Poppy Day (4 page)

‘Leave ’im be,’ Mrs Guerney commanded her. ‘He’s in no fit state to talk to yer.’

Olive walked holding the girls’ hands. Jess was dressed in navy, her thick hair gathered into two plaits. She insisted on picking up a brown, stiff leaf and holding it. She had to hold something or she would float away, lost. Her toes roared with the pain of chilblains. Now and then the stiff black stuff which swathed her aunt’s arms brushed against her cheek. Olive squeezed Jess’s hand with her own.

Friends and neighbours walked with them. At the church Olive waited with the girls at the end of the path as the coffin withdrew. The backs of the men carrying Louisa moved in a stately sway along the little path, and as they disappeared inside, Jess felt Olive’s hand tighten convulsively and a strange shudder seemed to go through her. She drew herself up.

‘Come on. That’s men’s work in there. Time to go ’ome.’

Jess sobbed, distraught as they turned from the church. Looking up she saw tears coursing down her aunt’s face. Olive’s hand kept clenching and unclenching on hers.

Olive could only stay one more day before going back to Birmingham. She organized for Sarah Guerney to help out in the house. And she tried to take William Hart to task.

‘You’ll ’ave to take a bit more notice of ’er,’ she said, eyeing Jess. ‘’Er’s only six and yer all ’er’s got now.’

He was numb with grief, spoke like a winded man.

‘I can’t be a mother to her, now can I?’ Jess heard him say. ‘’Er needs a mother.’

While Olive was there she seemed like part of Louisa, and was the woman of the house for now. That second day Jess was kept away from school, and played with Polly. Jess took her up the track to meet the farmer’s boys, but they were wary, as if death followed you round like a smell. She and Polly went and cracked the ice at the edge of the pond on the green.

‘’Ave yer got nits?’ Polly asked conversationally, shifting a brittle triangle of ice with the toe of her boot.

‘No. Don’t reckon so.’

‘I wish I ’ad hair like yours. It’s ever so nice, yours is.’

They were drawn to each other this time.

The night after Olive and Polly left, Jess lay in bed, cuddled in the deep dip of the mattress. The house was quiet and dark. After a time the stair treads creaked as her father came up, a candle stuck on a saucer. The door squeaked as he crept into her room, the flame wavering.

Jess pretended to be asleep. Through her lids she sensed the light thinning, bulbing outwards as he held the candle high over her. He looked down at her for a time, then sighed, a massive expulsion of breath from the depths of him. In a moment he went out again, crossing the landing to his cold, silent room. It was the closest he ever came to trying to comfort her.

Jess lay still, the blackness seeming to pulse round her. She thought about the dark yard below her window: outside it, black fields lit only by an ice-flake moon . . . And beyond them more darkness reaching on forever . . . She began trembling, sobbing, curling into a tiny, tight ball, crying out her distress into her pillow.

‘Mom! Oh Mom . . . Mom . . .!’

Sarah Guerney was in her late thirties when Louisa died, a lanky woman with black hair, rather hooded brown eyes and a surprisingly thin neck, giving her head an unbalanced, chicken-like appearance made more pronounced by the pecking little nods she gave when nervous or irritable. Jess had never taken to her, even at the beginning.

Sarah had married first at twenty and been left a widow two years later with a daughter to bring up and a grocer’s shop to run. As time passed she took on an assistant in the shop and started to attend births in the village, supported the women until they were Churched, and laid out the dead. As well as gaining a certain status, she earned a small fee for each attendance, or a basket of eggs or fresh vegetables if money was short.

‘I see ’em in and I see ’em out,’ she would say, full of her own importance.

She set her sights on William Hart almost as his lovely young wife was breathing her last. She did not expect her objective to be achieved quickly, nor did she expect love. What Sarah saw before her was an opportunity for combining assets – she had the shop, he the forge.

So in the year after Louisa’s death she left her daughter in charge among the tins, packets of Bird’s Custard and motley array of local produce, and set out to make herself indispensable to the Hart household.

She worked for William Hart with the tireless commitment of someone who’s after something. She carried water from the pump, cleaned, cooked and tended Louisa’s kitchen garden (the spare produce from which she could sell in her shop). She took brisk – not unkind, at the start, but never tender – care of Jess. She scrubbed, washed and darned, her gaunt energy adding a domestic pace and wholesomeness to a house which would otherwise have been bereft. As the months passed, like sand trickling into a hole she began in some measure to fill the space Louisa had left.

