by Anne Bennett
‘Will you not stay for a cup of tea?’ Flo asked, as she moved to put the kettle on above the fire, which she poked into life.
‘No, thanks all the same,’ Mike said. ‘I need my bed.’
‘What about work in the morning?’ Rodney asked. ‘What shall we say, for we can’t tell the truth—the lad will be out on his ear and jobs are like gold dust?’
Mike knew that. The unemployment rate was now touching two million and Steve couldn’t afford to lose his job. ‘What d’you want to say?’
‘We’ll say his stomach is upset.’
‘They’ll think he’s had a skinful.’
‘Then they’ll be right, but they won’t know it all and maybe they’ll not need to.’ Rodney glanced across at Flo and said, ‘You go along to the police station tomorrow and see what’s what. Just so we know where we stand an’ all.’
Flo nodded. She knew she’d have to. There was no one else and she knew she could expect little help from Neil.
But Flo didn’t follow her husband to bed after Mike had left. Thoughts of her boy in a prison cell would keep sleep at bay and she knew who was to blame. The same girl that had caused a row each time she was here. And now for that piece to throw her son over! She had no desire to lose Steve to any woman, but for one to indicate he wasn’t good enough! That wasn’t to be borne at all.
What else did Lizzie want in a man? Flo thought. True, he had a temper at times and a liking for the beer, but in that he was like a great many other men; and as for the women…Well, he was a normal man, after all, and the women usually chased him. You couldn’t blame a man for taking what was on offer.
Everything that had happened to her son that night was down to Lizzie Clooney, and Flo knew she’d never forgive her for as long as she lived.
Steve felt panicky when he came to the next morning and realised where he was. He couldn’t bear being cooped up and he had the desire to hammer on the door, but when he tried to stand, nausea caused him to vomit into the bucket by his bed.
The breakfast they brought him he couldn’t face, but he was grateful for the cup of tea. By lunchtime he’d not been sick for some time, but the headache continued to bother him and he was in no mood for the grinning face that appeared at the hatch.
‘Ready?’ the policeman asked, unlocking the door.
‘Ready? For what?’ So far no one had told him anything.
‘You’re before the magistrate, mate, so on your feet.’
Steve got to his feet gingerly. His head felt as if it were on fire and his red-rimmed eyes burned. The young policeman laughed. ‘You look a pretty sight, I don’t think.’
Steve shut his eyes for a moment against the pain. God, how he wanted to send the young copper’s teeth down his throat, but now he was sober he knew better and he was in no fit state anyway. But what was he talking about, before the magistrate? Just for getting drunk? He thought they’d tell him off and let him go. ‘What have I got to go before the magistrate for?’
‘Ooh, now let’s see. Little string of offences we have. Drunk and disorderly, causing an affray, assaulting a police officer.’
‘Assaulting a police officer?’ Steve said incredulously.
‘No recollection of it, mate?’ the policeman said with a grin. ‘Well, that won’t save you. Come on, let’s get going.’
Flo could have wept when she saw her son. His face was grey and his eyes were bloodshot and had black pouches beneath them. His hair stood on end and his Sunday suit was crumpled and stained.
Steve was fastidious about his appearance. His suits were regularly cleaned and returned to the wardrobe under a plastic cover and he was fussy about his shirts, which had to be pristine white and ironed just so, and on Sundays his tie always matched the handkerchief poking from his pocket.
But in the dock, Steve had no tie and no sign of the handkerchief either. He looked a beaten, crestfallen man and it tore at Flo’s heart.
When the police officer read out the charges against him, Flo saw him shake his head from side to side, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, and she knew he could remember little or nothing of what had happened. That didn’t seem to matter and the magistrate tore into him. ‘Assaulting a police officer is a serious offence and one that can carry a custodial sentence,’ he told Steve. ‘But as you’ve told the court you’re in steady employment we don’t think it would be in the country’s best interests to lock you up.’
Steve let his breath out in a sigh of relief. He’d never even thought of a jail sentence.
