Veronica's Bird

by Veronica Bird

  Mother had been awake beforehand. It had been easy for her to creep out of bed before going downstairs, and in some desperate cri de coeur had lit the fire herself. A bit of paper on the chair and a match was all that was needed, nothing too big so it could not be put out. She must have known that her son would have rushed downstairs as soon as he smelled smoke and he could put the fire out. Maybe it was post-natal depression that had led her to such desperate action, who knows, but the cigarette was invented as a cover. Whatever the real truth was, Dad could not be blamed this time. He was at the mine on a shift so he could not have dropped the cigarette. Working in the mines where he had to be so careful of naked flames, Dad would chew tobacco. I had wrongly assumed he or one of the members of the party must have been the real reason. But, it was a close-run thing. Five more minutes and they might not have been able to get out at all. It was a terrible thought, for one read of these horrors in the papers, so easily dismissed at the time with a slight frown and a sigh.

  When I arrived at the hospital, Mam was lying in a hospital bed, the smell of antiseptic and other chemicals tainting the air. She was being fed by a nurse. She was completely paralysed and could not use her hands or arms. It was a mind-numbing sight, seeing this gentle but frail woman brought to such a low level. She had never had a chance in life: it seemed so unfair. To a twelve-year old, it was a turning point, for my only lifeline was contained within the sad shell which had been my mother.

  I had to go back to school, but the crisis was far from over. There was a telephone box at the school which we could use and I had telephoned for news. It was a month after my visit and I had heard nothing since from any of the family. It was as if I had ceased to exist to them.

  ‘Don’t go out to day Veronica, Mam is not good.’ It was Joan who had answered the telephone. Why today, I wondered? Was it just a coincidence, me ringing, and bad news, possibly arising? At two that afternoon, Gordon, my brother, arrived in a car and I was spirited out of class to go back home. As we parked outside my old house, he told me to remain where I was. Strangely he said: ‘Stay in the car, I can see the doctor. He’s still here.’ In fact, he had gone in to warn the whole family who had gathered with my Father, to let them know I was back from school. I had not been told my mother had died that morning at eleven. Maybe Gordon was, in his muddled way, trying to protect me, though it was too late for that. Mam was dead. He could not change the fact she had given up the struggle to live. The pain of the moment, the idea I could have been excluded from my mother’s dying moments has stayed with me. I never forgot he had attempted to pull the wool over my eyes. She was my mother also.

  I was eventually told, and was taken upstairs to see Mam lying on her bed, the mountain of cares and worries smoothed out of her face. No more would she have to endure her awful life which, no doubt, had started well in nineteen twenty-eight with so many promises and plans. She was just forty-nine years old, no age, not even in nineteen fifty-five, and we had all failed her, every one of us. I drew some comfort from the knowledge that before she died she had retained an abiding image of her daughter, Veronica, who was doing well at school.

  I stayed away for a week, ending up with the funeral at Carlton where she was laid to rest alongside her family. On the Sunday, I was driven back to Ackworth. The countryside was sane, the trees still waved at me and my friends welcomed me back. No-one, as far as I could tell knew why I had been away and I didn’t enlighten them. The Headmistress kept the knowledge to herself not even telling her staff what had happened to me. Much later in life a teacher saw me on television and took the trouble to ring me up. I invited her to come and see me in the prison (not very well put but you know what I mean). She told me she was never told why I had been away for a week, for the Headmistress never shared this sort of information with any of her staff. Quite a change in today’s demanding social media environment.

  At least, poor Mam never had to witness the new shock, five months later, as Dad did, coming home from his shift to find Jack dead in his bed. Jack’s attacks had often been scary, usually with no warning as the tremors often ended with him on the floor foaming at the mouth. We would have to turn him onto his side so he did not swallow his tongue and he needed watching carefully until the attack subsided. Jack had been lucky to have had a good job in Woods Glass Company, for by this time companies were encouraged to help epileptics. They were taught to apply their first aid training and were aware of the fits and how to treat them. This time, he was alone when the fit came upon him. There was no-one to help free him in his contortions, for his brothers were in the Forces and lived away from home. A blanket had wrapped itself too tightly around Jack’s neck into which he had gasped out his life. He too had gone to a happier home. In less than half a year our family had gone from eleven to nine, two nice people, erased from life who had made neither a mark nor even a scratch on the surface of the world. It was as though they never had existed.

