by June Gadsby
‘Mrs Flynn has been giving Elizabeth lessons,’ said Elizabeth’s husband, who wasn’t normally known for any form of conversation since the war had robbed him of the ability to walk.
Not that a bomb or a bullet had put paid to his mobility. He had fallen from his bicycle while delivering a telegram to a bereaved mother. The Army had rejected him on the basis he suffered from “nerves” and an erratic bowel syndrome. The Royal Mail, on the other hand, was glad to employ him, along with spotty-faced adolescents and conscientious objectors.’
Elizabeth sat down and stared with brooding contemplation at the untouched food on her plate. She had been so angry with Maggie Flynn for not turning up as arranged. It had never crossed her mind that the woman might be ill. Nobody could have anticipated a baby would come so far ahead of its time. She now felt terribly guilty for the uncharitable thoughts she had entertained before seeing the situation with her own eyes.
She glanced down at Laura. The child was tucking courageously into her food. There was no sign that she was upset by what she witnessed that morning. Elizabeth, on the other hand, could not get rid of the memory. It would certainly keep her awake for many nights to come, but then she never did sleep easily. She didn’t know which was worse. Sleeping alone, or with John, tossing and turning, moaning and snoring loudly beside her.
‘Please may I leave the table?’ Laura put down her knife and fork on her empty plate, slid her bottom off her chair and stood to attention beside it, waiting for permission to be granted.
‘But you haven’t had your pudding, sweetheart,’ Elizabeth told her and saw the little girl’s face twist in distaste.
‘I don’t like it,’ Laura said, twisting her face even more.
‘It’s your favourite! Apple pie and custard.’
‘No.’ Laura shook her head adamantly, disturbing the thick, lustrous brown curtain of hair that framed her sweet face. ‘The custard has lumps.’
‘How do you know?’ her grandfather demanded with an amused twinkle in his eye. ‘It’s not even made yet.’
‘Mummy’s going to make it. She can’t make custard like Mrs Flynn. Mrs Flynn doesn’t make lumps.’
Elizabeth knew her daughter. She knew that if the child had made up her mind there was no persuading her one way or the other.
‘Very well, Laura,’ she said. ‘You may leave the table.’
‘Can I go out to play?’
There was a murmur of disapproval from Harriet Robinson, but it had been a long, hard day, and Elizabeth knew that a little fresh air between Laura’s luncheon and her afternoon nap would probably do her the world of good. In fact, she wished she dared accompany the child. The family festivities were always too suffocating for her delicate disposition. No doubt Oliver would, as usual, insist on playing games after the pudding dishes had been cleared away. Charades would be favourite, followed by Pass the Parcel and then a hand or two of dominoes or cards, where everyone would cheat and fall out and fight over who was the best player.
‘Mummy?’ Laura was waiting patiently for her decision.
‘Yes, all right, but stay in the garden, do you hear? Don’t go wandering off.’
‘She shouldn’t be outside on a day like this,’ Harriet Caldwell, said sourly. ‘She’ll catch her death of cold.’
‘Oh, she’ll be all right, Mother,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Go on, Laura, but don’t stay out too long It’ll be dark soon.’
Laura, however, had ideas of her own and it never entered her head that she was misbehaving. Well, not seriously, anyway. The grown-ups were busy talking about things that only grown-ups could understand. It was all too boring in the little girl’s opinion. Whereas, things down at the Flynn house might be far more interesting, if only she could remember how to find her way back there, and be safely home again before the light started to fade.. One way or another, Laura was determined to feast her eyes again on the squirming, red-faced, wailing little creature they had pronounced dead.
But he hadn’t been dead at all. He grabbed Laura’s finger as if it was the only thing that existed in this new world of his. He had looked up into her face with such an intent blue gaze it made her quiver. She just had to see him again to make sure that he was real. In a funny way, she felt this baby belonged to her. If they didn’t want him down at Mrs Flynn’s, she would bring him home for her mother and they could look after him together. She would love to have a little brother. She had asked for one time and time again, but they just looked sad or angry and shook their heads and told her to go away and play, like a good little girl.
