‘Hey, I know I’m irresistible to women, but they don’t usually fall at my feet.’
Heads swivelled to see who this rich male voice belonged to as the young man helped her to her feet. Joyce could see their glances of pure envy as he dusted down her skirt and picked up her shopping basket.
He was smartly dressed, polite, and utterly gorgeous. Just looking into those slate grey eyes made Joyce go all weak at the knees and almost made her collapse again. He was tall, but not too tall. Joyce didn’t care for lean gangly men. Stan was of medium build, broad shouldered, with a shock of red-gold hair and a teasing smile on his freckled face. Warm, easy going, he filled her with a strange, pulsing excitement, as if she knew she’d met her destiny.
Champion Street Market had been humming with activity that morning, as always, women’s heads bobbing anxiously together as they’d discussed the looming spectre of war. People had long since lost faith in any attempt at appeasement made by the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He appeared now as a rather foolish old man with his rolled up umbrella and bit of paper he thought could solve everything. No one had any doubt that war would come. But not yet, Joyce thought, smiling cheekily at the stranger, please not yet.
It was a summer for love, for dreaming and hoping everything might turn out right after all. The sun never seemed to stop shining and each evening Joyce would dash home from the market where she worked on Molly Poulson’s cheese stall, to meet this handsome young man. They’d walk arm in arm out into a warm, summer’s evening, not caring where they went, with eyes only for each other.
They were young, and naïve, Joyce just turned eighteen and Stan barely a year older. They felt as if they could conquer the world, instead of facing the grumbling warnings of a world war.
He proved to be the perfect gentleman, never trying anything on that he shouldn’t. They kissed a great deal, mainly on the back row at the flicks, and talked endlessly.
He told her all about his family, who lived in Macclesfield. His father ran a wholesale ironmongery business and Joyce got the feeling they were quite comfortably off. This made her nervous and she was reluctant to tell him about her own father, who was a mere dustman, surely the lowest of the low. Joyce had always felt a bit ashamed of her family, living as they did in a pretty rough part of Ancoats. It was a relief for her to escape each day even to Castlefield, which was marginally better. But she had hopes and dreams of a better future. Joyce intended to make something of her life. She avoided the truth by telling him that her dad worked for the council.
As July and August slipped rapidly by, the atmosphere gradually changed. Hitler signed a pact with the Soviet Union and even Neville Chamberlain was saying, ‘We are now confronted with the imminent peril of war.’ Joyce began to feel as if she were on a roller-coaster, one minute high with excitement, the next plunging into an abyss she couldn’t even imagine. The world was falling into dangerous territory and she could do nothing to stop it.
Then one evening as they strolled on the towpath by the Bridgewater Canal, Stan gave her a lingering kiss, holding her tighter than usual in his arms.
‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
Joyce’s heart skipped a beat. Was he going to say that he loved her?
He fidgeted a little then destroyed her dreams with just a few simple words. ‘I’ve volunteered to join the navy.’
‘What?’ In a way she’d been half expecting this, dreading it as mobilisation had already started. But she’d shut the thought out of her head, not caring to face the inevitable. Now she swallowed the ball of fear that tightened her throat. ‘When do you leave?’
‘I’m expecting to be called up for training any day now’
She nodded, too uncertain of him to express all the thoughts that were crowding in her head. Perhaps he was similarly affected for even now he didn’t declare himself. Joyce had thought him to be quite keen, as taken with her as she was of him, yet he didn’t even ask her to write.
It cast a shadow over their last few days together, but did nothing to prevent her from falling head over heels in love. It was far too late anyway to stop that from happening. She’d hoped he might feel the same way.
On September 1,1939, Hitler marched his troops into Poland and two days later war was declared. There was a surge of panic, with people lifting their eyes to the skies as if half expecting it to turn black with German bombers, as Goering had promised.
