“Me mam said I can ’ave you an’ Dot fer tea on Duck-apple Night,” Edie Perkins told Marianne whilst they were changing into their netball kit.
No, you can’t, we’re not edible, Marianne almost replied as she removed her vest in the icy sports pavilion and slipped an ugly striped shirt over her head. When had she begun noticing the other girls’ broad accents and poor grammar? It must have been when they’d started doing play-readings in class. They’d all voted for her to be Miranda in The Tempest and it was then that she had become conscious that she didn’t speak the way the others did.
Her mother had always corrected Marianne and her brothers if they dropped an aitch or didn’t sound the last letter of a word, and now Marianne was glad she had. And she’d decided to try to speak the way her English teacher did. Miss Briggs had no accent at all.
Edie prodded her in the ribs. “I just invited yer fer tea, but yer’ve gone off in one o’ yer daydreams again!” she grinned. Marianne’s pensive silences were a joke among her classmates. “Are yer comin’ on Duck-apple Night, or aren’t yer? I shan’t mind if yer’d rather ’ave it at ’ome wi’ yer brothers.”
“What on earth is Duck-apple Night?” Marianne asked emerging from her thoughts.
“’Alloween, o’ course! But we call it that ’cause it’s when yer ducks fer apples.”
Marianne looked perplexed. “I’ve never heard of it, Edie.”
“I’m glad there’s summat I know as Marianne Klein doesn’t,” Edie said with another impish grin that spread her wide mouth from one side of her freckled face to the other.
“Is it a Christian festival?” Marianne inquired, as they ran out on to the netball pitch with a high October wind raising their short gymslips and freezing their thighs. Her Christian friends at primary school had never mentioned it. But they hadn’t been Catholics like Edie was. Perhaps it was something Protestants didn’t celebrate?
Edie appealed to the other one of their threesome, who had arrived on the pitch late, as usual. “Did yer ever ’ear such ignorance, Dot? Fancy anyone not knowin’ ’Alloween’s t’eve o’ All Saints’ Day.”
Dot was the tallest girl in the school and as lean as she was long. “’Ow can yer expect a Jewess ter know, yer daft ’apporth?” she said looking down on Edie derisively.
“I’d love to come, thank you. But remember to tell your mother I can’t eat meat in your house,” Marianne said, though all the girls knew this. They saw her eating a sandwich lunch every day while they tucked into a hot school dinner.
“Don’t worry, yer not likely ter get any.”
The games mistress arrived with the ball and Marianne, who disliked physical exercise, stopped trying to puzzle out what Edie’s reply had meant and submitted herself to her weekly torture.
The meaning became clear to her the moment she entered the Perkinses’ house and so did the true meaning of the word poverty. Her two friends had been to the Kleins’ for tea several times, and Marianne and Edie had been to Dot’s which was a flat above her parents’ back-street grocery shop. But this was Marianne’s first visit to the Perkinses’.
Edie lived on a back street, too, and the single room downstairs led directly from it. The house was crammed in the middle of a grimy terrace, where not all the doorsteps were as clean as Edie’s mother kept hers. Marianne had lived in a street of small terraced houses in Cheetham Hill, but every one of them had had sparkling window panes and immaculate front doors. There had not been any litter on the pavements, or dog dirt. It had not been like this.
Marianne was depressed by the street before entering the house. She did not find the room into which she stepped depressing, but was immediately affected by it in another way, that clutched at her heart.
She had never been in a home that was uncarpeted and was aware of a damp chill rising from the stone-flagged floor, though a fire was burning brightly in the small, black leaded grate. Her eye fell on the table and she saw it was not a real one, but a long board balanced upon trestles, like decorators used when they spread paste on wallpaper. It was not covered with a cloth and the fare laid upon it for tea reminded Marianne of illustrations in Martin’s volume of Oliver Twist.
