The View From Her Window by Charmian Coates.
Category: Fiction/Romance
Paperback: 292 pages
Language: English
ISBN: 1843864495

""Laura! That child’s crying again. You’d best give her a dose of Fennings Fever cure. Her row’s making my head ache."

Laura groaned and dropped the wet baby vest and the wooden peg that she was just pegging it onto the line with, back into the bath at her feet. "Just coming!" She hurried indoors and unclipping Claire’s safety-harness, picked the red-faced Claire out of her pram and cuddled her. The baby began to chuckle. Laura knew the reason she kept crying was because she was bored with being confined to her pram. But Claire let loose wouldn’t suit Laura’s mother-in-law. Noticing something beneath the pram, she bent and picked up the knitted doll she’d made and handed it back to Claire. "She seems all right now, Mrs. Field. She just dropped Betty."

Doris Field’s gnarled hands paused at their task of easing shirts and sheets through the rollers of the mangle, and her thin lips tightened. "If I say she should have Fennings, then she should have Fennings. If anyone should know babies, I should. I haven’t had two of my own for nothing. I’ll have you know my fifty-five and I knows everything."

And didn’t Laura know it! Her mother-in-law with her bullet-brown eyes which only ever softened for her son, Sid or Claire, and straggly greying hair drawn tightly into a bun, looked every minute of her age. Knowing from experience that it did no good arguing with her, Laura found the medicine bottle and gave Claire a dose. "There you are, darling."

She put the baby back into her pram. Doris Field was always moaning about something. If it wasn’t Claire who was making too much noise, it was that Laura hadn’t swept in the corners when she’d cleaned the kitchen. Or else, she’d not washed up properly; that there were still traces of food on the plates. All lies. If only Rod hadn’t been killed in that fire like he had. She’d wished this a million times, but what was the good of wishing. What had happened had happened. Sometimes when she was particularly unhappy she would have little daydreams of Rod being still alive, and she and Claire happy with him in their own small home. Instead of here, in her parents-in-law’s house, with its dark paint work and dreary atmosphere - the view from her window; flapping washing, a ramshackle shed where her father-in-law kept his barrow, a depressing small yard and six-foot high wall. The only pleasant aspect of life in the terraced house near the railway station was the fruity smell from the burst plums in summer - though even this was spoilt by the fear she mught be stung by the wasps.

Bert Field himself was okay, but he was henpecked. Why he didn’t stick up for himself, tell his wife where to go when she laid down the law to him, Laura didn’t know. Her father-in-law was twice his wife’s size; the muscles on his arms alone stood out like duck eggs from pushing his barrow. Bert, who always wore a cloth cap over the sparse grey hair that fringed his bald head and a disreputable jacket with leather patches at the elbows, made his living wheeling a barrow laden with fruit and vegetables that he hawked around the local houses and guest houses. To have someone stand up to her was perhaps what Laura’s mother-in-law needed, but it was obvious that this person would never be Bert Field whose policy was to keep his mouth shut for a quite life.

She heard in her head for the umpteenth time Doris Field’s sharp voice, "You should be grateful to us, we took you in and we didn’t have to, you know. Your widow’s pension would have hardly kept you both, and you couldn’t have worked with a baby to see to, you’d have had no choice but to let the child go."

Laura knew her mother-in-law was right. The ten shillings a week widow’s pension would have gone nowhere, not if she’d had to pay the rent for a room, but did the woman need to keep rubbing it in like she did?"