There is a Season

by There is a Season (retail) (epu

  Cathy was astounded when Greg put the money on the table. ‘Fifty pounds!’ she exclaimed. ‘Greg, it’s a fortune. Think of what we can do with it.’

  He hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘I was wondering, Cath, what do you think of offering it to John for him to get started in something? Stan started selling from a handcart and John’s not proud.’

  Cathy eagerly agreed, but when the money was offered to John he flatly refused to take it. ‘No, it’s your chance to do something for yourselves. Rig yourselves out in new clothes or buy something for the house. Don’t worry about me. If I don’t get fixed up, I’ll try somewhere else, perhaps London. If there is a black list, it’s only a local one.’

  He promised not to go until after Christmas, whatever happened, and Cathy could only hope that he could get a job before then.

  Some of her neighbours and friends had been shocked to learn that John was fighting in Spain, but they were all pleased at his safe return. Cissie had asked about him every time Cathy had been on a job with her, and she summed up the general feelings when she said, ‘I see your lad’s home again. Lads get these daft ideas but this’ll have cured him. They don’t know they’re well off until they go away from home and get knocked about a bit.’

  ‘I’m one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit,’ Josie said. Cathy was relieved to see her looking cheerful again. She had been worried and downhearted, chiefly because of some problems her sister was having but also because Edie’s off and on love affair had finally ended, and now her wildness was causing trouble between her mother and father.

  ‘As if I haven’t got enough on my plate with our Mary,’ Josie complained to Cathy after one of these rows.

  ‘Is she no better?’

  ‘Better! She’s a hundred times worse,’ Josie said. ‘You know how she hates men? Well, now she won’t even take her change in a shop out of a man’s hand. Pip in the Co-op told me he has to put the change down on the counter, and I met the coalman and he said she puts the money on the wall and he has to put the change there too. She won’t take it in case she touches his hand.’

  ‘Poor Mary,’ Cathy said.

  ‘I’m terrified she’ll end up in Rainhill,’ Josie said.

  ‘She’s not bad enough for a lunatic asylum,’ Cathy protested.

  Josie said sorrowfully, ‘It’s not only the change. She’s going queer in other ways, too, and I don’t know what I can do. I can’t bring her here because of Walter and Danny and Frank. It’s partly because Mam’s gone. She was the only one who could talk sense into our Mary.’

  Cathy and Greg, Josie and Walter still made up a foursome for the dance at the Grafton Ballroom every week, and on the surface all seemed well between Josie and Walter, but Cathy knew that their marriage was becoming ever more unhappy.

  Sally thought that Josie might be short-tempered because she missed her mother, but Cathy disagreed. ‘I thought it would be better because Mrs Mellor was always stirring things up, but it’s worse, and I blame Walter.’

  ‘Why? He’s a good husband, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s not a good father, at least I don’t think so. You know Danny wets the bed and Walter beats him for it? Josie tells him the child doesn’t do it on purpose. She said you can see that by Danny’s frightened little face when he comes downstairs when it’s happens, but Walter won’t listen to her. It really upsets Josie.’

  ‘I’ll have a talk to her. Tell her how to help to stop the bedwetting.’

  ‘And Edie,’ Cathy went on. ‘Josie knows she’s unhappy and that’s why she’s gone wild, going out with different lads and staying out late. Josie wants to coax her out of it, but Walter’s shouting at her and hitting her and he wanted to lock her out one night. Josie said that’d only be putting Edie in more danger. She’s nearly distracted. I feel so sorry for her, with one thing and another.’

  ‘Walter’s not showing much sense,’ Sally said. ‘But a lot of men are like that.’

  Cathy smiled. ‘You sound a bit like Josie. She said the other night that she thinks their Mary might be right after all to dislike men.’

  When she thought of Josie’s troubles, Cathy felt even more grateful for her own happy life. She still grieved for her father, but she remembered him with love and admiration, and still felt close to him in spirit. In every other way she was perfectly happy.

