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  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

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  Contents

  Nina Bawden

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Nina Bawden

  Just Like A Lady

  Nina Bawden

  Nina Bawden was one of Britain's most distinguished and best-loved novelists for both adults and young people. Several of her novels for children – Carrie’s War, a Phoenix Award winner in 1993; The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; The Runaway Summer; and Keeping Henry – have become contemporary classics.

  She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, an autobiography and a memoir describing her experiences during and following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband, Austen Kark, and from which she emerged seriously injured – but fighting. She was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and several of her books, like Family Money (1991), have been adapted for film or television. Many of her works have been translated into numerous languages.

  Born in London in 1925, Nina studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in the same year as Margaret Thatcher. Following Potter’s Bar, she was movingly portrayed as a character in the David Hare play, The Permanent Way, about the privatization of the British railways. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime’s contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970.

  Dedication

  FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

  Chapter One

  A week after Lucy got her scholarship to Oxford, her uncle, Bob Low, had a stroke. He fell off a stepladder trying to put a bottle of Nux Vomica on to a shelf in the shop where he worked as a dispensing chemist. As soon as she heard the crash, the young lady assistant on the toilet counter flew into the dispensary and found him staring bemusedly at a deep cut in the palm of his hand that ran, she was horrified to see, right across the Line of Life. He was dreadfully pale and his face felt stiff, he said, all down the right side. Even after he had sat down for a bit he still felt giddy in his head and went back to his house in Woodside Gardens in a hired car.

  ‘He’s always overdone everything. And as I’ve told him, you don’t get any thanks for it,’ Aunt Ida cried, when he had been put to bed and she was pouring tea for the doctor.

  She stretched out her big jaw and looked stern. She was fond of her husband who called her ‘girlie’, or, occasionally, ‘Poddles’, a grotesque, honeymoon endearment that was incomprehensible to Lucy who could not imagine her aunt had ever been a young man’s fancy, but Ida suffered from that kind of false shame that makes the public display of affection difficult: usually she spoke of her husband as if he were an old dog that she had given shelter to in a weak moment. ‘You’re asking for trouble, I’ve told him time and time again, when he’s stayed on at the shop after closing time. Well, he’s got it. You get what you deserve in this world, that’s what I say.’

  The doctor raised his eyebrows. Lucy flinched. Indignation, with Ida Low, had entirely usurped the functions of compassion and concern. Lucy’s mother had ‘got what she deserved’, apparently, when she had died of pneumonia a month after her daughter’s birth. ‘Poor Mary’, as Ida’s contemptuous pity coldly styled her, would not have died if she had not insisted on going out, that bitter winter’s day, to put flowers on her young husband’s grave. In Ida’s opinion, poor people could not afford sentiment. She was never sentimental. She had taken in her orphaned niece merely because she knew her duty. That is, she knew what other people would think her duty. When you came down to it, Lucy sometimes thought, that was all family feeling consisted of.

  ‘It’s not Uncle’s fault,’ said Lucy with a little shrug and a smile for the doctor to show him that she was different. She feared he must guess from the tomb-like chill of the front room that it was only used for visitors and blushed to think of the fuss her aunt had made dusting and tidying and laying out her prettiest tray with the best embroidered cloth and a silver sugar shovel that had belonged to her mother. The doctor ignored it and heaped sugar into his brimming cup with his own spoon, spattering tea all over his waistcoat in a casual, upper-class fashion. ‘No, indeed,’ he said, blandly smiling, and looked at Lucy appreciatively.

  She was a small slender girl with brown, thick hair cut short in the current fashion, a poetically pale, oval face, and very dark, wide-set eyes. When people glanced at her in the street or she examined her face in a mirror, she liked to fancy, romantically, that she was of Spanish extraction. In fact, she was the posthumous daughter of an Irish steward in the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company and ‘poor Mary’, who had borne her in Canning Town, E.16. Lucy was nineteen, a grown woman, but in her school uniform—a navy, pleated gym slip, white shirt and white ankle socks—she appeared reduced to an artificial childhood. Feeling the doctor’s gaze upon her, she became conscious of the absurdity of her schoolgirl’s garb and stared down at her hands.

