Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis (5 page)

'Ada! Dolly!' The urgent summons from the house in their mother's voice would be the prelude to this ordeal.

First they had to endure a brisk rubbing of hands and faces with a soapy flannel wrung out in cold water. Then came swift and painful combing of hair with a steel comb which seemed to find out every sensitive spot on little Dolly's scalp. Both children had curly hair. Ada's sprang crisply from her head, but Dolly's was softer and fell in loose curls, later to form ringlets. Ada endured the hair-tugging stoically, chattering the while about what she would see and what she wanted her mother to buy.

'Hold still, child!' Mary would command. 'And hush your tongue! Us'll be lucky to get a good dinner from the shops, let alone sweeties and dollies and picture books!'

Dolly's eyes filled with tears of pain during the combing, despite Mary's endeavour to handle her gently. She knew it was no pleasure for the younger child to go shopping, but there was no one to mind her and the two must perforce accompany their mother everywhere.

At last they set out. Sometimes Dolly was pushed in the rickety perambulator, but its days were numbered, and more often than not she would struggle along beside her mother's long heavy skirt, clutching it with one desperate hand, or holding on to the stout shopping basket which her mother held.
Never for a moment did she let go. The thought of being parted from her mother was too terrifying to be borne.

Ada, on the other side, leapt and gambolled as gaily as a young goat, greeting friends, pointing out anything which caught her eye—a lady's pink parasol, a gleaming carriage door with a crest on it, or a pig squealing in a cart, covered with a stout net, and resenting every minute of its journey to the market.

Caxley High Street was always busy. It was a thriving town which served a large area, and the shops always had far too many hurrying people in them for little Dolly's liking. Customers pressed up to the counters to be served, assistants scurried back and forth filling baskets, weighing out sugar, fetching lumps of yellow butter on wooden pats, and slapping them feverishly into shape on the marble slab behind the counter.

Important customers usually waited in their carriages outside the shop while their menservants bustled to and fro carrying parcels, and the proprietor of the business himself fetched and carried too, leaving his premises to pay his respects at the carriage side. Sometimes a horseman, not wishing to dismount, would shout his order to someone in the shop. Out would race the shop boy at top speed, the parcel would be stuffed into a jacket pocket, coins would jingle, and the horse would clop-clop off down the street again.

The bustle was the breath of life to Ada. She scrambled up on the high round-seated chair by each counter, bouncing with such zest that her lofty ill-balanced perch frequently tipped over. From here she watched, with eyes as bright and round as a squirrel's. She loved to see the butter patted, and its final adornment with a swan or a crown from the heavy wooden butter-stamp. She delighted in the scooping of currants from deep drawers with a shiny shovel, and the see-sawing of the gold-bright scales and weights.

But Dolly, crouched between the counter and her mother's skirt, was in no mood to relish these joys. Bewildered by the noise, hustled to one side if she ventured forth, and half-suffocated by the people who pressed and towered around her, she longed for the time when her mother replaced her purse in the deep petticoat pocket beneath her voluminous skirts and they could make their way out into the street again.

Of all the shops, Dolly dreaded most the butcher's. The headless carcases, split down the middle to disclose heaven knew what nameless horrors in their sinister depths, were frightening enough. The poor dangling hares, with blood dripping from their noses to the sawdust on the floor, were infinitely worse. To see them flung on to the butcher's block and to watch his red hands wrenching the skins, with a sickening tearing sound, from their bodies was even more terrifying to the child, and the final awful tugging to release the head had once caused her to be sick upon the sawdust, thus bringing upon herself the wrath of her mother and the butcher combined.

But the most appalling experience, which happened all too frequently, was the purchase of half a pig's head. This useful piece of meat was very cheap and very nutritious, and Mary Clare often bought it for her family. Dolly watched, with fascinated horror, the whole head placed upon the butcher's block. The eyes, small and blue in death, seemed to look at her. There was something pitiful and lovable about its round rubbery nose and the cock of its great waxen ears. When the butcher, chatting cheerfully the while, raised his cleaver, Dolly squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her milk teeth, remaining so until the ominous thudding had stopped. She had never been able to keep her eyes closed long enough for the butcher to weigh, trim and wrap the meat, and so endured each time the ghastly sight of that cloven head, brains, tongue and grinning teeth exposed by the butcher's onslaught.

