A Clergyman's Daughter Read online

let a whole week go by before calling at the post office again.

  This was Saturday. By Wednesday her resolve had broken down. When

  the hooter sounded for the midday interval she left her bin and

  hurried down to the post office--it was a mile and a half away, and

  it meant missing her dinner. Having got there she went shame-

  facedly up to the counter, almost afraid to speak. The dog-faced

  postmistress was sitting in her brass-barred cage at the end of the

  counter, ticking figures in a long shaped account book. She gave

  Dorothy a brief nosy glance and went on with her work, taking no

  notice of her.

  Something painful was happening in Dorothy's diaphragm. She was

  finding it difficult to breathe, 'Are there any letters for me?'

  she managed to say at last.

  'Name?' said the postmistress, ticking away.

  'Ellen Millborough.'

  The postmistress turned her long dachshund nose over her shoulder

  for an instant and glanced at the M partition of the Poste Restante

  letter-box.

  'No,' she said, turning back to her account book.

  In some manner Dorothy got herself outside and began to walk back

  towards the hopfields, then halted. A deadly feeling of emptiness

  at the pit of her stomach, caused partly by hunger, made her too

  weak to walk.

  Her father's silence could mean only one thing. He believed Mrs

  Semprill's story--believed that she, Dorothy, had run away from

  home in disgraceful circumstances and then told lies to excuse

  herself. He was too angry and too disgusted to write to her. All

  he wanted was to get rid of her, drop all communication with her;

  get her out of sight and out of mind, as a mere scandal to be

  covered up and forgotten.

  She could not go home after this. She dared not. Now that she had

  seen what her father's attitude was, it had opened her eyes to the

  rashness of the thing she had been contemplating. Of COURSE she

  could not go home! To slink back in disgrace, to bring shame on

  her father's house by coming there--ah, impossible, utterly

  impossible! How could she even have thought of it?

  What then? There was nothing for it but to go right away--right

  away to some place that was big enough to hide in. London,

  perhaps. Somewhere where nobody knew her and the mere sight of her

  face or mention of her name would not drag into the light a string

  of dirty memories.

  As she stood there the sound of bells floated towards her, from the

  village church round the bend of the road, where the ringers were

  amusing themselves by ringing 'Abide with Me', as one picks out a

  tune with one finger on the piano. But presently 'Abide with Me'

  gave way to the familiar Sunday-morning jangle. 'Oh do leave my

  wife alone! She is so drunk she can't get home!'--the same peal

  that the bells of St Athelstan's had been used to ring three years

  ago before they were unswung. The sound planted a spear of

  homesickness in Dorothy's heart, bringing back to her with

  momentary vividness a medley of remembered things--the smell of the

  glue-pot in the conservatory when she was making costumes for the

  school play, and the chatter of starlings outside her bedroom

  window, interrupting her prayers before Holy Communion, and Mrs

  Pither's doleful voice chronicling the pains in the backs of her

  legs, and the worries of the collapsing belfry and the shop-debts

  and the bindweed in the peas--all the multitudinous, urgent details

  of a life that had alternated between work and prayer.

  Prayer! For a very short time, a minute perhaps, the thought

  arrested her. Prayer--in those days it had been the very source

  and centre of her life. In trouble or in happiness, it was to

  prayer that she had turned. And she realized--the first time that

  it had crossed her mind--that she had not uttered a prayer since

  leaving home, not even since her memory had come back to her.

  Moreover, she was aware that she had no longer the smallest impulse

  to pray. Mechanically, she began a whispered prayer, and stopped

  almost instantly; the words were empty and futile. Prayer, which

  had been the mainstay of her life, had no meaning for her any

  longer. She recorded this fact as she walked slowly up the road,

  and she recorded it briefly, almost casually, as though it had been

  something seen in passing--a flower in the ditch or a bird crossing

  the road--something noticed and then dismissed. She had not even

  the time to reflect upon what it might mean. It was shouldered out

  of her mind by more momentous things.

