Hidden Lives Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HIDDEN LIVES

  Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1938. Educated at the County High School, she won an open scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read history. Her many novels include Georgy Girl, The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury, Private Papers, Mother Can You Hear Me?, Have the Men Had Enough?, Ladys Maid, The Battle for Christabel, Mothers’ Boys, Shadow Baby, Rich Desserts and Captain’s Thin and The Memory Box. Margaret Forster has written numerous works of non-fiction, including a biography of Bonnie Prince Charlie, entitled The Rash Adventurer; a highly praised ‘autobiography’ of Thackeray; Significant Sisters, which traces the lives and careers of eight pioneering women; a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Award for 1988 under the Heinemann bequest; a selection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry; her critically acclaimed biography Daphne du Maurier, which was awarded the 1994 Fawcett Book Prize; Hidden Lives, a family memoir, which was nominated nine times in 1995 as Book of the Year; and Precious Lives, a memoir of her father, which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize in 1999. Many of her books are published by Penguin.

  Margaret Forster lives in London and the Lake District. She is married to writer and broadcaster Hunter Davies and they have three children.

  MARGARET FORSTER

  Hidden Lives

  A FAMILY MEMOIR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Viking 1995

  Published in Penguin Books 1996

  22

  Copyright © Margaret Forster, 1995

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195774-6

  Prologue

  Boxing Day, 1869. A Sunday. Snow lay thick on the ground, thick on the cathedral roof, thick on the stout castle ramparts. For days a bitter east wind had blown from the Pennines across the Eden plain, scudding across the heavily swollen waters of the river Caldew, splitting the opaque black surface into even darker ripples. There was a deathly silence in this snow-muffled night-time city of Carlisle except for the boom of the cathedral bells every four hours, a most sombre sound which carried far outside the city boundaries to the outlying Cumberland villages. The dawn that day was crude, the violent red of the suddenly lightening sky lurid against the startling white of the new snow, against the grim black of the many factories and mills in the district of Caldewgate. All of wide, wide Church Street was one mass of unbroken, crusty white and the side streets leading off it were silted up with snow. Where, in sheltered spots, cobbles showed through, these glistened with ice.

  In a house in one of these turnings, John Street, a young woman, nineteen years old, was giving birth to her first child. The woman’s name was Annie Jordan. She called her baby Margaret Ann. Three months later she had her daughter baptized in the church of St Mary. Not quite two years after that Annie Jordan died, aged twenty-one, leaving Margaret Ann an orphan.

  *

  The month of May, 1936. A Saturday morning in Raffles, the big new council estate on the west side of Carlisle where the poor of Caldewgate had been rehoused. Men were out in their gardens ferociously trimming hedges which were just beginning to mature, diligently mowing lawns now at last smooth and green, the weak growth of the first few years forgotten. Number 44 Orton Road was on a corner, facing the bus stop opposite, but the woman didn’t come on a bus. She came by car. Cars were rare on the Raffles estate. When the black car pulled up outside number 44 it was assumed by those watching, and many were, if in an idle fashion, that a doctor would step out. But no doctor had been sent for. Instead, an elderly woman, short of stature and dressed in black, veil included, emerged and walked up the short path to the green door.

  She knocked and waited. The door was opened by a graceful-looking young woman who looked startled to find anyone standing there. The visitor politely inquired if she was correct in believing Margaret Ann Hind lived here. The young woman said she was, that Mrs Hind was her own mother. The visitor asked if, in that case, she might have a few words with Mrs Hind? The young woman, Lilian, hesitated. It was rude to keep anyone on the doorstep but some instinct told her that it would be better if her mother was warned first. She didn’t want to show this visitor straight into the living-room where Mrs Hind was sitting with her grandson Gordon, aged four, on her knee. So, with an apologetic smile, and wishing there was either a hall or a parlour where this woman could wait, she said she would go to get her mother.

  Margaret Ann Hind, told there was someone at the door wanting her, lifted Gordon off her knee and stood up. She had grown a little stout in her sixties but she carried herself so well, as straight backed as Queen Victoria, that it became her. She had a welcoming expression on her face but when she reached the tiny vestibule and saw her visitor it vanished. She seemed to freeze. She put out a hand to steady herself. Lilian saw that, for whatever reason, her mother was shocked and such shocks were to be avoided. Margaret Ann had suffered from angina for the past decade and the doctor had warned her to guard against agitation of any kind. But as Lilian, hovering in the background, asked if her mother was all right, Margaret Ann seemed to rally, to control whatever emotion she was feeling. She did not address this stranger by name but merely said to Lilian that she would take her visitor upstairs and began to lead the way. The stairs opened straight up from the vestibule. They led to two bedrooms, one occupied by Lilian and her husband Arthur and their son Gordon, and one by Margaret Ann herself. She was in the process of selling her house, though she had not yet emptied it of her furniture since she had not yet decided where she would live. Always in awe of her mother, Lilian did not protest, though it embarrassed her to realize there was no chair in her mother’s bedroom upon which a visitor could sit. It was no place for a guest.

