Polly's Pride

by Freda Lightfoot

  Polly and Charlie were married by a delighted Father Donevan just a few weeks later. Not only had he the pleasure of welcoming Polly Pride and her children back into the Faith, but a new member as well. Charlie had willingly attended classes every Thursday evening with the old priest in order to make this change, which he saw as a new beginning for himself. Polly was also delighted to be at last returning to her Church, which felt like coming home in a way. Strangely, in the end, it seemed Joshua’s quarrel with her had not been about religion at all, but a bitter feud of his own making.

  She lit a candle in memory of Matthew, as she would do every year at the anniversary of his death.

  She and Matthew had been happy until poverty and his pride had got in the way. But then she was not without the sin of pride herself. Nevertheless, they would have overcome their difficulties, in time, if Joshua’s obsession hadn’t twisted Matt’s mind against her. But whatever had happened in the past could not be altered, simply endured. Now it was time to move on and face a new future. She’d been given a second chance to love and be loved by another good man. Oh, indeed, she was a lucky woman.

  As she walked down the aisle on the arm of the man she loved, Polly looked upon her family with pride and joy.

  There was Benny, seated beside Tom Shackleton in the front pew, looking quite the young man in a new grey suit, and giving her a wink as she passed by. He would be coming into the business full-time at Christmas, or so he’d informed her. Polly had welcomed the idea, for wasn’t he a great asset? Charlie too had plans for a big carpet store in the centre of the city, given a year or two’s good trading.

  She could see Big Flo grinning from ear to ear, refusing only to kneel along with the rest of the congregation as she preferred to sit with her back as ramrod straight as her morals, so that she could talk to her God face to face.

  Polly knew that her mother-in-law was not quite the woman she’d once been. A part of her robustness had gone, perhaps for ever. Her large frame seemed to have shrunk a little, although not for a moment did she complain. Watching her only remaining son struggle with those scalding burns after that terrible day in the warehouse should have filled her with compassion. But she’d shown no sign of such an emotion.

  When Joshua had recovered sufficiently to leave hospital, Big Flo had looked at the scars on his face and told him that they would forever be a warning to him that he had no understanding of the words love or compassion.

  She’d gone to see him off when Joshua had left on a cheap passage to Canada, Polly by her side at the dock on the Manchester Ship Canal, as support. But not a single tear had touched her mother-in-law’s cheek, nor had she waved, or wished him well as she’d stood, hands folded, spine rigid. She’d watched the ship carry her last son away, knowing she would probably never see him again, and that he was the cause of her losing her second son.

  ‘You still have us,’ Polly had told her.

  ‘Aye, lass, I know. I take great comfort from my two grandchildren, and my brave daughter-in-law.’

  They’d smiled at each other then, and walked home together arm in arm.

  ‘Are you happy, Mrs Stockton?’ whispered a voice in her ear.

  ‘How could I not be?’ Polly said, sighing.

  They stepped outside of the church to be met by a sunburst of brilliant light and smiling faces, everyone laughing and throwing rose petals and confetti. A cameraman with a tripod called instructions for the bride to look his way. But turning her head in quite the opposite direction, Polly sought out Lucy, who looked enchanting in a soft blue satin bridesmaid’s dress that exactly matched her eyes.

  ‘Catch. You next!’ she cried, and tossed her wedding bouquet of roses and lily-of-the-valley. But she was too happily engrossed being kissed by the groom to check whether her daughter actually caught it.

  Read on for an extract of Polly’s War – the next book in Polly’s Journey

  Chapter One

  1945

  Polly Pride stared at her boss open mouthed. ‘Laying me off? I’m thinking that’s a mean-minded, low-spirited thing to be doing to a body, particularly since you know I’m the family bread winner just now.’

  ‘Your Charlie no better then?’ Jack Lawson had the grace to look uncomfortable, as well he might faced with the blistering power of Irish temper which now confronted him.

