by Marie Joseph
Will Hargreaves, the letter said, was a milk roundsman, and he and Belle had managed to get a tiny cottage to rent at the top of Steep Brow, one of a cluster of small tenements, previously lived in by the town’s hand-loom weavers.
‘There’s a loomshop tacked on to the side, and we’re turning it into a parlour,’ the letter went on, and through the pen of the minister’s wife Joe could read the pride in his sister’s quiet voice.
She was still working for the Armitages’ on a day to day basis, and though she said little of Will, a whole page was devoted excitedly to the rugs she had pegged, and the shiny oilcloth her new husband had tacked to the floor.
Joe immediately sent a cheque of such a high figure that Belle cried for a day after receiving it.
He received in return a brief note of thanks from his new brother-in-law, writing on Belle’s behalf, assuring him with obvious insincerity that there would always be a bed for him, should he chance to be passing through.
‘Passing through!’ Joe muttered to himself, memorising the address before tearing up the letter. ‘That is telling me bloody straight not to make a habit if anything is.’
He worked even harder, banked a good part of his earnings, and told himself at least once a week that his inability to forget Maggie Craig, now Carmichael, was maudlin sentimentality.
He had money, he had power of a sort, and he had women if and when he felt like it. What more could any man want?
Now, as the years passed Maggie was beginning to be worried about the rising anti-German feeling in the country. It was taking the place of bad feelings about the Russians and the French, and Kit told her such topics were none of her business.
‘It’s not seemly to be fashing yourself about such things. Politics are the government’s business, not yours, love,’ he said.
‘But they are my business. And they should be yours!’ Maggie cried. ‘It’s wrong to generalize. There’s good and bad in every race, every creed. My father taught me that, and what’s more he said we can be taught to hate. That’s why he was such a good teacher, though I doubt if even he could have taught our Rose much. She doesn’t give a damn about her book-learning. I try to help her but she won’t let me, an’ I could . . . oh I could.’
Kit listened with tolerant affection. He didn’t doubt that his Maggie could do anything if she set her mind to it. She never wasted a moment, nor an opportunity. Always think-up schemes to make a bit extra to ensure that Rose was the best dressed kid in the street. Never grumbling about the meagre wage he took home of a Friday. He would watch her sort it out into a box she had made into sections. So much for the rent, so much for the gas and the coal, and never once getting behind with anything. And she was right about Mr Yates at the shop, he had to admit that.
‘He’s a proper miser,’ she said. ‘Three shops he has and all he does is count his money in those awful rooms over your shop, sitting there with the damp running down the walls as if he hadn’t two pennies to rub together. Why don’t you ask him for a rise, Kit? You run that place single-handed now he lets you do all the ordering. It’s a wonder he doesn’t ask you to bring the stuff back from the warehouse on a barrow. That would save the old skinflint a bob or two on deliveries.’
‘He gave me half a crown extra last Christmas,’ Kit had reminded her, worried lines creasing his face into a mould of acute anxiety. ‘I’m not getting any younger, love. What’s to stop him sending me packing and taking on a much younger man? He could get away with paying less than what he gives me, you know.’
Immediately Maggie saw, not only the logic of what he said, but what was more important to her, his real distress.
‘You’re a soft aporth, Kit Carmichael,’ she smiled. ‘I only wish our Rose had a bit more softness in her. She’s as hard as nails that one.’
For a long time that night Maggie lay awake worrying about Rose in her bed on the other side of the plywood partition now dividing her father’s room into two.
It was no good denying it. The years had not mellowed Rose. Far from it. She was old Mrs Carmichael to the life, and she had that way of staring at her mother as if silently promising herself that she would get the better of her one day.
Maggie tossed and turned, wondering . . . was there, could there be a hint of the instability that had boiled over into madness in Kit’s mother?
