The Diaries of Jane Somers

‘But my sister was there, right enough. Suddenly she began showing herself off and buying herself clothes, and then they moved to a better house. I knew Father had left something to us both, and I went to her and said, Where is what Father left me? And she couldn’t look me in the face. What makes you think you had anything coming? she said. You never came to see us, did you? But who threw me out? I said. And we quarrelled and quarrelled and she shrieked at me. I went to my sister, willing myself to do it because she always treated me so bad, and I said, Polly, where’s my share of the money? She has got it, my sister said. You’ll have to go to a lawyer. Well, how could I do that? You need money for lawyers. I and Laurie were all lovey-dovey just then, and we both of us found it such a nice change, we didn’t want to waste any of it.

‘Much later, when I was so down and poor and in need of everything, I went to my sister, and she must have told her, for one day when I got back from work the landlady said a big woman in feathers and scarlet had been and left me a parcel. It was some of my mother’s clothes, that’s all, and her old purse with two gold guineas in it. And that’s all I ever had from my father. For I never saw her again.’

Maudie’s very bad time.

‘I worked so hard and so hard. I used to get up so early and take Johnnie to the minder’s, and then to work, and work all day till six or seven. And then back to pick up Johnnie, and she’d be cross, often, because I was late and she wanted to be rid of him. And I’d get home and find not enough food for him and me. I was earning badly then. Mrs Rolovsky never forgave me for leaving when I married and then coming back. I wasn’t the pet any longer, and she was always taking her chance to fine me, or give me a hat that would take twice as long as the others. We were paid by what we’d got done, you see. And I never was able to scamp my work. I had to do it properly even if I was to suffer. And then we were put off. We were put off most summers. Oh, no security then, no pensions, nothing. She’d say, Pick up your cards as you go out, and leave your address, and we’ll contact you when there’s work.

‘That war was coming, it was nearly on us, and times were bad. I didn’t know what to do. I had a little saved, but not much. I had Johnnie home from the minder’s, that was something because I hardly ever saw him awake when I was working, but how to feed him? The landlady said, No, no credit on the rent. I kept the rent paid, but often and often I went to bed on cold water so Johnnie could have a cup of milk. It went on and on, and that was such a wonderful summer. I was wild with hunger. I’d go into the gardens and see if there was bread lying there the birds hadn’t eaten. But others had the same idea, and I’d be there first, hanging around, pretending I wasn’t watching while the people spread out the bread for the birds. Once I said to an old woman, I need that more than the birds. Then earn it, said she. I never forgot that, and I’ll never forget it. For there was no work. I tried to get a cleaning job, but they wouldn’t have me cleaning with a child hanging around. I didn’t know what I would do.

‘Then suddenly Laurie turns up, and finds me in bed on a Sunday afternoon, with my arms around Johnnie. I felt so faint and sick, you see. Oh, what a commotion, what a to-do! First, of course, it was all shouts, Why did you move without telling me? And then it was, You know I’d never let you go without! Then prove it, I said, and off he went and came back with groceries. I could have done with biscuits and tea and dried peas and stuff I could have kept, but no, being Laurie, it was all fancy cakes and ham. Well, I ate and Johnnie ate, and after all that he took us out for some food. I’m your Daddy, says he to Johnnie, and of course the little boy is pleased. And then, he went off. Back tomorrow, says Laurie, but I didn’t see him for months.

