The Journal of Dora Damage Read online

  I smiled at Nora Negley opposite at number one, with her saggy-dugged goat that always strolled into the parlour just when you were sat there having a cup of tea, and the widow Patience Bishop at number three who never liked visitors, or tea. Agatha Marrow was leading her donkey-cart up the road to number sixteen; I could see she had a new maid from the poorhouse to help her, for the last one was carried off by an ague even as she was stoking the range not long back.

  ‘Marnin’, Dara dearie.’

  ‘Morning, Agatha.’

  ‘Wet in’t it?’

  ‘Wet it is.’

  ‘It is wet, oh, in’t it wet?’

  When times were better I used to give her our laundry, for although her children were the dirtiest in the street, it was a miracle the way the sheets came back from her without a speck of soot on them. But when I did it, no matter where I hung them, inside or out, the smuts and blacks from my hearth, or of the hearths of the city, would get to them some way.

  I closed the door just as Peter re-entered from the house, somewhat sheepishly.

  ‘I – er – I was looking for the unguent,’ he murmured. ‘It’s gone from the pot on the dresser.’ He started hunting for his spectacles, fists curled by his sides.

  ‘It is gone, yes,’ I said, equally quietly, with only the slightest raise of my eyebrow, not so as he could chide me for any impertinence, for he had dismissed it as quackery when I made it the previous winter, but that hadn’t been such a wet one as this.

  Eventually he found his spectacles lying on the binding primer. He picked them up carefully, but his hideous fingers were a sorry sight; it was like he was raising his glasses to his face with two cow’s udders. I thought of suggesting a butter rub, but I held my tongue, for I already knew that the pennies in the tea caddy would not last the week, and Peter would scold me if there was no butter for his toast. We settled again into a grim, clammy silence; the only sounds were the puttering and hissing of the rain in the gutters and the gas in the pipes, whispering to us of the mysteries of the city, as if our very fates were bound into it, and which we could not hope to comprehend.

  At two o’clock as usual I carried Lucinda back into the house, her legs wrapped around my waist, and she folded her head into my neck. Her smooth blonde hair fell about my shoulders like a pelerine of gold lace on a gentlewoman; indeed, I was all the finer for Lucinda. I was glad to leave the workshop and get on with the household chores while she rested, for I could smell the trouble, and I did not want her to have an attack.

  The first time Lucinda had a fit she was but three days old. I still had no milk at the time, for it took a few days to rise into the breast, and in her fury and hunger she cried out sharply before convulsing, all twitches and purple. ‘Hush, you angry thing,’ I admonished, and, as if to punish me for my harsh words, her body flicked itself violently out of my hands, and almost into the fire. Her tiny tongue lolled from her mouth and only the whites of her eyes were visible, and she writhed and thrust herself close to the ashes, as if the devil himself were inside her and wanted to return to the inferno whence he came. I seized her and held her close, then laid her down on the chair and pressed my body against hers as her little fists and feet pummelled and thrashed my tender belly, until she lay still again.

  I was frightened; I even called for the doctor, who told me she was having a teething fit, and gave her castor-oil, and told me to submerge her up to her neck in hot water the next time she fitted. But when the convulsions persisted beyond her full mouth of teeth I did not call the doctor again, for there was a fear greater than that from which I knew my daughter was suffering. I had grown to understand that my daughter was afflicted by the same disorder that ruined my grandfather’s chances of a reasonable existence, and which saw him incarcerated in an asylum at the age of twenty-four.

  I went to visit him once – old Georgie Tanner – with my mother when I was only five, just like Lucinda. I remember an old man more vividly than my grandfather, an old man crouching by his bed, tugging at his sheets, hissing, ‘Your majesty!’ at him. ‘Your majesty. Can’t be? Is’t thou?’ When we approached, he stood up with the sheets wrapped round his loins, the bones of his chest protruding out of his nightshirt, and pointed at my grandfather. ‘Ladies of the court! His Majesty King George the Third!’ He pulled a chair up for my mother, then turned to me, and clasped my hand to his chest. ‘But mark you,’ he whispered, nodding conspiratorially, ‘it is my army that shall lead the rebellion, and then I shall rule the world!’

