She reached the shop and went round the side as she always did when it was shut. There was a tiny yard which stank of cats and dustbins and was looped across and across with greenish washing lines, and facing her was the back door, a great block of tarry wood with a high latch. With a sigh, Biddy crossed the yard, ducking under the sagging lines as she did so and reflecting a trifle bitterly that since usually on a Sunday afternoon the lines were laden with sheets, Ma Kettle had obviously decided to save them for Biddy to do as a treat. She reached the door and lifted the latch, heaving at the weight of it. It swung outwards, creaking, and a huge bluebottle, which must have been lured in by the Saturday smell of boiling treacle, lurched drunkenly past Biddy’s right ear.
‘Damned old fly,’ Biddy muttered. ‘I hope someone covered everything last thing Saturday or I’ll be scooping fly-blow off every sweet in the place.’
The back door gave onto the boiling kitchen, which one crossed to enter a tiny, dark passageway from which the linoleumed stairs ascended to the flat above. Outside, it was still a sunny afternoon but in here it was cool and quiet. Which was odd, Biddy reflected, tiptoeing up the stairs, because usually on a Sunday afternoon the house resounded with the noise of cleaning, laundering, ironing … only of course since she was responsible for most of those noises, it would be quiet without her.
She reached the landing and opened the kitchen door. Someone had put the sheets to soak in the upstairs sink, which was unusual and would mean she would have to carry them downstairs wet, weighing half a ton, to wash them in the little back scullery as she always did. She sniffed the air; dinner had not been cooked today – mercy, don’t say the old devil had put off having dinner just because there was no Biddy to cook it for her!
Biddy left the kitchen and stood looking thoughtfully at the two remaining doors which led off this landing. One was the living-room, the other the bedroom which she shared with Ma Kettle. The boys had the attic bedrooms above, as she well knew, since as soon as Luke and Kenny were in the kitchen having their breakfast she was supposed to rush up the stairs and make their beds. Kenny had lately taken to making his own, presumably hoping to get round her, but Luke probably didn’t know how, certainly he had never so
much as plumped a pillow in the nine months that Biddy had been working here.
Better try the living-room first. She opened the door, and knew before it creaked back that the room would be empty. She stood back, her heart beginning to pound; this was definitely odd. She had never known Ma Kettle go out on a Sunday afternoon without very good reason and the church service she attended was long over. Jack was home, to be sure, but he went out with his mates, not with his Mam, and Luke had recently met a young lady – not that Ma referred to her as such, she was
that nasty, scheming hussy
so far as Ma was concerned – and liked to visit her home on a Sunday afternoon.
Best look in the bedroom, then. No doubt Ma was laid down on her bed for half an hour …. Biddy opened the door and stuck her head round it. The big brass bedstead was empty, her own small truckle bed pushed almost out of sight beneath it. Biddy could just see her rag doll’s small, round head lying on the pillow.
With a frustrated sigh, Biddy closed the door and went downstairs. Was Ma Kettle in the shop, going over her accounts or checking stock? Or in the tiny scullery beyond the boiling kitchen, perhaps pouring water into the big copper so that Biddy could start on the sheets as soon as she returned? But the shop was deserted so Biddy went through into the scullery and looked rather helplessly about her.
The little room was dark and dank and at first Biddy could make out very little in the gloom, then she spotted the note. It was propped up on the copper as though Ma assumed she would go there as soon as she got back from church. The message on it was simple.
‘
Do laundry
,’ it said. ‘
Cook dinner
.’
Biddy stood looking at the note for a long time. Ma Kettle had not bothered to say where she had gone or why, nor for whom the note was intended. She had expected Biddy back after Mass, of course, so if she had left quite early she might have reasoned that Biddy would get the sheets on the line in plenty of time to get them dry. Or she might simply have thought to herself that Biddy must not begin to believe she might enjoy a few hours off without paying the penalty.
Finally, Biddy left the scullery. She went up to her room and rooted around under the bed. The old carpet bag was still there. She took off the blue coat and
skirt, the cheap shoes, the little straw hat with the ribbon round the crown, and put on her working clothes and the cracked old shoes she had worn when she first came to Kettle’s Confectionery. Then she checked her change of underwear, which had lived in the carpet bag ever since she moved in because Ma Kettle had never suggested she might have the use of a drawer or two. Next she picked up her pillow and thrust her hand through the hole in one end and deep into the feathers, withdrawing the lumpy little scrap of torn linen which contained all her worldly wealth.