‘Oh, dear God,’ she prayed, turning, as she always did, to prayer when she felt in dire need of comfort. ‘Let Rose be happy, because she is not a happy girl, I know that. She’s at some sort of war with herself all the time, an’ no matter what I do, or how much I try to get close to her, it’s impossible. It’s not true, Lord, that love begets love, because I ache to put my arms round her and tell her how much I love her. I want to ask her what gets into her, but she would wither me with one of those looks of hers. . . .
‘Oh, Rose,’ she whispered. ‘There’s one thing you’re not going to get the better of me about. You might not be much of a scholar, but you’re never going into the mill like I did. Never!’
Rose went straight into Dobson’s mill the week she turned thirteen. There was nothing Maggie could have done about it apart from beating her over the head, and the constant arguments were beginning to wear her down.
She managed to pass the labour exam, and told her mother in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t as daft as the scholars who were staying on till they were fourteen.
‘I’m fed up with books,’ she told her mother. ‘I want some money of me own, and I want to learn dancing like me friends do. Besides, I’m not clever and you can’t make me no matter how hard you try.’
She walked over to Kit’s shaving mirror fastened at an angle over the slopstone in the living-room, and adjusted the stiff ribbon bow at the back of her small head. ‘You went in the mill, Mam, and it didn’t do you no harm.’
It was no good trying to correct the way she spoke. Maggie had given up trying to do that long ago. She put her sewing down in her lap and rubbed her fingers over a jerking pain throbbing over one eyebrow.
‘I went in the mill, Rose love, because I had no choice. I had your grandpa to see to, and there was three and sixpence to find each week for the rent.’ She picked the shirt up again and started to unpick a frayed cuff, pulling at the cotton with her fingernail, unravelling it, then starting to pick again at the other side. ‘But you have a better chance to make something of yourself. I am sure I could get you an opening with the milliner in the Hat Market. She goes to Chapel and I could have a word with her.’
The cuff came away from the sleeve, and turning it over she started to tack it back in position. ‘You’d have a trade in your fingers,’ – she swallowed hard – ‘like your father’s mother had, and if you get married then you could trim hats at home to bring in a bit extra.’
Rose’s scorn brought the swift colour to her mother’s cheeks.
‘Bring in a bit extra! That’s all you think about, our mam. I’m not going in the Hat Market working in the evenings, and I’m not going in no shop neither. I want to have a bit of fun when I finish work, not come home like me dad, flaked out every night.’
Maggie forced herself to keep her voice low. Her face was white now and knowing she was on the verge of losing her temper, excited Rose somehow.
Maggie spoke quietly, fighting for control.
‘If I had spoken to your grandpa like that at your age, even though he was a sick man, I’d have been sent straight to bed and made to stay there till I was ready to apologize.’
‘There’s someone coming in,’ Rose said, her voice tinged with relief, knowing she had gone too far with bringing her father into the argument. Thank God for nosey Clara next door. . . .
Clara came straight through, sitting down without being invited to, in Kit’s rocking chair.
‘He’s gone!’ she said, pulling a screwed-up handkerchief from her apron pocket and bursting into loud tears. ‘He’s gone to live with another woman, and he says if I want any money I’ll have to have him up for it.’
She dabbed at her streaming eyes. ‘He said such awful things me mother’s taken to her bed. Oh, Maggie, you wouldn’t believe some of the things he said. I just could not repeat them, not to a living soul.’
Knowing she was about to do just that, Maggie nodded her head at Rose, but before she could tell her to go up to her room, Rose took swift advantage of the situation.
‘Can I go round to Mavis’s house, Mam? I’ll not stop more than half an hour. Honest.’
She was gone before Maggie could open her mouth to reply, long black hair flying, snatching her coat from behind the door and her tammy from out of the pocket.
Maggie sighed, and turning to Clara, said, ‘I’ll put the kettle on and then you can tell me all about it over a pot of tea.’
‘He called me mother a pissed-out old faggot,’ Clara said, setting the rocking chair into frantic motion. ‘And what he called me I can’t bring meself to repeat. . . .’
Arnie was back within a month, but Clara’s mother never spoke to him again. Now widowed mother and daughter slept together in the marital bed whilst Arnie was banished to the back bedroom.