Three loaves of bread were flanked by a packet of margarine, which Marianne had never tasted, and a pot of the cheap brand of jam her mother called rubbish and would never buy. There was also a pudding basin, with something in it that looked like the shmaltz Jewish women rendered down from the Shabbos chicken, except that it was white instead of yellow. And a number of mugs and plates, all of which were enamel.
The room had only one ornament, a plaster figure of the Virgin Mary, which Marianne recognized because Bridie had once showed her hers. It was on the mantelpiece beneath a picture of Jesus, which was also like the one Bridie had. But the eyes looked sadder and Marianne wondered if she just thought so because she felt sad in this room.
“I told yer Marianne was always miles away, didn't I?” she heard Edie laugh and felt her arm being shaken.
She looked up and saw Dot towering over a lot of little girls. Edie was the eldest of eight, but not the firstborn, she had told Marianne. Mrs. Perkins had given birth to eleven children, but three had died.
“Er mam said as she were a bit o’ a daydreamer,” Mrs. Perkins smiled.
Marianne knew Mrs. Perkins went into the shop occasionally to buy her husband a pair of twopence-halfpenny socks. The darned jumper she had on gave the impression she rarely bought anything for herself. Except for Edie, who was wearing school uniform, her children were shabbily dressed, too.
“It was nice of you to invite me, Mrs. Perkins,” she said, because she could think of nothing else to say.
“She’s proper posh, is our Marianne!” Dot laughed.
“But we don’t ’old it against ’er,” Edie added.
“Aye’n yer could tek a lesson from ’er, our Edie!” Mr. Perkins declared, raising his head from the stone sink in the corner where he was rinsing some bright green apples under the solitary tap. “It’s good manners ter be polite ter yer elders,” he added, smiling approvingly at Marianne. “Mash t’tea, luv,” he instructed his wife, “’n get this lot sat down at t’table, or it’ll be time fer Marianne an’ Dot ter go ’ome before we start t’ducking.”
Marianne took off her gabardine and her velour hat and hung them with Edie’s and Dot’s and the assortment of children’s coats which were piled one on top of another on a couple of pegs on the whitewashed plaster wall.
“Dump yer satchel on’t floor,” Edie said.
Marianne was conscious of the solid package inside it as she did so. They had come directly from school and that morning her mother had put the package into her satchel, as she had when Marianne went to Dot’s for tea. It contained a cup, saucer and plate, and some cutlery, so Marianne would not have to eat and drink from anything that had been in contact with non-kosher food. But she had left it in her satchel at Dot’s home, as she was doing here. Surely God would forgive her for not wanting to offend people? Her mother would certainly be insulted if visitors arrived with their own crockery and cutlery.
“We’ll ’ave ter squash up a bit,” Mrs. Perkins said as she brought a huge, earthenware teapot to the table and they all sat down on the two backless benches that served her family in the absence of chairs.
Marianne was hungry and enjoyed the thick slabs of crusty bread Mrs. Perkins had cut and spread with margarine. The contents of the pudding basin turned out to be dripping. Saved from Sunday, Edie told her, and Marianne guessed that her remark on the netball pitch meant that they never had meat on any other day, and that what was on the table was their usual evening meal.
What had Edie thought when she ate at the Kleins’ and was given things like lamb chops and fried fish? But the teas they’d had at Dot’s had been knife-and-fork meals, too. Tinned salmon, and sardines on toast, with cake afterwards, she reminded herself. So, Edie wouldn’t think it was only Jews who ate well.
She wondered if Dot felt the way she did; as if she ought not to be here eating the food of people who obviously could barely afford to feed themselves. No, it wasn’t bothering Dot, or she wouldn’t be putting great dollops of jam on her bread instead of just a thin layer as Marianne was carefully doing.
“I like yer ring, Marianne,” one of Edie’s sisters said admiringly.
“Don’t pass remarks, our Theresa!” Edie rebuked her.
All the little girls were named after saints, Marianne had noticed and wondered why Edie was not.
“All right, our Aggie!” the jammy-faced child retorted.