‘But, we don’t want to be considered as treating this as a trivial matter,’ the man went on. ‘No indeed, and if you come before me again there will be no doubt about the custodial sentence. This time, however, you are fined seventy-five pounds.’
Seventy-five pounds! The sum reverberated in Steve’s head. How in God’s name was he going to find that sort of money? Christ! The image of Lizzie staring out at him from the window of the hotel suddenly floated before him, and he knew just who was to blame for the state he was in. He’d never forget it for as long as he lived.
Steve and Flo weren’t the only ones blaming Lizzie, for she already did an adequate job of this herself. She thought she’d never get over the sight of Steve hauled into the van, handcuffs holding his hands behind his back, especially as she still thought it was her fault, at least in part. She certainly didn’t want to come across him, not for a while anyway, so when Tressa met Mike in her free periods, Lizzie would sit in her room and hem the sheets and blankets she had picked up cheap in the Bull Ring.
‘Come out with us,’ Pat urged. ‘We go to the flicks, or dancing at Tony’s Ballroom up the West End.’
But Lizzie would shake her head, thinking that at the moment it was best to lie low. Tressa worried about her, and in the end Mike reluctantly agreed she could come out with them a time or two, but she wouldn’t do that either. ‘She’s frightened of bumping into Steve,’ Tressa said, ‘and making things worse for him.’
Nothing could make things worse, Mike thought, for Lizzie’s decision had upset the man totally. He was paralytic each night, not tipsy or merry but fallingdown drunk, and before he got to that state he’d tell any who would listen about Lizzie and how much he had loved her and how he wished he could make her see that. He was hurting, and Mike was well aware of that, but he told Steve he had to keep well away from Lizzie. Steve knew that already and he drank himself into oblivion because that was the only way he could cope with it.
Then, he’d started becoming friendly with a man called Stuart Fellows, who lived at the bottom end of Bell Barn Road. They’d all been to St Catherine’s together, but as Stuart was considered a troublemaker, Mike and Steve had kept well away from him. But now, with Mike meeting Tressa as many nights as he could, they’d sort of been thrown together, and Mike could hardly blame Steve for that.
Stuart was only too willing to go after the women with Steve, despite having a steady girlfriend of his own. ‘Don’t it bother you?’ Mike asked him when the three of them were together one day. ‘What if your girlfriend finds out?’
‘She won’t,’ Stuart said confidently. ‘Anyroad, if she does, so what? It ain’t hurting her, it’s helping.’
‘How d’you work that out?’
‘Look, she don’t want to go all the way, frightened of finding herself pregnant; and she’s right to worry because I think her old man would kill the pair of us. This way I don’t have to push her.’
‘Tressa wouldn’t see it that way,’ Mike said, shaking his head.
‘You sleep with Tressa,’ Steve pointed out.
‘Well, we’re engaged.’
‘I ain’t going down that route, mate,’ Stuart replied quickly. ‘Have fun while you’re young, that’s me. But I don’t think it would stop me if I was engaged, or even married.’
‘Talk sense, man.’
‘Look,’ Stuart explained, ‘you can’t do nothing to stop having kids, can you, cos the Pope says so. Well, I wouldn’t want a houseful
of kids and a wife like an old hag. Some of these women having a baby every year and living hand to mouth would take it as a bonus to have their old man dip his wick elsewhere once in a while, I’ll tell you.’
Steve thought about that. Next door to them lived Bob and Chrissie Roberts. They’d been married thirteen years and Chrissie was pregnant with her tenth child. All the children were pitifully thin, dressed in rags and usually barefoot, and Steve had heard them crying with hunger and cold.
And countless times he’d heard Chrissie pleading with Bob to leave her alone and the resultant slaps and thumps and punches, followed by her muffled moans and the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of their bedhead against the wall, and later in the quiet of the night he’d often hear Chrissie sobbing.
The young, once beautiful girl was gone for good. Her golden locks were dark, lank and greasy and her skin had lost its earlier bloom and was heavily lined and sallow and thin. Added to that, her body was shapeless and she’d lost a lot of teeth. And the woman was too poor and wretched to take joy in anything. Would you want that for any woman you married? No, by God you wouldn’t.
