Chapter 10

Liverpool, Christmas 1868

Patty opened her eyes. Above her was a blank whiteness and somewhere nearby a choir was singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. So this, she thought, is what heaven is like. But she was surprised that her head and body still throbbed with pain.

A face framed by a white cap came into her field of vision.

‘Ah, you’re awake. Are you thirsty?’

‘Yes.’ Her throat was so dry that the word came out as a croak.

A strong arm was slid under her shoulders and a cup was held to her lips. ‘Sip carefully, now. Not too much at once.’

When she had drunk some water she was laid back on the pillows. She took in the figure of the person leaning over her. Spotless white cap and apron over a plain brown dress – a nurse then. She turned her head with difficulty and looked to one side. There was a long row of beds made up with clean white sheets and bright floral bedspreads. Not heaven, after all. A hospital.

‘Where am I?’ she whispered.

‘You are in the infirmary, dear.’

‘The infirmary? Where?’

‘It’s part of the workhouse, officially. But we work quite independently.’

Patty frowned. There was something here that did not fit. ‘This isn’t the workhouse infirmary.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It doesn’t look like this. It’s dirty, and it smells.’

‘Have you been here before?’

‘I grew up in the workhouse. I was sent to the infirmary when I had scarlet fever.’

‘Ah, that explains it. Things have changed here a lot since those days, so I am told. I only came to work here six months ago.’

‘Why can I hear singing?’

‘It’s Christmas Day. You didn’t know? Some charitable ladies have organised a choir to come and sing to the patients.’ The nurse took hold of Patty’s wrist and felt her pulse. ‘That’s better. But you should rest now. Don’t talk any more.’

She moved away and Patty saw her lean over another bed. She closed her eyes and tried to think. Her head was bandaged and her face felt swollen. How had she got here? What had happened to make her head ache so, and gave her a sharp pain in her ribs when she took a breath? The last thing she remembered was sitting in a crowded room, where there was a lot of laughter and chatter. Where had that been? What had she been doing there? She could find no answers and after a while she drifted into a doze.

She was woken by someone else leaning over the bed. An older face this time, but the same kindly expression.

‘Do you feel able to answer a few questions?’

She wanted to say no and be left alone, but that would be rude. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Can you tell me your name?’

‘Grisel … no, that’s wrong. It’s Patty. Patty Jenkins.’ Where had that other name come from?

‘How do you do, Patty? I’m Sister Robinson. Nurse Peters tells me you think you have been here before.’

‘Yes, when I was a child.’

‘And you grew up in the workhouse. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, are you an orphan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there anyone you would like us to contact? You are not wearing a ring, so I assume you are not married. Is there anyone else – your employer perhaps?’

Patty wrestled with the effort of remembering. There had been someone … Then it came back to her. She had been sacked. She shook her head.

‘No, there’s no one.’ She peered up into the other woman’s face. ‘How did I get here?’

‘You were found lying on the pavement when the porter opened up in the morning. Someone has obviously attacked you. You have been quite badly beaten. When you feel up to it I will send for the police.’

‘No!’ Patty was beginning to get glimpses of the past twenty-four hours and something told her she should not involve the police. ‘No, I don’t want that.’

‘Who was it, Patty? Was it someone you know?’

She started to shake her head and stopped because it hurt too much. ‘No … no.’

‘Don’t worry. We won’t call them if you don’t want us to. Just try to relax.’ Her head was raised again and a cup put to her lips. ‘Drink this. It will take away the pain.’

The drink was bitter and Patty gagged briefly, but she managed to finish it and once again sank into sleep.

