The Rag and Bone Girl

  Maggie Ford

  * * *

  The Rag and Bone Girl

  Contents

  Part One One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part Two Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  About the Author

  Maggie was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.

  She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.

  Also by Maggie Ford

  The Soldier’s Bride

  A Mother’s Love

  Call Nurse Jenny

  A Woman’s Place

  The Factory Girl

  A Girl in Wartime

  A Soldier’s Girl

  An East End Girl

  The Fisherman’s Girl

  Rags to Riches

  In memory of my dear husband Charlie, whose story this is. And for our daughter, Clare, who suggested I write it – thank you.

  Part One

  * * *

  One

  The clothes post was looking very precarious, and no wonder after what her brother Neil had done to it as he came home drunk in the early hours.

  Standing at the back door, Nora Taylor gave a wry smile. If nothing was done about mending that post it would probably collapse under the weight of Mum’s current lot of washing. At this very moment she was working off her anger at having to do it again, all the time swearing under her breath in her London-Irish brogue.

  Nora supposed she should offer to help but she knew she would only reap a sharp and hostile retort. Anyway, at twenty, with every neighbourhood boy taken by her slender figure and blue eyes accentuated by her dark hair, she could do without ruining her looks at a washtub. Let Maggie do it.

  Eighteen months younger than herself, Maggie was usually the one expected to help with the washing. Ten-year-old Elsie would often be recruited as well. Rose, of course, being only six, wouldn’t be called on for such heavy work, and certainly not fourteen-year-old George; boys not being expected to do any household chores – women’s work.

  As for Neil – that would have been unthinkable even though it had been his fault the clothes line full of washing had been discovered lying on the ground earlier this morning. At twenty-three he should have known better than to behave as he’d done last night, barging in through the back gate like that, pretty drunk in the bargain.

  The tiny backyard gate opened on to Slater Alley, though the house itself fronted on to Gough Street in Poplar. Backyards in London’s East End were mostly concreted over, but Dad loved his bit of lawn, even if it was more mud than grass with Mum moving up and down to hang out her endless washing.

  The clothes post had always been a bit dodgy but Neil, heavily built and easily goaded into action had helped it on its way. Coming home late after having seen a one-act drama called The Ghost Sonata at a small West End theatre with a few mates, he’d come in by the back gate and walked straight into Mum’s line of sheets, shirts and underwear flapping like pale spectres in the drying winter night’s breeze.

  The eerie play still on his mind, and fortified by more than a few pints and chasers, as the sheets on the washing line lightly touched his face in the dark, like the pale spectres of all Hell’s demons coming to get him, he’d wildly flung out his arms and torn the lot down before making a frantic run for the house and safety.

  This morning he’d left for work sharper than usual without a word to Mum, who’d already gone off her rocker at finding all her hard labour from the day before strewn in the mud.

  ‘It’s that bloody post agin, that’s what it is!’ she’d raged at Dad, her brogue now mixed with cockney after all these years living in London.

  ‘If I’ve told yer once, yer lazy old divil, I’ve told yer umpteen times to fix it. Me working me ’ands to the bone scrubbing yer dirty clothes clean, ter find it all draped in the mud and ’avin’ ter be done over again!’

  That the other end of the clothes line had been ripped off the bolt on the house wall as well, didn’t seem to strike her.

  But last night Nora had heard the stifled cry of panic just below her bedroom window, followed by frantic scuffling. She had hopped out of bed while her sisters slept on and had crept to the window in time to see her brother’s display of primitive terror. It was all she could do to stop herself bursting out laughing and waking up her sisters. She couldn’t resist telling Neil, just before he left for work. Obviously trying to save face he mumbled something about the strange effect the play had had on him.

  ‘Enough to give anyone a scare after that, blundering into something ghostly white you don’t expect. Flapping all round yer face like that in the dark, you’d have felt the same as I did. It ain’t no shame.’

  ‘You’d better tell that to Mum,’ she’d said, trying to hide a grin.

  But she was glad he hadn’t. This way she could blackmail him into handing over a few bob to keep quiet and not make him look a laughing stock and less than the man he saw himself to be.

  Five shillings would buy the hat she had seen in that posh shop in Plaistow High Street, and a nice skirt and jacket to go with it to wear to the class of six-year-olds she taught at nearby St Saviour’s infants’ school.

  She itched to tell Maggie about their brother’s capers and share a good laugh, but Maggie would have then expected a share of the money too. Though Maggie was probably more taken up with the man she had met a few weeks ago, so she said. She said she’d first met him at one of those lectures she loved going to at a nearby public meeting hall around the beginning of December. Christmas had intervened but much to Nora’s surprise she was still seeing him, though Nora was the only one she’d so far told and that only sketchily.

  ‘He’s ever so good-looking and ever so mature,’ was all she’d say

  A reluctance to say more not only revealed her feelings towards the man, but fear that Mum and Dad wouldn’t approve before they ever met him – if it ever got that far.