Sarah was a practical woman who had always made her decisions on the basis of what she could get out of a thing. She was not prepared for the violence of feelings this situation would lead her to.

She fell devotedly, jealously in love with William Hart, only to inhabit a house haunted by the presence of the woman he had adored – and her daughter. Brooding Jess, whose eyes held only resentment towards her. Sarah was all sharp fingers and elbows, and a sharp tongue to match – no cuddles against a soft body, or feminine prettiness. With all of her being, Jess wanted her mother.

She was almost eight when she had to be Sarah’s bridesmaid and followed her new stepmother up the aisle, face gaunt, giving off no joy at all. Once the ceremony was over, the neighbours departed, she went to the end of the garden with the bouquet of carnations she had been made to carry. She stood them in a jar on the wall of the sty and set fire to them. They didn’t burn well, being fresh and moist. She lit more matches until the petals were wizened and black, and left them there, an offering of resentment and loathing. Sarah found them the next day.

‘What’s this?’ She held out the jar, quivering with fury and upset.

Jess looked back at her. ‘Wedding flowers.’

There was a terrible expression in Sarah’s eyes. ‘I’ve tried with you, my girl, by God I have. And this is how you repay me.’

‘You’re not my mom. You’ll never be like her.’

The new Mrs Hart came closer, hand raised to strike the girl. Then she sank down at the table and burst into tears.

Sarah had her two children by William Hart, Liza and Billy, and they always came first. Jess was pushed aside, barely clinging on to the edge of this new family. Her father mostly ignored her. Chose not to see what was happening. Dealing with children, girl children especially, was ‘woman’s work’. Sarah made sure he was out of the way when she slapped Jess, or screamed at her with poison in her voice. Jess was a sad shadow of the child who had once been the centre of a mother’s love, growing up now with only the most basic attention paid to her, and almost no loving care.

As she grew older Jess got a little job. Before and after school every day, she carried cans of milk from the farm to the Big House at the edge of the village, and earned half a crown a week, and Mrs Hunter at the farm was kind to her. There was one afternoon in particular which stuck in her mind. The day was much like any other except for the torrential rain outside, the clouds swirling like thick smoke, and Jess got caught out in it. When she trailed in from school late, clothes saturated with rain, the new Mrs Hart was storming round the kitchen of Forge Cottage in a furious temper.

‘Where’ve yer been? Always in a flaming dream you are – no use to anyone!’

The sight of Jess only increased her fury. Beautiful in a way Sarah could never be, pensive, a sprig of blackthorn blossom twined in her wet hair, her large eyes looking back with a combination of loathing and fear. ‘You’ve not even taken the milk up yet and there’s no end to do ’ere! I s’pose yer’ve been hanging round the cemetery again? Talking to ’er grave ain’t going to bring ’er back, yer know, so yer might as well get that into yer head once and for all. And get that muck out of yer hair!’

She went to pull at the flowers hanging on Jess’s ponytail but Jess backed away, eyes narrowing.

‘No! Why should I take it out? What harm’s it doing yer?’

Sarah thought she would boil over. Lord, she had only to set eyes on the girl and she wanted to scream!

‘Yer should do what I tell yer. Have a bit of respect.’

Jess’s gaze burned into her. She didn’t say a word. Didn’t need to. Her eyes said it all. Why should I? You’re not my mom. I hate you.

Their mutual loathing crackled round the kitchen. Jess moved away and put her cloth bag down wearily. Little Liza, five, was at the table toying with bread crusts on a blue and white plate. Jess looked longingly at them. She was frozen, soaked to the skin and ravenously hungry.

‘You’ll ’ave to wait,’ Sarah said with harsh satisfaction. ‘That’s what happens to yer if you fiddle about and don’t get on – yer go hungry.’

Billy, aged two, was on the floor, banging at the tiles with a child’s rolling pin. Sarah suddenly whipped round from by the range and snatched it out of his hand. He started yelling.

‘You’ll drive me to distraction – all of yer. Now go on – clear off up the farm out of my sight, or they’ll get someone else to do the job.’

