Washerwoman's Dream Read online

  Winifred claimed, rightly, that she did not know what had happened to her father. I searched for a death certificate and found that he died intestate. In a corner of an official document someone had written in ink that a telegram sent to his daughter at Morven was returned. Now I knew where Winifred had gone after she left her husband, Charles. I wrote to the Morven Historical Society and found an old man, Stafford Burey, who remembered Winifred living with Ali Ackba Nuby, an Indian hawker who had a shop at Mungallala, and that they had had a little boy. An added bonus was a copy of a photograph Stafford had taken of Ali standing with a group of men on the steps of the Tryconnel Hotel, Mungallala. I followed this up with a search for a birth certificate and found out that Winifred had given birth to three children, Yusef, Rhamat and Pansy.

  Through Winifred’s papers, her unpublished novels and the newspaper serials, I was able to add to the biographical material I had gathered and build up a picture of the author’s life, and of her thoughts and ideas which were reflected in the characters in her novels. Most had a heroine who had had a child out of wedlock without having to marry the father and who eventually found happiness, and acceptance of her child, with another man. The novels reflected the mores of the day, when an unmarried mother was an outcast and her children described as illegitimate. The injustice such women suffered, at a time when there was no supporting mother’s benefit, no widow’s pension, was a recurring theme and was a reflection of Winifred’s own unhappiness, when she was forced into a loveless and early marriage, and of her struggle to survive as a washerwoman when she was left with three children to support.

  At about this time I received a letter from Jose Petrick, who had written a book on street names in Alice Springs. The street where Winifred had had her poultry farm had been named after her. In her letter Jose mentioned that Horrie Simpson, a former Oodnadatta resident who used to deliver meat to ghantown (the name given to settlements where camel men lived), had told her of a note he had made in his diary of a wedding between Karum Bux and Winifred Steger on 26 June 1925. This confirmed that it was with Karum Bux and not Ali that Winifred had gone to Mecca, and it coincided with the dates of the story of the trip published later in the Register.

  I could find no record of the articles in Life published by Shaw Fitchett, but I have no reason to doubt Winifred’s word.

  One question that intrigued me was what had happened to the family she left behind on the Darling Downs. I wrote to every person named Steger in the Australian telephone directory and received a letter from Winifred’s great-grandaughter, Belinda, who told me of meeting Winifred when she returned to Queensland after Charles Steger died. Later, I met other members of the family in Queensland, and they confirmed what I had believed to be true about Winifred’s disastrous relationship with her husband, Charles.

  In 1997 I submitted my thesis and was awarded my doctorate. But Winifred had invaded my life. She would not let me rest. I knew I had to tell the story of this remarkable pioneer woman to a wider audience. She had travelled through the trackless wastes of the Australian desert with her husband and children and a family of Aborigines, a journey very few white women of her period had made. When Ali Ackba Nuby died in India she had supported herself and her children by taking in washing. She had made the trip to Mecca with Karum Bux, and was rewarded by being made the Secretary to the Khalifat in Australia, a great honour. This was followed up with an invitation to become governess to the King and Queen of Afghanistan at a time of great political instability. Winifred wrote about the experience in a sequel to Always Bells, which she called There Was a King. It was too far-fetched to be believable and it was never published. Even I doubted that it was true, until I found a record of an interview published in the Register when she was on her way to India in 1928 to take up the appointment, and her later published dispatches from India about the situation in Afghanistan, in which she was referred to by the Register as a ‘special correspondent’.

  My thesis was an academic text, well documented, with quotations, references and footnotes, none of which had a place in the story I wanted to write. Instead I took the liberty of turning footnotes into people I conjured up out of my imagination. Mrs Watkins was the first to appear, as the kindly barrow woman who was representative of her times and who befriended the lonely child. Winifred had said that an old gentlemen befriended her on the trip to Australia, and so Mr Smithers was born. Mrs Dobson of Dalby may or may have not run a general store, and so it went through the story. People I gave birth to in my imagination lived and breathed alongside the real people in Winifred’s life. And walking beside me was Winifred, who had possessed me. I sensed her at my shoulder. She invaded my dreams while I slept, so that our thoughts blended and I felt as if her spirit had entered mine.

