Ragamuffin Angel

by Rita Bradshaw

  ‘Me?’ If Father Hedley had suddenly materialised with two horns and a forked tail, Connie couldn’t have been more astounded. Or hurt. And it was her hurt that made her say, ‘How can you say that when you’ve never liked him? You’ve been on and on at me from day one to finish with him now then. I’d have thought you’d be congratulating yourself you were proved right.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Aye, you are, an’ I’ll tell you somethin’ else while I’m about it. I don’t blame him for thinkin’ the worst the way he found out. He’s only human, lass.’

  She didn’t believe this. First Dan and now Mary. Connie’s great saucer eyes had always been mirrors for her soul, and now Mary dropped her head back on her shoulders and looked up to the ceiling, and what she said was, ‘Don’t look at me like that, lass. I don’t mean to have a go but you’ve always seemed to have a screw loose where he’s concerned,’ and, her head lowering, ‘I suppose everyone’s got a weak point an’ he’s yours.’

  ‘So you are saying this is my fault?’ Connie asked with painful restraint.

  ‘Aye, I suppose I am, a bit leastways.’

  ‘I see.’ The urge to cry had left her; Mary’s defection on top of Dan’s had sent the hurt too deep for tears. And now Connie stood up slowly, her manner strained as she said, ‘Well, you’re entitled to your opinion of course but it doesn’t make any difference. He has gone and I’m glad, glad, do you hear? And I don’t want you to mention his name again, all right?’

  ‘If that’s the way you want it, lass.’

  ‘It is.’ And it was the way it would remain. She was finished with love and fancy promises and sweet words that meant nothing. Bricks and mortar were solid and substantial and real, and they didn’t have the power to break her heart, Connie told herself fiercely. She wouldn’t forget that again. Like Mary had said, she’d had a screw loose where Dan Stewart was concerned, but oh. . . The lead weight in her chest was pressing down, grinding her heart to pieces. How did you stop loving someone just because they had stopped loving you?

  Chapter Nineteen

  At midnight on 4th August, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany, and cheering crowds surged through London to gather in Downing Street and outside Buckingham Palace, where thousands of people sang the national anthem amid scenes of great jubilation. News of the commencement of war reached Sunderland shortly after midnight, and was related to a bellicose crowd gathered outside the Echo offices.

  The flood of patriotic fervour temporarily washed away the bitterness of the builders’, mine workers’ and railway workers’ strikes which had laid two million men idle in the preceding months and caused whole families to starve and become destitute, and young men waved their hats and cheered all the way to the recruiting offices, eager to take part in the war which was predicted to be over by Christmas.

  For Connie, the last few months had been a composite of back-breaking hard work and nail biting tension as she, along with Mary and Ellen, had struggled to make enough to even cover their meagre wages, and then euphoria in July when suddenly the bakery and tea-rooms were crowded every day. But overall it had been a time of waiting. At least that was how Connie felt deep inside.

  She couldn’t believe, she just couldn’t believe that one day Dan wouldn’t come knocking on the door. She told herself it was ridiculous to continue hoping, and she was eternally thankful for the exhausting days and nights that meant she fell into bed each night too tired to think, but nevertheless, buried deep, deep in the core of her, the last remnant of hope refused to die completely.

  At the beginning of May she and Mary had moved from Walworth Way to the four rooms above the premises of the new ‘Bell’s Bakery & Tea-rooms’. With the assistance of a plumber friend Mary’s brothers had turned the first floor into a neat little parlour leading through to a kitchen, and the second floor consisted of their two bedrooms. It had taken them a full week to get used to the space. With their old room also rented out, Walworth Way was making Connie a handsome little profit each week, which had been very useful whilst things were tight and had provided for their groceries and fuel more than once when the cupboards had been bare.

  Connie had been glad to leave Walworth Way for reasons other than merely the splendour of their new living accommodation and the convenience of being above the shop and bakery however.

  Exactly two weeks to the day from the confrontation with Dan, John Stewart had knocked at the door asking to see her. She had refused him entry, and when he had made it plain – with a brazenness which had shocked and amazed her – why he had called, she had slammed the door in his face after warning him that if he came again she would inform the constable he was bothering her. The incident had upset and unnerved her, and twice in the weeks leading up to the move she had glimpsed sight of him in the vicinity of Walworth Way, although he had made no attempt to approach her, possibly because Mary had been with her. She told Mary nothing of this, nor Lucy, who was now heavy with child and confined to her bed most days with severe swelling of her limbs and face. Connie visited her frequently and they spoke of most things, but she found she couldn’t mention John Stewart to anyone. It was too humiliating, too debasing, the fact that he thought he could suggest. . . She didn’t like to dwell on what he had suggested.

