A Whisper to the Living

by Ruth Hamilton

  As most of my relations, including my mother’s father, were Irish, a small ceilidh band had been engaged and my grandfather’s large front room had been emptied for the dancing.

  I had just one interesting cousin called Eileen. Her father, Paddy Foley, had deserted Eileen and her mother two years previously, so I had, of late, come to identify with the fatherless girl. Her mother, Nellie, was my mother’s sister, though they did not look alike. Nellie was tall, thin as a reed and dark-haired, with the pale skin so often found in those of Irish descent. My mother, prettier by far than Nellie, had a softer, gentler look about her.

  Eileen herself was plain to the point of ugliness, with straight mousy hair and strange eyes that darted about constantly as if she were frantically searching for something.

  We took ourselves off to the top of the house, right up to the attic, away from all the fiddling, shouting and stamping of feet. We sat side by side on an old army trunk, our heels dangling and bumping gently against its side. She stared at me with all the wisdom of a ten-year-old, those odd, quick eyes seeming to pierce through my skull right to the very centre of my thoughts.

  ‘You don’t like ’im, do you?’ She put an arm around my shoulders. Unaccustomed, of late, to such empathy, I allowed a few tears of self-pity to run down my face and she dried them, none too gently, with the rough-ribbed cuff of her grey cardigan.

  ‘Me Mam says as ’ow you’ll get used to ’im, like,’ she went on. ‘You’ll be better off than what we are at any road – once he can get work. At our ’ouse we’ve seen nowt but bread and drip for a week now. See.’ She opened a brown paper bag. ‘I’ve fetched loads of butties up and a bottle of stout – we can ’ave our own party.’

  ‘No!’ I made up my mind quickly as an idea flashed across my brain with all the sudden brilliance of a streak of fork-lightning. ‘Save my half, Eileen. I’m running away.’

  Expressing no surprise, as Eileen had ceased to feel surprise at a very early age, she merely asked, with great calm, ‘Where to, like?’

  I thought about this for some seconds. ‘Well, I’d go next door, but they’d only find me straight off and drag me back. I think I’ll go to . . . to . . . Blackpool. That’s it, I’ll go to Blackpool.’

  She stared down at her white blancoed canvas shoes. ‘Where will you live?’ she asked. This was getting a bit complicated for me.

  ‘I’ll find somewhere. I can sleep on the pier or in a tram shelter. And . . .’ I began to warm to my subject. ‘And I’ll get food off people on the sands – bits of picnics and that.’

  Eileen shook her head wisely. ‘They’ll only bring you back. They always do – I’ve been fetched back four times now – mind, I never got as far as Blackpool, but it makes no difference. They’ll always get you in the end, Annie. Then you’ll get a right good ’iding off yer Mam. Nay. You’ll have to go ’ome with them and make the best of it.’

  She was right, of course. They did always get you in the end. I sighed deeply, trying to imagine what life was going to hold in store for me. I had already been banished from my mother’s bed, was already forced to sleep cold and alone in the small front bedroom.

  And I’d have to eat with him, sit with him in the kitchen every evening. There was no privacy in the house, no bathroom. If you wanted a wash, you used the tin dish in the slopstone. If you wanted a warm wash, then you heated water on the range or on one of the two gas rings in the scullery. Weekly baths took place in front of the kitchen fire in the metal tub from the back yard. Which was all very well when there was just me and my mother. But now, with a stranger in the house, how would we manage?

  I sobbed my unhappiness into my fingers, squeezing the tears in my palms until they ran right up to the elbows. It was the unfairness of it all that frustrated me. Grown-ups could do exactly as they pleased. We just had to fit in, were forced to fit in. We had to wait until we, in turn, became adults before we could have any choice at all in things that really mattered.

  ‘Don’t take on, Annie,’ whispered Eileen. ‘Don’t let them know ’ow you feel. Just carry on going t’ school and do your booklearnin’. I’ve ’eard as ’ow you’re clever at school. They can’t take that away from you now, can they? You’ll likely get a scholarship when you’re eleven – oh aye, you’ll pass for t’ grammar alright. Then you can be what you want, do what you want.’