  And when I looked around me to establish the whereabouts of the rest of his army, I caught the eye of another man, lying in his bed, who turned his face towards me and said, with a mouth as dry as skin, ‘No food since 1712.’

  It is possible that a five-year-old is better equipped than an adult when it comes to coping with such displays of mental peculiarity. That is not to say that insanity always turns an old fellow back into a child, but that children are of necessity constantly dancing in and out of the shadows of reason, and better at accepting displays of lunacy. Certainly my mother was more discomfited by the experience than I was, and had I not taken her as my example of how best to react in the circumstances, my sole memory of my grandfather would, doubtless, be a more pleasant one. Instead, I remember old Georgie Tanner more as she saw him: a cause for grief, smelling sour, lying inert, his rheumy eyes directed at the ceiling, and his mouth sore and dripping from the latest chemical solution intended to control his seizures.

  He wasn’t mad, even a five-year-old could tell that. He was just unlucky, for men don’t often get locked up, not for madness, even though there are more mad men than women. Madness is a female word. ‘It’s a madness’ they say, like it’s a governess, or a seamstress, or a murderess. There’s no male equivalent, no such word as ‘madner’. I should start saying it, but then they might lock me up. Peter took me to see Hamlet at the Royal in our courting days, and when I saw Ophelia, I knew she wasn’t mad. I wanted to cry out that madness isn’t this pretty, with flowers entwined in her hair and ivy between her toes. It was Hamlet who was mad, carrying on to himself like that, and Claudius too, but who’s brave enough to lock up a king and a prince? I wanted to tell the whole theatre, but they would have told me I was stirred by the heat, and that the gas-lights were hurting my head, which they probably were.

  Lucinda wasn’t mad either, but with the Falling Sickness one still had to be careful. We led a peaceful life, owing to the delicacy of her condition: she accompanied me each morning as I sewed and folded in the workshop; in the afternoons she helped me with the chores, and in the evenings we read books, made up fanciful stories, sang, or played the old cottage piano. In the winter, we nestled by the fire and sewed leaves of paper together to make simple, tiny books, bound with scraps of leather or cloth from the workshop; in the summer, we sat in our patch of a garden and sewed real leaves together, and then we placed our leaf-books under the spindly bushes for the fairies. I kept my anxieties away from Peter, as it was not right to trouble him with women’s worries; but I also kept them away from the medical profession. I have many regrets, but that is still not one of them.

  We liked being helpful to the bookbinders, Lucinda and I, for the sewing and folding was not hard. Occasionally I was privy to the books themselves, and had made several, not unheeded, suggestions for the casing design. I had enjoyed reading them: the legislative proposals, the academic theses, the histories, the memoirs of notables, and the primers for success in commerce (but Peter kept the medical anatomies away from me). I found them more edifying and provocative than the popular romances my sex was encouraged to read. Reading was my happiness: my father had described me to Peter’s father, William Damage, as ‘bookish’ when our engagement was made, and while I knew he had not meant it entirely as a compliment, it boded well for my match with my father’s apprentice bookbinder.

  Surely one could forgive the daughter of a bookbinder for her love of books? But my father took no responsibility for my passion; he blamed
my mother, who had been a governess before their match. She had, in his opinion, made the grave error of rearing me in the fashion of her superior charges, thereby expanding my intellect beyond the material station of any husband his income was capable of attracting. I would, he was convinced, remain not only a spinster, but entirely friendless, as I would be the intellectual, if not economic, superior of women of my own society. So I learnt the expediency of placing bell-jars, as it were, over my love of books, philosophy, politics and art, unmoveable as they were from the mantelpiece of my life, and I allowed them to become soot-blackened with neglect.

