Polly Pilgrim Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also in Arrow by Marie Joseph

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service.

  She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a Chartered Engineer, and they have two married daughters.

  After a very successful career as a short story writer, Marie Joseph now writes novels set in her native Lancashire, in periods ranging from the turn of the century to the present time. No less than four of her novels have been short-listed for the Romantic Novelist’s Association Award during the past few years. She is a well-known public speaker and broadcasts frequently on Radio Four and the Overseas Programmes.

  Marie Joseph is also the author of ONE STEP AT A TIME, the moving and at times hilarious account of her constant battle against Rheumatoid Arthritis.

  Also in Arrow by Marie Joseph

  Emma Sparrow

  Maggie Craig

  A Leaf in the Wind

  Footsteps in the Park

  Gemini Girls

  Non-fiction

  One Step at a Time

  Polly Pilgrim

  Marie Joseph

  For Tom Stevenson

  — One —

  HARRY PILGRIM WAS was a quiet man, a softly-spoken, reserved man who rarely lost his temper. But on that Sunday morning in September he stormed up the uncarpeted stairs in the cottage, leaving his wife, Polly, and his mother-in-law staring at each other in astonishment.

  His voice, hoarse with uncontrolled rage, spiralled down to them: ‘Out of bed this minute, Gatty! D’you hear me? If you’re not up this minute, I’m coming in. You’re not too old to have the blankets whipped off you, nor to feel the flat of my hand on your backside!’

  ‘Your dad doesn’t mean it, love.’ Polly spoke quietly to her son standing at the foot of the stairs, his young face creased into lines of anxiety.

  Then she turned to her mother. ‘It’s because he can’t bear not having enough work to do. Harry doesn’t feel right when he’s not working. A man has to bring up his family with money earned from his own graft. You know that, Mam. It’s been slowly killing him these past months hanging about with hardly anything to do.’

  Polly’s blue eyes were pleading as her husband clattered back down the stairs. ‘Don’t be too hard on Gatty, love. You know what long hours she has to put in at the shop, and last night she went dancing after finishing at eight o’clock. It’s no wonder she wants to lie in.’

  Harry Pilgrim held up his hands as if in supplication. ‘That’s right! Rub it in. Make it clear that my fifteen-year-old daughter is the bread-winner in this house. Show me up good and proper!’

  His boots squeaked as he walked hump-shouldered towards the door. ‘If you’re coming with me, Martin, get a move on. If not, stop where you are.’

  At a nod from Polly, the tall fair boy, thin wrists protruding from the sleeves of his grey pullover, followed his father outside. From the window Polly watched them go.

  There was beauty all around, stretching as far as the eye could see. Over to the east the darkly smooth mass of Pendle Hill; to the west the long wooded valley, and beyond, far beyond, the Irish Sea. Already, in mid September, the thin sparse grass had died, and its faded colour was broken by rough, grey stones. The distant hills, covered by purple heather, drifted in mist, but on the lower slopes gorse blazed in sunburst clumps of glory.

  Polly Pilgrim was a tall girl, a plumpish girl with a cloud of corn-coloured, wavy hair. Her mouth, though too wide for beauty, was normally set to smile, but that day it had a melancholy droop to it. At thirty-three, her face was unlined and had the open candour of a guileless child. She had borne a daughter, then a son with ease, and breast-fed them with pleasure. She cherished those she loved with a fierce and abiding protection. She loved children, dogs and old people, not with sentimentality, but with an all-embracing affection. Today she looked her age.

  Her mother joined her at the window. ‘Shine before seven, rain before eleven, I always say.’ She glared accusingly at the cloudless sky. ‘Views are all right for folks who have the time to stand about gawping at them. If you want my opinion, when you’ve seen one you’ve seen the lot.’

  Polly sighed heavily. She could do without her mother’s gloomy predictions at the moment, but because loving came more naturally than exasperation, she merely shook her head in mock reproof.

  ‘Oh, Mam . . . I know you hate it up here, but here’s where I live and I’m happy enough. You know me.’

