THE TYNESIDE SAGAS: Box set of three dramatic and emotional stories: A Handful of Stars, Chasing the Dream and For Love & Glory

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  On the point of giving up in frustration, a neighbour popped her head out. ‘Ivy’ll still be at the bingo,’ she said. ‘She spends a lot of time there these days. It’s Joanne Elliot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jo smiled. ‘I didn’t know Ivy was a secret gambler.’

  The woman clucked. ‘Aye, well, it helps fill in the time and stops her fretting about her grandson.’

  Jo nodded. ‘I know the feeling; my brother Colin’s just gone off on the QE2.’

  ‘Aye, I’d heard. Worrying times,’ the neighbour sighed. ‘Why don’t you go on in and wait for her?’ she suggested. ‘The door’s not locked. Pity for her to miss you.’

  Jo let herself in. She gazed around the familiar kitchen, with its old-fashioned range and the collection of thimbles on the rack above the dresser that Mark had bought her. The dresser and windowsills were covered in ornaments that her grandson had also brought back from his voyages, and on the mantelpiece there was a large photograph of Mark in uniform. She picked up a smaller one of him as a schoolboy, his impish face grinning and showing two gaps in his teeth. How long ago that seemed now, Jo thought.

  Then she noticed a postcard propped against an ebony statue, and turning it over, she saw that it was from Mark. ‘Dear Nana, We’ve reached Ascension Island already. Weather’s sweltering. We do a lot of running on deck for exercise − in shorts! Skippy and me play cards at night − it’s costing me a fortune! The lads are a grand bunch and we’re all in good spirits. Take care, love Mark.’

  ‘You always did read me postcards,’ Ivy said, startling her from behind. She closed the door behind her.

  ‘Sorry, Ivy,’ Jo said in a fluster, quickly returning the card to the mantelpiece. But the old woman chuckled, ‘Divvn’t worry, hinny.’ She dumped down her shopping bag and took off her hat and coat. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you round here again, now you’re so grand,’ she teased. ‘Read about your play in the papers. I hear you’re living with a fancy man in Newcastle an’ all.’

  Jo laughed in embarrassment. ‘He’s not a fancy man, Ivy! He’s a well-respected actor and director.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Ivy snorted. ‘I’ve given up trying to fathom the ways of you youngsters. In my day we had rules and everyone knew where they stood.’ She bustled over to the range and reached for the kettle. ‘You’ll stop for a cuppa, won’t you?’

  ‘Love to,’ Jo smiled. She watched Ivy’s ritual of warming the teapot and reaching for the Coronation tea caddy on the mantelpiece, spooning out three heaps and pouring on boiling water from the simmering kettle. They exchanged pleasantries and Jo wondered if she would ever summon the courage to talk about what troubled her.

  But Ivy sensed her unease and turned the conversation to Mark. ‘I didn’t hear it from him,’ Ivy said, ‘but I was told about the argument on his last night.’

  Jo nodded in distress and unburdened herself to Mark’s grandmother. She told her all that she could remember of that night, not glossing over the insults and accusations. She found herself speaking more frankly to Ivy than she had to anyone about it all.

  ‘Perhaps I meant to hurt him,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe deep down I’m still angry with him for the miscarriage and for hating me because of my mistake with Gordon. I don’t know! Am I very terrible?’

  She looked across at Ivy in her worn armchair with the crocheted antimacassars and saw the old woman struggling with her emotions. Her face was very flushed and her eyes glistened behind her spectacles. Her fingers were digging into the chair arms as if she were kneading bread. ‘He’s never hated you, hinny,’ she croaked.

  ‘But I knew what would hurt him most, didn’t I?’ Jo went on, turning back to finger the childhood photograph. ‘I knew that any talk about him not knowing who he was − who his dad was − would be a kick in the teeth. He used to go mad at Kevin McManners for teasing him about being a gypsy when we were bairns. All he’s ever wanted is just to belong − to be accepted as a Geordie like everyone else round here. It’s not much to ask, is it?’ Jo’s voice quavered. ‘Yet I was no better than those skinhead thugs he tried to get in with who called him racist names, am I? I’m sorry, Ivy, and I wish I could have said so to Mark. I’ll never forgive myself if he doesn’t come back…!’

