Colour Blind

by Catherine Cookson

  From between the curtains she could see Sarah Wilson striding up the yard, dragging her Janie with her. She knew that Sarah Wilson was no friend of hers, and now her raucous voice, louder than usual, was proclaiming that something was wrong. But what, and why was she coming here?

  Bridget did not move towards the door but hastily dried her eyes and stood waiting until Sarah, peering into the kitchen between the gap in the curtains, called, ‘You there, Mrs Paterson?’

  Mrs Paterson! Something was wrong…only when you were in the black books did you receive your full title. Bridget opened the kitchen door, saying ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘What’s wrong? Ah, ye might well ask. Here’—she pulled the straining Janie towards her—‘hev a look at this.’ She tried to force Janie’s hand, which was holding a bloodstained cloth, away from her face, but Janie cried, ‘Aw, don’t Ma…don’t; it’ll bleed again.’

  ‘Take yer blasted hand away and let her see!’

  ‘Don’t shout like that, Mrs Wilson!’ Now Bridget was on her dignity. ‘Come inside if it’s got anything to do with me.’

  ‘Don’t shout!’ cried Sarah, pushing Janie into the kitchen. ‘Don’t shout! Wouldn’t you shout if yer bairn’s eye was nearly put out?’

  ‘But how…?’ began Bridget in perplexity.

  ‘Aye, how? By that ’un there.’ She pointed to Rose Angela, whose face was almost comical in its amazement.

  ‘Rosie?’

  ‘Aye—Ro-see.’ There was definite mimicry in Sarah’s tone. ‘Let her see.’ She tore her daughter’s hand down, and Bridget saw an ugly cut about half an inch long to the side of Janie’s cheekbone.

  She looked from Janie to Rose Angela. The child was staring in horror at Janie’s face. ‘Did you do that?’

  Rose Angela shook her head slowly, and Janie cried, ‘Yes you did. You did it with your school bag.’

  ‘Aye, with her school bag,’ added her mother. ‘She can’t fight with her hands, like other bairns.’

  As Bridget stared in amazement at Rose Angela, whose meekness was sometimes a source of irritation to her, she was conscious of the back door opening, but she didn’t turn round. The whole incident so bewildered her that she just stood staring at her daughter and listening to Sarah.

  ‘She used the buckle side deliberately, didn’t she?’ Janie nodded at her mother. ‘And what’s going to be done about it? That’s what I want to know. Marked for life, my bairn’ll be, all through that one’s wickedness…through her not having proper control. Spoilt, that’s what she is, decked up to the nines…’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with you, Mrs Wilson.’

  ‘Ain’t it? Ain’t it though? If she wasn’t spoilt, this wouldn’t have happened. Wild she is, and dangerous, like him that was her da was.’

  ‘You never said a truer word.’

  Bridget swung round to find Matt surveying them from the doorway.

  ‘Aye, you’ve had some of it. Look at my bairn’s face, Matt.’ Janie’s face was turned up for Matt’s inspection, and from it Matt’s eyes travelled to Rose Angela, and their expression needed no translation. The hate was plain for all to see, so much so that Sarah said, ‘Aye, well, it’s enough to make anyone turn on their own kith and kin what you’ve had, lad. But it should be knocked out of her before it gets any worse. That’s all I say, Matt, it should be knocked out of her.’

  Matt, with his eyes still riveted upon Rose Angela, muttered, ‘Aye, it should be knocked out of her.’

  ‘If there’s any chastising to do, I’ll do it.’ The sharpness of Bridget’s tone brought Matt’s gaze away from the shrinking child.

  ‘Aye, you will, like hell,’ he said. ‘Soft as clarts you are with her, because she puts on her mealy mouth to you—butter wouldn’t melt in it, but I know her; I’ve watched her outside. This doesn’t surprise me’—he pointed to Janie’s face—‘I’ve seen it coming.’ His voice gathering deep in his throat, he went on, ‘For two pins I’d take the buckle end of me belt…’ His hand moved as he spoke to his trousers.