  ‘What can I be, Eileen?’ I gripped her hand tightly.

  ‘Ooh, anythin’. Well, nearly anythin’.’

  I thought about this for a few minutes, my sobs beginning to subside.

  ‘Could I be a teacher, Eileen?’

  ‘I reckon as ’ow you could, yes.’

  ‘Then I could tell people what to do instead of them telling me. Only I’d be a nice teacher like Miss Best with legs. I could never be a nun. I don’t like nuns.’

  Eileen, a not too frequent attender at St Gregory’s, which was also under the tender auspices of the Passionists, agreed with me wholeheartedly. She sat, tugging at her hair, twisting it about her fingers. Perhaps she thought if she twisted it for long enough it would go curly.

  ‘I’m goin’ to work in a shop,’ she announced. ‘A food shop. If they don’t pay me proper I can always pinch enough to eat.’ She grabbed a sandwich from the bag and swallowed it in two bites. For a moment or two I forgot my own troubles and thought about poor Eileen.

  Auntie Nellie worked full time in the mill, yet there was never enough to eat, seldom any coal for the fire. Most of the time, Eileen did not go to school, simply because she had little to wear. For days on end, her mother would lock her in, telling her that the house was being watched and should Eileen ever open the door, let alone step outside, then she, Auntie Nellie, would surely be informed by her spies.

  This poor ten-year-old child was, therefore, left without food to eat, without fire to warm her, while her mother, who did not always come home as soon as the working day had ended, spent her wages in the Swan or the Black Bull, returning only once her purse was empty and her belly full of ale. Surely my life, even with Eddie Higson in it, could not be as terrible as Eileen’s?

  ‘Do you get frightened when you’re shut in?’ I asked.

  She nodded quickly.

  ‘Shall I come sometimes and put a bit of bread or maybe an Eccles cake through the letterbox?’

  Now she was shaking her head vehemently. ‘No. They’ll only find out. Whatever you do, they always find out.’

  ‘But it’s not fair,’ I cried. ‘You should go to school like me and you shouldn’t be locked in on your own all day with no dinner.’

  She put a finger to her lips. ‘Shush. Nobody knows, ’cepting you. If me Grandad ever found out, he’d flay me Mam, you know he would. Then me Mam would go for me – aye, she would that – and where would that get me, eh?’

  ‘But it’s not fair!’ I shouted again.

  She looked at me wisely, shaking her head as if exasperated at me for expecting it to be fair.

  We sat together for a long time until the room grew chill, two girl children separated by four years, connected by the strangeness of our lives, she with the crazy mother, I with the horrible so-called stepfather. Yet we drew strength from each other as we sat there waiting, waiting for our day to come. It would be a long wait, we knew that. It would reach beyond this room, this house, this day and into dimensions as yet uncharted. But our strength, joint and separate, lay in our youthfulness, in our unspoken hope that we would be survivors.

  Thus began my journey into my mother’s second marriage, my pathway into a hell I could never have imagined. So fierce was the heat in my particular hell that when, some three years after this wedding day, I learned that Eileen and her mother had perished in their gas-filled scullery, I felt not only pity and grief, but something approaching envy too.

  Eileen had not survived. I was condemned to live.

  5

  Moving On

  Our house in Ensign Street was a slum. Although my mother did her best, scrubbing floors, blackleading t
he grate two or three times a week, making sure her doorstep and the two or three square feet of flags outside the front door were donkeystoned daily, she was fighting a losing battle.

  We were constantly overrun by vermin; in the night the kitchen and scullery floors would become blanketed in silverfish and cockroaches, while mice and even rats put in regular appearances around the meat safe and under the slopstone.

  It was a poorly built two up two downer, with a sloping scullery attached at the back and a brick air-raid shelter in the yard. The roof leaked with monotonous frequency and the bedroom walls were decorated with a variety of moulds, some wet and green, some white and furry.

  Facilities were, to say the least, primitive. At the bottom of the back yard was a tippler toilet consisting merely of a wide earthenware pipe which protruded from the flagged floor, the seat being a crude circle of badly splintered wood with a hole in the middle. There was no flushing mechanism. A suspended bucket in the pipe simply emptied itself into the open drain below once the contents became heavy enough to make it tilt.