  Now she is safely in the pages of this book, together with those I have raised from the dead, and those whom I have caused to walk this earth even though they only existed in my mind. I set myself a hard task and it is finished. I should be glad, but I have lived with Winifred for so long that without her my life is strangely empty. Yet I know the time has come to go our separate ways, to set her spirit free. Salaam alaikum, dear old friend.

  Hilarie Lindsay

  PART ONE

  1

  GROWING UP IN LAMBETH

  ONE OF WINIFRED’S EARLIEST MEMORIES was of standing by the front gate watching the men come home from work as she waited for her father. Her mother was lying down. ‘Stop bothering me. I’ve got a headache,’ she had said when Winifred had asked if she would take her for a walk. ‘Go and talk to Mrs Watkins.’ But the neighbour was out with her fruit barrow. The child had gone to the front of the house and, dragging a stool to the door, had unlatched it and let herself into the street.

  It was still warm, even though it was almost dusk. She stood watching a tram rumble along South Lambeth Road, the harness jingling, the driver sitting in the front flicking his whip at the horses. Nearby a man lurched past and she thought, ‘He must be a tipsy man.’ She’d heard her mother talking to Mrs Watkins about men who got tipsy. It was a strange word that sounded like ‘gypsy’. She knew what they were. Sometimes they camped on the common and grazed their horses. ‘They steal little children and they never see their mothers again,’ Mrs Watkins had told her. Winifred had made up her mind there and then never ever to go near the common in case the gypsies got her and she never saw her mother again.

  But the tipsy man wasn’t on the common. Winifred thought he looked funny staggering from side to side. He grabbed hold of a lamppost for a moment, then staggered out of sight. Winifred went to the corner and saw him go into the lane behind the shop where her father bought his tobacco, and where her mother bought bags of flour, tapioca, sago and sugar. When her mother had no money the man in the shop put it on the slate. Sometimes he would beckon Winifred over to the counter and give her a paper spill of boiled lollies. She liked the black and white ones best. Mrs Watkins called them humbugs and said they were better than the human sort. She couldn’t imagine a human shaped like a humbug. And you couldn’t eat a human humbug unless you were a cannibal. She knew about the cannibal islands from a story her father read her. She liked her father’s stories. They were all about adventure and sailing off to places far away. ‘How would you like that, eh? Sail on a big ship far across the sea.’ She thought she’d like it very much.

  But her mother always said, ‘Don’t talk nonsense. You’ll not get me on a ship.’

  ‘We’ll see. We’ll see,’ her father would say.

  Winifred watched the tipsy man unbutton his fly and then a stream of urine came spurting out, splashing on the paling fence. He looked up and saw her standing there and began to laugh. ‘Spying on me, are you, young’un? Come and have a good look.’ He lurched towards her, holding something pink in his hand, something that moved. He put out one hand to grab her and she screamed and ran back to the corner shop and down the street. She hammered on the front door with her small fists but it had shut behind her. She wasn�
��t tall enough to reach the door handle. No one came to open the door and she sat down on the doorstep feeling cold. The warmth had gone out of the day.

  She was still sitting there when her father came round the corner carrying his bag. ‘You’re a strange one, sitting here by yourself.’

  ‘I couldn’t get the door open.’

  ‘Did she lock you out again?’ He opened the door and Winifred followed him down the dark hall and up the stairs to their room where her mother was lying down. Her father bent over the bed and shook her roughly. ‘You lazy slut. Too lazy to look after your own child. I bring in the bread, the least you can do is look after her.’

  Her mother sat up and, picking up her hairbrush from the dressing table, began to brush her long, fair hair. ‘You know I never wanted her. I told you that when she was born. You wanted to keep her. You look after her.’

  Her father raised his fist as if to strike her but restrained himself. ‘God knows why I stay,’ he said as he struck a match and lit the paraffin lamp. It shed a circle of pale light onto the small round table where he emptied some coins out of a leather purse. He handed them to Winifred. ‘Run to the corner shop and get a bundle of saveloys and a loaf of bread. Take the basket.’

