On a Clear Day

by Anne Doughty

  ‘You know where you are now, don’t you?’ said Auntie Polly encouragingly.

  But Clare didn’t know where she was. There were just houses everywhere, semi-detached and detached and a road leading on through yet more houses. As they began to walk, she saw a street sign saying ‘Mount Merrion Park’. She knew that was where Auntie Polly lived because she had written the addresses on the Christmas cards while Mummy wrote the message inside, but she still didn’t see anything she remembered or recognised.

  All the houses looked the same except that half of them had the front door on the left and the other half had the front door on the right. Only when they came to a bend in the road and she saw a gate, unlike any of the other gates she had passed as they tramped up the park, did she recognise something that she knew.

  The gate was one of Granda Scott’s. She’d seen gates like this one lying in bits on the ground outside the forge while he cut the pieces of metal to size, she’d seen them propped up on billets of wood while he coated them with red lead and then, a couple of days later, with silver paint. She’d seen him hammer the twists and curlicues on the anvil before they were welded onto the topmost member. Never before had she seen a finished gate anywhere except in the fields and farms near Salter’s Grange where most of Granda Scott’s customers lived.

  She felt a sudden overwhelming longing to go straight back to the station they had left over an hour earlier.

  Tired and weary and wanting only to go to bed she stood on the doorstep waiting for Uncle Jimmy to come and let them in.

  ‘Ach, hello Polly, hello Clare. Sure we weren’t expectin’ you till tomorrow,’ he said, taking Clare’s shopping bag as he stepped back awkwardly into the hall and edged his way round a brand new bicycle which was parked against the banisters.

  ‘Sure I rang you las’ night from the box at Woodview,’ said Polly, an edge of irritation in her voice. ‘An’ whose, might I ask, is this?’

  ‘It was an awful bad line, Polly. Ah coulden make out the haf o’ what ye were sayin’,’ he said sheepishly. ‘An’ that’s Davy’s,’ he went on hurriedly. ‘He says he’ll put it in the shed when he gets a chain an’ lock for it. He doesen want it pinched. It cost a fortune.’

  There was a funny smell at the bottom of the stairs and as they went into the living room, Clare was sure she smelt bacon and egg. The kitchen door was open, she could see the draining boards were stacked with dishes. There were saucepans parked on the floor and on top of the meat safe. It looked as if no one had washed up for days.

  In the living room, Eddie sat with his feet on the mantelpiece, a stack of Picturegoer magazines beside his chair. The table was covered with sporting newspapers where Uncle Jimmy had been studying form before he filled in his Pools coupon. A teapot, an almost empty bottle of milk and a couple of large mugs had been parked on the polished surface of the sideboard. Clare knew what her mother would say if she saw the room in a state like this.

  ‘Can I go to the bathroom, please?’ she said, grateful she had remembered that Auntie Polly had a proper bathroom and not just a lavatory outside the kitchen door.

  ‘Yes, love, you know where it is.’

  Clare nearly caught herself on the pedal of Davy’s bike as she hurried past the table where the telephone sat.

  As soon as she stepped into the bathroom she sneezed. She saw immediately what it was she’d smelt the moment they came through the front door. The bath was full of sheets steeping in Parazone. Auntie Polly must have been in such a hurry to get to Armagh when she heard about Mummy and Daddy that she hadn’t time to rinse them out. They’d be very clean by now, but as her mother always said, ‘Overnight is one thing if they’re in a bad way, but more than that you’re just wearing them out’. These must have been here for days.

  The bathroom was in a mess. There were shaving things everywhere, foam on the mirror and shirts and socks lying all around the laundry basket. It was true Uncle Jimmy had a bad back, but surely Davy and Eddie could pick things up. And where was Ronnie?

  There was no toilet paper left so she had to do without and she felt very damp and uncomfortable as she went back downstairs. She had to squeeze past Auntie Polly at the foot of the stairs because she was in a hurry too.