  I have an image of Gilbert in his National Service uniform who was deeply upset at his mother’s death, so much so that after a plea to Roy Mason our M.P. with a strong mining heritage, (ennobled to Lord Mason of Barnsley) a compassionate discharge was arranged for him and he was released to sort out his life at home.

  About a year after Mam died I was told Dad took in another woman with her own children, but my brothers and sisters, who remained in the house, refused to come to terms with the new arrivals and it was not a success, so she left to go where, I have no idea, nor do I know her name. It was an incident in Dad’s life. Perhaps he was lonely for company even when surrounded by the rest of his family?

  *

  You did not have to be a sooth-sayer, just clued up to life, to see a pattern emerging. It was just too convenient; I was just too valuable a commodity to be allowed to continue at school. It was annoying, was it not, for me to keep disappearing at the end of the school holidays for another thirteen weeks, when I could be struggling with the next sack of potatoes. Fred was not stupid, he could see he did not have to employ further help, the baby-sitter was free and his wife could be released from the house-hold chores to spend more time on the stall, and all for a pound a week. Besides, his business, which had flourished, was beginning to feel the cold light of reason as the Supermarkets began to bite into his profits. It was just the excuse he needed and the option was a great deal cheaper than Joan having to bring in expensive baby-sitters and staff for the stalls. There I was, in my school uniform and my posh accent, an hour’s ride away, frustrating Fred’s carefully made plans.

  I received the dreadful news the day I returned for the autumn term. I was called in to the Headmistress’s study again, not even having had the time to unpack my trunk or gabble with my friends.

  ‘This will be the last term at school Veronica. I’m sorry but I have had notification from the Education Authorities that your family is no longer wishing to keep you here.’ She used the word family carefully, not sure who it was who was keeping me at Ackworth or who did not want me at Ackworth. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She might as well have thrown acid in my face. ‘But, I’m taking my GCE ‘O’ levels in June,’ I replied, not understanding, not believing what she had just told me. ‘Besides, I have a grant-’

  She cut me off. ‘It is final Veronica. I’m very sorry but remember, you have done well here.’

  I was to lose, not only my beloved school, but would be prevented from taking my crucial exams without which I could get nowhere in life, at best, I could look forward to a factory job or a bus conductor. Having taken my Art ‘O’ level earlier and passed I knew that I could achieve several more in the summer and I was entered for eight subjects. It was also shaming for neither Fred nor Joan could face telling me directly.

  I could not help it. I burst into tears. I thought the unhappy days were far behind me. Sure, I had to work long hours in the holidays but they were soon over and I sped off back to school and my friends with joy in my heart, able to forget the drudgery as I pulled out my hockey stick.<
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  I was stunned. I walked out of her study, my face streaming, other girls and boys wondering what on earth I had done on the first day back to merit such a telling off: and Veronica of all girls.

  What had it done to my carefully planned life? I had wanted to be a PE Teacher at a school of my choosing, far away from Barnsley. I knew that as soon as I left Ackworth I would be put to work, employed in the market for a pittance with no hope of ever gaining a better job. Of all the dark days in the past, there was none so black, none so despairing as this complete dismissal of a human being. And I would have given up the pound a term I received. That was not important. What other reason could Fred want than to exploit me for his own ends? The school fees were paid by my scholarship. I could get by with the clothes I owned. There would have been no cost to him.

