‘What about writing to some of the big shops in the city – they like to employ under sixteens. I’ll deliver the letters – or Alan can.’
Fiona’s face lifted a trifle. ‘Who should I write to?’
‘Um – er, try Lewis’s or Blackler’s.’
‘I’d love to work for Owen Owen’s or Boots.’
I was hastily getting into my coat and hat. Given good advice on how to improve her appearance, Fiona would have fitted well into these higher-class shops, but she was untidy and grubby, despite the fact that Mother bought her new clothes as often as possible. I said with caution, ‘You could try them.’ I picked up the letters that she had written the evening before. ‘I’ll put these into the Echo office for you.’
‘Come on, Helen,’ shouted Alan from the front doorstep.
Mother told Fiona what to give the children for lunch and fled through the back door to catch her tram. Suddenly poor Fiona was left standing alone in the dirty, cluttered living room.
Some time back, I had been very ill and for two years had not been strong enough to walk to work. Recently because I felt better and, anyway, could no longer afford the tram fares, I had begun to walk again. Alan had always been provided with tram fares, but he started to accompany me. This long march to and from the city was hard on shoes. We both had pieces of cardboard poked into our footwear to help to fill up the holes in the soles. I had painful ingrowing corns on the bottoms of my feet from the exposure of the tender flesh to hard pavement. At times it was like walking on knives.
We always went along the side of the Anglican Cathedral. It was the last of the big Gothic edifices to be built in Europe, and clearly on the morning air one could hear the tiny taps of the stonemasons’ hammers, as if a band of elves was hard at work. In pouring rain the great building looked like a huge red sandstone peak, and I loved looking at it, though I had never yet plucked up enough courage to enter it – I feared I was too shabby. Alan did not share my cat-like interest in new territory, so when I suggested that we go into it together, he shrugged and asked, ‘Whatever for?’
Along Rodney Street, with its charming Georgian frontages, its trim white front doors and gleaming brass plates, he made me stop several times. It was a street of medical specialists, whose cars parked in the street reflected their owners’ status. Alan would pause to touch reverently a polished door handle or a new shiny mascot sitting proudly on a bonnet, and would point out to me the merits of the various makes.
Sometimes he would talk enthusiastically about the cricket matches which he played in the park. He was always the hero batting steadily against the opposing team’s wicked bowlers.
Occasionally, he would ruefully rub his bruised bottom and mutter maledictions against the ruthless bookkeeper under whom he worked as an office boy. Older men were heavy-handed with their apprentices. They believed in knocking a young man into shape. They had never heard of bruised egos, and a bruised bottom was just one of the hazards of being young. Boys of fourteen found themselves a small minority amid older men and they learned their trade and how to behave, whether they liked it or not. Perhaps that is why in those days there was less vandalism and less theft. In big, soulless places like the docks, however, theft was a fine art.
I rarely talked to Alan about my own affairs. I was, after all, a stand-in mother to him. I listened. It was unusual for me to talk very much to anyone except my friend, Sylvia Poole. I never seemed to be able to stop talking to her. Ever charitable, Sylvia always said she learned a great deal from me. She certainly received a great number of lectures on British and French history.
Neither Alan nor I mentioned the necrophiles amongst whom poor Fiona had found herself working. To me it was another sickening facet of human behaviour to be shunned, condemned and put out of my mind. Alan had made a joke of it, and I wondered if he really thought it was funny. It must have been in his mind, because he said suddenly, as we hurried down fashionable Bold Street, ‘You know, Fi is very dumb. She was lucky she didn’t get raped in that place.’
‘She’s not so stupid, really,’ I replied. ‘She had enough sense to lock herself into the cash desk – like a doll in a glass case. She’s so pretty. Too nice to be pushed around.’
I caught my breath as a stab of pain went down the side of my stomach. A familiar dull ache spread down my back.
My step faltered, and Alan paused to ask, ‘Something the matter?’
‘No. Nothing much. Just a little spasm. It will go.’ I clutched one arm across my waist, to try to contain a second wave of pain.
‘You look awfully white.’
‘No. It will go,’ I reassured him, and moved forward again, pressed by the crowd behind me hastening to work.
Alan must have been aware that each month I was seized by terrible, clawing pain lasting some eight to twelve hours. It was impossible to hide it, because I would faint from time to time. Yet I could not bring myself to tell him what the trouble was. Our National Health Insurance doctor assured me that it would disappear when I married, which was not much comfort to a born spinster. He never examined me. I took aspirin in large quantities. Mother bought me ground ginger to take in hot water and, if the pain struck while I was at home, I had the use of Edward’s hot water bottle to hug. Nothing helped much. I wondered how I would ever crawl through the day’s work. I had no sanitary towel with me to use, and no money to buy one. We used bits of old cotton cloth which we washed over and over again.
I did not consider returning home. People who missed too many days of work tended to be dismissed at the first excuse, and I had lost a lot of days through illness already. If I fainted in the office it would be all right. Women frequently fainted from overwork, lack of food and all kinds of untreated illnesses.
I felt a stab of another kind as we moved slowly onward. The pin holding up my panties had opened and scratched me, and in seconds they slid down my legs and lay round my ankles. Alan giggled, as did one or two passers-by.
Proud as hell, I felt so humiliated that I started to cry quietly, as I stepped out of them. It was not the loss of the panties that bothered me; it was their grey raggedness. They were tattered beyond repair, elasticless, patched on patches, in a world where a good pair could be bought for sixpence – and they were already stained. I did not know how to endure the look of disgust on the face of one nicely dressed woman who stepped round me. I wanted to scream at her that it was not my fault that I was not clean.
‘Pick them up quick and put them in your bag,’ said Alan, a grin on his face.
I did so, hastily cramming them down into the old-fashioned handbag, and we moved on quickly. Alan produced a hanky and I surreptitiously wiped my eyes. The pain was coming in low-level, steady waves.
‘Thanks,’ I murmured, as I handed it back to him. The handkerchief was grey from poor washing. Sometimes it seemed as if we lived in a world which was made up entirely of shades of grey and black.
We came to the corner of Whitechapel and Church Street. Here our ways parted.
‘All right?’ Alan asked.
I hesitated for a second, wondering if he could lend me three-halfpence for a tram ride home. Fear of piling up more absences than my employer would tolerate made me say, ‘Yes, thanks. ’Bye.’
I shuffled up to the office. What was I going to do? I would have to ask one of the girls for help. Would they again think me to be a disgusting object, lacking even basic common sense to provide myself with ordinary sanitary requirements?
Filled with consternation, beside myself with pain, I climbed the six flights of stone steps to the cloakroom on the top floor.
There was no one in the cloakroom and it gave me the opportunity to attend to myself as best I could. I replaced the errant panties, pinning