  In the living room, Uncle Jimmy was gathering up the things on the sideboard, but Eddie hadn’t moved. He hadn’t said hello either.

  ‘I’m sure yer tired out, Clare. Would ye like a drop of milk before ye go tae bed?’

  ‘No thank you, Uncle Jimmy. I’m afraid I don’t like milk. Mummy says I’m a nuisance because it means William won’t drink it either. She gives us orange juice instead. We get bottles of it from the Dispensary on the Mall and you have to mix it with water. It’s really quite nice.’

  ‘Is that so?’ asked Uncle Jimmy kindly.

  He looked at the child perched on the settee, her legs dangling inches above the floor and reminded himself that Ellie and Sam were dead. Gone. He couldn’t rightly take it in. Maybe he should have gone to the funeral, back or no back, they could have scraped up the second train fare somehow.

  Auntie Polly hurried in and Uncle Jimmy grasped his newspaper as if its flimsy pages might deflect what he feared was to come.

  ‘Could you not even have done that much?’ she began crossly. ‘I told you the wee bed wasn’t fit to sleep in. Where’s Ronnie? I thought at least he’d do it if none of the rest of you could be bothered.’

  ‘Sure he’s away at camp with the school, Polly. Had ye forgot?’

  She shook her head and muttered under her breath.

  ‘Come on, Clare dear,’ she said, putting an arm round her, ‘Come on away upstairs, these big men might want to rest themselves, they’ve been so busy all evening.’

  Ronnie’s room was beautifully tidy. He had lined up his books on the windowsill and the mantelpiece and his radio still sat on the small table where she and Daddy had helped him to mend it in the Christmas holidays.

  ‘You can sleep in Ronnie’s bed tonight. You won’t mind, will you? The bed in my wee work room is covered with sewing and there might be the odd pin there as well,’ she explained, as she took out the new pyjamas they’d bought only that morning. ‘Will I come and tuck you up when you’re into bed?’ she whispered, as she kissed her.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  It was longer than she intended before Polly got back upstairs to tuck Clare in. By then Clare was fast asleep. Polly noticed that she had fallen asleep clutching Ronnie’s copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. What Polly didn’t notice was that the pillow below the much-loved book was sodden with tears.

  Clare woke next morning refreshed in body but sadly depressed in spirits. As she lay looking up at the unfamiliar ceiling, she listened to the sounds of the household as it began its morning round.

  ‘What’s keepin’ you in there? I haven’t all day to stan’ here.’

  She recognised the voice though she had not seen its owner for a long time. Davy must have been out with his girlfriend last night. There was a hasty but muffled reply from the bathroom. Later, the door banged and there were trampings up and down the stairs. Clare would have liked to go to the lavatory but the thought of bumping into Davy or Eddie intimidated her so she waited till all was quiet before she slipped out of her room and across the landing.

  On her way back she saw that the two older boys had left the door of their bedroom, the largest bedroom of the three, wide open. The beds were unmade. Beside each bed a high-backed chair was draped with clothes which spilt down onto the floor which was already covered with random shoes and odd socks. Surely they tidied up before they went to work. Even William, who was not the tidiest of little boys, knew not to leave shoes for someone to trip over.

  As she walked away from the open door it dawned on Clare that Auntie Polly and Uncle Jimmy must sleep downstairs. That big settee, on which she and William had perched at Christmas, must be one of those put-you-ups she had heard Mummy and Daddy talking about. Poor Auntie Polly. She had the living room to clear e
very morning before breakfast and then all this mess waiting upstairs even before she started her sewing. Mummy would be so upset when she told her how Davy and Eddie behaved.

  And then she remembered she wouldn’t be telling Mummy. She knew she could manage Davy and Eddie for a week if she was going home at the end of it, but she wasn’t going home. She had been so looking forward to seeing Ronnie but now she thought about sleeping in the tiny sewing room and walking down to that bus-stop, past all those houses, and going to that awful school with no playground and no trees for ever and ever amen.