  It was of the future that she had got to be thinking now. She was

  already fairly clear in her mind as to what she must do. When the

  hop-picking was at an end she must go up to London, write to her

  father for money and her clothes--for however angry he might be,

  she could not believe that he intended to leave her utterly in the

  lurch--and then start looking for a job. It was the measure of her

  ignorance that those dreaded words 'looking for a job' sounded

  hardly at all dreadful in her ears. She knew herself strong and

  willing--knew that there were plenty of jobs that she was capable

  of doing. She could be a nursery governess, for instance--no,

  better, a housemaid or a parlourmaid. There were not many things

  in a house that she could not do better than most servants;

  besides, the more menial her job, the easier it would be to keep

  her past history secret.

  At any rate, her father's house was closed to her, that was

  certain. From now on she had got to fend for herself. On this

  decision, with only a very dim idea of what it meant, she quickened

  her pace and got back to the fields in time for the afternoon

  shift.

  The hop-picking season had not much longer to run. In a week or

  thereabouts Cairns's would be closing down, and the cockneys would

  take the hoppers' train to London, and the gypsies would catch

  their horses, pack their caravans, and march northward to

  Lincolnshire, to scramble for jobs in the potato fields. As for

  the cockneys, they had had their bellyful of hop-picking by this

  time. They were pining to be back in dear old London, with

  Woolworths and the fried-fish shop round the corner, and no more

  sleeping in straw and frying bacon in tin lids with your eyes

  weeping from wood smoke. Hopping was a holiday, but the kind of

  holiday that you were glad to see the last of. You came down

  cheering, but you went home cheering louder still and swearing that

  you would never go hopping again--until next August, when you had

  forgotten the cold nights and the bad pay and the damage to your

  hands, and remembered only the blowsy afternoons in the sun and the

  boozing of stone pots of beer round the red camp fires at night.

  The mornings were growing bleak and Novemberish; grey skies, the

  first leaves falling, and finches and starlings already flocking

  for the winter. Dorothy had written yet again to her father,

  asking for money and some clothes; he had left her letter

  unanswered, nor h
ad anybody else written to her. Indeed, there was

  no one except her father who knew her present address; but somehow

  she had hoped that Mr Warburton might write. Her courage almost

  failed her now, especially at nights in the wretched straw, when

  she lay awake thinking of the vague and menacing future. She

  picked her hops with a sort of desperation, a sort of frenzy of

  energy, more aware each day that every handful of hops meant

  another fraction of a farthing between herself and starvation.

  Deafie, her bin-mate, like herself, was picking against time, for

  it was the last money he would earn till next year's hopping season

  came round. The figure they aimed at was five shillings a day--

  thirty bushels--between the two of them, but there was no day when

  they quite attained it.

  Deafie was a queer old man and a poor companion after Nobby, but

  not a bad sort. He was a ship's steward by profession, but a tramp

  of many years' standing, as deaf as a post and therefore something

  of a Mr F.'s aunt in conversation. He was also an exhibitionist,

  but quite harmless. For hours together he used to sing a little

  song that went 'With my willy willy--WITH my willy willy', and

  though he could not hear what he was singing it seemed to cause him

  some kind of pleasure. He had the hairiest ears Dorothy had ever

  seen. There were tufts like miniature Dundreary whiskers growing

  out of each of his ears. Every year Deafie came hop-picking at

  Cairns's farm, saved up a pound, and then spent a paradisiac week

  in a lodging-house in Newington Butts before going back to the

  road. This was the only week in the year when he slept in what

  could be called, except by courtesy, a bed.

