Symmetry: Short stories

By Margaret Hughes

Drawing on her thirty years’ experience as a social worker in England and three Australian states, Margaret Hughes’ stories explore the dark world at the heart of modern Western society. In this hidden world, children and the elderly suffer misfortune, violence and tragedy. The perpetrators of abuse and exploitation range from poor, illiterate parents to the privileged elite. The response from the authorities is, at times, protective and benign while at other times incompetent and even destructive.
But above all else, it is the survivors who shine through. Their remarkable resilience and their uniquely creative solutions break through the adversity they have suffered.
There is symmetry between the dilemmas they face and the answers they find.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528985949

Margaret Hughes

Margaret Hughes worked as a social worker for 30 years, first in England and later in several Australian States. She has three children and lives in Thailand with her partner. Her passions in life are writing and photography.

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About the Author

Margaret Hughes worked as a social worker for 30 years, first in England and later in several Australian States. She has three children and lives in Thailand with her partner. Her passions in life are writing and photography.

Dedication

To my three wonderful children

Margaret Hughes

Symmetry

Short Stories

Copyright © Margaret Hughes 2021

The right of Margaret Hughes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528985932 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528985949 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2021

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London E14 5AA

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the brave and wonderful clients who inspired me to write these stories.

The Seventies

These stories are based on real cases and contain events and episodes that are true. They are just stories, intended to be representative of the world of social services in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in England and Australia. All the names and histories and places have been changed to protect the innocent.

Electric Lily

Part 1

My second assignment as a trainee social worker was Lily. James, my manager, explained:

There’s an old lady in the village and the neighbours are worried about her. She’s always been a bit of a recluse apparently, but in recent weeks, she has stopped going out altogether – something to do with decimalisation. It seems she was going to collect her pension each week but now, she’s refusing to accept the new money; mutters something about an American conspiracy. What’s worrying the neighbours is that she has run out of food and has been seen creeping out at night cutting grass with a pair of scissors and putting it in a saucepan.

Does she have any family? I asked.

Two sisters we’re told. A neighbour rang one of them but she doesn’t want to know. Apparently, a long-standing feud about a will and who owns the house.

As I became involved in the case, I began to piece together Lily’s history.

Lily was the oldest of three daughters born to a poor railway worker and his wife at the turn of the twentieth century. She was a quiet studious child who progressed through her childhood without causing her parents the least concern or anxiety. Unlike her younger sisters, who were, in turn, extrovert and boisterous, challenging and self-possessed, Lily bore all the hallmarks of a dutiful oldest child. She was unfailingly obedient and meticulous in the tasks demanded of her by her mother and father. As she reached her teenage years, far from testing out the boundaries of her independence, she increasingly took on the role of mothering the two young ones. Indeed, her mother’s health was starting to fade and her father, still devoted to his wife after all their years together, became withdrawn and distant from his children.

The family lived in a small village, a few miles outside Oxford. The village was little more than a crossroads with four streets and perhaps a hundred inhabitants, a pub and a corner shop. There was a regular bus route to Oxford and most of the gainfully employed took the bus each morning to work in the city, returning the same way in the evening. Little happened in the village itself, even the regular Christian events such as Easter or Harvest Festival were celebrated a mile away in the neighbouring and somewhat larger village containing a primary school and a church, all of which might have fallen on hard times had strong attendance been a prerequisite of their survival.

A narrow-terraced brick house in a row of some eight identical dwellings was home to Lily and her family. With just two bedrooms upstairs, the girls not only had to share a bedroom, but they had to maintain decorum at all times after dark. Lily achieved this without any great effort for she was moulded in that way. Her sisters, on the other hand, managed to keep quiet at night only by developing a form of whispered giggling, which kept their voices just below their father’s radar while alienating them further from the dutiful Lily.

Downstairs there was a tiny kitchen and scullery which opened out onto a yard only just large enough to allow two of the girls to play with skipping ropes and in keeping with everything else. It was Lily who failed to develop strong skills in this activity. The kitchen itself was poorly equipped but served the limited culinary aspirations of a conventional English working-class family in that era. There was a coke-fired stove with two hotplates and an oven for the Sunday roast. There was a small cupboard, a meat safe and the most basic utensils.

