The days when those haberdashers’ deliveries arrived was like birthdays and Christmases rolled into one: taking the wrappers off the rolls and discovering new colours and patterns, and breathing in that clean, summery smell of new fabric, like washing drying on a line – there’s nothing to match it, even now. When we was growing out of our clothes the nuns would let us have offcuts of patterned cotton to make ourselves new dresses and skirts, and Nora and me would always pick the brightest floral prints. We didn’t see too many flowers for real, so it brought a touch of springtime into our lives.
‘Nora? You knew each other even then?’
Oh yes, we go way back. She was my best friend. We was around the same age so far as we knew, and always shared a dormitory, called ourselves sisters – the family kind, not the nun kind – and swore we’d never be parted. Not that we looked like family by any stretch: she was blonde and by the time we was fourteen she towered above me at five feet six, with big feet she was always tripping over, and a laugh like a tidal wave which made anyone around her – even the nuns – break out into a smile. She had large hands, too, double the size of mine, but that didn’t stop her being a good needleworker. We was naughty little minxes but we got away with it ’cos we worked hard.
Like I say, we was happy because we knew no different, but we was also growing up – even though my chest was flat and my fanny still smooth as a baby’s bottom, Nora was getting breasts and hair down there, as well as under her arms, and both of us was starting to give the eye to the gardener’s lad and the baker’s delivery boy, whenever the nuns weren’t watching.
That day we was doing our needlework when this grand lady with a big hat and feathers on the top of her head comes with a gaggle of her lah-di-dah friends, like a royal visit it was, and she leans over what I am embroidering and says, ‘What fine stitching, my dear, where did you learn that?’
And I says back, ‘It’s daisy chain, Ma’am. Would you like to see how it works?’ And I finish the daisy with three more chain links spaced evenly round the circle like they are supposed to be, and quickly give it a stem and a leaf which doesn’t turn out too bad, even though my fingers are trembling and sweaty with being watched by such a grand person. She keeps silent till I’ve finished and then says in her voice full of plums and a bit foreign, ‘That is very clever, dear, very pretty. Keep up the good work’, and as she moves on to talk to another girl I breathe in the smell of her, like a garden full of roses, what I have never smelled before on a human being.
Afterwards I hears her asking Sister Mary about me and Nora, was we good girls and that sort of thing, but we soon forgot about her and that was it for a few months till my birthday – it was January 1911 when I turned fifteen – and me and Nora, whose birthday was just a few days before, gets a summons from Sister Beatrice, the head nun. This only usually happens when one of us has done something wicked like swearing ‘God’ too many times or falling asleep in prayers, so you can imagine the state that Nora and me are in as we go up the stairs to the long corridor with the red Persian runner and go to stand outside the oak door with those carvings that look like folds of fabric in each panel. I am so panicked that I feel like fainting, and I can tell that Nora is trying to stifle the laugh that always bubbles up when she’s nervous.
Sister calls us in and asks us to sit down on leather-seated chairs that are so high that my legs don’t reach the ground and I have to concentrate hard on not swinging them ’cos I know that annoys grown-ups more than anything else in the world.
She turns to me first. ‘Miss Romano? I think it is your birthday today?’ she asks, and I am so startled at being called ‘Miss’ that I can’t think of anything better to say than, ‘Yes Ma’am.’
‘Then God bless you, child, and let me wish you many happy returns of this day,’ she says, nearly smiling.
‘Thank you, Ma’am,’ I say, trying to ignore the way Nora’s body is shaking beside me.
‘Miss Featherstone?’ says Sister, and I know that if Nora opens her mouth the laugh will just burst out, so she just nods and keeps her head bent down but this doesn’t seem to bother Sister Beatrice, who just says, ‘I understand that you two are good friends, are you not?’ I nod on behalf of us both, and she goes on, ‘I hear very positive things about the two of you, especially about your needlework skills, and I have some very exciting news.’
She goes on to tell us that the grand lady who came a few months ago is a duchess and the patron of the Needlework Society and was visiting to inspect the work that the convent was doing for the poor children of the city. She was so impressed by the work Nora and me showed her that she is sending her housekeeper to interview us about going into service.