Two days after that Joyce was standing on the platform at London Road Station, saying goodbye. ‘It’s been a great summer,’ Stan said, taking her gently into his arms. ‘You’re a great girl, Joyce, I’m glad I met you.’
‘I’m glad I met you too,’ she told him, going all misty-eyed with unshed tears.
All around them were other young couples weeping and saying their goodbyes. There were women as well as men dressed in khaki and navy blue, some of them looking quite skittish with blonde curls and lipstick, which surely was against regulations. Not that Joyce blamed them for this small show of defiance, they’d need all the courage they could muster where they were going. She felt her own surge of pride to be standing with this handsome young sailor who was holding her so tightly in his arms.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll miss me,’ he jokily remarked, as he stepped away and swung his kitbag on to his shoulder.
‘I don’t suppose I will,’ she jauntily replied, afraid of seeming needy.
She ached for him to tell her that he loved her, to ask her to wait for him, and to write to him every day. He paused, uncertain for a moment, as if he might be about to say something more, but then a rowdy group of laughing sailors suddenly surged all around them.
He had time only to give her one last kiss on the tip of her nose before climbing into a carriage with them. As the train started to move he leant out of the carriage window shouting something to her which might have been, ‘I’ll write,’ but she couldn’t be certain. Then he was steaming out of her life, and far too late Joyce remembered that as she’d never allowed him to come to her home, he didn’t even know her address. She didn’t expect to see or hear from Stan Ashton ever again.
Thinking about that day now, twenty years later, made Joyce’s heart bleed. She and Stan had started out with such high hopes. He an idealistic, eager young man setting off on the adventure of war. She a silly young girl with romance filling her head. They hadn’t the first idea what they were facing. It had all seemed so unreal, like something out of a Hollywood movie. Yet when reality had struck, they’d both sadly come down to earth with a bump.
Now he was dead, praise the Lord, and Joyce did not encourage the mourners to linger. Once everyone was fed, courtesy of her daughter, she made it very clear that she had a more pressing engagement.
‘I must open the salon in time for my three o’clock appointment,’ she informed her guests in her carefully enunciated diction. ‘The lady in question is one of my regulars.’
‘Show some respect,’ Rose hissed, under her breath. Even though she’d had little affection for her son-in-law when he was alive, it didn’t seem quite proper to shuffle everyone off in order to rush the next person under the hair dryer before they’d decently disposed of the body.
Joyce, however, had no such sensitivities. ‘It’s all right for you, Mother, but I’ve my living to earn. Haven’t I always had to fend for myself?’
Even the priest winced at this blatant reference to her late husband’s incapacity in that direction. People took the hint and one by one began to set down their cups and saucers and drift away, some of them to adjourn to the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck.
‘If you’ll excuse me, I must change,’ Joyce coldly announced, her smile frosty as she walked away. ‘Please show people out, Harriet, and thank them for coming and giving your father such a good send off.’ Just as if he were going on some long sea voyage and not into the hereafter.
Harriet did as she was told, appalled by her mother’s blatant lack of tact. The prospect of life in this claustrophobi
c little flat over the hairdressing salon without Dad to keep the peace between the three women filled her with sudden fear. There’d be blue murder done before the week was out.
After the guests had gone, Harriet followed her mother downstairs. ‘Could I just have a quick word, Mam, before you start your three o’clock?’ Her pale, heart-shaped face was etched with anxiety.
‘Not now. Haven’t I just said that I’m busy?’ Joyce’s tone was irritable. The girl had never been anything but a trial to her, always ready to voice an opinion and never prepared simply to do as she was told. Arrogant little madam and stubborn as a mule, just like her father. Joyce felt bitterness sear her soul. She’d done her best by her, she really had, more than most would have been willing to do in the circumstances. It was asking too much to expect her to feel the same way about this child as she did about her own beloved Grant.
She’d loved her son from the moment he’d been put into her arms despite a long-drawn out labour and a painful, difficult birth. As he’d grown older she’d seen him as compensation for rushing into a hasty and unsatisfactory marriage.
