Polly's Pride

by Freda Lightfoot

  POLLY'S PRIDE

  Freda Lightfoot

  Born in Lancashire, FREDA LIGHTFOOT has been a teacher and a bookseller, and in a mad moment even tried her hand at the ‘good life’. A prolific and much-loved saga writer, Freda’s work is inspired by memories of her Lancashire childhood and her passion for history. For more information about Freda, visit her website: www.fredalightfoot.co.uk.

  The Polly books were inspired by a story of Freda’s great-aunt, who ‘sold everything but the bread bin and bed’ to survive in the thirties.

  Praise for Freda Lightfoot

  Freda’s book was a joy to read for her characters were so believable and richly drawn I really cared what happened to them and interspersed with the story was the the arrival of the Americans, who caused such a furore in that small Cornish town as D Day approaches, And when World War 2 grinds to a halt, people’s lives are changed for ever. It was a real page turner with a very satisfying end.

  — Anne Bennett.

  ‘Polly is made of stern stuff. . . the tale of her courage and grit against the backdrop of a Northern city in the grip of depression makes for a powerful narrative.’

  Newcastle Evening Chronicle on Polly Pride.

  ‘Freda Lightfoot is strong on sense of place’ Westmorland Gazette on Lakeland Lily

  ‘The scene is set for an excellent, hard-to-put-down read with some deeply drawn characters...’ The Historical Novel Society on Angels At War

  ‘Another Lightfoot triumph’ Dorset Echo on Daisy’s Secret

  ‘A bombshell of an unsuspected secret rounds off a romantic saga narrated with pace and purpose and fuelled by conflict.’ The Keswick Reminder on The Bobbin Girls

  ‘An inspiring novel about accepting change and bravely facing the future.’

  The Daily Telegraph on Ruby McBride

  ‘This is a book I couldn’t put down . . . a great read!’ South Wales Evening Post on The Girl From Poorhouse Lane

  ‘a fascinating, richly detailed setting with a dramatic plot brimming with enough scandal, passion, and danger for a Jackie Collins’ novel.’ Booklist on Hostage Queen

  ‘You can’t put a price on Freda Lightfoot’s stories from Manchester’s 1950s Champion Street Market. They bubble with enough life and colour to brighten up the dreariest day and they have characters you can easily take to your heart.’

  The Northern Echo.

  ‘Another heartwarming tale from a master story-teller.’

  Lancashire Evening Post on For All Our Tomorrows.

  ‘a compelling and fascinating tale’ Middlesborough Evening Gazette on The Favourite Child (In the top 20 of the Sunday Times hardback bestsellers)

  ‘She piles horror on horror - rape, torture, sexual humiliation, incest, suicide - but she keeps you reading!’ Jay Dixon on House of Angels.

  ‘paints a vivid picture of life on the fells during the war. Enhanced by fine historical detail and strong characterisation it is an endearing story...’

  Westmorland Gazette on Luckpenny Land

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Author Bio

  Praise

  Blurb

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Extract

  About Freda Lightfoot

  Copyright

  1920s, Manchester. Living in the deprived area of Ancoats area of Manchester Polly Pride feels more fortunate than most until her husband Matthew loses his job and her life is thrown into turmoil.

  With no money coming in Polly must act to keep her family from starvation. In a desperate gamble she sells all the family goods and buys a handcart, from which she sells second-hand rugs and carpets. But struggling to deal with poverty and her husband’s hurt pride are only the start of her problems.

  For when tragedy strikes Polly has to do battle with the bigotry of a sour brother-in-law to keep herself and her family from falling apart.

  A stirring, heartrending story of love, passion, duty and family, set in the 1920s as the Second World War looms.

  Chapter One

  1929

  The residents of Dove Street knew that summer must be coming because it was already seven o’clock and the lamplighter had not yet appeared. They looked forward to his coming; watched for the long pole with its blue light at the end to come dancing past their windows. When the gas lamps were lit, lads would shin up the lamp-post, open the glass and light their cigarettes, more often than not scraped together from the dimps they’d picked up in the gutters. The women, wrapped in their woollen shawls, would normally linger on their doorsteps only a little while longer, enjoying the glow of dusk and the rare blink of a star glimpsed through the thick grey smoke that blanketed the city, billowing like dragon’s breath from the hundreds of mill chimneys.

  If they were lucky the barrel organ man would come along and they’d find a penny or two between them so they could hitch up their skirts and kick up their legs, making their clogs spark on the cobbles. He might play them ‘Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ or a piece from an Italian opera. There was nothing the people of Ancoats liked better than a song and dance. Then each mother would call in her own children from whatever street game they were playing and send them up the ‘dancers’ to bed, welcoming the opportunity to put their own feet up and perhaps enjoy a glass of stout if they’d the money to pay for it.

  But tonight was different. Tonight the door of number twenty-three, like all the others in the street, was shut fast. It had been slammed so firmly closed that the piece of board, still bearing the words ‘Ceylon tea’, had come loose from the hole it was meant to be blocking and swung freely on one nail.

