by Anne Bennett
The child had taken to her, that was clear enough, for she was clinging tight to Maeve’s hand as if she’d never let it go. People told you children had a sixth sense on such matters. And it wasn’t as if there was a queue of people waiting to take care of Angela, anyway.
‘I might be in the army for some time yet,’ Matthew said. ‘I’m part of the army of occupation in Berlin. Will that bother you?’
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘I’ll pay for her keep.’
Maeve looked at the man with the same sombre brown eyes as his daughter and said, ‘I wish I could say I’ll look after her gladly and without payment, but I’m not in a position to do that, so I’m grateful to you. But it’s not why I’m offering to do it.’
‘I know that,’ Matthew said shortly and added, ‘will you take her now?’
Maeve was anxious to get the child out of the house and clean her up. ‘No time like the present,’ she said. ‘If you could get her shoes and socks and coat and pack a few wee things for her, we could be back in my house in time for dinner.’
And when Matthew Bradshaw stepped into Maeve’s house a little later with Maeve and Angela, the table was set for a meal. Maeve’s children clustered together in the room and a young girl, who looked like a younger version of Maeve, stood at the stove.
The home, Matthew saw, was lacking in many creature comforts, but he felt the warmth of the family wash over him and he knew Maeve Hogan was a remarkable woman. He’d been in the depths of despair, not knowing what way to turn and she’d offered him a solution. He’d never forget it.
The children stared at the dirty little girl holding hands with their mother. ‘This is Angela,’ Maeve said briskly. ‘She’s going to stay with us for a wee while.’ And then while her children still stood speechless she chided, ‘Come away out of that. Don’t be staring at the poor wee thing. Come and say hello to her. Grace, lay out another couple of plates.’
Mary Ann didn’t follow the example of her brother and sister and speak to the little girl, but she smiled at her. She was just turned two years old herself and she liked the look of Angela, though she was the dirtiest little girl that she’d ever seen.
‘And say hello to Mr Bradshaw,’ Maeve went on. ‘He’s Angela’s daddy, but he has to go back to the army.’ The children chorused their greeting and were bursting with questions, but Maeve forestalled them until they were all sitting down to eat.
Much later, Matthew went back to his in-laws’ house happier than he’d been for a long time. He’d enjoyed his time at the Hogans’ table and the company of the lively chattering children.
And before he’d left, Maeve had bathed Angela in a tin bath pulled before the fire filled with pans of water heated on the gas cooker. Matthew could hardly believe the transformation. Days and days of accumulated muck had been scrubbed from Angela’s body and kneaded from her scalp. She emerged pink and rosy-cheeked, and when she was dressed in an old nightie of Mary Ann’s Maeve rubbed her hair till the excess water was off and then combed it through, teasing out the tangles as she went.
She looked angelic and there were tears in Matthew’s eyes when he picked her up to say goodbye. But Maeve had seen the child squirm uncomfortably and realised Angela didn’t know her father and hoped soon the man would be able to get to know his daughter properly.
Not everyone was pleased with Maeve’s decision to look after Angela Bradshaw. Elsie said if she’d known what Maeve was about to do, she’d never have mentioned it in the first place. ‘Haven’t you enough on your plate already, girl?’
‘Maybe I have, Elsie, but I couldn’t leave her to be taken into care. It was just seeing her there, so dirty, but worse than that, so . . . oh, I don’t know, so uncared for, unloved. It broke me up, Elsie.’
‘So you upped and brought her home,’ Elsie remarked drily.
‘Yes I did,’ Maeve said defiantly, ‘and I don’t care what you say, it was the right thing to do.’
She wrote the same in a letter to her mother. Annie was concerned that Maeve would wear herself out, bringing up another child as well as her own. Maeve wrote back and assured her that one more child made little difference and that Mary Ann was easier to manage now that she had a playmate. She added that the money Matthew Bradshaw gave for little Angela’s keep was useful.
Kevin just said it was only what he would have expected from his mother, and the rest of the neighbours, according to local gossip, seemed to think she was some sort of saint, Elsie told her.
