There is a Season

by There is a Season (retail) (epu

  Lawrie and Sally looked at each other and Lawrie said, ‘I get your point, Sam, and you know I believe that children should look after their parents if they’re in need, but me and Mam have always managed all right for money.’

  He caught an ironic glance from Sally and chuckled. ‘I’d better amend that. Your mam has always managed all right for money. I’m hopeless with it as you well know, Mary.’

  ‘So will you take it, please, Dada?’ she coaxed him, and Sam put his hand on Sally’s.

  ‘Will you, Mrs Ward?’ he asked. She looked at Lawrie and gave a slight nod.

  He said cheerfully, ‘Yes, we will, and thanks very much. I never heard of anyone pleading to give money away before.’

  ‘You’re good children to us and we’re very grateful to you,’ Sally said quietly.

  The next morning Sam told them that it was all settled. ‘It’ll be in the form of an annuity,’ he said. ‘So you’ll receive a draft each month starting the beginning of September.’

  ‘That was quick work!’ Lawrie exclaimed.

  ‘I might as well tell you, I had it all worked out,’ Sam said. ‘I just needed your say so.’

  Mary and Sam were due to leave the following day and although Cathy had sometimes been irritated by Mary, when the time came she wept bitterly at the thought that her sister was leaving, and that she might not see her again for years, and Lawrie wept with Mary as she clung to him.

  Sally hid her feelings behind a stony expression until the last moment, when she too broke down and cried. Kate wept and asked if she could go with them, but Mary promised that she would send for her one day.

  Mary had asked if they could say goodbye at home but Kate pleaded to go to see them off on the boat and Mick was looking hopefully at Sam. In the end it was decided that John would take Mick and Kate to wait at the Landing Stage to wave them off, but the other goodbyes were said at home.

  When they had all departed, Sarah made a pot of tea for her parents and grandparents. She had expressed no wish to go to the Pier Head, and no one had pressed her.

  She liked Sam and was sorry to see him go, but the episode on the first night had given her a deep distrust of Mary, and her young intolerance could see no redeeming feature in a woman who had behaved so with her father. Mary was aware of her animosity and had not bothered to try to charm her, and they parted with no regret on either side.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Before Mary and Sam had even reached America, life had settled back to normal for their relations in Liverpool. Everyone was pleased that Lawrie had now reached retirement age, and Sally was pleased to have him home all day.

  ‘I won’t have to worry now when the weather’s bad, because he won’t have to go out in it,’ she told Cathy.

  Mary’s visit seemed to have completed the improvement in Lawrie’s health and he was fitter and stronger than he had been for years.

  ‘I feel a fraud, retiring now,’ he told John. ‘I seem to have got a second wind.’

  ‘But you didn’t retire because of your health,’ John said. ‘You’d reached retirement age.’

  Lawrie had resigned as treasurer of his union, but was still organizing committees and deputations, working hard for better wages and conditions.

  ‘It’s all so slow, Grandad,’ John said impatiently.

  ‘Yes, but steady, lad. There’s a poem I often thought of when things seemed at a standstill and I was young and impatient like you. It’s by a Liverpool man, too, Arthur Hugh Clough:

  “Say not the struggle naught availeth,

  The labour and the wounds are vain,

  The enemy faints not nor Faileth,

  And as things have been things remain.

  For while the tired waves, vainly breaking.

  Seem here no painful inch to gain,

  Far back through creeks and inlet making,

  Comes silent, flooding in the main.”

  ‘Think of that, John, when you feel things are too slow. Quietly and steadily we’re making ground, lad. Some of the things I’ve fought for have come, and more will yet.’

  John was not convinced. ‘I don’t think we can afford to wait, Grandad,’ he said. ‘Peter’s brother was in London last week and he said the Fascists are strutting round as large as life. I saw one here in Sheil Park in Jackboots and a blackshirt. Gerry and I chased him, and Gerry said: “He’ll have brown trousers now as well as a black shirt.”’

  Lawrie looked troubled. ‘Those lads are a bit wild, aren’t they, John?’

  ‘No, we just meet and talk usually, but we’re worried about what’s happening in Abyssinia.’

