Emma Corey was coming.
Get ready, world.
This rebirth didn’t happen overnight, of course. It took me years to work myself up to the point where I could be so independent and determined. As soon as I was sixteen, there was a second big event in my life that helped me become so. My father knew who owed the bank money, and because of that knowledge, he had influence with many of the smaller businesses in Guildford. As soon as my birthday celebration was over, he informed me that he had found a nice weekend position for me at Bradford’s Department Store on High Street.
“Mr. Bradford himself has seen you walking to and from school and thinks you’re a perfect fit for his perfume counter. You can take that as a compliment,” he added. “He knows you’re still in school, of course, so you’ll work nine to five Saturday and Sunday. He’ll pay you twenty-five pounds a day at the start. In six months, if you work out, which I’m sure you will, he’ll raise it to thirty quid. That’s a tidy sum for doing nothing more than squeezing scents at women who think an aroma will overcome their ugly faces.”
“Oh, what a terrible thing to say, Arthur. Beautiful women wear perfume, too,” my mother said.
Daddy grunted, which was really all he would do when Mummy corrected him.
“What about church on Sunday?” my mother asked.
“She can go to the early service if she wants.”
My father was not really a churchgoing man, but he did attend services on Sunday occasionally, more, I thought, to chin-wag with some of the successful businessmen who did business at his bank than to pray to be forgiven for his sins. He looked at everything in life from the point of view of profit and loss, even prayer.
“When will she do her homework?” my mother asked him. “They get homework to do on weekends.”
“In the evenings. She has both free.”
“I’m singing on Fridays, Saturdays, and probably Sundays soon at the Three Bears,” I told him.
He stared as if he was trying to decide if I really was his child.
“They give me ten pounds, Daddy,” I said proudly, but mainly to measure it in the terms he would appreciate.
“Now, let’s see how good you are in math, then. Here,” he said, holding out his right hand, “is Mr. Bradford offering you twenty-five to start, and here,” he said, holding out his left hand, “is your ten pounds at the pub. How much more will you have if you work at Bradford’s and do your homework at night, forgetting about the pub?”
I looked away, and then I smiled. I held out my right hand. “Here’s my twenty-five quid at Bradford’s, and at night,” I said, holding out my left hand, “is my pub ten. That gives me ten on Friday, Saturday, and maybe Sunday, thirty-five on Saturday and thirty-five on Sunday at Bradford’s added to it eventually. And when I get my raise, that becomes forty a day. So I’ll do my homework early in the morning on Saturday and Sunday or at night when I return from the pub. I could be up to ninety quid over the weekend, including Sunday and my pay raise.”
“We have Sunday tea. Forget about the pub on Sunday,” he snapped, annoyed that I was using his kind of logic successfully. “It disrespects your mother and me to miss Sunday tea.”
“Subtract ten, then,” I said with a shrug. “I’m still ahead quite a bit.”
“If you’re tired when you are at work at Bradford’s and drag yourself around yawning in the faces of customers, he’ll let me know bloody fast,” my father warned. “You don’t embarrass me out there, hear?”
“Yes, Daddy. Don’t frown so much. You’ll get wrinkles and look like an old sod.”
I glanced at Julia. She was always astonished at my cheeky way of responding to our father. She would never have dared utter the smallest defiance. Secretly, I thought she wished she was more like me.
Ironically, in the long run I really had my father to thank for enabling me to go to New York. He’d never have given me a penny for the trip, but by working in Bradford’s and with the additional pounds I made singing in the pub and other places, as well as gifts of money on my birthdays, I was able to save a tidy sum, enough to give me the confidence to go forward. My father thought my miserly way when it came to spending my own money was simply due to his good influence.
Probably some of it was his influence, but I wouldn’t dare thank him, although at the moment I was leaving and he was raging at me, I was tempted to do it. I wanted to throw something back at him that would put him on his heels and stop him from stringing along his threats. He’d stutter and stammer like an old car engine.
I always tried to swallow away the images and words of that day. It wasn’t how I wanted to remember my father. Although he was a stern, unforgiving man, he was generous when it came to dispensing his wisdom, and I would never deny that he was doing so to ensure our welfare. Probably, that was the most I missed from him or about him the day after I had left my family: hearing his advice, his prophetic declarations and firm conclusions. No matter where I went, I would hear his voice often. And in New York, I would meet many men who reminded me of him.
I suppose the greatest bit of wisdom he didn’t have to preach to me to get me to believe was that no matter where you go or who you become, you cannot really escape your family, not that I ever really wanted that. They are forever part of you, and whether you realize it or not, they determine who you really are.
But I would meet people, including the man I eventually would marry, who lived to do just that, escape their own families and, in a true sense, escape who they really were.
TWO
Despite my determination, I almost turned back a few times before boarding the plane for New York. Besides the fact that it was my first airplane ride, the sight of all these people coming and going was almost overwhelming enough to send me home. I never really grasped what writers meant when they wrote “a sea of humanity” until I saw the crowds at the airport. People from so many different countries were coming at me and passing by me in waves full of conversations, laughter, hugs, and kisses, many dropping loved ones off and many, out of breath from excitement, rushing to greet arrivals.
There was no one there to bid me a fond farewell, and there would be no one waiting in New York to welcome me. There would be no kisses and hugs. The tears I left behind were so full of sorrow that they would look like droplets on a hot stove, sizzling with sadness. I had kept my travel details secret from friends, but now, at this moment in the airport, I never felt like more of a stranger in a strange land, someone truly alone, and technically, I hadn’t yet left England. I wondered if I had made a mistake being so secretive after all.
I tried desperately to hide how much of a novice I was when it came to traveling. If I didn’t build up my self-confidence before I left, what would I be like when I arrived in a city with a far larger population mainly quite different not only from me, but many from each other? More often than not, I had been told, New York was a city of strangers rushing by and around one another. I would see someone lying on the sidewalk, maybe on a piece of cardboard with a sign advertising how desperate he or she was, and I would witness how easily people walked by as if no one was there.
“In New York, people are quite invisible,” Mr. Wollard had warned me. “It’s the way of big cities. They make people afraid and therefore indifferent simply to avoid trouble. Don’t expect to make new friends quickly.”