  Winifred pressed herself against the door, shaking violently. ‘There’s a tipsy man … a tipsy man … I saw his willie,’ and she burst into tears and flung herself to the floor.

  * * *

  Long after she had left England, Winifred would think back to her early life in London and the house where she had lived with her parents in two rooms on the top floor, though her room was more of a box room that overlooked the back lane and the tap in the yard and the length of rope which the women fought over as a clothes line. The privy, where they emptied their slop pails in the morning, stood in one corner.

  The roof was slate and often in the night Winifred would hear something scrabbling across it. ‘Them’s water rats,’ a boy once told her when she was down by the river. ‘When I’m wif a tosher we chase ’em up the sewer and knock ’em on the head. It’s capital sport … we git a farthing a dozen from the sanitary.’ She shuddered and turned away when he held up a string of rats by the tails. He was one of the mudlarks who earned their living by diving in the river, looking for coins and bits of rag and bone that they sold to the man who came around with a horse and cart.

  Winifred knew from a book her father had read to her that the River Thames separated their part of London from the other, where Parliament met and where Queen Victoria lived in her palace. She’d seen the palace’s back entrance once when she’d walked with her father to Victoria Station. There were guards in uniform standing in the street. ‘That’s where the tradesmen go in and out,’ her father had said.

  ‘The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,’ she had recited as she skipped along beside him. She liked to imagine the Queen sitting on her throne choosing the best cabbages and feeling the tomatoes to make sure they were not bruised, perhaps even biting into an apple. She wondered if the grocer gave her children spills of boiled lollies.

  The thought of rats scrabbling on the roof frightened her. She would bury her face under the blankets in case one came scuttling down the chimney and under the crack beneath the door. It might find its way into her bed and bite her. She knew that rats had bubonic plague and made you sick until you died.

  A sick man lived on the floor beneath them. She could hear him coughing when she passed his door. It was coal dust, her father said. He’d been a coal-whipper. It was something to do with unloading coal from boats that came down the river. Sometimes her father sent her in with a cup of milk. She would hesitate at the door, almost afraid to go in because of the smell of sweat, and piss in a bottle under his bed. He had a tin mug and sometimes it was full of blood. He’d gaze at her, his unshaven face almost transparent, so that she could see the bones poking through, and two bright spots of colour on each cheek like blood plums. He would beckon her to come closer, curling up one long thin finger with a blackened nail, trying to focus with his filmy blue eyes. She would sidle up to the bed and put the cup on the chair beside him before he could touch her. Then she would turn and be out the door like a flash, running helter-skelter into her own room. He was dying, her father said so: ‘And the sooner the better. Otherwise it’s the workhouse.’

  Winifred often heard about the workhouse from Mrs Watkins when they walked past the forbidding building on their way to the markets. ‘It’s a cruel place,’ she said, ‘where poor folks are taken when they have no job. They lock them up, like in a prison, and send their children away. As if they were horphans. And they get whipped and made to clean the lavatories. I know. And they never git to taste a dish of hot peas or a plate of jellied eels but live on gruel and slops that is only fit for pigs. When my Watkins took to the drink and I had no money coming in, I thought about the workhouse and my Aggie being taken away and I went to the markets and bought some apples with my last shilling. It was the best thing I ever done. It don’t matter whether my Watkins is working or taken with the drink, we get by. And it’s honest work. Niver be afraid of honest work.’ She leaned close to Winifred, the wart on the end of her nose wobbling while the child listened wide-eyed and shivered as she glanced at the high brick wall of the Lambeth Workhouse, imagining she could hear the children crying for their mothers and starving to death on gruel.

  ‘You can’t blame the men for being taken in drink,’ Mrs Watkins said once as they walked past the Royal Albert Beer Engine. Men were spilling out onto the road and as the doors swung open and shut, smoke wafted out to the street, Winifred hopped nimbly to one side as a dollop of nicotine-laden spit landed at her feet. ‘Times is hard. There’s too many folks in London. I hear tell that there are more than three million souls in London all struggling to make a living. Some of ’em be bad but most are just ordinary folks like your dad who come from the country. There ain’t no work out there and they be hoping to find somethink to do in London, other than thievin’. We be honest folks.’