  Standing with her fists screwed into her still slim waist, Polly Pride was an awesome sight even in a crossover pinny. She was still a handsome woman, her dark shining hair with its glimmer of red catching the light as she shook her head at him, greeny-grey eyes flashing dangerously. The fact that she was still known as Polly Pride for all she’d been wed to Charlie Stockton, her second husband, for near a decade spoke volumes. ‘Indeed you know full well he’s been off work these three weeks past. So how are we to manage without a wage coming in, will ye tell me that?’

  Lawson’s solemn face did not soften the slightest degree. ‘Same as everyone else Poll. By doing the best you can. Anyroad, your Benny’ll be home from the front soon, and your Lucy’s chap. That’s why we have to let all you women go, to make way for our boys.’ He raised his voice a little, glancing about him as if appealing to their compassion but more than one woman in the workshop shook a clenched fist and told him where he could stick the cards he was giving them all.

  ‘Put ‘em where the sun don’t shine,’ yelled one, not known for her finesse.

  ‘Aye, and then take a long jump off th’end of Irwell Street Bridge.’

  Many of the women no longer had husbands, brothers or fathers who could come home, and those men who had survived in one piece weren’t necessarily coming home to them. Jack Lawson turned away, almost at a run, so eager was he to evade their accusations and sharp wit. The workers in this warehouse close by Potato Wharf weren’t the only ones to get the chop, not by a long chalk. The building had served as a store for many things during the long war, cotton, timber, packing cases, even food. Now it was returning to its original purpose - a print works. There’d be no employment then for women like these.

  The waters of the canal basin looked as black as ever, thick with oil and cluttered with rubbish, seeming to echo the women’s dour mood as Polly and her friends made their way home at the end of their morning shift. For all they’d dreamed of this day for years, happily planned the celebrations for weeks, yet there was precious little laughter as they walked up Medlock Street and past Liverpool Road Goods Station, the taste of coal dust in their mouths and the booming and shunting of trains loud in their ears so they had to raise their voices to shout to each other.

  It’d been the most exciting summer anyone could remember. They’d already enjoyed VE Day with jubilant street parties as well as the usual May Day Parades with Shire horses bedecked in ribbons and rosettes and the coronations of the various district May Queens. Now, with the surrender of Japan, hostilities really were at an end and red, white and blue bunting flapped joyously in the breeze, criss-crossing every street the women passed through, from bedroom windows more accustomed to blackout curtains during the long days of war. A Union Jack painted on a back yard wall, the hammer and sickle flying side by side with the stars and stripes; bright, brave flags heralding a day the likes of which had never before been seen, not even in Manchester where they knew how to have a good laugh. They’d soldiered on and ‘made do’ for nigh on six years, and they were only too ready for a good knees-up.

  Bright eyed children in threadbare jerseys with holes in the sleeves. Boys in sleeveless pullovers and trousers they would ‘grow into’ hung on elastic braces, sparking their clogs on the setts as they kicked a ball about; girls skipping in skimpy cotton frocks, dirty bare feet thrust into scuffed sandals, not a hair ribbon among them to hold back shining bobbed hair recently washed and trimmed for the occasion but their singsong voices rang out with youthful joy and a certainty in the future, one their mothers were now beginning to fear.

  ‘Ta ra,’ the women called as one by one they peeled off and went home to mak
e dinner for their children, trying not to worry about what the next week, the next day might bring.

  By the time the remaining stragglers turned the corner into Pansy Street, a long string of a street which jostled with many another around the canal basin, they’d almost convinced themselves that they were doing a public service by allowing themselves to be sacked. Even so there was much bitter talk about how eager the bosses had been to take them on at the start of hostilities when men were scarce on the ground.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ Maisie Wright said, as she and Polly broke their linked arms for a moment to dodge a young lad wheeling a barrow load of coal to one of the barges moored on the canal. ‘You can start up your precious carpet business again. It’s the likes of me who are up the Swanee. What am I supposed to do? I’m too old to go on the streets. I’d have to pay them to take me on,’ she joked.

  ‘Nay lass, you do yourself a disservice, Maggie Stubbs told her. ‘It’s experience what counts every time,’ and chuckling at her own drollness, was already yelling to her brood to ‘get t’kettle on’ even as she strode in through her own open front door.