When she woke next time a trolley was being pushed along the middle of the ward and she could smell food. A young girl who was not in nurses’ uniform helped her to sit up and put a tray with a plate of stew on her lap. She ate some but she was not hungry and it was a relief when the girl came to take the plate away. Patty lay back and looked at the ceiling, so surprisingly clean and white compared with her memory. Something had happened to her, something bad. What was it? Then, like a curtain being lifted, it came to her; the man who had asked her to do that revolting act; his voice shouting at her, then nothing. Had he hit her? He must have done. But that had been in her room at the club. How had she got here? Left outside the doors in the middle of the night … Bit by bit she pieced together the rest of the story; the inspector’s revelations about Percy’s betrayal of her trust; her sacking from Freeman’s; the ‘work’ she had done at the club. At length she understood. The man had beaten her unconscious and someone had found her – one of the other girls, probably. The manager would not have wanted to call a doctor, or the police, for obvious reasons. So they had brought her here under cover of darkness and left her. It was a heartless thing to do, but she understood the reason. The manager was breaking the law and could be accused of living off immoral earnings. As for the girls, they could be heavily fined. It was wicked, the way the women always got the blame, she thought, but that was the way of the world.

Next day the nurse who had first spoken to her came to her bedside with a tray of ointment and bandages.

‘I’m going to replace the dressing on your head and I’ve got an unguent that will help to take the ache out of those nasty bruises.’

She undid the bandage and Patty winced as the dressing was removed. ‘Why …’ she began. ‘What is wrong with my head?’

‘You’ve got a nasty cut but the doctor stitched it while you were still unconscious. It’s healing up nicely.’ She paused. ‘It looks as though someone kicked you there, and again in your ribs. Sister says you don’t want to involve the police. Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Patty had realised that the people who would suffer most if the police were involved would be the girls she had come to regard as friends. If the club was closed down they would have to resort to working on the street, which was far more dangerous. The man who had attacked her had told her his name was Jack, but she knew no more and that was probably a false name anyway. The manager might know who he was, but he would not tell anyone.

The nurse was smearing something on a dressing. To change the subject Patty asked, ‘What is that?’

‘It’s a herbal ointment, special to the infirmary. I’ve got another one here to help your bruises.’

‘Why is it special to the infirmary?’

‘It was made by one of the nurses, Sister Latimer. Her mother was from Jamaica and she taught her how to make medicines from herbs. Some of the doctors don’t really approve but the fact is they work.’

Patty thought back. ‘I remember someone who worked here when I was a child. She was black, but she wasn’t a nurse. Her name was Dora, I think.’

‘You knew her? What a coincidence! But that would be before she went away to London to train, of course. When she came back she was fully qualified. Everyone said she was a brilliant nurse. I’ve heard some of the old hands say she should have been Lady Superintendent.’

‘Is she here?’ Patty asked.

‘No. She got married, only just over a month ago, and they went to live in Jamaica. You should have seen the wedding! The little chapel here was packed and all sorts of important people came, as well as the staff here – and all the children from the orphanage. That was her special request.’

‘Was she the one who got this place cleaned up, like it is now?’

‘No. That was Sister Jones. She was brought up from London by a gentleman called Mr Rathbone, a philanthropic gentleman who saw that this placed needed something radical done. He got in touch with Miss Nightingale and got her to send Nurse Jones and a team to work here. That was before my time, of course. You will appreciate the difference better than I can, if you were in here as a child.’

‘It’s certainly different,’ Patty agreed. ‘It was horrible before.’

Later that day Patty was able to get out of bed and on the following day a doctor came and examined her.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the wound on the head is healing up nicely and the bruising is going down. I think you’re ready to leave.’

‘Leave?’ Patty said, with a sudden surge of panic. ‘Where can I go?’

‘You don’t have a home to go to?’

‘No, I don’t.’

He regarded her doubtfully for a moment, then said, ‘Well, in that case I think you need to talk to Mrs Court.’

‘Who is that?’ Patty asked.

‘She is the Lady Superintendent of the workhouse, not the infirmary. If you are destitute you will probably have to stay here.’