But then life was never quite what you expected. Nor people either. Stan Ashton certainly hadn’t turned out to be the strong, dependable husband she’d hoped for. In Joyce’s opinion he was a lazy, good-for-nothing lout who couldn’t keep his hands off other women. He’d always hotly denied this, save for landing her with Harriet whom he could hardly deny was his child. But Joyce was convinced there’d been any number of other women. Weren’t sailors well known for having one in every port? She’d accused him of such time and time again but he would just look at her sadly and sigh.
‘There was just the one, Joyce, as you well know. More’s the pity,’ he would add, treating her as if she were stupid.
Then they would sink to petty point scoring yet again. ‘The pity is that I ever married you in the first place,’ she would fire right back, which seemed to amuse him, much to her intense irritation.
‘Or that I believed your own eagerness to wed me was a result of true love.’
She’d refused to answer that charge, simply insisting that no woman in their right mind would love such a useless imbecile, great lazy lump that he was. Stan would agree that, trapped by their own folly, each had indeed made the other’s life a complete misery, destroying something beautiful between them. Joyce hated such remarks and would accuse him of making no effort to rebuild his life after the war, and of using his disability as a means of avoiding family responsibilities.
‘The only time you ever make use of your crutches is to stagger down to the pub, which is no doubt where you pick up your women.’
‘Whereas I’d be better off using them to knock some sense into your daft head. I ask you, what woman would take me on, eh? Long John Silver would have more luck.’
Sometimes he would mock her for acting above herself, for her airs and graces and her grand ideas when she left Poulson’s Pie and Cheese stall to train as a hairdresser and later opened her own shop. He teased her for her love of frills and furbelows on her cushions and curtains and dressing table skirts, her fastidiousness, even for sleeping in a hairnet and plastering her face with Pond’s cold cream before retiring alone to her single twin bed. The funny and tender man she’d fallen in love with could be bitingly cruel at times, and the fact this was often as a result of the pain he suffered, was no excuse in Joyce’s eyes.
Having suffered from the ignominious shame of what she considered to be a poverty-stricken childhood, for all Rose might insist she’d lacked for nothing she really needed, Joyce had made up her mind quite early on that she was going to make something of herself. If Stan Ashton couldn’t provide it, then she’d get it for herself.
He was right about one thing though, their marriage had been a complete shambles, doomed from the start. He simply wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with.
After Harriet had been born in November 1941, almost two years to the day since they married, the shame of this unexpected and unwanted child had set her on a course of action the consequences of which she was feeling to this day. And who else could be blamed for the outcome of that long running battle between them, but her cheating husband?
Oh, yes, Joyce was glad that he was dead, and that the endless war of attrition between them was finally at an end.
‘Will you be wanting a little trim, Mrs Gregson?’ Joyce brightly enquired of her customer, combing her fingers through the woman’s hennaed locks. ‘When did you last have it cut? Was it four weeks ago or five?’
‘I wouldn’t know, dear, but I rely entirely upon your opinion, and your skill with those scissors.’
On this occasion Joyce used a razor, efficiently cutting the hair into graduated lengths from two inches to five to suit the latest pixie style. She was just putting in the last of the rollers, wound smoothly in place from right to left, starting at the crown and then down each side, when Harriet stuck her head around the door.
‘Hello Mrs Gregson, would you like a coffee?’
‘Oh, what a dear girl you are. That would be lovely. Two sugars please. You are so fortunate in your daughter, Joyce. What a treasure she is.’
‘Indeed,’ Joyce agreed with a tight smile, starting on a row of pin curls to frame her client’s face. She’s no daughter of mine, Joyce longed to say but kept her lip buttoned, as she had for nearly eighteen years. If fate had decreed that she be the one left holding the baby, it failed to make her love the child, try as she might.
