I understood that Emmerjane was the illegitimate daughter of Mrs. Williams's dead sister, and that she had been born in Carnarvon, which still shimmered in her memory in purple and gold.
Emmerjane was the drudge of the family, and I first saw her in the street at dusk, mothering a brood of her little cousins, taking Hughie by one hand and Katie by the other and telling Gwennie to lay hold of Davie lest he should be run over by the milk vans.
Afterwards she became my drudge also—washing my floor, bringing up my coals, and cleaning my grate, for sixpence a week, and giving me a great deal of information about my neighbours for nothing.
Thus she told me, speaking broad cockney with a Welsh accent, that the people opposite were named Wagstaffe and that the creaking noise I heard was that of a mangle, which Mrs. Wagstaffe had to keep because her husband was a drunkard, who stole her money and came home "a-Saturday nights, when the public-houses turned out, and beat her somethink shockin'," though she always forgave him the next day and then the creaking went on as before.
But the greatest interest of this weird little woman, who had a premature knowledge of things a child ought not to know, was in a house half-way down the street on the other side, where steam was always coming from the open door to the front kitchen.
The people who lived there were named Jones. Mrs. Jones "washed" and had a bed-ridden old mother (with two shillings from the Guardians) and a daughter named Maggie.
Maggie Jones, who was eighteen, and very pretty, used to work in the dairy, but the foreman had "tiken advantage of her" and she had just had a baby.
This foreman was named Owen Owens and he lived at the last number on our side, where two unmarried sisters "kept house" for him and sat in the "singing seat" at Zion.
Maggie thought it was the sisters' fault that Owen Owens did not marry her, so she conceived a great scheme for "besting" them, and this was the tragedy which, through Emmerjane's quick little eyes and her cockney-Welsh tongue, came to me in instalments day by day.
When her baby was a month old Maggie dressed it up "fine" and took it to the photographers for its "card di visit." The photographs were a long time coming, but when they came they were "heavenly lovely" and Maggie "cried to look at them."