  Next to the lavatory was a midden, a low wall over which debris and decaying food were thrown. Two or three times a month, the cart would rumble up the back street and men with rags wrapped around their mouths and noses would shovel the putrid contents of middens onto the open lorry, thereby disturbing the rats’ nests, causing the creatures to panic and move once more towards our homes in search of food.

  Yet there was a predictability about life in Ensign Street, a monotony that made us feel secure in spite of our unclean environment.

  Because most of the women worked on weekdays, washing was done on Saturdays. Each household had its own posstub and posser and the pounding of wood on metal, the swish of garments in water, the scrubbing of sheet against washboard, these sounds were our dawn chorus at the beginning of each weekend. Should it rain, then these activities must take place in the sculleries and tempers were always frayed on inclement Saturdays, for no-one, not even the most hardened of heathens, would dare face the contempt of her neighbours by washing on a Sunday, however bright the weather.

  Once the clothes had been rinsed and forced through the rollers of the wringer, they were hung across the back street to dry, row upon row, three or four lines to every house and woe betide any child found playing round the backs on washdays. Inside the kitchens were pulley lines where the wash was hung to air once brought in or, in the event of rain, clothes would be transferred straight from mangle to pulley, thus forcing the residents to live in a steam-filled atmosphere for the whole day.

  The rentman came on Saturdays too, when he knew that the women would all be about their washing and could not, therefore, hide from him. He had a small moustache like Hitler and a large black book to write in, but he was a pleasant enough man and always gave me a mint imperial or an Uncle Joe’s mintball.

  On Tuesday evenings, the clubman arrived, collecting our pennies for the Providence cheques with which we bought most of our clothing. He had bright red hair, a tooth missing at the front and he did bird imitations. At least, he used to, though once Eddie Higson moved in with us the Provvy man never stopped again, but just took his money and left quickly. I was pleased in a way. It made me realize that I was not the only one who disliked Higson.

  Wednesday night was insurance night. Like most poor people, we set aside a few coppers each week so that we would not be buried as paupers.

  Lamp Eel came on Friday evenings, the sad carthorse dragging its load up the back street while his master, who always wore a trilby hat with a flower stuck to the brim, called in a high voice, ‘Lamp eel, lamp eel, come on Missus, bring out your dead . . . lamp eel . . .’, and we would rush out of our houses to inspect whatever was on offer this week. Lamp Eel, whose original function had been to deliver oil for lamps, sold just about everything from donkeystone to sets of china, though where he got the stuff during the shortages nobody seemed to know. His cart was wonderful to behold and to hear, for it shone like a million jewels and jingled magnificently as pans and bottles clattered together whenever his cartwheel hit a rut between cobbles.

  So although my mother had married a man I despised, I took comfort from the familiarity of my surroundings, drew solace from the continuing routine, reassuring myself that nothing had really changed, that life was still, more or less, the same. I knew every flagstone, every crack, every cobble that paved my walk to and from school. I was even allowed to the shops now and had made friends with the keepers, enjoying a chat in the fruit store or the Co-op, pretending to be grown-up as I commented on the price of a gas mantle, the cost of a tape of Aspros or a packet of Fennings Cooling Powders. The Co-op was my favourite place, because I loved the smells, loved to watch the staff as they deftly shovelled up potatoes or scooped precious sugar into blue bags. I would breathe in the odour of ground coffee, the scent of hanging bacon, the perfume of the earth that clung in wet lumps to potatoes and carrots. If there was a heaven and if there were smells in heaven, I knew it would be just like the Co-op.

  But for recreation, the bombsite was my favourite place, because again I could play shops, resting an old door on two piles of bricks for a counter, grinding up brick dust to ‘sell’ as sugar, using small stones for fruit and sweets. I had never seen a field except from a distance, had never needed a field, for I had, right on my doorstep, a real adventure playground. Of course, the bombsite was forbidden territory, a fact that made it all the more attractive to us and we never minded the trouble we got into for playing there.