Jess trudged along the muddy track as more clouds were piling up, swollen with unshed rain, and the wind swept across the fallow winter fields. She was a lonely, bedraggled figure, her clothes too small, hugging her wet coat round her, teeth chattering so much she had to clench her jaw to keep them still. Her boots kept slipping and sliding, wet rat’s tails of hair lay plastered to her forehead, and under the weight of her cold and misery her heart was so heavy she thought it might fall out of her body. She was so wretched that afternoon that she started to cry, tears mingling with the rain as it began to fall again, sobbing out her longing to be loved by someone, to matter to anyone in the world. She cried with longing for her auntie Olive, for the feel of that sleeve of her black dress as it had brushed against her face. Olive who had been kind. Who felt like her only family in the world apart from Louisa’s gravestone, the only place where she could go to pour out her feelings.

Jess remembered that afternoon as she set out from Olive’s house along the strange city streets, still able to recall it so sharply that for a moment tears stung her eyes. After so many moments of doubt on her way to get here, after all her soul searching and worry, she knew at that moment with fierce certainty that coming to Birmingham had been the best decision she had ever made.

‘Jess, what the hell are yer
doing
?’

Polly turned, lifting a pail of ash to take out, and stopped short at the sight of her cousin dreamily rubbing condensed milk all over her face.

Jess’s mind was obviously miles away. She stared at her gooey fingers, then back at Polly.

‘Yer a case, Jess – yer really are!’ Polly burst into her loud laugh, and Sis started giggling too.

‘S’good for yer skin, milk is. Mrs Hunter at the farm told me – top of the milk.’

The farmer’s wife had dipped a spoon into the thick surface of the cream and rubbed it on Jess’s cheeks with her rough index finger.

‘Keep yer skin lovely, that will.’ And Jess believed her. Mrs Hunter’s eyes were sunken with exhaustion and her body sagged like an old mattress, but her cheeks were radiant as rose petals.

Polly was chortling away. ‘But that ain’t fresh, Jess – it’s out of a tin!’

‘I weren’t thinking. It were just force of habit.’ She laughed and laughed, then suddenly found she was in tears.

‘We was only teasing, Jess!’ Polly dropped the pail and slipped her arm round Jess’s shoulders. ‘This ain’t like you.’

Jess was laughing and crying together.

‘I’m awright,’ she spluttered. ‘Don’t know what’s come over me. I just feel a bit strung up, that’s all – oh ta, Sis.’ The girl had poured her a cup of tea. ‘Better wash me hands and face first, hadn’ I?’

She went into the scullery, bewildered at the odd mix of feelings inside her.

She’d been in Birmingham two months and it had been an emotional time. She’d caused the family a lot of laughs with her strange ways. Used to the freedom of her own room she stripped her clothes off with no hesitation, not mindful of who might be about, looking through windows. Polly and Sis who were more coy and easily embarrassed went into fits at the sight of her.

‘Yer want to watch it, Jess – plenty of peeping Toms round ’ere!’

So Jess tried to be more modest. She learned lots of new things. That each family took turns cleaning out the stinking privies in the yard and she’d be no exception. That she’d be taking a bath in the tin tub by the fire once a week if she was lucky and sharing the water with her cousins. That if she wanted to grow flowers and herbs she was going to be hard pushed to find anywhere to do it. She spent a few pennies on seeds: chives, parsley, pansies and Sweet William and planted some pots, but she didn’t trust the children in the yard not to knock the tops off. So she stood them out the front and they struggled to grow, poor, sickly looking offerings. Jess decided it was probably more effort than it was worth. She learned that if she suddenly felt like running and jumping in the street as she might have done on the farm track at home, everyone’d look at her as if she was stark staring bonkers and probably tell her so too. And she learned, for the first time in her life, what real family teasing was like, and that she had a sense of humour which had never found a proper outlet before. She loved her cousins and the longer she stayed the more she spoke like them and understood their teasing. She found Bert and Sis easygoing enough. Polly and Olive were more tricky. Polly could be moody and liked everything just so, although Jess found she could often tease her out of being crotchety. Olive was more of a puzzle. She could be warmth and kindness itself, then the next minute distant, angry. And though Jess kept trying to find different ways of asking about her family, all the relatives she’d never seen or known, she got nowhere.

‘There’s nowt to say. Stop keeping on,’ was typical of the abrupt response she got. She found it odd and disappointing.

