by Anne Bennett
‘She’s talking about Isobel, Paul’s sister,’ Aggie said, with a sigh.
‘Oh, he mentioned her,’ Joe said. ‘He said she was a lovely lady and a good friend.’
‘And that’s all they are – friends,’ Aggie said. ‘Though Molly would just love it to be different. There was not and is not any romantic entanglement at all.’
‘Maybe there wasn’t at the start,’ Molly said, with a wink at her uncle, ‘but how do you know that it hasn’t developed between them since?’
‘Yes,’ Joe smiled, playing up to his niece’s banter, ‘These strong silent types are the ones you have to look out for. Haven’t you ever heard the expression “still waters run deep”?’
‘I don’t know which is worse, you or Molly,’ Aggie said in mock exasperation, taking a seat at the table and handing Joe the milk jug.
‘Well, I am intrigued by the woman, anyway,’ Joe said. ‘She must be an irresistible type, this Isobel, because Tom would usually run a mile if a woman even spoke to him.’
‘She is fairly ordinary-looking,’ Molly said, ‘but very nice, and she likes Tom.’
‘Everyone likes Tom,’ Joe said. ‘That’s no measure of anything.’
St Nicholas’s Catholic School was as far removed from the cosy national school in Buncrana as it was possible to be. Ben watched the swarms of children playing in the playground before the first bell and decided that he didn’t like it one bit. He strode across the playground with his father, aware that many of the children paused in their games to watch him curiously, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled with apprehension.
Inside, the headmaster, a Mr Beaufort, was a large, jovial man, who welcomed Joe and Ben as if they were long-lost cousins he had been waiting to see for ages. Ben’s eyes slid across to his father and he wondered if he was taken in by his attitude. He himself certainly wasn’t. He had met teachers like Mr Beaufort before, and guessed he would be the very devil if he was to get on the wrong side of him.
Ben heard the clang of a large bell outside, and watched the children stand as still as statues and then, when the bell rang for a second time, form lines at each of the doors. He sat and watched his father fill in the relevant forms with the headmaster and listened to the muted sound of children entering through the nearest door and the receding tramp of their feet as they marched down the corridor. He felt a lump of dread settle into his stomach.
With the formalities completed, the headmaster said to Joe, ‘I haven’t had the records from the other school yet, but your boy looks a bright one. Were you thinking of putting him in for the eleven plus?’
Joe shook his head with a smile. ‘You’ll have to explain what that is.’
‘It’s an exam that the children take at the end of this year and it determines whether they go to grammar school and go on to matriculate,’ Mr Beaufort said. ‘Ben can then go on into the sixth form and take further exams called the Higher School Certificate when he is eighteen. They are the passport to university, should he wish to go.’
Joe had never thought that far ahead for Ben. He said, ‘I don’t know whether Ben is capable of that or not.’
‘If he isn’t, then he will go a secondary modern school for a different type of education,’ the headmaster went on.
‘Kevin goes to one of them,’ Ben said suddenly. ‘He said it’s all right as far as any school is all right.’
‘Kevin?’ the headmaster enquired.
‘His cousin,’ Joe said.
‘Ah,’ said Mr Beaufort, speaking directly to Ben, ‘your cousin is right. An education in a secondary modern school is excellent for some children. All I am saying to your father is, if you have the ability, then a grammar school gives you more opportunity.’
It was the word ‘opportunity’ that seeped into Joe’s brain. He remembered Brian Brannigan holding out the hand of opportunity to him and that he had grasped it. It was up to him to help his son in the same way and so he said, ‘I hear what you say, sir. I would like him to have the chance of taking this eleven plus, if he is bright enough. That all right with you, Ben?’
Ben shrugged. None of it was all right, but when did that ever matter? Ben was taken down to join his new class, accompanied by the school secretary, a position the school in Buncrana hadn’t needed. Joe had stayed talking to the headmaster and Ben knew why he was being shuttled out of the way: his father was going to tell the headmaster about his mother and what she had done. He burned with shame that anyone had to know, but his father had been firm that the school had to be told. ‘It is your mother who has done wrong,’ he told Ben when he complained. ‘You have nothing to be ashamed about.’
‘Course I have,’ Ben had cried. ‘The others will take the mickey.’
‘But why?’ Joe was genuinely nonplussed.
‘They just will, that’s why,’ Ben said. ‘Well, you tell the headmaster the truth if you want to, but I am going to tell anyone who asks that my mum is dead. It isn’t really a lie either, because she might as well be.’
All this went through Ben’s head as he stood by the teacher’s desk that first morning. Her name was Miss Tranter and she was young and quite pretty and, Ben guessed, not all that strict. However, as he looked around at the sea of faces he knew straight away who he would have trouble with and that was a group of boys at the back of the class. He saw them nudge one another in delight and knew they viewed him as a new boy to bait, and knew too he was in for a tough time in the playground.
Ben had been at school just over a fortnight when Tom came home. Joe was immensely glad to see him. Tom had always been a firm favourite with Ben, and Joe was greatly worried about him because he seemed to be worse, not better, since he had begun at the school. Joe had hoped that he might have made friends and begun to settle to life in Birmingham, but that hadn’t happened yet, and if ever Joe tried to talk to him about it he always claimed he had homework to do.
