Washerwoman's Dream Read online

  Winifred opened the door and tried to sidle into the desk but it was no use. ‘Ah, the late Winifred Oaten,’ Mr Cornwall said. ‘Have you an excuse?’ Winifred flushed and hung her head. Everything was horrible. She put her head down on the desk and began to cry.

  The teacher turned away. ‘Today I’m going to read to you from a new book by Robert Louis Stevenson. I want you to listen carefully because I’m going to ask you some questions later.’ He opened the book and began to read: ‘Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the rest of these particulars about Treasure Island …’ He continued reading, glancing up from time to time to make sure the children were paying attention. Some of them were fidgeting at the back, others had a vacant look on their faces, but Winifred Oaten was sitting there, elbows on the desk, her chin in her hands, grey–green eyes shining with excitement, a look of rapture on her face.

  That afternoon when the bell went for the end of lessons Mr Cornwall said, ‘Winifred Oaten, I want you to stay behind.’ He saw a look of panic cross her face. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You like hearing stories, don’t you?’ She nodded. He held out his copy of Treasure Island. ‘This belongs to the school but you can borrow it. Take it home and bring it back when you’ve finished.’

  Winifred was still holding the precious book in her hand as she ran across South Lambeth Road and into Tradescant Street. The daffodils had gone from outside the shop but she didn’t care. The front door of her house was open and she heard Mrs Watkins call out, ‘Is that you, Winnie? Your ma’s out. Come and have a bite to eat and a cuppa tea.’ But Winifred pretended she didn’t hear. She flew up the steps, dropped her sunbonnet and school bag on the floor and, propping herself up on her bed, began to read

  She showed the book to her father when he came home from work, being careful not to let her mother see it. She didn’t approve of the child reading and ‘filling her head with nonsense’, while Mrs Watkins said, ‘It’ll fair ruin your eyes. Looking at books all the time ain’t natural. My Watkins says that if God had meant us ter read we would’ve been born with spectacles. Someone he knowed of went blind.’

  Fortunately for the child her father encouraged her, taking her to the newly opened public library. ‘Fancy Lambeth being the first to have a library, even before London proper,’ he said when they stood before shelves laden with books, some bound in cardboard, other in red leather, introducing her to Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Tennyson and his ‘Daffodils’. This love of literature established a bond with his daughter that Louisa resented and never understood.

  Winifred began to read avidly, waking in the morning at first light with a book under her pillow and at night reading till the candle guttered. Her new-found knowledge reflected itself in her school work for which she won a prize. She was filled with trepidation when the headmaster sent for her to come to his office, and she knocked timidly at his door, hesitating before opening it when he called, ‘Come in.’ She entered, looking nervously around, half expecting him to take out his cane. Instead he smiled at her. ‘My dear, you have done very well this year. Your compositions are excellent, you have a very lively imagination and your behaviour is good. You have the makings of a pupil teacher in a couple of years, and after that, it wouldn’t surprise me to see you becoming a fully fledged teacher.’

  Still in a highly nervous state, his words didn’t sink in till later. When he told her to select a book from an array spread out on his desk, she grabbed the first thing that came to hand: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, which was not the sort of book that appealed to her at all. But later when she showed it to her father he said, ‘Well done,’ and gave her threepence.

  All her mother said was, ‘You spoil that child.’

  3

  THE POVERTY TRAP

  BY THE TIME WINIFRED HAD turned eight there was a major upheaval in the labour market. London was swept with industrial strife. First the match girls at Bryant and May’s went on strike, then the dockworkers. It had far-reaching effects.

  Winifred listened as her father read something from the paper about a woman called Annie Besant who had her own newspaper. She said that the match girls had to live on a pittance while the shareholders were getting thirty-eight per cent dividend.