  ‘Of course I didn’t really mean that,’ said Ida, looking suddenly anxious and patting the heavy bun of red hair at her neck.

  Lucy recovered from her embarrassment. She felt it was selfish.

  It was not important, at this moment, to try to impress the doctor. ‘How long will he be ill, do you think?’ she asked.

  The doctor shot out his wrist and looked at his watch. He had already answered this question. ‘Can’t make any promises just yet. Give him a month or two.’ He picked up his bag. ‘I suppose you’ll be leaving school soon,’ he said to Lucy. There was a slight, amiable condescension in his voice. Lucy read his mind and scowled. The Lows were good patients, he was thinking, they were seldom ill. He was awarding them a little extra interest, like a good conduct medal. Lucy wanted to show him that her horizons were wider than he expected. ‘I’m going up to Oxford,’ she said with a level look.

  The doctor’s eyes widened. ‘Jolly good,’ he pronounced. ‘You’re a lucky girl.’ He did not bother to hide his surprise.

  ‘Of course things are different now,’ Ida said.

  All at once, Lucy felt sick at heart and scared. Her glance flew nervously to her aunt, who responded with a significant look.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know how you expect us to manage,’ said Ida darkly as they washed up together in the small, brownish kitchen. ‘He may well be ill for a year. And we haven’t saved, not a penny!’

  Lucy bit her lip. She did not like the picture of herself selfishly pursuing her own aims in the face of her uncle’s and aunt’s poverty. On the other hand, she knew that her uncle put five pounds every month into savings certificates and that her aunt had not wanted her to sit for the scholarship in the first place. Ida Low was a firm adherent of the do-too-much-for-people-and-they’ll-turn-on-you school, and it
was her constant fear that she had already done too much for Lucy, that she had been ‘soft’. The least sign of ingratitude enraged her. ‘Oh, take that look off your face,’ she said angrily, wringing out the dishcloth. ‘You can’t have everything your own way, always.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lucy gravely, and hung her head.

  ‘When my mother died, I had to leave school at fourteen and look after my brothers and sisters.’ Ida spoke triumphantly as if this misfortune reflected credit on her.

  Lucy heaved a sigh. ‘But don’t you see, I shall be able to help you more once I’ve been to Oxford. I’ll get a better job.’

  She was sure this must be true, because her headmistress had told her so. ‘Lucy can do anything,’ Miss Jones had said in the report she had made when Lucy applied for her scholarship. Actually, she was uncertain what she intended to do once she had got her degree; whether to break into journalism on the strength of the literary essays she had written for the school magazine; or to teach, which is what her uncle hoped she would do; or to become a probation officer, which was what Miss Jones, who tried to instil a social conscience into all her girls, had suggested. Lucy’s aspirations were large and vague. ‘Miss Jones says Oxford will help me to find myself,’ she murmured.

  Ida smiled grimly and emptied a bag of potatoes into the sink. ‘Talk doesn’t cost anything, I suppose.’ She threw back her head and gave Lucy a gimlet glance. ‘I bet your Miss Jones has never been short of a penny! What does she know about Life?’

  Lucy could not suppress a smile, both at her aunt and Miss Jones, whose attitudes did sometimes seem strangely divorced from reality. Miss Jones was a good and innocent woman who truly believed that endeavour was worth more than success. ‘Does the road wind uphill all the way?’ was her favourite poem. She taught her pupils that life was a merry idyll, full of jolly strife and laughter, and sometimes she wondered—Lucy had often caught a sad, bewildered look—why they seemed so cynical and old. ‘Miss Jones says Oxford is a tremendous opportunity,’ Lucy said uncertainly.

