Although small, Freda looked older than her years. For a pretty girl, she was surprisingly lacking in vanity about her looks, which she considered to be more a matter of chance than anything else. Or God-given, if you believed that God gave beauty as a gift, which seemed unlikely. It was more like the kind of trick that the Greek gods played on people—a curse rather than a gift. One of the few books Freda had read was an illustrated anthology of Greek myths (A Child’s Guide) that she had found abandoned on the seat in a train carriage when she was ten years old. It was hardly a helpful primer for life.
Freda had been on display since she was able to sit up unaided and had a battery of photographs that catalogued her progression, from appearing in Bonny Baby competitions to playing the locally sourced Clara in a professional touring Nutcracker the previous Christmas. Her mother, Gladys, once the chronicler of her daughter’s looks, had recently lost interest and transferred her energy into finding a new husband to sponsor her indolent lifestyle. Gladys had, in the past, exploited Freda’s looks for an income, but the investment was no longer paying off. “You’ve lost your bloom,” she said to Freda. Freda frowned. She felt she still had a lot of blooming ahead of her.
It was her talent rather than her looks that gave Freda cause for pride. The hours she had put in spinning, turning, tapping, pointing and chassé-ing. Since the age of three she had attended a dance school from which, every year, the Theatre Royal harvested the best pupils to swell its pantomime chorus, as did the touring ballet and opera productions that came to York, hence her Clara (Girl from the Groves charms in role). The Groves was a district of York, but Freda liked the way that (to her mind) it made her sound like a wood nymph, rather than someone who lived in a shabby end-of-terrace in the hinterland behind Rowntree’s factory. They used to live in a much better house on Wigginton Road, right opposite the factory where Freda’s father had worked when he was alive, but they had been bundled out by the bailiffs three years ago.
In the short span of her years, Freda had acquired an extensive repertoire playing cats, dogs, baby bears, snowflakes, fairies and an assortment of “village children” (yet somehow always the same), who danced and sang and skipped around maypoles. No Christmas pantomime, it seemed, was complete without a scene in a village square. Freda was a dainty child and took instruction well; it made her popular with adults.
Freda believed that there was nothing in the whole wide world that was better than standing on a stage. There was a grandeur to it that transcended the otherwise humdrum world. Her heart soared in her chest at the very thought of it.
Between the ages of seven and thirteen, Freda had modelled hand-knitted garments for a yarn manufacturer. And not just for the photographs on their paper patterns—posed in a chilly attic studio in Manchester—but also in mannequin parades that toured parts of the north, hosted by local wool shops, who sold the patterns and needles and balls of wool with which to make the garments on display.
These sporadic little cavalcades took place mostly in dispiriting church halls, and mostly to an audience of women still worn out and raw from the bereavements of war. And always in winter, for some reason. “That’s the nature of wool, I suppose,” Vanda said.
They were a team, Vanda said. There were three of them, Duncan, Vanda and Freda, plus Adele, who “worked for the company” and was responsible for their travel and accommodation, clutching her Bradshaw’s in one hand and with the other lugging a suitcase full of “the Knits,” as she called them (indisputably a capital letter), from one smoky third-class train carriage to the next. None of them, not even Adele, knew how to knit anything beyond plain and purl, although Duncan claimed he could do French knitting. Vanda laughed and said, “Don’t be filthy.” He had been a sailor in the war. Sailors were fond of knitting, apparently.
They were always being asked questions when they were demonstrating the wares—What kind of a selvedge is that? Or Is that a wishbone stitch? Vanda had a way of turning these questions into flattery. Oh, you noticed that, clever you! What kind of stitch do you think it is? I expect you’re the expert. And so on.
Their “costume changes,” as Adele referred to the swapping of one knitted garment for another, took place invariably in a dimly lit annexe at the back of the hall that was used as a storage area for hymn books and crumbling Nativity mangers and other neglected church paraphernalia.
In the hall, they did not walk on a stage, if there was a stage, which there often wasn’t, but proceeded individually down the aisle between the lines of rackety old chairs occupied by their audience. When they reached the back of the room, they did a measured twirl and then returned to the front. “The slower the better,” Adele counselled. “They haven’t come out on a wet Wednesday evening for the knitting, they’ve come for the occasion.”
Freda modelled a variety of intricately patterned cardigans and sweaters and three-piece outfits with pleated skirts and Shetland tammies. Pom-poms abounded. “You look very covetable,” Vanda said.
Freda had quickly grown accustomed to gazing straight ahead and smiling serenely while members of the audience reached out and plucked a sleeve or pinched a rib-stitch hem or, occasionally, Freda herself—nipping the back of her hand or patting the calf that rose firm and inviting above her white socks and black patent shoes, shoes that were removed immediately afterwards, in case they got scratched, and replaced with her plain brown leather Oxfords.
Freda often received a smattering of applause which had nothing to do with the Knits but rather was on account of the way that she shone with the promise of a future, a future that would surely be better than the past. It sanctified her in the eyes of the audience. If they could have kept a piece of her as a relic—a finger bone, a lock of hair, even a pom-pom—they would have done.
Vanda was tall and raw-boned, with hair the colour of ginger nuts. Glamorous in a rather seedy way, she was always doused in Molinard’s Habanita, which could knock your socks off if you got too close. She even dabbed the perfume on the Sarony cigarettes that she smoked continually and that made her Teesdale accent as “hoarse as a crow,” as Duncan liked to say. Vanda was always offering Freda one (“Go on, treat yourself, pet”), her hacking, phlegmy cough announcing her presence long before she became visible.
Duncan, who before the war had “trod the boards,” had once shared a stage with an ingenue Edith Evans at the Haymarket—“spear-carrying stuff,” he said dismissively. This entire sentence had been incomprehensible to Freda, but she learnt by a kind of osmosis and often things said one day made more sense the next. She thought “spear-carrying” sounded rather noble.
It was Duncan’s job to sport the pullovers, cardigans and waistcoats, many in complex Fair Isle patterns and often with the accessory of an unlit pipe to make him seem more manly. Even at her young age, Freda had been able to discern that manliness was not necessarily a quality Duncan strove for. He had a funny accent that was “posh Liverpool,” according to Vanda, which Freda rather liked and spent a good deal of time trying to imitate.
Vanda was a seasoned performer, too, having been on the stage herself once, in the music halls, as a magician’s assistant, levitated on a nightly basis.
“It’s not real, pet,” she said to Freda when she expressed admiration. “It’s a trick.” But that was even better than real!