Free Orphan of Angel Street by Annie Murray

and the sad darkness haunting the rooms near the canal thinned and blazed into hope again. Dulcie was born on All Hallows Eve, a plump, fair baby. Albert wept again, this time for joy.
    At three months Dulcie contracted whooping cough. Mabel rushed for a doctor, uncaring of the expense and cursing the mother with a whooping child she’d spoken to when crumbling crusts for the ducks over in Handsworth Park. In five days she was dead.
    Mabel fell into mourning and depression. They didn’t see Albert’s scattered family, and with none of her own to mourn with her she took it all on herself. Somewhere in her nature was a dulled, lugubrious space reserved for grief and disaster, perhaps cultured in the workhouse. But this was not the case with Albert. He was sunshine and tears all at the surface, his personality as slim as cardboard, enough to accommodate only the thinnest of shadows.
    He didn’t start drinking heavily though, until later.
    Susan was born in 1899, with Mabel’s dark eyes. She smiled from the first week – Mabel was certain of this even though the few people she allowed near the child said it was wind. She was placid and sweet and thrived steadily, if delicately, into a solemn-faced yet mischievous child.
    Afterwards Mabel came to think of these as the last years of her marriage. Albert, his frame already shuddering under the terrible weight of responsibility – all these lives, these deaths – was kept steady by Susan. By the light in her eyes when he came into a room, the frantic, joyful kicking of her legs as he lifted her high in the air as a baby, her running to him as she grew into a five-yearold with his own loving nature. Of all his daughters she charmed him the most, softened him as Mabel no longer could, gave him hope.
    When she fell ill they thought at first the fever was influenza, unseasonably in July. When the doctor pronounced it something far more serious the first image that blazed through Albert’s mind was another small white coffin.
    Memories of those days, then weeks were almost impossible to recall, so strange and fragmented were they as to be discounted as a dream. Absolutely sure and certain for Mabel six months later though, was that she had a child who would never run into her father’s arms again, a drunk for a husband and that her hopes for an increase in the good things in life had been sadly misplaced.
    There were another seven years of something that passed outwardly for marriage. Susan stayed small and loveable. Albert stayed drunk on and off, no longer sweet, sometimes working, sometimes not. He tried to be tender with Susan, wanted to take her out and about.
    ‘But she’s a cripple!’ Mabel raged. ‘Look at ’er legs. She’ll ’ave to stop at ’ome. I’ll not ’ave ’er wheeled out like a freak show.’
    She took over Susan in a perverse, compulsive way. Overprotective, smothering yet ashamed, shutting Albert out. She kept even Susan’s existence as secret as possible, only letting very few people see her, like the crusading Miss Pringle with her pince-nez, her bag of coloured sewing threads and offcuts of cotton and felt.
    ‘She has such dextrous fingers,’ Miss Pringle said. ‘Such a pity to waste a skill like that. She could be marvellous at the piano, you know, or the violin.’
    Mabel stared at her as pigs struggled to take wing around the room.
    But Miss Pringle did make it possible for Mabel to live with all the contradictions of her feelings towards her remaining daughter. Susan, whom she would have been mortified to take out in the street, Susan, her companion for life who would never leave her because she couldn’t walk away and no one would marry a girl with wizened legs. Susan would always be there. Susan, in whom all her guilt, her compassion was invested. Who for so much of the time she couldn’t stand to be anywhere near, embodying as she did all the loss, all the failure of a life in which Mabel had once found hope.
    Their possessions –