  But on the evening of 5th August Connie wasn’t thinking of John Stewart or even Dan; she was concentrating on keeping the customers in the tea-rooms happy. She and Mary had been rushed off their feet all day – it seemed everyone wanted to be out and about and talking about the splendour of Britain’s ultimatum calling on Germany to respect the neutrality of Belgium which Germany had patently ignored – so when she saw Harold Alridge at the door of the shop she waved gaily at first, before she took in his desperate expression.

  ‘What is it?’ She had reached his side in seconds. ‘Is Lucy all right?’

  ‘Can you come?’ Harold glanced round the crowded tea-rooms. ‘Lucy is asking for you. The baby is coming early.’

  ‘But she is all right?’

  Harold looked at her, gulping spittle into his dry mouth. ‘She is tired, very tired,’ was his reply, but the manner in which it was spoken prompted Connie to call to Mary as she untied her apron, and after explaining the circumstances to leave at a run.

  Lucy’s labour pains had started in earnest at four o’clock in the morning and it was now nearly six in the evening and still the baby showed no signs of emerging. When Connie entered the luxurious bedroom in the manager’s suite she was shocked at the sight of her friend. Lucy was barely recognisable as the beautiful elegant creature she had always known. Her hair was wild, her poor swollen body straining against the pain racking it, and she appeared oblivious to the ministrations of the midwife who was with her.

  ‘The doctor is on his way.’ Harold had approached his wife, stroking her forehead with a tender hand as he added, ‘And I fetched Connie as you asked.’

  As Harold moved to one side Connie took his place at the other side of the bed to the midwife, and when Lucy’s tortured eyes turned to her she said softly, ‘I’m here, Lucy. I’m here.’

  ‘Connie?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘Watch. . . watch over my baby, won’t. . . you. Help. . . Harold care for it. My mother, she might try to take it. . . and she mustn’t. My father. . . It mustn’t grow up with my father, Connie.’

  ‘Lucy, don’t talk like that, dear. Your baby will grow up with you and Harold.’

  ‘Promise me, Connie.’ And then, as another spasm gripped her, ‘Oh no, no, not again.’

  Connie reached out and took her friend’s hand in her own and Lucy held on to it with all her might as she strained and stretched against the contraction, but it was obvious to each one of them that Lucy had no strength left.

  At the same moment as the spasm finished and Lucy sank back into the rumpled pillows, the door opened to show the doctor, but when Connie tried to leave Lucy’s grip on her hand became vice-like. ‘P .
. . promise me, Connie. I want my child to be free and . . . unfettered, not caged. My home was like. . . a prison. I couldn’t breathe. Help Harold, he’ll need you. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understand.’ From all Lucy had confided about her life as a child Connie had often thought the constrictions not unlike the workhouse. ‘But you’ll be taking care of your baby, Lucy, as soon as you are well enough. But I promise, dear. Of course I do. I’ll help in any way I can.’

  ‘Harold knows, and he . . . he’s promised.’ Lucy was gasping against the forthcoming contraction. ‘My parents don’t understand children, they never have.’

  ‘Don’t worry any more.’

  Connie would have said more but the doctor and midwife were waiting for her to leave, and she could do nothing other than join Harold on the landing after bending down and holding Lucy close for a moment.

  It was another hour before the child was born. It was very small and barely alive, and it was a girl. Lucy Alridge died twenty minutes later.

  ‘Lass, I know what you promised, an’ it was to watch over the bairn, not take it on full-time. You’ll never manage it, not an’ run this place an’ see to everythin’ else. He can afford a nursemaid, now then. An’ there must be other friends he can call on?’

  ‘They didn’t have friends as such. Social acquaintances maybe, and Harold has his associates at his gentlemen’s club, but not friends. Lucy used to say she always felt an outsider here, coming from the south, and what with running the hotel and all it left little time for getting to know people. Besides, she wasn’t like that, you know she wasn’t. She kept herself very much to herself. It. . . it was the way she had been brought up. Her father had stifled that part of her and she was only just. . . just beginning. . .’