Then she picked Dolly off the bed and put her in the carpet bag on top of the underwear, and after that she turned and looked around the small room. She felt a little pang, but only a little one: it had been, after all, a refuge of sorts.
Downstairs, she went back into the shop and found her lettering pen and the big bottle of blackish ink. She fetched the note from the scullery and sat down at the table. She read Ma Kettle’s words again, then smiled and bent her head, beginning to write.
Presently she stood up and propped the note against the ink bottle in the middle of the table, where no one coming into the room could fail to see it. It now read, in Ma Kettle’s spidery hand,
Do laundary, cook dinner
, and under that, in Biddy’s neat script,
Do it yourself
.
‘I don’t know what came over me,’ she told Ellen later that day, when the two of them were settled down over a bread and cheese supper, with the windows open to let in the breeze from the river and a glass of stout beside each plate. ‘It’s the worm turning, I guess. And do you know where she’d gone?’
‘Can’t imagine,’ Ellen said, sipping stout. ‘How d’you find out, anyroad?’
‘Well, I was going off down the road, feeling a bit scared in case she turned up and got really nasty, when someone called me. It was Maisie, the one who used to work in the flat.’
‘I didn’t know you knew her,’ Ellen said. ‘Or that she knew you, for that matter. What did she want?’
‘She wanted to know if I was slingin’ me ’ook, as she put it. She grinned like a Cheshire cat when I said I was, and then she told me Ma Kettle had been invited to her sister Olliphant’s for tea … but listen to this, Ellen, she’d been invited last week but hadn’t said a word to
me, in case I thought I ought to go too! As if I would, as if I cared a fig for her old sister, who’s probably just as horrible as her. But wasn’t that mean? To go out just leaving me that message, when she could have told me before I went to Mass that she’d be out when I got back.’
‘Not that you went to Mass,’ Ellen said, spearing a pickled onion and popping it into her mouth. She crunched and then swallowed before she spoke. ‘Still, I know what you mean; she’s norra nice woman, that one. But it gave you all the excuse you wanted to scarper, didn’t it?’
‘Yes, it did. And all the reason I needed not to tell her where I was goin’ or anything. And if Kenny gets in first, which he probably will, he’ll read the note and understand that things had just got beyond bearing.’ Biddy leaned back in her chair and gave a sigh of pure contentment. ‘Oh Ellen, just to be able to go to bed early, for once! Just to know I shan’t be heaved out to wait on those boys … it’s heaven, honest to God.’
‘Yes, I wouldn’t mind if I didn’t ’ave go to in to the shop tomorrer,’ Ellen admitted. ‘Still, it’s awright when I’m there, specially if I gets a customer early. The customers like me,’ she added, ‘It’s Miss Elsegood and Miss Nixon what don’t.’
‘They’re just jealous because you’re young and pretty, and probably they’d like Mr Bowker to spend money on them instead of you,’ Biddy said generously, for the more she thought about it the less she liked the thought of an old man pulling her about. But Ellen, though she smiled, shook her head.
‘Nah, it’s not that because they don’t know about me an’ Mr B. Well, I don’t think they does, anyroad. But they know a waitress shouldn’t ’ave ’ad a good job in Gowns first go off, they know there’s something fishy goin’ on.’ She hesitated. ‘What you goin’ to do tomorrer, Bid?’
‘Dunno. Take a look around, maybe. It seems a long time since I went into a nice shop and browsed a bit. Why?’
‘We-ell, your money won’t last for ever, and …’
‘Oh, I’ll look for a job first go off,’ Biddy said, conscience stricken. ‘Sorry, for a moment I quite forgot I needed to earn. What pays best, would you say? Waitressing, shop work, that sort of thing?’
‘Factory work’s best,’ Ellen said authoritatively. ‘You wouldn’t get taken on in a shop in them clo’es – why didn’t you keep them nice things you ’ad on, earlier?’
‘She bought ’em,’ Biddy said briefly. ‘I know I earned ’em, but I didn’t want her saying I’d left with property belonging to her. She could have put the scuffers on me.’
‘What, the way she treated you, chuck? She wou’n’t dare! There’s a law in this country ’ginst slavery, you know!’
