The Old House on the Corner

by Maureen Lee

  Anna and Ernie

  Chapter 8

  It was a long time, years later, when Ernest realized that the man was his dad. His name was Desmond Whitely and he was tall, slim, and very handsome, with straight, white-blond hair and dazzling blue eyes. He came to see Mam every Friday on his way home from work. Mam called him ‘Des’ and used to cry when he left. Des was better dressed than all the other men Ernest knew. He wore a suit and a collar and tie. The suit had frayed cuffs and his well-polished shoes were worn down at the heels, but he still looked dead posh. The first finger of his right hand had a dark blue stain that Mam said was ink.

  ‘He’s a bookkeeper,’ she said proudly.

  Des always came with a little gift for Ernest: a magic painting book, a drawing pad, a box of crayons, a wind-up toy. He would give Mam money before he said tara, always using exactly the same words, ‘I only wish it were more, Peggy, but I’ve got three more mouths to feed.’

  ‘It’s all right, Des,’ Mam would say. ‘I know you do your best.’

  Every now and then, Des would turn up with a paper bag that contained clothes for Ernest. ‘Our George has grown out of these, I thought they’d do for the little chap.’

  Ernest was always referred to as ‘the little chap’. When he was very small, Des would jiggle him up and down on his knee and say what a fine little chap he was. ‘Just like his dad,’ he would chuckle.

  ‘Just like his dad,’ Mam would echo.

  Mam and Ernest lived in a small upstairs room at the back of a terraced house in Chaucer Street, Bootle, only a stone’s throw from the docks and the River Mersey. It had a gas fire, a gas ring, and a gas mantle on the ceiling, and was so full of furniture there was hardly room to turn around – the little table they ate on had to be moved to open the door and there was only one chair, so Ernest always sat on the bed. The window overlooked a dirty backyard where the lavatory was. Mam and Ernie hardly ever used the lavvy, preferring the po that was kept under the bed. Every morning, very early, before the O’Briens who lived downstairs were up, Mam would empty the po in the lavvy and at the same time fetch a huge pan of water from the kitchen that would last all day – the O’Briens resented having to let out their back bedroom and weren’t very polite to their lodgers so Mam always made herself as invisible as possible.

  On the occasions when there was no money for the meter and it was cold as well as dark, they would cuddle up in bed together and Mam would tell Ernest stories about when she was young – not that she was all that old now. She’d had Ernest when she was only seventeen.

  She’d been born in a big house in Merton Road, only a mile away. Her mother had been the live-in cook and her father a seaman in the Merchant Navy who her mam had met one Christmas when she’d gone to the music hall.

  ‘They sat next to each other and it was love at first sight,’ Mam said. ‘His name was Charlie Burrows and they got married the next time his ship came in.’ Her mam had managed to stick it out as a cook until a second child was born when she’d felt obliged to leave and had rented the bottom half of a house in Clifford Street.

  ‘Me dad didn’t exactly earn a fortune, but we had enough to eat and he brought us home lovely things from places like Turkey and Persia.’

  ‘What sort of lovely things?’ Ernest would ask, although he already knew the answer.

  ‘Sweets and dried fruit, scarves and stuff.’

  Mam was eleven when the Great War started and twelve when her dad’s ship was sunk with the loss of all hands in a storm in the Black Sea.

  ‘Is the water really black, Mam?’

  ‘Yes, Ernie,’ Mam replied with conviction, ‘as black as night.’

  According to Mam, Ernest’s own dad had died in the final year of the Great War. Ernie wasn’t old enough to know this couldn’t be true. He was born in 1920 and the war had ended two years before. It wasn’t until he was about ten that the penny dropped – three pennies to be precise: he was too young for his father to have died in the war; if Mam had been married then her name would have changed from Burrows to something else; Ernest had the same coloured hair and eyes as Des Whitely, who was almost certainly his dad. Hadn’t Des remarked how alike they were on more than one occasion?

  None of this seemed the least bit strange to Ernest. He didn’t wonder why Mam never went to see her own mam and the five brothers and sisters who only lived a few streets away.