  ‘Just you try it and you’ll see who’ll get the belt,’ cried Bridget, blocking Rose Angela from Matt’s sight by standing in front of her. ‘And now clear out, the lot of you. And Mrs Wilson, if you take Janie to the doctor right away he’ll put a stitch in it, and I’ll pay—it’ll heal all right if it’s done now.’

  ‘Aye, it’ll heal…like this.’ Matt slapped his distorted cheek with his palm.

  ‘Get out, I’ve told you!’ Bridget’s eyes blazed at her brother.

  Mrs Wilson went out, pushing Janie before her, crying, ‘You haven’t heard the last of it, by a long chalk.’

  Matt, pausing at the door, spoke with chilling quietness, ‘The buck nigger will never be dead as long as she’s alive, and I hope she lives long enough to pay for this.’ He again slapped his face. ‘And she will pay, and with her physog too. I’ll fix her one of these days so she won’t mark anyone else.’

  He was gone, and the kitchen was filled with dark premonition. It chilled Bridget, turning her faint and weak. She looked at Rose Angela. The child was leaning against the wall, and her face, pallid with stark terror, seemed more beautiful than ever before. She was too beautiful, Bridget thought—such looks brought nothing but trouble. And it was her face that enraged Matt—it always had—and given half a chance he would destroy it. My God! If he did anything to spoil the bairn’s face! As if his intention was imminent, she pulled Rose Angela to her, and held her tightly, saying, ‘It’s all right, don’t be frightened—your Uncle Matt won’t do anything. Why did you hit Janie Wilson?’

  She could feel the tenseness sinking out of Rose Angela’s slight body while she waited for an answer. And when it came, it was in whispered gasps. ‘Janie slapped my face, ’cause I told her I’d get to Heaven. She said I wouldn’t ’cause…’cause my da’s a nigger. And I asked Father Bailey and he said I would…’cause God’s colour-blind, he said.’

  Bridget’s arms became stiff, and her eyes, staring at James’ fretwork pipe-rack on the wall, were fixed in their pity.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her…I just swung my bag at her…Ma!…Oh, Ma!’

  ‘Sh! Sh! don’t cry, hinny.’

  ‘Ma, will Uncle Matt—’ She was stiffening again.

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘But he said…’

  ‘Sh…I’ll not let him. Don’t worry, don’t cry.’ As Bridget’s arms tightened around the sobbing child she knew that only constant vigilance would save her from Matt’s hands.

  She had always known that there was something odd about Matt. When she was a girl she had been able to ignore it for long spells during which he was ‘just like any of them’, but when unintentionally she aroused his anger by laughing or joking with one of the lads she would be brought into painful awareness of the oddity. Even when, her own rage aroused, she was fighting him, she would be wondering all the time why he should be like this. She knew no other brother who treated his sister as he did her—sisters generally came in for scorn and derision.

  She had expected her marriage to alienate him from her; but it hadn’t, and the result was his twisted face. Nor did this, contrary to what she had imagined, direct his bitterness towards her. Instead, he used the disfigurement to bind her to him, to draw on the affection he could get in no other way. That he hadn’t vented his venom and bitterness on her wasn’t, she knew, because he didn’t feel bitter; she was only too well aware that every fibre of his being was corroded with bitterness. It was towards the child that it was directed, and it always would be. Bridget, looking ahead down the succession of coming years, realised that she would always have to watch Matt in order to protect the bairn, just as her da and Tony watched him to protect her.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Seven: The Workless

  The cancer of unemployment was eating the country, and Tyneside in particular. It was eating into initiative and hope, and doubling despair. A man, becoming unemployed, went on the dole; and he would sign on
each day before vainly doing the round of the shipyards. And in the evening he would stand at the corner with his pals, who were in the same predicament as himself, and they would hide their feelings in jokes. If he lay in bed at night and wondered what was to become of him and the wife and bairns once the dole was finished, he gave little sign of it during the day.

  It is said that man can get used to any condition if he is in it long enough, and it would seem there was truth in this, for, as the years went on and the dole bred the Means Test, most of the men on the Tyne had forgotten how it felt to carry a bait tin—in fact they doubted whether there had ever been a time in their lives when they had worked. The younger men didn’t have to wonder about this; those born just prior to or during the 1914 war never knew what it was to be employed. Even those apprenticed to the few small firms still in existence were stood off immediately they reached the age of nineteen.

