Saturday's Child

by Ruth Hamilton

  ‘Has she? I’m right pleased to hear that, Roy. And who’s she? The cat’s mother?’

  Roy hopped from foot to foot. He was bursting with words, yet he couldn’t organize them into a sensible sequence. ‘Drainpipe,’ he achieved eventually. ‘I went up it while she were out, Mam. Smelly’s drainpipe. It weren’t easy to climb, but I managed at the finish – and – well, I saw it.’

  Lily slammed the rolling pin onto the table’s surface. ‘You what? You daft little bugger. Everything in that house is rotted, lad, including the drainpipes. It’s a wonder you’re not lying in her yard with your back broke.’ She noticed that his expression was one of shock and bewilderment. ‘Well? Has the cat’s mother took the tongue from your head?’

  He sat down. ‘Back bedroom,’ he stammered, ‘her back bedroom. Mam, it’s clean. It’s . . . it’s cleaner than our house, cleaner than owt I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It’s clean,’ he repeated.

  ‘Clean? What do you mean, “clean”? Her’s never batted a mat since we moved in here. As for a sweeping brush, I bet she hasn’t got one to her name.’

  ‘There isn’t no mats. It’s lino or oilcloth, I think, and the room’s full of stuff. There’s a big, long table, Mam, all shelves up the walls, boxes on them, a massive chair what she must sit on with a little table next to it and loads of oil lamps and books and cotton – big reels, not like what you have in the sewing box, Mam – and cloth, white cloth stood up in a roll and it’s clean. It were like looking into a hospital room, all spotless, like.’

  Seconds staggered past. ‘Clean? Clean? She never has a bath. Yon tin bath in her back yard fell off the wall years since, when the handle rotted away.’

  ‘One clean room, Mam. Window’s clean and all. She must have sat out.’ Sitting out was an activity that always frightened Roy. The women of the street often chatted to each other as they cleaned the upstairs windows, bodies outside, legs inside and usually pinned down by children whose responsibility was to stop their female parents from dropping to certain death.

  ‘She’s never sat out, Roy. I’d have noticed.’ Very little in Prudence Street escaped the notice of Lily Hardcastle.

  ‘She might do it at night, Mam.’

  Pastry forgotten, Lily cupped her chin with her hands, thereby depositing self-raising flour all over her neck. ‘Well,’ she breathed, ‘I’ll go to the foot of our stairs and sing “Land of Hope and Glory”. Whatever next?’

  ‘There’s a thing hanging on the door,’ he offered now.

  ‘A thing? What thing?’

  Roy struggled once more for words. ‘It’s on a coat-hanger, but it’s like . . . like a big frock, only it’s not a frock.’

  Lily waited, watched as gears fought to mesh within her son’s nine-year-old brain. When was a frock not a frock? And was this youngest of hers all right in his head?

  ‘It’s like . . . like two sheets sewn up with a hole for her head and holes for her hands. Like a tent, it is.’

  Well. Lily Hardcastle didn’t know what to think or say, so she took the docker from its place of residence behind her right ear, lit it, inhaled deeply. A clean room? In Nellie Hulme’s house? ‘I thought she never went upstairs, Roy. I thought she slept in her front parlour.’

  ‘It’s not a sleeping room,’ the boy answered, ‘it’s a making room. She makes things.’

  ‘What things?’

  He shrugged. ‘Cloth things.’

  Lily, seldom at a loss, could not lay her tongue across a single syllable. Cloth things? Anything coming out of Nellie Hulme’s dump must have stunk to high heaven and low hell. And if the old woman was making clothes, why didn’t she fettle a few bits for herself? There was neither rhyme nor reason to this. ‘Are you sure, Roy Hardcastle?’

  ‘Yes, Mam.’

  ‘You’re not making it up?’

  ‘No, Mam.’

  The mystery of Nellie Hulme was deepening fast. ‘Put that kettle on, son, I need to get me brain working.’

  He put the kettle on. ‘And a paraffin stove.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘There’s a paraffin heater, Mam. That’s clean and all, like shiny. It were that much of a shock, I near slipped off the drainpipe.’

  ‘Then don’t go up it again, else I’ll tell your dad.’

  ‘Right.’ He inhaled deeply, hopefully. ‘Can I have a dog?’

  ‘No, you can’t.’ Roy often did this, distracting her then slipping in that same request, though sometimes he asked for a cat. He was desperate for an animal of some kind.