She had, though, found a job that first day, setting off past small workshops making screws, and copper piping, out into the wide main street which led uphill to the Bull Ring market and St Martin’s Church. All the trams and carts and people seemed to be heading there. The street was busy, a bobbing mass of hats in front of her: caps and homburgs, straw hats and bonnets.

Away from the back streets, and the nearer she walked to the Bull Ring, a host of smells mingled together: roasting coffee, freshly baked bread, fresh horse manure and the rough smoke of cigarettes. There was so much to see, and smell and hear, the clatter of carts, the delivery men and market stallholders bustling about hollering at each other.

Jess felt her spirits soar. This is my new home, she thought. It’s where Mom came from and I’m going to like it here, even if it is rough and ready. At least it’s nice to see a place with a bit of life in it for a change!

The Bull Ring teemed with people moving round the stalls which seemed to sell everything you could possibly imagine. Jess wove a path between piles of fruit and veg and crocks and rags, looking at everything. There were flowers and birds in cages, live chickens clucking, women with trays of lavender, sweets and cakes, a knife-grinder, sparks showering from his grindstone . . . Tarpaulins over the stalls protected the holders from heat or rain and they stood behind their stalls waving and all trying to see who could yell the loudest.

‘Get yer peaches ’ere – luvverly peaches!’

‘Best spuds in town . . .’

‘Oranges over ’ere – sweet and juicy!’ In the background the shrill voices of lads selling the
Despatch
competed with them. Jess saw a man walking in small circles waving a Bible and shouting and the stout lady selling flowers was in full voice. She found herself grinning affectionately. Flipping noisy lot, these Brummies! And now she was going to be one of them.

The thought of getting a job almost slipped her mind for a time. She wandered on, up New Street, past the Great Western Railway Station at Snow Hill. Dinnertime came and went. She ate her piece of bread in a church yard and ambled on, until gradually it dawned on her she had no idea where she was.

On the corner of a main street she saw a policeman.

‘Please – can yer tell me where Digbeth is?’ she asked.

He stared stonily ahead and there was such a long silence she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then suddenly he said, ‘Well unless you was thinking of going via Wolver’ampton, yer’d be best advised to turn round.’

Eventually, tired now, she found herself back in the Bull Ring again. In a side street the aroma of coffee made her mouth water. Perhaps she could afford a minute or two for a drink . . .

The little shop had a sign outside saying ‘A.E. Mather – Coffee and Tea House’. In the window Jess could see plates with a few cakes still left on them. A little girl in filthy, ragged clothes was standing with her face pressed up against the window.

Poor little mite, Jess thought. I wonder when she last had a meal in her belly.

She was about to offer her a penny for a cake when the child scampered away and in the place where she’d stood Jess saw the little sign in the window. ‘Help Required.’

It was gloomy inside, sawdust on the floor, a few plain wooden tables squeezed in round the room. At one sat two women with tall, thick glasses of tea in front of them. Jess felt them sizing her up.

‘What can I get yer? Coffee or tea?’ A thickset man with a moustache spoke to her from behind the narrow counter at the back. On it sat two or three plates draped with white cloths.

Jess went to him shyly. ‘I’ve come about the sign.’

‘Sign?’ The man’s eyes twinkled. ‘A sign in the celestial ’eavens, would that be? A portent and wonder?’

‘No,’ Jess said earnestly. ‘The one in the window.’

‘Ah, go on with yer, wench – I were pulling yer leg.’

‘Oh. I see.’ She felt foolish, but the man was smiling at her.

‘Why – you offering? Only we’re short-’anded, see. The wife’s just ’ad another babby and she ain’t back on ’er feet yet. It might be only for a week or two, like, but I could use yer.’

Two little children with Mr Mather’s slate-coloured eyes were staring at her from the doorway behind him. She smiled at them and the older one smiled back.

‘I’d like the job,’ Jess said. ‘I need to start somewhere.’

‘Not yer first job, is it? Yer look more’n fourteen.’

‘Oh no – but I’ve only just come to Birmingham. I don’t ’ave any references to give yer.’

Mr Mather snorted. ‘We take yer as we find yer, wench. References be damned. If yer don’t come up to scratch yer’ll be out and that’s that. Awright?’