  Lilian went back into the small living-room where Gordon was still looking at the picture-book his grandmother had been showing him. Arthur was in the garden, preparing the ground for his bedding plants. Soon he would take Gordon to visit his other grandmother and his grandfather. Lilian began to get Gordon ready. She had a sense of foreboding, but then she very often did. There was a fire burning in the black-leaded range even though it was May, and she warmed Gordon’s jacket at it. Then she dressed him in it and sat him on her knee, taking up the picture-book again and waiting for Arthur to come in and say he was ready. She could hear no sound from upstairs, not even the low hum of voices. She wondered if the two women were sitting side by side on the double bed. Were they whispering? It would be cold up there. It was a cold morning even if it was spring. A long time seemed to go by. Gordon became impatient. Finally, she went out to see how long Arthur was going to be. He was just finishing his digging. While he washed his hands in the kitchen sink she told him about her mother’s visitor and how worried she was because her mother had seemed ala
rmed.

  Arthur delayed his departure long enough to see Mrs Hind’s guest leave. He stood back from the window, well back, and watched. The woman looked perfectly respectable, quite unthreatening, to him. What was the fuss? He admired the car. He was a mechanic and knew about cars. He couldn’t see who was driving, just that the woman got into the back seat and was driven away without either a wave or look. Arthur set off, with Gordon, to visit his parents, not at all disturbed, and impatient with Lilian for being so. Worrying was a bad habit of hers.

  When he had gone, Lilian went upstairs, wondering what had happened. She tapped on her mother’s closed door and said, ‘Mother? Are you all right?’ There was silence. It frightened her, and this time, as she tapped again, she opened the door a little and peeped round it. Her mother was lying on the bed, her eyes closed, clutching a handkerchief. The constant kneading of this handkerchief was the only sign she was not asleep. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ Lilian asked, and then, ‘Shouldn’t you take a pill now?’ Her mother turned her face away, but not before Lilian had seen she was weeping, and said, ‘Leave me. I’m resting. I’ll come down presently.’

  Presently turned out to be eight hours later. When Margaret Ann did come down she never once referred to her visitor or anything that had been said. Nothing. No explanation whatsoever. And Lilian, remarkably, never asked a single question. She was too afraid of her mother’s evident distress to have the heart to pry. She saw how pale her mother was, how tired and sad, how defeated she seemed and it was too painful to probe. Margaret Ann drank some tea, ate some toast, then went back up to bed. Almost three months later she died, quite suddenly, and throughout that period there was an unhappiness about her which never seemed to lift.

  The same year, 1936, 22 July. A hot day, most unsuitable for a funeral. It seemed so inappropriate to be standing at a graveside when the sky was a holiday blue and the sun shone so festively. It would have felt better to the mourners if it had been raining, if the weather had remained as unseasonably dreary as it had been three days earlier, the actual day Margaret Ann died.

  Died quickly, dramatically, with Gordon sitting on her knee, shelling peas, slitting the pea pods open for him and letting him pop half the peas into his mouth. Arthur was at work, Lilian in the kitchen washing dishes. Gordon suddenly cried out. He didn’t know what had happened, only felt the rim of the metal colander, into which the peas were supposed to go, dig painfully into his fat little tummy, pushed forward by the weight of his grandmother’s slumping on top of him as she collapsed without a sound. Gordon struggled and cried and the budgerigar flapped wildly in its cage in a panic. It was the bird Lilian heard, and she came through from the kitchen, hands still wet. She saw Gordon red-faced and wriggling and her mother’s body curved over him. The hands she released from around her son were warm and soft but she knew at once that her mother was dead. She didn’t know what to do. Gordon was sobbing, the bird screeching. There was no telephone, no way of getting help without leaving the house.

  She ran to the end of the road, still clutching the wailing Gordon, to the public telephone outside the Horse and Farrier pub. She rang the doctor but he was out on his calls and she could only leave a message. Re-entering her house was dreadful – seeing the dead body lying so unnaturally, so awkwardly, in the chair. She wished her sisters, Jean and Nan, were with her or that Arthur had come home for his dinner, but it was only half past eleven, another hour to go before he cycled back from the Metal Box factory. But the doctor came quicker than expected, before Arthur arrived. Margaret Ann had died of a heart attack. Dr Honeyman was surprised there had been no definite warning signs, no complaints of breathlessness or acute pains. But this was in character everyone later agreed. Margaret Ann Hind, née Jordan, was brave, she was stoical, she had had a hard life and was used to suffering of every sort.

  This was what they all said to each other on that sunny day, the day of the funeral. They sat, the three daughters – Lilian, Jean and Nan – and the two sons-in-law – Arthur and Dave – and Nan’s boyfriend, Jack, and said what a wonderful woman Margaret Ann had been and what a hard life she had had. None of them knew exactly how hard, though they were convinced of its hardness, because Margaret Ann never talked about her background. No one knew where she had been born or brought up. In the Newcastle area, it was believed. She had not liked to be asked and such was the strength of her character and of her dislike of any questioning that nobody’s curiosity ever got the better of them. She was allowed to have had no past until the age of twenty-three when she was quite happy to acknowledge that she had begun work as a domestic servant to the Stephenson family.