  It was strange, too, how stark poverty changed the flavour of the jokes from sex to food.

  ‘Well, I’m off for me dinner.’

  ‘What’s it the day, lad?’

  ‘Chicken.’

  ‘Chicken agin?’

  ‘Aye…I’m so bloody full of chicken I’ve got the urge to gan an’ sit on a clutch of eggs.’

  And so it went on. Here and there a man suddenly ended the struggle, and the effect on his mates, oddly enough, was such as to stiffen their fibre. ‘It’s no use taking things like that,’ would be their attitude; ‘things can’t get any worse; the bloody Government will have to do something if they don’t want trouble. Hang on a bit longer.’

  There were protests, mass meetings, marches, but no perceptible change. In many houses the furniture was sold bit by bit, until only the table and mattresses remained. The sight of the bairns standing around the table to their meagre food hurt a man, but when the wife sat on the boards to feed the youngest, blazing anger would fill him; and so there would be more shouting at meetings, more protests. But even anger cannot be sustained on an empty stomach, and it would fade, except in the case of the few, in whom injustice burned as a fuel. These carried the fight in London—even to 10 Downing Street itself; but their sincere cries were lost in the noise of the rabble they gathered to themselves on the march.

  The slump had long been with the McQueens—Cavan’s last full week’s work was in 1922, and his last work of all in 1926. Terence, too, had early joined the band of unemployed. Only Matt found work, odd days here and there. The McQueens seemed to think that Matt would always have work, however small…for life owed him this. But latterly, even Matt had failed to achieve even a day a week; and now Tony was the only one to go out at a regular hour.

  Although most shops sported a sign ‘No more credit given’ and the windows showed more and more empty cartons, Mr Crawley’s two shops still managed to keep their heads above water. Tony for some years now had been managing the second business, a small one-windowed shop in a side street, and the fact that he was in the glorified position of manager and had never been out of work, added to which he was receiving the great sum of ten shillings per week rent for his house, surrounded him with an atmosphere of unwilling respect and thinly veiled resentment. If he had not been the asset that kept the wolf from the door, Kathie’s spleen and Matt’s venom, together with Terence’s jealousy, would have been openly hurled at him. Only Cavan was grateful to him. It infuriated Kathie to know that for years now Tony had stayed in her house because, by doing so, he was helping Bridget…He’d had the nerve to tell her he’d cut down the extra five shillings he had been giving her each week if she sponged on Bridget. Sometimes Kathie thought she hated Tony worse than she had the nigger…for, give the devil his due, the nigger had been good for a few bob or so every trip, with no conditions attached.

  And another infuriating thing was that her daughter Bridget, her that had been the apple of her eye, her who she had brought up like a lady, had withdrawn herself from them all during the years. Only Cavan seemed welcome in her house…and, of course, her fancy man. It was the desire of Kathie’s heart to hurl this latter accusation at Bridget, but fear of the consequences kept her tongue in her cheek. If Tony should go, God knew how she would manage. As it was, with such a lodger, she appeared to be in comfortable circumstances compared with those of her neighbours, and to shine in any way helped to make life bearable. It was good to be able to say to Jane Cullen, next door, ‘It’s a stone of flour I’m after bakin’, and two dozen fresh herrin’s I’ve got in the oven this minute. Oh, it’s a tea they’ll have the night,’ for it gave her a queer sense of satisfaction to see Jane unconsciously moving her tongue over her blue lips whenever food was mentioned. On baking days she would open her back door and window wide to allow the smell to waft into the Cullens’ hungry house.

  The Cullens were meek, and Kathie despised them. Most of all did she despise Molly, who had grown hollow-eyed and grey-faced waiting for Tony to take up with her. At this moment Kathie was thinking of the Cullens as she banged her oven door on a shelf of baking potatoes…‘Gutless lot!’ There were the scrap-ends of bacon Tony had brought home at dinner time to be fried; she’d kick up such a stink of food that the smell would knock them all out.