A duchess! Well, you can imagine how excited we are, but scared too as we haven’t a clue what to expect and our imaginations go into overtime. We was going to live in a beautiful mansion with a huge garden and sew clothes for very important people, and Nora is going to fall in love with one of the chauffeurs but I have my sights set a bit higher, a soldier in the Light Brigade in his red uniform perhaps, or a city gent in a bowler hat. Either way, both of us are going to have our own comfortable houses next door to each other with little gardens where we can grow flowers and good things to eat, and have lots of children who will play together, and we will live happily ever after.
There’s a pause. She clears her throat loudly.
Forgive me, Miss, don’t mind if I has a smoke?
‘Go ahead, that’s fine. Let’s have a short break.’
No, I’ll just light up and carry on, please, ’cos if I interrupt meself I’ll lose the thread.
A cigarette packet being opened, the click of a lighter, a long inward breath and a sigh of exhaled smoke. Then she clears her throat and starts again.
Not that there’s much chance of me forgetting that day, mind, when the duchess’s housekeeper is coming to visit. We was allowed a special bath and then got dressed in our very best printed cottons and Sister Mary helped us pin our hair up into the sort of bun that domestic servants wear, and a little white lacy cap on top of that.
At eleven o’clock we got summoned into Sister Beatrice’s room again and she looked us up and down and gave us a lecture about how we must behave to the visitor, no staring but making sure we look up when she speaks to us, no talking unless we are spoken to, answering clearly and not too long. She gives Nora a ’specially fierce look and says the word slowly in separate chunks so she’s sure we understand: and there is to be
ab-so-lute-ly
no giggling.
‘How you behave this morning will determine your futures, young ladies,’ she said. ‘Do not throw this opportunity away.’
She went on some more about if we got chosen we must do our work perfectly and never complain or answer back or we’ll be out on the streets because we can’t never return to The Castle once we have gone. My fantasies melted on the spot. We was both so nervous even Nora’s laugh had vanished.
The housekeeper was a mountain of a woman almost as wide as she was tall, and fierce with eyes like ebony buttons, and spoke to us like she’s ordering a regiment into battle.
She wanted to see more examples of our needlework because, she said, we would be sewing for the highest in the land.
‘“The highest in the land”?’ Nora whispered as we scuttled off down the corridors to the needlework room to get our work. ‘What the heck does that mean?’
‘No idea,’ I said. My brain was addled with fear and I couldn’t think straight for all me wild thoughts.
We were told to lay our work out on Sister Beatrice’s table, and the mountain boomed questions at us: what is the fabric called, what needles did we use and what thread, why did we use those stitches, what did we think of the final result? We answered as well as we could, being clear but not too smart, just as Sister told us. One of my pieces was the start of a patchwork. I’d only finished a couple of dozen hexagons as yet but I was pleased with the way it was shaping up, and when I showed her the design drawn in coloured crayons on squared paper she said, ‘The child has some artistic talent, too.’
‘Indeed,’ Sister Beatrice said back, ‘Miss Romano is one of our best seamstresses,’ and my face went hot and red with pride.
When the housekeeper sat down the poor old chair fair creaked in torment and Nora’s giggles returned, shaking her shoulders as Sister Beatrice poured the tea. Not for us, mind. We just stood and waited, my heart beating like I’d just run up all four staircases at The Castle, while they sipped their tea, oh so ladylike. She ate four biscuits in the time it took to give us a lecture about how we must, as she called it,
comport
ourselves if we was to be invited to join the duchess’s household: no answering back, no being late for anything ever, no asking for seconds at dinner, no smoking, no boyfriends, wearing our uniform neat and proper every day, clean hands, clean face, clean hair, always up, no straggly bits.
When she stopped there was a pause, and I was just about to say we are good girls, Miss, very obedient girls, but she put her cup and saucer down on the table with a clonk and turned to Sister Beatrice and said, ‘I think these two will do very nicely. Our driver will come to collect them the day after tomorrow.’