  What I have never told anyone until this book was agreed, is that a few weeks later I returned to Ackworth at the end of January, having left the school at Christmas to meet with a person who had helped me the first time. I was desperately unhappy and lonely and without my beloved sport. We discussed my predicament and, after careful thought she suggested she might be able to gain a bursary for me allowing me to return to the school and take my ‘O’ levels. She told me to go home and think about it very carefully. I left with my hopes high but then began to understand just what I was doing and what could happen to me. I would be unable to return to Barnsley in the holidays; no-one to return to. I would become homeless; a condition I am sure the school would never accept. No money, no home, what on God’s earth could I do? The plans died before they had had time to form. I returned to Barnsley with not a single light in the future.

  *

  That last term I existed only. I was as low as I could recall. Each day I woke, my pillow was damp, my eyes red, filled with nothing…. nothing at all to look forward to, no future, the cheap option to satisfy a greedy man.

  I was to be denied a proper education and a chance to make something of my life. If you are able to look back yourself to nineteen fifty-five, think what you were doing in that year? What hopes and aspirations you held, and what successes you eventually achieved? Perhaps I could have matched your achievements, who knows, but we will never know because of the incalculable greed by one man. We would have been living in the same country yet as far apart as it was possible to conceive.

  I had had my own hopes. Then, and despite my wretched family, I was on the edge of starting off in life myself but I was powerless to stop time or reverse it. Instead, the term went, passed in a flash as if I was sitting in a train gazing out the window, none of which I can recall with any certainty, until the day came when Fred arrived at eleven in the morning, when most of my friends had been picked up at seven, and collected me. During the drive back and when I got home I was told nothing, there was nothing mentioned, no apologies for my lost schooling, my lost life, and the next day I was back on the stalls serving customers and restacking.

  Despite the growth of Tesco, Fred’s business was huge in those days. He and his brothers did not sell, as you might think, five or six boxes of apples and a similar number of bananas on a Saturday but a hundred boxes in a single day. Eventually, I was detailed to look after Joan’s three children on a Saturday to keep them out of the way of the parents. All I did was feed them in front of a television set, lay the table and clean the house ready for their return.

  I dropped into a routine. I was not going back to school, so I had to accept the new situation whether I liked it or not. This meant being told to remove the children on a Sunday morning from the house with instructions not to return until one-thirty for lunch. As soon as the meal was finished I was placed in charge of her children and took them to Sunday school to allow Joan to retreat to her bed. This routine would run into the following day when I would often have to be up at three in the morning to climb on a lorry to go and pick up or deliver fruit and veg. to their other stalls. I was expected to pick up the heavy sacks just as much as the men, for which I was still paid one pound a week.

  My sister Susan had joined us and was living in the attic with me and the three Ward girls. Even in those early days she was filled with a holiness I could not match, and she could be found anytime armed with a bible. Unkindly, I wondered if it was the only book she had? But, neither of us had an option in life. We were told what to do and when to do it, such that neither of us had any control on our futures.

  After both of Fred’s parents died, leaving the family their house at Flamborough, we were all sent there for what was termed a ‘holiday’. We were to be without an adult, unchaperoned in other words. It was an ideal excuse for Susan and me to be sent with the three girls for three weeks in the summer, giving the parents a break from the hassle of the children at home. I was now seventeen, growing up with responsibilities thrust upon me whether I wanted them or not. One could say I was just another ungrateful awkward teenager, but five of us together in a house with food convoyed in at the weekends by Joan, was not a great holiday despite what you may think. It hurt that Joan would always arrive with beautiful, clean clothes for her children but my clothes had to be washed by me as part of the eternal routine. After the first day together we had run out of ideas so we stayed in most of the time, watching television. Ghislaine, the eldest of Joan’s girls was always good and helpful, not reflected in the second sister Isabel, her mother’s favourite. When disciplined by me, which I had to do from time to time, she would wait for the weekend and pour out her sorrows to her mother leaving me with much less control during the long week ahead. The third sister, Katie was a beauty with blonde curly hair who was thoroughly spoilt. I, in the meantime had to wash, cook and clean for the four, before turning to and ironing a mountain of girls’ clothes. At the end of the ‘holiday’ we were driven back to Barnsley on the assumption we had had a wonderful time, and weren’t we lucky? (again).