Mary, delighting in her purchase and making plans for several meals from it, never knew the repugnance which little Dolly felt. The child could not go near the basket which held this horror, shrouded in newspaper, and was careful to walk on the other side of her mother on the return journey. For Dolly, this was only the beginning of her misery. The pig's head would float, she knew well, in a basin of brine for hours to come, on the floor of the scullery, and every movement would set it swivelling slowly, while one blue eye cast a cold malevolent beam from its watery resting-place.

'Don't pick at your vittles,' Mary would say two days later, when she placed a plate of boiled pig's brain before her younger daughter. 'Look at Ada gobbling up hers! You be a good girl, now, and clean up your plate.'

'That's right, my little love,' Francis would say jovially. 'Thousands of poor children 'ud give their eye teeth for a plateful of brains like that. Why, I wager there's plenty down the marsh would like 'em!'

For all unhappy little Dolly cared, as she pushed the revolting things about, the marsh children could have them. Memories of the butcher's shop, the strain of living with half a pig's head in the house, and meeting the reproachful gaze of that one fearsome eye, completely robbed Dolly of any appetite. Her parents' concern was an added burden, yet how could she explain her revulsion?

And so the pigs' heads continued to appear and to cast their shadow over young Dolly's existence. It was small wonder that shopping in Caxley High Street presented so little attraction for the child in her early years.

Although Dolly's heart sank when her mother slammed the gate and turned left towards the town, it rose with equal speed if she turned to the right, for that way lay the fields, woods and gorsy common land which were becoming so dear to her. That way led to her grandparents' home. Most visiting was done on a Sunday, when Francis was free.

During his enforced idleness, and as soon as he could hobble as far, it had become a habit for the young family to spend Sundays with the old people.

'At least they'll get a good feed,' old Mrs Clare had told her husband. 'That baby don't appear too strong, for my liking; and it takes Francis out of himself to leave that chair of his now and again.'

'Don't overdo it,' advised her husband. 'They don't like to feel they're having charity, that pair, and good luck to 'em. Besides, they won't want Sundays booked here for the rest of their lives. Invite 'em as much as you like while things are bad—but you ease up a bit when our Francis is back at work.'

By the time the little girls were four and six, the Sunday visits were occasional treats. One particular Sunday remained vividly in Miss Clare's memory.

It was a day of high summer. The family set off clad in their Sunday best. Francis wore the dark suit which he had bought for his wedding, and Mary's lilac print was drawn back into a bustle showing a darker mauve skirt below. Three rows of purple velvet ribbon edged the skirt, and on her head was a neat straw hat with velvet pansies to match the underskirt. Both frock and hat had been a present from her generous employers at the time of her wedding, and were kept carefully shrouded in a piece of sheeting on working days. Dolly thought her mother looked wonderful as they set off, and told her so.

'Has Queen Victoria got a hat like that?' she wanted to know.

'Dozens of 'em,' laughed her mother, flattered nevertheless by the child's admiration.

'Not as pretty,' maintained Dolly stoutly. Her own clothes did not give her as much pleasure. Her two petticoats, laceedged drawers and white muslin frock had been so stiffly starched that it had been necessary to tear them apart before arms and legs could be inserted. Now the prickly edges dug into her tender flesh, and she knew from experience that the lace on her drawers would print strange and uncomfortable patterns on her thighs from the pressure against grandma's horsehair sofa. Tucked under one arm she held Emily, wrapped in a piece of one of her own old shawls. She was the least welldressed of the party, but not in her mistress's eyes. She was heavy, too, and Dolly was obliged to hitch her up every few yards.