  Winifred wasn’t sure what a dividend was but she knew about the match girls. Some of them lived in South Lambeth. She’d watched them running to work like scared rabbits. If they were late they got fined half a day’s pay. And Mrs Watkins knew a woman who had a sick husband. She made matchboxes at home and only got twopence farthing for making a gross of matchboxes. Winifred worked it out once in her head and tried to imagine one hundred and forty-four matchboxes piled up. It didn’t seem like much money when you had to keep four children and a sick husband. ‘She has to burn the midnight oil,’ Mrs Watkins said. ‘Up half the night making matchboxes and tending to her poor old man who’s ailing.’ He’d had an accident at the wharves — a bale of wool had fallen on him and he’d broken his back. ‘If he dies she’ll have to go on the parish, for sure.’

  Now, with the strike, Winifred wondered how the match girls got money for food, and how the poor woman who made matchboxes at home was managing when there were no matches to put in the boxes. Her father told her that the girls in the factory only earned eight or nine shillings a week. ‘By the time they pay their rent they can barely afford to put food in their mouths. And it’s nasty work too. I wouldn’t like to see one of mine working in the match factory. The girls get phossy jaw. It’s from the stuff they put on top of the match to make it burn. It’s called phosphorus.’

  When Winifred asked what phossy jaw was, he told her it was something that ate away at the jawbone ‘until your face is gone and you die’. Just thinking about it made Winifred feel sick.

  ‘And now the girls at the match factory have formed a trade union and the Trades Council is asking people to give money to the strike fund. If the folks don’t give, the girls’ll have no money for food. I put my shilling in.’

  Winifred was pleased when her father told her that the strike had ended. ‘They’ve got a clean room to eat their lunch, away from the phosphorus fumes, and they’re not going to get fined any more.’

  A year later the dockworkers went on strike. The work was hard and yet every day thousands of men gravitated to the dockyards seeking a few hours’ casual work. Regular work was hard to come by. The gasworks laid off men in the summer because there was not so much demand and many other trades were seasonal. But people still had to eat and pay rent.

  It was a bitter and drawn-out affair which lasted for five weeks. The churches and charity organisations such as the Salvation Army were hard pressed to feed the strikers and their families. School attendance dropped and there was an air of uncertainty. People stopped spending money.

  Mrs Watkins knew all about it. ‘My Watkins says that the foreman has his favourites. Sometimes the men fight each other and sometimes git killed, just fighting to git to the front, climbing on other men’s backs like wild beasts, jist tryin’ to git noticed. You know, dearie, the bosses ain’t Christian. They ride round in carriages, own posh houses in Mayfair and live off the fat of the land. Money don’t mean nothing to them. They pay half a crown for a cigar. Yet men like my Watkins slave away humpin’ bales and only git half a crown for a day’s work. If the strike goes on we’ll be out in the street afore we know it. If it weren’t for our Aggie, and the meal tickets they’re handing out … I hate to think.’

  As the strike dragged on, Wilfred Oaten became concerned. ‘If this keeps on, there’ll be no work for anyone. People are afraid to spend money having their houses painted. And they’ve stopped building new ones. If I can’t get work, I don’t know how we’ll manage. I’m eating into my savings. Once they go, we’ll be stuck here forever.’

  The arguments between Wilfred and Louisa became more frequent, with Winifred’s mother shouting and her father storming out of the house. Once Winifred woke in the
night to the sound of raised voices coming from her parents’ room. She crept down the stairs and heard her mother say, ‘Go then, see if I care … I can look after myself. I did it once and I can do it again. And when you go, take your brat with you.’ Standing by the door in her flannelette nightgown the child began to tremble, terrified that her father would rush out of the house and not come back, leaving her behind.

  Then she heard her father’s voice, very low and clear. It was the voice he used when he was angry. ‘It was a bad day when we met and I fell for your blandishments. You and your pretty face, your extravagant ways. Don’t you realise that if we stay here any longer I’ll be ruined? Then what will we do?’ He added in a softer tone, ‘Louisa, don’t let’s fight. All I want is a better life away from here. If I can get some land, we can start a little farm. I’ll be my own boss. You know I love you. There’s never been anyone else but you.’

  Winifred listened for a few moments but all was quiet and she crept back to her own bed. But the arguments continued. This time there was no refuge with Mrs Watkins, no warm arms to creep into, no cup of hot, milky tea and a bite of bread and sugar.