  Phew, it was hot! As she wiped the sweat from her neck with the oven rag Eva’s youngest boy called through the open door, ‘Grannie, Rosie’s home. She’s got her case an’ all.’

  ‘What?’ Kathie swung round on the boy. ‘When?’

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘My God, she’s lost her job again.’ Kathie turned abruptly to Cavan, who was sitting on the edge of the bed and peering over the top of a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles at the boy.

  He closed the book he was reading and asked quietly, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Aye, I am—she give me a ha’penny.’

  Taking off the spectacles, Cavan placed them in an old black case, and put them in his waistcoat pocket.

  As he slowly took his coat from the back of the door Kathie said, ‘Three weeks she’s been in that job…my God!’ and as he went out of the door she called after him, ‘Mind, if she gives you owt, you stump up.’

  Cavan threw an angry glance back at her, but said nothing. He turned into the back lane, dusting the front of his greasy coat as he went. What was it this time? It couldn’t be the same thing again…surely to God not. What was the lass going to do? If only she could get married or something. But there would be small chance round here—the fellows would be willing enough, God knew, but their mothers and sisters wouldn’t be. It wasn’t only the bit of colour in her that turned the women upon her, but something else—what, he didn’t know—he couldn’t lay a finger on it—it wouldn’t go into words. Was it the proud way she walked that maddened them? or the quietness of her? or her voice, so like her father’s, him that must be dead these many years? or was it her face? Aye, it was likely her face, for it did something to men, particularly married ones.

  How many times had she been given a week’s money in advance and sent packing? He had lost count. And it was bad that she should be out of work at this time, too, with Bridget off an’ all. He doubted whether he’d come in for anything at all the night. She was always liberal with her bit pocket money—rarely did she see him without slipping a sixpence into his hand. And he always made the same protest, ‘No…no, lass, ye’ve got little enough;’ but she would smile and say, ‘Get yourself a bit baccy, Granda.’ Aye, she was good; both her and Bridget—his pipe would have cracked many times during the past years had it not been for them. It was strange, he thought, that he felt no humiliation in taking from either of them, yet if Kathie threw him tuppence his stomach bridled.

  Funny what life did to you; funny how people changed. Time and things that happened made you change. And many things had happened to him during the past ten years. But more so during the past two; for who would have thought the desire to work would go completely from him, that it would be sent packing by this other strange desire that filled him?

  He walked slowly, taking the l
ong way round to Dunstable Street…He was sixty-two, and it was only during these last two years of abject poverty that he had become aware of living. It happened in an odd way, so odd that he trembled when he thought that but for a fight about St Patrick’s nationality, and being laughed into spending his last threepence on buying a hundred books that he didn’t want, he would never have known this new world.

  He remembered the night that Kathie bullied him into making a barrow out of a soapbox and a couple of old bicycle wheels so that he should go to the tip and pick cinders. The barrow would hold twice as much as a sack, and he had been given the ultimatum of picking more cinders or going without food, for she couldn’t buy both coal and food. His protest that the tip ripped the soles from his boots brought the retort from Kathie that he wrap old sacking about his feet and leave his boots at home. He had done this, but, like a great number of other men, not until it was dark.

  Part of the tip burned continuously, and this saved many of the men from their death, for in the chill, often mist-ridden dawns they would huddle together as near the blazing parts as was safe. It was during one such dawn that the row began. A big Irishman was expounding, half in fun and whole in earnest, on the merits of being Irish, when a quiet voice from among a little group of men said, ‘If it’s such a grand country, why don’t you go back there?’

  ‘By me patron saint! Are ye meanin’ to be insultin’?’ the Irishman had demanded.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ went on the voice, ‘but it’s odd that you lot who are so bigoted about your country couldn’t pick an Irishman for your saint.’

  ‘What! In the name of God what is St Patrick but the most Irish of the Irish?’

  ‘English…St Patrick was English.’

  That did it. The men had all their work cut out to keep the Irishman from throwing the man into the blazing tip. When the row subsided, Cavan, taking up his barrow, urged the young fellow to leave and come along with him.