Durham Trilogy 02. The Darkening Skies

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘Nancy Bell,’ Iris gulped.

  ‘We’re courtin’,’ Raymond announced stubbornly, ‘so you might as well know. Auntie Louie and Uncle Sam think they’ve stopped us seeing each other, but I knew you’d understand better. You don’t mind do you, Mam? Nancy’s got nothing to do with you and her mam falling out.’

  All at once Iris found her voice and her famous temper ignited.

  ‘She’s got everything to do with our falling out!’ she cried and, lunging at the girl, pushed her from Raymond’s side.

  Nancy, caught off balance, fell to the ground with a howl of surprise. Iris turned to Raymond and slapped him hard across his astonished face.

  ‘Don’t you go near her again, do you hear? Never again!’

  ‘Mam!’ Raymond protested, reaching to rescue Nancy.

  Iris let out a stream of abuse at the two of them, consumed by rage.

  ‘And your mother’s nothing but a slut!’ she yelled. ‘By, I’ll have words with Louie about this - it’s her fault for allowing the two of you together.’

  ‘Belt up!’ Raymond was finally goaded in to opposing his mother. ‘And don’t you go blaming Auntie Louie for anything. She’s the best in the world - cares more about me than you’ve ever done.’

  ‘And what about all the clothes I buy for you and the money I send home?’ Iris choked with anger. ‘Haven’t you ever thought how hard it was for me to leave you with Louie - how hard it is every time I leave you behind?’

  ‘No,’ Raymond was hurtful in return, “cos it’s not true. All you’ve ever cared about is your singin’ and dancing.’

  Sara, quite mystified by Iris’s outburst and distressed by the harsh exchange, intervened. ‘Don’t fight each other, please.’ She put a hand on Iris’s arm. ‘You’ll only regret it when you’re gone. Old Mr Kirkup’s just been buried…’

  Iris turned pained green eyes on Sara and her aggression evaporated. She burst into tears and flung her thin arms around her son.

  ‘Sorry, pet,’ she sobbed.

  ‘So am I,’ Raymond mumbled, while Nancy stood sulkily, ignored by them all.

  ‘What about me?’ she complained. ‘And all those things you’ve said about my mam - what about saying sorry to me?’

  They turned to peer at Nancy in the dark and Raymond loosened his mother’s hold, feeling torn between the two.

  To Sara’s surprise, Iris answered her quietly. ‘I am sorry for you and Raymond - but it’s your mam’s fault that you mustn’t go on seeing each other.’

  ‘How can it be?’ Nancy asked in annoyance. ‘She isn’t stopping me.’

  ‘Well, she should be,’ Iris replied more sharply. ‘But she’s obviously too frightened to tell you in case that bad-tempered husband of hers beats her up.’

  ‘Don’t speak about my father—’

  ‘Not your father,’ Iris interrupted, glaring at the girl. ‘Your father was Davie Kirkup - my husband.’

  ‘What in the wide world do you mean by that?’ Nancy retorted.

  ‘I mean you are Davie Kirkup’s daughter - just as Raymond is Davie’s son.’ Iris’s voice was dull. ‘Your mam and Davie had a fling on Stand High Farm during the strike. It has to have been Davie who’s your father ‘cos your dad was in prison at the time. You and Raymond are half-brother and sister.’

  That bitter strike, Sara thought again, is still poisoning the lives of these pit people a generation later. She saw Raymond’s stunned figure turn away; he vomited into the road.

  An ARP warden advanced down the street, shouting at them to get home. Nancy began to cry.

  ‘Do you want to come inside to talk?’ Sara asked, feeling deep pity for them all. It was no wonder Louie had been so anxious about their friendship.

  ‘There’s nothing more I want to hear,’ Raymond said, his face ghastly. Without another word to any of them, he turned and ran down the street into the night.

  ‘I never wanted him to find out,’ Iris said mournfully and, turning to Nancy, put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Nor you, pet. You’re not to blame for what Minnie and my Davie did, but you had to know.’

