Polly's Pride

by Freda Lightfoot

  The derision in Joshua’s tone left Matthew bereft of words. They both knew to what he was referring. It went right to the core of the bitterness between them. They’d never been close, not even as young boys, but Cecil’s death had soured their relationship for all time.

  Even now, fifteen years later, it hurt Matthew to remember his younger brother, the eager young idealist who had volunteered along with his two elder brothers for action in a war he did not comprehend. As luck would have it, he and Matthew were posted together to France and Matthew had promised his mother faithfully that he’d look after the boy. In the event it had been a naive and foolish vow to give, empty of meaning once they’d seen what was waiting for them over there.

  They’d lived day by day, sleeping in the same tent, eating the same food which was all too often caked in mud, even sharing the same stinking trench and the same devastating battlefield. But it hadn’t been enough.

  Matthew could still bitterly remember the day of his young brother’s death. It was etched into his mind as painfully as any physical wound. Given the choice, he’d gladly have cut off a limb to have Cecil alive and well.

  He recalled the preparations they’d made with painstaking care, the plans, the instructions, the mockery of rehearsing a battle charge. He remembered the September mists, the stink of gas, the poplar trees gently rustling in the breeze.

  Encumbered with equipment, rations, rifle, pick or shovel, flags and Ayston fans, for clearing gas out of dugouts. they’d struggled to take up position in a long winding trench or in one of the few dugouts or gun emplacements. Matthew had tried to help the boy by offering to carry some of his load, but he would have none of it.

  ‘Don’t treat me like a child,’ had been Cecil’s constant cry. So Matthew had treated him like a man. And like a man he had fought and died.

  They’d spent a miserable, cold night with precious little sleep and nothing but mouldy bread and cheese to eat. Then it was time to abandon the majority of their equipment so they could ‘chase’ the enemy. The view of Hulluch and Loos, high on the ridge above them, had seemed benign, even beautiful in the early mists of dawn. Except that the road ran right through the German trenches. No one was in any doubt about that.

  They learned it was time to go into action when they received a message from the Adjutant. He ordered the attack to be carried out with bayonets fixed. The two brothers had done as they were bidden, then looked at one another, each silently acknowledging the fragility of this defence. Their battalion had three machine-guns and a bag of Mills bombs. Matthew had 150 rounds of ammunition; plenty, he believed, to see him safe. He checked on Cecil, despite his protests, and seeing he had 50 rounds fewer, split the difference with him, so each had 125.

  ‘Keep your bloomin’ head down!’ was the last thing Matthew had said to him. Cecil simply grinned and winked in that cheeky way of his.

  The first thing to go wrong was the wind. It blew the gas they’d thrown right back into their own faces. Matthew could remember men falling down, choking from its effects.

  And it took no time at all for them to realise the inadequacy of their preparations. They’d been hopelessly outnumbered. There were German gun emplacements or bomb throwers every few yards. They’d walked openly up the hill as if on parade, the morning sun winking on their tin helmets, and marched straight into the jaws of hell.

  Men fell all around, swallowed up by the banks of mist and swirling smoke from the bombs, rolling in screaming agony down the hill they had just climbed. One minute Cecil had been there beside him, solid, firm and alive, firing for all he was worth. But by the time Matthew had reached the German wire, he’d been quite alone. He’d set off running then, skirting the fringes of the defences, desperate to find his brother. A blow to his shoulder had flung him into a shell hole, already occupied by two dead men and one who quietly died with the cigarette Matthew had given him still between his lips. Matthew had lain half buried in that stinking hole for what seemed like days but must have been six or eight hours, perhaps as many as twelve, he couldn’t tell.

  Acutely aware that going forward he would be shot and going back would mean facing a court martial. He could do nothing but remain where he was. Every time he risked lifting his head, the thud of a bullet hitting the ground inches away would send him scurrying back like a rabbit into its hole.

  It was a miracle he hadn’t been hit again. His own shoulder wound had been superficial, but the battalion was well near annihilated, scarcely anybody left. Matthew would never forget the sight of all those prone figures; those young-old faces frozen in death.