  Mrs Watkins was looking haggard and ill and once Winifred found her crying. ‘It’s me nerves,’ she said. ‘I’ve had to pawn me barrow. It’ll be me few sticks of furniture next and then we’ll have nothing.’ Winifred looked around Mrs Watkins’s room. There was a rickety table with one leg missing. It was propped up with a piece of wood. Three battered wooden chairs and a stool stood round the table. On the mantlepiece over the fireplace was a candle in an empty gin bottle, the treacle tin where Mrs Watkins kept her money, a spirit stove for cooking, a bottle of methylated spirits and a picture of Queen Victoria which Mrs Watkins had cut out of a magazine and pasted onto a sheet of cardboard. There was also a china teapot with a broken spout, four tin mugs and plates and some cheap knives and forks on a tin tray beside a blue willow-patterned tea caddy she had found in the street.

  The child wondered if there was anything worth carting to the pawnshop, though she liked the blue and white tea caddy with the story painted on it. She thought about her mother’s room, which was full of pretty things. There was an oak dressing table with a winged mirror so that you could see the back of your head, a silver-backed hairbrush and a bowl of face powder. Her mother’s haircombs were in a little silver tray with some hairpins, and her dresses were in a tin trunk in the corner. The table was of polished wood and there were four chairs covered in brown leather. On the mantelpiece was a picture of Queen Victoria in a carved wooden frame. A set of china tea cups and saucers and a matching teapot with pink roses on it was on a little dresser where the lamp stood. The old white cups with chips around the rims, which they used every day, were kept inside the dresser with the bottle of paraffin oil for the lamp and her mother’s treacle tin in which she kept her money. The floor was bare but her father had stained it black and in the winter, with the firelight dancing around the room, it was warm and cosy. Winifred wondered if her parents would have to take their things to the pawnshop if her father had no work and there was nothing to eat in the house.

  ‘Yesterday they ran outa meal tickets.’ Mrs Watkins gazed into Winifred’s face with tears in her eyes. ‘Twenty-five thousand souls all after the same thing and then there weren’t none left for the likes of us. Poor Aggie, saving up to git married, and who wants shirts washed when they don’t know where their next penny’s coming from? It’s a cruel business. There was a great march yesterday. I told my Watkins to stay away. I didn’t want him fightin’ with the police and going to gaol.’

  Later, Winifred heard about the march from her father. ‘I was going to take you but I was afraid there might be trouble. In the end there wasn’t any fighting, only thousands of men carrying banners and flags. And the Salvation Army was there with a water cart to give them a drink … too many to feed. I had a slice of bread and dripping in my pocket. I gave it to a woman with a baby … She hadn’t eaten for two days. Her man was one of the marchers. Watching them made me proud to be an Englishman.’

  But it was the action of the Australian dockworkers that impressed Wilfred most. When the strike was finished he discovered that out of the £46 500 pounds donated to the strike fund, £30 000 had come from Queensland, where the dockers were earning one shilling and threepence an hour. The English dockers had fought for the right to earn sixpence an hour and eightpence overtime. This was the catalyst responsible for Wilfred Oaten leaving England.

  But he kept his plans to himself, knowing that he would have to persuade Louisa, confident that once everything was organised she would have no choice but to accompany him. Away from the overcrowded house, the drunks who fell out of hotels after closing, the polluted air from factories and the coal dust that seeped into lungs and turned the washing on the line a dismal grey, she would change. He still loved her. His one desire was to make her happy.

  * * *

  One Sunday afternoon Wilfred took his wife and daughter to Hyde Park to hear one of the speakers who were travelling around the country urging people with trades to migrate to Australia. The Government was offering a hundred and seventy-six acres of land to any man with a wife and family. Later, Wilfred spoke to the man in private while Louisa and Winifred stood to one side. A cold wind blew through the park, and Louisa shivered in her blue muslin dress. She sent Winifred to tell her father to hurry up, but he only told his daughter to be quiet and went on talking. He was in a good mood when he rejoined them and took them to a tearoom where he ordered a pot of tea for himself and Louisa, a glass of milk for Winifred and a plate of little iced cakes like nothing the child had ever tasted before.