  ‘Oh aye, I know you all right.’

  Edna Myerscough sniffed. She wore her hat to protect the hard ridges of a recent perm, but had removed her coat so as to feel the benefit when she went back down the hill to catch her bus into town. If she lived to be a hundred, she often told herself, she’d never forgive her son-in-law for bringing her Polly to live up here in the back of beyond. Settling herself down on a chair as heavily as if she weighed fourteen stone instead of barely seven, she watched Polly take a roasting-tin from the fire oven.

  ‘Rabbit again?’ She chewed reflectively on nothing for a moment. ‘Still, rabbit does come up like chicken if it’s cooked slow.’ She sniffed again as she stared round the untidy living-room. For by no means the first time, she told herself that if her only daughter could have bided her time instead of marrying the first man to come along, she could be living now in one of the new council houses on the Brownlow Estate on the outskirts of the nearby cotton town. She could have had a bathroom upstairs and a lavatory inside, instead of having to use that terrible hut where you sat on a plank with a hole in it, suspended over a bucket.

  The cottage had been built in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and had a date stone over the door to prove it. The triple windows at the front bore evidence to the fact that it had once, long ago, been the family house of hand-loom weavers. The windows were made of small square panes, framed in lead, once protected by shutters. In the partitioned off, barely-used parlour next to the kitchen-cum-living-room, constant plastering of the walls had left the mortar soft. Harry had explained, with a kind of reverence, that in those far off days a water trough ran the length of the house to keep the air moist and prevent the cotton threads from snapping. Edna saw nothing to swank about in that. After all, it was 1933 now not the Dark Ages!

  ‘I might put my coat on,’ she said. ‘It always smells damp in this place, and my rheumatism always plays me up at the back end.’ She gave a cursory glance through the window at a towering oak tree, its flimsy leaves drifting down like red and gold pieces of tissue paper. ‘It always strikes me when the leaves are on the turn.’

  ‘Harry’s going away tomorrow.’

  Polly spoke quickly before her mother had time to reach for her coat. The sight of Edna sitting round the Sunday dinner table muffled to the eyeballs was one she could do without today. Already she felt bereft, anticipating the comfortless width of the feather mattress of their double bed without Harry’s body warm beside her. He was her child, just as Gatty and Martin were her children. Her love for him was as much maternal as passionate, and his unhappiness reflected itself in Polly’s own heart. One day, returning from an abortive search for work, he had stretched out his arms to her.

  ‘I’ve nothing but what I’ve got in these hands,’ he had shou
ted. ‘Make them idle and I’m finished.’

  The words had almost broken her heart.

  ‘Going away? Where to? What do you mean, he’s going away?’ Polly saw her mother’s pale blue eyes pop with surprise. ‘Has he got another woman?’

  Before she answered, Polly moved a pan of potatoes on its trivet nearer the fire. Then, turning round, she pushed a strand of hair away from her hot face.

  ‘Harry’s decided that as he can’t find enough work round here to keep him going, he might as well go down south and try there.’ She twisted a corner of her apron round and round in her fingers. ‘He’s had hardly any work at all for over a year now, and it’s getting him down. You heard him shout at Gatty just now? That wasn’t Harry talking, it was his frustration. He’s desperate, Mam.’

  ‘She’s still up there, stopping in bed.’

  Polly ignored her. Opening the drawer set in the side of the square table, she took out a handful of knives and forks.

  ‘Nobody wants gardeners any more, not even special ones like Harry. The mills and factories are closing, so the bosses in the big houses have to cut back. They’re managing with less servants, and the odd-job man does the garden. But Harry’s a specialist, Mam. He’s a landscape gardener; he’s never been anything else.’

  ‘Has he tried to get work down the town?’

  ‘What as? There are skilled men being laid off every day. What chance would Harry have? Anyway, you know what the doctor said when he came back from the war. He will always have to work outside because of his chest.’

  ‘And I suppose there’s plenty of outdoor jobs going down London way?’

