I thought I might be in dead trouble. Miss Beckworth was such a funny old-fashioned teacher. I didn’t know what she might do to punish you. Maybe she had a cane tucked up her skirt and she’d whip it out and whack me one.
But all she did was crumple up my poem and say, ‘I don’t think this is quite Emily Dickinson standard, Charlotte. Now write me a proper poem please.’
I decided she maybe wasn’t such a bad old stick after all – so I tried hard with my poem. I decided to be a bit different. I chose to write about a tube, because they’re underground trains, aren’t they, and it was all about the dark in the tunnels and how that weird voice that says ‘Mind the gap’ could be the voice of the Tunnel Monster.
Jamie peered rudely over my shoulder. ‘You’re writing rubbish,’ he sneered.
‘Yours is the real rubbish,’ I snapped back, reading his pathetic twee twoddle about the Train going through the Rain, in the Midst of the Storm, the Train will keep you Warm . . . Yuck!
But when Miss Beckworth walked round the class to see what we’d written so far she said he’d made a Good Attempt. And do you know what she said about my poem?
‘Try to stick to the subject, Charlotte.’
That was it!
‘Told you you were writing rubbish,’ said Jamie.
So I put down my pen and didn’t write another word. I had Angela and Lisa and all the other girls in hysterics in the cloakrooms after lunch doing my Miss Beckworth imitation. Even back in class I just had to put my front teeth over my bottom lip to have all the girls in giggles.
‘Settle down, please,’ said Miss Beckworth sharply. ‘Now, History. I thought this term we’d do the Victorians.’
I ask you! Who wants to study the stuffy old Victorians? Well, guess. Jamie Teacher’s Pet Edwards.
Miss Beckworth began telling us about the Victorians, starting off with Queen Victoria herself – that fat little waddly Queen with the pudding face who said, ‘We are not amused.’ Well, I wasn’t amused either, especially when Miss Beckworth started on about the Queen Vic pub down the road and Albert Park and how she lived in these old Victorian mansion flats, and did any of us live in a Victorian home by any chance?
I slumped to one side with the boredom of all this just as Jamie stuck his hand up so violently I very nearly got two fingers impaled up my nostrils.
‘I live in a Victorian house, Miss Beckworth,’ he said, showing off like mad. ‘In Oxford Terrace.’
I sat up straight. I knew he was a right little posh nob – but I had no idea he lived in one of those huge grand houses in Oxford Terrace, all steps and little lion statues and incy-wincy balconies as if the people who live there might come and do a Royal Family and wave down at you.
Oxford Terrace is on our way home from the town. Sometimes when Jo and I are trailing back with our Sainsbury’s bags cutting grooves in our hands we make up stuff and we sometimes play we live in Oxford Terrace and we’re Lady Jo and Lady Charlie and we have champagne for breakfast and we go for a workout in a posh club every day and then we have a light lunch some-place snobby and then we shop until we drop, going flash flash flash with our credit cards, and then we eat out and go dancing in nightclubs and chat up film stars and rock stars and football players but we just tease them and then jump into our personal stretch limousine and whizz home to our five-storey half-million mini-palace in Oxford Terrace.
‘You live in Oxford Terrace???’ I said.
Even Miss Beckworth seemed surprised. ‘Do you live in a flat there, James?’
‘No, we’ve got the whole house,’ said Jamie airily.
‘Well, perhaps you can help us understand what life was like in a big Victorian house, James.’ Miss Beckworth rummaged amongst a whole box of books about the Victorians. She pounced on something about Victorian houses and held up a picture of a Victorian parlour. ‘I don’t suppose your house looks much like this inside, though, James?’
‘Actually my mum and dad have this real thing about the Victorians and they’ve tried to make the house as authentic as possible, so we’ve got stuff like William Morris wallpaper and Arts and Crafts tiles – though we’ve got ordinary modern things like televisions and computers and stuff.’