  ‘Well, a cat would kill the mice,’ he said, ‘and a dog would chase the rats away.’

  Lily threw her cigarette end into the fire. She draped pastry across her rolling pin, flicked it effortlessly onto the top of her brown baking dish. He wanted a dog, a cat, a rabbit and a good hiding. ‘Did you see any of the things Nellie had made, Roy?’ Lily scalded the pot and made tea.

  He folded his arms. ‘I could look after a dog.’

  She sniffed. ‘You looked after them goldfish, didn’t you? Dead in a week, they were. You fed them enough to keep a whale going for a year.’

  ‘Cloths,’ he replied.

  ‘What kind of cloths?’

  ‘I’d take it for walks. I could take it to the park every day after school. It would guard the house and all.’

  Lily fixed him with a hard stare. ‘What kind of cloths?’ she repeated.

  ‘I could teach it tricks. They sit up and beg.’

  ‘I’ve enough beggars round my table, so think on and tell me about them cloths. No use leaving me with half a tale – you know it’ll mither me for the rest of today.’

  He studied his mother, assessed that her mood was fair-to-middling. ‘Holes in the corners,’ he replied finally. ‘At the pictures, in posh houses, they wipe their gobs on them while they’re having their dinners.’

  Lily popped the dish into the fireside oven. She had learned more today about her next door neighbour than she had found out in ten years. But she still couldn’t work out how Nellie kept the stuff clean. Then she remembered. She’d seen Nellie once coming out of the Chinese laundry on Derby Street, a large brown paper parcel under an arm. Nellie in a laundry? It was like trying to imagine an iceberg in the desert.

  ‘Cats don’t eat much,’ persisted Roy.

  ‘Neither do I,’ retorted Lily, ‘and we’re not having a cat, they howl in the night.’

  ‘A dog, then,’ he wheedled.

  ‘I’ll think on it.’ She threw a handful of cutlery onto the table. ‘Get shaping and set the places,’ she snapped.

  He set the places. Mam had said she would think on it. Next time the subject came up, he would remind her of that. Now, all he had to do was choose a name for the dog.

  At the other side of Lily Hardcastle, number 5 Prudence Street, lived Dot and Ernest Barnes. Like Nellie Hulme, they had survived two world wars and had spent many years in the same house, doing the same things week in and week out, no hiccups in the regime, no excitement, few surprises.

  Ernest, whose contempt for Catholics had become a legend in his own lifetime, no longer attended lodge meetings. The owner of a troublesome leg, he walked infrequently, with a limp and with the aid of two walking sticks. He slept in the parlour, read a great deal and listened to the wireless every evening.

  But Ernest’s main hobby, wife-beating, had been all but removed from him by a bolting brewery horse. Bitterness about this accident had twisted his face and his mind, rendering him coldly furious, implacable and verbally abusive to the point of slander.

  Dot hated him. She hated him quietly but thoroughly, wishing him dead every moment of every day while she cooked, cleaned, washed and shopped her way through each waking second of time. Shopping was the best; she stayed out as long as possible, gossiping in queues, meeting old friends on corners, pretending that life was normal and liveable.

  But when she returned to Prudence Street after these expeditions, her feet slowed, he
r expression changed and her limbs stiffened in anticipation of the greeting she would inevitably receive. She had married a bad man and had paid the price for forty-five years.

  Still nimble at the age of sixty-five, Dot knew exactly where to stand to be beyond the reach of Ernest’s heavy sticks. But sometimes he caught her unawares, sneaking up behind her when his leg was not too painful, cracking her across the back with a length of thick, polished wood. When this happened, Dot would absent herself by leaping through the scullery, out into the yard, and locking herself in the lavatory. It wasn’t fear that drove her out of her home, not any more. When her sons had been in residence, she had experienced terror; now, she ran off into solitude to pray. She prayed fervently and endlessly for strength; she prayed that however powerful the temptation might become, she would not kill him.

  Dot was bringing in her washing when Lily Hardcastle’s face peeped over the wall. ‘Hello, Lily,’ said Dot, syllables contorted as they fought past two pegs gripped between her teeth. ‘Bitter for September.’

