The Journal of Dora Damage Read Online Free Page A

mother had been a veritable army general in the way she kept first our house in Hastings and then our So-ho
     tenement impeccably clean, but for me, I fear, it was a war I seldom won, and even if I were to wave a white flag of defeat,
     it would not be white at all, but a dingy grey flag, so no one would understand that I was surrendering. I spent the first
     years of our marriage waiting for Peter to realise that I did not wear a halo with regard to house-keeping; when he finally
     became aware of this, I felt continuously guilty for disappointing him so. If we were ever to have tipped one hundred pounds
     a year we could have considered employing a young maid-of-all-work in her first employ, but every year we never made it. We
     used to make do with a charwoman once a fortnight who helped with the heavy work and laundry, but now we could not even run
     to that. It was Peter’s highest aspiration; not because he thought to ease the burden on me, but because it would have been
     proof of a certain gaining of station.
    But my mother’s favourite instruction to me, which she also taught the little girls in her charge (although never the little
     boys), was ‘whatever it is that you desire, halve it’. Whether it be hopes for cake at tea-time, or a wish for a speedy recovery
     from an illness, my mother advised that if one halves one’s expectations, one will never be quite so disappointed. And so
     I learnt that a polite little girl only takes half of what she really wants, and learns to settle with that half, and so I
     did, especially as far as Peter and our way of life in Lambeth were concerned.
    My smock, apron, cap, face and arms were all wet and filthy, but it was four o’clock, and Lucinda was waking, so I shook all
     my dusty, sooty cloths, skirts and aprons into the dust-hole, then carried her downstairs and set her in her chair while I
     made Peter’s meat-tea: eggs and forcemeat balls with potatoes. The wind raged outside, and I dared not leave the lid off the
     pan for too long for fear of soot being blown down the chimney.
    ‘Are you making soot soup for Papa?’ Lucinda said from behind me.
    ‘No, love, I’m making smut stew,’ I said, kissing her, and smoothing her hair, which was all ruffled from the bed.
    ‘Yum, yum. And I’d like some black broth.’
    ‘And so you shall have it. Just let’s wait until Old Man Wind has blown some more blacks down the chimney, and we’ll catch
     them in our pan and fry them up good and proper.’
    But just then, Peter crashed in from the workshop in such a gammon I feared Lucinda would fall fitting. He barked at me, kicked
     the table leg as if he wished it were my own, and ignored Lucinda huddling in my arms.
    ‘Where is it? We must have one somewhere. What have you done with them, woman?’
    ‘What is it you’re looking for?’
    ‘A candle-stub, a candle-stub. Jack has failed to wax the cords of a casing. Again. And I must do it. Again.’ Neither he nor
     I knew at this point that it would be the last one he would ever make; still I ignored the signs.
    ‘Here you are,’ I said, ‘and here, drink this, before you head back.’
    ‘Wretched stuff. Doesn’t work.’ But still, he downed it, and went back to his mechanics in the workshop. And he was right.
     Salicin never seemed to offer his fat old joints the relief that it was reputed to provide.
    Where Peter was round, I was sharp: he used to complain that it was like sharing a bed with a carriage-axle. But I was not
     so much thin as muscular, all sinewy arms and bony shoulders, with no breasts or hips to speak of, and I knew that I lacked
     femininity because of my muscles. My snub nose and lank hair gave no beauty to my face, only my chin was round and stuck out
     like a bun put on the wrong side of a cottage-loaf. We were Jack Sprat and his wife, but in reverse. Maybe it was wrong of
     me to describe Peter’s fingers as fat. They weren’t fat, just as the pot-belly of a bag-of-bones Fenian isn’t