Free A Better World than This by Marie Joseph Page B

and leaning heavily on her arm. Daisy had taken in the seams of her mother’s good linen coat, and beneath the veil on a hat that made her look like a consumptive bee-keeper, Martha’s once round face was drawn and pale.
    Like the spring daffodils, Martha had drooped and flattened as each month went by, her once towering cottage-loaf hair-style sunk to the thickness of an oatmeal biscuit. A fierce lady from Spirella had visited the house and fitted her with a new pink corset more in keeping with her shrinking frame, and her old ones had gone for fourpence each at a chapel jumble sale.
    Daisy had long since lost her battle to have Florence working behind the counter in the little shop. Edna was firmly ensconced and would take some shifting now.
    ‘They need the money with Arnold being out of work and the baby coming,’ Martha had argued.
    ‘It’s Betty’s and Cyril’s baby!’ Daisy’s objections were loud and forceful, but her mother was adamant.
    ‘It’s her first grandchild and I know how she feels. I would go out and scrub floors for a grandchild of mine,’ she added, shooting a baleful glance at Daisy. ‘But then I won’t be here to see one of
mine
.’
    She sat constantly over the fire, needles clicking as she worked on a matinée jacket in yellow with an intricate scalloped edging. In yellow, because that would do for either.
    ‘Your Daisy’s seen the back of that Londoner,’ Edna said one day.
    ‘He’s spoilt her for other men,’ Martha agreed at once. ‘She’s started going to the pictures again once she’s got me to bed, but she won’t meet the right sort that way. She’ll never meet a man if she doesn’t mix up.’
    ‘It isn’t natural a girl of her age going to the pictures on her own.’ Edna smiled complacently. ‘You never know who she’s sitting next to. Our Betty, bless her, and Cyril, never go out except to his mother’s of a Friday. They’ve got more to do with their money.’
    Neither of them could see or understand that the cinema was a lifeline to sanity for Daisy. Her sixpenny ticket to a world where glossy-lipped beautiful women, wearing satin dressing-gowns and smoking cigarettes in long ebony holders, drove men mad. Exhaling the smoke into their lovers’ eyes, they lowered spider’s legs eyelashes over pancake make-up, not a hair on their heads out of place, even in force ten gales.
    Where Sam’s handsome features became superimposed on the rugged countenance of Clark Gable; where the suave John Gilbert’s tight smile reminded her of the way Sam had looked the night he went away. The lanky stride of Gary Cooper brought his walk to mind, but on the evening Daisy identified him with Paul Muni escaping from the chain gang, she accepted the fact that she had almost forgotten Sam’s face.
    Sitting alone, huddled in a tip-up chair in the back stalls, Daisy gave herself up to the Hollywood dream. She was a thick-lidded Garbo in
Grand Hotel
, an anguished Helen Hayes in
A Farewell to Arms
and a husky-voiced Claudette Colbert in
The Sign of the Cross
.
    In the cinema she knew that Sam would come to her again.
    In the bakehouse in the cold pre-dawn mornings she knew that he would not.
    Wakes Week came as usual in the middle of July.
    Evolved originally from village religious festivals, the Wakes holidays had weathered the Industrial Revolution, and the whole of the cotton and engineering industries still closed down completely for at least a week.
    ‘If the world was to end with them,’ Josiah Wedgwood down in the Potteries had complained a long time ago, ‘Wakes
must
be observed.’
    The holiday savings clubs were the salvation of the working people. Sixpence a week for a year meant twenty-five shillings plus interest to be collected just before the Wakes, and the amount of money saved was often the deciding factor as to the length of the holiday. Every train carried crowds of holidaymakers away from the smoke and the grime, and the rows of closed shops gave towns the