  She climbed back into bed and buried her head under the bedclothes so that no one would hear her cry. It was no use, no use at all. However kind Aunt Polly was, she couldn’t live here with these large figures and their loud voices and all these grey houses. She’d far rather go to the orphanage. At least in the orphanage there’d be other children and she’d have a teddy bear.

  When the lady from Dr Barnardo’s had come to school to receive all the money from their collecting boxes, she’d brought pictures of the children to show to them. They looked so happy playing together in a garden with a swing. They each had a little bed and there were toys and books beside each one.

  She made up her mind, came out from under the bedclothes and started to get dressed. She’d just have to explain politely to Auntie Polly that she really couldn’t impose on her kindness and could she take her to the orphanage right away.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Whenever Polly McGillvray looked back on the weeks that followed her sister Ellie’s death, she wondered how she had found the strength to go on during that awful time. In those weeks she came to know a despair that was quite new to her. There were moments when the woman who had always seen herself as easy going and optimistic was shocked to find that she would be only too grateful to join her sister under a mound of flowers.

  It was not that Polly expected life to be easy or without grief. From her earliest years she had been well acquainted with both hard work and sudden losses. As the eldest girl in a family of six, with a mother often disabled by illness, she bore much of the burden of running the household. She rose early to light the stove, carried water from the well before she went to school and came home to sweep and scrub the stone floor of the big kitchen where the day to day life of the family went on. In the month of her ninth birthday, her own much-loved grandmother died and later that same summer, her playmate, Dolly, from the farm just down the hill was drowned in a flax hole. Two years later, her baby brother died suddenly when only a few days old to the great distress of her mother who continued to lament for years because he had not even been baptised.

  The Scott family were not poor for her father, Robert, was a skilled craftsman. Although there were several other blacksmiths within a few miles distance, he was never short of work and he willingly toiled all hours for the sake of his young family, but until Ellie and Mary and little Florence were able to help in the house, the burden of keeping the place clean and making sure the younger children were presentable for school was often a full time job for Polly.

  Bob and Johnny, her two brothers had an even greater talent than most small boys for tearing their trousers, scraping their boots and arriving home marked with the results of their activities. Long before Polly left school at fourteen to be apprenticed to a dressmaker in Armagh, she was an expert on mending.

  In the cramped back premises of the shop in Thomas Street, Polly worked six days a week. The hours were long and wearisome, the pay during her apprenticeship almost non-existent. But Polly always had the capacity to make the best of any situation. It was she who made the other girls laugh when they were presented with yet one more batch of sleeves to make up, a job they all hated, and it was she who suggested dances and parties and picnics on their rare days off.

  But any hardship there might have been in her early years was completely forgotten when Polly met Jimmy at a dance in Belfast while she was staying with her aunt on the Lisburn Road.

  Jimmy, who was some years older, wanted to go off to Canada and make his fortune and he made it quite clear that he wanted Polly to go with him. At nineteen, she was delighted with the prospect. Polly, who had never been further from home than her annual visit to Belfast, organised her wedding and set out for Canada a few weeks later as if she were going to the Isle of Man for her holidays. She simply assumed she would come home regularly to visit her family as so many Canadians and Americans appeared to do.

  Life in Canada in the 1920s was not as easy or as luxurious as the letters of emigrants often made out. Two years after the local band had played to her and Jimmy for the two miles to Armagh station and ranged themselves to play Will Ye No Come Back Again on the platform where her family and friends were to say their goodbyes, life in Canada was not as rosy as the picture Polly had painted for herself.

  With two babies and a husband who could not always find work despite his skills, the prospect of coming home to visit her parents had receded into the far distance. She was homesick and often short of money, but only the most perceptive of her new friends would have guessed at either. Polly always managed to stay cheerful and she had the gift of spending a very small amount to create a treat, or some small outing for her family however bad things were. She began sewing at home and the moment Eddie went to school she found a job in a dress shop.

