Yes, Mama

‘Ma’am?’

‘Tell Maisie to show Miss Webb straight up when she arrives. You will all take your instructions from her. I also want to see my daughter, Mrs Browning, when she comes. Tell Cook that both ladies will probably be here for dinner.’ Elizabeth paused to take a big breath as a stab shot through her abdomen. Then she went on, ‘And, Rosie, none of the servants is to leave the house without Cook’s permission.’ She twisted suddenly in the bed and arched her back. ‘Ah!’ she cried.

Waiting to be dismissed, Rosie stood woodenly facing her, while the spasm passed. ‘Blow her,’ she thought, ‘just when I were thinkin’ I could nip out a few minutes to see the Queen. And Miss Webb is a single lady – she won’t want to come into a birthing room, any more’n she’d want to look into a midden full o’ garbage.’

Mrs Macdonald wrung out a cloth in cool, scented water and began solicitously to wipe the patient’s face. Elizabeth pushed her impatiently aside. ‘Has Mrs Ford come?’ she gasped to Rosie.

‘Yes, Ma’am. She’s bin waitin’ in the kitchen this past three hours.’

‘Send her up – I’ll see her – while I still can,’ Elizabeth ordered pessimistically.

II

Mrs Polly Ford was a widow, aged twenty-three. Six weeks before the Queen’s visit, her husband, a docker, had fallen into the hold of a ship and had died, almost immediately, of his multiple injuries. Two nights later, in her parents’ crowded cellar dwelling, his frantic widow had given birth to her first child.

Born on to a pile of rags in a windowless, waterless, heatless home, without even a clean sheet to be wrapped in, the baby boy had decided, three weeks later, that life was not worth living and had quit it. Polly wished passionately that she had been allowed to follow him. She was, however, a strong, healthy woman and, despite her despair, her milk surged in her.

Weeping helplessly, she had sat by a tiny fire lovingly built for her by her father, James Tyson. He had walked down to Seaforth sands to search for driftwood, in order to provide a little heat for her.

‘We didn’t know the babe was goin’ to come so quick – or be born here – and we run out of coal and money,’ he told her almost apologetically, his bearded face turned up towards her, as he knelt to feed the flames with chips from an old railway sleeper which he had found on the shore.

‘I know, Dad,’ she told him gently between her sobs. ‘You shouldn’t’ve took the wood from the sands – you could’ve been arrested for it.’

‘Och, I know that. Devil take the bleeders!’ He got up off his knees and stood leaning against the rough, brick chimney, the firelight catching the golden hairs of his beard and eyebrows. ‘What you goin’ to do now, duck?’

Her mother, Bridie Tyson, had been sitting beside Polly on the backless bench. Wrapped inside her shawl, to keep him warm in the foetid cellar of the court house, lay Billy, Polly’s baby brother. His wide brown eyes glittered, as he peeked out of the enveloping shawl to watch the dancing flames of the fire. Now his mother sighed, and asked, ‘Aye, what to do?’

‘She can stay with us,’ responded her husband immediately.

‘Aye, Dad, you’ve got enough trouble without me,’ Polly told him.

She looked helplessly round the tiny room, dimly lit from the open door leading to the steps up to the court itself. Down those steps, on wet days, trickled sewage from two overflowing earth lavatories which served the fourteen houses surrounding the court, to add to the overwhelming misery of the ten people living in her parents’ windowless room below ground level. But her father was a casual labourer on the docks, and this, though he was as good a man as ever heard a Wesleyan sermon, was the best he could provide for his family from his irregular earnings. Also living with him was his widowed sister-in-law and her five children.

Polly’s aunt had been sitting, almost unnoticed, on a three-legged stool tucked up by the fireplace. Under her black shawl, her stomach was swollen with pregnancy. She cackled suddenly, ‘Youse wet with milk. You could mebbe wet-nurse.’

Polly’s breasts ached with milk. She had let her little brother, Billy, suckle from her to ease the pain, but still the milk pressed within and damped her calico dress.

‘Some fine lady’d pay good for that – and you’d be well fed to keep it up,’ her aunt went on.

‘Aye, you’d live the life o’ Riley,’ her mother agreed eagerly.

James Tyson looked down at his womenfolk and shrugged. This was woman talk, and, anyway, it was time to go down to the dock gate again, to stand in the rain and hope to be picked out for half a day’s work. He patted Polly on the shoulder as he passed, and left them to it.

Through a grapevine of female cousins and aunts, inquiries went out to ask anyone in service whether their mistresses were expecting.

From Fanny, the little skivvy in the Woodmans’ house, came the information via her aunt, that the Missus was expecting any day and was proper mad at it. In Fanny’s considered opinion and judging from the gossip in the kitchen, she would be glad enough to be relieved of feeding the expected child and of looking after it; its nearest brother, Master Charles, was ten years old and had gone away to boarding school. His nurse had long since been let go.

On her Sunday afternoon off, Fanny visited her aunt in her tiny house in Shaw’s Alley and confided to her that a real blow-up about the child was expected daily, between her Master and Mistress. ‘It int his kid,’ Fanny told her. ‘And he’s got a temper like you’d nevaire believe. Always pickin’ on her, he is – and yet he can’t talk – he took up with a woman as keeps a tobacco and sweets, back o’ Water Street, downtown.’