He moved on to examine another patient, leaving Patty to come to terms with this new twist in her life’s story. ‘Destitute’? Was that what she was? She had no home, no job, no prospect of getting one. He was right. So was that to be her fate, brought up here, only to end up back again?

An hour later a small boy came in with a message. She was to go to the superintendent’s office. She said goodbye to Nurse Peters, who wished her luck, and followed him out into the workhouse proper. At once she was in a familiar place. The tall, grey buildings and the narrow lanes between them had not changed since she left at the age of fourteen. Even the smell was the same, a mixture of old cabbage and dirty clothes. The boy left her at a door labelled Female Superintendent. She knocked and was told to enter. A woman in a severe black dress sat at a desk. Patty realised that she remembered her from her childhood, though she had forgotten her name.

The superintendent looked up at her. ‘Patty Jenkins? Yes, I remember you. You were a good girl and we thought you would do well. That was why we chose you to go to Speke Hall when they were looking for a scullery maid. There were several girls who would have been glad of the chance to work in such a grand house. You were the lucky one. But it seems you have lost your position.’

Patty felt like telling her that far from being lucky she had been condemned to a life of unrelenting drudgery, put upon and taken advantage of by all the other servants who were above her in the pecking order. But she sensed that it would not help her case now to seem ungrateful, so she said nothing.

‘What happened?’ Mrs Court asked. ‘Have you been dismissed?’

‘That was years ago, ma’am,’ Patty found herself reverting to the manners and mode of address of her childhood. ‘I wasn’t there long.’

‘Why?’

‘Cook caught me eating some of the pie that had been sent back from the dining room. She said it was theft.’

‘What made you do a thing like that? You must have known it was wrong.’

‘I was hungry. I never got enough to eat.’

The superintendent looked hard at her for a moment and then made a note in the file on her desk. ‘So what have you been doing since?’

Patty decided to slide over the period before May came to her rescue, when she had worked as a prostitute. ‘I’ve been working at Freeman’s Department Store, in the kitchen.’

‘Freeman’s?’ Mrs Court looked slightly less forbidding. ‘I used to go there quite often to take tea in the tea room. I don’t suppose you had anything to do with that, did you?’

‘If you please, ma’am, I was in charge of it. I made all the cakes and pastries.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I … I’m quite a good pastry cook.’

‘If you made all those delicious cakes you must be. But it suddenly closed down. There was some kind of scandal. I read about it in the newspaper.’ She frowned for a moment, then looked at Patty with a sudden expression of horror. ‘I remember now! Don’t tell me you were the one who made the gingerbread ladies.’

Patty drooped her head. ‘I did, ma’am. But I didn’t know what that terrible man was using them for. He told me he was giving them away to poor children, as a treat.’

‘And is that why you lost your job?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Mrs Court said nothing for a moment, then she sighed. ‘Well, you are not the first to be led astray by an unscrupulous man, and I don’t suppose you will be the last. I suppose you have been living on your savings since then?’ Patty let her silence be taken for assent. ‘And you have nothing left now?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘You must have earned a good salary. Has it all been spent?’

‘Every penny, ma’am.’

‘And have you nowhere to live?’

‘No, ma’am. I used to live in at Freeman’s.’

‘So where have you been staying since you left?’

Patty bit her lip. She had talked herself into a tricky situation. She had already decided that she would tell no one about her time at the club. ‘Cheap lodgings, ma’am. But I had to leave when my money ran out.’

‘And then you were attacked in the street and left half dead on our doorstep. Were you soliciting?’

Patty hung her head. ‘A girl has to keep body and soul together somehow.’

Mrs Court sighed again and shook her head. ‘It makes me sad to think that you have sunk so low. I had good hopes of you. Is there any chance that you might find another position, as a cook?’

‘Not without a character, ma’am.’

‘No, you are right, of course. Well, you have no money and nowhere to live, so we shall have to take you in. You had better start work in the kitchen here. They are always glad of an extra hand.’ She made another note in the file and looked up. ‘Very well, that will be all.’

