Her Ladyship's Girl Read online

  And in winter, just after Christmas, the Mari Lwyd, or Grey Mare, would come trotting down the street with its ‘Ostler’ and Merryman and Sergeant and with Punch and Siwan dressed in tattered clothes with blackened faces. Its bony mare’s skull would be bleached white and have green fire inside its eyes and its jaws would snap and frighten the living daylights out of the women as well as the children.

  This darkest time of year was traditionally believed to be the time when the veil between the upper world and the underworld was thinnest and creatures could cross from one to the other. The tradition of Mari Lwyd was a calendar custom that went all the way back into ancient times and the festivities would go on for a week or two and was supposed to bring good luck.

  A mare’s skull was fixed to the end of a wooden pole, with a white sheet fastened to the back of the skull, hiding the pole and the man underneath carrying it. Black cloth ears were sewn onto the sheet, along with ribbons and bells, and the eyes were made of green glass. The jaws could open and snap shut again at passers-by and people in the houses where it would stop. The Mari Lwyd was led by the Ostler with his whip or stick and the Merryman played music and the others sang songs as they wassailed along the way. Punch carried a long iron poker and Siwan swept the road before them with a besom broom.

  The skull was carried through the streets of the village and they stood outside the doors of the houses and pubs, banging to be let in. They’d sing a verse and my father would try to sing a verse back at them from behind the closed door. They’d start off with something the likes of –

  Wel, dyma ni’n diwad

  Gyfeillion diniwad

  I ofyn cawn gennad – i ganu

  And my father would cough –

  Os na chawn ni genad

  Rhowch glywed ar ganiad

  Pa fodd mae’r madawiad nos heno9

  And they’d come back at him with another verse and he’d answer them and Punch would rap on the door with his poker and Siwan would beat her broom against the windows and it would go back and forth until the coughing got the better of my father and he couldn’t answer any more. Then we’d have to let them in. Us children would cower in the corner because, once they got inside, the Mari would run around the house neighing and snapping its bony jaws and it would chase us into the arms of Punch, who would try to kiss the girls and be beaten over the head by Siwan. My father would offer them food and drink and eventually they’d move on to the next house, after bringing good luck for the coming year and frightening away the bad luck of the previous year, and everything would quieten back down into the dark dull wintertime, while we waited for the spring.

  As I got older, the fire-and-brimstone-breathing chapel preachers tried to stop the Mari Lwyd, because it had a bad reputation for drunkenness and rowdiness as it roamed round the village. They preached from the pulpits about unholy pagan practices and we should be doing something more saintly instead, like taking part in eisteddfodau.10 They hated the Mari Lwyd and the tradition died out over the years of breast-beating and crippling Christianity. I hear there’s a revival under way by folk groups and traditional types – although it’ll never be as hair-on-end as in the old days.

  As far back as I remember, I went to chapel every Sunday with the rest of the family. The whole village would be there and the preacher, who was called ‘Eyebrows’ Evans, would tell us about Christian Socialism and how Christ was in the coalmines with us – although nobody ever saw him swinging a pick nor wielding a shovel. I’m sure his intentions were good, but that’s all they were. We continued to live in poverty, despite the Lord and the Congregationalists, with their choirs and eisteddfodau and festivals and processions. And even though they made the pubs close on Sundays, the shadows could still be seen inside the back rooms where the police came to play a few hands of poker with the priests.

  By 1925, coal production in the valleys had crashed from its all-time high a few years earlier. It affected everybody, because the price of coal fell with the decline in production. The mine owners didn’t want to cut their profits, so they cut wages instead, and a general strike in defence of miners’ wages broke out in 1926. But the blacklegs and the scabs and the fascists joined forces with the government and the strike failed – and us children of the South Wales valleys descended into even more appalling poverty, which had been our playmate since long before I came into the coal-black world. I can still hear them, even now, the voices of the mongrel children in the hunched-down doorways, with dysentery and impetigo and hepatitis taking their toll – along with rashes and breaks and burns and stillbirths and infant mortality and malnutrition. I can still see them, even now, the spectres running in the smoky streets – playing hide-and-seek amongst the houses. I can feel the small ghostly hands touching me with cold fingers, faces wide-eyed and white in the morning light. I can smell the disappointment in the faraway and forgotten little lives and I sometimes say a prayer for them – with them.

  Mother Earth be always there

  And keep me safe within your care.

  Lord of night please dance and sing

  And happy dreams to me please bring.

  And when I wake to greet the day

  Brother Sun please light my way.

  The dust-strewn streets and the black hills in the distance, which we had to climb for a long way to reach the green of the grass, grew even dustier and blacker. The narrow houses and grey men and shoeless children – the slag-heaps and smoking chimneys and the politicians with a different smile on either side of their faces remained, along with the never-ending hopelessness that spread itself like a slate blanket over our lives.