  Even the fear of John’s going away to work had been removed. Stan Johnson asked Greg about him and was surprised when Greg told him the type of job that John had been applying for. ‘He believes in the dignity of labour,’ Greg said with a smile.

  ‘Well, if he wants to practise what he preaches, tell him there’s a job going with the chaps who repair my houses, but it’s only labouring and paid accordingly.’

  John eagerly accepted the job and worked hard at it, and he said no more about going away. He still held long discussions with his father, but not usually about his own affairs so much as the threat of war.

  Cathy lay in bed one night, listening to the rise and fall of their voices, and when Greg finally came up to bed she said resentfully, ‘You were having a long talk with John tonight. What’s he troubled about now?’

  ‘Nothing personal, Cath,’ Greg said. ‘We were discussing this business about Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘And you stayed up until this hour for that?’ she exclaimed. ‘You must both be mad.’

  Greg and John talked of the possibility of war but most people disregarded the newspaper accounts of foreign affairs.

  ‘Stands to reason,’ Mabel said. ‘Hitler won’t bomb us when he knows we’ll do the same to them if he does. We’d just wipe each other out.’ And the customers in the shop agreed with her.

  Sarah and Anne, flirting with the young men who came in the shop and spending their leisure time in cycling and dancing, had far more interesting things to think about.

  ‘Don’t be such an alarmist,’ Sarah said scornfully to John, when he said that things looked bad. ‘It’s all talk.’ She truly believed that it was an empty threat until one Sunday in August when she travelled by tramcar to see her friend Maisie in Dovecote.

  The tram passed Springfield Park near Alder Hey Hospital and she saw that trenches had been dug in the park.

  ‘Look at them,’ a woman said. ‘My feller says we’ll be at war by Christmas.’

  Sarah longed to go home and talk to her father but Maisie was expecting her for tea. Maisie had brothers who would be called up if war came, and she said that two of them had already joined the Territorials. ‘I’ve heard that gas masks have been delivered to different depots,’ she said, ‘ready to be given out if war starts. Even gas masks for babies.’

  Sarah returned home earlier than planned, feeling thoroughly depressed and frightened, but her father reassured her. ‘A lot of this is just sabre rattling,’ he said. But suddenly, in September, everyone was talking of war.

  ‘It won’t be just the soldiers this time,’ a customer in the shop said. ‘It’ll be all of us if they drop bombs. Your brother was in Spain, wasn’t he, Sarah? Was he anywhere near Guernica?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  And another woman asked, ‘Where’s Guernica?’

  ‘It’s a place in Spain where hundreds of people were killed when German aeroplanes bombed it,’ the first woman said importantly. ‘That’s what we can expect.’

  Sarah told John what she had heard but he said, ‘People like that should be locked up. Scaremongers! It was different altogether. Guernica was a little town, crowded for market day, and the people there were quite unprepared. Don’t worry about tales like that, Sass.’

  Although John reassured Sarah, he was privately very worried about the family. ‘We’re not prepared at all,’ he told his father. ‘If it comes, the best place for the family would be a cellar, or better still the basement of a big shop because they’re reinforced.’

  Everybody listened to the news bulletins on the wireless, and people could be seen standing waiting near newspaper vend
ors, opening the paper as soon as the next edition arrived and searching it for news.

  On September the twenty-sixth the Foreign Office warned Hitler of the consequences if he attacked Czechoslovakia, and the following day the Fleet was mobilized.

  ‘And our Joe’s still on the high seas,’ Anne wept to Sarah. ‘My mum says she wouldn’t care if he was home and we could all be killed together.’ As Sarah walked home she thought how worried everyone looked, and felt, as she wrote dramatically in her diary, that she was carrying a great weight about with her.

  The relief was all the greater when on September the twenty-ninth the Prime Minister flew to Munich and returned waving a piece of paper which he declared meant ‘Peace in our time’.

  Many people, including Cathy and Greg and their children, went to church to give thanks, and everywhere there was relief and rejoicing. ‘I’m really going to enjoy life now,’ Anne announced in the shop.

  Mabel said sourly, ‘I thought you always did.’