The more Laura thought of the idea of seeing Little Billy Big Boots again, the more she liked it. She went off skipping gaily in the direction of the straggling streets where the Flynns resided.
* * *
Patrick Flynn paced the floor of the shabby front room in Dawson Street. His boots fell heavily on the floorboards, raising clouds of dust through the threadbare clippie mats that were strewn haphazardly about the place. They were so dirty you could no longer distinguish one colour from another in the tangled strips of rag woven into the Hessian backing. He glanced frequently at his battered silver pocket watch, the only possession that was entirely his when he met Maggie, and had taken her to be his wife. It was an act he never ceased to regret.
‘Well,’ he said, stopping his pacing once and for all with an abrupt twist of his big body, his malevolent gaze sweeping over the occupants of the room. ‘Haven’t ye’s seen enough for one day? Divvint ye’s have hames to gan to?’
There was a low muttering as people responded, making excuses, offering half-hearted apologies and help if needed. The only reply they got was a further narrowing of his pale, cruel eyes. Feet shuffled, anxious to be off. Patrick Flynn wasn’t a man to mess with, especially when he had the drink inside him and it looked as if he’d been drinking all night while he slaughtered the beasts down at Wilson’s Abattoir. The blood from the animals was impregnated into his clothing and his unwashed skin, giving off a vile smell that made the strongest stomach heave just getting near to him.
He watched as, one by one, everybody except his wife’s mother and the priest had gone. He jerked a thumb at the small cluster of children regarding him fearfully from the darkest corner of the room.
‘Ye’ll take the bairns to your house, Annie,’ he said bluntly and the old woman nodded grimly, gathering the children to her and herding them out of the house with urgent, stumbling steps. ‘No doubt our Maureen will already be there.’
He was speaking of his eldest child, a girl of limited brainpower, and the reason why he was rushed into marriage long before he was ready, and to the wrong woman. It had not taken him long to figure out Maureen was none of his making. She was one hundred per cent Thomas, the result of Maggie’s incestuous relations with her brother, if there was any truth in the rumours that had been rife at the time of her birth.
William Thomas had already hung himself from some scaffolding in the shipyard where he worked. Given the unfortunate circumstances of his life, no-one believed any hand other than his own had been responsible for his tragic demise.
‘I’ll be back to see to Maggie,’ Mrs Thomas called over her shoulder before the door closed on the agonized groaning of the woman who had just given birth, and the soft mewing of the infant in the shoebox by the side of the bed.
‘You too, Father,’ the big man said, fixing the priest with a mean, protruding eye. ‘There’s nothing more for you to do here.’
‘Your wife needs comforting, man,’ Father O’Rourke said, a pleading note in his reedy voice. ‘And there’s the child...arrangements must be made...though it’s still alive and only God knows why or how.’
‘Ach, be off wi’ ye, and yer religious bletherin’. What good does all that stuff do, eh?’
‘Oh, come on, Patrick, man.’ Father O’Rourke came forward half a step, and then backed off abruptly at a jerky movement of the irate man whom he knew would beat him to a pulp with little or no invitation.
Patr
ick Flynn had a longstanding reputation for his brutality and it was a miracle he had not been put away in prison long term before now. It certainly had nothing to do with the luck of the Irish, for even the other Paddies in the Tyneside docks area kept their distance from this one.
‘Do ye not understand English, Father?’ Patrick took a menacing step towards the priest and Father O’Rourke was out of the door quicker than he could say two Hail Marys. ‘We don’t need the likes of you and your black magic mumblings. What I have to do I’ll do meself with no help or hindrance from nobody.’
The words of the big Irishman followed the retreating priest out of the door and could be heard all the way the length and breadth of Dawson Street, and probably one or two streets beyond.
Patrick’s face twisted and he gave the door a hefty kick. So hefty, indeed, that it nearly came off its hinges and bounced open again a few inches. He ignored it and the cold that was blowing through the gap. Turning to the woman in the bed he spat sideways into the embers of the dying fire. Sparks crackled up the sooty chimney and the baby gave the tiniest of whimpers.