  Lily had never mentioned to Dot the noises she had heard over the past decade. It would have been impolite, intrusive, because, in spite of her situation, Dot Barnes was blessed with a quiet dignity that did not invite expressions of sympathy. ‘Our Roy’s been up Nellie’s drainpipe,’ Lily explained, ‘and he says she’s got a factory up in that back bedroom. Do you know owt?’

  Dot shook her head and dropped clothes and pegs into a wicker basket. ‘Nothing surprises me any more, Lily. I’ve gone well past shock, I have.’

  Lily understood. Here stood the creature in whose soft-padded footsteps Lily might well follow. The woman from 5, Prudence Street was enough to put anyone off marriage. Dot had shrivelled into her current state, had allowed herself to be dried out by a man who should have been hanged, drawn, quartered, minced and thrown to the lions at Belle Vue. Lily jerked her head sideways in the direction of Dot’s house. ‘How’s Ernest?’

  ‘All right.’ Dot folded a towel. ‘Well, he’s as all right as he gets, if you take my meaning.’

  This was a different day, Lily told herself. Today, she had walked on the Other Side, the Catholic side where few Protestants trod now that war was finished. Of course, they were all polite to one another when they met by chance in shops or in other streets, but the quiet division remained here, on Prudence Street. ‘Nowt prudent about it,’ Lily said now.

  ‘You what, Lily?’

  ‘Name of our street – it means wisdom. What’s been wise about it, eh? I mean, I know it’s different now, but I had to think before crossing over to stop Magsy O’Gara falling off her chair.’

  Dot managed a slight blush. ‘Well, we know whose family were at the back of all that.’

  A very different day, Lily realized. Nellie Hulme was running a one-woman industry, Lily had enjoyed a brief conversation with a papist widow, Ernest Barnes’s wife had not only expressed an opinion but also had finally admitted that her man had caused more trouble than enough in these parts.

  ‘He’s not up to much these days,’ commented Lily.

  A corner of Dot’s mouth twitched disobediently. ‘No,’ she answered after a pause, ‘no, he’s not.’

  Lily waited for more, was not surprised when Dot offered nothing. ‘I’ll see you later, then,’ said Lily.

  ‘Wait.’

  Lily froze.

  ‘Have you got ten minutes?’ asked Dot. ‘Can I come in for a cup of tea?’

  ‘Ooh, course you can. There’s a good half hour before they come back from the pit,’ said Lily, her ‘they’ encompassing her husband and her eldest son. ‘And our Aaron’s gone straight to the baths after school.’ Roy was in, but he was upstairs with the Beano and the Dandy. Trying to keep the shock away from face and voice, Lily went back into her house.

  Dot left her washing where it was, walked through her gate and into the entry, then through Lily’s back gate. At the rear door of number 3, she hesitated for a few seconds.

  ‘Come in,’ yelled Lily from the scullery.

  Dot hovered in the doorway. ‘Eeh, Lily, I’ve not been in here since . . . I can’t remember.’

  ‘Since better and worse days, Dot.’

  ‘Aye, since better and worse.’

  Not much had changed about Dorothy Barnes, thought Lily as they sat at the kitchen table, each with a pint brew of Horniman’s and a thin slice of walnut cake from Warburton’s. ‘Not same as home-made,’ declared Lily, ‘but it’ll do at a push.’

  ‘Aye, at a push,’ said Dot.

  Dot agreed with everybody, usually about three times. When she made a rare statement of her own, it dropped slowly from her lips and was underlined immediately by repetition. The visitor stared into her tea for a few moments.

  ‘You all right, Dot?’

  After a further pause, Dot raised her face. ‘I’m not, Lily,’ she replied. ‘No, no, I’m not.’

  Lily teetered, both physically and mentally, on the edge of her seat. People in these parts didn’t go in for tea parties, weren’t forever in and out of each other’s domains. During the war, doors had always been left unlocked so that neighbours could have a borrow. Many was the time Lily had come in to find a note: ‘I owe you two spoons sugar, Dot next door.’ But things were a bit different now that rationing was less stringent. The camaraderie of war had ended with the signing of treaties; peace had brought unease and wariness. Yet here sat Lily Hardcastle, drinking tea with Dot Barnes from next door.

  ‘It’s not the same any more, is it?’ said Lily.

  ‘It’s not as bad now as he can’t hardly walk,’ came Dot’s cross-purpose reply.

  Another opinion, noted Lily.

  ‘I . . . er . . . I don’t know how to say it, Lily. No, no, I don’t know how to say it.’