  ‘Aye, but it’s been referred to the League of Nations,’ Lawrie said. ‘They’ll make this Signor Mussolini toe the line.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ John said. ‘Dad believes in the League and the Peace Pledge people, but I don’t think Signor Mussolini or Herr Hitler cares about them.’

  John felt that he had been proved right when Italy invaded Abyssinia on October the third, and all the news reels showed the sad figure of the tiny Emperor Haile Selassie.

  ‘He looks romantic and dignified in that cloak, doesn’t he, even though he’s so small?’ Sarah’s friend Eileen whispered to her. ‘I like tall men really, though.’

  Sarah knew that the tall man who interested Eileen most was John, but she had warned her that he was too busy with politics to bother about girls.

  ‘He’ll soon get fed up with them,’ Eileen said confidently, but Sarah was not so sure.

  Sarah was desperately in love at this time, but not with a real person, and not even with one man but with two.

  Her grandfather had found the article about Rupert Brooke which carried a picture of the poet. His large eyes looked out from a handsome face, his chin resting on his hand and dark hair falling in waves above his brow. He wore a loose shirt and a broad tie, with the deep cuffs on his shirt turned back. ‘He looks like a poet, doesn’t he, Grandad?’ Sarah sighed. ‘He seems to be looking right at you too.’

  She had framed the picture in passe partout and hung it above her bed, but now it had been joined by another picture, that of the actor Hugh Williams. He too looked unsmilingly from the picture and had large dark eyes and sensitive features, and Sarah found it hard to decide which photograph appealed to her most.

  She took Eileen Reddy up to see them, and Eileen assured her that it was possible to be in love with two men at once. ‘It said so in Peg’s Paper,’ she told Sarah. She also said that she thought that both men were like Sarah’s dad, but Sarah disagreed with her.

  ‘For one thing Dad’s quite old,’ she said, but her real reason was that it seemed wrong to feel as she did when she looked into the eyes in the pictures if they were linked by a resemblance to her father. Sarah knew exactly how she felt but would have been unable to explain her feelings to anyone else, although sometimes her grandfather seemed to understand her.

  He had found a copy of the poems of Rupert Brooke in the Library, and had been amazed to find that lines had been taken from a longer poem and put together to form the short poem she had seen in the Guides Handbook. She also learned that the poem had been written in Lulworth Cove, and Lawrie said that she might go there one day.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to, Grandad,’ she said.

  He looked surprised. ‘You wouldn’t, love? Why not?’

  ‘Because I – I have a picture of it in my mind,’ she said. ‘If I go there it might not be the same, and it would spoil the poem.’

  Her grandfather had not laughed, Sarah thought later with gratitude, only kissed her gently and said, ‘Oh, wise young bird. You’re right, love. Don’t ever change, Sarah.’

  Lawrie was enjoying his retirement. The extra money from Sam meant that they could live comfortably without drawing on their savings, and he enjoyed pottering round the second-hand book shop in Brunswick Road while Sally shopped for food, then meeting her to sit in the herb shop and drink a mug of Bovril before walking home arm in arm.

  Most of
the crops had been cleared from the allotment, and Greg spent only a couple of hours there at the weekend but he and Lawrie enjoyed planning for the following year, reading through catalogues and making scale drawings of the plot.

  John still held long discussions about local politics with his grandfather, but he said nothing about his activities with Gerry and his group.

  One night when Cathy was out late at a job, Greg heard a noise in the lobby and went to investigate. John was leaning against the wall, breathing heavily. His coat was torn and there was mud on his face and blood from a cut above his eye. He straightened up when he saw Greg and tried to push past him but his father blocked his way.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Breaking up meetings?’

  ‘No. Someone trying to break up ours,’ John said in an insolent voice. ‘But they didn’t succeed, you’ll be sorry to hear.’

  Greg had been about to offer to treat the cut, but he lost his temper at John’s tone.

  ‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ he said furiously. ‘You’re not with your roughneck friends now, and by God you’ll behave civilly in this house.’

  ‘Do you call that civil? Insulting my friends,’ John said hotly. ‘I’ll do what I like. It’s my life.’