  ‘Miss Jones, Miss Jones, I tell you I’m sick and tired of Miss Jones.’ Ida turned on Lucy with a potato peeler in her hand. Before Lucy’s eyes, her face seemed to distend as if slowly filling up with air. ‘I could tell her a thing or two. Lots of women, you know, look forward to the time when their daughters are out at work and bringing home a bit extra. Not many people have scrimped and saved and gone without like your uncle and me.’ Hectic spots burned in her cheeks: thinking about her own generosity always whipped up her anger. ‘I tell you, my girl,’ she cried in a loud, hectoring voice, ‘if we hadn’t wanted to give you a good education, we could have had a lot of things. Nice holidays, a little car …’

  Lucy pouted. She was familiar with the string of possessions her aunt might have acquired if she had not been born, or, at least, had not ‘lost’ her parents so improvidently. And also with the dangers Ida had braved on her behalf: during the war she had moved back to London just so Lucy could go to a good grammar school which didn’t exist in the country town where Uncle Bob had been lucky enough to get a nice safe job away from the bombing. But she had done all these things quite voluntarily, Lucy thought furiously. And, in fact, Ida was proud of her niece. She kept her school reports tied up with blue ribbon in a special drawer in the bureau, along with a lock of Lucy’s baby hair and her first little shoe. The truth was, she was a difficult, aggressive, disputatious old woman who loved, as she did everything else, against the grain. She wanted Lucy to get on but hated it when she gave herself airs, or said anything that smacked of being ‘stuck-up’. Once, when Lucy had referred to the ritual Sunday dinner as ‘lunch’, Ida had humiliated her for weeks afterwards by remarking each time she dished up the roast meat and vegetables, ‘We’re having our dinner, but Miss High and Mighty is having her lunch.’

  This kind of mockery no longer troubled Lucy. Since she had grown up she had come to regard her aunt with a detached, superior pity: she was going somewhere, she ineluctably knew, and her aunt was standing still. Now, though she glowered through her eyelashes, she did not feel in the least angry. ‘I wouldn’t earn much if I got a job now,’ she said reasonably. She sought for something that would impress her aunt. ‘Rosalind Baker went to Cambridge and she got a job in television last year. Miss Jones says she’s earning eight hundred and ninety pounds a year.’

  ‘I dare say. But the Bakers are a different sort of people from us. He’s a bank manager.’ Ida leaned over the sink, gouging out eyes in the potatoes. ‘Oh, I don’t deny it’s a disappointment for you not to go to college, since you’d set your heart on it. If your uncle hadn’t talked me round, I’d never have agreed to it. I thought it was a silly idea at the time and I still think so. You’d only have got married, and then it would all have gone for nothing. Unless you tried too hard to look like your Miss Jones.’

  Lucy smiled. Her headmistress was an angular, jerky woman who wore shapeless garments made in a style that had been all the rage when she was a girl, necklaces made of sea shells that had been enamelled by the blind, and a dung-coloured cloche hat that looked as if it had been used, earlier in its history, to scare off the birds. A witty sixth-former had once said that you had to see Miss Jones in order not to believe in her. All the same, thinking of Miss Jones steadied Lucy’s purpose. ‘Perseverance wins the crown’, was one of her favourite sayings. ‘Please Auntie, I do so want to go to Oxford,’ Lucy said coaxingly, picking up a vegetable knife and starting in to help with the potatoes.

  ‘Then want must be your master.’ Ida straightened her back, rested her hands on the edge of the sink and stared with a flushed face at her niece. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what’s wrong with you.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Here you are, living in a nice home, nineteen years of age and never had to turn your hand to anything. Thousands of girls would jump for joy to find themselves in your shoes. And all you can say is you want to go to Oxford. Oxford isn’t the be-all and end-all. I don’t understand you, I really don’t. Why can’t you be sensible, like other girls?’ Her expression was suddenly sad and bewildered, her eyes grew moist.