  ‘She’s mad because she told everyone she was absolutely sure there’d be a war,’ Anne whispered to Sarah, but Mabel’s ill humour soon vanished and she joined in the general thanksgiving.

  Sarah told the family about Anne’s words when they were having their evening meal, and added, ‘I think Anne’s right. I think life feels sweeter now and I’ll enjoy everything twice as much.’

  Her mother agreed. ‘It’s the feeling that everything is precious because we nearly lost it, I suppose. Grandma and Peggy went to the pictures this afternoon and when Mr Chamberlain came on the Pathé news holding up the agreement at Downing Street, everybody stood up and cheered.’

  Greg and John took the news more quietly. ‘It’ll give us a breathing space to get ready,’ Greg said, and John agreed.

  A letter came from Mary which annoyed everyone, although they were all too happy to care about it for long. She wrote:

  Sam says England has come very close to war, but I’m glad to see that one man at least has shown some sense. We saw Mr Chamberlain on the news reels. Fortunately it doesn’t affect us, except of course that I worry about all of you.

  Sam has bought me the cutest little Pomeranian to keep me company while he’s working such long hours. I’ve called her Peggy, and I’ve got one set of pink flowered bedding for her basket, and one set of blue. I put a matching blue or pink bow on her collar.

  We had a lovely letter from John thanking Sam for the money. So glad he’s safely home again. We laughed when we read about Mam’s jollop which seems to have acted like a Micky Finn on him and knocked him out. I could do with some of that for some of the bores here.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to write to her and tell her to mind her own business!’ Cathy exclaimed. ‘They’ve got a cheek, criticizing England, when they don’t even live here.’

  ‘Leave it for now,’ her mother advised. ‘Sleep on it. You might say something you’ll regret, and it’s only her usual soft talk, anyway.’

  ‘Fancy buying a Pom,’ Mick said when he read the letter. ‘I’d like an Airedale. Poms are such stupid yappy dogs.’

  ‘It’s not only Poms that are stupid,’ Cathy said tartly.

  Mick wisely made no reply, but took out a book and began to read. He was now sixteen, and had gained five distinctions in his Matriculation examinations. It had been decided that he would stay on at school until he was eighteen when he would take the Higher School Certificate. The headmaster had spoken of his hope that after that Mick would win a scholarship which would take him to university.

  With such a future planned for him, Cathy and Greg had been furious when they discovered that he had attempted to join the Royal Air Force. The recruiting officer had taken particulars from him but told him he was too young, in spite of Mick’s protests that he was eighteen.

  ‘We’ll send for you when you are, son,’ the man said firmly. ‘Just go and work hard at College until then.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  There was one happy result of the war scare. Edie Meadows’ boy friend, the printer, thought he might be called up, so came to see her and patched up the quarrel.

  ‘This time it’s for good,’ she told her mother. ‘Frank’s coming to see you and Dad and we want to get engaged on my birthday next week, and married next September.’

  Josie was delighted, and with Edie settled there were fewer rows between her parents. Edie was tremendously proud of her ring, a half hoop of diamonds. Anne told Sarah, ‘I saw Edie on the tram yesterday. I couldn’t ask her about her engagement right away because the girl who was with her knew Helen and she was rattling on, but you should have seen Edie waving her ring about. I had to interrupt and ask her about it before she knocked my eye out.’

  ‘I know,’ Sarah said. ‘She’s made up, and so is her mum. Mrs Meadows was saying to Mum, “Your Sarah’ll be next,” as though she was consoling her.’

  ‘You can get engaged to Big Feet,’ Anne suggested, laughing.

  Sarah retorted, ‘Not likely.’

  Sarah and Anne now went sometimes to modern dances in addition to the ceilidhes and one young man named Donald, nicknamed Big Feet by them, was pressing Sarah to be his regular girl friend.

  ‘No, I don’t mind a date now and then but I’m not getting serious with anyone yet,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t press you to get engaged even, just for people to know we’re courting,’ he pleaded.

  She refused to go out with him on those terms. He persisted in asking her to dance and pleading with her to change her mind, but she was adamant.