  Lily paused, hand containing cake hovering halfway between mouth and table. ‘Just say it,’ she answered. ‘Get it over and done with, Dot.’

  ‘Just say it,’ echoed Dot. ‘Right, I will, I will.’

  Lily’s cake found its way back to the plate. She waited, watched Dot’s face closely. ‘Come on, love,’ she wheedled. The men would be back soon and Lily had to know. Why, she wouldn’t catch a wink tonight if Dot Barnes didn’t cough up.

  Dot drew in an enormous breath. ‘I’m going,’ she said.

  Lily waited. ‘Going where?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Away, love. I’m leaving him.’

  The hostess sank back against the spindles of her chair. Hadn’t she entertained the same idea only hours ago? Wasn’t this wizened woman one of the very people in whose tragic footsteps Lily was following? Oh, she’d never been hit, but Lily Hardcastle felt just as squashed and hopeless as Dot plainly was. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘To our Frank.’

  ‘Your Frank?’ Dot had Lily at it now, repeating, repeating.

  ‘He’s got a little general store up Bromley Cross,’ said Dot, her spine straightening with pride. ‘Saved up, he did, then got a mortgage on the house at the back of the shop. I’ll be selling all sorts, Lily, selling all sorts.’

  ‘Well, I am pleased for you, love.’

  Dot took a great gulp of tea. ‘There’s a bit more to it, Lily, a bit more to it.’ She sucked thoughtfully on her dentures, ran a hand over thinning hair.

  Lily set herself in waiting mode once more, watching as Dot drained her cup right down to the dregs. She glanced at the cheap clock on the mantel, hoped it wasn’t running slow again.

  ‘You know my Frank, Lily. Aye, you know him.’

  ‘Course I do.’

  ‘He’s forty-two soon. Forty-two, Lily, and still a little lad to me. Shy, he is. I thought he’d never marry. Time and again I’ve told meself he’d always be a bachelor.’

  ‘Aye, he’s shy all right,’ answered Lily encouragingly.

  Dot shivered. ‘Courting, Lily. Been courting about six month.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Lily?’

  ‘What, love?’

  ‘It’s one of the Higginses.�
��

  It was Lily’s turn to gulp in mouthfuls of air. ‘But they’re only young, them Higginses, Dot . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And they’re . . . Catholics.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And he’s . . .’ Lily jerked a thumb in the direction of Dot’s house, ‘he’s . . .’

  ‘He’s a swine.’ Dot completed Lily’s sentence for her. ‘He hates Catholics, especially the Higgins lot. Remember that time he threw stones at the statues during the walks? Then when Peter and Paul’s church were set afire – that were him, Lily. So, I’ve had to tell you, because you live next door to him. When I go, there’ll be murder. There will, there’ll be murder.’

  ‘God help us,’ gasped Lily.

  Dot’s hand crept across the table and grasped one of Lily’s. ‘Frank’s for turning,’ she whispered.

  ‘No!’ In the silence that followed, a dropping pin would have achieved the same impact as a bomb. Turning was unheard of in these parts. Turning was a form of brainwashing, weeks on end of sitting with a priest while you learned a load of rules and promised to bring your kids up as Catholics.

  ‘See, when Ernest hears, Lily . . . When Ernest hears . . .’

  Lily agreed, though she tried to look on the brighter side. ‘There’s not much he can do, Dot, not with his leg.’

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ declared Dot. She looked her neighbour straight in the eyes. ‘You must have heard it all, Lily.’

  ‘Aye, I have, love.’

  ‘He battered my boys, too, long before you moved in. Years I’ve had. Years and years.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So I’m going. Aye, I’m going, lass.’

  Lily gripped Dot’s hand tightly, noticing that it was drier, harder even than her own. ‘You can trust me, you know that. Anything I can do, just tell me.’

  ‘I will.’ Dot’s eyelids blinked rapidly, a few reluctant tears squeezed out by the movement. ‘When I’ve gone, I’ll write to you.’

  Lily shivered involuntarily. ‘Hey – I’ve just thought – what about that lot across the road? How will they take it?’

  Dot smiled through her sadness. ‘They’re thrilled to bits, Lily. They know their Rachel will be looked after and they’re not bothered about the age difference, specially seeing as how he’s turning. Aye, he’s all right because he’s turning.’