A Mother’s Spirit. Anne Bennett
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that it was going to happen. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ she said to Joe when he tried to explain. ‘You cannot expect me to leave here and go into some slummy apartment block.’
‘Norah, it’s all that we can afford,’ Joe said. He felt sorry for her because she had been in a privileged position all her life and any other way to live was alien to her.
‘There must be money in the bank.’
‘There isn’t, Norah,’ Joe said decidedly. ‘And that is why we will have to sell the factory, and this house, and so we can’t live here any more. In fact we no longer own it, because Brian borrowed against it. The bank now owns this house.’
‘I have never heard anything so absurd in the whole of my life, and I will not move from here and no one will make me.’
Joe could see that Norah was getting agitated and upset, and he left her and appealed to Gloria. ‘Talk to your mother,’ he pleaded. ‘I know she is fighting the inevitable because she’s scared. See if you can get her to understand.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Gloria said, though she too was frightened of the future and hated the thought of leaving her home. She knew there was no alternative, however, because Joe had written all the figures down for her. That was what she must make her mother see.
Gloria tried hard. For a long time she explained how bad the situation was for them all, but Norah wouldn’t listen.
‘Ignore her,’ Joe said eventually. ‘You have done your best. Pack up her stuff along with your own. Take none of your fancy dresses or ball gowns, though you can take any personal items and gifts you have been given, so you can take your jewellery and your mother’s. We may well have need of it yet.’
‘Can we take nothing else?’ Gloria said.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Joe said. ‘It has to be sold to pay off the creditors. The bank has agreed, however, that I can take the everyday crockery and cutlery from the kitchen, and a selection of cooking utensils.’
‘Cooking utensils will be wasted on me,’ Gloria said. ‘I told you before we married that I couldn’t cook and didn’t know the least thing about keeping house.’
‘It can’t be that hard,’ Joe said, ‘for there are plenty of people at it. Anyway, I should think not being able to cook a four-course meal will be the least of our troubles.’
Adamant to the last, even when the bailiffs entered the house, Norah sat on an easy chair in the drawing room and refused to move.
Outside, a man with a clipboard gave a perfunctory look over the truck that Joe had hired to ascertain they hadn’t squirrelled away the family silver. They were ready to go, but Norah wouldn’t budge.
‘Lady, if you don’t move then we will lift you up and dump you on the drive outside,’ one of the men told her eventually. Norah’s lips were clamped shut and she glowered at him. He went out to where Joe stood leaning against the truck and said, ‘By, but she’s one cussed old bird.’
‘She’s scared and saddened,’ Joe said. ‘Let me talk to her again.’
The man shrugged. ‘All right, pal,’ he said. ‘She’s all yours, but remember we haven’t got all day.’
Joe went into the drawing room and faced Norah. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘What’s this about now? Both Gloria and I explained it to you.’
Norah didn’t answer that. Instead, she said in an outraged tone, ‘He said – that man said – that he would pick me up and put me on the sidewalk.’ She gave an emphatic nod of her head and added, ‘He wouldn’t dare.’
‘He might well,’ Joe said. ‘He has a job to do.’
‘Then let him try,’ Norah said fiercely. ‘The audacity of it! Carrying me out of my own house.’
Joe kneeled down and, taking Norah by the shoulders, he looked her straight in the eyes. ‘Norah,’ he said. ‘Listen to what I am going to say. This is not your house, not any longer, and you have no right here. The bank owns it now, and you must leave it to them and come with me and Gloria. She is waiting for you in the truck.’
‘Joe, it will break my heart to leave this place,’ Norah said, and Joe’s own heart turned over in sympathy for her, but this wasn’t the time to soften.
‘No it won’t. You are stronger than that, Norah, and anyway, there is no alternative.’ He stood up and put out his hand. ‘Come on,’ he coaxed.
He saw the tears trickle down Norah’s lined cheeks, but she took Joe’s hand and he led her outside.
Joe was very proud of the furnished apartment that he now rented in Manhattan West Side. It was expensive, though, and he knew that he would have to find a job as quickly as possible to pay for it. It was on the fifth floor and had two sizeable bedrooms, a living room, a separate dining room, a roomy kitchen and bathroom, and a balcony.
Gloria could see that Joe was pleased with it and so she didn’t say that she thought it awful, cramped and squalid. She knew her mother felt the same, because she saw it in the disdainful curl of Norah’s lips and the set of her jaw. She said nothing, but then since the day she had been taken from her home she had said very little at all.
From the very first day in the apartment Gloria’s life changed beyond all recognition. She had to learn to wash dishes, launder clothes and clean the apartment, and though she found things extremely difficult, she complained little, knowing that it wouldn’t help. She also looked after her mother, who was so sunk in melancholy that she seemed unable to rouse herself at all and spent most of her time in bed.
In the early days, Joe showed Gloria how to cook porridge, bacon and fish, eggs, both boiled and fried, and how to make tea and boil potatoes. Apart from that they lived on sandwiches and pies they bought from the shop.
Gloria had no idea of budgeting either, in the beginning, for in her old world, if she had money she spent it on anything she wanted. Much of what she bought was put on her father’s account before her marriage, and Joe’s after it. Now Joe had to explain about putting aside the money for bills and rent, and saving any spare in case he had difficulty in finding work, and she found this very hard to take.
He thought he would find work with little trouble, but he soon realised there were few jobs to go around and many people after them. Men would cluster around the gates of one of the factories still operating, and that way might be picked for a day or two’s work. That work might consist of anything and whatever wage you were offered, however paltry it was, you took it, for if you didn’t someone else would.
Their poverty frustrated and angered him because it was the result of nothing he had done wrong. And the worry that he wouldn’t earn enough to keep them alive never really left him. He certainly wasn’t earning enough to pay the rent. Every week he had to dip into the biscuit tin and he knew things couldn’t go on like that indefinitely.
By 1930 more factories had gone to the wall and it was harder than ever to get work. The cold was intense throughout January and February, and there were many snowstorms. Joe was often soaked to the skin after standing for hours in the hope of employment, only to be passed over for younger, fitter-looking men. That was a real problem, for in March that year Joe was forty and since finding Brian in his study that time, and the dreadful days following it, he really did look his age.
Gloria, however, was still optimistic that their fortunes would improve and this seemed to be the case when Joe was taken on as a labourer in the building of the Empire State Building in March. She began to believe their troubles were over, but Joe told her to go easy, for the work would not last for ever. He was proved right too. The job was good for the months that he had it, but although the building was set to be the tallest skyscraper in the whole of America, it was going up far too fast for Joe’s liking and was finished by May of the following year.
Gloria felt engulfed in panic and misery when Joe told her that his job was at an end, because she knew he had nothing else lined up.