‘Meanwhile I’d hit the bottom. I went to Relief. In those days there was a Board stuffed with snobby ladies and gentlemen, and you’d stand there, and they’d say, Why don’t you sell your locket, if you’re so poor – it was my mother’s – have you got any personal belongings, we can’t keep people who have their own resources. Their own resources! You say you have a little boy, and they say, Then you must force your husband to contribute. You couldn’t explain to the likes of them about the likes of Laurie. Well, they said I could have two shillings a week. That was high summer still, and no end to it in sight. They sent a man around. I’d pawned everything, except a blanket for Johnnie, for I was sleeping under my coat. He came into our room. Bed with a mattress but no bedclothes, a wooden table – this one here, that you like. Two wooden chairs. A shelf that had on it a bit of sugar and half a loaf of bread. He stood there, in his good clothes, and looked at me and Johnnie, and then he said, Have you sold everything you can? And I had, even my mother’s locket. And he leaned forward and pointed to this …’ Maudie showed me the long dark wood stick with which she pushes back and opens the curtains. ‘What about this? he said. How am I to open and close my curtains? I said. Are you expecting me to sell my curtains as well? Shall I sell the bed and sleep on the floor, then?

‘He was a little ashamed then, not much, it wasn’t his job to be ashamed of what he had to do. And that was how I got my two shillings a week.’

‘And could you live on it?’

‘You would be surprised what you can live on. Johnnie and I, we ate bread, and he got some milk, and so we lived until the autumn and there was a note from the Rolovskys: they’d take me on but at less money. Because of the hard times. I would have worked for half what they gave. I slowly got back the blankets from the pawnshop, for the winter, and I got my pillows, and then … One day, when I got to the baby-minder’s, no Johnnie. Laurie had come and taken him away. I begged and screamed and begged, but she said he was the child’s father, she couldn’t refuse a child to his father – and I went mad, running about the streets, and going everywhere. No one had heard anything. No one knew. I was very ill then. I lay in bed, I didn’t care, I thought I would die and I would have welcomed it. I lost my job at the Rolovskys’, and that was the end of them, for me. When I was up, I got myself a job cleaning, to tide me over, because without a child they’d employ me. And when I saved up enough I went to a lawyer. I said, How can I get my child back? But where is your husband? he said. I don’t know, I said. Then how can I help you? he said. I don’t know, I said. You must advertise for him, he said. But where? I said. Isn’t there a way of finding out where people are? Yes, but it costs money, he said. And I haven’t got any, I said.

‘And then he came over to me and put his hands all over me, and he said, Very well, Maudie, you know what you can do if you want me to help you. And I ran, and I ran, out of that office, and I was scared to go near a lawyer again.

‘All this time, Laurie had Johnnie down in the West Country with a woman he had then. Much later, when I met Johnnie again, he told me she was good to him. Not his father, for his father was off soon, to another woman, he could never stay with one woman. No, this woman brought him up. And he did not know he had a mother, he didn’t know about me. Not till quite recently, but I’ll tell you another time, another time, I’m all roiled up and upset with thinking about it all, and I meant to tell you something nice tonight, one of the times I like to think about, not a bad time …’

A nice time.

Maudie was walking down the High Street, and she saw some hats in a window. She was appalled at the way the hats were made. She went in and said to a woman who was making a hat, Don’t you know how to put a hat together? And the woman said, No, she had been left a widow with a bit of money and thought she would make hats. Well, said Maudie, you have to learn how to make a hat, as you have to learn to scrub a floor or bake a loaf. I’ll show you. She was a bit huffy at first, but she wanted to learn.

‘I used to go in there, and she’d show me what she’d done, and I’d make her pick it to pieces again, or I’d make her whole hat, for the skill was in my fingers still, and it is now, I know. And yes, I can see from your face what you are thinking, and you’re right. No, she didn’t pay me. But I loved it, you see. Of course, it wasn’t like the Rolovskys’, not the West End, nothing in the way of real good silks and satins, just cheap stuff. But all the same, between us, we made some lovely hats and she got a name for it. And soon she sold the shop for the goodwill – but the goodwill was me, really, and that wasn’t in any contract and so I don’t know what happened afterwards …’

A nice time.