‘Right,’ Patrick said, picking up the shoebox and staring down into it contemptuously. ‘I’ve got things to do.’
‘What are you going to do, Patrick?’ The voice was urgent and Maggie’s fear of her husband shone through it. ‘For the love of God, give me the child. Let me have my baby.’
‘You call this a babbie? Ach, ye’re ramblin’ woman. It’s nothing but a scrawny, hairless rat wi’ a red face an....’
‘He’s your son, Patrick!’ Maggie spoke in a soft, trembling whisper and her husband threw back his head and laughed raucously for a long time, until he stopped suddenly and his eyes blazed with liquid fire.
‘So you say, woman, but I don’t buy all this malarkey about him being born afore his time.’ His voice was like broken glass. ‘Besides, he won’t survive but an hour or so. You heard what they all said. The miracle is he’s breathin’ at all. Even the bliddy priest thought that.’
‘Give him to me,’ Maggie stretched out long, skinny arms in his direction, her fingers plucking at the air between them. ‘He must be hungry, poor little mite. I’ve got to feed him.’
Another laugh from her husband that was as cold as the air in the room.
‘I’d say you’ve not got milk enough in those pathetic paps of yours to feed a mouse.’
‘Please, Patrick...oh, please give Billy to me. Let me love him before he’s taken from me.’
Her husband hesitated, ruminating on whether or not it mattered one way or the other. He truly believed that the child would soon be dead, anyway, and right now Patrick would do anything to stop his wife’s bleating. He felt like his head was caving in with the sound of her pathetic droning.
‘Here, take it.’ He thrust the shoebox at her and turned his back so that he didn’t have to watch her lift the pathetic creature to her flaccid breast.
He tried to close his ears to his wife’s crooning and the unbelievable, yet distinct sound of the suckling baby. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was too weak, almost dead; would be dead soon. Yes, soon, please God. Patrick Flynn was fed up with being expected to provide for brat after brat, which Maggie produced as if he was some kind of money machine. And if this last one was his he’d be mightily surprised, for he’d only been demobbed six and a half months and even he could work that one out.
‘Look, Patrick, look! He’s taking it. He’s sucking so hard on my tit I can hardly bear it. Dear God he’s a strong one this, my bairn, my Billy. He’s a fighter...just like his uncle was before he...before they strung him up like a side of beef. That lad never took his own life. He wasn’t made like that. I know it, and so do all of you here.’
There was a palpable silence that fell over the room as the words left her lips, the force of them sapping Maggie of her last ounce of energy. Patrick’s shoulders rose and fell and he gave a low, wolfish growl that grew in a great crescendo to an agonized howl. He turned, crazy madman that he had become, grappling hands going out to the child.
‘That’s it!’ His voice was rasping, his eyes red with rage. ‘I’ve had enough. Give it here.’
As he plucked the child from its mother’s weak arms neither of them was aware of the horrified gaze of the little girl who had crept, unnoticed, into the room.
* * *
In the Caldwell’s warm, cosy front room, the New Year’s Day celebrations were going along as well as could be expected for a family not generally known for embracing the frivolous on even the jolliest of occasions. They were, by chance or by design, rather staid in their approach to all things in life. Only Elizabeth’s father, Albert Robinson, was aware they had all been brainwashed over the years by the wife he married in good faith because he believed himself to be in love with her.
He looked around the room now, studying them all, analysing their natures, their moods. For much of the year he did not allow himself to ponder on the whys and the wherefores. He found it all too sad, this small group of good-living people, who were incapable of receiving any form of joy in their hearts. Smiling came hard to them. Actual laughter was non-existent, unless you counted Oliver’s inane guffaws, inserted into the conversation whether necessary or not. Warmth and affection was something that occurred in other families. The Robinsons neither understood nor practiced it.
