GOOD DAUGHTERS

  Mary Hocking

  GOOD

  DAUGHTERS

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  To Barbara

  Chapter One

  In later years, Alice heard people talk as if those who grew up during the period between the two wars had lived their youth beneath the shadow of the swastika. But it had not seemed like that at the time.

  Although in her childhood older people talked of the war that was just finished, and then, some ten years later, began to talk of the war which was to come, no shadow seemed to touch her until she was sixteen.

  At the beginning of 1933 Alice was twelve and had lived in Shepherd’s Bush for four years. The Fairley children had been born in Sussex which was the home of their father; their mother was a Cornishwoman. Most of their friends were first generation Londoners whose families’ links with the shires had still not been broken. They grew up aware of an older, more stable way of life, though they were not to be its inheritors.

  In the area around Pratts Farm Road where the Fairleys lived the present was eating determinedly into the past; but fragments of the life of other centuries were still to be found imposed as uneasily upon the twentieth century as one snap upon another when Alice forgot to wind forward the reel in her Box Brownie.

  The houses in Pratts Farm Road had been built towards the end of the Victorian era. In nearby St Bartholomew’s Churchyard, where the Fairleys’ black cat, Smut, played with the field mice, there were tombstones dating back to the thirteenth century, and some people believed that beneath the present graveyard there was a Saxon burial ground. Alice, who equated history with romance, imagined Roundheads chasing Cavaliers along Shanks Alley, and Baron de Rothschild plotting with Disraeli in the temple by the lake at Gunnersbury Park. She peopled the Old Tuck Shop and the green at Gypsy corner with characters derived from Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson.

  The newspaper boy who turned into Pratts Farm Road as the first tram clanged its way towards Shepherd’s Bush saw nothing romantic in his surroundings. He moved in and out of gates with dispatch until he came to the two tall, semi-detached houses which stood a little apart from their terraced neighbours. Here, outside the gate of Number 29, he paused to examine the newspaper in his hand before going up the steps to the front door. Mr Fairley had made a fuss the previous day because he had found the Daily Herald lying on his doormat, an affront which he was ill able to tolerate at any time of the day, let alone first thing in the morning. This time, the News Chronicle was pushed through the letterbox with more than usual care. It landed title upward, proclaiming that this was the fourth of January, 1933, that the weather was likely to be bright and cold, and that Japan had laid waste a Chinese city.

  The affairs of the wider world much exercised Mr Fairley. At the very moment that the newspaper landed on his doormat he was praying for the people of China. As he prayed he thought of his own experience of war – three years in the trenches during which he had sustained a cut finger – and of his happy marriage and his three beloved daughters still asleep in bed. He was torn between gratitude for God’s goodness and a faint but persistent dissatisfaction that he had not been called upon to suffer more. It was possible, for he tended to make insufficient distinction between domestic and cosmic disorder, that he would have found cause for suffering adequate to his daily needs in the sight of his second daughter, now stumbling down the lane which divided the back gardens of Pratts Farm Road from those of Church Street.

  The sunken path which divided the gardens was generally referred to as ‘the back lane’ although older people spoke of it as Shanks Alley. Along this path, a little over a century ago, drovers had passed to and from the farming settlements, and along it at this moment came Alice, in great discomfort of mind and body.

  For some time Alice had been absorbed with secret passages. One such passage was reputed to have linked a manor house, recently demolished, with a priory which had come to grief in the time of Thomas Cromwell. Alice had spent fruitless hours digging in Shanks Alley. There were a lot of nettles here and she had been told that this usually meant that old walls were concealed beneath the earth. Her friend Daphne occasionally joined her in this enterprise. Second only to Alice’s absorbtion with secret passages was her passion for midnight feasts. Daphne had challenged her to come to her house for a feast, after which they would search for a passage.

  It had all started splendidly. Alice had successfully bribed her younger sister, Claire, to be silent; her escape from the home had been effected without waking Badger, the dog; she had been suitably terrified as she made her way along the dark alley: and the climbing of the tree by which she gained access to Daphne’s garden had been just difficult enough to test her agility without diminishing her resolution. Most important of all, Daphne had not overslept this time and was waiting for her at the kitchen door. As Daphne’s brother occasionally came home as late as two in the morning, the feast had had to be postponed until well beyond the witching hour. Alice found it a trifle disappointing: while Daphne had not failed in the supply of sugar mice, whipped cream walnuts, and other essentials, these proved not to be the fare which Alice’s stomach craved so early in the morning. But to make up for this there was all the excitement of being in a strange place, a strangeness which Daphne shared to some extent since the kitchen was usually the servants’ domain. It was this very lack of familiarity with their surroundings which eventually led them to investigate the trapdoor in the wall by the kitchen stove which must conceal a chamber of some kind. They pulled, it yielded, and out came something which fell soft as black snow upon the red-tiled kitchen floor.

  Alice’s reaction had been laughter; it was left to Daphne to assess the situation. ‘You’d better keep clear. I can make some excuse for “discovering” this and explain away the soot on my clothes.’ She had pushed her giggling friend out of the door and, aching with laughter, Alice had lurched down the garden path. Somewhere in Shanks Alley laughter had turned to tears. Now, as she made her way home, she asked why it was that for her adventures could not be adventure? Why must they resolve themselves into a matter of sooty fingernails and a churning stomach? Why should magic casements yield only soot? Where was all the glamour, the excitement?

