Once a week we were alone without my father. He would hire a trap from The Trumpet and drive about London to see sick animals, and would often bring them home with him. We liked these days. Sometimes Mother would sing the sad Welsh songs she used to sing when she was a girl, but lately she would say, ‘Alice dear, has he really gone? Do you think you could manage if I rest a little?’ Then she would creep upstairs and lie under an old eiderdown filled with feathers from long-dead mountain hens, and have a warm brick to add extra comfort. I would take her cups of hot milk and tea; but she would eat nothing because she had pains that came and went. She seemed to like to be alone.
I would do the work and take the dogs as far as the arch to be excused. Sometimes I would run to Lucy’s house for a few minutes and watch her sewing with her mother in their front room, with pins, paper patterns and material all round. It sometimes happened that the material they were sewing was beautiful and gleaming, or foamy; but usually it was heavy and dark. Lucy’s mother did not like me to stay long in case Lucy stopped working to use her hands to speak to me, but Lucy would smile above her sewing and I knew by her gentle, greenish face she was glad I came.
One day, when I returned from seeing Lucy, I saw my father’s hat in the hall and knew he was there. I always thought of him as wearing a top hat, but now I saw it was only one called a bowler. While I was looking at it, he came thundering out of his office with a thing like a large private rat under his arm. It turned out to be a mongoose. He kept shouting that he wanted his tea and where was Mother. He would have hit me if he hadn’t been holding the mongoose. I escaped to the kitchen, but he came after me demanding a saucer of milk for the mongoose. He said it had got to live in the kitchen to make sure it was warm. I didn’t welcome it, because I’d remembered hearing they eat live snakes.
When I was left alone with it, Mother came quietly down the stairs and into the kitchen. She was still doubled up with pain, but she said, ‘Don’t tell him I’ve been lying down; I’ll be better in a few minutes. What is that dreadful little animal? Have we got to have it in here?’
I just nodded as I fried fish for Father’s tea. A stronger kind of sadness than I usually knew suddenly came as I looked at Mother and saw how really ill she was. My heart was full of trouble as I rather awkwardly went to put my arm round her thin, sloping shoulders.
‘No, no! don’t leave the fish or it will burn,’ she whispered, ‘and don’t forget to warm his plate. There, I’m better now. I’ll make the tea.’
We both bent over the gas oven as we listened to the sound of heavy feet pacing up and down the dining-room. Then his meal was ready and I took the tray in to him. He stood over me breathing deep, impatient breaths as I arranged the food on the table, and, when it was ready, he sat down and ate as if he were starving, although it was really earlier than he usually had his high tea. As he propped the evening paper up with the teapot, he said, ‘You know what you have to do with the animals in there,’ jerking his head in the direction of their room. ‘Well, get on with it and don’t stand gaping at me.’
I fed the animals and took the dogs to the red arch, and, when I returned, Mother was almost straight again and the pain had gone. We heard Father leave the house and it became a peaceful evening, except that we had a mongoose in the kitchen. A sudden rain came, and even the earth in our garden smelt good. Lucy had lent me a book called Pomeroy Abbey by Mrs Henry Wood. There was a ghost in it with a livid face and hare lip. I sat in a creaking chair made of basket and read until the daylight went and Mother lit the faintly hissing gas. I had to leave the ghost of the Lord of Pomeroy in the West Tower (‘it has a dreadful look of reproach on its face’) while we did our final work of laying morning trays, covering the parrot with an old flannel petticoat, and leaving ham in the dining-room for Father to eat when he came home in the night.
With a candle by my bed I read that the Lord of Pomeroy wasn’t really a ghost but had shot the lower half of his brother’s face right away. I was longing to know more, but heard Father return and knew that, when he had eaten the ham, he would pass my door, so the candle must go out.
I dreamt that I was walking with bare feet in a garden filled with snow, and above my head I carried an open parasol. Across a terrace, an almost square politician walked towards me. He came so near that our shoulders touched and sparks flashed from us. From the trees small cries and groans came, as if they were women in pain, and I thought, ‘I did not cover the parrot with flannel,’ and was awake in my bed.
The snow-covered garden had gone for ever, but the cries were still there.