  Sara felt a stab of pity for the sad-faced Iris having to admit her husband’s infidelity after all these years, and marvelled at her sudden compassion towards Nancy. Sara left Iris comforting the girl her faithless husband had conceived.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  By the time Sara saw Raymond again a week after Jacob’s funeral, Iris was gone and he had immersed himself once more in work and football, his dedication getting him picked for Whitton’s first team. He determined to waste no more time over lasses, for they had brought him nothing but heartache. From the autumn, Nancy Bell was never mentioned in the Ritson household and Raymond never went near the Bells’ house in Oswald Street or bothered what films were showing at The Palace. Sara learned from Louie that Bomber Bell had thrown Minnie and Nancy out of the house when news of the scandal spread and they had sought refuge once more with Minnie’s long-suffering mother, Mrs Slattery.

  Just before Christmas, Sara heard that Nancy had left Whitton Grange to work as a maid in a big house in Sunderland and wondered if the unfortunate girl would ever get over the shock of discovering that the lad she had courted had turned out to be her half-brother.

  But by then, the village gossip about Nancy and Raymond had been eclipsed by momentous news at the pit and abroad. The persistence of union men like Sam Ritson had resulted in an enquiry and the Greene Award of a national minimum wage.

  ‘£4.3s underground and 6d a shift extra for “wet work”,’ Sam told Louie. ‘It’s taken a bloody world war to get us back some of the rights we had before the ‘26 lockout.’ Sam shook his head, but Louie could tell he was encouraged by their success.

  Then news came of Allied counter offensives in the African desert, as the Battle of Egypt began and days of gruelling combat ended in the German Afrika Korps retreating west, pursued for a thousand miles by the British Eighth Army who captured hundreds of Italian Infantry on the way.

  For the first time since the threat of invasion had shadowed the country, church bells were allowed to be rung once more in celebration and people went to stand at their doors in the crisp November air to listen to the joyful peal from St Cuthbert’s belfry.

  Sara walked up onto Whitton Common, restless at the thought of Joe and thankful she had had no dreaded telegram to spoil her feeling of optimism. Returning by the kissing gate and the allotments, she spotted Raymond digging in Sam’s plot.

  ‘I thought you’d be out drinking a toast to the lads with all the others,’ Sara teased him.

  ‘Thought I’d lift the last potatoes for Sam,’ Raymond grunted, unbending from his task and pushing back his cap to look at her. He felt a familiar tightening in his chest at the sight of Sara’s rosy face and tangled fair hair licking around her temples.

  ‘Hardly see you these days,’ Sara said, leaning on the battered fence. ‘You never call round to see us at Pit Street anymore.’

  Raymond blushed. ‘Prefer to keep to myself.’ He glanced away, feeling guilt towards his friend Joe for the nagging want he felt inside for the Weardale girl. When was it, he wondered, that his friendly affection towards Sara had fanned into desire? Ever since that terrible summer of 1940 when the Dimarcos had become scapegoats of the war and Sara had given him the courage to stand by Joe’s family she had been special to him. Her contempt for his part in the attack on the Dimarcos’ shop had shamed him deeply and he had been desperate for her approval. But when Sara had chosen Joe for good and he knew that his love for her was futile he had filled his emptiness by courting the pretty but juvenile Nancy.

  Sara sensed Raymond’s reticence and wondered whether Rosa and Albina, vying for his attention when he and Sam had come to do jobs for the Dimarcos, had frightened Raymond away. Since the incident over Nancy, Louie had told her, Raymond showed no interest in courting anyone else.

  ‘Is Iris coming for Christmas?’ Sara asked.

  ‘No, I’m going to stay with Mam
in Manchester for the holiday - she’s in a pantomime.’

  ‘That’s grand,’ Sara smiled, ‘it’ll do you good…’

  ‘To get away from all the wagging tongues, you mean?’ Raymond’s voice was suddenly bitter.

  ‘Nancy’s gone now. Can’t you try and put that business behind you?’ Sara asked him gently.

  ‘How can I?’ he scowled. ‘They should have told me long ago I had a sister - why didn’t they?’

  ‘To protect Minnie, I suppose, and your mam,’ Sara sighed. ‘And not to spoil your memory of your dad too.’

  ‘I don’t have any memory of me dad,’ Raymond answered, spitting savagely onto the black earth. ‘All I know is that he’s done nothing but harm. It’s because of him that Mam had to leave me - and it’s his fault I got me head kicked in by Normy Bell - and that I nearly had incest with me half-sister. I hate the bastard.’

  ‘Don’t say that about your own father,’ Sara said, shocked. ‘He can’t have been a bad man - your Auntie Louie thought the world of him.’