  Though life was grim, grimmer than anyone who didn’t experience it could imagine, grimmer than any generation since could imagine, we simply didn’t know any better and so accepted our lot, and the Christians consoled themselves with songs and saints. The church in Llangynwyd was dedicated to Saint Cynwyd, the sixth-century son of Cynfelyn the Chief. And the old village of Top Llan was the home of the legendary Maid of Cefn Ydfa, whose name was Ann Thomas and who inspired the song ‘Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn’. The story goes that Ann was forced to marry against her wishes and died pining for her true love. The man she had to marry had money, but she loved a penniless poet. The poet left the village, but she pined and pined and pined so much for him that he had to come back, just in time for her to die in his arms. The poet wrote the song – it means ‘Watching the White Wheat’, but it wasn’t the wheat he was watching, it was Ann. When I was a young girl, I couldn’t understand why any woman would want to pine herself to death over a man – and when I grew up and got married myself, I couldn’t understand why every woman didn’t want to kill her husband. Maybe that was the way with Ann Thomas, maybe she wanted to kill the wealthy bugger she was married to – and that would’ve been better than pining herself to death over some penniless poet who would probably have turned out to be a big disappointment in any case.

  Like I said, we lived in a two-up-two-down terraced house with an outside toilet. The back garden was fifty foot long and rose up into the hill at the back of the street. It was a black hill, like all the rest, and it was a constant struggle to make anything grow in that garden – even the grass. But my mother tried, to her credit. She was sometimes able to grow hardy vegetables like cabbage and mustard greens and turnips and radishes and English peas and Irish potatoes. She also had a little herb patch of sage and wintergreen and fennel and holy thistle and house-leek and stinging nettle that she kept under a sheet of glass to keep the coal dust and ashflakes off and we used it as medicine for all sorts of ailments. If the summer was good, she used to grow a species of nightshade that tasted like tobacco when it was dried and she sold it to the locals for their pipes at sixpence an ounce.

  Electricity came to the valley in 1926, after the general strike had succeeded in making things worse for miners and their families. Not that it was the fault of the strikers, but the coal bosses refused to take back many of the men who went on strike and that made
the unemployment even worse. So, maybe the government felt guilty for the way it put the boot into us poor people and thought it would make things a little easier. No one could afford to pay for the new electricity, of course, but where there’s a will there’s a way – as they say. The men of the South Wales valleys were nothing if not versatile and they soon worked out how the power ran along the wires and how to stop it and how to start it. And, when the power company came every month to check the meters, they saw that nothing had been used – officially. As soon as they knocked on the door of the first terraced house in the street, the people would bang on the wall with a secret knock code and the second house would bang on the wall of the third and so on up the whole street. And all the illegal wires that were being used to bypass the meters would be pulled out and we’d all smile at the power company men with innocent faces.

  In autumn, us kids went fruit- and berry-picking across the undulating countryside, miles and miles from the ash and dust and slag, to help our mother out. Sometimes it took hours to get there and the farmers didn’t like us scrumping their orchards and they fired at us with buckshot from their guns. But we were always too far away for them to do any damage and we could run like the wind, despite the coughing and crouping. Mother made pies from the gatherings we brought back and sold any surplus to other families whose kids were too lazy or too laid-up to go scrumping for themselves – or families whose kids had died from one disease or the other. And so, between this and that, we scraped an existence out of the way we lived and, like I said, we knew no better and accepted it all in our stride. Until, of course, I was fourteen and could leave school and go to work.

  I mostly got part-time jobs to begin with, like cleaning the lavatories and collecting glasses in the local pub. Then milking cows on a farm. And finally working in the hat shop in Maesteg – where I read the magazines on the occasional table and saw the styles of the ladies who came in for a straw cloche or a wool beret or a felt satin bow or a Henry Pollak or a topper with a feather flower. Then I realised there was more to life than drudgery and more to the world than Wales.

  Chapter Three

  So, that’s how I ended up as a scullery maid and, as time went by, I was getting used to the life of a skivvy over in Hampstead. For the first few weeks, I rarely got to go outside, except when I was hanging out the washing or beating the ugly rugs and, on Sunday afternoons, everyone did what they were accustomed to doing and I was left alone. I was apprehensive about going out on my own because of the tales of murder and mayhem in the big city – what if I got lost and couldn’t find my way back before dark? I might be molested or ransacked by Cook’s relations. So I stayed in the room and wrote long letters to my mother. I never said how sad and lonely I was, because that would only have made her feel bad as well, so I said I was doing fine and had made a few friends and was looking forward to seeing everyone at some time or other in the future.

  Jobs finished at one in the afternoon on a Sunday and Kathleen was in the room when I got up there on this particular day.

  ‘Fancy going out, Annie?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’

  It was a nice day and I was glad of her offer, so we went to the park and saw Lilly there with the children. She never spoke to us and neither did the kids and we didn’t try to speak to them, in case it went against some outdated social etiquette or other. So I just enjoyed the sun and the light and the sounds all around me of people laughing and playing and the smell of grass and the taste of the air. It reminded me a bit of home – just a bit, mind you, and I wanted to sit there forever, amongst the sounds of the afternoon. And I realised for the first time that humanity could only really be understood at arm’s length – like a painting on a wall – up close it was a mass of random patterns and abstracts and waves and from a distance it blended into the bigger surroundings and was no longer separate from them.