In a long dressing-gown, made by Lucy from a blanket, I stood on the landing to listen. The cries were coming from Mother’s room. They sounded awful, and I wished I hadn’t read about the Lord of Pomeroy – perhaps the lower part of her face had been shot away in the night. I went to her door, and, although Mother was not religious any more, she was crying to God and there was a light under her door. Then I went in. Although her face was twisted with pain and tear-drenched, it was all there. She lay with her pain framed in the shining of her brass bed, and she did not see me at first.
I called ‘Mother!’ and she turned and saw me from the sides of her eyes.
‘Hush, dear, don’t let your father know,’ she whispered. ‘There is nothing you can do.’
Although she protested that I might make a noise, I filled her stone hot-water bottle with boiling water and brought her a glass of warm milk; but there was little I could do to help her and she lay there whimpering. To my great relief she eventually dozed off. I watched her in the gaslight. She lay all twisted under the honeycomb counterpane. One hand kept moving, but the rest of her was still. I felt a great sorrow for her and knew that she would soon die, and that her small and gentle presence would be gone and I would be alone with Father. I did not like to leave her and sat there until it was morning. On a wooden chair I saw her little petticoat and rather grey and sad corsets waiting to be worn.
It was several days before the doctor came. It was my father who sent for him. Even he noticed something was wrong with Mother. When he saw her all doubled up over the dining-room sideboard, he suddenly bellowed, ‘For Christ’s sake, woman, send for a doctor; and, if he can’t put you right, keep out of my sight!’
She crept from the room, and I heard her climbing upstairs on all fours like an animal. It was somehow a terrible sound. Father stood listening and biting his moustache, and, when he heard her bedroom door close, he almost ran from the house. He returned quite soon and shut himself in his office, and a little later the doctor came.
He was a Jewish doctor who lived down the road. He was old and looked dirty, but he was kind. After he had examined Mother he went into the office and talked with Father, and I could hear from the kitchen that their voices were grave. Before he left, he called me out into the hall. He told me that Mother was dying and that all he could do to help her was to give her drugs to ease the pain. I was so grateful for the mention of pain-killing drugs that I caught hold of his hand and kept shaking it. He promised that a woman would come to help with nursing her and doing the housework. Then I went with him to his surgery to collect the medicines that were to relieve Mother’s pain. The pavement was so hot from the sun I could feel it through my shoes. I’d forgotten it was summer outside.
It was the next day that Mrs Churchill came. I opened the door to her and there she stood, old and square under her man’s cloth cap, her legs very far apart and her stockings wrinkled. She spoke in a hoarse voice that was full of warm feeling.
‘Yes, my dear,’ she croaked, ‘I’ve come to help you now your ma’s poorly. Is this the kitchen, ducks? Well I never, what a nice little rat!’ She stroked the mongoose which was tied to a chair near the stove. Then she took off the cap, and I saw her hair was streaky red with pink combs in it. We went upstairs to my mother’s room. It already seemed filled with illness and a smell of chlorodine sweets, but I noticed Mother was almost looking pretty, and I could imagine how she had looked when she was young. I could not have been looking after her very well because Mrs Churchill croaked, ‘Oh! you poor creature. Let me make you comfortable,’ and flew at the bed and started taking it to pieces. Pillows were treated unmercifully and hot water was demanded for a blanket bath. I thought she was going to wash the blankets, but it was Mother who was washed.
Mrs Churchill came to love Mother and she seemed fond of me and the animals; but she didn’t like men. ‘Yer don’t want to worry about them!’ she would say with great scorn. If Father spoke to her, she would sniff in a sort of amused way and, as soon as his back was turned, mutter, ‘All right, all right, old moustaches.’ She was a great talker and used to stay hours longer than she was meant to. She would tell me about the people she had been in service with when she was a girl, and about her dogs. ‘Our house is all dogs’ hairs and I like it that way: it feeds the carpets.’
In spite of the dogs, she seemed to have a wonderful garden, its paths edged with broken china, all of beautiful colours. Over a cup of tea, she would dreamily tell me about every plant that grew in it. ‘Did I tell yer about the little old vine I’ve got that I grew from a pip?’ Or ‘As true as I’m sitting here, my sunflower is twelve feet tall and still growing.’