Beyond the rickety stairway to the bedrooms under which was stored a broom and an axe for chopping firewood lay the main living room with an armchair in front of the hearth for father to occupy after a day’s work and a wooden table and chairs. Being of such limited dimensions, only a small open fire was required to heat the entire house in winter. The small space also allowed for just four chairs around the table and except for rare occasions when the father came home late from work or one of her sisters was in bed sick, it was Lily who cooked and served the meal. Only when her father rose from the table to rest in his armchair did she get the chance to sit at the table and eat.

Lily was the rock to which the family clung during the last few turbulent years of the mother’s life and yet more so after the poor woman died. Had it not been for the discovery of electricity, it is probable that Lily would have gone from strength to strength and enjoyed a fruitful and productive life.

One evening when father returned home from work, he announced he had learned of a vacancy for the position of a maid that had arisen at one of the colleges at Oxford University. Lily was seventeen years old at the time and her father arranged to take her to the college at the weekend to be interviewed for the job. Lily paid no great heed to the prospect. Since the death of her mother, her life had become entirely congruous with the position her father was describing and it seemed to her that in return for a small amount of money, all of which would no doubt be donated to father’s beer and tobacco fund, she would find herself doing twice as much cooking and cleaning and looking after the needs of other people as she was already.

Of course, it was not in her nature to refuse the offer, nor indeed to betray the slightest sign of apprehension. So, sure enough, after the weekend journey to Oxford and back, after the interview where the domestic bursar had formed the impression that she would in all probability be hard working if a little light on initiative, she was offered and took up the position.

Despite her initial misgivings, Lily found to her surprise that she enjoyed her new life. Taken for granted by almost all, there were nevertheless one or two students and teaching staff – in her limited understanding of the college system, all the staff were professors – who went out of their way to say ‘good morning’ or to thank her for some small task. This was quite beyond her experience at home where it was assumed that housework belonged to Lily and Lily had been put on this earth to keep the house in order.

Then there was the question of money. While her father did indeed assume the right to her earnings as a means of supplementing his preferred forms of relaxation, he was less of an accountant than she had previously assumed. She quickly worked out a method of slight manipulation whereby she could retain small gratuities for herself. Never having any money of her own, not being entirely sure what she might wish to buy and being quite certain that the news of any purchase whatever at the local store would be reported to her father or one of her sisters, she started squirrelling away small sums of money in an empty biscuit tin at the back of the kitchen cupboard, confident in the knowledge that none of the family would ever venture into such a place.

When one day a young American student gave her a miniature bottle of perfume as a thank you present for some small favour, Lily was quite overwhelmed. The college became not only a rather beautiful workplace away from the stern eye of her father and the laughter and occasional derision of her sisters. It was slowly transformed into a magical place where her emotions, hitherto held in check, suppressed and utterly unappreciated began to blossom.

Like the chick that attaches to its mother by way of its fixation on the markings of her beak, so Lily’s newfound sentimentality was focused on the American. When she thought she would encounter him in the corridors or the courtyard, she would dab a small amount of perfume on her neck in the hope that somehow the scent of her in passing would augment his obvious affection for her. Her growing attachment to this young man not surprisingly met with a complete lack of reciprocity, but as a young man of impeccable breeding, his politeness alone was enough to fuel the fire of her newfound emotional life.

Sadly, but predictably in the social context of early twentieth-century England, this is a story of the head and not the heart. Lily’s love or sentimentality, call it what you will, went unrequited as did subsequent attachments evoked by a gift, an unexpected smile or an act of generosity from one of the ‘professors’.

What changed her life for all time was a spark. While it was not a spark of emotion, it was nevertheless a spark that came at a time of peculiarly heightened emotions for Lily. First of all, her father had just died. He had not been well since his wife’s death and it became clear to all the girls that he was fading, not through any specific illness or ailment, but as a result of a general malaise degenerating into an apparent lack of the will to live.