  The picking came to an end on 28 September. There were several

  fields still unpicked, but they were poor hops and at the last

  moment Mr Cairns decided to 'let them blow'. Set number 19

  finished their last field at two in the afternoon, and the little

  gypsy foreman swarmed up the poles and retrieved the derelict

  bunches, and the measurer carted the last hops away. As he

  disappeared there was a sudden shout of 'Put 'em in the bins!' and

  Dorothy saw six men bearing down upon her with a fiendish

  expression on their faces, and all the women in the set scattering

  and running. Before she could collect her wits to escape the men

  had seized her, laid her at full length in a bin and swung her

  violently from side to side. Then she was dragged out and kissed

  by a young gypsy smelling of onions. She struggled at first, but

  she saw the same thing being done to the other women in the set, so

  she submitted. It appeared that putting the women in the bins was

  an invariable custom on the last day of picking. There were great

  doings in the camp that night, and not much sleep for anybody.

  Long after midnight Dorothy found herself moving with a ring of

  people about a mighty fire, one hand clasped by a rosy butcher-boy

  and the other by a very drunk old woman in a Scotch bonnet out of a

  cracker, to the tune of 'Auld Lang Syne'.

  In the morning they went up to the farm to draw their money, and

  Dorothy drew one pound and fourpence, and earned another fivepence

  by adding up their tally books for people who could not read or

  write. The cockney pickers paid you a penny for this job; the

  gypsies paid you only in flattery. Then Dorothy set out for West

  Ackworth station, four miles away, together with the Turles, Mr

  Turle carrying the tin trunk, Mrs Turle carrying the baby, the

  other children carrying various odds and ends, and Dorothy wheeling

  the perambulator which held the Turles' entire stock of crockery,

  and which had two circular wheels and two elliptical.

  They got to the station about midday, the hoppers' train was due to

  start at one, and it arrived at two and started at a quarter past

  three. After a journey of incredible slowness, zigzagging all over

  Kent to pick up a dozen hop-pickers here and half a dozen there,

  going back on its tracks over and over again and backing into

  sidings to let other trains pass--taking, in fact, six hours to do

  thirty-five miles--it landed them in London a little after nine at

  night.

  7

  Dorothy slept that night with the Turles. They had grown so fond

  of her that they would have given her shelter for a week or a

  fortnight if she had been willing to impose on their hospitality.

  Their two rooms (they lived in a tenement house not far from Tower

  Bridge Road) were a tight fit for seven people including children,

  but they made her a bed of sorts on the floor out of two rag mats,

  an old cushion and an overcoat.

  In the morning she said good-bye to the Turles and thanked them

  for all their kindness towards her, and then went straight to

  Bermondsey public baths and washed off the accumulated dirt of five

  weeks. After that she set out to look for a lodging, having in her

  possession sixteen and eightpence in cash, and the clothes she

  stood up in. She had darned and cleaned her clothes as best she

  could, and being black they did not show the dirt quite as badly as

  they might have done. From the knees down she was now passably

  respectable. On the last day of picking a 'home picker' in the

  next set, named Mrs Killfrew, had presented her with a good pair

  of shoes that had been her daughter's, and a pair of woollen

  stockings.

  It was not until the evening that Dorothy managed to find herself a

  room. For something like ten hours she was wandering up and down,

  from Bermondsey into Southwark, from Southwark into Lambeth,

  through labyrinthine streets where snotty-nosed children played at

  hop-scotch on pavements horrible with banana skins and decaying

  cabbage leaves. At every house she tried it was the same story--

  the landlady refused point-blank to take her in. One after another

  a succession of hostile women, standing in their doorways as

  defensively as though she had been a motor bandit or a government

  inspector, looked her up and down, said briefly, 'We don't TAKE

  single girls,' and shut the door in her face. She did not know it,

  of course, but the very look of her was enough to rouse any

  respectable landlady's suspicions. Her stained and ragged clothes

  they might possibly have put up with; but the fact that she had no

  luggage damned her from the start. A single girl with no luggage

  is invariably a bad lot--this is the first and greatest of the

  apophthegms of the London landlady.

  At about seven o'clock, too tired to stand on her feet any longer,

  she ventured into a filthy, flyblown little cafe near the Old Vic

  theatre and asked for a cup of tea. The proprietress, getting into

  conversation with her and learning that she wanted a room, advised

  her to 'try at Mary's, in Wellings Court, jest orff the Cut'.