Ben did tell his father that as the records hadn’t come through from the school at Buncrana he had been given an aptitude test, which had showed him to be grammar school material and so he had homework every night and he would disappear into his room and stay there. From then too, he would never let his father into the bathroom when he was washing or in the bath. It had never bothered him before but he knew he would have a hard job explaining away the bruises and abrasions on his body to his father’s satisfaction should he catch sight of them.
Joe had made enough fuss about his constantly grazed knees. ‘Goodness, Ben!’ he exclaimed a few days previously when once more his scraped knees had been covered with a plaster. ‘What’s the matter with you? You never used to be this clumsy. Can’t you keep on your feet at all?’
It’s hard, Ben might have said, when the legs are kicked from under you. What he did instead was growl at his father, ‘I fell over, that’s all. I didn’t do it on purpose or anything, so what you’re giving out to me for?’
‘It’s just … Ben, is anything the matter?’
‘I told you there isn’t,’ Ben cried. ‘So why don’t you leave me alone?’
Joe had great hopes that Tom might break through the hard shell that Ben had wrapped all around himself, but as one week slipped into another, Ben seemed to distance himself further and further away from them all.
Even Kevin had tried to find out what was wrong, to no avail. ‘You have to get over this, mate,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Look, I know what it’s like to lose your mother,’ he said more gently. ‘It is just about the worst thing that can happen in the whole of your life and it hurts like hell. But in the end you have got to face it, because nothing you do will change it.’
‘Your mother died,’ Ben hissed, ‘and I know that was sad and everything, but she had no choice. My mother chose to go away and leave me and leave my dad. She preferred some stupid American that she had only just met to us. You have no idea how that feels.’
It wasn’t just the lack of his mother that was bothering Ben, but also
what was happening in the school. The very things that had made him popular in London worked in the opposite way in Birmingham.
His accent now was a mixture of American with an Irish lilt, not at all like the Brummie accent, and something else to tease him about. His good looks appealed to many of the girls so the bullies called him a sissy. He was also bright and keen to learn and, like his father, quick to pick things up. While this endeared him to the teachers it enraged the bully boys on the back row.
Each morning, as he turned in the gate as late as he dared to be, he would feel as if he was entering a hostile battleground, and the knot lodged in the pit of his stomach would tighten as he saw those boys elbowing one another as they saw him arrive.
There was no hope of avoiding them at playtime, for if one wouldn’t spot him, another would, and they would congregate round him and start jeering. Anything could start them off. They even mocked him because he had no mother. It was useless to try to defend himself, though he attempted this when the jeering and name-calling escalated into blows. In the beginning the girls in the playground had tried to intervene and stop the fighting, but it made matters worse and their intervention was just another stick to beat him with. Now they watched helplessly.
Going home too was a trial. He always left the building like a bat out of hell, but the bullies often caught up with him and would continue what they had begun in the playground. He would arrive home with his clothes in complete disarray, often with a rip in his shirt or jersey. His father was always annoyed with him about the state of his clothes, reminding him he only had so many coupons a year to buy him everything he needed and urging him to take more care.
Then he would often ask him if there was anything the matter. Ben would shake his head because there was a great deal the matter but nothing that his dad could help with. There was one person, though, that he was strangely drawn to and that was his Uncle Tom’s friend Isobel, whom he called Aunt Izzy. He couldn’t understand why this was and yet while she seldom said much, he felt that she was sympathetic towards him.
Isobel was a kindly lady, like Uncle Tom. Her brown hair, which she often wore in a soft roll at the nape of her neck, was streaked with grey, but her deep brown eyes in her honest and open face missed little, and he wasn’t a bit surprised that she was so friendly with his uncle, for, as his dad said, they were made in the same mould.
Isobel wasn’t a great talker. She had been the younger sister and had let the elder one talk for her. Then she’d married a voluble man who had taken over where her sister left off, so Isobel had learned to listen and found a person learned a lot about another by observation. She found out too at an early age that sometimes what a person did was a better indicator of what was going on in their head than what they said.
And so she knew that it wasn’t only the loss of his mother that was making Ben so unhappy, it was something else as well. She guessed it was to do with school because it was the only place Ben went, and yet Joe said he had no trouble with the work and was in line to sit the eleven plus. Isobel didn’t badger him with questions, though she knew he was suffering, because she also knew that he wasn’t ready to say anything yet.
As the bullying continued, Ben worked even harder. He knew that none of his tormenters would be sitting the exam and the only way to get rid of them, as he saw it, was to make sure he passed, so he took extra work home. He even took work home to do over Christmas because the exam was in two parts, the first part to be held in the town hall in January.
By Christmas the end of the war seemed as far away as ever. Since September, the beleaguered Londoners had been attacked by a new hazard: V-2s, pilotless like the doodlebugs, but which were even more dangerous as they made no noise at all.
‘I feel so sorry for the Londoners,’ Joe said. ‘The blitz was shocking, wasn’t it, Ben?’