If they only knew, Maeve thought, but she just gave a wry smile to Elsie and said, ‘I’m anything but a saint, Elsie. I’m just trying to get along, like anyone else.’
TWENTY-ONE
Nineteen forty-seven began with blustery winds and icy cold, but no one could have guessed that they were in for the worst winter in living memory. Postwar Britain was an austere place, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and the rations that people had struggled with for years were tightened still further while eggs and all meat were in short supply and considered luxury items. The Government advised the nation to have two meat-free days a week.
‘We’re one up on them already,’ Elsie said. ‘We’ve not been eating meat on Fridays for ever.’
‘I don’t know that we’re going to have that much choice in it either,’ Maeve said. ‘If the stuff’s not in the shop, then you can’t buy it, even if you have the money and the coupons.’
And Maeve spoke the truth: many people were wearied and depressed by further restrictions when it was almost two years since the war had ended. It showed in the unrest and disillusionment in the labour market.
Added to that, the people had been making do and mending for years. Most of their clothes were shabby and, more often than not, threadbare. Certainly the undernourished, demoralised people in their inadequate clothes were no match for temperatures that fell to –16° Fahrenheit. Factories, offices and schools were forced to close, due to the fact they had no coal to heat the places and the only light many had were from candles. To add to the general misery, most of the transport workers went on strike, making it well nigh impossible for workers to get to their place of work, even if they were so inclined.
Billowing, relentless snow fell day after day, whipped by gusting winds into drifts big enough to cover a man. By night the snow froze, making the roads and pavement surfaces like sheets of glass, which were then covered by even more snow. Anyone who ventured out was in constant danger of being swept into a drift or slipping on the icy pavements and breaking a limb.
Pipes burst all over the city, roads were impassable, and those trains that tried to run were either delayed or cancelled altogether. The foodstuffs weren’t getting through to the shops, and people had to queue for hours and be in receipt of a rent book to receive even a meagre share of coal. Everyone in the slum dwellings of the city was cold. There was never enough coal to heat the draughty houses sufficiently, the wind seeped under doors and round ill-fitting window frames, and no matter how many layers of clothes people wore, most were constantly chilled to the marrow.
It was a dismal winter for paperboys and -girls at that time, and Kevin told his mother he was exhausted by the time he got back to the shop.
‘It takes me hours, Mammy, the snow is so deep,’ he said. ‘I’m wet to the skin wading through it. Mind you, the papers are often delivered to the shop late to start with, and some days they don’t come at all. And,’ he added with a grin, ‘it’s a good job I’m not expected to turn up at school after the round. It would be the strap for me every day for lateness.’
Maeve smiled with him and tried to be grateful to Gwen Moss, who, Kevin told her, had dry clothes ready for him to change into, with a hot breakfast to set him up for the day. She tried not to resent the woman who did these tasks. What did she want, she asked herself angrily, that Kevin would stay in his wet clothes and go hungry all morning? What was the matter with her and why should she care who did these things for her son as long as they were done? Hadn’t she
enough already to feed and try to keep warm?
She gave herself a mental shake and firmly told herself not to wallow in self-pity. She reminded herself she could have had him home every night, for he’d offered as soon as he learnt of his father’s death.
And Maeve had wanted him to return more than anything else in the world, but then she’d had a sudden flash of his bedroom at the Mosses’ that she’d been taken to see one Friday when she’d gone to collect the five shillings Kevin had to hand over for Brendan every week. She’d stood stunned, and gazed round the room. Kevin’s wooden bed stood against the wall and was covered with soft blankets, a quilted eiderdown and a peach-coloured candlewick bedspread, with a wooden wardrobe at the foot. Beside the bed was a small table, housing a bedside lamp enabling him to read in bed. He even had his own crystal set! His very own wireless! Luxury indeed. There was lino on the floor, but a fluffy blue carpet almost covered it. There was a chest of drawers against the other wall with a desk beside it, and a bookcase above it held a fair few books that Kevin had either bought or acquired. Perhaps from a selection Stanley had.