  A life suspected to have been hard, then, but over now. Her three daughters had wept copiously, even Nan, the youngest, the wild one, the defiant one, the one who had caused her mother most anxiety. Guilt as well as grief hung in the air, the usual guilt feelings of adult children who fear they never expressed their love and gratitude sufficiently to the dead parent. And extra guilt in this instance, the guilt that came from knowing none of them had properly taken their mother into their own homes. Jean had tried. Her mother, while her house was being sold, had come to Motherwell, intending to stay, but she’d been unhappy and returned to Carlisle. Jean worried that she had not tried hard enough to make her mother part of her family, but it had been difficult in a room and kitchen only, with a husband and two children, to give her mother the peace and privacy as well as the warmth she needed. Nan had not even had a home to offer her mother (who didn’t know she was living in sin with Jack in Glasgow). And Lilian, to whom their mother had come after the abortive Scottish trip, worried that she had not urged her mother to make her stay with her permanent and not the temporary thing she spoke of.

  So it was a miserable gathering as befitted the occasion. Three daughters, aged thirty-four, thirty-one and twenty-eight, and their three men, all crowded into the front parlour of their mother’s house in Bowman Street from which everything was to be cleared the following day. There had been others present, cousins and friends, but they had all left. They had been Hind relatives, not Jordans, no one from their mother’s side at all, not a single Jordan. Their mother had had friends but no family, a fact well known to them.

  It was warm in the parlour, close, being such a hot day. No one had lived in their mother’s house for the last four months. The first sale had fallen through, and the second dragged on and on, and meanwhile their mother had vacated the place and it had not been regularly aired. The blind was down and the thick velour curtains drawn and the house baked in the afternoon heat. There were sighs as they sat in the stifling heat and the gradual removal of hats and gloves, the opening of jackets and blouses – only a discreet button or two but a relief. The men were restless. Jack stood in front of the empty fireplace, legs apart, hands behind his back, immaculate in his elegant suit, lifting himself every now and again on the balls of his feet, eyes only for Nan, the lovely spirited Nan, longing to get her away, hating these rituals and only with difficulty respecting them. Dave was splayed out in an armchair, all six foot of him, neat enough in his best suit but hair rumpled, eyes closed with fatigue (and whisky), thinking only of the few hours left before his next shift. And Arthur, whistling soundlessly, head bowed, was sitting on a stiff-backed chair, dreading Lilian’s sustained grief and wondering why she always had to be twice as upset as anyone else.

  Jack looked at his gold watch and said to Nan it was time to leave. Leave in their car. Nobody else in the family had a car, only Jack, flash Jack with his public school education, his southern ways. Nan got up and straightened her beautifully cut skirt and picked up her crocodile-skin handbag and at that moment there was a knock at the door. Quite a timid knock, three gentle-enough taps with the brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. More flowers, arriving too late? Nan said she would go, she was going anyway. They heard Nan go to the door and open it and then, indistinctly, another voice speaking words too muffled to be heard in the parlour. Nan came back, looking astonis
hed. ‘It’s a woman,’ she said. ‘She says she’s come to see if there is anything for her.’ The others stared at her. ‘Anything for her?’ echoed Jean. ‘What does she mean, who is she, do you know her?’ But it was Lilian who next went to the door, the ever-polite, grave, eldest daughter.

  There was indeed a woman standing at the door. A woman, and behind her a man. Lilian took in the man’s face before the woman’s. She felt she’d seen him, or someone like him, before. A burly fellow with a big moustache. Maybe she’d seen him in the market, maybe he was a butcher. But the woman she had never seen. She was perhaps forty, quite tall, good posture, a square not unattractive face with large brown eyes which seemed both fierce and frightened. ‘Can I help you?’ said Lilian, at her most gracious. ‘I’ve come to see if she left me anything,’ the woman said, and then, seeing Lilian’s bewilderment, ‘in her will.’ ‘You mean,’ said Lilian, ‘my mother’s will?’ ‘Yes,’ said the woman firmly. ‘I’ve come to see if she’s left me anything. I want to know, has her will been read yet?’ ‘My mother’s will?’ repeated Lilian, still dumbfounded by the question, aware of Nan and Jean now behind her in the narrow passage. ‘Why should my mother leave you anything? Who are you?’ ‘I’m her daughter too,’ the woman said.

  Lilian, Jean and Nan stood utterly still and stared at this mad creature. Patiently, the woman on the doorstep repeated yet again that she had come to find out if she had been left anything. ‘We’ve just buried our mother,’ said Jean angrily. ‘We don’t know anything about any will.’ ‘I think you should show some respect,’ Nan chimed in. ‘And take yourself off, coming at a time like this, you’ve no manners. Close the door, Lily.’ But Lilian had no chance to do so before the woman burst into tears and turned and ran down the street. The man hesitated, then, before following her, said, ‘It’s right enough. She is her daughter, and if she has been left anything you’d better see she gets it or I’ll set the law on you.’