It was late that night when the results were declared. Matthew Hume was the elected Member of Parliament for Mobury.
What a celebration there was! Uncle Peter presided. We drank champagne to the success of the new Member, and he stood with Helena on one side and Uncle Peter on the other receiving congratulations. I felt quite carried away by the excitement, and for a while forgot my difficulties.
Back in London, the question arose: What was I going to do? It had to be answered.
I went down to Frances’s Mission. I was surprised at the difference in her premises. She had a large house with many rooms in it. She told me that the old one was turned into a dormitory for the homeless.
Peterkin and she worked in harmony. They had the same ideals; they knew exactly what they wanted to do. Peterkin’s gentle manner was a contrast to Frances’s brisk one. Each seemed to supply what the other lacked.
“Ours,” Peterkin told me, “is a marriage of two minds in complete harmony with each other.”
I felt a touch of envy. Both Helena and Peterkin had found happiness. I was the only one to whom that desired state would not come.
When I suggested staying with them for a few weeks they welcomed the idea warmly.
Frances said: “We have people who come down now and then to help … society girls often who feel like a change and have the urge to do good. Some of them are good but they like to say they’ve been. My father has made the place fashionable.”
I came in contact with poverty such as I had never dreamed existed. I went into attics where women sat sewing all day, often in poor light; some had children to feed. I noticed these women’s eyes which looked as though they had sunk into their heads and I knew it was due to their working at their sewing half into the night—all for a pittance barely enough to keep them alive.
Frances said: “We’re trying to get them to pay more for the work. I have some of them here sewing for us and I see that they get good food.”
What I found most pathetic was the children. There was one little fellow—he couldn’t have been more than five years old—who had been a chimney sweep since the age of three. He was terrified of the dark, sooty chimneys and had run away from his master. Peterkin had found him wandering in the streets. Frances dealt with him in her usual brisk, unsentimental way. When I was there he was doing little jobs in the kitchen. The little one was in the seventh heaven bliss and his attitude towards Frances was one of idolatry.
“It makes you humble,” said Peterkin.
There was the crossing sweeper who had been run over and crippled—a boy of some eight years. Frances took him in and found him some light job he could do about the house.
There were women whose husbands or paramours had ill-treated them. Their wounds horrified me. I learned a little first aid; I did some of the cooking; I turned my hands to several jobs; and like Peterkin, I felt humble, and so much better.
There was one young woman to whom I took quite a fancy. Her name was Kitty. She came to the house one day when both Frances and Peterkin were out and I was the first one who saw her.
She was in a pitiful state—unkempt and near starvation.
She stammered something about someone’s telling her they’d help her if she came to this house.
I gave her some soup—there was always a cauldron of soup simmering in the kitchen. I spoke to her soothingly and told her we would look after her.
She looked lost and lonely and frightened. She was, I could see, really a pretty girl.
Frances came in and took charge and in a few days there was a great change in Kitty. She was bright and meant to enjoy life but she had had a bad time. She told us she had come up from the country to work in London. She had had a job as tweeny in a big house but the master had taken notice of her. The mistress found out and sent her packing with no money, no reference.
“It’s an old story,” said Frances.
I took a special interest in her; she seemed to like me too. She was very capable and almost took over the management of the kitchen.
The house was sparsely furnished.
“We don’t waste money on fancy stuff,” said Frances. “As much as my father-in-law has given us we still need more money.”
There was a big room with a wooden table in it; this table was kept scrupulously clean and we used to eat there in the evenings. Dinner was usually between eight and nine o’clock and was generally a stew of some sort which was kept simmering on the fire so that it was ready at whatever time we sat down. After we had eaten we would sit there, with the candles guttering, tired after an exhausting day, and we would talk about the work we were doing and life in general.
The memories of those evenings would stay with me all my life. I can still recall Peterkin’s hot anger about something particularly shocking he had seen that day, and Frances’s almost clinical approach; and the views of the other young people who had come to help. We talked far into the night, sometimes absorbed by the conversations, at others too tired to move even when the clock struck midnight.
One day I had been out shopping and when I came in Frances was in the hall.
“Oh hello,” she said. “Someone you know is coming to see me this evening.”
“Someone I know?”
“Brother Joe.”
“Joe? How is he?”
She lifted her shoulder. “He comes to London now and then and he always looks in on his little sister. Sometimes he stays for a few days and gives a hand.”
“Is he here now?”
“No. He’s been in and gone off somewhere on business. He’ll be back this evening. I didn’t tell him you were here. I wondered whether you wanted to see him.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I didn’t know.” I realized that she, like some others, thought that at one time there had been a rather special friendship between Joe and me which had petered out when the scandal about Joe’s father and Uncle Peter had been revealed.
I wondered what it would be like meeting Joe again.
He was there at the scrubbed wood table that evening. He had changed a little. He looked older and more solemn.
He took my hand and shook it warmly.
“How nice to see you, Annora.”
“And for me to see you, Joe. How are you?”
“Oh, quite well. It seems a long time …”
“It is.”
“You’ve been to Australia since.”
“Yes.”
“I’m very sorry. I heard, of course.”
I nodded.
“Are you staying here long?”
“I haven’t many plans. I am just spending a little time with Frances and Peterkin.”
“They are doing a wonderful job here.”
It was obviously trivial conversation. I thought, We are both a little nervous of each other. He is remembering how I caught him coming out of Uncle Peter’s study, putting those papers in his pocket. He is embarrassed about that and because I have lost my family and my home.
How different life was for both of us since our first meeting in the Park!
In the candle-lit atmosphere, amongst all the talk, the tension seemed to lessen. Once or twice Joe smiled at me at something which was being said, and I felt pleased to see him again.
One of the helpers—an earnest young woman from a county family—was saying: “I met Reverend Goodson this afternoon. He is a little displeased with us. He says no good can come of what we are doing because so much of the money we are using comes from a tainted source. Those, my dears, were his very words.”
I saw Joe flinch and then his mouth hardened. I knew he was thinking of the manner in which Uncle Peter was attempting to rehabilitate himself by giving so generously to charity.
She went on: “I told him how you had rescued Maggie Trent from that savage she was living with and that you had saved her life, for he would surely have killed her. I told him about little Tom, bruised and terrified, who is too big for chimneys now and was still being forced up them. He would have gone mad, poor mite. He was scared out of his wits of being burned to death. And there are others like that, I said to the reverend gentleman. I said, ‘If they can save people like that, they are not going to look twice at where the money comes from.’”