  She knew the answer, of course: the bitter truth was that she was twelve and should by now have outgrown secret passages and midnight feasts. They had passed her by and she must find sterner adventures more suited to her years. She reached the gate at the back of the garden which she had left open. As she came into the garden her conscience, that puritan destroyer of adventure, was waiting for her; she could feel it getting a grip on her as she tiptoed across the lawn. The light was on in the kitchen and she could hear her mother singing. Alice gritted her teeth and took hold of the lowest branch of the oak tree; both her strength and her spirits were low and she found it difficult to swing herself up. As she climbed towards the landing window she could distinguish the houses on the far side of Shanks Alley with the spire of St Bartholomew’s Church rising above them. To the right, where light sparked from the trams, there was the Uxbridge Road: in one of the big houses fronting the road Daphne must by now be announcing her ‘discovery’. Alice rested in the fork between two branches. Tears of frustration trickled down her gr
imy face and as she looked into the darkness she murmured, ‘Oh Kashmir, Kashmir!’ It was not quite so wild a flight of fancy as might have seemed. Within the square formed by Lime Avenue, Croft Road, St Bartholomew’s Lane and Saddler’s Road there was a house surrounded by a high brick wall. From the topmost branches of the tree it was possible to see beyond the wall and Alice had often climbed up there to command this precious view. All around her lay the grimy town with its haphazard grey streets; then, secure behind the wall, set in green lawns and walled gardens, there was this inaccessible house, which had the secret look of a place out of its proper time. There were other old houses in the neighbourhood, but they had been incorporated into newer developments. The house, called Kashmir by an earlier seeker after adventure, had been built in Tudor times and re-faced in the Regency period. It was unlike anything in Alice’s experience, except Hampton Court; but you could pay to go into Hampton Court and you could walk in the gardens and admire the formal flowerbeds. There was nothing in this to compare with Kashmir. The existence of places like Kashmir, where you had no right to be, was the essence of adventure. Cinemas ranked high in this category; films with titles such as Forbidden aroused an intense, almost desperate longing in Alice, who lived within scrupulously prescribed boundaries. In the case of Kashmir, there was the additional fascination that, being concealed, it seemed as though it had no right to be either.

  This morning it was still too dark to see even the high wall which surrounded the house and Kashmir was more inaccessible than ever. By this time, Alice’s puritan conscience was well in command and, as she climbed through the landing window, she would have been relieved to find her father waiting for her so that she could make him a present of her burden of guilt. But he was not there and she went upstairs to join Claire.

  Claire had spent several hours wrestling with the temptation to sneak. As soon as Alice appeared, she said, ‘Oh, Alice, I feel so awful, I’ve got the most awful tummy ache.’ She rocked to and fro on the bed, holding her stomach and screwing her face into the contortion which she had perfected in her infancy when she discovered that the gnomes had more interesting things to do than the fairies in the preparatory school frolics.

  Alice said, ‘That’s only because it’s the first day of term.’

  ‘Your face is black, Alice; what will Mummy say?’

  ‘She won’t know, will she?’ Alice went to the washstand and spat on her flannel, then rubbed it round her face. She repeated this treatment until she was confident her face would pass her mother’s cursory examination. Claire could be relied upon to attract the most attention with her pleas that she was too unwell to go to school. The pleas were usually unavailing but had become a pattern of behaviour that was as much a part of the first day of term as the tram conductors’ jokes and the headmistress’s less jovial welcome.

  ‘Alice, what happened?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’ Alice was undressing.

  Claire watched, biting her lip, thinking that this time she really might manage to make herself sick. But then, while she was at home being cosseted, she would almost certainly tell; and this, Alice had made it clear, would be one tale-bearing which would not be forgiven. ‘My tummy really is bad,’ she said forlornly.

  Alice got into bed. ‘If you don’t go today, you’ll have to go tomorrow and that will be worse because everyone else will have got over it.’

  Claire lay back against the pillows. All kinds of unpleasant things were happening. Faintly, she could hear her mother raking out the grate in the dining-room and, beyond the window, the distant clip- clop of the milkman’s horse accompanied by the familiar rattle of bottles. Inexorably, the day was beginning. In the other bed, Alice was humped with her face to the wall, keeping to herself the secrets which couldn’t possibly be shared with an unreliable, tale-bearing nine-year-old. Only recently, the new year had begun and Claire had made good resolutions not to show off or tell tales. Now, only a few days later, goodwill had dwindled. The school holidays were at an end and Alice would want to spend her time with Daphne and her other friends. Claire was aware that, in spite of being the clever one, there was no way in which she could prevent Alice from casting her off if that was what Alice decided to do. She stared up at the ceiling, contemplating the bleakness of her future. The milky pallor of her face contrasted with the brilliant red hair which was a legacy of her Cornish grandmother. Grandmother Tippet would as soon that Alice or Louise had inherited her glory, since she saw little else of herself in this nervous child, forever on the fidget, burning up energy to no good purpose. On the rare occasions when she was still, however, Claire’s small face had a deceptively angelic quality – what Louise (who thought she was as tough as old boots) referred to as her ‘not-long-for-this-world look’. Now, if only there had been someone to observe her, she did indeed look pathetic.