  While he wasn’t perfectly happy, he was happy enough. He loved his mam with all his heart and didn’t doubt that she loved him back. She never smacked him or raised her voice and they would roll their eyes at each other whenever the O’Briens downstairs had one of their frequent rows and the whole street would echo to their screams.

  ‘Some people!’ she would say exasperatedly, her head bent over a knitting pattern. Mam knitted for a living – or, as Des put it, she was a professional knitter, which sounded terribly grand. People would place their orders at Martha’s, the little wool shop in Marsh Lane, buying the wool and the pattern at the same time, and Mam would deliver the finished garment within a few days if she wasn’t busy and the pattern was a plain one. It would take longer if she already had several orders or the customer wanted a Fair Isle jumper making or something in a complicated stitch and her charges would go up accordingly.

  One of Ernest’s abiding memories would be of winter evenings, the curtains drawn, him lying on the bed drawing or reading, while his pretty mam sat in front of the gas fire, needles flashing, whatever she was knitting having grown magically longer every time he looked.

  Apart from various pennies dropping, another important thing happened when Ernest was ten. Mam got a job as a housekeeper and they left the room in Chaucer Street and went to live around the corner in Sea View Road where the houses were much bigger and Ernest had a room of his own.

  The house belonged to Cuthbert Burtonshaw, who had a chandler’s shop in Marsh Lane that sold not only hardware, but things like animal food and firewood, crockery, and dusty, secondhand books that were in boxes outside and hastily brought in if it started to rain. The shop was a little gold mine and recently Cuthbert had bought a second-hand car: a Model A Ford.

  Cuthbert was a widower approaching sixty. His face was very fat and red, contrasting oddly with the rest of him, as he was quite thin and his big head made him look top heavy. He had a bush of wiry grey hair, mutton chop whiskers, and a grown-up son and daughter, Vernon and Hilda, both married, who resented Ernest’s mam right from the start.

  ‘She’s not dusted the sideboard properly,’ Hilda said one Sunday when she came to visit her father – she found something to complain about every time she came. Ernest used to sit on the stairs and listen. ‘See, Dad, there’s dust underneath the clock.’

  ‘Peggy’s all right,’ Cuthbert replied good-naturedly – he was a good-natured man all round and Ernest liked him tremendously. ‘She looks after me fine and she’s a decent cook. That nipper of hers, Ernie, is dead bright. He can read and write better than I can.’

  ‘Our Dicky can read and write an’ all, Dad.’

  ‘Yes, but not as good as Ernie.’

  Mam cooked the meals, did the washing and shopping, and kept the house sufficiently clean and tidy to suit Cuthbert. He was a lonely man and liked her and Ernest to keep him company of an evening. They would listen to the wireless or Cuthbert would teach Ernest to play chess or they’d just read, although Mam couldn’t read very well and usually got on with the knitting that she still did in her spare time. Cuthbert was dead chuffed when she made him a Fair Isle pullover.

  It wasn’t long after the pullover that Ernest was woken up in the middle of the night by a shrill scream followed by, ‘Get off me! How dare you! I’ll be leaving this house first thing in the morning.’

  He jumped out of bed and raced into his mother’s room, where Cuthbert, wearing striped pyjamas buttoned to the neck, was standing at the foot of the bed almost in tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Peg,’ he stammered. ‘I thought … I thought … I
don’t know what I thought.’

  ‘Whatever you thought, you were dead wrong. Go away, Cuthbert. I’m going to start packing right now. Look, you’ve woken our Ernie. Come here, luv. Did you get a fright?’

  Eventually, Ernest went back to bed, satisfied that Mam was no longer in danger. He was never sure what happened between him falling asleep and waking up, but Mam never left the house in Sea View Road and a month later she and Cuthbert Burtonshaw got married, much to the ire of Vernon and Hilda who refused to come to the wedding.

  Within a year, Ernest’s half-sister, Gaynor, was born, and Charlie arrived eighteen months later. Cuthbert claimed to have never been so happy as he was with Mam and his new family – including Ernest, of course.

  Unfortunately, Cuthbert wasn’t to enjoy his happiness for long. Charlie was barely a year old when his father fell off the ladder in the shop while reaching for something off the top shelf and knocked himself out. Sadly, he never regained consciousness and died the following day.

