Free Paradise Court by Jenny Oldfield

why’s young Amy Ogden sweating away over them top hats in Coopers’?’ Duke demanded. ‘If there’s plenty of jobs, why’s our Ett parading herself half-naked in front of them dirty-minded little bleeders at the Palace every night of the week? Tell me that. If there’s jobs, why are them poor bleeding women walking the streets out there? Don’t talk daft, Frances!’
    Duke had raised his voice, but now he halted. That last remark had hit a nerve with him. He turned away, shaking his head. That’s what had struck him the night Frances first told him about Jess; what if she ended up like those skeleton-women, clutching her bundle of rags that was really a baby starving to death? He walked to the window to gaze out. Then he took a deep breath. ‘Tell her she can come home,’ he said.
    Frances nodded without showing any reaction. But she was satisfied. She finished off her work, snipped the thread and rolled the socks into a pair. ‘I’ll go and fetch her this afternoon then.’
    Duke’s head had sunk to his chest.
    â€˜Will you tell the others, Pa?’
    â€˜Yes. Go and fetch her home, there’s a good girl. Quick as you can.’
    Frances went to him, reached up on tiptoe and kissed his lined cheek. She’d been thirteen when her mother passed on. Never since that time had she seen her father look so bad as he did this moment. ‘Don’t worry, Pa, we’ll manage.’
    â€˜I’ll knock his bleeding head off if I get the chance!’ His voice was cracked and hoarse.
    She nodded and went to put on her coat and hat. She stepped straight downstairs and out of the house, her heart heavy. She only hoped Jess would be good and co-operative now, since Duke had relented. She’d better realize what it had taken out of the old man; this arrow of disgrace in his respectable heart.
    The tram took her up Duke Street, along Bridge Road to Southwark Bridge. Over the river, she stepped out of the cold drizzle down into Cannon Street underground station. She headed north-east to Hackney, feeling the train rattle and shudder, blind to the attractions of Van Houten’s Cocoa and Nestlé’s Milk Chocolate. To outsiders, she was the schoolteacher figure in her high-necked grey costume with its fur collar and matching toque hat. She sat severely, hands crossed over the black leather bag on her knee.
    Frances had always been called Frances, never Fran, even within the Parsons family. One look at her told you she warranted the use of her full name if you wished to avoid the risk of receiving one of her somewhat haughty stares. She didn’t invite intimacy, with her straight-backed carriage and fastidious manners. She didn’t invite suitors either, since she lacked the easy banter of her sister Hettie, or Daisy O’Hagan from down the court.
    Her cool appearance might be something she regretted but couldn’t do anything to alter. She’d lost her mother at precisely that age when a girl needs some role model in her budding relationships with the opposite sex. She’d no one to turn to when she needed to know the details of how to behave after a man began to show interest. Not a natural flirt, her uncertainty converted at first into shyness, then into a distinct air of reserve. At the age when mostgirls walked out on the Common or went cycling into the countryside with the boy of their choice, Frances turned to books and study. This was an unusual thing for a girl, even then. She filled her head with novels, with images of Mr E. M. Forster’s elegant young ladies touring round Italy or showing up in India to be married. And she turned her back on the Chalky Whites and Syd Swans who drifted in and out of the tenements or who propped up the bar in the pub downstairs.
    If she was lonely she didn’t show it. Her one disastrous experience in life came after she’d finished with Board School, where she’d won prizes and