There he could lie and listen to them talking to each other at the tops of their clarion-call voices, referring to himself as ‘’im in there’, and letting him get up to make his own breakfast before he went off to work in the mornings.
Arnie found that in a strange way he was happier than he had been for a long time. There was a kind of peace in knowing exactly where he stood. He could tend his little back-yard garden, and he could sit in his chair by the fire knowing he had won. They had had a taste of missing his money, and once, when the Workhouse had been mentioned, he had seen a flicker of fear in his mother-in-law’s eyes. Money was power, Arnie was discovering, and as long as he gave them enough after he had taken out his beer money, they seemed willing to call an uneasy truce.
He was quite insensitive to the spite-filled atmosphere, never having been much of a talker, and if he felt a bit belligerent and did not like what they gave him to eat, he merely pushed his plate aside and said he knew where there was a good meal waiting for him anytime.
Then he would see the swift look of apprehension exchanged between mother and daughter. . . .
Aye, things had changed all right, and they weren’t to know he had been chucked out by the woman he’d taken up with when she got fed up with his silences, and his way of staring at nothing for hours on end.
And the next time he got a rise of eightpence a week in his wage he handed it over to Clara with aplomb, just for the sake of seeing the expression on her face.
‘Well?’ he said, monarch of all he surveyed.
‘Ta very much,’ said Clara from behind clenched teeth.
When Rose had been working for a year Arnie went on munitions, making big money, as Clara said, and the war in France broke out.
At Chapel the very next Sunday the minister preached a sermon based on what Saint Paul had said:
‘He who is not with me, is against me!’
‘To hell with Saint Paul!’ Maggie shouted. ‘It made me blood boil when I could see that most of the congregation were siding with the minister. Saint Paul never meant it like that. Taken out of context you can make things mean anything. Does nobody remember the last time? What about all those lads killed in South Africa? What about Benjamin and Jonathan? Do we never learn nothing?’
‘This war will be over by Christmas,’ Kit soothed. ‘That is official. The boys will be back afore we know they’ve gone, you will see.’
But by the end of that year, the majority of the warehouses in the town were forced to close, and Mr Yates lost two of the shops he had built up over the years. The papers were full of long casualty lists, and Maggie read with horror that one hundred and four thousand men had been killed, gravely wounded, or were missing.
That Christmas Clara, giving her weekly order to Kit, asked for a tin of lobster.
‘Sorry, love, but we’ve no call for that sort of thing in my shop. You will have to go to one of the downtown shops,’ Kit told her, and Maggie bent her head over her knitting, working furiously at a khaki scarf in between long sessions at her sewing machine.
‘Lobster!’ she muttered, then she counted her stitches as if she was telling her beads. ‘Let the men come home safe from that terrible war,’ she prayed.
The only person who might have prayed that Joe Barton had an easy war was his sister Belle, and she was too busy polishing and sweeping her tiny cottage in the evenings after working at the Armitages’ house all day.
Will had left his milk round and gone, like Arnie, into the more lucrative job of working on munitions, even opting for work miles away from home. A wispy and lithe little man, with legs bent like a jockey’s, a legacy of rickets from an impoverished childhood, he swore that the army would never catch up with him.
‘Strikes and wars will be the downfall of this country, mark my words,’ he told Belle, a doting Belle who hung on to his every word in gratitude for him having married her and given her a home of her own.
‘Think of them poor sods marching to their deaths. I’m going to die in me own bed, with me hands crossed over me chest, then buried with a nice tongue and ham spread, all civilized like, that’s me.’
‘Oh, don’t talk about dying,’ Belle cried, flinging herself into his arms. ‘Please, Will. Promise me you’ll never die!’
Joe, her brother, marching at that very moment along a treeless road towards the Ypres Salient, thought about the possibility of dying every minute of his waking hours. He was thinking about it now as he plodded one foot gingerly in front of the other, swearing loudly with every step he took.