I felt I was sitting next to Little Lord Fauntleroy. He carried on in this sickening fashion for ages until eventually even Miss Beckworth got tired of it.
‘Thank you very much, James. If anyone wants to know more about Victorian houses then you’re obviously a mine of information. Now, we’ll be studying the Victorians all this term in class, but I want you all to work on your own special project at home too.’
I groaned. I hate home projects. ‘You don’t sound ultra-enthusiastic, Charlotte,’ said Miss Beckworth.
‘Well. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anything about the Victorians. Not like some people,’ I said, glaring at Jamie.
‘I’ll copy a whole lot of suggestions for topics on the board. See if you can get your famously defective eyes to focus on them,’ said Miss Beckworth briskly. ‘It might be worth your while. I intend to award a prize for the best project at the end of term.’
So I copied out all her suggestions:
I didn’t fancy any of them.
‘Can we do more than one topic, Miss Beckworth,’ said You-know-who. ‘Can we do them all if we want?’
‘Yes, if you like,’ said Miss Beckworth.
He was quite sickening in his enthusiasm, grabbing all sorts of stuff from the book box, though he’s probably got his own private library in his Victorian mansion.
‘Here, it’s not fair, you’re bagging all the best books,’ I said, trying to snatch at a book on Victorian hospitals that looked as if it might be promisingly gory.
‘OK, OK. Here’s one specially for you,’ said Jamie – and he bungs me this book on Victorian domestic servants! ‘Know your place,’ he goes.
I was about to bash him on his big head with the servant book but Miss Beckworth got narky and told us to settle down and start the research for our projects with the books we had in our hands. So I was stuck with the servant book.
I flipped through it furiously – and then stopped. There was a photo of this girl about my age. She even looked a bit like me, skinny and pale. It was a black-and-white photo so it was hard to make out if her hair was red too. It was long, like mine, but scraped back tight behind her ears, with a little white cap crammed on top. She was surrounded by little kids, but they weren’t her brothers and sisters. She was a nursery maid. She had to look after them. She was their servant.
I was a bit stunned. I didn’t know they used to have children as servants. I read a bit about these nursery maids and kitchen maids and housemaids. They had to work all day and into the evening as well for hardly any money. Girls as young as eleven and twelve. No school. No play. No fun. Just work work work.
I decided I’d do a project on ‘Servants’. I was all set to write quite a bit about it actually. I decided I’d show that Jamie.
But Jo was already at home when I got back from school and she had such terrible scary news I forgot all about my servant project.
I didn’t remember until the next day when everyone was showing off their project books. Jamie had done ten whole pages about ‘School’ and he’d stuck in this old photo of kids in rows in a Victorian classroom and got his mum to do some lines of special copperplate handwriting.
‘I’ve finished my school topic already,’ he boasted.
So I whipped out an old exercise book and scribbled out a page at playtime.
‘I’ve finished my school topic too,’ I said, sticking my tongue out at Jamie.
SCHOOL
My name is Lottie. I am eleven years old. I left school today.
My teacher Miss Worthbeck, nearly cried when I told her I could not come back. She thinks the world of me. I am her most talented pupil. I am not being boastful, this is exactly what she said:
‘Dear Lottie, you are the best at English and writing and arithmetic, you know your geog
raphy and history perfectly, you play the piano well, you paint beautifully and you sing like a lark.’
There! I am also useful to Miss Worthbeck, because she is the only teacher at our school, and she has to control a class of forty mixed infants and twelve of us older pupils. I am not the eldest by any means. There is one great lad of fourteen, Edward James, but he is very slow. He is a head taller than Miss Worthbeck, and she finds it hard to control this boy. In fact many of the boys are great lummoxes, stupid and surly. Miss Worthbeck has to use her cane on them to keep them in order.
I do not need to resort to the cane when I am left in charge of the boys though I take delight in swishing it in front of them! But I usually instruct the little ones, and they all try hard for me and give me apples and bites of their gingerbread and scratch ‘I love Lottie’ on their slates.