There had been a time when she’d been desperate for another child, had dreamed of adopting this one so that Harriet would indeed be her own, but that was when Joyce had still held hopes of saving her marriage. They’d proved to be false hopes. Later, after all that happened, she’d been driven by duty, and a certain sense of responsibility, reinforced by pressure from her own mother. Nevertheless, Joyce had fully intended to escape her disastrous marriage the very moment peace was declared, and reclaim her precious freedom.
Unfortunately, by the end of the war everything had changed yet again. Stan had come home crippled, both physically and emotionally. Deeply bitter and mentally scarred, he’d been quite unable to fend for himself. Like it or not they were tied to each other, and as a consequence succeeded only in making each other’s lives a misery. What’s more, she fully expected Harriet to make an equal mess of her own life. Nature will run its course, no matter what, and there was bad blood in that girl.
Joyce did feel that at least she’d made a success of her little hairdressing business, of which, quite rightly, she was immensely proud.
She most certainly intended things to change for the better now that her useless husband was gone. There had to be a limit to any woman’s patience and generosity, and no matter what Rose might say to the contrary, she’d certainly reached hers. With the girl’s father no longer around to hold her to that reluctant promise, she was now free to do as she pleased.
‘Could I have five minutes before your next customer?’ Harriet persisted.
The smile did not leave Joyce’s crimson mouth, despite the clipped quality of her tone. ‘I’m busy right up to seven o’clock, as always, so whatever it is, Harriet, will have to wait.’
Once the client was tucked under the dryer with a cup of coffee and the latest copy of My Weekly, Joyce marched upstairs and accosted her daughter.
‘What do you mean by keeping on interrupting me when I’ve already told you I’m busy? What’s so important that it can’t wait?’
Harriet took a breath. ‘Nan told me something today that shocked me. I can’t quite take it in, so I need to ask if it’s true.’
Joyce cast a swift glance across at her mother’s chair only to find it empty. She rightly guessed that Rose had finally let the proverbial cat out of the bag, as she had threatened to do many times. The old woman evidently meant to stay well clear until the matter had been dealt with, a skill at which she was past master. So be it. Joyce felt more than ready to tell the girl the truth, except that she would do
so in her own good time, duly edited, naturally. Joyce glanced at her watch and let out an impatient sigh. ‘I’ve already explained that whatever it is will have to wait until later.’
‘But it’s important, and you might be going out later.’
‘I certainly will be going out. When have you ever found me lazing about the house as your father used to do?’
Cheeks bright, Harriet said, ‘He didn’t have much choice, did he?’
‘He wasn’t always crippled, but he never did find much time to take his wife out on the town, being far more interested in his other women. And after all these years stuck in this house like a prisoner, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself a bit and get some pleasure out of life?’
‘Don’t exaggerate, Mam. You’ve never been a prisoner, not like Dad was, so don’t start. Not today of all days. Dad’s gone, isn’t that enough? Let him rest in peace at least.’
Joyce bit down hard on her lip to stop the vitriol which threatened to erupt. What devil inside drove her to say such harsh and cruel things? Rose insisted they’d each been equally responsible for destroying their marriage, but then she hadn’t been the one compelled to live with him, or suffer his black moods and fits of temper in recent years. As for Harriet, the girl had seen him only through the eyes of an adoring daughter, not that of a betrayed wife.
‘You just remember who you’re talking to, girl. This is still my house, my business that pays the bills, so see my dinner’s ready sharp on seven-thirty. Joe Southworth has offered to buy me a rum and coke this evening, and I reckon I deserve it after what I’ve been through today. I’ll talk to you when I’m good and ready.’
On these words Joyce stalked off to comb out her client and fluff out the soft pixie curls all over Mrs Gregson’s head.
Chapter Three
‘No, it wouldn’t matter to me who your mother was. Why would it? It’s you I love.’ Harriet was sitting down by the River Irwell, cuddled up on a bench weeping into Steve Blackstock’s shoulder.
Lonely Teardrops (2008) Page 2