  While Lucinda slept, I took the plants off the windowsills, shook out the muslin soot-stoppers, and washed the windows with cold tea – which would let in as much of the day’s meagre light as possible, save our candles, and bring more cheer to the dim, north-facing room – and then I cleaned the lamps. I scattered yesterday’s tea-leaves over the carpets, then swept them up again with the dust, and put them in the range to burn. My neighbours might have snubbed me for not washing the floor, but I was ever fearful of adding to the damp throughout the property and aggravating Peter’s condition, so on my knees I worked only on the worst areas, scrubbing, wiping and drying in one motion. I swept black beetles, spiders and silverfish out of the corners of the kitchen, then I went down to the room where Peter made up his paste, next to the coal-cellar, and pulled some more water from the tap. I scrubbed the pans with sand, and set about cleaning the range, as the laundry dangled on my head from the clothes-horse on the grimy ceiling. Each time I turned my head, a damp trouser leg or shirt sleeve would slap my cheeks, as if a ghost were demanding intimacy with me. A lethargy set in as I toiled, and with it the familiar quiet anger, that this was my life, these were the walls of my existence, and the confines of my hopes.

  It was not as if I were a particularly good house-keeper. For all my diligence, the house was never clean enough; I always fell short. My mother had been a veritable army general in the way she kept first our house in Hastings and then our So-ho tenement impeccably clean, but for me, I fear, it was a war I seldom won, and even if I were to wave a white flag of defeat, it would not be white at all, but a dingy grey flag, so no one would understand that I was surrendering. I spent the first years of our marriage waiting for Peter to realise that I did not wear a halo with regard to house-keeping; when he finally became aware of this, I felt continuously guilty for disappointing him so. If we were ever to have tipped one hundred pounds a year we could have considered employing a young maid-of-all-work in her first employ, but every year we never made it. We used to make do with a charwoman once a fortnight who helped with the heavy work and laundry, but now we could not even run to that. It was Peter’s highest aspiration; not because he thought to ease the burden on me, but because it would have been proof of a certain gaining of station.

  But my mother’s favourite instruction to me, which she also taught the little girls in her charge (although never the little boys), was ‘whatever it is that you desire, halve it’. Whether it be hopes for cake at tea-time, or a wish for a speedy recovery from an illness, my mother advised that if one halves one’s expectations, one will never be quite so disappointed. And so I learnt that a polite little girl only takes half of what she really wants, and learns to settle with that half, and so I did, especially as far as Peter and our way of life in Lambeth were concerned.

  My smock, apron, cap, face and arms were all wet and filthy, but it was four o’clock, and Lucinda was waking, so I shook all my dusty, sooty cloths, skirts and aprons into the dust-hole, then carried her downstairs and set her in her chair while I made Peter’s meat-tea: eggs and forcemeat balls with potatoes. The wind raged outside, and I dared not leave the lid off the pan for too long for fear of soot being blown down the chimney.

  ‘Are you making soot soup for Papa?’ Lucinda said from behind me.

  ‘No, love, I’m making smut stew,’ I said, kissing her, and smoothing her hair, which was all ruffled from the bed.

  ‘Yum, yum. And I’d like some black broth.’

  ‘And so you shall have it. Just let’s wait until Old Man Wind has blown some more blacks down the chimney, and we’ll catch them in our pan and fry them up good and proper.’

  But just then, Peter crashed in from the workshop in such a gammon I feared Lucinda would fall fitting. He barked at me, kicked the table leg as if he wished it were my own, and ignored Lucinda huddling in my arms.

  ‘Where is it? We must have one somewhere. What have you done with them, woman?’

  ‘What is it you’re looking for?’

  ‘A candle-stub, a candle-stub. Jack has failed to wax the cords of a casing. Again. And I must do it. Again.’ Neither he nor I knew at this point that it would be the last one he would ever make; still I ignored the signs.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said, ‘and here, drink this, before you head back.’

