Cakes and Ale

plum jam when I needed them, packed my box when I went to school, nursed me when I was ill, read to me when I was bored, and scolded me when I was naughty. Emily, the housemaid, was a flighty young thing, and Mary-Ann didn’t know whatever would become of me if she had the looking after of me. Mary-Ann was a Blackstable girl. She had never been to London in her life and I do not think she had been to Tercanbury more than three or four times. She was never ill. She never had a holiday. She was paid twelve pounds a year. One evening a week she went down the town to see her mother, who did the vicarage washing; and on Sunday evenings she went to church. But Mary-Ann knew everything that went on in Blackstable. She knew who everybody was, who had married whom, what anyone’s father had died of, and how many children, and what they were called, any woman had had.

I asked Mary-Ann my question and she slopped a wet clout noisily into the sink.

“I don’t blame your uncle,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you go about with them, not if you was my nephew. Fancy their askin’ you to ride your bicycle with them! Some people will do anything.”

I saw that the conversation in the dining room had been repeated to Mary-Ann.

“I’m not a child,” I said.

“That makes it all the worse. The impudence of their comin’ ’ere at all!” Mary-Ann dropped her aitches freely. “Takin’ a house and pretendin’ to be ladies and gentlemen. Now leave that pie alone.”

The raspberry tart was standing on the kitchen table and I broke off a piece of crust with my fingers and put it in my mouth.

“We’re goin’ to eat that for our supper. If you’d wanted a second ’elpin’ why didn’t you ’ave one when you was ’avin’ your dinner? Ted Driffield never could stick to anything. He ’ad a good education, too. The one I’m sorry for is his mother. He’s been a trouble to ’er from the day he was born. And then to go an’ marry Rosie Gann. They tell me that when he told his mother what he was goin’ to do she took to ’er bed and stayed there for three weeks and wouldn’t talk to anybody.”

“Was Mrs. Driffield Rosie Gann before she married? Which Ganns were those?”

Gann was one of the commonest names at Blackstable. The churchyard was thick with their graves.

“Oh, you wouldn’t ’ave known them. Old Josiah Gann was her father. He was a wild one, too. He went for a soldier and when he come back he ’ad a wooden leg. He used to go out doing painting, but he was out of work more often than not. They lived in the next ’ouse to us in Rye Lane. Me an’ Rosie used to go to Sunday school together.”

“But she’s not as old as you are,” I said with the bluntness of my age.

“She’ll never see thirty again.”

Mary-Ann was a little woman with a snub nose and decayed teeth, but fresh-coloured, and I do not suppose she could have been more than thirty-five.

“Rosie ain’t more than four or five years younger than me, whatever she may pretend she is. They tell me you wouldn’t know her now all dressed up and everything.”

“Is it true that she was a barmaid?” I asked.

“Yes, at the Railway Arms and then at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham. Mrs. Reeves ’ad her to ’elp in the bar at the Railway Arms, but it got so bad she had to get rid of her.”

The Railway Arms was a very modest little public house just opposite the station of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway. It had a sort of sinister gaiety. On a winter’s night as you passed by you saw through the glass doors men lounging about the bar. My uncle very much disapproved of it, and had for years been trying to get its license taken away. It was frequented by the railway porters, colliers, and farm labourers. The respectable residents of Blackstable would have disdained to enter it and, when they wanted a glass of bitter, went to the Bear and Key or the Duke of Kent.

“Why, what did she do?” I asked, my eyes popping out of my head.

“What didn’t she do?” said Mary-Ann. “What d’you think your uncle would say if he caught me tellin’ you things like that? There wasn’t a man who come in to ’ave a drink that she didn’t carry on with. No matter who they was. She couldn’t stick to anybody, it was just one man after another. They tell me it was simply ’orrible. That was when it begun with Lord George. It wasn’t the sort of place he was likely to go to, he was too grand for that, but they say he went in accidental like one day when his train was late, and he saw her. And after that he was never out of the place, mixin’ with all them common rough people, and of course they all knew what he was there for, and him with a wife and three children. Oh, I was sorry for her! And the talk it made. Well, it got so Mrs. Reeves said she wasn’t going to put up with it another day and she gave her her wages and told her to pack her box and go. Good riddance to bad rubbish, that’s what I said.”

I knew Lord George very well. His name was George Kemp and the title by which he was always known had been given him ironically owing to his grand manner. He was our coal merchant, but he also dabbled in house property, and he owned a share in one or two colliers. He lived in a new brick house that stood in its own grounds and he drove his own trap. He was a stoutish man with a pointed beard, florid, with