‘I met someone called Carbery,’ Sara said. ‘It can’t be the same family, though. They were outside church this morning.’
‘No, it wouldn’t be them; too far to walk on empty stomachs,’ Mrs Prescott said. ‘This is a poor neighbourhood, but the Carbs have touched bottom, I reckon. Still, maybe Stan’ll get some work in the new year. And maybe he’ll not drink all his money away this time, if he gets a job.’ She glanced sharply down at Sara’s hands. ‘Where’s your gloves, Miss?’
‘I gave them to the girl I was telling you about outside the church,’ Sara said rather diffidently. ‘She had a baby in her arms, Nanny, and the baby’s feet were
blue
. She was so pretty, but so very cold . . . I gave her my collection, too,’ she added rather guiltily.
‘You did? Good for you, chuck,’ Mrs Prescott said decidedly. She opened the front door and ushered Sara out. ‘Give a knock next door, and I’ll explain what’s happened. What did your mam say?’
‘Oh, she’d given me a shilling, but when she saw the plate I think she realised that everyone else had given more, so she slipped me a whole half-crown. I put that in and she probably didn’t realise I hadn’t added the shilling as well,’ Sara said. ‘She’s not noticed the gloves yet, though. I was lucky, because she hates it when I lose gloves.’
‘You can say you left ’em at my house, and by the time Christmas is over she’ll likely have forgot all about them,’ Mrs Prescott said comfortably. ‘Which gloves were they?’
‘Oh, Nanny, I’m sorry, they were the pretty white angora ones you knitted me at the start of the autumn term,’ Sara said guiltily. ‘But the baby’s feet were so cold . . .’
‘You did right,’ Mrs Prescott assured her. ‘Them as have should give freely to them as haven’t. I spent years tryin’ to din that into my employers and their children, but it passed over most of their heads like water off a duck’s arse. Seems you’re kindly by nature, Sara.’
‘Some people don’t seem to care much about the people near them, Nanny . . .’ Sara began, but at that point the door of number five flew open and a thin, angular woman with a huge smile and very few teeth shouted, ‘Eh, if it ain’t Annie Prescott and the little gal!’ and pulled them both into the warm, overcrowded little room.
‘Eh, Marj, we’re frozen stiff an’ we’d kill for a nice cuppa,’ Mrs Prescott said, holding out her hands towards the blazing fire. ‘I’m off to the Cordwainers’ for a couple of days so me fire’s out, no chance of anything ’ot. Believe it or not I’d forgot to pack me bag, so they’ve gone off ’ome whiles me and Sara here gets a few things together.’
‘Kate, gi’s a couple o’ cups,’ Mrs Rushton shouted and an indistinct voice replied that she’d not be a minute, she’d just gorra gerra brew on the go. ‘Now, Annie, what’ve you been up to, eh? You was sayin’ only yesterday that you was packed an’ ready.’
‘Aye, well . . .’ Mrs Prescott broke off as a spindly girl in her mid-teens came into the room, carefully holding two chipped white cups which steamed invitingly. ‘Oh, Kate, luv, you’re worth your weight in gold! We’re that thirsty, Sara an’ me, that our tongues are hanging down to our knees. And on Christmas Day, an’ all!’
‘Auntie Annie, you’re always up to somethin’,’ the girl said jokingly, handing both females a cup. ‘Sit yourselves down . . . I’ll bring you t’rough a mince pie presently, or a piece of apple pasty if you’d rather.’
‘Thanks, queen, but it ’ud only spoil our dinners, and the tea’s a treat, jest what the doctor ordered,’ Mrs Prescott said, sipping the scalding liquid. ‘Eh, isn’t a decent cuppa a treat, our Sara? Bet you never get better’n this at ’ome?’
‘No, I never do,’ Sara said, not quite truthfully, for she did not enjoy strong tea, much preferring milk or the delicious lemonade that Cook made for the schoolroom. ‘It warms me up right down to my toes, Nanny.’
‘Aye, that’s right, a nice cuppa’s a real winter warmer,’ Mrs Prescott agreed. ‘Eh, there’s good smells comin’ from your kitchen, Marj – can I smell a roast?’
‘You can. With three of me boys in work, Kate here bringin’ home an apron full of goodies from the Bellmans, and Alf workin’ regular on the railway, we can afford a decent Christmas. I cooked the goose up at Sample’s yesterday, now it’s heatin’ through whiles the spuds an’ the cabbage boils. Aye, life’s not so bad, this year.’ She beamed at Mrs Prescott and Sara. ‘I could give up the pub cleanin’ tomorrer, if I’d a mind – we’d scarce miss the money.’