So, when Stuart said, ‘Seems to me the church has you by the balls every which way, and I’ll go on the way I’ve always done, wife or no wife, and no bloody church will tell me different,’ Steve could see the reasoning behind it.
‘Well, I have no wife, no girlfriend, no nothing,’ Steve said. ‘And I’m not doing without female company a minute longer. Are you coming along with us, Mike, or are you not?’
Mike shook his head, and the other men laughed. ‘Suit yourself,’ Steve said, and with a wave they were gone.
CHAPTER SIX
‘You said it would be all right,’ Tressa said accusingly to Mike as they wandered arm in arm down Colmore Row.
Mike was still getting to grips with the news that his lovely, beautiful Tressa was carrying his child, and yet he knew she had a right to be angry with him. He had promised she’d be all right and that he would see to it. He knew he couldn’t wear anything to prevent pregnancy, the Church’s teaching was clear, but he’d intended to pull out before any damage was done. He hadn’t realised how difficult that would be, how carried away he’d become, so that he’d be virtually unable to do that. So the condition Tressa was in was entirely his fault.
He wasn’t aware she was crying until he felt her shoulders shaking. ‘Don’t cry, pet,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ He turned her away from the city centre into one of the deserted side roads and kissed her gently. ‘Now,’ he said, facing her. ‘You are sure about this?’
Tressa nodded her head. ‘My monthlies were due a week after we became engaged, but nothing happened and it’s been the same this month, and it’s nearly the end of March now.’ She looked at Mike and added, ‘It must have happened that first time.’
Bugger! thought Mike, and he knew it must have. That time he was so buoyed up with the culmination of his dreams, and drunk with lust as much as the drinks he’d consumed, he could no more have stopped than he could have turned back the tide, and this was the result. ‘We’ll get married sooner rather than later, that’s all,’ he said reassuringly.
‘We haven’t money enough,’ Tressa cried. ‘Where will we live and everything?’
‘Look, Tressa, many start with less and manage,’ Mike told her. ‘We have a bit saved between us and I know you’ve been picking up bits and pieces in the market. I’ll put in for any overtime going and as long as you are feeling all right you can work a wee while yet, till the wedding at least.’
‘Where will we live?’
‘We might have to stay with my mom and dad for now,’ Mike said.
Tressa gave a shiver of distaste. Mike’s parents were almost as bad as Steve’s and Mike’s two sisters also adored their baby brother. They’d resented Tressa from the beginning, sensing how Mike felt about her. They were too clever to do this in front of Mike, when they were icily polite, but they had plenty of opportunity to give digs and make comments to show Tressa she wasn’t welcome in their family. Tressa never complained about this to Mike, for she knew the high regard he held his family in and she told herself it was Mike she loved and was marrying, not his family. But then she’d never envisaged living with them.
Mike, catching sight of her face by the light from the lamppost, said quite sharply, ‘It’s no good looking like that, Tressa. It’s my parents or the streets as far as I can see just now.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s just not what I imagined.’
‘D’you think I did?’ Mike snapped, and then he put his arms around Tressa. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he said, kissing her gently. ‘I’m a brute yelling at you. It’s all my fault, because I know you would have waited.’
Tressa knew Mike spoke the truth. However hard it was, she would have held out to keep her virginity till the wedding night if Mike hadn’t wanted it so much. That first night, the night of the engagement, she’d done it fearfully to please him, because she knew he expected it, and she’d been totally bowled over by the experience. Few of the women she had spoken to had mentioned any enjoyment they got from sex, never mind the exhilarating, mind-blowing rapture Tressa had felt. After that first time she’d been as anxious to repeat the experience as Mike was, and so she said, ‘No, I loved you too much to want to wait.’
‘Well,’ Mike said with a rueful grin. ‘See where our loving has got us both?’
‘Aye.’