  She heard a sob behind her and swinging round was shocked to see Ivy’s face streaming with tears. Ivy took off her glasses and mopped her eyes with a handkerchief, letting out a cry as if she had been winded. Jo leapt over and put out her arms in comfort.

  ‘Ivy, I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say,’ she gasped. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you too.’

  But Ivy clung on to her and shook her head, trying to speak. ‘N-no − not your fault.’ She was overcome again and sobbed into Jo’s shoulder. ‘Oh, hinny,’ she said in distress, ‘it’s me. A-all this is m-my doing!’

  ‘Ivy, don’t be so daft!’ Jo remonstrated, rocking her like a baby in her arms, baffled by her words.

  Ivy pulled away and Jo saw the utter desolation in her face. ‘It’s true,’ she whispered. ‘I love that lad more than anyone in this whole world,’ she gulped. ‘But I’m the one who’s hurt him most, not you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jo asked, holding on to Ivy’s thick, veined hands.

  ‘Oh, Joanne, hinny,’ she said, with a beseeching look. ‘Can I tell you something? I have to tell someone. I can’t keep it to meself any longer!’

  ***

  Mark looked out over the deep, dark water rippling and lapping below. In the distance could be seen the blue-white tip of an iceberg drifting by, echoing the colour of the pale sky. It was bitterly cold, the air pinching his face in seconds. He had taken up smoking again and liked to do so on deck. His favourite time out here was when it grew dark and the sea calm. Then he would lean on the railings and gaze at the glittering Southern Cross and marvel at a shooting star among the brilliance of other stars. At home there was always such a glow of artificial light that the night sky was never this clear, yet now he would stare at the vast heavens and feel connected to those back home.

  There wasn’t an hour when his thoughts didn’t drift homewards, however briefly. He saw Ivy making stottie cake, wheezing in her apron. He imagined Brenda dressing for work. He had regretted not letting her come to see him off from Plymouth. He treasured a good-luck card she had sent that had been waiting at Ascension Island, with a photograph that he had stuck on his locker.

  Mark wondered where Colin was and whether he was on his way out to join them. Which made him think of Jo. But that made him angry. At times he thought he really hated her. How was she able to aggravate him so easily? And he could not bear that overweight, condescending, sneering Alan she seemed so besotted with. Well, she was welcome to him, Mark decided. She had done him a favour breaking off their engagement when they were younger and more foolish. Just because they had been childhood friends did not mean they would have been happily married. They had nothing in common now and it would have been a disaster. Mark determined to stop dwelling on Jo once and for all.

  Today the air was still, and so clear that he could see every fold in the gently rolling hills of East Falkland. Even the whitewashed cottages that huddled on the shore, with their neat red roofs, were visible like pieces of Lego. He could see other frigates dotting the becalmed ocean like watchful beasts. They would be glad of the respite from the stormy seas that could so easily whip up around them, like a crazy rollercoaster. Winter was coming to this side of the world and the weather would worsen sooner or later.

  Mark extinguished his cigarette between his fingers and tossed it over the side. There would be action soon, he knew. No one wanted a long winter campaign. He sensed they were building up to something. He looked anxiously into the pearly sky for signs of aircraft. The drawback to clear days was the ease with which enemy planes could pick them out. Mark thought of the luckless Sheffield and the loss of twenty-one crew. He shivered and hurried below.

  Chapter Seventeen

  1919

  Ivy rem
embered the end of the Great War because her father came home from sea. She was eight years old and she had only a vague memory of a very tall man with prickling whiskers and long sideburns who would pick her up and throw her in the air.

  ‘How’s my little dumpling?’ he bellowed, for as a gunner he was partially deaf. Ivy screamed in alarm as he tossed her at the ceiling, which only made him laugh louder, like the horns that boomed through the fog off South Shields where they lived.

  ‘Put her down,’ her mother fretted. ‘The neighbours will think you’re doing away with her,’ and Sarah twitched the blind for a quick anxious look.

  ‘Damn the landlubbers!’ Mathias Black boomed. ‘I’ll play with me pretty plump daughter if I want to, eh, Ivy?’ He chuckled and hugged her to his tobacco-smelling cheeks. ‘And take down those blackout blinds. The war’s over and this old tar is home from the high seas!’