  The milkman was getting nearer and another disturbing sound came to Claire’s ears. ‘Louise is playing music again,’ she said to Alice.

  Their elder sister had discovered delights which did not depend on the opening of trapdoors or the scaling of the walls of Kashmir. As she sat in her bedroom braiding her hair she was listening to a Schubert serenade played on the old phonograph which her grandmother had given to her. The sound was not good and the volume was turned down because her father would be annoyed if he heard it. Had Louise been more articulate in her musical appreciation, had she shown even a rudimentary appreciation of form and content, he would have been delighted; but a love of music in which the intellect played so small a part was something of which he disapproved in principle.

  The milkman arrived just as Louise replaced Schubert with Mozart. Badger, the old Scottie, who was deaf and had not heard the paper-boy, made up for this omission by a long, bad-tempered display. Judith Fairley took in the milk and, having satisfied herself that the right paper had been delivered, looked to see if her husband’s letter had been printed. ‘Oh dear, there’ll be two of you in a bad temper now!’ she said to Badger as they returned to the kitchen. This was a good-sized room where the family ate their breakfast in winter to save lighting the dining-room fire. Judith opened the back door and pushed the dog out. ‘You’re not to bark and wake the neighbours.’ She said this without much concern, having scant sympathy for anyone who was still abed at this hour.

  The flames were roaring in the pipe of the Ideal boiler. Bacon was cooking and the kettle was boiling. The hands of the clock pointed to twenty-five to seven. Louise was already up; she had fetched her hot water and Judith could hear her moving about in her room doing whatever mysterious things kept her so occupied each morning. Probably the young ones were awake by now, Claire complaining of tummy trouble and Alice dealing with her practically. Judith thought of Alice with gratitude and of Claire with affection.

  As she prepared breakfast she sang ‘Bonny Mary of Argyll’ in a manner more robust than the words would support. She was not a quiet worker, her activities would be unwelcome in a sickroom; there was a suggestion, too, that her store of patience would be limited. Her thick brown hair was drawn into a knot at the nape of her neck, a style well suited to one who had little inclination and less time for the fashionable. The face, strong-boned and a little heavy about the jaw, was remarkable for brown eyes informed by an intelligence which only the demands of three children and a strong-willed husband had prevented from becoming formidable: a woman whom some would find attractive and others a shade too forthright for their taste.

  She finished her rendering of the song in operatic style, put the bacon in the oven, placed the porridge pan on a low gas, and poured hot water into a big aluminium jug; all the while giving the impression of having more than one pair of hands. Then she went upstairs to rouse Claire and Alice, pausing outside Louise’s room to say, ‘Turn that thing off, Louise, and get dressed.’

  ‘I am dressed.’

  ‘Well, turn it off anyway. It will disturb old Mr Ainsworth.’ Mr Ainsworth, their neighbour, was deaf, but this fact was overlooked when Jud
ith or Stanley wanted the children to be quiet.

  When Judith entered the children’s room only the top of Alice’s head was visible, but Claire, surprisingly, was wide awake. ‘It’s cold,’ she complained. ‘And I’ve got tummy-ache.’

  Judith put the hot-water jug down on the marble washstand. ‘Nonsense! You won’t notice it if you dress quickly.’ Since Claire was the delicate one, she added, ‘And don’t forget to put on your camisole as well as your coms. School won’t be well heated this morning.’

  Claire sat up shivering, an art she had mastered so that she shook from head to foot. ‘Rosalind has a radiator on the landing in her house.’

  ‘Never mind about Rosalind or any of the others. I want you downstairs in ten minutes.’ She went over to Alice’s bed and made one of those remarks which made her family suspect that she had inherited second sight from her Celtic forebears. ‘It’s no use pretending, Alice. Up you get!’

  ‘She knows, Claire said in a sepulchral voice when their mother had gone out of the room.

  Even if she didn’t know, God did, Alice thought gloomily as she got out of bed. For the first time she understood something of the compulsion which led Claire to tell tales. As she washed she reminded Conscience that this was Daphne’s secret as much as her own, and that loyalty to friends was important.

  When Alice had finished washing Claire eased herself out of bed, shuddering as her feet touched the cold linoleum. ‘You’ve made the water black,’ she protested. ‘What will Mummy think?’

  ‘I’ll empty it away.’

  Claire dabbed at her face with a flannel. ‘Rosalind and Marguerite have got a washbasin with running water in their bedroom.’

  Alice made no reply and concentrated on brushing her hair which was straight and so long she could sit on it. As it was her one asset – her face being long and, by the standards of the film stars whom she revered, plain, and her figure regrettably plump – Alice paid a lot of attention to it, brushing it until lights glinted like gold-dust in sand and then weaving it into two plaits. The weight of the plaits on her shoulders gave her a feeling of reassurance, even of respectability, in the company of more elegantly endowed companions.