Maudie was working for an actress who was at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. She was prepared to take an hour’s journey there, and an hour back, because this woman was so gay and laughing and always had a joke. ‘She lived alone, no man, no children, and she worked. Oh, they work so, these poor actresses, and I used to make her supper ready for the oven, or a good big salad on a plate, and get her fire laid, and go home thinking how she’d be so happy to come in and see everything so nice. And sometimes after a matinée she’d say, Sit down, Maudie, share my supper, I don’t know what I’d do without you. And she’d tell me all about the theatre. She wasn’t a star, she was what they call a character actress. Well, she was a character all right. And then she died. What of? I was so upset I didn’t want to know. It was a sudden death. I got a letter one day, and it was, she had died, sudden. So I didn’t go back, though I was owed a fortnight’s money.’

‘When was that?’

For all the time I am trying to get her life mapped, dated.

‘When? Oh, it was after the war. No, the other war, the second war.’

Maudie doesn’t talk about the first war as a war. She was sick with worrying about Johnnie, for she thought that her husband would be in the army, and where was Johnnie? She went ‘to the Army’ and asked, did they know anything about a Laurie Fowler, and they said, But what part of the country does he come from?

‘I was so desperate, I went on my knees. I didn’t know I was going to, but there I was, with all those officers around me. Please, please, I said. They were embarrassed, and I don’t blame them. I was crying like a river. They said, We’ll see what we can do. We’ll let you know.

‘And a long time afterwards, and I was waiting for every visit of the postman, a card: We have been unable to trace Laurence Fowler. And the reason was, he joined up from Scotland, not England, for there was a woman in Scotland he was living with he needed to get away from.’

So that is what a month of visiting Maudie looks like, written down! But what of the evening when I said to myself, I am so tired, I am so tired, I can’t, but I went? It was an hour later than usual. I stood outside that crumbling door, knock knock, then bang bang bang. Faces in the upper windows. Then at last she stood there, a little fury with blazing blue eyes.

‘What do you want?’

‘I am here to visit you.’

She shrieked, ‘I haven’t got time, and dragging down this passage, getting the coal, is bad enough.’

I said to her, hearing myself with some surprise, ‘Then go to hell, Maudie,’ and went off without looking back. This was without real anger on my part, almost like reading lines in a play. Nor was I worried that evening, but made good use of my spare time having a real bath.

Next day, she opened the door on my second knock, and said, ‘Come in,’ standing aside with an averted unhappy face. Later she said, ‘You don’t have to take any notice of my nonsense.’

‘Yes, I do, Maudie, of course I do. If you say a thing, I have to believe you mean it.’

And, a few days later, she was stiff and silent. ‘What’s wrong, Maudie?’

‘I’m not going to, I’m not leaving here, they can’t make me.’

‘Who’s been this time?’

‘She has.’

‘Who is she?’

‘As if you don’t know.’

‘Oh, so you’re back at that, then. I’m plotting against you!’

‘Of course you are, you all do.’

We were shrieking at each other. I am not at all ashamed of this, yet I’ve never, or not since I was a child, quarrelled in this way: quarrelled without spite or passion, even with a certain enjoyment. Though I know it is not enjoyable to Maudie. She suffers afterwards.

‘But was there someone else to see you, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s her name?’

With a blazing blue look, she said, ‘Rogers, Bodgers, Plodgers, something like that.’ And, later, ‘They can’t make me move, can they? This house is privately owned?’

I sent for the information. If the flat is condemned, then she’ll have to move. By any current housing standard, it should be condemned. By any human standard, she should stay where she is. I want to contact this Mrs Rogers. I know I can ring up the ‘Welfare’ and ask, but this isn’t how things happen – oh, no! You have to let things work themselves out, you must catch something at the right time.

I found the two old women again waiting for me the other day. Mrs Boles and Mrs Bates. Bundles of coats and scarves, but their hats had flowers and bright ribbon. Spring.

‘Oh, you do run about,’ says Mrs Bates. ‘And how is Maudie Fowler?’

‘She is the same.’

‘Mrs Rogers was asking after you,’ she said.

‘Do you know what about?’

‘Oh, she’s ever so good, Mrs Rogers, running about, just like you.’