Out of habit Patty made a small curtsy. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

Out in the narrow street she leaned against the wall, suddenly overcome with a sense of hopelessness. She had spent all her childhood within these grey walls. She had had a few short years of freedom, a brief sample of a better life, and now she was back again and she might have to spend the rest of her life here. The prospect was bleak indeed.

After a few moments she straightened up and squared her shoulders. ‘I will not stay here,’ she told herself. ‘Somehow I will find a way out of this place. I will make a new life for myself, and I will never let myself be used and duped by a man again.’

In the huge kitchen, six or seven women were at work. The steam from great vats of stew made it hard to see across the room, and there was an overpowering smell of cabbage and onions. It was lobscouse day. Patty hesitated for a few minutes, uncertain who to address herself to. Then an older woman saw her and came over.

‘Want something?’

‘Please, I’ve been told to come and help out here.’

‘New, are you?’

‘Yes, well – sort of. I grew up here.’

The woman peered at her. ‘Thought your face was familiar. What’s your name?’

‘Patty.’

‘What you doing back here again? No, don’t tell me. I can see the bruises. Some man beaten you up and then chucked you out, has he?’

‘More or less,’ Patty agreed.

‘You’d better go and help Vera over there. She’s a nice girl. You’ll get on with her.’

A young woman was chopping onions at a table a short distance away and something about her appearance set her apart from the others. Although she was dressed in the plain blue dress, white cap and apron issued to all the female paupers she wore it tidily, as if she still had some pride in her appearance and her dark hair was pinned up neatly in a bun.

Patty went over to her and said, ‘Good morning. I’ve been sent to help you.’

The woman looked up and Patty saw that her eyes were red and her cheeks were wet. ‘I’ll be grateful for any help peeling these wretched onions. I can hardly see what I’m doing for the tears.’

‘I know how it feels,’ Patty said. ‘Give me a knife.’

They worked in silence until the heap of onions had all been peeled and chopped and one of the other cooks came over and took them to throw them into one of the pans. The young woman rubbed the back of her arm across her eyes and said, ‘Phew! Thank goodness that’s done.’ She turned her eyes to Patty. ‘I’m sorry. I’m forgetting my manners. I’m Vera Aston. How do you do?’

Her speech was more refined than that of most of the inmates, and her accent was not the typical Liverpool scouse. It had a country burr. Patty guessed she came from a village in Lancashire somewhere.

‘My name’s Patty,’ she responded. ‘Patty Jenkins.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Vera said. She looked at Patty’s face. ‘I can see you’ve been in the wars. Are you feeling well enough to work?’

‘I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ Patty confessed. ‘But I can carry on.’

They worked side by side until the meal had been cooked and served. Looking at the long tables, men on one side of the room, women on the other, Patty felt a gloomy familiarity, but it was the sight of the children, with their pinched faces and bony arms and legs, that really caught at her throat.

‘Poor mites!’ Vera said. ‘It must be horrible to grow up here.’

Patty said nothing. She was not yet ready to confide her story to this new acquaintance, but she was intrigued to know how a woman like Vera came to be in the same predicament.

It was two days before either of them felt like broaching the subject. They were sitting in the kitchen after the midday meal had been cleared away and washed up. It was a slack time, before the preparations for supper began, but the kitchen was warm, which was more than could be said for the rest of the workhouse. Officially they were peeling potatoes for the evening soup but there was no urgency and most of the other women had left so it was quiet for once.

Patty said, ‘You’re not from round here, are you? You don’t speak like one of us.’

‘No,’ Vera agreed. ‘I grew up in a little village called Winwick. It’s about halfway between Liverpool and Manchester.’

‘Oh,’ Patty said, not sure how to proceed. ‘That sounds nice.’

‘Yes, it was. It’s a bit of a backwater, I suppose, compared to a city like this. Not much going on. But it suited me and I loved the countryside all round.’