‘You’ve had your chips if you fall off these sodding duck-boards,’ he told a private following behind. ‘That mud will suck you down before you can say “Jack the flamin’ Ripper.”
‘Welcome to this stately home,’ he told the private as they climbed down into their dug-out. ‘Come on, lad. You’ll feel better after a brew-up, you’ll see.’
The private stared around him with startled eyes bulging from a dome-shaped forehead. A lad of no more than seventeen who had lied about his age to get into the army, he was doing his first stretch in the forward trenches, and Joe Barton, Corporal Joe Barton, looked as if he might be laughing at him.
‘What’s that shocking smell, Corporal?’ he asked, then jumped a foot in the air as a cat-sized rat ran from one corner of the dug-out to the other.
Joe, busy with the task of pouring chlorinated water from an old petrol tin, pretended not to have heard the whispered question.
If the poor little beggar did not know that what he was smelling was dead bodies, men and horses, lying just over the top in no man’s land, then he was better left in ignorance for the time being. He would learn soon enough . . .
Joe passed over the tin mug when the tea was ready. It tasted of petrol and was sweetened with tinned milk, but the private drank it down quickly.
‘Are there many rats?’ he asked, wincing as another scuttled from the shadows. ‘That’s the second one since we got down here.’
Joe shook his head. ‘Rats is nothing to worry about, lad. Don’t you bother about them. I’ve caught more of them than what you’ve had hot dinners.’
‘How?’ The pale eyes protruded more than ever. ‘I once heard that rats go for you if you get them in a corner.’
Joe grinned. ‘We don’t make no attempt to corner them, lad. When we sometimes get a bit of what they like to call meat, we bait ’em with it.’ He made a throwing motion with his hand. ‘We fasten it on to the end of summat – anything does – then we chuck it over the top, and rats, having no brains, sink their teeth in it. Then we pull quick and bonk it one afore it knows what’s hit him.’
The private, his eyes looking as though they were about to leave their sockets, stared at his Corporal as if he could not believe the evidence of his toby-jug ears.
‘Then we skin them and eat ’em,’ Joe teased, relenting when he was aware that the no
t very bright young soldier was taking his every word literally.
‘That were meant to be a joke,’ he said.
‘All the same I don’t think I am going to like it here,’ the private said, and thinking he was showing a welcome touch of humour, Joe slapped him on the back, almost causing him to lose his balance.
‘I’ll watch out for you, lad,’ he said. ‘It’s getting used to it that’s the worst, but give yourself a week and you’ll feel as if you’ve been living down here for bloody years.’
The nights were the worst. Accustomed from his furtive, nomadic childhood to walk like a cat, eyes and ears alert for danger, Joe took to soldiering like a duck to water. As a Very light shot into the air he could freeze into the stillness of a marble statue. He could hurl himself forward into the sticky mud, burying his face into the overpowering smell.
Once, to his horror he had found that he had fallen on to the decaying corpse of a soldier, decomposed too far for him to know whether the man had been British or German.
Out in no man’s land it could have been either. . . .
And because of his could-not-care-less attitude, Joe’s Sergeant, a veteran of the Boer War, found his Corporal what he considered to be a ‘natural’. Joe could outswear him, and did so often, as hearing the whine of a heavy shell hurtling death at top speed towards them, Joe’s colourful language peppered the air like gun-fire.
When on a night raid the Sergeant was killed with a bullet smack between his eyes, Joe stepped neatly over the body and carried on moving forward.
The object of the exercise was to demolish a pillbox manned by Germans wielding stuttering machine guns.
‘And the main object is to bring one of the blighters back,’ his Lieutenant had said.
‘As if we was going pheasant shooting,’ Joe muttered, moving ever forward into the staccato firing, and believing every tortured moment to be his last.
Not ten yards from the pillbox, he threw himself flat on the ground, and thought wildly of praying. But to whom? To God?
It did not seem possible that with men falling all around him, screaming with pain, bleeding and dying – how could it be possible that God was there?
