Edwina and Alicia

Edwina and Alicia’s relationship is the practical and emotional support that helps Edwina survive early motherhood and build a working life. It begins in a moment of near-collapse, grows through years of daily care and shared domestic routines, and becomes one of the memories through which Edwina understands both the house and her own past. Its tenderness is real, but so are the inequalities surrounding Alicia’s labor and the violence that eventually enters the household.

An alliance born in exhaustion

Edwina meets Alicia in the grounds of the Imperial War Museum while sitting on a bench near the twins’ pram. Alone in a large house that needs money and attention, with two small children and no income, Edwina is overwhelmed. She is bored by the babies’ crying and even considers walking home without the pram; at other times, she admits, she hates the children. When Charlie throws his shoe out of the pram, Alicia retrieves it, recognizes that there are twins, and makes them gurgle with a performance of faces and animal noises. Their contentment gives Edwina a few moments to breathe. Then she begins to sob as rain falls, and Alicia helps get the family home.

The first encounter establishes the shape of their bond through action rather than declaration. Alicia carries a baby under each arm up the steps into the house, then returns for the pram and manages it alone. Inside, she strips and dries the twins, fetches dry clothes from the pulley, and gets them warm and fed. Edwina, who has relied on tinned food and jars of baby food because she does not know how to cook, is painfully aware that the children have not been eating properly. The twins settle with toast and honey in the playpen. Alicia’s competence makes the immediate household manageable at a time when Edwina cannot manage it alone.

Care, work, and unequal intimacy

Alicia comes to the house every day until the twins are old enough not to need a nanny, and then stays on to do the ironing and cleaning. She also takes on much of the cooking and laundry. The arrangement allows Edwina to work at home as an illustrator: Alicia watches the children in the nursery or kitchen while Edwina draws and paints in her studio. They often meet at lunchtime over soup and toast, after which Edwina returns to her work. She credits Alicia with giving her the freedom to be a working mother and says that illustrating the Betsy and Tom books brought her substantial income. The small visual details in those books—the shoes Betsy keeps losing, Tom’s freckles, and the biscuits in his pockets—belong to Edwina’s work; the time and care that made that work possible were shared with Alicia.

Their domestic intimacy does not erase the unequal conditions of their lives. When Edwina meets Alicia, she is a part-time cleaner whose two sons are being cared for by Alicia’s mother in Kingston, a custom Alicia explains. Alicia lives with her husband and some of his cousins off the Old Kent Road. Edwina never visits her home and never meets those relatives, while Alicia enters Edwina’s household every day and helps sustain it. The difference is especially visible in how Alicia’s work is treated as available household labor: Dickie wants his shirts professionally laundered, and Edwina retreats to her studio when Alicia reacts angrily to being told.

The household’s racial attitudes also shape the relationship. Edwina remembers that her mother used a racist slur to describe Alicia, and she later recalls Dickie saying that Lucas had not been in such close contact with a Black person before. Edwina challenges Dickie’s language, connecting his assumptions to the narrow social world of Wyebourne College, where the Black people he and Lucas encountered were either pupils of royal descent or staff who cleaned toilets. Her defense of Alicia is forceful, but the relationship still unfolds across a boundary Edwina does not cross: Alicia’s family and home remain outside her own experience.

Affection without idealization

Edwina’s attachment to Alicia rests partly on a contrast in how they care for the twins. Edwina is sometimes relieved to hand them over; Alicia has room for both on her lap, loves them steadily, and does not judge their characters. She does worry about their physical well-being and treats regularity as a priority, with prunes among her favored remedies. Edwina can feel jealous of the unconditional love Alicia gives the children, even as she depends on it. The relationship is not presented as effortless or saintly: Alicia is moody, dislikes hoovering, and does not like doing things for Lucas. Lucas, in turn, does not want Alicia touching his clothes; garments needing repair are marked for the matron instead. Their tensions coexist with Alicia’s long service and Edwina’s gratitude.

The practical help also leaves its mark in ordinary, memorable details. Alicia cooks, dries clothes, feeds the babies, and fetches sweet potato from Brixton; Edwina remembers the twins’ first taste of mango. Years later, while preparing to sell the house, Edwina sees Alicia in the kitchen in her mind, with flour-covered hands, bibbing the babies and singing. The house is not merely the setting for the friendship: its rooms and routines preserve traces of work that Edwina recognizes she could not have done alone.

Memory, injury, and rupture

When Edwina writes to Alicia, she is struggling to clear the house and says she has found eleven plastic containers for filling an iron, none of which she can bring herself to discard. She considers moving to Cornwall and imagines dying with a paintbrush in her hand, but the account of the future is threaded with memories of Alicia: the babies being fed, the sweet potato, and their first taste of mango. Edwina’s recognition that the house would not have been hers without Alicia gives the friendship material force. Alicia helped make it possible for Edwina to remain there, raise the twins, and earn a living.

The relationship is later marked by Charlie’s burglary. On a weekday in September, Edwina returns home after waiting in town for Charlie and finds Alicia at the bottom of the stairs, badly injured. Charlie has taken antiques, including silverware and framed landscapes, and is trying to leave when Alicia confronts him. In the ensuing stand-off, Alicia is either pushed or falls; the exact cause is left uncertain. Charlie runs without helping her. Alicia suffers a smashed hip and collarbone, and Edwina changes the locks. The injury makes Alicia the direct victim of Charlie’s actions, while his flight breaks Edwina’s trust in him. Edwina later believes he had also stolen her jewellery box years earlier, adding that suspicion to the rupture.

A relationship carried through the house

Alicia’s importance to Edwina is measured not only by the years she worked in the house but by what Edwina later remembers and credits. The story gives care its concrete forms—carrying a pram up the steps, warming and feeding children, ironing, cooking, and making space for Edwina’s studio work—without making those tasks a sentimental substitute for the unequal conditions in which they occur. Edwina’s affection and gratitude are inseparable from her awareness that Alicia sustained the family’s daily life. Even after Charlie’s violence changes the household, memories of Alicia remain among the things Edwina cannot simply clear away.