The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [54]
While the water was heating, Ma Parker began sweeping the floor. ‘Yes,’ she thought, as the broom knocked, ‘what with one thing and another I’ve had my share. I’ve had a hard life.’
Even the neighbours said that of her. Many a time, hobbling home with her fish bag, she heard them, waiting at the corner, or leaning over the area railings, say among themselves, ‘She’s had a hard life, has Ma Parker.’ And it was so true she wasn’t in the least proud of it. It was just as if you were to say she lived in the basement-back at Number 27. A hard life!…
At sixteen she’d left Stratford and come up to London as kitching-maid. Yes, she was born in Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare, sir?1 No, people were always arsking her about him. But she’d never heard his name until she saw it on the theatres.
Nothing remained of Stratford except that ‘sitting in the fireplace of a evening you could see the stars through the chimley,’ and ‘Mother always ’ad ’er side of bacon ’anging from the ceiling.’ And there was something – a bush, there was – at the front door, that smelt ever so nice. But the bush was very vague. She’d only remembered it once or twice in the hospital, when she’d been taken bad.
That was a dreadful place – her first place. She was never allowed out. She never went upstairs except for prayers morning and evening. It was a fair cellar. And the cook was a cruel woman. She used to snatch away her letters from home before she’d read them, and throw them in the range because they made her dreamy… And the beedles! Would you believe it? – until she came to London she’d never seen a black beedle. Here Ma always gave a little laugh, as though – not to have seen a black beedle! Well! It was as if to say you’d never seen your own feet.
When that family was sold up she went as ‘help’ to a doctor’s house, and after two years there, on the run from morning till night, she married her husband. He was a baker.
‘A baker, Mrs Parker!’ the literary gentleman would say. For occasionally he laid aside his tomes and lent an ear, at least, to this product called Life. ‘It must be rather nice to be married to a baker!’
Mrs Parker didn’t look so sure.
‘Such a clean trade,’ said the gentleman.
Mrs Parker didn’t look convinced.
‘And didn’t you like handing the new loaves to the customers?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Mrs Parker, ‘I wasn’t in the shop above a great deal. We had thirteen little ones and buried seven of them. If it wasn’t the ’ospital it was the infirmary, you might say!’
‘You might, indeed, Mrs Parker!’ said the gentleman, shuddering, and taking up his pen again.
Yes, seven had gone, and while the six were still small her husband was taken ill with consumption. It was flour on the lungs, the doctor told her at the time… Her husband sat up in bed with his shirt pulled over his head, and the doctor’s finger drew a circle on his back.
‘Now, if we were to cut him open here, Mrs Parker,’ said the doctor, ‘you’d find his lungs chock-a-block with white powder. Breathe, my good fellow!’ And Mrs Parker never knew for certain whether she saw or whether she fancied she saw a great fan of white dust come out of her poor dear husband’s lips…
But the struggle she’d had to bring up those six little children and keep herself to herself. Terrible it had been! Then, just when they were old enough to go to school her husband’s sister came to stop with them to help things along, and she hadn’t been there more than two months when she fell down a flight of steps and hurt her spine. And for five years Ma Parker had another baby – and such a one for crying! – to look after. Then young Maudie went wrong and took her sister Alice with her; the two boys emigrimated, and young Jim went to India with the army, and Ethel, the youngest,