Yes, Mama. Helen Forrester
required and the careful pressing of Elizabeth’s elaborate dresses, while Humphrey strove to keep the costs of his household down.
Today, his housekeeper-cook, Mrs Tibbs, usually fairly calm, was in full spate in the steaming kitchen. She shouted to a reluctant Fanny to fill up the hot water tank by the blazing fire and then to peel the potatoes. The light of the fire danced on her sweating face, as she tasted the mock turtle soup and added a quick shake of pepper to it.
Polly was weeping as she came through the door, and Mrs Tibbs, Fanny and Alicia all looked up. They listened in shocked silence as Polly told them what Elizabeth had said about her going to her mother. Polly turned to Fanny. ‘Could you manage the clearing up, Fan?’
‘’Course I can, duck. Mrs Tibbs and me – we’ll manage, won’t we, Mrs Tibbs?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know how – but we will,’ sighed Mrs Tibbs. She picked up a ladle and opened the big, iron oven at the side of the fireplace to baste the joint of beef in it. Then she carefully closed the door on it again. She turned to Polly, who was wiping her eyes with a corner of her apron. ‘Now, Polly, make yourself tidy again, and then you could beat the cream for the trifle – and give Miss Alicia her tea.’
Alicia had come forward to watch Mrs Tibbs deal with the meat. The cook asked her, ‘Would you like a bit of our Shepherd’s Pie, luv?’
‘Yes, please, Mrs Tibbs. Can’t I help you – or do some of the dishes for Fanny?’
Mrs Tibbs smiled at her. ‘No, luv. It wouldn’t be proper. Your Mam wouldn’t like it.’
So Polly carried a tray containing Shepherd’s Pie and trifle up to the nursery – Mrs Tibbs had made the dessert in a little glass dish specially for Alicia.
As Polly put the tray down in front of her, Alicia asked, ‘Why doesn’t Mama let me come down to dinner, now? All the girls at school have dinner with their parents. I’m nearly grown up – and it would save you such a lot of running up and down, Polly.’ She shook out her table napkin and put it on her lap. ‘I could even eat my meals in the kitchen with you and the others. And, you know, I could have helped Mrs Tibbs today, so as to free Fanny to wait at table.’
‘Bless your lovin’ heart.’ Polly bent and gave her a quick kiss on the top of her flaxen head. Then she hastily rewound the plaits of her own hair more tightly and settled a clean cap on top of them, while she considered how to answer the girl.
‘It’s not proper for you to eat with the servants, luv. And your Papa gets cross very quickly, as you well know. So your Mam probably wants him to have his dinner quiet, like.’
‘I don’t think it’s because of that, because I can be as quiet as a mouse. I think they don’t like me, not even Mama. There must be something wrong with me.’
‘Och, no! Parents always like their kids,’ Polly lied.
‘Well, I don’t understand why I can’t be with them.’
No you don’t, thanks be, thought Polly. I’d hate you to find out. She was anxious to get back to her work, but Alicia was following her own line of thought, so she lingered for a moment, as the child asked her, ‘Do you think Mama would be grumpy, if I asked Mrs Tibbs to teach me to cook? Some of the girls at school are learning from their Mamas. You see, I could then help Mrs Tibbs.’ She looked earnestly up from her dinner.
‘Well, you could ask your Mam. But don’t say nothin’ about helpin’ – she might not like that.’
‘Surely I can help a friend?’
Polly did not respond. She merely said she must get back to the kitchen and fled before she had to explain the limit of friends allowed to little girls.
Alicia licked both sides of her trifle spoon and sadly scraped the empty dish. She put the dish back on to the tray. As she slowly folded up her napkin and pushed it into the ivory ring which Edward had sent her from India, she thought there was no explaining the idiosyncrasies of parents. She leaned back in her chair and her lips began to tremble – she wanted to cry. It was so strange that the other girls at school had parties at Christmas and birthdays and went on holidays with their mothers and fathers, and no such things ever happened to her – she was not even taken shopping by her mother – Polly took her to Miss Bloom, the dressmaker, to have her dresses and coats fitted, or to Granby Street to buy the few Christmas gifts she did not make herself. Polly even took her to All Saints Church most Sunday mornings.
She got out her spelling book to do her homework for the following day. But the letters seemed to jump erratically, as she realized suddenly that not only had she never given a party; she had never been invited to any other girls’ parties, either.
I
James Tyson did not take much notice of his wife, Bridie’s, complaints of fatigue and of pain in her legs; women always complained of their feet and that they were tired. He himself suffered chronic pain in his back, a relic of his work as a docker; it made it impossible, now, for him to find work, except occasionally as a nightwatchman. It was Bridie selling her rags and old buttons in the market who kept them from starvation. When one morning she failed to get up in time for the opening of the market, it was suddenly brought home to him that her complaints were not the usual ones.
‘Me head,’ she nearly screamed to him. ‘It’s me head!’
She was hot with fever, so a worried James suggested that she should go to the public Dispensary to ask for medicine.
‘I couldn’t walk it,’ she gasped. ‘I’ll be better later on.’
James woke Billy and sent him off to work; he had a job cleaning up after the horses in a stable belonging to a warehouse. On the way, James said, he was to call in on his sister, Mary, and ask her to come to her mother. Mary arrived at Bridie’s bedside half an hour later, her newest baby tucked inside her shawl. She was followed by her daughter, Theresa, a fourteen-year-old who plied the streets at night. They both stared down at Bridie tossing on her truckle bed; neither knew what to do.
Finally, Mary sent James upstairs to the tap in the court, to get some water to bathe Bridie’s face with. ‘Looks as if she’s got the flu,’ she suggested, as she handed her baby to Theresa to hold.
Nobody else attempted to put a name to the fever; there were all kinds of fevers, and people either got better from them or they died. And pain such as Bridie’s was something you put up with.
The news went round the court that Billy Tyson’s Mam had the flu. Nobody wanted to catch it, so they stayed away. James went to peddle Bridie’s fents in the market.
Word that Bridie had the flu very badly reached her Great-aunt Kitty, who lived in the next court. She hobbled down the stairs from the attic in which she lived and, slowly and painfully, dragged her arthritic limbs into the Tysons’ cellar room. She was panting with the effort as James, returned from the market, made her welcome; few people knew as much about sickness as Great-aunt Kitty did. She pushed her black shawl back from her bald head and bent over to talk to the patient.
‘’Ow you feelin’, Bridie?’ she croaked.
Her eyes wide and unblinking, Bridie tossed and muttered unceasingly.
‘Lemme closer,’ the old lady commanded Mary. ‘And give me the candle so I can see proper.’
As was the custom, Bridie still had her clothes on; clothes kept you warm at night as well as in the daytime. Only her boots had been removed, to show black woollen stockings with holes in the heels and toes.
As she shuffled closer to the bed, the old lady muttered, ‘Well, it int cholera, praise be, or she’d be dead by now. Is ’er stummick running?’
‘No.