The furniture all matched, and Maeve knew there would be no chamber pot under her son’s bed for, next to the kitchen, just along the passage, was a lavatory with a bathroom beside it. Maeve had once visited the bathroom to wash her hands and had seen the bath and washbasin, both with hot and cold taps above them. There was scented soap and thick soft towels to dry your hands on. She thought of her own stark cold tap over the sink, with a hard cake of carbolic soap and a bit of hessian they used in place of a towel.
How could she ask Kevin to leave that luxury and return to his dingy back-to-back home, sharing a bed with his wee brother and the attic with all of them? There was only an orange box for his clothes and the room was lit by a flickering candle, for there were no gas mantles in the attic. He’d once mentioned casually that he sometimes had a bath three times a week. Would he still do so if he had to first make sure everyone was in bed before pulling the bath down from the hook, and filling it with pans of hot water, and then of cold, and emptying it the same way, or go stealing through the streets in the evenings after a day at work, to the public baths, clutching a bar of soap and hard towel and risk catching pneumonia coming home?
No, Kevin was better off where he was and she’d told him so. He’d tried hard to hide his relief, but wasn’t entirely successful and, at the time, Maeve had been hurt by his reaction.
Still, that was water under the bridge now, and Maeve knew Kevin’s predicament would have been worse that winter if he’d had to walk back and forth to Latimer Street. She worried about him enough as it was. She was grateful that she had enough money to buy food for the weans, even if it was only bread or potatoes. It filled them up and she knew from experience you felt the cold more if you were hungry as well.
Eventually, the unrelenting cold brought on a wave of illness, first to the very young and the very old. All the children went down with flu, the same time that Alf developed severe bronchitis. Maeve helped nurse Alf, for he was very ill indeed. It was touch and go with him for a time, and Maeve and Elsie had been run off their feet. Alf took so long to recover he decided to retire from work. He’d turned sixty-five the previous year and so was of an age, but Elsie complained she didn’t know how she’d cope with him under her feet all day long.
Then Angela’s grandfather died, closely followed by Lily Hogan. Maeve attended both funerals and stood shivering in the piercing wind that was shrieking across the graveyard, knee deep in snow. She tried to feel some sorrow at Lily’s passing, but she couldn’t. They’d never got on, and she couldn’t pretend now that they had, just because she was dead.
And yet she wondered if Lily had ever had a day of true happiness in the whole of her life. Married to a bullying, domineering husband, she’d reared sons who’d gone on to bully their wives, and cowed daughters frightened of their own shadow. Not much of a testament to a successful life, Maeve thought as she’d watched the coffin being lowered into the grave.
Grace turned fourteen on 9 February 1947 and she was mightily glad that her birthday would fall before the government plan to raise the school leaving age to fifteen came into effect on 1 April 1947. She was as desperate to officially leave as her two friends, Ruby Willis and Bernadette Cleary, not that any of them had actually been able to go to school much that dreadful winter. Although sometimes Grace would have actually preferred school to being confined in that small house day after day.
For Grace’s friends, leaving school spelled freedom and money in their pockets for the first time. Neither of them wanted it postponed for another year and they were forever going on about it. Grace wished they’d shut up about all the money they’d soon be earning because, although she had a job to go to, she knew she’d still have very little left in her own pocket to spend.
‘I’m going to go to the cinema every night once I start work,’ Ruby said one day.
‘I’m not, not every night,’ Bernadette put in. ‘I want to go dancing too. That’s where you meet the boys.’
Grace was shocked enough to reply, ‘Urgh, you’re disgusting, the pair of you!’
‘What’s up with you, Holy Hannah?’ Ruby taunted. ‘We’re just being honest.’
‘Anyroad, how’re you going to spend your dosh?’ Bernadette asked.