  Mam was upset, naturally. She’d liked Cuthbert, although she’d never loved him. She feared for her children. ‘What’s going to happen to us now?’ she asked Ernest.

  Ernest had no idea. Life was full of ups and downs and people had to cope as best they could.

  Vernon and Hilda came back to the house after the funeral. ‘We’d like you out of here forthwith,’ Hilda said crisply.

  Mam looked at Ernest. ‘What does that mean, son?’

  ‘It means straight away.’ He’d never heard of the word ‘forthwith’ before, but got the meaning. He was struck by a brilliant idea. ‘Why can’t me mam just rent the house like Cuthbert did?’ he asked. They could afford it. In a few months, he was due to leave school and start work, the house was big enough to let out a couple of rooms, and Mam could start knitting fulltime again.

  ‘Because it’s a bought house, that’s why, and now it belongs to me and our Hilda,’ Vernon sneered. ‘We’re going to sell it, the shop an’ all.’

  When Ernest thought about this later, it hardly seemed fair. Surely Cuthbert’s wife, in other words Mam, had more right to the house than Vernon and Hilda? And, after all, Gaynor and Charlie were Cuthbert’s children too. It seemed to Ernest that he was urgently in need of advice. But where could he get it?

  He called in the police station, but the copper on duty told him to go and piss up his kilt and stop bothering him. He asked the teacher at school, but she seemed unable to understand what he was getting at. ‘It all sounds terribly complicated, boy. You need to see a solicitor.’

  Before seeking out one of these mysterious individuals, Ernest had one last try at the library where he was well known as a keen borrower of books. He explained the situation to the woman behind the counter where the books where stamped. She was very old, with neatly waved grey hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She listened attentively, then said to a young man, also behind the counter, ‘Will you take over for a while, Mr Bright? I have to see to something.’

  Ernest was taken into a little office and asked to explain everything again. When he’d finished, the woman asked if Mr Burtonshaw had left a Will. ‘It’s a document saying who would inherit things when he died,’ she explained in response to Ernest’s puzzled look.

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ he replied.

  ‘Well, in that case, the property automatically goes to his wife. His son and daughter are just trying it on. Tell your mother under no circumstances to move out. The house belongs to her. Is this the Mr Burtonshaw who ran the chandler’s in Marsh Lane?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ernest acknowledged.

  ‘Well, in that case, the shop belongs to your mother too.’

  For weeks, his mam kept walking around the house touching the walls, stroking the furniture. ‘Is it really ours?’ she would ask Ernest, seeking reassurance.

  ‘Yes, Mam. The shop an’ all.’ The shop was being temporarily looked after by Tom Quigley, an old mate of Cuthbert’s.

  ‘You’re dead clever, Ernie. Me, I’d have just walked out and let them two have it.’

  ‘Them two’ had been round a few times, raising hell when Mam, Ernest standing staunchly at her side, stubbornly refused to move, claiming the property was hers by rights. They hadn’t been for a while. Perhaps they’d been to see one of them solicitor people who’d told them they were flogging a dead horse.

  Thelma O’Neill sidled into the chandler’s, fluttered her long lashes, and said in a cloying voice, ‘Can I have a firelighter, please, Ernie?’

  Ernest put the firelighter on the counter, wrapped it in brown paper, and grunted, ‘That’ll be a halfpenny.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Thelma said in the same cloying tone. She came into the shop most days, asking for things like a single cup hook, a dishcloth, a couple of nails, stuff that never cost more than a penny. Ernest knew darn well she was after him – the firelighter was a pretty poor excuse, as it was midsummer and only someone who was stark raving mad would light a fire. ‘Are you going to the dance at the Town Hall on Saturday?’ she asked.

  ‘I might,’ Ernest said carelessly. He was eighteen, six-foot-two-inches tall, fair-haired, and a ‘catch’, according to Mam, because not only was he incredibly handsome, but he had his own shop and his own car – he’d learned to drive the Ford.

  Ernest quite enjoyed girls chasing after him, although wouldn’t have admitted it for the world. Pretty, buxom Thelma was just one of half a dozen who came into the chandlers for a variety of reasons. Molly Regan always came to ask the time – ‘You’re the only one I know who’s got a watch,’ she would brazenly claim – and Magdalene Eaves would enquire after things he didn’t stock, always pretending to be astonished when he said that no, he didn’t have any Kellogg’s cornflakes or that week’s Dandy.