What had he, Albert Robinson, done to deserve such a miserable, uncharitable lot? Laura was the only gem, but give her time and she would grow up to be just like her mother and her grandmother, no doubt. Their strict ways with the child were already tarnishing her, lowering her morale. His granddaughter was effectively constrained in an ever-tightening straightjacket of exigent rules and regulations passed down from mother to daughter. How much longer, he asked himself, would it be before that pretty, smiling face lost its innocent vitality?
His wife had inherited her rigid, maudlin personality from her forebears. Their daughter, too. He could only pray that his little granddaughter would escape it. But he wasn’t a praying man. Religious faith, all that stuff, was beyond him. The only thing he understood was work. That and being a clean, honest, decent man. It wasn’t enough.
Albert gave a sound like steam escaping from a train. It was a suppressed angry, frustrated sound. He would like to give his wife a good talking to, shake some sense into her silly old head. But it was far too late for that, as it was for his daughter too. Instead, he picked up the poker and stabbed at the burning coals in the grate, making sparks, cinders and ash fly up the chimney and scatter onto the hearth, covering his slippers and burning tiny holes into his new, knitted socks that Harriet had given him for Christmas. They were too big and curled up inside his shoes. And the wool made his feet itch. But he wore them because it was easier than facing his wife’s emotions if he let it be known that he didn’t appreciate her gift.
‘Oh, Father! What on earth are you doing?’ Elizabeth came scuttling over, a rattling tray in her hands, bearing tiny glasses of port and a platter of cheese. ‘Look, there’s some hot cinders on the rug. Oh, you are so careless. Mum gave us that rug. She’ll go mad when she finds out.’
‘Oh, God help us,’ Albert said, though he said it with no particular emphasis or feeling. ‘Oliver, pass me the fire irons, will you? Quick, before your mother sees it.’
‘Here, let me do it,’ Oliver picked up tongs and coal shovel and fumbled with the cinder that was already burning into the rug and causing the air to be filled with a strong smell of singeing.
‘Too late,’ Albert sighed when he saw the small, but very obvious burn left by the cinder. ‘I’m sorry, lass.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you didn’t do it on purpose, Father,’ Elizabeth said tightly. She was doing her best to be forgiving, but her lips were drawn tight over her teeth and she avoided meeting his eyes.
‘Put something over it,’ his son-in-law suggested, handing over the thick book he had been reading. ‘Take this.’
Albert gave John a grateful look and covered the burn
with the book just as his wife entered, clean and neat, having changed her dress in favour of a tweed skirt and a beige twin set with amber beads. It wasn’t unusual for her to wear two or three different outfits in a day. Even during the war she had managed to do it. She called it “having pride in one’s appearance”. Albert called it something else, but had never dared voice his opinion of such strangely obsessive behaviour.
But they should have known better than to try and fool Harriet. She sniffed at the air suspiciously and drew back her long chin, her small eyes darting this way and that.
‘What is that awful smell?’
‘What smell?’ Albert said, trying to place himself between his wife and the damaged rug. ‘I can’t smell anything.’
‘Something’s burning!’ She looked from one to the other of them.
‘Maybe you’ve left the gas on in the kitchen,’ Oliver said blandly, staring her right in the eye unwaveringly, but she wasn’t taken in..
‘Nonsense! I don’t do things like that.’
‘No, I suppose you don’t, Mother. Quite right.’ Oliver stood shoulder to shoulder with his father, happy in the knowledge that if there was to be a telling off, he would not, this time at least, be in the line of fire.
‘Perhaps somebody’s burning some rubbish outside,’ John said and they all turned to look at him, so he raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, it’s possible.’
Harriet was still sniffing the air, determined to find the cause of her displeasure. Albert decided that it might be better; after all, to come clean and get it over with. He could then make his escape up to his allotment and smoke a Christmas cheroot in peace with whoever else was there.
He and his pals had a few bottles stashed away up there. It was their crisis supply, saved and stored carefully out of the way of nosey wives. There were candles, too, for light, and enough old timber to make the odd fire for added warmth. Albert found that he was spending more and more time up there now that he was officially retired. He still showed his face down at the chandler shops, however. It kept everybody on their toes.