  Ten years ago any decent girl of only eighteen, and from a respectable family, would have definitely been discouraged from going off with friends, gallivanting and meeting young men just as she pleased, but this was 1910, if only January, and standards weren’t what they had once been. Even so, Mum who had kept her strict Catholic faith, even though Dad and the rest of the family were Church of England, would be more than upset, especially as another small point Maggie had let drop in Nora’s ear was that the man she’d met wasn’t even a churchgoer. And there was one more thing.

  ‘So what’s his name?’ she’d ventured at breakfast one day, keeping her voice to a whisper while their mother stood preparing porridge oats, Dad already gone off to the rag factory he owned having had his breakfast earlier.

  ‘Mr Robert Titchnell,’ Maggie whispered back, at last beginning to warm to her confiding in her sister.

  ‘Mister!’ Nora gasped quietly. ‘You call him mister?’

  ‘Shh,’ Maggie warned as her mother’s head turned. ‘Tell you later.’

  It wasn’t until the evening as they were getting ready for bed that she said, gabbling it as if glad to get it off her chest, ‘He’s a widower. He’s in his thirties and he has a son.’

  Nora stopped combing out her long dark hair to turn horrified blue eyes on her sister. ‘Widowed? With a son, and you’re going to tell that to Mum?’

  She saw Maggie’s full lips begin to tremble. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to. I don’t know what to do. She’ll go right off her rocker, I know she will.’

  ‘How old is this son?’ was all Nora asked.

  ‘Nearly nine, he told me. But please, Nora, don’t tell a soul. If Mum knew she’d put a stop to it. I’ve fallen in love with him and I don’t want to have anything happen to spoil it. Promise you’ll say nothing to anyone.’

  ‘I promise,’ Nora said.

  ‘You can be a proper bitch sometimes,’ Maggie snapped as she tossed her honey-coloured tresses; her hazel eyes were like Dad’s but now flashed in the way her mother’s so often did.

  ‘I told you about Robert in confidence and all you keep doing is dropping broad hints in front of them both.’

  ‘Broad hints?’ Nora repeated, trying to keep her face straight as the pair of them undressed for bed this Friday night.

  All evening Maggie had been giving her looks. According to Maggie it seemed that almost every word she’d spoken to their parents, as the family sat hugging the fire against the February draughts from under doors and window frames, had apparently been loaded with connotation.

  With the two younger girls, Elsie and Rose, in bed, everyone had been preoccupied with their own pursuits as usual, saying little to
each other. Nearing the end of her penny novelette, Nora wanted only to see how the final page would pan out, though already guessing that the willowy heroine would marry the man she loved. Maggie and George had been engrossed in an on-going jigsaw puzzle of a Scottish castle. Neil was out as usual, either with mates or some girl or other. Tall and handsome, he apparently had endless female admirers.

  In his wooden armchair by the fire, Dad dozed, braces dangling, collar off, feet propped on the fender just far enough from the fire for the soles of his boots not to steam, his pipe lying in one limp hand, the tobacco in the bowl long since burned away and tapped out.

  Only Mum, sewing at the big table by the light of an elaborate oil lamp pulled nearer to her from the centre of the table, had things to say, asking how her two eldest daughters’ day had gone.

  ‘So then, how’d yer teaching go today?’ she had asked Nora without looking up from her sewing. ‘Little ones caused yer no trouble?’

  ‘They never cause me trouble,’ Nora had said absently, her gaze concentrated on her book. ‘They wouldn’t dare.’

  She meant that. Her children were well behaved. If one stepped out of line, a quick look from her soon brought the child to heel, failing that a quick slap to the back of the head always did the trick.

  ‘And what about you, Maggie?’ Mum glanced up at her. ‘You was a mite late coming home to tea. Was your bus late? It’s been snowing well and it don’t take much to make buses late. Or was you kept late at work?’

  ‘No. We closed on time,’ Maggie replied absently, her mind on the piece she was trying to fit into the jigsaw puzzle.

  Maggie was employed by what Mum saw as befitting a young lady, a small haberdashery in Commercial Road. Deep down, she didn’t approve of young ladies going out to work. She’d have preferred to see her stay at home like the young daughters of the upper classes did. She considered this family to be middle class at least, having come up in the world since her parents came over from Ireland bringing their humble rag-picking trade with them.

  Their small business brought in good money and their children spoke moderately well, which was how Nora had become an infant school teacher and the family held its head high among those of humbler means.

  ‘Why so late then getting home?’ Mum queried, still sewing away

  She could have sent out her mending to a nearby seamstress but felt she could make a better job of it herself. It was the same with her washing, certain no washerwoman could, in her estimation, bring it up as clean and sparkling white as she did. At least they had a cleaning woman who came in daily to sweep, dust, polish, wash the outside windows and sills, whiten the doorstep and black lead the grate, and a young girl as a maid-cum-cook.