  ‘Well, I can’t forgive him for ruining my life.’ Raymond was uncompromising.

  ‘Iris did,’ Sara replied gently. ‘So can’t you?’

  Raymond’s handsome, sullen face looked suddenly vulnerable as he met Sara’s concerned look. He was wretched that he had ended by arguing with Sara and would never be able to tell her how he felt about her. He hardly cared about breaking up with Nancy; it was the knowledge of yet another betrayal by his father that really hurt him. So he turned back to his gardening, thrusting his spade into the soil and said no more. Sara left him and did not see Raymond again until after Christmas and his visit to his mother, by which time he had recovered much of his old humour.

  The arrival of 1943 brought renewed resolution at the pit to increase production in support of the Durham Light Infantry campaigning in Africa. After insistent demands from the pitmen a makeshift canteen was erected in the pit yard and Louie went to work there in February, happily giving in her notice at the Naylors’, where she had cleaned for years.

  ‘Doing my bit for the war effort,’ she told Mrs Naylor, the under-manager’s wife, hardly suppressing her glee.

  ‘Surely you can manage here as well?’ The formidable Mrs Naylor was dismayed.

  ‘Not with my two workers to wash and cook for - and Stan our evacuee,’ Louie added pointedly. It had always rankled with her that the Naylors had somehow managed to avoid taking in any displaced children, yet they had four empty bedrooms.

  ‘Well, I do think this is rather ungrateful of you, Louie,’ Mrs Naylor sniffed, ‘after the good money we’ve paid you and the hamper every Christmas.’

  Louie nearly struck the woman in her anger and might have done so had Sara not been with her, on her way to work at The Grange.

  ‘You’re the one who should be grateful,’ Louie trembled as she spoke. ‘Grateful that I’ve worked so hard for you all these years, after the way Mr Naylor evicted Sam and me after the strike.’

  Sara steered Louie away before Mrs Naylor recovered from her astonishment. When they had marched down the drive, Louie burst into tears and told Sara how she had lost her only baby when Naylor had attempted to evict her the first time, during that dreadful year of 1926. Sara had never seen Louie cry before.

  ‘I never carried a bairn again after losing Louisa,’ Louie said in deep sadness. ‘And I still think of her all these years later and what might have been…’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sara said, feeling quite inadequate and struck once more by the fortitude of Louie and the Whitton women like her who rarely complained of the hardships they endured. How the generous-hearted Louie must have suffered over the years at her childlessness! No wonder she was so devoted to Raymond.

  ‘Haway, flower,’ Louie recovered her composure and gave Sara a hug as if she needed comforting. ‘Let’s get ourselves to work.’

  That spring, Sara was kept busy at The Grange hospital as battle-ravaged men returned from North Africa for operations and recuperation. Some brought grim stories of bloody hand-to-hand combat with bayonets and of heroism against a tenacious enemy. Others could only remember the tedium and dysentery.

  At home, the Dimarcos eked out an existence, opening the shop as a matter of pride, even if there was nothing to sell. Yet Arturo’s wages from the factory, Bobby’s small payment from the cycle shop and Sara’s meagre pay packet kept their large family from going hungry and Rosa and Sylvia became adept at refashioning old clothes to fit their growing children. Sylvia’s son Peter was now at school and had a ferocious appetite, often bringing small friends home to the parlour with promises of jelly and custard, which could not always be honoured.

  From what Sara could gather, Joe and Tom’s battalion was somewhere in the Middle East being reinforced or retrained once more, for where, no one seemed to know. After a visit to see her husband Davide on the Isle of Man, Elvira returned resigned to her husband’s imprisonment and threw herself with more vigour in to helping Anna run the household.

  With initial instruction from Sam Ritson, the tending of their yard allotment became Elvira’s preserve, and, no matter the weather, she would be seen flitting about her crowded garden like a sparrow, busily planting and weeding, raking and harvesting her crops of potatoes, onions and carrots, runner beans, peas and marrows. Anna’s old pots of flowers became home to cascades of parsley and fragrant herbs which the women used to enliven their pasta and vegetable soups.

  In the early summer, when Albina and Rosa turned twenty, Albina was shaken out of her lazy existence by a direction from the Ministry of Labour and National Service to go and train with the ATS.

