When Skies Have Fallen

by Debbie McGowan

  Chapter Twenty-Three: 1947–1948

  Edward Lucien Tomkins, so named after the two uncles he would never meet, was born January, 1947, on the day after they were snowed in, which turned out to be rather fortuitous, as Molly had been staying with them in between shifts at the hospital, thus she was on hand to deliver the baby. Having stocked up in advance with oil for the central heating, they were largely unaffected by the power cuts, making Dalton Place one of the warmest and brightest homes in the city.

  Other than little Eddie’s arrival in the blizzards, the year progressed quietly. The business—which the locals had dubbed ‘Wingy’s Workshop’—steadily grew; Antonio offered them first refusal on Dalton Place, and for a very good price. The trouble, however, was that Jean and Arty were stubborn as mules, for they both felt an obligation to contribute financially to the purchase, but Jean no longer brought in a wage and Arty refused to draw one from the workshop. He tried to build up his strength by attempting increasingly heavy tasks, but it would leave him in so much pain he could barely walk, and it could take days for him to recover. Until he could do his share of the work, Arty could not justify taking the same pay as the other two men, and so he and Jean revisited the possibility of renting out the top-floor apartment, or maybe even selling it, but quickly realised it was no longer an option. One day Eddie would need his own room, as would his younger siblings, not that Jean was planning on having more babies. There again, she hadn’t planned on having Eddie.

  There was, of course, one other potential solution, but whenever Arty brought it up in conversation, Jean changed the subject. Her dream to run a dance school was the very first thing she had shared with him, and he knew that he was the reason she refused to pursue it. Short of doing to her what she and Jim had done to him—finding and renting a space without her knowledge—there didn’t seem to be any way of getting her to turn her lifetime ambition into a reality. And so the four of them, plus one, saw in another New Year with some dreams fulfilled whilst others languished.

  January of 1948, thankfully, brought no snow, although it rained long and hard enough to flood the workshop inspection pit. Each night, Jim and Charlie squelched home, wrung out their socks and hung them on the radiators to dry in a steamy monochromatic parody of Christmas Eve. Ignoring Arty’s terrible warnings of trench foot, the two men trudged to work next morning, returned home in the evening, took off their boots…and so on, and so forth. All in all, it was a damp, dreary month, with only two high points: Eddie’s first birthday, and the much-anticipated publication of a book that made Lady Chatterley’s lovers seem positively demure.

  Alfred Kinsey’s tome, entitled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, had already been causing a furore in the USA, and Jim’s desperation to read it far surpassed his patience in waiting for it to arrive. Indeed, it was the cause of Arty and Jim’s first real argument, which began when Arty jokingly remarked that Jim didn’t even like books, to which Jim retorted that he liked books of merit and substance, inferring that Arty’s passion for literature was worthless. The storm circled for a couple of days, sucking in all manner of flotsam concerning Jim’s continued worries for Arty’s health, and Arty’s feelings of inadequacy.

  Many unkind words were spoken, and the reconciliation reopened wounds that each had believed healed, yet it afforded a necessary, though far from welcome opportunity to talk frankly about their fears, the biggest for Arty being the sense that his disability stopped Jim from living a full life, to which Jim replied simply that Arty was his life.

  “I’m hardly knocking on death’s door,” Arty protested.

  “Not yet, you ain’t.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You push yourself too damn hard.”

  “I’m just trying to do my fair share.”

  “You’re trying to prove a point.”

  “Because you worry over nothing.”

  “Darlin’, if you can’t do the one thing you love more than any other, then I ain’t worrying over nothing.”

  Jim’s words cut deep, and Arty hated him for them—for reminding him of what he had lost, and for the seven months alone, and for all of the small, inconsequential things that loom vast and ugly when spite and fury rule the senses. But what he hated most of all was that Jim was right. The day Arty could dance again would be the day he was fit enough to work. His rage spent, he fell in defeat, and into Jim’s waiting arms.

  “When that book gets here it’s going straight back where it came from,” Jim said through his all-American tears.

  Arty kissed him, and the storm rolled away, leaving in its wake a night of passionate peace making and a new resolve to share their worries rather than attempting to carry the burden alone.

  By the time the book that started it all finally arrived, Arty was just as excited as Jim. As soon as the grumbling postman who delivered the exceedingly heavy package was out of sight, Arty went over to the workshop to tell Jim.

  At lunchtime, Jim called Molly to let her know and then opened the package, leaving the books on the table while he ate, just so he could look at them. Arty had never seen Jim quite so enthralled and it made him chuckle, watching him flick through the pages, trying not to read because he’d promised Molly he’d wait until the evening.

  Evening came, as did Molly, and dinner went uneaten, with the two of them instantly consumed by the eight-hundred-page report on Kinsey’s research. They were sharing the same copy, so Arty read the other one, carrying it back and forth to the kitchen whilst he furnished a constant supply of tea. Were it not for Molly leaving to work a night shift, she and Jim would likely have read through till morning—ne’er had a bookmark been so reluctantly inserted.