He explained that her job would be to wash up, keep the tables and floor clean and generally keep the place nice while he brewed coffee and tea and looked after the customers.

‘Think yer can manage that? It’ll be six shilling a week – I can’t spare more.’

‘That’s awright,’ Jess was pleased. She’d have that to give to Auntie Olive for her board and food. ‘When do I start then?’

Mr Mather’s eyes filled with mirth again, looking at the pretty, and somehow unworldly girl in front of him.

‘’Ow about this minute?’

‘That’s all very well,’ Olive said when Jess proudly presented her with her first week’s earnings. ‘But yer’ve got to keep yerself clothed and shod as well.’

Jess’s excitement subsided a little. ‘Oh – I ’adn’t thought of that. Sarah made a lot of our clothes, see . . . ’

Olive perked up, hearing this. ‘Did she teach yer? You any good at sewing?’

Jess absolutely loathed sewing, but she was anxious to please the hard-faced woman in front of her.

‘I can sew a bit.’

‘Well that’s summat, ’cause we’re a right cack-’anded lot ’ere, all of us. Why didn’t yer say? You could get yerself a job as a seamstress.’

‘I never thought,’ Jess said, vowing silently that that was the last thing she’d ever do.

‘Not to worry – yer can move on when yer’ve found yer feet a bit. Factory pay’s better, no doubt about it. Tell yer what – you keep this family in darned stockings and yer can keep ’alf your wages every week. ’Ow about that?’

Over the first week as she settled in, they had a mattress stuffed for her and got some bedding from a pawn shop sale. She lay down to sleep between her cousins every night and it was cosy, chatting before they slept. That was, until Bert shouted up to them.

‘Shurrup gassing, will yer, and let us get some kip!’

Sometimes they could hear him snoring, and Olive snored like a dormant volcano as well.

‘It’s a wonder the house can stand it!’ Polly giggled sometimes, when they were both at it.

The weeks had passed and Jess hadn’t reminded Olive about writing to Budderston. It was only now that Olive remembered.

‘I reckon it’s about time you let ’em know where yer’ve taken off to. Yer father wouldn’t’ve kept a note of my address, would ’e?’

‘No. It was only on your letters and I’ve got them.’

Olive painstakingly penned a note saying that Jess had come to live with them, had found work and was in good health. She wrote her address clearly at the top of the paper.

‘Right – you go and post it.’

Jess felt churned up as she slipped the letter in the post. She walked back slowly down the road.

I miss ’em, she thought, in a funny way. Even though being ignored and used as the family drudge was what she had been used to. She longed to know whether her father would forgive her for taking off, even though she knew it was his fault she had had to go.

And as much as that she missed the beauty and familiarity of the countryside, the peace of it. Faces she recognized all round the village, when here she saw only strangers.

I wish I could just go for a visit and come away, she thought. See the house again, and my room and the apple trees. She imagined walking along the edge of the hayfield, the rustle of the dry grass which she’d heard every summer of her life, until now. At that moment the city felt such a big, noisy, squalid place. Jess felt suffocated by it, longed to breathe fresh country air, be away from the turmoil and human squalor.

I don’t belong here, she thought, in this miserable mood, walking back along Allison Street. I don’t really belong anywhere.

As the spring passed, along with the fun and warmth of living with the family, sitting round the table to eat, the jokes, there were other things Jess was starting to notice. Polly was worried about Olive.

‘Mom—’ she protested when Olive gave her another long list of shopping to fetch in after work. ‘I can’t carry all that back on me own – and I won’t ’ave time! Why can’t yer get it this morning?’

‘I’ll do some,’ Jess was always glad to feel useful. ‘If you go up Jamaica Row, I’ll go in the Market Hall and we can do half each.’

Gradually the girls got into the habit of doing all the shopping between them. If anything extra was needed Olive sent someone out – Sis, often, on an errand.

‘I don’t know what’s got into our mom,’ Polly said one night. ‘She don’t seem to want to go out the house nowadays. I think she’d get us to go to the lavvy for ’er if we could.’

‘Yer’d think she’d want to get out and ’ave a bit of a gossip for a while,’ Jess said, remembering that Sarah had usually come home in a marginally better temper from a walk to the village to fetch groceries and chat to anyone she met.

‘She don’t want to see anyone,’ Sis’s voice came softly through the darkness. ‘It ain’t like ’er.’