  ‘We don’t know, Mam. But the Depression hasn’t hit down south as much as it has up here. There’s more money, bigger houses. They don’t even understand what’s going on up here.’

  ‘Southerners think they’re it. Always had it cushy that lot have.’

  ‘Harry wrote to Kew Gardens and had a letter promising nothing but saying they’d see him. He’ll be over the moon if he gets taken on there.’

  Polly looked down at the knives and forks in her hands as if wondering what they were. ‘The way things are, I can’t bear to see Harry’s self-respect seeping away. He’s got to do something about it or die.’

  ‘Now you’re talking like an a’penny book.’

  ‘No, I’m not, Mam! It was in the paper last week that there are over two-and-a-half million unemployed. That’s a lot of men on the dole.’ She frowned. ‘Harry says that if he applied for the dole they would actually deduct his war disability pension from it.’

  ‘So that would mean he went to France and got gassed by those Germans for nothing.’ Edna spoke with a morbid satisfaction.

  ‘Mam? Can’t you see? He’s ashamed of not getting steady work, and seeing Harry ashamed makes me want to cry. You know how proud he is.’

  ‘His Romany blood,’ Edna said at once. ‘Gypsies are like that. And his grandfather was one, so don’t go looking at me like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t come out that his grandmother knocked on doors selling pegs and putting a curse on folks if they didn’t buy a bundle. Bad blood will out. Nature always tells in the long run.’

  Beneath the green hat, modelled like a flying helmet, Edna’s mind was in a ferment. If her son-in-law got himself fixed up with a job down south, then his family would follow on. The thought of the left-over years of her life lived without a weekly visit to Polly’s house filled her with a dread that sharpened her features into a vixen-like mask of despair.

  ‘He married you when you were seventeen,’ she said bitterly. ‘A girl hardly out of her gym-slip. Then he brought you to live at the top of a hill in a cottage with no emneties.’ She frowned. Surely that word wasn’t right? Still, she knew what she meant. ‘You could have picked and choosed if you’d only waited. It’s a wonder he didn’t bring you to a caravan painted red and yellow, and sat you out on the steps with gold ear-rings dangling. When your Harry told me he could find his God in the hedgerows instead of in chapel, I had his measure straight off.’

  A dog barked and Polly jumped up with relief. Harry was coming home. As she laid out the knives and forks she wondered what her mother’s reaction would be if she suddenly said: ‘But don’t you see that I married Harry because I was drowning in love for him. I would have worn ear-rings as big as hoops and a red scarf round my hair at the time if that was what he’d wanted of me.’

  She hurried to the door. Love was not a word bandied about loosely in her mother’s vocabulary. Love, for Edna, was for soppy women who dyed their hair and read poetry in bed. In the whole of Polly’s life, she realized with a pang, she could never remember her mother once holding her in her arms and speaking of love. And yet it was there, hidden inside Edna’s unnecessarily corseted frame. She was sure of that. It was just not her way to speak of it.

  They were coming up the cinder path now to the cottage – the dog called Jim, a mongrel bred from mongrels, trotting to heel at Harry’s side, and Martin, walking pigeon-toed, swishing a stick at nothing. Polly sighed as she saw the leaning stoop of her husband’s thin shoulders. Harry was as dark as his wife was fair, a man with the shortish stature of one who comes from generations of cotton-mill workers. And gypsies, she reminded herself, her eyes twinkling.

  The maternal, un-Romany side of Harry’s family had been among the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, forced from their hand-looms, he had told Polly, by the onset of machinery. Harry’s grandmother had borne her children in a two-up, two-down terraced house in the very shadow of the tall mill chimneys. She had sent those children off, one after another, at the age of twelve, to stand at their looms on damp stone floors as half-timers. And she had buried two of them with rheumatic fever.

  No wonder Harry had rebelled. No wonder he couldn’t find his God in the ranting hell-fire sermons of the Wesleyans, seeking Him instead in the fields and hills and moors of his beloved Lancashire countryside.