  Ivy soon grew used to his boisterous ways and delighted in sitting on his knee and hearing about his days at sea. Her father had started on whaling ships and then been away for years on long voyages to places with exotic names like Sumatra and Penang. Her mother, tired of waiting, had threatened to marry another, but eventually, mature in life, they had been ‘spliced’, as Mathias put it in his seaman’s idiom.

  Ivy, living in a day-dream of romantic tales, did not notice the hardship that crept up on them after the war. She was only aware that her father never returned to sea and that they moved away from their neat little cottage near the park that overlooked the golden sands on which she delighted in walking with her father, imagining they were on a tropical island. They moved nearer the teeming docks, where her mother ran a small boarding house as strictly as any sea captain his ship.

  ‘Best do as the captain says,’ her father would wink when Sarah shouted at Ivy to help around the house. ‘Else we’ll be swinging from the yardarm.’

  Most of the lodgers were merchantmen off the ships, a transient group who brought the smell of the sea with them and left having shared a bowl of tobacco and a few yarns with Mathias. Ivy remembered clearly the day she answered the door to Hassan Mohammed. She gawped at this lean-faced man with dark oval eyes and skin the colour of toffee, who nodded politely and swung his duffel bag to the ground.

  He spoke in a sing-song eccentric English, a mixture of seadog idioms and formal literary expressions. She was captivated. He must have been conjured out of one of Mathias’s tropical tales. She ran to fetch her father and tell him the exciting news. By the time Sarah had returned from the market, Hassan’s kitbag was installed in one of the rooms and he was conversing with Mathias over a cup of strong sweet tea.

  Sarah’s mouth set in that grim, thin line that Ivy knew meant they had committed some sin, but her mother was far too sensitive to proper decorum to make a scene in front of any of the lodgers. Ivy heard the row later, lying in the boxroom, her ear pressed to the wall of her parents’ bedroom.

  ‘…But the lad’s served this country in the war just like me,’ said Mathias. ‘He was a stoker. A lot of his type lost their lives fighting against the Hun. People have short memories round here.’

  ‘Aye, well round here is where we live,’ Sarah hissed, ‘and coloured men are nowt but trouble. The Shields Gazette was full of that Arab riot at Mill Dam; they had to bring in the bluejackets to sort them out. They carry knives like savages! And you’ve let one of them stay here. What about our Ivy? We’re not safe in our beds!’

  ‘Be quiet!’ Mathias grew angry. ‘Ivy thinks he’s a prince from the Orient, she’s not the least bit scared of him and neither am I. He’s a lad of twenty, a long way from home, and he needs a hammock till he joins another ship.’

  ‘Why can’t he live with his own kind?’ Sarah protested. ‘Them coloureds have got their own boarding houses down Holborn. Let him go there.’

  ‘He says they’re all full,’ Mathias answered.

  She snorted. ‘Shows there are too many of them! They’re taking over the town − and taking the jobs from our seamen. It’s because of them that times are so hard. Why can’t they all gan back where they came from?’

  ‘It was our government and shipowners who encouraged them to come in the first place,’ he pointed out. ‘We lost that many shipmates and vessels, we’d’ve lost the war at sea if it hadn’t been for the likes of them Yemenis stoking our ships. They’re good sailors − decent, hard-grafting lads when they’re left alone to get on with it.’

  ‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ Sarah said scornfully. ‘Thieves and cowards who’ll cut your throat in the middle of the night. That’s what I’ve heard!’

  Ivy lay fearful and perplexed as the argument raged for an hour or more. At the end of it, she heard her father shout impatiently, ‘The lad stays and that’s an end to it. If any of your busybody neighbours start their tongues going I’ll be the one cutting them out, not that young Mohammedan!’

  Ivy had been unable to sleep; lying petrified listening to every creak in the house and turning every shadow into a creeping murderer. She waited for Hassan to come and slit her throat, but he never did. During the following days she kept away from him, watching him cautiously from a distance and wondering where he kept his cutlass. He wore a suit when he went out, just like the other men in the town. Disappointingly, he did not seem to possess a jewelled turban or golden cloak. She would spy on him as he knelt on a small mat and prayed in a strange language, and observed him sitting cross-legged on the floor sharing his Woodbines with her father.