  Inside the house a young woman with hair as dark as a raven’s wing, but with a hint of fire in its depths and a fine Irish temper to match, railed at the injustice of life.

  ‘I’ll have you know my house is clean. Don’t I scrub it with me own hands from top to bottom every week? I’ll not hear anyone say otherwise!’

  Polly Pride, green-grey eyes glowing with passion, spoke as if she challenged the older woman sitting opposite to dare disagree - which of course, being her mother-in-law and set in her own opinions and prejudices, she usually did. But then Florence Pride, as she was often heard to say herself, was not afraid of speaking her mind.

  ‘Nay, don’t take on so. Yon council can’t pick and choose which house they gas and which they don’t. D’you expect them to come knocking on t’door saying, “Good morning, Mrs Pride, have you any bugs in your house that we should shift?”’

  She put back her huge head and laughed at her own wit, screwing up her small eyes and cackling with joyous mirth. Being a large woman, heavily built rather than fat, with arms on her that some might think could challenge Randy Billy in his next wrestling contest, she was generally known as Big Flo. She could have made three of her skinny daughter-in-law who was such a whirlwind of energy that no flesh w
ould stay on her for more than five minutes, even on the days she ate well, which admittedly were few.

  Big Flo watched with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity as Polly went about her work in the small kitchen, movements brisk as she brewed tea from the big black kettle puffing out steam where it sat, like a welcome friend, on the hob. She looked like a child who had outgrown her strength. Short dark hair cut into a sensible bob; eyes like bruises against the pale skin of her elfin face. It was a wonder she’d managed to produce two healthy children when to look at her it seemed a breath of wind from the Pennines would blow her clean away. What Matthew had ever seen in her, Flo couldn’t rightly say. He should’ve married a good strong Methodist lass, like she’d told him to.

  As if reading her thoughts, which had been made plain more times than she cared to contemplate, Polly wagged a condemnatory finger at her mother-in-law, her other fist planted against her narrow waist. ‘It’s because we’re Irish Micks, as you call us.’

  ‘If the cap fits . . .’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong. I’m only half-Irish.’

  ‘How d’you work that out? Your parents both hailed from Ireland, didn’t they?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And thee were born there?’

  ‘So? I’ve lived in England since I was six years old, which makes me half-Lancashire.’

  Big Flo gave her loud rumbling laugh. ‘Says you!’

  ‘It’s true. Yet for all the Irish have been in Manchester for nigh on three hundred years and built the railway from here to Liverpool with their own muscle, not to mention fighting in the Great War, still you call us immigrants.’

  ‘The whole of Ancoats is full of immigrants.’ Flo pronounced the word with a disapproving sniff. It was true she’d no truck with foreigners, nor anyone in fact who differed from her own fixed views - which included those who worshipped idols, built fancy altars, swung incense and needed anyone to intercede on their behalf before the Almighty, instead of talking straight with the Good Lord himself, as she was fond of doing. This ruled out pretty well every religion under the sun, barring her own non-conformist persuasion, including Baptists and Congregationalists, Church of England, Jews, and many other less established religions. Big Flo was a rebel at heart, a dissenter not a puritan, anti-establishment rather than a woman with a mission. That burden she left to her elder son Joshua, who relished following the law of Primitive Methodism to the letter. But she shared his hatred of papists, like this little madam, for they were the worst of the lot in Big Flo’s unbending opinion.

  ‘There are Italians, Polish and Russian Jews, even a few from Burnley living here. Bugs ain’t fussy, they’ll bite anybody. And if there’s one thing we’re not short of in Ancoats, it’s bugs.’

  Polly blinked back tears. ‘Will you not try and understand for once how I feel? ‘It’s shamin’, so it is.’ She loved her little house for all some might call it a two-up-and-two-down slum. There were many worse. The Murphys’ next door, for instance. They’d only one bedroom, and them with four boys and two girls and Davey Murphy having recently lost his job. What a terrible thing that was, to have no work. Worse than being accused of being filthy and having your house fumigated, whether you needed it or not.

  She brought flour from the pantry and began shaking it into a large brown bowl. If she hurried, she might have time to make some potato cakes with the leftover mash from yesterday’s dinner. ‘And we have to stay in Ardwick barracks with the soldiers while they do it.’ She could at least make sure they took their own food with them. Polly began to mix the flour and potato together.

  ‘Aye. And take nowt with us.’ Seeing what she was about, Big Flo began to chop onions, which would add a delicious flavour to the cakes, once they were fried. She was rather partial to a few potato cakes for her supper. ‘They’ll need to chuck powder over everything; make a right mess they will. Stink to high heaven for days will that gas. But with the warm weather coming and the bugs stirring, what else can they do, eh? We’d be overrun with the blame things if they didn’t.’ She considered the girl with a keen glint in her eye. ‘What’re you fratchin’ about anyroad? It happens every year at this time. I reckon you’re more frightened of them soldiers than you are of the blackjacks and lice and what-have-you.’