  Those left alive crawled or staggered any way they could to get back to safety, in a silence so terrible it was almost tangible. It was as if even the Germans were sickened by what they had done.

  Cecil had not been amongst the living.

  Ever since that terrible day Joshua had insisted that Matthew could and should have done more for the boy. He shouldn’t have lost sight of him, should have brought him out so he could receive first aid for his injuries. He refused to acknowledge the reality of the situation; how their own officers would let none of the men back on to the field to collect the wounded, not in the middle of a pitched battle.

  In response to this explanation, Joshua added his accusation of cowardice, charging Matthew of saving his own skin at the expense of his brother’s, of wanting only to return safely to the new wife he had left waiting for him at home. He swore Matthew had reneged on his word and blamed him entirely for not guarding Cecil more carefully. How could Matthew disagree? Didn’t he blame himself even more for Cecil’s death? The hatred engendered between the brothers as a result had festered and grown ever since that day.

  Florence, of course, had stoically borne her grief in silence, believing her youngest son had died bravely and nobly.

  Matthew grieved for the brother he’d lost as keenly as anyone, if not more so. He’d torn himself apart with guilt; suffered the agonising pain of his memories and refused to speak of the war for years afterwards. He was saved from madness only by Polly’s unfaltering love and devotion.

  ‘Are you planning on doing yerself in, lad?’ hissed a voice in his ear, bringing Matthew sharply back to the present. ‘You’ve been gawping at that mucky water so long, I thought you were about to jump in it.’ The voice was that of his gaffer, Jim Taylor, a man prone to fault-finding even where none existed.

  Matthew started. ‘No, I’m grand, ta very much.’ Hot with panic at his own carelessness, he grabbed the wheelbarrow handles and shot up the plank at a cracking pace.

  The man followed him to stand on the deck of the narrow-boat, shaking a fist at him. ‘If you don’t shape yourself, you’ll be turned off, Matthew Pride. You’ve gone slack lately. You were late back after that so-called funeral you went to, t’other day.’

  Matthew stopped, startled by this accusation. ‘It was the funeral of my neighbour, I told you. And I wasn’t late at all.’ He heard the intake of breath of his fellow workers, sensed a frisson of sympathy and something very like fear emanating from them, and knew he’d made a mistake in arguing. It wasn’t wise to engage in a spat with the gaffer.

  ‘Are you calling me a liar? You were late back by two minutes, I timed you.’

  It was a lie, and everyone listening knew it. Matthew Pride had never been late for work in his life, funeral or no. It was all too clear management was starting a policy of discouraging some of the regulars as work grew harder to come by, and perhaps having heard about the meeting, Jim Taylor was anxious to make an example of anyone not toeing the line to prove what could happen if they didn’t all watch out. Gritting his teeth, knowing why he was being baited, Matthew wisely said no more, merely continued stolidly with the task of refilling the barrow.

  ‘We’ll have no shirkers getting paid money they don’t earn. We can do without lazy louts taking too much time off and idling instead of working.’

  Red in the face with the effort, yet Matthew held his tongue.

  ‘
Though you manage to find time to attend meetings and visit your lady friend, eh? Its common knowledge one of you Pride brothers is servicing a young widow woman.’ And Jim Taylor looked about him with a smirk on his face, as if he’d said something very clever.

  It was too much for Matthew. Though conscious of the way his workmates were silently willing him not to react, he felt driven to speak up by this terrible slur on his character, and on his lovely Polly. White to the lips, he said, ‘That’s not true. I’ve always been faithful to my wife, which is more than most can say.’

  ‘You’re not trying to tell me it’s that Holy Joe brother of yours who services the woman? He doesn’t look capable of such a manly pursuit.’ And the foreman laughed.