  Lucy’s eyes filled with tears in sympathy. She knew she was a disappointment to her aunt, and not just on this score. She had never been able to be the daughter that Ida—so Uncle Bob said—had always longed for. The liveliest times they ever spent together were on Thursday evenings when Bob Low went to the philatelic society and Lucy and her aunt played bezique. Although Ida was careful to show no positive pleasure in anything, she enjoyed bezique. She and her husband had played it all through their honeymoon in their hotel bedroom at Bognor, by the sea. The knowledge that her aunt wanted something from her that she did not know how to give, filled Lucy with a sense of helpless guilt. ‘I don’t want to live all my life in Earls Gate,’ she said mutinously.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Lucy shook her head sadly and began to weep. Her tears, falling steadily into the potatoes, infuriated her aunt. ‘Oh, you make me tired.’ She threw her potato peeler into the water. ‘It’s a nice suburb, only half an hour from the City. You’ve got too big for your boots, that’s the trouble with you. You shudder every time I open my mouth—I’ve seen you. Who do you think you are? Other girls are quite happy to get a nice job in an office and stay at home with their mothers.’

  ‘I am different,’ cried Lucy, flinging down her knife and rushing off to her bedroom.

  And she was different, she told herself, sitting glumly on the edge of her narrow bed and biting her nails. She was not in the least like the other girls in Earls Gate and it was her chief dread that she might become like them, content to live in a neat little box of a house with privet hedges, a crazy-paving path to the front door and no ambition except to be a typist, tap-tap-tapping all day long and giggling over boy friends in the lunch hour. Their lives were mapped out from the moment they left school, put on high-heeled shoes and trotted off gaily to their first office jobs; the future stretched in front of them, a safe, dull pathway to the grave. Or so it se
emed to Lucy, seeing the pretty, painted misses, clattering breathlessly down the slope into the station yard, as suburban mothers in embryo with bunions, flowered aprons, and corsets that stuck out like cages as they bent over. She felt like one of the Eumenides, grimly pointing a scrawny finger and prophesying the changes that would overtake them by slow stages: the marriage at the Methodist church with the bridesmaids in violet satin; the mortgage on the three-bedroomed house; the television set, the perambulator, and the washing machine on hire purchase; the weekly cinema and the flutter on the football pools; Friday night, Amami-night, Saturday night, sex-night.

  Such a fate was tedious: Lucy wanted something bigger than this and she had believed it would come to her if she worked hard for her scholarship. Education, no question, she had thought, listening to Miss Jones’s clear, lady-like voice, was the only way of escape. Not from poverty, for there were no really poor people in Earls Gate. If her uncle and aunt had been poor, Lucy reflected, stiffening as she heard her aunt’s slow footsteps climb the stairs, she would not have felt so lost—indeed, despairing—at the prospect of remaining there. What frightened her was something more subtle than poverty.

  She sighed with relief as she heard her aunt go into her bedroom and close the door. Poverty was something you could get to grips with. No one would think the worse of you for wanting to lift yourself by your bootstraps out of a slum. Yet, in a way, Earls Gate was worse than a slum. Among the poor there was at least some kind of life: women screaming at their children and men beating up their wives. No one screamed in Earls Gate and families only quarrelled in whispers in case the neighbours should hear. In Lucy’s opinion, this nervous desire for respectability was death to the individual spirit.

  When she was fifteen, a lady who was rumoured to be a sculptress had rented a room from a neighbouring widow and induced the eighteen-year-old son of the house to pose, mother naked, on the back lawn. She was a plump, rather ordinary woman with a pale face and a moustache on her upper lip, but to Lucy she seemed an exotic visitor from the exciting world of art and intellect to which she felt she rightfully belonged. At this time, Lucy believed she was destined for greatness, but no one else appeared to recognize it. She was not popular at school: she was top of her class but she was bad at games and not allowed to use lipstick or go out with boys, so no one vied for her favours. The older girls, whose company she craved, ignored her and her teachers said she was ‘old for her age’—in their eyes, an infallible sign of hidden depravity.