‘Aye. But there’s others not so lucky,’ Mrs Prescott said soberly. ‘Them next door to you; things ain’t so good when you’ve a dozen kids, none of ’em workin’ yet, and your old man’s not done a hand’s turn for six months.’
‘A dozen kids? In a house the same size as yours, Nanny?’ Sara started to say, then stopped short. There were quite a lot of kids in this house and they all had to sleep somewhere. Either in the decent front, or the small back, or in the slip of a room which Sara thought of as her own. But . . . twelve kids and two grownups? How on earth did they manage? She looked interrogatively at her nanny, who was placidly drinking her tea from the cracked and handleless cup.
‘I know, poor souls,’ Mrs Rushton said. ‘But there ain’t many of us what haven’t known the pain of an empty belly, so you do your best. Alf took ’em round a leg o’ mutton yesterday and some veggies; they’ll not sup on blind scouse this Christmas at any rate.’
‘It won’t go far between fourteen of ’em,’ Kate said. She was a plain, cheerful girl with straggly hair and ears which stuck out, Sara thought, like a car with both doors open.
Mrs Prescott was about to reply when the door burst open and a crowd of kids surged into the room. They were all thin, with untidy hair, and they were all grinning from ear to ear.
‘Is the dinner cooked?’ shouted an urchin of about Sara’s age. ‘The smell’s that good, Mam, I dunno as I can wait another second!’
‘Well, try,’ Mrs Rushton said grimly, ‘because norra mouthful will any of yez get until your da’s home. But if you’re real starvin’, there’s a new loaf on the kitchen table and a packet o’ margarine . . . there might be some jam an’ all if you look behind the meat safe.’
The kids surged out of the room, shouting and laughing, and Kate turned to her visitor.
‘Our Seth works at the jam factory; that’s where I’ll work when I leave school,’ she said, sitting down beside Sara on the lumpy sofa. ‘They give you jam cheap, sometimes, so we’re better off’n some. Not bad, eh? Where’ll you work when you’re growed?’
‘I’m only twelve,’ Sara said. ‘I haven’t thought, not yet. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, you see, so I can’t work with them.’
‘Only twelve? I’d ha’ put you at thirteen, mebbe fourteen,’ Kate said flatteringly. ‘They grows ’em big up your way, queen. Have a mince pie!’
The pies looked good, but Sara was still uneasily conscious of what Jess had told her. Not everyone could eat, even when they were hungry. These people seemed happy and successful and talked cheerfully, but the mother hadn’t offered the kids pies, it had been bread and margarine. She was being offered a pie because she was a visitor – but she would go home presently and have a very large luncheon, with plum pudding and fruit to follow. And there would be boxes of chocolates and heaps and heaps of nuts and at teatime more food, more treats.
‘No, thanks, Kate,’ she said, therefore, ‘I don’t want to spoil my lunch.’
And when they’d finished their tea Nanny said they’d best be getting back because she didn’t want anyone thinking she’d not had a bag to pack . . . more laughter . . . and they had said their farewells and left, with Christmas wishes ringing in their ears.
One thing struck Sara as odd, though. As they were about to open Mrs Prescott’s front door Mrs Rushton stuck her head out into the cold and shouted after them, a halo of steam rising from her open mouth.
‘Ask your Letty if she ever thinks about the Sunday school treat, the year we was twelve,’ she shouted. ‘We ’ad some fun on New Brighton funfair! Our Sid remembers it an’ all, he often asks after Letty.’
Sara, who knew that Nanny Prescott had once been her own mother’s nanny, pricked up her ears. If Mrs Rushton was referring to her mother, she would have liked to hear a bit more! She glanced enquiringly at Nanny, but the older woman was inserting her key in the front door, turning it . . .
‘That’s nice. I’ll tell her,’ Mrs Prescott said vaguely, and then she had unlocked the door and they were inside the chilly little room once more, and Mrs Prescott sat at a chair in the window to watch for the chauffeur whilst Sara ran upstairs to take a look at the front bedroom.
It was lovely, running up the narrow, creaking stairs, turning on the tiny landing and going into the slip of a front room. Sara felt a warm glow envelope her, she had been so happy here! She had sometimes felt that the only times she was really alive were when she was with Mrs Prescott, sleeping in the little front room, kneeling on the floor on a summer’s evening with her nose pressed to the glass, staring out at the railway, the docks, the river.