  Before Maggie could reply to her mother’s questioning, Nora had burst out without thinking, ‘Probably some young man,’ immediately wanting to bite her lip as the look Maggie shot at her had been enough to kill.

  Mum’s blue eyes had lifted sharply from her sewing to take in both girls. ‘What young man?’

  Her tone had been full of suspicion and realizing her error, Nora said hastily, ‘Just a thought, that’s all.’

  Mum’s glare had concentrated itself on Maggie. ‘Is there a young man?’ she questioned. ‘Yer mind yerself young lady, because I’m not having you gallivanting with the sort o’ roughs we’ve around these parts. Me an’ yer father need to meet whoever it is to see what he’s like.’

  Compelled to lie for her sister, Nora cut in, ‘I didn’t mean anything by what I said, Mum. It was just a remark. 1 expect it was more like one of her girl friends talking to her so long who made her late. Isn’t that so, Maggie?’

  ‘Yes … Yes, of course,’ came the hasty response and Mum had seemed satisfied enough, but Maggie’s eyes had continued to dart fire in Nora’s direction and now she was bringing it up again as they got ready for bed, Rose and Elsie already fast asleep in their own bed.

  ‘If you ever drop another hint like that, I’ll kill you!’ she hissed as she dragged her warm, white winceyette nightgown over her head, having sluiced her face and combed out her long hair from the ribbon that had held it back off her face.

  In the act of unpinning her own hair from where it had been dressed full and wide on top of her head, the dark strands falling heavily about her shoulders to reach her waist in a glossy cascade, she turned on her sister.

  ‘Why? I didn’t mean to do any damage,’ she whispered so as not to disturb the two younger girls huddled together in their narrow bed.

  ‘You know full well you did,’ Maggie hissed back. ‘You did it on purpose.’

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. Honestly.’

  ‘Honestly or not, what matters is that you’ve got Mum thinking. And I hate you!’

  Nora shrugged. Her sister was always hating someone or something.

  Shivering in the cold as she too struggled gratefully into her own thick night gown, anxious to get into bed and warm up, she sought to calm things down.

  ‘You’ll have to bring him home sooner or later to meet everyone,’ she said gently. ‘How long are you going to wait? That’s if you’re both serious.’

  Maggie seemed to wilt a little. ‘We are! He says I’m the right person for him and he’s certainly becoming more … well, intent.’

  Nora looked at her, her blue eyes widening. ‘He hasn’t … I mean, you haven’t …?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Shocked by the unspoken implication, she looked just like their mother as she glared back. ‘How can you think such a thing? We’ve only been going out since just before Christmas, and only a couple of times a week when he takes me to the music hall. Mum still thinks I’m out with friends. And now you’ve almost spoiled everything for me. I wish I’d never told you.’

  ‘It wasn’t intentional,’ Nora said, genuinely sorry. ‘But you are going to have to introduce him to them eventually. And what I said wasn’t meant to be horrid. I promise I’ll really watch my tongue in future.’

  She herself was dying to see what this man looked like. All she could visualize of this widower was someone a little boring, maybe suitable to Maggie’s somewhat staid nature, perhaps not as good-looking as she made out, though, like herself, Maggie was fussy about looks and presentation, both in herself and in anyone she might one day decide to go steady with. Was this the one?

  Well, in time, they would see, Nora told herself as, with Maggie having partway forgiven her, they snuggled up together in the bed for warmth in the freezing bedroom, burying their faces under blankets and eiderdown.

  Two

  This Sunday morning Nora sat on their bed watching Maggie getting herself ready to go out. Maggie had told her mother it was with a girlfriend, though in truth it was her Robert.

  Nora was still the only one she’d told, here in their bedroom, the only place they could share confidences, the rest of the house always full of people and Mum’s ears sharp as a bat’s.

  This morning, Mum had gone to Mass as usual and Dad was down the pub with a few mates. Neil was out with one of his many girl friends, Nora guessed. But the younger children were in, their mother forbidding them to play in the street on Sundays, and young ears soon carry tales as Mum often said. So the bedroom was the best place.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s time you told Mum and Dad about this Robert of yours?’ asked Nora continuing to watch her sister dressing. ‘You’ll have to tell them soon. After all, it’s been nearly three months. It must be getting serious.’

  Maggie’s hazel eyes were wide with anxiety as she paused in getting into the skirt of her smart Sunday costume, pleated to the calf to flare out about her ankles to go with a tailored bolero over a high-buttoned blouse.

  ‘The moment Mum knows more about him she’ll try and put a stop to it, I know she will. You know what she’s like.’

  Nora knew exactly. Mum was not the easiest person in the world to get around if it didn’t suit, and this person Maggie had found would certainly not suit the moment she revealed him to be a man in his thirties – fifteen years older than her daughter – and a widower with an eight-year-old son at that.