  Greg stood back and gestured towards the kitchen. ‘Go and clean yourself up before your mother sees you,’ he said with icy contempt. He went back to his chair and tried to read but found he was reading the same lines over and over as he strained his ears to listen for Cathy above the noise of splashing from the kitchen.

  Finally he put the book aside and went to the door of the back kitchen. John’s torn jacket lay on the chair and he had washed his face but blood still trickled from the cut.

  ‘Sit down. I’ll dress that,’ Greg said quietly. As John began to refuse, he added, ‘Your mother will be here at any moment.’

  John sat down on the chair without a word and Greg quickly and skilfully dressed the cut.

  ‘You’d better go up to bed and take that jacket before she comes. I’ll bring you a cup of tea.’

  ‘I don’t want—’ John began.

  Greg said firmly, ‘Treatment for shock. Very necessary.’

  John was cold and trembling with the shock of the sudden attack, and he knew that his father was right. Although he would have liked to refuse help, he was glad to accept the mug of hot tea and the aspirins his father brought up when he was in bed.

  When Greg bent over him and put the aspirins in his hand John felt a sudden urge to cry and cling to his father, but Greg spoke and the moment passed.

  ‘I’m not going to ask you any questions now,’ he said, ‘but I expect you to tell me tomorrow what happened. I’m sure you’ll be able to think of a convincing lie for your mother about that cut.’ He hesitated, but John said nothing and kept his eyes lowered. Greg went out of the room.

  Sarcastic swine! thought John. He regretted his moment of weakness and was glad that he had not given way to it.

  The next morning John told his father briefly that he and Gerry had gone to a meeting in the park, and had been standing at the back when a crowd of hooligans had suddenly attacked them. John had been hit by a stick and knocked to the ground, and Gerry had pulled him up and away from the crowd.

  To his mother he explained that the cut over his eye had been caused when he and Gerry had been “horsing around” in his friend’s bedroom and he had fallen against the furniture. Thanks to Greg’s treatment the cut was healing and looked insignificant, and Cathy was less interested in it than in the fact that it had been acquired in the doctor’s house. She was innocently pleased that John had taken up again with such “nice” friends, and told her mother about it later.

  Lawrie looked up and frowned. ‘I don’t like him going round with that lad, Cathy. He’s very wild.’

  ‘John said he used to be but he’s not now,’ Cathy replied.

  Sally said, ‘Peggy says the doctor and his wife have patched things up so maybe that’s had some effect on the lad.’

  John talked to his grandfather later about the fracas.

  ‘It was unprovoked, Grandad,’ he insisted. ‘The speaker was a Communist, and Gerry and I had gone along to listen, but those louts attacked the crowd for no reason. They weren’t in uniform but I’m sure they were Blackshirts.’

  ‘I’d give the whole lot a wide berth if I was you, lad,’ Lawrie said. ‘There’s better ways of going about things. Your mam told us about the fall but I thought it sounded a bit fishy. She and your gran believed it, though.’

  ‘I could have told Mum the truth and she’d have understood,’ John said angrily. ‘But my father told me to tell her a lie.’

  Lawrie looked surprised at the way John spat out the words “my father” and said quietly, ‘Don’t underestimate your dad, John. He’ll do anything to shield your mam from worry. He might have a quiet manner, lad, but underneath that he can be very hard where she’s concerned. He won’t let her be hurt.’

  ‘You mean, he’ll ditch his conscience and tell me to lie?’ John said.

  ‘I mean he won’t let anyone upset your mam, John, not even you.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t upset her,’ protested John.

  ‘Not intentionally,’ Lawrie said. ‘But just watch yourself, lad, and try and see why your dad gets narked sometimes.’

  Although John felt sometimes that his grandfather’s views were out of date, he still had a great respect for him and stored up his words in his mind.

  There was a spatter of hail against the window as Sally came in from the parlour where she had been making up the fire for Josh.

  ‘Will you listen to that?’ she exclaimed. ‘I hope Josh waits for it to go off but I don’t suppose he will. He goes out and comes back at the same time every night, no matter what.’