  ‘The dinner’s nearly ready,’ Polly told him, relieved to see his face was smoothed of its anger once again.

  ‘It smells good.’ Harry touched his wife’s cheek gently with a finger.

  As they went inside, Gatty appeared at the foot of the stairs, eyes puffed with the weeping that these days came as naturally to her as breathing.

  Harry smiled at her, but looked away from the sight of his mother-in-law’s pointed features set in lines of deep distrust between the false ear flaps of the atrocious hat.

  When Polly climbed back up the hill after seeing her mother off on the bus back to her neat little house in town, Gatty was standing at the mirror nailed over the slop-stone, gazing at herself, outlining her lips in Tangee lipstick.

  ‘You’re not going out on your dad’s last night at home?’

  Polly spoke without hope. Since turning fifteen, Gatty tended to treat her mother’s every utterance with contempt, raising her eyebrows ceilingwards as if seeking the patience to tide her over to Polly’s next stupid remark. Now she merely shrugged her shoulders, without turning round.

  ‘I asked you a question, Gatty.’ Polly fought down the exasperation rising in her throat. From the back Gatty looked like the good little girl she had been not all that long ago, thin legs protruding from beneath the gathered skirt of her striped cotton dress. Her hair, black like Harry’s, hung like the hair on a Japanese doll, straight and shining almost to her shoulders. But when she turned round, Polly saw her cheeks had been dotted with rouge the same orange shade as the lipstick.

  No longer able to keep her temper in check, Polly snatched up a flannel from the soap-dish and held it out.

  ‘You can just wipe that muck off your face, Gatty. You don’t need it, not at your age.’ Reaching out she tried to draw Gatty towards her.

  Immediately Gatty stepped back, eyes flashing. Grabbing the flannel from Polly’s hand, she hurled it against the far wall.

  ‘At my age!’ she yelled. ‘That’s all I hear in this house! You were married at not much more than my age
, remember? Why can’t you leave me alone? Why can’t you ever leave me ALONE?’

  Polly leaned back against the table, feeling the need for support. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked quietly.

  Again the dark eyes uplifted. ‘To Winnie’s house, if you must know.’

  ‘Yes, I must.’

  Gatty reached for her beige, swing-backed jacket, bought from C & A sales in the summer. ‘Winnie doesn’t have to account for her every movement. Her mother doesn’t pry like you.’

  Closing her eyes for a moment, Polly saw her daughter’s bosom friend Winnie, red-haired, with freckles dotting her pale face like the surface of an unstirred glass of Horlicks malted milk. A small girl with pointed, foxy features and small eyes set slyly above a sharp nose.

  ‘Was it Winnie you went dancing with last night after you’d both finished at the shop?’

  Gatty dredged a sigh up from her chest, tiny bosoms sticking out like ice-cream cones in the new uplift bra. ‘I know you don’t like her. You don’t like any of my friends.’

  She moved towards the door, the coat swinging out as she turned. ‘Winnie keeps asking me to stop the night at her house. She thinks it’s daft me coming back on the bus to the village, then having to walk all the way up the hill.’ She gave Polly a quick, underhand look. ‘Mebbe when me dad’s gone we’ll get a house to rent down the town. We only live here because of him, anyroad.’

  As this was a truth never openly acknowledged, Polly felt anger surface again. ‘Don’t you care about your dad going away, Gatty? Don’t you know it’s breaking his heart having to leave us?’

  Slowly Gatty licked a finger and slowly drew it across first one dark winged eyebrow then the other. She shrugged, closing both eyes as her shoulders ascended almost to her ears.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she asked wearily, lifting the heavy sneck of the door, opening it just wide enough to slip through before closing it behind her.

  ‘Gatty!’

  Wrenching the door open so furiously it swung back against the plaster wall, Polly shouted at the top of her voice. What did it matter if she sounded like one of the common women her mother was always going on about. There was no one to hear; not for miles around was there anyone to hear. She could yell her head off and nobody would come running.