  Perhaps, Polly thought, ready as always to look on the bright side, Maisie was right. Could this be an omen? Someone up above giving her a kick up the backside and telling her to do something different with her life. ‘Tis mebbe true,’ she agreed. ‘I could take over the carrier’s warehouse and fill it with carpets, so I could.’

  ‘Aye, that’d be grand,’ Maisie agreed, happy to go along with the fantasy. ‘You could have the swanky manager’s office and I’d be foreman and have the pleasure of giving po-faced Jack Lawson the boot. Both women enjoyed a good laugh at the prospect, but the chuckles soon faded as they neared their own doorsteps.

  ‘Well, me darlin’, the war might be over, but we still have a fight on our hands,’ Polly said, ‘if only to earn a decent living. But then we’re expert at looking after ourselves, so we are.’

  Even so as she gently closed her own front door behind her, some of the shine and laughter slipped from her face and a flicker of pain and worry seeped through.

  In no time at all it seemed, the women were back on their doorsteps doing a bit of ‘camping’, revelling in the undercurrent of buzzing excitement, arms folded over their pinnies, as excited as the children at the prospect of the street party that afternoon to celebrate VJ Day. Others sat on their window sills, the sash windows pulled down to their knees to hold them secure while they vigorously polished already gleaming glass. Today was a day when spit and polish was important, for a husband, son or father could at any minute walk in.

  At the far end of Pansy street, a young woman knelt scrubbing a doorstep, her neat figure moving with the rhythm of her effort, nose pert and mouth tight with concentration. A lock of soft brown hair fell across her brow and Lucy Shackleton pushed it away with a tired hand then sat back on her heels to survey the length of the street.

  ‘Have you not finished yon steps yet? You want to shape yourself. I haven’t got all day.’

  Lucy didn’t even need to glance up to picture the pale oval face and blackcurrant eyes watching her through the window. It was a favourite occupation of Minnie Hopkins, owner of this fine double doorstep which, as she was so often at pains to remind her, should be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you’d a mind. Lucy tried to imagine the woman pulling up her rocking chair, which she rarely left, to eat her pie and pickles off the whitened steps. It almost made her laugh out loud but Lucy smothered the eruption of giggles with the flat of her hand just in time.

  ‘Rightio, Mrs Hopkins. I’ve nearly done, then I’ll get you a nice cuppa,’ she called, as cheerfully as she could, then slid the donkey-stone with a final flourish along the edges of each step, to add an artistic touch.

  ‘You said that an hour back.’

  Lucy did not respond, merely surveyed the two steps she’d just spent the best part of an hour cleaning. She’d scrubbed them with a solution of washing soda so strong her hands were red raw, then whitened them with a donkey-stone got from the rag-and-bone man. They must be the cleanest steps in all of Pansy street and that was saying something. But then nobody in this part of Castlefield would be seen dead with a dirty doorstep, despite all the muck dropped onto them from the movement of coal from barge to warehouse and back again, not to mention factory chimneys belching smoke in this city.

  Manchester’s chief claim to fame was that although its rows of back-to-back houses might be black, its cotton was the whitest and finest in the north, if not the world; it’s men the most inventive and skilful, and its women the hardest working and most good humoured. Give or take one or two notable exceptions, Lucy thought as she rubbed at an itch and deposited a smear of dirt on one round pink cheek.

  ‘I suppose you’re pushing to get off to that party. I’ll have no slacking here, nor any work skimped.’

  Biting her lip Lucy managed to hold her silence, which was ever the best armour against Minnie Hopkin’s razor sharp tongue. She happily began wringing out her cloth and swilling the dirty water down the gutter. Today she didn’t care about an old woman who picked a fight for no good reason. Today aprons and shawls had been abandoned in favour of summer frocks and flower-decked hats in honour of the occasion. Eager hands spread margarine and potted meat on thick slices of bread, set out cakes, decanted jellies and wobbly pink blancmanges with a recklessness that defied the self-sacrifice it had taken to save sufficient coupons to purchase such treats. There was laughter in the air, a voice singing Take me back to dear old Blighty, and Lucy could almost smell the very real scent of freedom along with the tar bubbles and sunshine.