  ‘I see that fellow in Birkdale forecasts a hard winter,’ Lawrie said. ‘Well, he’s been right before. We’re having freak weather all right. Snow in May.’

  ‘It’s these aeroplanes, I’m sure, disturbing the heavens,’ Sally said. ‘If God meant people to fly, he’d have given them wings.’

  ‘Better not let Mick hear you, Gran,’ John said, grinning. ‘He’s determined to have a flight soon. He wanted to go up when they went to Blackpool but he hadn’t enough money. He’ll do it though. You know how determined he is.’

  ‘And the first thing he’d do would be fall out of it,’ Sally exclaimed. ‘Surely your Mam won’t let him?’

  ‘No. He hangs round Speke at the new Airport but he only talks to mechanics. You need money to fly, Gran.’

  Since his retirement Lawrie had visited old workmates who were ill in hospital and without family to visit them, and one day at the beginning of December visited an old man in the Southern Hospital and took him some sweets and some of Sally’s cakes.

  The day had been fine but rain began to fall as Lawrie waited for the tram home. When it came, it was crowded. The conductor allowed four people on but put his arm across as Lawrie and an old woman attempted to board it.

  The old woman was a “Mary Ellen” wearing voluminous skirts and a black shawl. She said civilly to the conductor, ‘How long’ll the next tram be, Mister?’

  ‘The same length as this one, Missis,’ he said loudly, guffawing at his own wit.

  Quick as a flash the woman shouted, ‘An’ will it ‘ave a gobshite like you on the back too?’

  The smile was wiped from the conductor’s face and Lawrie stood helpless with laughter at the expression on the man’s face as the tram moved off. He was so tickled by the incident that it seemed no time to him before the next tram came, but it was nearly fifteen minutes and he was thoroughly soaked when he arrived home.

  He tried to tell Sally about the incident at the tram stop but she bundled him upstairs. ‘Go and get those wet clothes off. When are you going to learn sense, Lawrie?’

  She had a hot drink ready for him and a mustard bath for his feet when he came downstairs, but in spite of her remedies Lawrie developed a cold wh
ich soon became a bout of bronchitis.

  Fortunately the attack was slight, but all the family regarded it as a warning that he was still vulnerable and Lawrie promised to be more careful in future.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,’ he said to Greg when they were alone. ‘Sally’d like to keep me in this kitchen for the whole of the winter, as if I was hibernating. I can’t let people down when they’re waiting for a visitor.’ Greg agreed but said he understood why Sally was so worried.

  ‘She said she could wring the water out of your cap,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you can stay in all the time but you should be ready for our English weather. Wear a raincoat and carry a spare cap in your pocket.’

  ‘That’s sensible talk, lad,’ Lawrie said. He grinned. ‘You don’t mind if I put it to Sally as my own idea? I’ve got to convince her I’m sensible, safe to be let out.’

  Before Christmas Lawrie was able to visit the hospitals again, carrying a raincoat and a spare cap, and bearing small gifts to make the holiday more cheerful for his old workmates. Sally had been impressed by the idea of carrying a spare cap, as she was convinced that Lawrie’s cold had been caused by the fact that he had worn his wet cap while travelling home on the tram.

  It was a happy Christmas for all the family. Money was more plentiful and Cathy and Sally were able to spend freely on extra food and small luxuries. As usual each family had the Christmas dinner at home then all went to the grandparents’ house for tea.

  Sally had the usual leg of pork for dinner, supplemented this year by a sirloin of beef provided by Josh. He had also bought one for the Redmond family. This year for the first time they also had a turkey for the Christmas dinner.

  Cathy felt proud as she looked around the table at her well-fed, well-dressed family. The scrubbed kitchen table and dresser had recently been replaced with a square dining table and chairs with seats covered in rexine, and a highly polished sideboard. A large bowl of fruit and dishes of sweets and nuts stood on the sideboard, and the table was filled with the turkey and beef and tureens of vegetables. There were also, for the first time, two bottles of wine provided by John. He had bought a sweet white wine for his mother and Sarah, and a Burgundy which he knew his father would enjoy.