  ‘Wretched stuff. Doesn’t work.’ But still, he downed it, and went back to his mechanics in the workshop. And he was right. Salicin never seemed to offer his fat old joints the relief that it was reputed to provide.

  Where Peter was round, I was sharp: he used to complain that it was like sharing a bed with a carriage-axle. But I was not so much thin as muscular, all sinewy arms and bony shoulders, with no breasts or hips to speak of, and I knew that I lacked femininity because of my muscles. My snub nose and lank hair gave no beauty to my face, only my chin was round and stuck out like a bun put on the wrong side of a cottage-loaf. We were Jack Sprat and his wife, but in reverse. Maybe it was wrong of me to describe Peter’s fingers as fat. They weren’t fat, just as the pot-belly of a bag-of-bones Fenian isn’t fat either, but the opposite: it’s the worst sign of hunger, and Peter’s fingers were the worst sign of something else, I didn’t know what. He was born in the caul, his sister Rosie had told me, and drank his mother dry by the time he was four months old. Her tit gave up on him, and he on her, for she was rather partial to gin, and Peter had been an advocate of the temperate way of life since he could talk. But he could certainly drink water and tea by the gallon. He had already had nine cups of tea today, and would drink another six more before the day was out. Three to every one of Jack’s; four to every one of mine. Still, tea wasn’t costly, and left me with a fine bunch of leaves to sweep the dust up with each afternoon. Besides, it was his only excess, and I believed all men had to have one. He did not squander our money in the ale-house; I could forgive him his weekly pound of tea.

  At half past six I aired Lucinda’s nightdress over the fire, then put her to bed, read her a story, and heard her prayers.

  ‘Mama,’ she said to me, in that tone of voice which always preceded a difficult question.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What if God doesn’t look on me tonight, and something bad happens?’

  ‘God always looks down on you, little one.’

  ‘But bad things do happen too.’

  ‘Yes, they do, but maybe they are God’s will.’ I didn’t believe it, but it was said to me, and I said it to her, and she will say it to her children too, and so the conspiracy goes on. Besides, I did not have a better answer.

  ‘But why would He want bad things to happen, if He loves us?’

  ‘Some things He just can’t help. But bad things won’t happen to you tonight.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I know.’

  ‘Because you won’t let them?’

  ‘That’s right. I won’t let them.’

  ‘But what if a spider comes into my room, and wants to get into my bed?’

  ‘You must tell it to shoo.’

  ‘But what if the spider’s mother had told him to tell me to shoo?’

  ‘Then you must call me, and I will come and lie down with you, and then the spider will see that I’m bigger than its mother. Now, good night. And sleep well.’

  ‘Good night.’

  And as I left her bedroom I thanked the Lord as always that we had lived another whole d
ay together, even if He does let bad things happen.

  The clock on the mantel chimed seven as I descended, and I quickly scanned the parlour, which looked very dark tonight. The walls were papered with brown sprigs of flowers; the blue of the round tablecloth on the table was the only source of colour. Four ladder-backed chairs were neatly tucked in to the table, and a Windsor chair and an armchair with fatigued upholstery were turned towards the fire, on top of a faded floral rug. On the wall above the fire was an old print of The Annunciation, and below it on the mantel was a black marble clock, with a jar of spills on one side and a box of lucifers on the other. I heard Peter dismiss Jack and Sven through the curtain, so I checked that Peter’s slippers were warm by the fire, and his pipe padded with fresh tobacco. I knew that Jack was helping him on with his overcoat, and I could hear the keys outside in the street as Peter locked the external workshop door.

  Peter was just now standing and waving Jack and Sven off up Ivy-street, before turning to walk the few steps along the pavement to his own front door. He could, of course, have simply locked the workshop from the inside once his workers had departed, then entered the house through the curtain. He would have stayed warm and dry like that, but then, the good folk of Ivy-street would not have got their twice-daily glimpse of Mr Damage.