  'Mary', it appeared, was not particular and would let a room to

  anybody who could pay. Her proper name was Mrs Sawyer, but the

  boys all called her Mary.

  Dorothy found Wellings Court with some difficulty
. You went along

  Lambeth Cut till you got to a Jew clothes-shop called Knockout

  Trousers Ltd, then you turned up a narrow alley, and then turned to

  your left again up another alley so narrow that its grimy plaster

  walls almost brushed you as you went. In the plaster, persevering

  boys had cut the word ---- innumerable times and too deeply to be

  erased. At the far end of the alley you found yourself in a small

  court where four tall narrow houses with iron staircases stood

  facing one another.

  Dorothy made inquiries and found 'Mary' in a subterranean den

  beneath one of the houses. She was a drabby old creature with

  remarkably thin hair and face so emaciated that it looked like a

  rouged and powdered skull. Her voice was cracked, shrewish, and

  nevertheless ineffably dreary. She asked Dorothy no questions, and

  indeed scarcely even looked at her, but simply demanded ten

  shillings and then said in her ugly voice:

  'Twenty-nine. Third floor. Go up be the back stairs.'

  Apparently the back stairs were those inside the house. Dorothy

  went up the dark, spiral staircase, between sweating walls, in a

  smell of old overcoats, dishwater and slops. As she reached the

  second floor there was a loud squeal of laughter, and two rowdy-

  looking girls came out of one of the rooms and stared at her for a

  moment. They looked young, their faces being quite hidden under

  rouge and pink powder, and their lips painted scarlet as geranium

  petals. But amid the pink powder their china-blue eyes were tired

  and old; and that was somehow horrible, because it reminded you of

  a girl's mask with an old woman's face behind it. The taller of

  the two greeted Dorothy.

  ''Ullo, dearie!'

  'Hullo!'

  'You new 'ere? Which room you kipping in?'

  'Number twenty-nine.'

  'God, ain't that a bloody dungeon to put you in! You going out

  tonight?'

  'No, I don't think so,' said Dorothy, privately a little astonished

  at the question. 'I'm too tired.'

  'Thought you wasn't, when I saw you 'adn't dolled up. But, say!

  dearie, you ain't on the beach, are you? Not spoiling the ship for

  a 'aporth of tar? Because f'rinstance if you want the lend of a

  lipstick, you only got to say the word. We're all chums 'ere, you

  know.'

  'Oh. . . . No, thank you,' said Dorothy, taken aback.

  'Oh, well! Time Doris and me was moving. Got a 'portant business

  engagement in Leicester Square.' Here she nudged the other girl

  with her hip, and both of them sniggered in a silly mirthless

  manner. 'But, say!' added the taller girl confidentially, 'ain't

  it a bloody treat to 'ave a good night's kip all alone once in a

  way? Wish _I_ could. All on your Jack Jones with no bloody great

  man's feet shoving you about. 'S all right when you can afford it,

  eh?'

  'Yes,' said Dorothy, feeling that this answer was expected of her,

  and with only a very vague notion of what the other was talking

  about.

  'Well, ta ta, dearie! Sleep tight. And jes' look out for the

  smash and grab raiders 'bout 'ar-parse one!'

  When the two girls had skipped downstairs with another of their

  meaningless squeals of laughter, Dorothy found her way to room

  number 29 and opened the door. A cold, evil smell met her. The

  room measured about eight feet each way, and was very dark. The

  furniture was simple. In the middle of the room, a narrow iron

  bedstead with a ragged coverlet and greyish sheets; against the

  wall, a packing case with a tin basin and an empty whisky bottle

  intended for water; tacked over the bed, a photograph of Bebe

  Daniels torn out of Film Fun.

  The sheets were not only dirty, but damp. Dorothy got into the

  bed, but she had only undressed to her chemise, or what was left of

  her chemise, her underclothes by this time being almost entirely in

  ruins; she could not bring herself to lay her bare body between

  those nauseous sheets. And once in bed, though she was aching from