Oh my, that drive was so exciting. Don’t forget we’d been stuck in The Castle for most of our lives, never been in a coach, never even been out of the East End. Our eyes was on stalks all the way, like we had never seen the wonderful things passing by, watching the people doing their shopping, hanging out their washing, children playing. In one place we passed a factory at clocking-off time and got stuck in a swarm of men on bicycles – like giant insects, they looked to us – and so many we quickly lost count. They saw us gawping through the coach windows and waved, which made them wobble all over the place, and it was an odd feeling to be noticed, not being invisible for once.
It was just as well we had plenty to distract us ’cos by the time we’d said our goodbyes at The Castle both of us were blubbing. Strange, isn’t it, you can spend so many years wishing yourself out of somewhere and, once you get out, all you want to do is go back? Not that I ever felt that about this place. It’s a funny old feeling, coming here today, I can tell you.
‘It was very good of you to take the trouble to see me.’
Don’t mention it, dearie. Makes a good day out, Nora said. Now, where was I?
‘You were sad to leave The Castle.’
Ah yes, them nuns was a kindly lot, as I think I’ve said before – forgive my leaky old brain, dearie – but they never showed it, not till the last minute when both Sister Mary and Sister Beatrice gave each of us a hug and pressed little parcels into our hands. I nearly suffocated in all those black folds, but this was what set me off on the weeping – it showed they really did care about us, after all. We waved at all the other children peering through the windows and climbed up into the coach with the lay sister Emily, who was to be what Sister Beatrice called a
chaperone
.
After a while the dirty old streets of the East End turned into clean, wide roads with pavements for people to walk, and tall beautiful houses either side.
‘I didn’t know we was going to the countryside,’ Nora whispered to me, pointing out her side of the coach and sure enough it was green grass, shrubs and trees stretching away as far as our eyes could see, and even people riding horses. Around the edges were real flowers, planted in dazzling carpets of colour, brighter than you could imagine. More brilliant even than the printed cottons we loved so much.
‘That’s Hyde Park, silly,’ sharp ears Emily said, ‘where the grand ladies and gentlemen go to take the air, to walk or ride.’ Well, that silenced us both – the very idea of having the time to wander freely in a beautiful green place like that – and it wasn’t long after that the coach passed beside a long, high wall and slowed down to enter a gate with guardsmen on either side, went round the back of a house so tall I had to bend down beside the window to catch a glimpse of the roof, and then we came to a stop.
We had arrived.
The voice stops and the tape winds squeakily for a moment or two then reaches the end, and the machine makes a loud clunk as it switches itself off.
London, January 2008
‘Panic stations, darling. The Cosy Homes people are coming next week, and they say I have to clear the lofts before they get here, and Peter down the road was going to help me, you know, the man who suggested it all in the first place, but he’s gone and hurt his back so he can’t come any more and I don’t know what I’m going to do …’
My mother Eleanor is seventy-three and her memory’s starting to fail, so it doesn’t take much to upset her. Plus she’s always nervous on the telephone.
‘Slow down, Mum,’ I whispered, wishing she wouldn’t call me at work. The office was unusually quiet – it was that depressing post-Christmas period when everyone is gloomily slumped at their desks pretending to be busy while surreptitiously job hunting. ‘You’re going to have to tell me what all this is about. For a start, who are Cosy Homes?’
‘The insulation people. It’s completely free for the over-seventies, imagine that, and they say it will cut my heating bills by a quarter and you know what a worry the price of oil is these days so I could hardly refuse, could I? I’m sure I told you about this.’
I racked my brains. Perhaps she had, but with everything that had been going on in the past few days, I’d clearly forgotten. On our first day back after the break we’d received an email announcing yet another round of redundancies. Happy New Year, one and all! Morale was at an all-time low and the rumour mill working overtime. And, joy of joys, next week we were all to be interviewed by some of those smug, overpaid management consultants the company had called in.
I didn’t really want to be here anyway – it was only meant to be an ‘interim job’ to raise enough cash to realise my dream of starting my own interior design business. But the macho, target-driven environment, the daily bust-a-gut expectations and ridiculous deadlines had become surprisingly tolerable when I saw the noughts on my monthly pay slip and annual bonus-time letter. The financial rewards were just too sweet to relinquish. Especially now that I was newly single, with a massive mortgage to cover.