  ‘Have you seen the picture on at the Palace?’ Thelma enquired pertly.

  ‘Haven’t been to the Palace in a while.’

  ‘It’s called Wings of the Navy with George Brent and Olivia de Havilland. I haven’t seen it meself,’ she hastily assured him, ‘but me friend said it’s dead good.’

  ‘I might go and see it if I can spare the time.’ If he took a girl, it would be Magdalene Eaves, who was small and dark and prettier than Thelma by a mile. Thelma was wasting her time and money buying things from his shop.

  A year later, Ernest and Magdalene were going steady and marriage was on the cards, but it was 1939 and such a major decision would have to be left until the war that was about to start was over and done with. Ernest had already received his call-up papers, had passed the medical with flying colours, and been assigned to the Royal Tank Regiment. No one doubted that the war would see Britain emerge victorious in six months’ time, possibly less.

  ‘We’ll get engaged when I come back,’ Ernest promised a tearful Magdalene when he bade her tara. His mam, Gaynor, and Charlie were even more tearful to see him go, although he felt sure they would manage without him – Desmond Whitely had come back into his mother’s life after the death of Cuthbert and spent a lot of time in the house in Sea View Road.

  Ernest was secretly looking forward to the war. Managing a chandler’s wasn’t exactly an exciting occupation for a young man of nineteen and he quite fancied being a soldier and having all sorts of thrilling adventures. In the years to come, once he and Magdalene were married and had children, the chances were he would never leave Bootle again.

  Six months later, there was no sign of the war being over and Ernest hadn’t used a weapon in anger or left the shores of the British Isles. It wasn’t until the spring of 1940 that his particular section of the Royal Tank Regiment set sail on the 14,000-mile journey around the Cape of Good Hope bound for North Africa and a place called Cyrenaica.

  Their first battle against the Italians was a doddle: 130,000 of the enemy were taken prisoner, along with most of their guns and 400 tanks. As Ernest’s best mate, Ronnie Beale, put it colourfully, ‘We tore them bastards up for arse paper.’

  Within a few months, Ernest was perfectly attuned to deser
t life. He felt almost as if he’d been born for it. The scorching heat didn’t bother him. Despite his fair colouring, his tough skin soaked up the sun, turning it a golden bronze. He enjoyed living under canvas, knowing that everything could be moved at the drop of a hat to another site, that it was only temporary. He liked the feel of the silky sand undulating beneath his bare feet. There was something strangely liberating about being able to see from one flat horizon to the other, the sky just acres of blue and not a single cloud in sight, the sun a brilliant burning ball of fire.

  Ronnie Beale wasn’t so cockily triumphant when General Rommel appeared on the scene at the head of the mighty German Army and the British were driven back until all of Cyrenaica was in enemy hands. Over the next two years, thousands of men were killed in action as the battle raged back and forth, the British and their Allies advancing one minute, the Germans forcing them back and predominantly in control, until on 23 October 1942, under the leadership of General Montgomery, British forces attacked at El Alamein and Rommel was routed.

  Ernest, an old hand by now, felt lucky to be alive, having lost quite a few of his mates in the fighting, Ronnie Beale among them. By now, he had forsaken tanks for a staff car and become driver to Colonel Turlough McBride. The colonel had taken a shine to him when the company had been holed up in Tobruk. One evening, a sergeant had stuck his head into the tent where the lower ranks were eating and hollered, ‘Can any bugger here play chess?’ Ernest had put up his hand and been taken to the colonel’s tent where he was sitting staring miserably at a chessboard, the black and white figures standing idly at each side as if raring to have a go at each other.

  What the colonel liked about him, he said rather stiffly after losing the first two games – Cuthbert had been a good teacher – was that Ernest, a mere private, hadn’t felt obliged to let his superior officer win.

  ‘Can you drive, Burrows?’ he asked after losing another two games.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In that case, from now on, you can drive me. It’ll make a change to have someone to talk to who isn’t as servile as hell.’