Miss Worthbeck has always said I am a born teacher. She has always wanted me to stay on at the school until fourteen, and then she will give me a position as a pupil-teacher, with a proper wage. But I cannot wait two years. I need to earn a proper wage immediately.
HOME
Jo and I haven’t always had a home. We lived with Grandma and Grandpa at first. That was pretty bad. Grandma is the sort of lady who keeps a damp flannel neatly folded in a plastic bag and she’s forever whipping it out and smearing round imaginary sticky bits. On me. Even at my age. That’s nothing. She does it to Jo too.
She doesn’t do it to Grandpa because he’s one of those pale men in stripy suits who don’t ever get sticky. I can’t imagine hanging on to his sharply creased trousers or bouncing on his bony knees when I was a baby.
Grandma and Grandpa didn’t want Jo and me around, but we didn’t have any place else to go. Then we got told about the Newborough Estate and asked if we wanted a flat there. Grandma and Grandpa just about died. You’ve probably not heard of the Newborough Estate unless you live around here. You’ll definitely have heard of it if you do. The police get called out every night. And the fire service, because the kids keep setting fire to the rubbish in the chutes. The ambulances are always there too, because there are so many fights and people getting battered. Sometimes they come to scrape up the bodies because people throw themselves off the balconies because they’re so fed up living in a dump like the Newborough Estate.
But we went to live there, Jo and me. There was this HUGE row and Grandma and Grandpa said they were really washing their hands of us this time. But Jo stood up to them. Funny that. Jo can’t say boo to a goose. She lets everyone walk all over her. Especially me.
She worries terribly about Grandma and Grandpa and she tries so hard to please them. When they come over nowadays and pick faults – Grandma’s the worst, pick pick pick, and Jo winces like she’s scraping at her actual skin – she still stands up to them over me. It’s as if it’s easy-peasy, simple-pimple where I’m concerned.
I asked her how come once.
‘Because you mean more to me than anyone else,’ said Jo.
She does to me too. She’s my mum. You guessed that, didn’t you? You wouldn’t guess it though if you saw us out together. Big sister and little sister, that’s what you’d think. With me the big sister. No, that’s just a joke. Though it won’t be long before I’m taller than her. She’s only little and I’m getting big.
There’s only that much in it now.
There’s not much between us age-wise either. She was still at school when she had me. Shock Horror Disaster!
That’s what Grandma and Grandpa thought. Of course, I wasn’t observing much in those days but I can imagine it all too well. Jo’s told me lots of stuff anyway. They didn’t want her to have me. And then after I got born they wanted Jo to put me in a Home. The sort with a capital H. So that Jo could start a new life all over again.
‘This is my new life,’ said Jo. ‘As if I’d ever give my baby away! I’ll make a proper home for both of us.’
She did too. It wasn’t so bad on the Newborough Estate. Well, it was some of the time. Like when we got our door kicked in and boys wrote stuff all over the walls. Or the day this loony cornered us in the lift. Or the time our telly got nicked the day after it got delivered.
But we made some great friends there too.
It was our home, even though we didn’t have any cash to do it up and make it look pretty. We were on benefit at first, and then Jo got a job once she’d got me into nursery, but we didn’t spend much even then. We were saving.
Grandma and Grandpa stopped being so huffy and offered us lots of money to get us out of the Newborough Estate. I thought Jo was mad to say no. But she said we had to do it all by ourselves. To show them. Because they didn’t think we stood a chance.
But we made it! Jo worked hard at her job selling televisions and washing machines and we saved like crazy and then Jo got a promotion and another and then guess what. She was made the manageress of the big branch down in the shopping centre, in charge of a staff of twelve. And so we started hanging out around estate agent windows, looking for anything going really cheap because people keep getting made redundant in our area and so they can’t keep up the payments on their homes and they get taken away from them.
There were a few ex-council flats we could have managed, posher than the Newborough Estate, but Jo wasn’t having that.
‘We want something Private,’ she said. ‘Small but select.’