  But Susan couldn’t settle. Although she didn’t work in the market as I did, she often had to care for the three girls when I was on the stall, being held responsible for washing and feeding them. So, despite the news she had received, of the continuing drunkenness at home, Susan left and went back to Father. Later on in life she talked a great deal about the drunken rages but, by then I had moved on and my mind had wrapped and packed the nightmares together and stored them away in a dark place.

  Chinese restaurants from Taiwan finally came to Barnsley. The Chinese island at the time was then known as Formosa. It had a need to raise money urgently for their beleaguered new state, separated as it was from the mainland, so they built restaurants all over the world, much to the delight of English diners who had never experienced such food. The Taiwanese families running these new style restaurants, received the main elements of the menus from Taiwan sending any profits back home, but needed fresh fruit and vegetables on a daily basis. Fred quickly stepped in and set up agreements to deliver to their back door. It became my job to take trays of mushrooms over at lunch. I would always find six or seven Chinese sitting on the floor noisily eating away with their chopsticks, surrounded by piles of vegetables, some strange ones I did not recognise. They would be mixed up with raw chicken legs and exotic smelling spices. Sitting on the floor to eat, in Yorkshire, was about as alien as this new food was to us.

  Tomatoes were another fruit which were seasonal in the Sixties. They were very expensive especially when the first of the year’s crop arrived from Guernsey. If I put just one tomato too much in a bag I was scolded ‘…. that’s a penny wasted’ but when you were adding up in your head in pounds, shillings and pence and weighing the next item at the same time, it could be difficult to get it right every time. I would nod my head in understanding, trying to remember I had got to four shillings and fourpence, and smile at the customer. It made me good at mental arithmetic.

  Neighbours and family saw I was living, or staying might be a better word, in Fred’s vastly superior house. ‘Wasn’t it nice to be there? Wasn’t it so much better than being with Dad?’ There was a sitting
room which held the much-prized television, a three-piece suite and a carpet (yes, really) and some very nice curtains but, naturally, I was not allowed to enter this room, the Front Room, at any time. Attendance, instead was to Fred’s daughters. When he took them swimming he took me also so he would not have to bother about putting them in their costumes. I was there, and I did it well, to remove, from his shoulders, the annoying parts of having children. He simply did not want to have a tearful daughter near him when I could do the job of comforting a half-drowned child. And of the television in that Front Room? I have a memento today, for I bought the cabinet it had sat in for years, from Fred, and I use it today to store my shredder. Quite an apt use.

  It was just as well Joan pushed us out to play, for she was always irritable and critical of my work on Sunday mornings. It was hard, knowing I had not made many mistakes – I was always so careful in doing what I was told for fear of stirring someone’s wrath – but I stayed away walking alongside the canal path in all weathers while I attempted to keep the three girls in a reasonable mood when it began to rain.

  This canal almost proved calamitous one day, which had started off quite normally. I was washing up in the kitchen keeping an eye on Ghislaine, now aged five who was playing in her toy jeep in the field behind us. Distracted by the other girls, I had taken my eye off the window for a while. And, when I looked out again there was no sight of my charge. Panic-stricken I dashed outside but she was nowhere in sight. I knocked up as many neighbours as I could and their shrill, increasingly alarmed voices began to bounce around the houses. Fred arrived in his lorry some fifteen minutes later. Taking in the high pitch of voices he roared off towards the canal, our greatest worry, where he soon found Ghislaine sitting in her toy car alongside the canal’s edge but talking to a stranger. Seeing Fred, the man disappeared and the day ended in firm words all round but no harm done. It can be as quick as the bat of an eye. A sneeze almost, a glance to find the time, a few seconds to open the oven door and then, one falls into a pit of pure terror. But, we cannot keep our children in cotton- wool all their lives for if we do, we take away their natural defence mechanisms such as I had learned at home. There has to be balance.