  By the following bedtime, Arty had read Kinsey from cover to cover, whereas Jim and Molly were still only halfway through, not helped by them pausing every few pages to discuss some finding or other, although Arty read quickly under ordinary circumstances, and the subject matter had him sprinting through the pages, desperate to gobble up every last word. It also forced him to concede Jim’s point, for now he understood: just as he had once referred to his feelings as an ‘abhorrence’, so too did fictional stories treat homosexuals as if they were an abomination almost always destined for a tragic demise. There was no hope in that. It was…worthless.

  In Alfred Kinsey’s work—and this was no work of fiction, but research of some scientific merit—Arty did find hope, if not of the same kind Jim and Molly had for a sexual revolution. Evidence that homosexuality was rife among American men would strike at the heart of the establishment, and fear was a dangerous instinct. However, if governments could be persuaded that homosexuality was an ‘inherent physiologic capacity’, then surely there was no purpose in their continued attempts to rid men of it?

  To Arty, it seemed like a practical direction for Jim and Molly’s group to take, not that he had ever been especially involved. The group met every other Thursday, and had done so for the past eighteen months, and whilst there was much to be said for the sense of belonging it gave to its two dozen or so members, they didn’t seem to be making much progress of the kind Jim had anticipated, and he was profoundly frustrated. Jim wanted to take a stand and get out there, fighting for their rights, whereas Molly’s approach was far more subtle, and she had achieved what she’d set out to. They now had a small yet strong network of lawyers, doctors, academics, senior policemen and other professionals who were well clued up on the law and on standby if the worst happened.

  Arty could see both sides, and in the longer term they would work together in formidable tandem. Jim and Molly were organised, enthusiastic, and each complemented the other wonderfully. Nevertheless, four years with Jim Johnson had transformed Arty’s intellectual theorising and daydreaming into a more radical pragmatism, and he had to admit he was guilty of egging Jim on.

  When Molly and Jim finally relented on their second night of reading, mostly because neither could see the words any more, Molly went off to work her night shift, and Jim settled on the se
ttee, patting his thighs by way of prompting Arty to lift his legs. At least three times every week, Jim gave Arty’s legs a firm massage. Whether it was helping at all Arty couldn’t say, but he wasn’t about to complain.

  “So what’d ya think?” Jim asked, once they were settled.

  “Of Kinsey’s findings? I think there’s hope for the future, but I’m not sure society is ready for it yet.”

  “All the more reason for us to keep making a noise.”

  “Maybe.” Arty groaned and slid a little further down the settee. “Mind you, I’ve had it if you end up in prison. Who’s going to rub my legs?”

  Jim laughed. “It won’t come to that. Not with the people we know.”

  The truth was, for all of Jim’s outspokenness, he stopped short of doing anything that would draw attention to them personally, because Arty needed him. Since their argument, Arty had withdrawn from physical labour and instead took care of the administrative side of things—logging work, ordering parts, banking the day’s takings, going to the post office for Jim and Charlie’s stamps, and so on—but that only kept him occupied for an hour or so at best, and it didn’t tax him in the slightest.

  It was also damn cold in that workshop, and so Arty had started to spend more time in Dalton Place, keeping Jean company, now she was ‘stuck at home’ being a housewife and mother. And what a job that was! Between washing nappies and bibs, doing the cleaning and cooking, and then washing the nappies and bibs all over again, poor Jean never had a moment to herself. Coming from a well-to-do family, she had been looked after by a nanny, and now she understood why, although it was just one of her many annoyances with how unequal things were between the haves and the have-nots, and men and women.

  The welfare promises were slowly but surely coming to fruition, and de-rationing had begun, making life more tolerable for those in greatest need, none of which tamed Jean’s fury that once she’d married, she lost every last bit of her independence.

  “If I’d known, I’d have carried on living over the brush,” she complained at an astonishing frequency. “Clearly the man had no regard for women whatsoever.”

  The man in question was the late John Maynard Keynes—the economist whose ideas had been influential in bringing about the improvements they were seeing all around them: new houses, hospitals and schools, help for the unemployed, state pensions. Arty thought it was a great achievement, which only added to the high esteem in which he already held Keynes, courtesy of Antonio’s anecdotes, passed on through Sissy, who went into a period of extended mourning when Keynes passed away.

  Keynes had been Sissy’s idol; he was everything she admired in a man: a gifted economist, openly homosexual, but he also loved women. She declared that had she met Keynes before Antonio, she would have thrown herself upon him in a spectacularly embarrassing fashion. Curiously, Antonio wasn’t in the least bit perturbed by this news.

  Jean was not quite so enthralled, for the entire system Keynes had inspired relied on women staying at home and men going out to work. A woman didn’t need to earn as much as a man, because she didn’t have a family to provide for. Why did a wife need to pay the same national insurance when it was her husband’s responsibility to look after her? Charlie, who often arrived home in the midst of one of Jean’s rants, kept his head down and his mouth shut. Whether he agreed with her or not, he preferred the quiet life.

  The more Arty heard, the more certain he was that their time was yet to come. There were bigger battles to be fought before homosexual rights could have their day and, in spite of the initial excitement about Kinsey’s report, nothing happened. There was still a long way to go in recovering from the war, and the destitute cared little for women’s laments or men’s private proclivities. In time, perhaps things would change, although it was by no means certain that the change would be for the better.

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