His temper, his absolute dominance of the household, his total lack of interest in their day to day lives, began to unravel. He would occasionally forget that the fire needed lighting or a candle needed replacing and would instead sit in his armchair in the cold and dark and daydream. The girls for their part would never take the initiative and restore the normal order without his instruction and they waited in vain for him to tell them what to do. Instead, he reminisced about the old days, his childhood, his time in the army, his courtship. Once in a while, he would even ask Lily how her day had been at the college. While he never troubled to listen to her reply, it was another sign of a weakening in the mental order that had held his life and theirs together.

He died in his sleep, peaceful and uncomplaining and even in his dying moment, he did not see fit to speak to his daughters and pass on some pearl of wisdom or admission of long-held affection. He was gone and the life of the three sisters went on.

At first, Lily was unaffected by her father’s demise. The immediate practical consequence was that the family had more money to purchase food and an occasional item of clothing for the winter. This meant that she no longer had to hide small change in the kitchen cupboard. By a curious kind of coincidence, her sisters for the first time in their lives began to help Lily with the cooking and housework. Even the problem of who should use the armchair was quickly solved when they took in a stray cat, who was encouraged to join the family in return for a small amount of milk and food. Life, in other words, became harmonious for the three young women, at least for a few months.

Soon after her father’s death, Lily suffered another blow. The young American student graduated from Oxford University and returned to the United States taking with him the last vestiges of hope the Lily held for achieving an affectionate bond with a man. Then the sadness of her father’s death, her lost love, her life of endless drudgery and even the newfound sympathy of her sisters sank into her heart.

She cried unexpectedly the next day, when she was travelling to college on the bus and again while shopping for some toiletry in the department stores of Oxford. She lost her bearings at work and found her mind wandering while she performed routine and menial tasks.

Just two days after the American student’s departure, while cleaning the skirting boards in the college dining area, she absentmindedly wiped clean a section where there were exposed electric wires. Lily had no knowledge of electricity; the university was the first institution or residence in the area to have this new service installed. It may have been that the bursar had explained the introduction of electric lighting to the college but she did not have even a rudimentary understanding of what electricity actually was, how it was transmitted along wires and how it carried forces that could not only light up a darkened room but could also send a powerful shock through the appropriate medium.

And that is exactly what happened to her. A violent shock pulsated along her left arm, down through her heart, her thigh, her leg and to the ground. Lily fell screaming to the floor clutching at the burn to her hand. It was not simply the pain of the electric shock that so devastated her, it was the assault. Out of nowhere, by some magical means, at a time when she was already feeling despondent, she had been savagely attacked by an insignificant wire in the wall.

Lily was taken to the sickbay and cared for by a nurse. While she soon recovered physically, it was apparent to the nurse and the domestic bursar that Lily was completely overwhelmed by the incomprehensible disaster that had befallen her. They arranged for a ‘professor’ to drive her home that day and in an uncharacteristic display of sympathy, the bursar suggested she take a day or two off work.

She took a day or two off work, but while her shock abated and the pain subsided, her fear and anxiety grew. If one small wire could cause such harm, what other dangers were lurking in that college? It may be all right for the well-educated and worldly-wise, they could navigate the treacherous walls and unpredictable floors, but what chance did she have against these dark and hidden forces? And how was it that these dangerous forces had suddenly emerged?

She had heard talk among the kitchen staff of the Americans, how they were from a distant country of exceptional wealth and power, how they were tall and suntanned, how they were civil and well-mannered on the outside but had the capability somehow of taking quite extreme and even violent actions under certain circumstances, how they were, in other words, some kind of smiling alien race with the unlimited potentiality to cause harm.

In pondering these casual and disparate remarks, it slowly dawned on Lily that her American had suddenly – suddenly to her that is – said goodbye and left the country just a day or so before her accident. Was he somehow involved? Had he secretly installed the dangerous device and then left the country? Was she the victim of some grand design, some international conspiracy?

Word came from the college that Lily should now return to her duties and when she did not do so, a