Fanny bent to wring out a rag in a pail of cold water and reapplied it to one of her aunt’s eyes, which her husband had blackened the previous night. Her aunt was hardly listening to her niece; she was wondering dully if, after last night, she would be in the family way again, and she sighed at the very thought of it. It would be the fifteenth and, out of the whole bloody issue, only three of them full grown.

Wearily, she tried to give her attention to what Fanny was saying, and replied, with pity, ‘Well, you talk to Rosie and Mrs Tibbs about Polly Ford. The poor gel is broken-’earted and ’er Mam is near out of ’er wits over it.’

III

While Elizabeth Woodman’s affairs were discussed in one of Liverpool’s worst slums, Elizabeth herself had wandered round her handsome Upper Canning Street house through the last days of her pregnancy, and viewed with dread the birth of her child.

She had done her best to get rid of the child. She had drunk bottle after bottle of gin and had sat for hours in hot baths, while Fanny stoked up the kitchen fire to heat the water in the tank behind it, so that Elizabeth could keep renewing the water in her fine mahogany-encased bath in the bathroom. To no purpose.

She had even contemplated throwing herself down the main staircase in order to dislodge the foetus, but when she had looked at the steepness of the flight her courage had failed her.

She watched with horror her expanding figure and worried at her husband’s complete lack of comment about it. As the months went remorselessly by, his silence began to terrify her. They had not slept together for months. He must know it’s not his, she agonized. Is he going to ignore the fact or will he throw me out at some point? And where shall I go? What shall I do?

Perhaps it will be born dead, she thought hopefully. Then he won’t have to say anything.

But Alicia Beatrix Mary had no intention of being born dead; Elizabeth, Polly and Fanny would all have their lives totally altered by her existence.

Chapter Two (#ulink_7557659d-5f49-583f-900b-1969786c3709)

I

Fanny consulted Rosie, the Woodmans’ housemaid, about Polly. Rosie spoke to Mrs Martha Tibbs, the cook-housekeeper, an unmarried lady graced with the appellation of a wife because it was the custom.

In consideration of receiving Polly Ford’s first month’s wages, if she got the job, Mrs Tibbs graciously agreed to broach the subject of a wet-nurse with Elizabeth Woodman. Since nothing had been said to the domestic staff about the impending addition to the family, Mrs Tibbs went about the matter very delicately.

Bored to tears by three months’ confinement during the more obvious period of her pregnancy, anxious to keep the child away from her husband as much as possible, assuming it were born alive, Elizabeth was almost grateful to Mrs Tibbs and agreed to look at Polly.

It took the efforts of all her extended family to make Polly look respectable for the interview. She had a black skirt in which she had been married. A black bodice was borrowed from a distant cousin down the street; she had had it given to her by the draper whose tiny shop she cleaned. It had been eaten by moths at the back, but with Polly’s own black shawl over it, the holes would not show. A battered, black straw hat was acquired for a penny from a pedlar of secondhand clothes, after hard bargaining by Polly’s married sister, Mary. Polly’s mother washed and ironed her own apron to an unusual whiteness, so that Polly could wear it for the occasion. Polly had boots, though they were worn through at the bottom and were bursting round the little toes. ‘I’ll keep me feet under me skirt,’ said Polly dully.

Through all these preparations, Polly wept steadily. At her mother’s urging she suckled little Billy. ‘It’ll nourish ’im and it’ll keep the milk comin’, luv,’ her mother consoled her.

It was comforting to hold the small boy to her. Though as grubby as a sweep, he was a merry child, who laughed and crowed and tried to talk to her.

Before Polly could aspire to a job as an indoor servant, she had, somehow, to acquire a reference from another lady. At first, Polly’s mother had suggested that Mrs Tibbs’ recommendation would be enough, but, through Fanny, Mrs Tibbs herself insisted that Polly must produce a written reference.

‘Aye, she’s right,’ Polly agreed. Then, trying to make an effort for herself, she added, ‘Now I’ve got a hat, I could go and see that ould Mrs Stanley, and ask ’er.’

Before her marriage, Polly had cleaned the doorsteps and the brass bells and letterboxes of a number of elegant houses in Mount Pleasant. For five years, she had donkey-stoned the front steps of a Mrs Stanley, an ancient crone who claimed that she had once danced with King George IV. Mrs Stanley lived with a white cat and an elderly married pair of servants.

With feelings akin to terror, Polly pulled the bell of the servants’ entrance of Mrs Stanley’s house. The same bent, bald manservant she remembered answered it. He did not recognize her, and asked, ‘And what do you want?’

She told him.

‘I’ll ask the wife,’ he told her, and shut the door in her face.

She was almost ready to give up and go home, when a little kitchen-maid opened it and said shyly, ‘You’re to coom in.’

She was led into a well-scrubbed kitchen where, on a bare, deal table, a meal was laid for four. Bending over to poke the roaring kitchen fire was an elderly woman-servant. A good smell of roasting meat permeated the room; it made Polly’s mouth water.