  Matthew flushed a darker red. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m not my brother’s keeper. You’ll have to ask him yourself. It’s nowt to do with anyone, least of all me, what Joshua does. And what if I do attend the odd meeting? It’s not a crime, is it? I give a good day’s work for my pay, and nor was I shirking just now. I was thinking, while I stopped to catch me breath for a minute.’ He was keenly aware he hadn’t defended Joshua quite as ably as perhaps he might, but knew it was too late to say more. And he had perhaps defended himself too well.

  ‘Thinking, eh? My word, we’ve got Einstein among us and didn’t know it.’ The foreman looked around him again as he chortled with laughter, expressing his scorn of the very idea that Matthew might have a brain in his head to think with. Some of the other men judiciously joined in the enjoyment of his little joke. ‘Well then, perhaps you should share these grand thoughts with us all. Give us the benefit of your wisdom like.’

  Matthew was furious with himself. He clenched the handles of the barrow so tightly his knuckles whitened. ‘It wasn’t anything important,’ he said, and set off down the plank, anxious to be done with this dangerous conversation and get on with his work.

  ‘Don’t you turn your back on me!’

  It happened so quickly that afterwards Matthew couldn’t work out what exactly had gone wrong. One minute he’d been wheeling the full barrow-load of coal down the planks, the irritated voice of Jim Taylor buzzing like a fly in his ear; the next the whole caboodle was at the bottom of the canal. Had he somehow rolled over the edge, or had he really seen a stick flicked under the wheel to catapult it into the water? One glance into the foreman’s sneering face suggested the latter, and his next words confirmed it.

  ‘That’s you finished, lad. Collect what’s owing to you and go. I’ll not have troublemakers on my shift. This is the last time you’ll get work on this wharf.’

  When Matthew told Joshua what had occurred as a result of his attending the meeting, and that Jim Taylor had accused him of bothering with women, his brother gave him a cold assessing glare, the barest hint of a frozen smile on his thin lips.

  ‘Are you trying to lay the blame on me, because you were idling and got yourself sacked?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, and I’ve told you, I wasn’t idling.’

  ‘What were you doing then?’

  Suffering torment after years of guilt, Matthew thought, yet not for the world would he admit as much to his brother. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Dear me. What will the little wife say about you losing your job?’

  ‘Damn you to hell!’

  ‘No, Matthew, I don’t think so. You’re the one who’ll end up in hell.’ Joshua pushed his face up close, nostrils flaring with a cruel resolve which did nothing to brighten those dead eyes. ‘And perhaps I’ll be the one to put you there.’

  Chapter Five

  Polly chose that very night to reveal her secret. As soon as supper was over, she went to fetch the dress. which she’d stored in a drawer wrapped in a piece of unbleached cotton. She carefully unfolded it and held it up for them all to see.

  Lucy was almost speechless with delight. ‘Oh, you’re the best mum in the world! Where did you get it? Did you make it yourself?’

  ‘Wasn’t I stitching away whenever the house was empty for five minutes?’

  Lucy hugged and kissed her mother, and even Big Flo, sitting by the fire with her feet up on the steel fender, smiled.

  ‘Well, go and put it on then. Let’s have a look at it.’

  Lucy turned and ran, bare feet skittering on the wooden stairs, giggling like the child she still was.

  In the silence which followed her departure, Benny said, ‘I’m not walking in no cissy procession.’

  For once it was his father who answered, telling him to hold his tongue and do as he was told. If his son considered further protest, he soon thought better of it as the atmosphere in the room dropped to freezing.

  Matt, seated on a wooden chair polishing his clogs, knew this was the moment he should admit to Polly that he’d lost his job, and that he might well have kept it if only he’d buttoned his lip a bit tighter. It was guilt over this which now held him silent. Instead he asked in clipped tones, ‘And how did you manage to find the brass to buy such fancy stuff?’

  Polly’s cheeks grew red but she answered in a firm voice, bracing herself for his disapproval, ‘I got another job, cleaning.’

  ‘Cleaning what?’

  She shrugged and moved to the table, flicking unseen crumbs away, wiping down a surface that had been wiped ten times already. ‘Whatever needs cleaning. Sure, and isn’t there plenty of that around here?’