She had stared out at life, too, passing constantly in the street below. Kids at play, adults on their way to and from the public houses on Stanley Street, the occasional drunk lurching along, taking a short-cut from Commercial Road through into Stanley, a dog, sauntering along behind its owner, sniffing at walls and lamp posts, lifting a leg, breaking into a trot.
There wasn’t a lot of life on Aigburth Road, or if there was she was unaware of it, because the grounds of her home protected her from such doses of reality. And the nursery with its barred window was high up, and lonely, too, very different from the little bedroom on Snowdrop Street. So now Sara knelt on the floor and pressed her nose to the glass as, outside, the flakes of snow continued to fall.
It wasn’t easy, on such a day, to see her favourite view, but it was just possible. There it was, outside the window, her own particular, beloved slice of life. But today there was little or no movement from the railway – presumably no trains, or very few, ran on Christmas Day – and even the Mersey, steel-grey against the downward-swirling flakes, was quiet.
Still. Despite it being Christmas Day there was some movement in the street. The sliding boys had scattered and gone as the snowstorm increased but someone was even now making her way along the pavement, head shrugged down into shoulders, bundles firmly grasped in skinny arms. It was a girl, skinny and underfed, with something wrapped in a blanket on one arm and a soggy paper bag from which large objects – they looked like loaves – protruded. Sara had been breathing on the glass and fogging it up; now she rubbed frantically, trying to make herself a proper peephole. Yes, there was the figure, passing closer now, almost directly beneath the window . . . frantically, Sara tried to get the window open, she leapt to her feet and wrestled with the little round latch that locked the top half of the sash in place, got it back, shoved and pushed at the bottom half . . . it was opening, icy air – and a great deal of snow – was rushing into the room, Sara was leaning out, head and shoulders into the storm, her voice rising.
‘Jess! Jess, it’s me, Sara . . . oh, Jess, do look up!’
But Jess, if it was Jess, continued to slog along through the snow, head down, her shopping clutched fiercely to her skinny breast. And the child, if it was the child, was now completely immersed in the thin blanket.
Reluctantly, Sara withdrew into the room once more. It couldn’t have been Jess, it would have been too much of a coincidence and anyway, if it had been, she would surely have recognised her own name and looked up?
Struggling to pull the window down again, rather conscience-stricken by the great wet patches of melting snow on the linoleum, Sara glanced once more at the fast disappearing figure – and promptly tried to push the window up once more. But by the time she had got it a couple of inches from the sill, it was too late. Girl and burden had disappeared.
‘But it
was
Jess,’ Sara told herself miserably, making her way downstairs in answer to Mrs Prescott’s shout. ‘It was Jess, because the baby’s feet were sticking out under the blanket – and I could see my white angora gloves!’
Chapter Two
Jess was as near freezing as a human being could be, she decided as she walked as fast as she could along Snowdrop Street. But beneath all the cold there was a warm little glow. That girl, Sara, had been a nice kid, and the money she’d handed over had bought not only some loaves of bread but two currant buns, a large piece of cheese and a bully beef tin full of milk.
She had been heading home, but now she paused in her onward rush. The trouble was, it was Grace and the baby who needed the food most and if the others saw it, it wouldn’t last long. Wouldn’t go round all that her, either. Mam always fed Da and herself first, then the boys, then the girls. Yesterday there had been a proper stew, made especially for Christmas – a neighbour had donated the meat. But somehow, it had all got ate, and neither Grace nor Mollie had had a sniff of it. Grace had been poorly, so hot you could have fried an egg on her, and Mollie was too little to fight her corner. Jess herself had only had a boiled potato and a smear of gravy and that hadn’t gone far between her and Mollie.
Jess sighed and stood still for a moment, doubly burdened by the sleeping child and the food. What should she do for the best? Grace was a dear little soul but she’d never manage bread and cheese, not with the fever she’d had. Jess had given her the buttermilk, warmed, with bread crumbled into it and the kid had scarcely managed two mouthfuls before she fell asleep again. But Mollie must be very hungry, and Jess herself was empty as a drum. If I don’t get something inside me soon I’ll be no good to the others, Jess thought, immediately practical. I’ll go somewhere quiet, eat some bread and cheese and a bun, feed Mollie the milk with some bread in it, and then go home later with what’s left.