And that’s what we’ve got. A one-bedroomed flat in a quiet private block with laid-out gardens. No-one tore out the roses or smashed the windows or peed in the lift. The people living there were mostly elderly ladies or young married couples or schoolteachers who don’t usually tear and smash and pee publicly. They looked a bit nervously at Jo and me when we moved in – especially me – but Jo insisted we had to be on our Best Behaviour at all times.
‘Well, at least till we get accepted,’ she said. ‘So we’ll keep the CD player turned down low, right, and we’ll smile at everyone and say stuff like Good Morning and Good Afternoon ever so polite and we won’t go barging straight past someone to get in the lift first and if we’re having one of our famous ding-dong rows we’ll have to do it in a whisper, get it?’
I got it. I stuck to all these rules. Most of the time. And we’ve got accepted. Oh, one or two of the truly stuffy old bags have asked me pointed questions about Daddy and then they mumble with raised eyebrows, but even those ones say hello and offer me toffees and tell me how tall I’m getting. We’re friends with just about everyone in the flats.
But we don’t really need all the other people, of course. When we shut our blue front door (I wanted red, but Jo said we had to blend in with the others along the balcony) then we’re home and it’s all ours and we can be our family. Small, but select, like the flats.
We still haven’t got much money to do it all up because most of Jo’s earnings go on the mortgage. We’ve got a good telly and video and CD player and washing machine though (because Jo gets them at a serious discount) and we’ve painted all the flat so that it looks great. Jo wanted white for the living room (boring) but she let me choose this amazing dark red for our bedroom, and we’ve got these truly wonderful crimson curtains we found at a boot fair and a deep purply-red lamp and when it’s a treat day like a birthday we draw the curtains and switch on the lamp and have a special red picnic in our beautiful bright bedroom. Cherries, plums, jam tarts, strawberry split ice creams, Ribena for me and red wine for Jo, yum yum.
I was kind of hoping Jo and me might be having a bedroom picnic that evening because she had an appointment with the manager for the whole of our area and she was hoping it might be about further promotion.
It was scary opening the door of our flat and seeing Jo because she doesn’t usually get back from work till six at the earliest. But there she was, sitting in the middle of the living-room floor. Not doing anything, just sitting with her hands clasped round her knees.
‘Jo? What’s up?’ She looked so small sitting there like that. I towered over her as I stood beside her. ‘Jo, why
are you home from work? Don’t you feel well? Have you been sick?’ I thought maybe that was it. She looked so white. No, grey, and her eyes were all watery.
‘Oh, Charlie,’ she whispered.
‘What?’
‘The most terrible thing’s happened,’ she said in such a tiny voice that I had to bend right down close to hear.
All these different possibilities came bubbling up inside my head until I felt as if it was boiling. ‘Tell me,’ I said.
Jo opened her mouth again but her voice was just a wisp now.
‘Tell me, go on. You’re scaring me,’ I said, giving her shoulder a little shake.
I could feel she was shivering even though it was hot in the flat and she hadn’t bothered to open any of the windows when she came in.
‘Jo?’ I sat down properly beside her and put my arm right round her.
She gave a little stifled sound and then tears started dribbling down her face.
‘It can’t be that bad, whatever it is,’ I said desperately. ‘We’ve still got each other and our flat and—’
‘We haven’t!’ Jo sobbed. ‘Well, we’ve got each other. But we won’t be able to keep the flat. Because I’ve lost my job.’
‘What? But that’s ridiculous! You’re great at your job. They think the world of you. How could they get rid of you? Was this the area manager? Is he crazy?’
‘He’s lost his job too. We all have. The firm’s closing down. We all knew things had been a bit tight recently, and some of the smaller shops closed, but no-one thought . . . They’ve just gone bust, Charlie. They can’t find a buyer so that’s it. They’ve ordered us to lock up all the shops. I’m out of a job.’
‘Well . . . you’ll get another one. Easy-peasy, simple-pimple,’ I said.