  Her mother complained when he did not eat the bacon she served and shouted at him when she found him cooking rice on a small stove in his room. But eventually his quiet politeness and ability to stay out of trouble won her round. The other lodgers tolerated him, calling him Sinbad, and would play cards or backgammon with him at night. But Hassan never went out drinking with them or getting into brawls. He did not touch alcohol at all.

  Then, one day, Ivy found him sitting on the back step in the sun, his head bent in concentration. As she stole up to him, he turned suddenly, his face wary, and she screamed. He was holding a knife! Quickly, before she could run away, Hassan put out a hand to stop her, saying something in Arabic. Ivy felt herself freeze, her eyes wide in terror.

  Then he smiled. ‘Don’t be frightened. I’m not hurting you. Here, see. I fashion this for your papa.’ His grip on her arm was warm, his face more handsome than any Eastern prince when he smiled. Ivy looked at the piece of wood in his lap. He was carving a small sailing boat.

  ‘That’s clever,’ she gasped, and sat down beside him. She watched him whittle away at the wood, creating intricate sails and rigging with his small knife. She marvelled at his supple brown hands and the smoothness of his muscled arms as he worked in his shirt sleeves. He was quiet but strong, dignified and self-contained, yet with flashes of teasing humour. There was a poise about him, a fluency in his movement that Ivy admired and wished that her small, plump body could imitate. It was probably during that quiet moment of companionship, sitting silently in the sun together, that Ivy first fell in love with Hassan.

  Throughout the twenties he came and went as their lodger, sometimes being absent for months on end. Ivy would find these times dull and would snap back moodily at her mother, who constantly complained at her lack of interest in housekeeping and her dreamy nature. ‘Always got her head in the clouds,’ Sarah would grumble to her neighbours, ‘or in a book of fairy tales.’ Her father would stand as a buffer between his women, defending Ivy’s right to take the air with him along the pier or beach.

  ‘We’ll up and start a mutiny one of these days,’ he would promise her with a wink. They were conspirators against the drudgery of life, ignoring the increasing hardship in the town and the spiteful gossip that they were Arab-lovers.

  But Ivy lived for the times when Hassan would reappear smiling at their door, bag slung over his shoulder and a hundred new tales on his sensuous lips. He would bring gifts of oranges, nuts and ribbon to try and please her mother. Ivy would sit close
by, demanding to be told of his adventures, listening entranced to his words. Once they had been exhausted, she would entreat him to tell the ancient tales of the Arabian Nights and stories passed on by word of mouth that had never been written in her fairy-tale books.

  Her mother would berate her for being so familiar with him, but Mathias was indulgent. ‘There’s no harm in their friendship,’ he said, ‘and it helps the lad practise his English.’

  ‘He’s not a lad any more,’ Sarah replied tartly. ‘And it’s time she was courting a local boy. Can’t you introduce her to some captain’s son, or a lad with a trade?’

  ‘Ivy’s not interested in courting,’ Mathias blustered.

  ‘You mean no lad’s interested in her while she goes about with a coloured man,’ Sarah railed. ‘It makes me ashamed to go out some days, the way the neighbours whisper at their gates.’

  ‘Damn the landlubbers!’ Mathias cried, and dismissed the subject.

  Then, one cold December day in 1929, while Hassan was away at sea, Mathias dropped down dead from a heart attack. Ivy had been watching him returning from his morning walk and saw him pitch sideways like a listing ship and fall to the cobbles. She dashed out to help him, but in the short time it took to reach him, her father was dead, his cobalt-blue eyes gazing up at the sky.

  She wept for weeks and her mother went into mourning, wearing black and drawing down the blinds, shrouding the house in a sepia light. When Hassan next returned, Sarah took satisfaction in telling him he was no longer welcome. Ivy’s heart broke at the harsh words and the shouts of approval from the neighbours when her beloved Hassan had to retreat past their doors.

  For days afterwards she searched the town in vain for a sight of him, returning to the house that now felt like a prison. She would stroke the delicate carving that the Yemeni had made for her father, remembering the strong, supple hands working on the wood. Then, one day, in the market, she was startled by a fight breaking out by a fruit stall. A group of men who had been idling at a pub door had gravitated over to the stall. They were surrounding two Arab seamen attempting to buy fruit, pushing them and shouting abuse.