‘I’ll say.’
‘Do you remember it well?’ Isobel asked, and Ben nodded vigorously.
‘I’ll never forget it,’ he said. ‘Dad was a volunteer fireman and it was usually just me and Mom down the shelters.’ He stopped. He never spoke about his mother, but now that he had, the memories came flooding back. He remembered the feel of her arms around him and how comforting they were when he was so scared, and how brave she was in the teeth of the most terrifying raids. He could even remember the smell of her as she held him close. The loss of her stabbed his heart as keenly and as painfully as it had in the early days.
Isobel looked into Ben’s anguished eyes, guessed at the thoughts tumbling about his head and felt her heart turn over for the young boy. She knew this had been a particularly poignant time for him, the first Christmas without his mother.
Isobel wasn’t surprised when Ben suddenly leaped to his feet and made for his room.
When Isobel got up to follow Joe said, ‘I should leave him be. He gets over these moods on his own.’
‘I don’t think he is in a mood,’ Isobel said. ‘I think he is finding the memories almost more than he can cope with. Maybe he needs the comfort of another human being in the room.’
‘He might be rude to you,’ Joe warned.
Isobel shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter if he is,’ she said. ‘I have very broad shoulders.’
Ben lay spread-eagled on the bed and he continued to lie there though he knew that Isobel had entered the room. She made no comment, just sat down on the chair beside the bed. The room was virtually silent and yet it wasn’t uncomfortable. Instead it seemed to radiate peace, and as Ben lay there he felt all the tension seeping out of his body.
Eventually he turned over on his side and regarded Isobel as she sat on the chair as if she had all the time in the world. ‘Why aren’t you interrogating me with questions?’ he asked in the end.
Isobel smiled. ‘Is that what you would like me to do?’
‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I’d hate it, but that’s what most adults do all the time.’
‘Maybe I’m not like most adults.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Kevin said. ‘So why did you come in here then?’
‘I had the feeling that the memories you had were suddenly too much to bear,’ Isobel said. ‘I have been there too and sometimes it helps to have someone with you, especially if they know what you are going through.’
‘What were your memories then?’
‘Of my son … my husband,’ Isobel said. ‘There are so many memories that comfort me now, but it wasn’t always like that.’
‘Did they die?’
‘Yes, Ben,’ Isobel said.
‘But that isn’t the same,’ Ben argued. ‘That’s like Kevin’s mother and father, and I know it’s sad but it isn’t the same. They had no choice in it, but my mother chose to go off.’
‘My son, Gregory, chose to go in the army,’ Isobel said. ‘He didn’t have to. He was only seventeen and he lied about his age. He could have deferred it too, for he had a brilliant future ahead of him, a place in medical school virtually guaranteed, which he was due to start the following year. But he didn’t listen. I could have gone to the recruitment board with his birth certificate and they would have released him.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Because it wasn’t what he wanted,’ Isobel said. ‘He wouldn’t have been happy.’
‘So what happened to him?’
‘He died at Dunkirk,’ Isobel said. ‘My husband, Gerald, never got over it. He collapsed when the telegram came and was never fit for work again, and I nursed him till he died in 1941.’
‘So do you think your son was selfish?’
‘Perhaps a little.’
‘Well, he only thought about himself, didn’t he?’ Ben said.
‘Yes, he did,’ Isobel said. ‘But lots of people do that.’
‘Like my mother.’
‘Yes, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t love you, Ben. Gregory loved us very much, but he still went. Your mother wanted to take you with her, remember.’
‘Dad would say that is like having your cake and eat
ing it.’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘And, anyway, I didn’t want to go,’ Ben said. ‘How could I go and leave Dad on his own?’
‘Your mother will know that now,’ Isobel said. ‘She must love the American very much, but there won’t be a day goes by when she won’t miss you, and even perhaps wishes things had worked out differently.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because I miss Gerald and the son we had for just such a short time every day, and it is as if there is a hole in my heart where they used to lie.’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what I feel like too.’ He looked up at Isobel. ‘You know, no one has ever spoken to me like this before.’
‘The thing to remember, Ben, is that whatever bad situation you are in, there will be someone in the world even worse,’ Isobel said.
‘So I just have to put up with things.’
‘Yes, Ben,’ Isobel said. ‘If you can do nothing to change the situation. That’s exactly what you must do.’
Ben thought about Isobel’s words and knew she spoke the truth. He had to accept that his mother had chosen to go away and live a different life in America and there was nothing he could do about it. He had missed her so much at Christmas; though they had spent the day at Molly’s, with Uncle Tom as well, he felt like there was a gaping hole inside him.
He accepted now that that was something he had to deal with on his own. His dad couldn’t bring his mother back, which was really what he would like him to do, and so it was no good getting cross with him because it didn’t help anyone. As for the bullies at school, as long as he passed the eleven plus, he would leave them far behind, so in a few months his life was bound to be better than it was now.
He slid off the bed and Isobel said, ‘Now where are you going?’
‘Back into the living room,’ Ben answered. ‘I’m getting on with it, like you said.’
TWENTY-FIVE