There was a silence. Then Vera said, ‘I suppose you’re wondering how I came to be here.’

‘Well, yes,’ Patty admitted. ‘But you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

‘There’s no reason why I should hide it,’ Vera said. ‘None of it was my fault.’ She threw the potato she had been peeling into the pot and picked up another one. ‘I came to the city looking for work.’

‘Oh?’ Patty hesitated. ‘No offence, but you don’t seem like a lady who has to work for her living.’

Vera gave a brief, bitter laugh. ‘I would have agreed with you once. My grandfather was well off. He owned a factory making machinery for the cotton mills in Manchester. When he died, he left the factory jointly to his two sons, my father and my uncle Wilfred. My father had no interest in the factory. He was fascinated by this new science of geology and spent his time picking up rocks and hunting for fossils, so he offered to sell his share to his brother. Wilfred agreed, and we moved away from Manchester to Winwick. That was when I was about five years old. But Wilfred was a wastrel. He was a gambler and he let the business go to rack and ruin. Then, when I was ten, there was a disastrous fire and the factory burnt down. That was bad enough, but then we discovered that he had not paid the insurance premium, so there was nothing left. A couple of weeks later he hanged himself.’

‘Oh, how terrible!’ Patty said.

‘I suppose it was, but I didn’t feel it affected me really. Father and Wilfred did not get on very well, so we hadn’t seen much of him. And Father said there was no need for us to worry because his share of the money was invested and was giving us a good income.’ She paused, gazing unseeing at the part-peeled potato in her hand. ‘Then, when I was twelve, my mother died in childbed. I didn’t know it at the time but she’d had two miscarriages before that and the doctors had said she should not have more children, so that is why I was the only one. But these things happen, don’t they?’

‘That’s very sad for you,’ Patty said. It seemed the right thing to say, but at the back of her mind was the thought, ‘at least you had a mother for twelve years.’

‘After that,’ Vera went on, ‘I had to keep house for my father. That’s why none of this—’ she gestured round at the kitchen ‘—is strange to me. We didn’t keep a servant, except for a woman who came in daily to clean, so I learned to cook and deal with the tradesmen and generally manage things. I was quite happy doing that, but as the years went by Father became more and more vague and forgetful. He would go out in the morning and be brought back by one of the local farmers who had found him wandering, not able to find his way home. Sometimes he thought I was Mother and called me by her name. I asked the local doctor for help but he just said, ‘it happens as people get older. They become forgetful.’ Then, last April he announced that he was going to Lyme in Dorset to look for fossils. I tried to dissuade him but he was determined. He was never a man to listen to arguments. A week later I heard he had been killed by a rock fall while he was digging in the cliff.’

‘Oh no!’

‘When the solicitor came to look at his affairs he discovered that the company father had invested in had gone to the wall and lost all our money. Since then, we had been living on what Father could borrow. He had mortgaged the house and when I could not keep up the repayments the company repossessed it. I had to sell the furniture and everything else to pay off his creditors. When it was all done, I was left with nothing but the clothes I stood up in.’

‘That’s terrible! Patty said. ‘Was there no one to help you?’

‘No. Uncle Wilfred was my father’s only close relation and he had no family, which was a mercy under the circumstances. So I had no aunts or cousins to turn to and Father was never very sociable so we had no close friends in the village. I looked for work locally, hoping someone would take me on as a governess or a housekeeper. I have had a reasonable education at least. My mother saw to that and after she died my father liked to talk to me about his interest in geology. It’s surprising how much you can learn about history and geography from that. But no one needed me, so I thought I would try my luck here. I did think of going to Manchester and looking for work in one of the mills but my mother had told me such dreadful stories about conditions there that I couldn’t face it. I thought, in a rich city like Liverpool, there must be people who need a governess or a housekeeper. I didn’t understand that without references no one will take you on.’