‘You’ve had time to think and worry about this,’ Mike said. ‘To me it’s like a bolt from the blue. Who else have you told?’
‘No one,’ Tressa said. ‘But I think Lizzie suspects. I’ve been sick a few times in the morning, you see. I’ve even seen Pat and Betty looking at me oddly a time or two. But they’ve said nothing and neither have I.’
‘We need to get things organised,’ Mike decided. ‘I think we should tell Mom and Dad straight away.’
Tressa quailed inside at the thought of that and yet she knew they’d have to know, and fast, for a wedding had to be arranged speedily. ‘What about my mammy and daddy?’ she asked suddenly. ‘They’ll have to give permission; I’m not twenty till July. I’ll have to tell them face to face. We’ll have to go over on a flying visit.’
‘First things first,’ Mike said. ‘Let’s tell my parents tonight and at least get that over and done with.’
‘She looked at me like I was some sort of slag,’ Tressa cried later to the three girls grouped about the bed. ‘She said…she said it…it was all my fault; that…that I’d trapped her son, snared him in some way.’ She looked at them all, her face red and awash with tears, twisting a sodden handkerchief in her agitated hands. ‘It wasn’t like that. Mike and I love each other.’
None of the girls were surprised. Mothers seemed to care more for sons than daughters and they all knew how Mike’s family behaved towards Tressa for she’d told them bits before, but now wasn’t the time to remind her of that.
‘Come on, bab. Don’t take on,’ Betty said. ‘These things happen. She’s likely in shock.’
‘At least your man’s standing by you,’ Pat added. ‘That’s summat today.’
‘That’s not all,’ Tressa said. ‘She says we can’t stay with them. That she’d never live with the shame and that she’s writing to her brother Arthur and his wife Doreen, to see if we can live there after the wedding. I don’t even know the man and he lives in Longbridge.’
‘Where’s that?’ Lizzie asked.
‘Bloody miles away,’ Pat said. ‘You don’t even know these people?’
‘No, but apparently they’ve always had a soft spot for Mike,’ Tressa said. ‘They had four daughters all growing up when Mike was a boy and he used to go and stay with them both. Mike told me this Arthur always wanted him to go into the car industry with him, but Mike said he’d have to live with them and he knew his parents would have been hurt. And,’ she added bitterly, ‘then they might have been. Now, they can’t get rid of him quick enough, and God alone knows what my parents will
say when we go over and tell them.’
‘So, if they agree, you’ll go to live in Longbridge?’ Lizzie asked, and suddenly realised how she would miss her cousin. They’d lived only a few miles apart since they’d been born and had lived in the hotel together for two years. They almost knew the secrets of each other’s soul.
But, she told herself, this was no time to think of herself. There was a wedding to arrange, and hurried forward or not, Lizzie was determined to do all she could to make the day a wonderful one for Tressa and one she could think back on with pride.
Saturday, 14th June 1932, and the wedding reception, held in the back room of The Bell, was in full swing. Lizzie had worked hard to keep her promise to make this a day to remember, but she doubted Tressa would look back on it with any sort of pride, though she’d probably remember the glowering looks Mike’s sisters and parents cast in her direction.
But then Tressa’s parents, though they had been bitterly disappointed with Tressa when she and Mike had gone over to tell them they had to get married and speedily, were inclined to blame Mike. Before Tressa had gone to England she’d never even dated a boy, never mind kissed one. And now!
‘The man must have taken advantage of her,’ Eamon said. ‘She was young and innocent and had her heart turned.’
‘Well at least he’ll marry her,’ Margaret had said with a sigh of relief.
When they came over and saw the fawning way Mike’s parents and sisters behaved towards him, they’d been even more incensed, and when the two families had to speak to each other you could almost feel the disdainful animosity between them.
Lizzie wished she could tell them both to behave, for Tressa and Mike’s sakes, if for no one else’s. Neither of the two young people had meant to hurt and disappoint anyone, they had just let their feelings overwhelm them. It wasn’t as if they’d never intended to get married, for goodness’ sake.