  ‘Why haven’t you been summoned?’ Albina accused Rosa with petulance.

  ‘Because I have a daughter to look after,’ Rosa defended herself.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ Albina protested.

  ‘No, it’s war,’ Sara answered dryly.

  Albina shot her a hostile look. She had never kept her dislike for Joe’s Durham wife a secret. Sara had taken over the family with her English lessons and her chatter and her over-anxiety to please and, Albina thought with resentment, she always sided with Rosa against her. Albina was filled with jealousy for the pretty, blunt-talking girl who had even won the approval of her cautious and conservative mother, Elvira.

  ‘And what are you doing to help?’ Albina turned her vicious tongue on Sara. ‘Washing dirty pyjamas, that’s all.’

  ‘Aye, washing dirty pyjamas,’ Sara replied with spirit, ‘and sheets covered in soldiers’ blood and surgeons’ overalls covered in guts. I clear up the mess of lads who’ve lost half their bowels. Imagine, Albina, what would happen if nobody did. There are plenty different ways of fighting this war - and doing the army’s washing is one of them.’

  The Dimarco women gaped at Sara’s outburst and Albina turned puce at the raw language. But for once she was silenced and shortly afterwards took the train south, to the relief of all but Elvira. Rosa, although not obliged to work, volunteered at the pit canteen and, after the first terrifying days of serving soup and cheese to the blackened pitmen, began to revel in her new-found independence. It was after Rosa had started working at the Eleanor pit that Sara noticed Raymond beginning to call at Pit Street once again.

  He would saunter round with his second-hand bicycle, bought by Iris on his eighteenth birthday, and chat to Bobby while the younger boy looked it over with a critical eye. Raymond brought fruit from Sam’s apple tree for Anna to bake and took Peter out for football practice in the park. It cheered Sara to see more of him again, and she speculated as to his reasons for calling. She noticed how Raymond was kind to the children and friendly to Rosa, yet never attempted to get Rosa alone.

  In July, the war-jaded village decided to put on a field day as the pitmen’s Big Meeting was cancelled for the fourth year running.

  Rosa and Sylvia dressed the children up in fancy dress and took them along to see Raymond and Sam play in a charity match, in which the Home Guard challenged the WVS and
female ARP wardens to a game of football.

  Raymond persuaded Sara to join in and Rosa and Sylvia whooped with delight as Sara rushed on dressed in galoshes and a pair of flowery shorts she had made out of cushion covers. Peter and Linda screamed with mirth to see their aunt cavorting around the field and Rosa had to restrain an inquisitive Mary from straying in to the middle of the pitch. Dozens of goals were scored on either side and no one was quite sure who won in the end.

  After sack races for the children and a tea of indigestible cakes made from dried egg, the people of Whitton Grange took their tired but jubilant families home.

  ‘Come back for a drink of lemonade,’ Sara invited a hot-faced Raymond. ‘Mrs Dimarco’s managed to get some specially for the field day.’

  ‘Aye, I’d like that,’ Raymond answered with a bashful glance.

  It was while they were sitting in the back-shop with the door open to Elvira’s fragrant yard that the sound of her humming was disturbed by the announcement on the wireless that the Allies had invaded Sicily. Arturo and Anna came in from the shop and stood listening to the report of the British success in overpowering Italian divisions and the prisoners taken.

  ‘It will be the Italian mainland next,’ Arturo said dully, his face furrowing into familiar lines of anxiety.

  Sara thought of Joe fighting in the heat against his father’s countrymen and kept quiet.

  But Raymond did not. ‘Perhaps Italy will come over to our side now, if they see it’s no use putting up a fight against our lads,’ he said optimistically.

  The silence around him was awkward.

  ‘But Italy is full of German soldiers who do not want to lose.’ Arturo gave a dispirited shrug. ‘They do not care if Italy is destroyed under the jackboots.’

  Raymond left in a hurry, uncomfortable in the sudden atmosphere of worry, taking refuge among villagers who were rejoicing at the news.

  As July wore on, there were reports from Italy of fierce German resistance and heavy casualties. Then the startling news of Mussolini’s resignation and the fascist party being banned boosted the morale of the country. Despite a gleeful obscenity about Mussolini and cowardly Italians daubed on the shop window that night, the Dimarcos felt a certain relief at the news.