  Tom Hyatt remained my dearest friend. He was twenty now and a very great age this seemed to me. He had become a qualified tradesman, a painter and decorator and he brought me sweets every Friday when he got his wages. As soon as Lamp Eel had been and gone, I would rush next door to visit and collect my bounty, sitting in the big rocker with dolly mixtures and halfpenny spanishes while Tom told tales of the great houses beyond the moors where he was working. During the first few months of my mother’s marriage, Tom often asked, ‘Are you alright?’ and I would nod, not wanting to worry him.

  There were some beatings, just a few, but my mother and Eddie Higson ignored me for the most part. I was left more and more to my own devices and although this neglect did not make me exactly happy, at least I was free to do much as I pleased.

  So when I discovered that we were moving, that Eddie Higson had found a job of sorts, that we would be leaving the street and Tom and the bombsite – and yes, even my school suddenly became attractive when I thought of moving to another – I felt as if my world had been completely shattered.

  Higson was out. I faced my mother across the kitchen table where she was rolling out pastry, arms covered to the elbows in flour. This time, I was fully determined to dig in my heels and get my own way. They couldn’t do this to me. Hadn’t they done enough already?

  ‘You and him can go if you want, but I’m going nowhere. I’m stopping here and that’s that.’

  She wrapped the pastry round the rolling pin and transferred it to a blue-rimmed enamel dish.

  ‘Ah, so you’re stopping, are you? And who’ll pay your rent and do your dinner? What about your washing and who’ll drag you out of bed every morning for school, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’

  ‘Well then, I suggest you start knowing and caring pretty damn quick. We are moving up Long Moor and that’s flat. Now stop being so daft and pass me that pan of mince off the range.’

  I banged the large iron pan hard onto the table, causing utensils to rattle and fly about. My mother pushed a lock of hair from her face, leaving a smudge of flour on the end of her nose and I studied this as she spoke.

  ‘Eeh, it’s a lovely house, Annie. Wait till you see it, just you wait. It’s got a back-boiler and a bathroom – well, a sort of bathroom, just like a big cupboard off the front bedroom. And we’re getting the electric in – proper lights and a cooker.’ She paused in her labours to look at me. ‘Listen, Annie. Your Grandad has give us the deposit – s
ome money, like, to put down. Now that’s a secret and you mustn’t tell nobody, even your cousin Eileen, for Grandad can’t do it for everybody and we don’t want to cause no fights. Can’t you see what this means, love? We’re to have a mort-gage, a proper mort-gage instead of a rent book. It’ll be our house, not the landlord’s. Won’t you try to see I’m doing what’s best?’

  It was hopeless. I’d have been as well off talking to the wall, yet still I went on. ‘But it’s not what I want, is it? Nobody ever asks me about anything in this house. I just get told what to do – not asked – told. And if I don’t do it then I’m in trouble.’ I stopped for a second to draw breath. ‘You went and married him and I have to live with him. I can’t choose, I never get the chance to choose. Now you say I’ve got to leave my own house, my Dad’s house, and go piking off to live where you want to live. Well, it’s not fair. I don’t want to live up Long Moor with electric and a bathroom.’

  ‘Do you want to stop here with rats and cockroaches, then? Is that what you want, to stop in a filthy slum the rest of your life?’ She was waving the rolling pin in the air now. ‘Now you listen to me, our Annie. Six sisters I’ve got and every last one of them married to some no-good lump of an Irishman, every one of them up to their eyes in muck and kids they can’t feed. Well, I never married an Irishman, because apart from your Grandad they are the scum of the earth. Your Dad was a fine man, a Gordon Highlander and he would have looked after us if he’d lived, oh aye, your Dad would have done right by us.’

  She must have seen my lip quiver, because she continued in a quieter tone, ‘But he didn’t live, Annie. Get that into your head, will you? And now he’s dead, Eddie has took us on, both of us, and he’ll do his best now he’s on the mend. Oh, Annie . . .’ She came round the table and took my hand in hers. ‘All I’ve ever wanted is me own front door, me own bit of garden with a few daffs and marigolds. It’s got a bit of garden at the front, you know. And there’s fields nearby where you can play and the tram stops right outside the door to take you to school.’