  ‘Things are much better in Australia than here,’ he said as they sat watching the afternoon crowds drifting down Oxford Street. You heard what the man said, ‘It’s a land of opportunity … a land where the sun shines and where every man is equal.’

  Winifred only half listened, intent on nibbling every crumb of her cake and licking the delicious pink icing, picking the sugared cherry off the top and leaving it till last.

  Though Louisa drank her tea and ate a cake, she seemed distant and out of sorts. Instead of sharing her husband’s enthusiasm she said, ‘I feel cold. I want to go home.’ They caught the train to Vauxhall Station where the Salvation Army was singing hymns outside the hotel on the opposite corner. Wilfred gave his daughter sixpence to put in their collection box and in return a uniformed woman holding a tambourine gave her a tiny card decorated with painted violets and the words God is love printed on it. She watched from the other side of the road as her father tried to take Louisa’s arm, but her mother broke away and hurried ahead. Wilfred let her go and waited for his daughter to cross over, then took her by the hand. ‘You’d like to go to Australia, wouldn’t you?’ She said yes, without thinking, knowing it was what he wanted to hear.

  It was a month before the letter came, telling him that he had been granted a land order in Queensland for ten pounds. He would receive a second one for twenty pounds if he stayed in Australia for two years. He was overjoyed, dancing around their room waving the letter, kissing Louisa, hugging Winifred, before running down to show Mrs Watkins. ‘It’s a new beginning. They tell me there’s plenty of work and the wages are good. It’ll be a wonderful life … a country where there’s room to move and where the air is pure and fresh. It’s like a dream come true.’

  ‘You’re one of the lucky ones.’ Mrs Watkins lifted the black-iron kettle off the fire, pouring the boiling water into the teapot, and reached up to the shelf for an extra tin mug. ‘They don’t want the likes of us. What with my Watkins gittin’ taken with the drink and not havin’ a trade. But then I ain’t got the stomick for the sea. Wild horses wouldn’t git me on a boat. I’ll miss little Winnie, though. You mind you take care of her now. She’s been like a daughter to me. I buried two of ’em and three little boys.’ She wiped her eyes with her apron. ‘Still, that’s life and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

  She poured
the tea and stirred a generous spoonful of sugar into each mug, before lifting one of the mugs high in the air. ‘I ain’t got nothing stronger in the house.’ Her lips parted in a smile and the wart on the end of her nose wobbled. ‘Here’s to luck,’ she said, and patted him on the cheek.

  * * *

  Wilfred drew on his savings to buy some tools: an axe, nails, a hammer and a shovel, things he had been told were cheaper in England than in Australia. And he gave Louisa some money. ‘Get yourself something serviceable for the journey and get Winifred some strong boots and a dress, something that won’t wear out in a hurry.’

  Her mother took her to the Cut where she bought a length of grey flannel for a winter dress and a length of brown head-cloth for summer. Winifred was disappointed, gazing longingly at the muslin patterned with tiny pink roses, imagining herself in a pretty dress with a wide pink ribbon sash, pink ribbons in her hair and a pair of pink kid slippers. She knew it was no use asking her mother. She would only sneer and say, ‘Look at yourself in the mirror … you’re a joke. You take after your father’s side of the family.’

  The boots her mother bought for her were two sizes too large. ‘You’ll grow into them,’ Louisa said when the child protested that she couldn’t keep them on properly and that they felt heavy. For herself Louisa chose a length of violet velvet, a pair of black patent-leather boots with grey gussets which buttoned up the side, and a small felt hat with a veil to match her dress.

  Louisa took the goods to a woman with a sewing machine who lived in a basement room in South Lambeth Road with her crippled son. She showed the woman the design she wanted copied from the fashion pages in the Girl’s Own magazine which Louisa bought every week for a penny.

  When her mother went for her final fitting Winifred thought the dress was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It had a high collar and was nipped in at the waist, the skirt falling in soft folds to just above the ground. Gazing at her mother as she stood there in her velvet dress, she swelled with longing and pride. She wanted to tell her mother how much she loved her, to reach out and hug her, but she knew that if she did her mother would push her away, saying, ‘Leave me alone, child. You’ll crush my dress.’