  ‘And where did you do this cleaning?’

  She could hear the tightness in his voice, feel his anger. She glanced anxiously at her mother-in-law, waiting for Big Flo to wade in on the side of her favourite younger son, as she so often did. But for once the old woman held her tongue.

  ‘Well?’

  Polly sighed. ‘At the Peveril of the Peak near the Hippodrome, if you must know. ‘It’s a decent enough pub. Better than most, I dare say. The actors call in during the interval, and the money is good so . . .’ Her voice tailed away as she watched his face darken. Even so, it was her mother-in-law whose outrage was the first to surface.

  ‘You’ve been working in a pub! Where hard liquor is served and lewd actresses with Red John on their cheeks parade themselves before men? Was it that slut next door what put you up to it?’

  ‘Eileen isn’t a slut. She had a bad start in life, that’s all. Anyway, I wasn’t serving at the bar,’ Polly protested. ‘Only cleaning up every afternoon while it was closed for an hour or two. What can be wrong with that, may I ask?’

  She stood with arms folded as she faced her husband, but her eyes weren’t so much defiant as pleading with him to understand. ‘How could I buy our Lucy a frock to wear for the Whit Walks, or Benny the new coat and boots he needs, on what we have coming in? Would you have me children look like beggars?’

  Matthew was on his feet, anger making his face ashen. ‘So that’s what you think I achieve by grafting all hours on the canal? Making my children look like beggars.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean it how it sounds . . .’ But it was too late. Matt thrust his feet back into his shining clogs, clipped the clasp on each, then picking up his jacket strode from the house, clog irons sparking on the stone floor. Polly knew he’d be back later, after he’d walked off the worst of his temper, but it pained her to see how she’d hurt him.

  Big Flo chose this moment to put in her twopennorth. ‘Now see what you’ve done! You shouldn’t show your husband up, not a fine proud man like our Matthew. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘I only wanted to help.’

  ‘No brains, like all Irish.’

  Polly was so used to this accusation, she managed a tight smile. ‘But plenty of heart, Flo. You have to admit that.’

  The two women considered one another in silence. There’d been many times when her mother-in-law claimed to have given someone ‘a good talking to’ and Polly always felt great sympathy for the poor miscreant. But her silences could be worse. Matthew had once told her they could be so condemning as to bring his father, as strong a man as you could hope to meet in a long day’
s march, to his knees, begging forgiveness for whatever misdemeanour he’d supposedly committed. After that poor man’s death, from exhaustion some said, Flo practised her well-honed skills on other unfortunates. Now Polly found herself on the receiving end of that forbidding gaze and saw exactly what Matthew meant.

  Whether she would have found the courage to break the silence she was not to discover as a sound of clattering feet and excited laughter intervened. A breathless Lucy stood before them in her new frock.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘He had to go out. Don’t worry, he’ll see you on the day. Oh, and don’t you look fine and dandy? A proper beauty.’ As indeed she did. So lovely with her fair hair curling softly on her shoulders and her grey-blue eyes bright with a youthfulness and innocence that quite took Polly’s breath away. The dress was lovely, too, a blaze of startling white in the shabby room.

  ‘It was worth every stitch, to be sure,’ said Polly, swelling with pride at the wonder of her own daughter’s beauty. The hours of labour on her knees scrubbing and cleaning had also been worth it, no matter what Matthew might say.

  ‘Aye,’ Big Flo softly agreed, equally bowled over by the transformation from ragged urchin to something very like a fairy princess. ‘Happen you’re right there.’

  Matthew came home late that evening, quietly undressed and slid beneath the blankets. He told his wife that her job at the Peveril of the Peak was over. He’d called in and informed the proprietor she’d not be returning. ‘You can keep the job at the temperance tavern, but nothing more. You’ve enough to do coping with that and looking after us.’

  Polly was shocked. She had expected him to grumble, even rant and rave for a while, but never before had he attempted to override any decision she’d made, especially when they needed the money so badly. She attempted to say as much, but he wasn’t listening.