‘Yes, but it’s provin’ it,’ Biddy pointed out, ever practical. ‘It would be her word against mine, because I didn’t go shouting it from the rooftops, exactly. Still, I’ll look for a job first thing.’
‘I only said it because it’s a deal more difficult to find a job than to look,’ Ellen said rather gloomily. ‘Tell you what, we’re much the same size, how about if I lend you somethin’ to wear, eh? Somethin’ decent? Jest till you’re in work, like.’
‘Oh, Ellen, you are kind … but don’t lend me anything too good,’ Biddy urged. ‘Just a plain dress and some shoes. I know what you mean, I wouldn’t give me a job myself in this old gear.’
‘Right. Now if you’ve done with them onions, what about a spot o’ kip? We’ve both gorra long day tomorrer.’
Biddy very soon realised that Ellen was right; jobs were hard to come by in the city, with a good many girls chasing every one. But she did have an advantage; she was able to accept a very small wage and she was experienced at shop work.
Against that experience, however, was set the fact that jobs on the Scottie and in that general area were out, for fear of meeting a Kettle face to face and having to put up with at worst outright abuse and false accusations, and at best coldness. But the weather was fine, Biddy’s little store of money meant that she could keep going for a week or two before the situation became desperate, provided she was content to eat cheaply, and for the first time since her mother had died she knew what it was to have time to herself.
Being just fifteen, there was enough of the child in Biddy to enjoy watching the trains steaming in and out of Lime Street, walking down to the pierhead to see the ferries come and go, sauntering along Sefton Street and watching the overhead railway chugging noisily along above her head whilst the masts and funnels of the big ships were easily visible in the nearby docks.
And neatly dressed in borrowed pink cotton with her curls tied in a knot on top of her head she looked sufficiently respectable to browse for hours in Lewises, George Henry Lee’s and Blacklers, dreaming of the day when she would be able to shop here, to ascend to the restaurants on the top floor and eat delicious food, to buy a straw hat with a field of daisies and poppies strewn across the brim, to try on elegant ankle-length skirts and to tittup around in patent leather shoes with heels three inches high.
But of course jobs do not just materialise, so towards the end of her first week Biddy began to search for employment. She bought the
Echo
each evening and scanned the advertisements, she looked in all the shop windows as she passed to see if anyone was after a shop assistant, and she hovered outside a small factory which made leather handbags in the hope that someone might come and put a ‘wanted’ notice on the big wooden gates.
She had decided to leave Tate’s for the time being at least. Luke worked there, in a managerial capacity admittedly, but with my luck, Biddy concluded gloomily, he’d be the one to interview me for the job, or I’d walk slap into him in the corridor, and that ’ud be me scuppered.
The two girls were sitting in the living-room of the flat one evening, companionably sharing a fish-and-chip supper whilst Ellen soaked her feet in a bath of cold water and scanned the paper, when there was a knock on the door. It was the first time such a thing had happened since Biddy moved in and both girls panicked at once, Biddy flying across the room and trying to hide behind the sofa whilst Ellen, going very pale, whisked the paper out of sight beneath the cushions, tried to do the same with Biddy’s fish and chips, with disastrous results to the upholstery, they discovered later, and adjured Biddy, in a piercing whisper, to shut up and stay still or they would both be out on their ears.
It was Biddy who came to her senses first.
She emerged from behind the sofa and grabbed Ellen’s arm. ‘Say I’ve just popped in to share your supper,’ she hissed. ‘He won’t suspect a thing … act natural, for God’s sake, or a babe in arms would know we were up to something!’
‘Oh yes … oh Bid, you’re a bright ’un … you’ve come to ’ave your supper wi’ me, you’re an ole friend from me schooldays,’ Ellen muttered, mopping her brow. ‘Oh bugger me backwards, ’e’s ringin’ agin … talk about impatient!’
‘Your language!’ Biddy said, giggling. ‘Go and let him in, and act cool, will you?’
Ellen disappeared and Biddy, sitting demurely on the sofa with her plate and its damaged food on her knee, listened. She heard Ellen’s high voice, a laugh, a masculine burr of speech, and then Ellen said, ‘Come along in then, for a moment,’ and her feet pattered back across the linoleum with a man’s heavier tread sounding behind her.
The footsteps drew nearer and Biddy had picked up the newspaper and was scanning the job advertisements when the door opened. Ellen came in, and one look at her face showed Biddy that whoever had been at the door, he or she represented no threat.