A Daughter’s Secret. Anne Bennett

the familiar strains of the jigs and reels fill the air, she felt her toes curling with anticipation.

      And when she began to dance a skip jig in the bare feet that she was used to, all nervousness left her. It was as if she was an extension of the music. The girls sat spellbound watching her, and the applause at the end was spontaneous and heartfelt. Aggie was pleased though she flushed with embarrassment.

      ‘My God, girl, Levingstone will snap you up,’ Lily said when they went back into the room for Lily to change to take to the streets again. ‘He would be mad not to. He would be sitting on a bleeding gold mine.’

      Aggie made a face and Lily rapped out, ‘Don’t look like that. Let me tell you, girl, it will be a sight more respectable than what I do.’

      Aggie remembered asking McAllister, rather primly, if there had been no ordinary jobs that people could do. She had known nothing then, and it had been Lily that had put her right to the true situation when she had suggested looking for a job.

      ‘Where was you thinking of looking, ducks?’

      ‘I thought of work in service somewhere,’ Aggie had said. ‘It’s all I know really.’

      ‘Listen, bab,’ Lily replied, ‘you won’t be taken into service or any other place respectable without references.’

      Aggie could see that now – see that and understand it as well – but still she asked, ‘What am I to do?’ The silence spoke volumes. ‘I … c-couldn’t do what you do,’ she stammered.

      ‘That surely would depend on how hungry you get,’ Lily snapped.

      ‘Don’t be offended.’

      ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ Lily said. ‘I bring you in and look after you, put food on the table and get coal for the fire to prevent us freezing to death, and you look down on me. The money you brought is almost gone, so what’re you going to live on then, fresh air?’

      ‘No,’ Aggie said. ‘I’m sorry.’

      ‘Time you grew up, girl,’ Lily said. ‘Think I chose this life? You think when I was a nipper at school I thought, when I grow up I’m going to be a prostitute? Tell you why I did it, girl. I lost my parents to typhoid and there was just me and my little brothers. I was thirteen, and it was either me go onto the streets, the only thing that would pay enough to keep us, or throw ourselves on the mercy of them at the workhouse. Course, I didn’t know the least thing about how to go about it then, and I was terribly frightened. The first man I propositioned was Levingstone.’

      ‘Did you do anything with him?’

      ‘Yeah, I did,’ Lily said almost defiantly. ‘He was kind, though, and gentle, and yet I felt dirty – filthy, in fact. When he had gone, I vomited into the gutter. But he paid well. He came again the next night and the next, and each time I vomited. Then he asked if I wanted to work for him, but he didn’t have management of the clubs then. As a sort of extra payment, and because we had been neighbours, he looked after my brothers too, saw them through school and that, and later paid their passage to America. And I became one of his whores. There weren’t no choice really, and that was it. I stopped being sick in the end, though I never liked it and don’t now. That’s why I drink so much. We all do. And we take the opium ’cos it blurs the edges a bit.’