‘At least you have a position.’

‘I don’t want to be a kitchen maid or a house maid. I want to drive a car,’ Agnes repeated.

‘Don’t be ridiculous! You’re a girl. Girls do not drive cars.’

Sarah Stacey looked and sounded exasperated. She had always hoped that her daughter would stay in the house where she worked, a domestic servant on better pay and enjoying better conditions than most. It had never occurred to her that Agnes might not want that and it had certainly never occurred to her that Agnes wanted to drive a motor car.

‘Damn Ted Thompson! He had no business teaching you how to drive. No business at all!’

Sarah had never liked Ted Thompson, a man who considered himself attractive to women with his smart uniform and leather gloves that squeaked when he pulled them on.

She knew he was having a fling with Megan and had cautioned the girl.

‘He’s not the settling type,’ Sarah had said to her.

In return, Megan had smiled knowingly and said, ‘Neither is Sir Avis.’

The barb had hit home and a bright flush had flown over Sarah’s handsome face. Deep down she knew it was Sir Avis she had to blame. He’d encouraged Agnes to aim above her status. It wouldn’t do. It just wouldn’t do.

‘Sir Avis thought it was a brilliant idea,’ said Agnes, instantly confirming the truth that her mother found hard to face.

Sarah was speechless. Sir Avis had very modern ideas that she herself found difficult to come to terms with. She’d laughed the day he’d declared that at some point in the future men would take to the skies in flying machines.

‘Nonsense,’ she’d said to him. That was some years ago before Agnes had been born. Since then she’d had to eat her words, but still she found it difficult to believe that the lot of the domestic servant and the working class in general would ever change.

The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.
God ordained one’s lot in life according to the words of the hymn. Not that she needed a hymn to tell her that. Some things would change but not everything.

‘Remember to say don’t instead of do not, and drop a few aitches. Otherwise your Gran might think that we’re both getting ideas above our station and the neighbours will make fun.’

‘So why teach me how to speak properly in the first place?’

‘For the benefit of your betters. Rich folk like to have servants who speak properly.’

‘I’ve already told you. I don’t want to be in service. If I did I would be a chauffeur.’

‘Well, you can’t. And that’s an end to it.’ Sarah sighed. ‘Well, in the meantime you’ll have to accept your lot in life until something else turns up. If you meet a nice young man and get married, you won’t be working for long anyway.’

Agnes smiled to herself and whispered a long drawn out ‘Yesss … That might be different.’

‘Don’t even think about Robert Ravening,’ hissed her mother. ‘Mark my words; marrying him is something that will never happen.’

Agnes pouted. ‘That isn’t necessarily so …’

‘No!’ snapped her mother, a warning finger raised in front of Agnes’s face.

‘If that’s the case, where does my father fit in?’ she’d asked but her mother had just walked on.

Agnes was determined to hold on to her dream. Some day she would get to do what she wanted to do. Like the doctor’s daughter, she too wanted to do something useful, not cleaning and cooking for rich folk no matter how good to her they were.

Agnes followed her mother past Jarmans, the shop on the corner of the street where they sold everything from enamel jugs to fresh bread, Colman’s mustard to Cherry Blossom shoe polish.

Sacks of cabbages, potatoes, carrots and onions took up half the narrow pavement in front of the shop window. An enamel sign advertising Sunlight soap filled the gap between shop window and the living space above the shop. Brushes and mops hung from the wall in the narrow shop doorway making it necessary for customers of wide girth to turn sideways to enter. Inside the shop smelled of lavender polish and strong tea.

A bell jangled and the door opened as they passed. Mr Jarman came out wearing a brown apron that reached to his ankles. He had a broad face, kind eyes and a black moustache that curled over the corners of his mouth. His hair too was black, plastered down with hair cream and parted in the middle.