  Polly did not deny it. What loyal Irish girl would not be? Her memories of the old country were vague, having come to Manchester as a small girl when her parents were seeking work in the mills, but Irish memories were long. Her own mother, who told tales of the Fenian bombings, had been terrified of the soldiers, having lost a younger brother in a riot. She was dead now, which Polly regretted deeply, while her father was very much alive - an even deeper cause of regret. Somewhere she still had brothers and sisters but she never thought of them. When she’d announced her intention of marrying a Protestant, they’d made such a fuss she’d packed her bags and left. Even so, for all her defection from her homeland and family, she knew that nothing good had ever come out of an English barracks so far as her family was concerned, and despite her years of living on English soil unmolested, Polly felt the same.

  She did recognise, however, the problem with the bugs. Despite Polly’s best efforts with gallons of washing soda and disinfectant, cockroaches still crept out every night from under the fire grate, though there were none in her pantry, thank God, nor in the meat safe that sat proudly in her yard. And there wasn’t a flea in the place. Didn’t she take the lighted candle to the bedsprings every night of her life? And her children grew tired of her nightly ministrations with the fine tooth comb. So she hated to think of anyone considering her house as bad as those in the Dardanelles, for instance, or the notorious district of Angel Meadow.

  Polly Pride put money in the poor box every week for those less fortunate than herself, for all she rarely attended mass these days, preferring to worship before a picture of the Sacred Heart and a crucifix in her own front parlour. Since the church considered her husband to be a heretic bound for hell, and this being one piece of their doctrine to which she could not subscribe, Polly had not set foot in a Catholic church since the day she wed Matthew Pride fifteen years previously. Sometimes she would have liked to find a church in the city where she wasn’t known and quietly attend mass and make her confession. But this was a comfort she had so far denied herself, if not her children. They’d both been raised in the Catholic faith, to the bitter disapproval of Matthew’s family and in particular his brother Joshua.

  If she and Matthew were outcasts, what of it? Weren’t they happy enough without the blessings of either church? Generally speaking, with the exception of Father Donevan, Big Flo, and a few like them, within Ancoats itself nobody much cared one way or the other who you were, where you came from, or whether you attended church. They had far greater problems to contend with than religion.

  What mattered was whether you had enough food in your belly, a roof over your head, and were a good neighbour to those about you, ready to lend two spoons of sugar whenever necessary. As a result of this pragmatic philosophy, it was where you lived and the allegiance you had to your own street that counted most, not which banner you carried on the Whit Walks. Each was cheered as loudly as the next in any case, and Polly appreciated that fact. Although if it rained on the Friday when the Roman Catholics walked, Big Flo would say the sun only shone on the righteous.

  ‘Live and let live’ was largely the order of the day. The one thing that could set apart neighbour from neighbour in the district was trying to appear better than the rest. ‘Getting above yourself was the real sin.

  ‘Thinks she is someone,’ they’d say with a sneer if anyone put up new curtains or dared to set fresh flowers on their windowsill instead of paper ones bought from the tinkers. The next day there could be a half-brick thrown through it.

  But still Polly had her pride, and could be fussy about her own curtains - when she had any. Her house was clean, no doubt about that, so fumigating it was entirely unnecessary and filled her with shame for all she understood it cou
ldn’t be singled out from the rest.

  ‘What if the soldiers won’t let us back into our own house?’ Or what if, despite all the Derbac and lye soap she used, they found something wrong with her children and took them away, saying she wasn’t a fit mother? ‘What if they put Lucy and Benny in Ancoats Hospital or, worse, a children’s home and I never see them again?’

  ‘Nay, lass, you’re getting all a-flunter over nowt.’ Big Flo, who knew exactly where she stood in life, had never been troubled with ‘nerves’ while this lass seemed full of them, so far as she could see. Polly lived in constant fear of her two children getting into trouble, pinching something and ending up in the reformatory. That’s if they didn’t walk under a tram, get TB, diphtheria or any of the other dread diseases that stalked this street almost daily, it seemed. Moreover she didn’t seem to appreciate family ties, and wanted out of Ancoats, for all it was one of the friendliest places on God’s earth, if also one of the muckiest.

  By the time Big Flo had gone back to her own house, which she shared with Joshua, just four doors away, for once Polly couldn’t blame her mother-in-law for feeling exasperated. She had indeed worked herself up into a fine lather with largely imagined terrors. Every year it was the same. Being turned out of her own home, even for the annual fumigation, filled her with insecurity. She longed for Matthew to come home, knowing he would understand her fears and soothe them.

  Her husband was good and kind and strong. She felt herself lucky to have been courted and wed by such a man. He didn’t drink all his money away like some, but brought it home for the care of his children, and the wife he loved and cherished above everything. She’d looked forward to his coming home all day, as she always did, but tonight there would be no easy chat over supper, no time to cuddle up beneath the blankets and old army greatcoats in their own bed. But he’d be there all the same, her rock, so really she had nothing to fret about at all.