  Mrs Watkins looked after Winifred — Lord knows, the child’s mother certainly took no interest in her. As she trotted along beside Mrs Watkins, Winifred absorbed the sights and sounds of South Lambeth: the monstrous gasometer which dominated the skyline near Vauxhall Cross; the stench of rotting bones waiting to be boiled down at the soap works; the black smoke belching from the tall chimneys of the brewery; and the steam laundry where Aggie Watkins worked. Sometimes she was around when Aggie came home from work, her feet and ankles swollen and her hands red raw from being in the water all day. Winifred would watch as the young woman soaked her feet in a basin of hot water with a teaspoon of salt in it and rubbed sugar and dripping into her hands, drawing on a pair of white cotton gloves which she did not take off till the next morning when she went to work. She was walking out with a young man who had a job on the railways and they planned to get married ‘by and by’.

  The times Winifred liked best were when her father was in a good mood and told her stories about his childhood in Bath: the pure air; the swans and ducks on the river; the fish he caught when he had an afternoon off school; the song of the blackbird at dusk in their cottage garden. There were hollyhocks and marigolds, pansies and violets, lavender and roses. She would listen to the names rolling off her father’s tongue and recite the words to herself as she lay in bed at night. He talked about the Assembly Rooms where rich people came to drink wine and play cards and dance and the baths where they took the waters for their health. Then there was the school where his father taught and where Wilfred and his brother William Ivanhoe had learned Latin, Greek, mathematics and English history. When she asked him about his sisters he said, ‘My mother taught them their letters at home. They had to help in the house. There were boys who lived in, with beds to make, linen to sort, flowers to pick and put in vases and milk to be separated and made into butter. They were too busy to go to school. In any case, there were no girls in my father’s school.’

  When she asked if he w
ould take her to visit Bath he would shake his head and say, ‘There’s nothing left of that life now. There’s no going back. That part is finished. And even if it wasn’t there’s no money for fares.’

  Other times he would be morose and angry, quarrelling with her mother. She would creep out the door and sit on the steps in the dark, listening to Mrs Watkins yelling at Mr Watkins and wondering if he would hit her and give her a black eye as he sometimes did when he was in the drink. She was glad her father didn’t drink. But she wished he and her mother didn’t fight all the time. It frightened her, wondering if one day he would clear out and she and her mother would end up in the workhouse. She would have liked to have asked him to take her with him if he left, but she didn’t want to make him angry. Sometimes when he was angry he would hit her with a stick for no reason that she could see. Then he would yell at her, ‘I’m sick of you gawking at me. Get out of my sight,’ and she would run up the narrow stairs to her room and cry herself to sleep. Later she would wake to find him bending over her bed, stroking her forehead, or tucking the coarse grey woollen blanket around her, and hear him whisper, ‘On Sunday we’ll stroll across the bridge to the path and feed the ducks. Perhaps your mother will come with us. We’ll have a little treat.’ She would drift back to sleep again, not sure whether she had imagined it or not. It was a long while before Winifred realised that the blows were directed at her mother, but that he loved Louisa too much to hit her because he was afraid of losing her.

  Sometimes when Winifred woke in the night and the wind was blowing from the right direction she would hear the train whistle at Victoria. It was a friendly sound — and exciting, because it meant travel. She liked to imagine the people sitting in the carriages in their fancy clothes, the men in top hats with a carnation in their buttonhole, and the women wearing diamond tiaras and feather boas. She thought that the train would be different from the train that took the working men down to the dockyard and the match girls to the Bryant and May’s factory. Her father walked to work. He was a house painter and had a regular job, not like Mrs Watkins’s husband who unloaded ships. He had to line up every morning with thousands of men, all hoping for a day’s work. Sometimes when he got work he forgot to come home until morning, and spent his two and sixpence in the Wheatsheaf round the corner. Then there would be shouts and screams downstairs and Mrs Watkins would end up with a swollen face. Once the police came and she was taken to hospital.