  Today she refused to fret about the fact she was bone weary yet had to do every job twice over in this house, though she’d no complaints from the other houses in which she worked as a cleaner in order to earn an honest living to feed her two children. What did it matter if here, at number 179, she was considered to be the lowest of the low, hardly fit to polish the mahogany dresser that took up the whole of one wall in the front parlour. She’d cheerfully dusted the many ornaments, the glass lamps with their crystal droplets around the rim, the gloomy pictures, mainly of highland cattle or young girls in smock dresses without complaint for today was a special day. Today was the end of the war.

  Lucy lifted her gaze to examine the clear blue sky, cherishing the warmth of sun on her face and the blissful surge of happiness that swelled in her heart for she knew that soon, very soon, her Tom would be home.

  She’d worried about him quite a lot lately, what with there being no word for a while - a long while actually. But that’d happened before, she told herself. She’d hear nothing for months then got a bunch of letters all at once. War seemed to be funny that way. Oh, but she would welcome him home, just see if she didn’t.

  The women were covering the food with cloths now, keeping a weather eye out for marauders and enjoying a brew of tea and a chin-wag before facing the onslaught of the afternoon’s festivities. Down at the corner shop, Lucy could see Gladys Benson leaning over her counter to have a natter with her friend Lily Gantry. No doubt swapping tales about the failings and misdemeanours of their respective husbands, both of whom had already returned from the war to less than a jubilant welcome from their wives.

  In her mind’s eye she could see Tom striding up the street, kit-bag resting on his broad shoulder, a wide grin on his handsome face, fair hair shining. He’d swing Sarah Jane up into his arms and give her a big smacking kiss. Young Sean would be next. Then he’d look teasingly into Lucy’s eyes, give her a big wink and she’d know that her man was home at last and that he still wanted her. Later, when the children were tucked up in bed, perhaps hugging presents from a father they’d hardly ever set eyes on before, Lucy would slip into bed with this handsome stranger who was her own husband and they’d start to get to know each other all over again.

  If she was honest Lucy was a bit nervous about this part of her fantasy. Would he still fancy her? Would she still fancy him? She w
asn’t the giddy young girl she’d been when he went away. She’d become a responsible mother to her two children, though Polly would mind them sometimes so she could enjoy a bit of fun, like going to a dance or the Gaumont with her pals, shouting ‘Put a Penny in’ at the projectionist whenever the film broke down which was a frequent occurrence.

  She’d held down several different jobs during the long war, had money in her purse, run her own life exactly as she pleased. Lucy knew that she’d changed. Perhaps Tom had too. He’d once seemed so strong, so forceful, sweeping her off her feet and arranging for them to be married in a hurry at the local registry office, for all Tom had known that Lucy had longed for a white wedding in the Catholic Church. They’d been hard up and far too young, had two children far too quickly, each following one of Tom’s leaves home. Only this time he would be home for good. Filled suddenly with a mixture of apprehension and longing, she didn’t at first hear the slam of the door behind her.

  ‘What the hangment are you up to, dilly-dallying in the gutter? I don’t pay you for day dreaming.’ Startled by the sound of the sharp voice so close to her ear, Lucy dropped the bucket, which rolled noisily away.

  Minnie Hopkins stood arms akimbo, brows beetled, small mouth sucked into empty gums. Her false teeth, kept largely for best, would be reposing in a glass on the bamboo table by her high brass bedstead. She’d slip them in later, when she deigned to put in an appearance at the street party, for all she’d stick chiefly to the jellies. In honour of the occasion she was wearing her best brown chenille frock with a marquisette clasp at the vee of the collar. Above this was tucked a lace front, that hid the scrawny neck as high as the chin. She looked like a miniature Victorian schoolmistress, holding a broom handle in lieu of a cane. Minnie Hopkins was famous for her battles with her yard brush. It was said that she’d chased away every likely suitor with it, which was why at well into her sixties, she was still unwed.