  But it was soon time to go back and, on the way, our path was impeded by a march coming down Haverstock Hill towards the West End. I think it was the Socialist Youth or the Young Communists, I can’t be sure now, but there were lots of banners and loud voices chanting against the rising unemployment of the time and the police were keeping a close eye on things. I didn’t know too much about politics back then, but I’d seen what unemployment did in the valleys of South Wales, and I felt an affinity with the marchers and a yen to be stepping alongside them. Wasn’t that strange? Here was I, working for the rich, yet wanting to walk with the poor. The parade soon passed and we went on home and I had myself a cup of tea and a jam sandwich that Cook hadn’t made, so I knew it was safe to eat. I washed and ironed my uniform and then I went to bed, exhausted by the good feeling the trip to the park had given me.

  Monday morning I was awake before Bart tapped on the door, just lying there in bed thinking about things. I wondered what would become of me and where I’d be in a year’s time and five years’ time and ten years’ time – when I’d be twenty-six. I didn’t have a clue, so I gave up the wondering and got out of bed and washed as usual in lukewarm water and went downstairs. Later that day, I saw the lady of the house again.

  ‘Hello, Anwyn.’

  At least she knew I had a Christian name, even if Cook didn’t. I hadn’t seen her husband yet and I was thinking about what Kathleen told me. There were plenty of men who had no respect for women, so how was he any different?

  It was a new week. Down in the kitchen, I was thinking about my tasks and using my loaf to make life easier for myself. I got piping-hot water from the copper to wash up with and I’d figured out how to make a lot of the other jobs lighter as well – like wrapping a wet cloth round the broom to mop the floors standing up instead of kneeling down and making the coalman take off his boots before traipsing in for his fried bread. I was getting things done in half the time and I wondered why I didn’t work all this out much sooner. Out hanging the washing, I saw Bart. He gave me another wink and this time I winked back, as much as to say his secret was safe with me.

  When I went back to the kitchen to do the vegetables, I saw that Cook was baking bread. Bread! That was another thing I wouldn’t be able to eat any more. She told me to wash down the shelves. I carefully took down the china dishes and washed everything and was putting the cups and saucers back when the dragon knocked over a plate and it smashed on the floor in smithereens. She ran straight over and walloped me round the head and sent me flying across the kitchen floor.

  ‘Clumsy girl!’

  Nora came in to see what the ruckus was about.

  ‘She broke a plate!’

  Nora looked at me and she knew the truth, but neither of us said anything. I wanted to wallop her back, and I would have, but for fear of being beaten to death by one of her kinfolk out on the street. After the clout, my head was hammering and I felt sick as a spaniel, but I had to carry on with my jobs and there was a load of ironing to do. I was still feeling sick that evening after Cook went home and I didn’t want anything to eat. Nora and Biddy washed up and cleared away for me and I went to my room and sat on the bed. My head was still pounding when Kathleen came in with some hot tea and a plate of buttermilk biscuits.

  ‘I don’t want them.’

  ‘You have to eat, Annie.’

  ‘I saw Cook baking today.’

  ‘Not these biscuits; Brat got them from the shop for you.’

  So I ate them and drank the tea. Kathleen told me that Bart had got some eggs from chickens a friend of his kept on an allotment near Highgate and passed them on to Nora for me. They were in the secret hiding place with the rest of our stash and there was no fear of getting into trouble for pinching them. I lay down and tried to get some sleep. I thought about what it must have been like for the skivvies back in times gone by. If Cook could clout me like that and get away with it, what must those poor girls have had to put up with? I thought about making a complaint to Mrs Harding about it, but if she took Cook’s side, it would make things even worse for me. I decided to wait and see if it happened again.

 
And so the weeks wore on – weeks of fireplace-raking and floor-mopping and step-polishing and potato-peeling and dishwashing – drudgery and dogsbodying and donkeywork and all kinds of daily grinding, despite the labour-saving devices. I had to scrub down the kitchen table once a day, clean the cupboards and dressers inside-out, wash down the shelves once a week, along with all the plates and platters and bowls and biscuit tins and sauce boats and soup tureens. But lighting the range every morning became the bane of my life. It was a big, black surly monster and it ran on solid fuel, not gas nor electric, and fired up inside with rolled paper and kindling first, then coal and more coal, until it glowed like a blacksmith’s forge. The washing copper also growled at me and threatened to overflow if I didn’t treat it with the respect it demanded. All the jobs had to be done in the proper order – my days were timed according to my many duties and I worked in terms of rotas and routines and regimens and never-ending rituals.

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that I would eventually run into Mr Harding, the owner of the house. I was in the kitchen one day on my own, Cook had gone to the shops to buy some meat and Nora and Biddy were on their break. He was a tall man of about thirty-five, with dark hair and a handsome face. He looked a bit like the actor William Powell and he was wearing a double-breasted grey flannel suit, with a buff-coloured shirt and a silk tie. I’d heard bits and pieces of conversations about him having interests in South African gold mines and that was how he managed to avoid the effects of the Great Slump that had brought other rich people to grief. I remembered Kathleen’s words and wondered why a man who looked so bright and shiny was one to be wary of.