But these minor discomforts were soon forgotten in the joys of the walk. They crossed a stile and made their way across a meadow high with summer grass. Some of the bobbing grasses stood as high as Dolly herself and she saw, for the first time, the tiny mauve seeds quivering at the grass tips. Ox-eyed daisies and red sorrel lit this sweet-smelling jungle that stretched as far as the small child could see. Above her arched a sky of breath-taking blue where two larks vied with each other in their outpourings.

In the distance the six bells of Caxley parish church chased each other's tails madly. A warm breeze, scented with the perfume from a field of beans in flower, lifted Dolly's hair, and she became aware, young as she was, of her own happiness in these surroundings. Sunlight, flowers, Mother, Father, Ada, and dear Emily were with her. Here was security, warmth, love and life. Nothing ever completely dimmed that shining memory.

At grandma's house there were different joys. There was an aura of comfort and well-being here which the child sensed at once. The furniture was old and solid, unlike the poorer machine-made products in her own home. The old couple had inherited well-made pieces from their families, and the patina of a century's polishing gleamed upon the woodwork. These sturdy chairs and chests had been made and used long before the commons were enclosed and their self-supporting owners became poor men. The difference in the two homes was eloquent testimony to the revolution which had split a nation into classes. Although the young Clares might consider themselves fortunate when they compared their way of life with that of 'the marsh lot', yet the fact remained that they were as poor. Francis's parents were the last inheritors of an older England where a man might live, modestly but freely, off his own bit of ground.

After the greetings and the Sunday dinner were over, the grown-ups settled back to rest and talk and the two children were told to sit up to the table to play.

'I'll take off your sashes, so they don't get crushed,' said their mother, undoing Ada's blue and Dolly's pink ones. It was good to expand, free of their bindings. The sashes were eight inches wide and four or five feet long. Made of stout ribbed silk, they were considerably restricting when tied tightly round a wellfilled stomach. Dolly watched with relief as her mother rolled them up, smoothing them on the table to take away the wrinkles.

Ada was given a picture book, but Dolly had her favourite object to play with—a square tin with pictures of Queen Victoria on each side. It had been bought at the time of the sovereign's golden jubilee, the year before Dolly's birth, and had held tea then. Now it was grandma's button box, and Dolly was allowed to spill out the contents across the table and count them, or form them into patterns, or match them, or simply gloat over their diversity of beauty.

There were big ones and tiny ones. Buttons from coats and caps, from pillowcases and pinafores, from bonnets and boots, cascaded across the table. There were buttons made of horn, bone, cut steel, jet, mother o'pearl, linen and leather. Dolly's fingertips, as well as her excited eyes, experienced the gamut of sensations roused by handling the variety of sizes, textures, colours and shapes which were held in the bright button box.

As she bent over her treasures, scraps of conversation floated to her from the grown-ups.

'Found a house yet, my boy?'

'Not that I can afford, Dad.'

'You won't find anything much cheaper than your own, I'd say. Take my advice and stay on a bit till you've built up the work again.'

'Things aren't too good. Straw's scarce.'

'Ah, there's not the wheat grown. Old George Jackson, shepherd to Jesse Miller, was in here this week. He's got more sheep than ever before. He gets twelve shilluns a week, he tells me, and two pounds Michaelmas money. He's not doing so bad.'

'And gets it regular, too,' said young Francis, with a hint of bitterness in his voice.

The women talked of clothes and bed-linen, meals and children. They seemed, to Dolly, to talk of nothing else, unless it were of illness and death, and then it was in low tones meant to keep such things from attentive young ears.

At last the time came when the buttons must be swept from the table back into the jingling tin. Dolly followed the two women into the kitchen and watched the preparations for tea.

Bread and butter at grandma's was quite different from that at home, for here the bread was cut very thin and buttered very thickly. Home-made plum jam could be spread upon the second slice, too—the first must be eaten plain—whereas at home one either had bread with butter on it or bread with jam, never both. Fingers of sponge cake followed the bread and butter, the top sparkling with a generous sprinkling of sugar.

The children had milk to drink from mugs with a pattern of ivy leaves round the rim, but the grown-ups had tea poured from a huge brown tea-pot which wore a snug buttoned jacket to keep the tea hot.