‘I won’t have any left to spend,’ Grace snapped. ‘What I earn will have to go to my mother.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yes, all of it.’ That wasn’t strictly true. She knew Maeve wouldn’t take all her money but she was aware that, even now, there was little to spare in the house. She’d managed to get a job easily enough in a draper’s shop where Kevin had seen the coat he’d been determined to buy for his mother. Going in to pay it off each week, he’d got talking to the girl behind the counter and when he heard that she was leaving to get married in March, he put a word in for his sister, knowing she’d be looking for a job soon. He had said nothing until he brought the coat home, fully paid for, in November, and gave it to his mother. Grace knew her mother had been more than glad of it that winter.
She knew she would never forget the look on her mother’s face, when she opened up the box that the shop had packed the coat in. She had wished she could have afforded to buy her something like that too.
However, she knew that would be a long time coming, though she went round to see the owner of the draper’s shop, a Miss Overley, as soon as the weather allowed her to. The interview went well and Grace was to begin in the shop the week after she left school. Miss Overley told her that would give her two weeks with the older girl before she left – enough time for her to learn the job – but her wages would be just ten shillings and sixpence. ‘Let’s see how you shape up,’ the prim Miss Overley said.
Grace was nervous of the woman at first. She was extremely thin, especially in the face, with the skin drawn tight across her hollowed cheeks and so wrinkled that deposits of face powder ran along the deep ridges on her face by the end of the day. Her lips were thin too, her nose slightly beaked and her black hair, liberally streaked with grey, was piled on top of her head. Her green eyes darted constantly around the shop missing nothing and, though she spoke very correctly, Grace knew she could screech at her well enough if she did anything wrong.
But then Grace reckoned a job was a job and she knew her mother preferred her there rather than see her in a factory. She seemed to think it was a step up for her, and Grace didn’t mind. But, knowing her mother was losing five shillings family allowance once she was fourteen, she insisted Maeve take nine and six from her each week. Maeve protested she’d have nothing left, but Grace told her she wanted nothing.
Eventually the last day of school came and, for once, it was a day when the girls were able to get there through the snow. They said goodbye to their teachers, thankfully turned their back on their schooldays and left arm in arm, laughing uproariously at nothing at all.
Just a couple of weeks after Grace began work, Mat
thew Bradshaw was demobbed. He returned home with nowhere to live, for the house had been let to someone else. He couldn’t stay at Maeve’s while he searched for a suitable place for himself and Angela – that would have been considered highly improper – and so for a while he lodged with a mate. All through his time serving in Berlin he’d looked forward to the day when he would take his small daughter to live with him.
He’d taken no account of the scarcity of housing in Birmingham at that time. Maeve was sympathetic towards him, but also practical. ‘Even if you were able to find a suitable place,’ she said, ‘you’d still have to have Angela minded during the day while you’re at work. Let her stay with me for a bit and you get yourself sorted out with something near at hand so you can see something of her. And,’ she added, ‘while you’re about it, put your name down for one of those prefabs. They’re going up all over the place and have two bedrooms, bathroom, and hot and cold running water. Little palaces, so I’ve heard, and just right for the two of you.’
‘I had thought to buy,’ Matthew said. ‘I have the gratuity from the army and I’ve saved a fair bit too. Renting would be like dead money, wouldn’t it?’
‘Maybe,’ Maeve said. ‘But I think houses to buy will be just as hard to find as those to rent. At least if you get offered a prefab, it will mean you and Angela can be together and it will give you a chance to look round.’
Matthew knew what Maeve suggested made sense and, as there was no one he’d prefer to have looking after his daughter than Maeve Hogan, he let Angela stay with her, put his name down for a prefab and, for the short term, looked for accommodation for himself near to Latimer Street.
He found a room in a house just off the Balsall Heath Road – a bare and very basic room. It was scarcely adequate for him and wholly unsuitable for a small child. He doubted anyway he’d convince Angela to come and live with him there because, despite Maeve’s valiant efforts to remind Angela she had a father who, when he returned she would live with, she took not the slightest notice. She regarded Maeve as her mother and even called her Mammy like the others did, ignoring Maeve’s pleas to call her Auntie Maeve.