Edie blushed. “Me secret’s out. I’m really called Agnes,” she told Marianne and Dot. “But I ’ate getting called Aggie fer short, so me mam lets me use me second name.”
“Ow’d yer like ter be a Dorothy what gets called Dot when she’s five-foot-ten like me?” Dot said.
“Nobody’s ever cut my name down,” Marianne told them.
“Yer not t’kind folk does it ter, is she, Dot?” Edie said studying her.
“What do you mean?” Marianne asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just summat about yer.”
“Edie’s right,” Dot pronounced.
Marianne looked down uncomfortably at the gold signet ring on her right hand. If only she hadn’t worn it today, then they wouldn’t be having this conversation that made her feel different from her friends. But she hadn’t taken it off since Uncle David gave it to her. He’d given Shirley one, too. For their birthdays last year; because Jewish girls didn’t get special presents when they were thirteen the way Bar Mitzvah boys did, and because Shirley had said it wasn’t fair.
“You can try my ring on if you like, Theresa,” she said impulsively to Edie’s little sister and wished she could give it to her.
After tea, they played the Halloween game and Marianne forgot her troubled feeling amidst the carefree laughter as everyone tried to grab an apple with their mouth from the big washtub of water in which Mr. Perkins had set the fruit to float.
The feeling returned when she arrived home and thought of the mean room that was home to her friend. Its scrupulous cleanliness and the cosy fire had somehow emphasized everything it lacked and that night she cried herself to sleep, wondering how Edie could be the cheerful person she was when life had been so unjust to her.
The next morning, when Esther went to awaken Marianne, she found her stuffing a parcel into her satchel. “What’s that?” she asked. “I already packed your cookery overall.”
Marianne hesitated before replying. “It’s my best frock, Mam. I’m giving it to Edie.”
Esther eyed her silently for a moment. She did not need to be told why; seeing Mrs. Perkins carefully counting out the coppers to buy her husband’s cheap cotton socks had told her enough. And if it had not, Marianne’s description of the Perkinses’ home would have explained the gesture.
“I don’t mind but are you sure Edie won’t be offended?” she said quietly. “You never liked wearing Shirley’s things when I couldn’t afford to buy you much.”
“We weren’t as poor as Edie’s family are.”
“There were times when we were. But you kids were too young to realize it.”
A distant memory of her father’s shoes drying in the hearth, with gaping holes in the soles, assailed Marianne.
“Some weeks your father only made enough to pay the rent and Uncle David used to settle my grocery bill.”
“I didn’t know.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, love. Bobbie and Zaidie arrived in England penniless, and when I was a child they didn’t know where the next pan of borsht was coming from. I used to wear boots that were too small for me because there was no money to buy me new ones. I’ve got corns on my toes because of it to this day.”
Esther sat down on the bed and played with the fringe of the counterpane, absently. “I sometimes think it’s the memory of poverty that makes Jews drive themselves to get on. Most of us started with nothing and we’ll never forget what it was like. We want to make sure it’ll never be that way for our children.”
Marianne thought of Edie’s mother on whom poverty seemed to have the opposite effect; there was something about her that told you she didn’t expect her life to be any different. And most of the men and women who came into the shop were the same. “Christians aren’t like that, are they, Mam?”
“It must be something we’re born with that they’re not,” Esther replied as if she had arrived at this conclusion long ago. “Your dad’s education was no different from Mr. Perkins’s and the home he came from was just as poor, but he’s ended up owning a business and your friend’s father is a labourer.”
Marianne was eyeing the parcel uncertainly. The last thing she wanted was to offend Edie. “I’ll say the dress is a Christmas present,” she decided.
Esther smiled. “On November first?”
“I want her to have it and I’ve got to say something, haven’t I? It isn’t right that some people’re well off and others have got next to nothing,” Marianne declared.
“I agree with you, love. But you giving Edie Perkins a frock isn’t going to change the world.”