‘Oh, I know all about that,’ Patty said.

‘I tramped the streets day after day, knocking on doors and being turned away,’ Vera said. ‘And of course the longer it went on the shabbier and dirtier I looked, so it became harder and harder to convince anyone. I even tried to get work as a scullery maid, but they told me I was too well educated for that. I suppose they thought I wouldn’t be prepared to work hard enough – or I would upset the other servants.’

‘So what happened in the end?’ Patty asked.

‘I started to beg in the street. Sometimes men offered me money to go with them, but I couldn’t bear the thought of that. It was getting colder and colder and sometimes I didn’t eat for days. In the end I must have collapsed. Someone found me unconscious in an alleyway and brought me here.’ She looked around her. ‘At least here it’s warm and you get enough to eat. It’s not so bad. But I’m not staying here. One day I’m going to find a way of supporting myself so I can leave.’

‘That’s exactly what I promised myself when I found myself here,’ Patty said.

Vera looked at her. ‘Well, I’ve told you my story. Now it’s your turn.’

So Patty repeated more or less the same story as that she had given Mrs Court, except that Vera had never heard of the scandal surrounding the tea room and her part in it, so she just said she had been dismissed for giving some of the cakes she made to someone who promised to pass them on to poor children. But in one respect she was more honest. She felt she owed it to Vera, in view of what she had said about refusing the offers of men.

‘I’m not as strong as you. I did go with men, for a while after I lost my job. Until one of them beat me up and left me on the doorstep here.’

‘So that’s what happened,’ Vera said gently. ‘I wondered. You poor thing!’

Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. Then Patty said, ‘You said you were determined not to stay here. What would you really like to do, if it was possible?’

‘I … don’t know,’ Vera said slowly. ‘I suppose what every woman wants is a husband and a family.’

‘Not me!’ Patty said firmly. ‘I’ve had enough of men. I never want to be at the beck and call of a man, to be dependent on one for every little thing. I want a job where I can be my own mistress.’

‘What sort of thing were you thinking of?’ Vera asked.

Patty considered for a moment and out of the blue an idea came to her.

‘I know what I would really like, but of course it isn’t possible,’ she said. ‘I should love to have my own tea shop. Nothing big or flashy, just a little place where ladies could come and drink tea and eat my cakes.’

‘That doesn’t sound too much to aim for,’ Vera said. ‘From what you’ve told me, you more or less ran the tea shop at Freeman’s, so why shouldn’t you do it again?’

‘Because to start something like that you need money,’ Patty said. ‘No one is going to give you a place and the equipment you need.’

‘Then you have to find a way to build up some capital,’ Vera said.

‘In this place?’ Patty responded.

‘It must be possible …’ Vera said thoughtfully. She looked at Patty. ‘Would you consider going into partnership?’

‘Who with?’

‘Me. Think about it. You can make wonderful cakes. I can do plain cooking and I’m a good organiser. I know how to deal with tradesmen, manage money, that sort of thing. You would need someone to take care of the business side. What do you think?’

‘I think it sounds a wonderful idea, if only we had the money,’ Patty said.

‘Well, we shall have to find a way to make it. We might have to do it in stages. Perhaps we can find work of some kind so we can save up.’ She dropped the knife she was holding and grasped Patty’s hand. ‘I know we’ve only known each other for a couple of days, but I feel we can be good friends. What do you think?’

Patty looked at her with a sudden pricking of tears at the back of her eyes. ‘If you can bear to be friends with what some people call a “fallen woman”.’

Vera smiled. ‘When I was little and fell over, my mother would say, “Are you badly hurt?” and if I said I wasn’t she’d say, “Well, don’t sit there whinging. Pick yourself up.”’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ The tears were spilling down Patty’s cheeks now but she smiled back at Vera. ‘Let’s make that our motto. Don’t sit there …’

‘Whinging,’ Vera joined in. ‘Pick yourself up.’