  It was only months after they had bought their first modest home on the outskirts of Toronto that the prospect of the coming war forced a difficult decision upon them. They had been in Canada for fourteen years and had never made the return journey to Ulster. Both sets of parents were ageing and Jimmy’s mother was dying of cancer. If they crossed the Atlantic that summer they might not be able to get back again. But if they didn’t go now, with war in sight, they might never see their parents again.

  Finally, they decided they would return home. They arrived back in Belfast in August 1939. A month later they opened the newspaper to find that the ship on which they had travelled back had been torpedoed as it made the return journey to Canada.

  There was no problem with Jimmy finding work. As a skilled mechanic he was taken on at Shorts immediately. Within days he was assembling parts of the fuselage of the Sunderland flying boats which were to patrol the western approaches. Finding a house was another matter. Houses were in very short supply in the city and Polly found that living with her McGillvray in-laws was even worse than being homesick. Davy and Eddie were resentful and unsettled and complained continually about the absence of candy and ice-cream parlours. They compared everything in Belfast with what they had left behind in Canada and hadn’t a good word to say for anything.

  When the Blitz began it was poor Ronnie who was terrified. Always the quietest and most thoughtful of the three, he became anxious when the first barrage balloons appeared in the sky. Although Polly tried to explain they were there to protect them, Ronnie was oppressed by the great, grey shapes and remained even more anxious about them than about the planes that were soon making raids on the docks, shipyards and aircraft factories.

  Night after night Polly lay awake listening, for when Jimmy worked a double shift, he would be at work when the raiders came. She learnt, as everyone in Britain learnt, to fear moonlight, those beautiful clear nights when the raiders could find their targets more easily. But the worst night of all, the one that would remain forever in the minds of those who lived through it, Jimmy was at home, asleep by her side in the new house they had finally acquired.

  In the morning they smelt the smoke and the taint of rubber in the air. When they listened to the radio at six o’clock, before the boys were awake and heard the toll of dead and missing, they kissed each other and shed a few tears. Hours later the phone rang and a neighbour of Jimmy’s parents told him that his brother was missing. The police had called on his father and suggested that someone should go down to St George’s Market to see if he was there. That was where the bodies were being laid out for identification.

  Jimmy had found his brother�
��s body, undamaged and unmarked, a victim of blast. By a strange chance he lay beside three of his old school friends whose battered remains had been dug from the rubble of the back-to-back houses down by the docks where Jimmy and his brother had begun their lives. He was looking down at them unable to grasp how four of the five wee lads who kicked a tin can round the street together, should be together once again, when the mother of one of them appeared, bent over and leaning on a stick. Jimmy had stood and wept and the bereaved mother had comforted him.

  Although she worried about her family, the war years were not as hard on Polly as they were on many other women. She was practical and cheerful, coped with shortages and rationing better than most and although she seldom got up to Armagh to see her family, she drew such comfort from knowing that they were there, that they were safe and that she was no longer thousands of miles away.

  Disasters it seemed, always struck unexpectedly. One night when Jimmy was cycling to work he was caught by a sudden raid. Before he could find an air-raid shelter, he was knocked out by a lump of flying wood. Lying in the road, lit only by the flickers from burning buildings, a fire engine just managed to avoid his unconscious body at the last minute. That night he escaped death and suffered only a bad headache the next day. He was not so fortunate at the beginning of 1945.

  It was with peace already in sight that Jimmy had his accident, as he worked on a plane that might never be needed. No one ever worked out exactly what happened. Jimmy remembered only that his feet went from under him and the next thing he knew he was in hospital. It was likely that engine grease had been the cause of his fall. There shouldn’t have been engine grease on that scaffolding, but if it was there and Jimmy was concentrating on the job as he moved slowly along the fuselage, he certainly wouldn’t have seen it. There was a long argument about compensation which was never resolved. Jimmy was on his back for two months at Musgrave Park Hospital and in too much pain to join in the Victory celebrations. The doctors admitted that he would seldom be without pain for the rest of his life.