  At almost the same time, several of the boys from the ceilidhes who had seemed to accept that Sarah and Anne also had dates with other boys, suddenly began to press them start serious courtships with a view eventually to marriage.

  They were at a ceilidhe one evening, sitting in a large group of the Fitzgeralds and their cousins, the Andersons, when Sarah was asked to dance by a young man she often went with to the cinema or the Ice Rink, Nick Owens. When the dance ended he drew her to a quiet corner near the door.

  ‘I know you have dates with other fellows, Sarah,’ he said, ‘but I think it’s time we started to go out seriously and you gave them the push.’

  ‘You’ve got a cheek,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’d like to go out seriously with Jimmy Rafferty or Bob Doyle and give you the push.’

  His face grew red. ‘You’ve been out with me more often than either of them,’ he said. ‘I haven’t minded you having your fling but now I want to put things on a proper footing, and I don’t want you to see anyone else.’

  Sarah too was flushed with temper. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you who I go out with. We’re not engaged or anything, and you don’t own me. I’ll go out with whoever I like, and from now on it won’t include you.’

  ‘I thought of you as my girl friend,’ Nick said, ‘but if that’s how you feel, maybe I’ve had a lucky escape. You obviously can’t be faithful to one man.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ snapped Sarah. ‘But I can tell you, that one man won’t be you. It’ll be someone who isn’t as big-headed or as rude. Goodbye.’

  She turned on her heel and stalked back to her friends. Nick dashed out of the door. Sarah was still shaking with temper and Anne said, ‘What’s up? We could see you were having a row.’

  ‘The cheek of that Nick Owens!’ Sarah said. ‘Trying to dictate to me who I’ll go out with, or rather won’t. He’s kindly decided that I’m going to go out seriously with him and drop my other friends – without consulting me, of course.’

  ‘It looked as though he got a flea in his ear,’ commented Terry, who was sitting nearby.

  ‘I should think so too,’ said Anne. Another dance had been announced and a tall willowy young man was making his way towards her, smiling. ‘Here’s another one who thinks he’s the answer to a maiden’s prayer.’

  Terry leaned towards Sarah. ‘Never mind, alannah,’ he said in a mock brogue, ‘I’ll be your steady feller.’
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  ‘She’s not that hard up, are you, Sar?’ Anne said over her shoulder as she went on to the dance floor with the young man. Sarah laughed and Terry seized her hand.

  ‘Come on, Sarah. Let’s dance in case Nick comes back for the second round.’

  ‘He wouldn’t dare,’ she said, but Nick did reappear later and came up beside her.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that about you being unfaithful,’ he said. ‘I was just angry. You will be my girl, won’t you?’

  ‘No, not on those terms,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m going to be very sure before I settle down with anyone.’

  A few days later Anne had a similar experience with one of the young men she had casually dated for some months, and Sarah said to her mother, ‘I don’t know what’s got in to fellows lately. They often went out with other girls as well as with us, but suddenly life’s all serious with them.’

  ‘It’s probably all the worry about the war in September that’s made them think they should get themselves organized,’ Cathy said.

  Sarah replied flippantly, ‘Herr Hitler’s got a lot to answer for, then.’

  Sally approved of Sarah’s determination not to settle down until she was sure that she had met the right man.

  ‘You’ll know when you do, love,’ she said. ‘It might be that you’ll know as soon as you see him, or you might come to like someone you already know and suddenly realize he’s the one you’ve been looking for. Don’t settle for anything less, pet.’

  ‘I won’t, Grandma,’ she promised. The feeling of relief after the threat of war was removed still persisted. Sarah thought that it was like being in the condemned cell and then being set free. All her perceptions seemed heightened; flowers were more beautiful, colours were brighter, and the people around her more interesting.

  Even the weather seemed better, and as the days lengthened all the family looked forward to a good summer. Sally’s arm had been very painful during the cold weather and the arthritis seemed to be affecting her shoulder and neck too. ‘At least my legs are all right,’ she said cheerfully to Cathy. ‘Not like poor Mrs Mal.’