  ‘All right, all right, don’t take on, lass. You know I’ll do what I can, an’ me mam an’ all, it’s just that lookin’ after a bairn is a full-time job at the best of times an’ what with it bein’ sickly an’ all. . .’

  Connie swallowed deeply in her throat. Mary was right, she knew she was right, but it didn’t make any difference. From the first moment she had seen Lucy’s child last night she had loved her. The tiny screwed up face, the minute hands . . . This wee scrap of nothing had to live, it had to. And Lucy wouldn’t have wanted her daughter to be entrusted to a nursemaid, not at first anyway. Her friend would have wanted her to be with someone who loved her. But not her parents. She had been adamant about that. And poor Harold. . . Connie had never really taken to Lucy’s husband, but seeing him last night had made her realise his whole world had revolved around Lucy. He had been utterly broken, lost. And he hadn’t even held the child. . .

  ‘Lass, why don’t you just let things settle for a week or two an’ see what he sorts out, eh? He’s not short of a bob or two.’

  ‘This isn’t about money, Mary.’ Money was the last thing it was about. This was to do with paying back the deep faith in her which Lucy had always shown, a faith which had been tried and tested over the Colonel Fairley affair when Lucy had even gone against her beloved Harold in Connie’s defence; it was about a wretched little cottage and that other tiny fragile child who had been born too soon into a world that had no time for her; it was about Larry and her granny and her mam. They had all gone and she missed them so much, and she couldn’t hold them and tell them how much she loved them. But she could Lucy’s child. That she could do.

  Mary had been watching the play of emotion over Connie’s face and what she said now, in a tone of resignation, was, ‘So, you goin’ round there now then?’ It was half past five in the morning and they had been sitting at the kitchen table for half an hour, neither of them having been able to sleep much since Connie got home the night before.

  Connie nodded. The midwife had agreed to stay and nurture the infant through the night after the doctor had spoken to her, but the woman had made it clear she would have to leave at seven o’clock, having her own family to see to. ‘If he’s still the same’ – and she didn’t doubt Harold Alridge would still be beside himself; it was more his attitude with the child that had worried Connie the night before – ‘I’ll have a chat with the midwife about bringing her back here until Harold’s more like himself and can think straight.’

  ‘Aye.’ Mary inclined her head but her voice was taciturn as she said, ‘But you bring it back here now an’ you’ll be makin’ a rod for your own back, lass, you take it from me. It’s human nature to flog a willin’ horse. You’ll be stuck with it an’ he’ll take advantage.’

  Oh, she hoped so. She did so hope so. Connie stared at her friend’s small, bespectacled face, and whatever Mary read there suddenly caused her to grin as she pushed her glasses further up her small snub nose. ‘Well, lass, I’ve said it afore an’ no doubt I’ll say it agen, there’s never a dull moment. If nothin’ else, there’s never a dull moment.’

  Harold Alridge was more than willing for Connie to take his daughter until he was able, as he put it, to marshal his thoughts and make appropriate plans for the child’s future. He couldn’t have described how he felt about the child to a living soul, but even to look at it made him want to be physically sick. He had planted that thing in his Lucy and in the bearing of it it had killed her. After hours of torture, terrible, terrible torture, it had killed her. It was an . . . an abomination.

  He watched now as Connie went about gathering all the paraphernalia Lucy had bought so happily over the last few months, and after a full minute of silence he had to force himself to say, ‘I am deeply in your debt. My. . . my wife was insistent her parents mustn’t have her child, but I’m really not in a position to have it here.’

  That was ridiculous and they both knew it; a nursemaid would have fitted in easily at the hotel. But Connie merely nodded as though it was perfectly natural before she said, ‘I promised Lucy I would help, didn’t I, and there is plenty of room at home now we have moved. You must come every day if you like and as soon as you feel able to have her home please say, but in the meantime I’m happy to keep her as long as you want. I mean that.’ And then she straightened and stopped her buzzing about as she looked him full in the face and said, her voice soft, ‘Lucy would have wanted this so please don’t worry; I will take good care of her child.’

  If it occurred to either of them that the child had been referred to throughout as purely Lucy’s, neither of them mentioned the fact, but when Connie carried the baby out to the horse-drawn taxi carriage Harold had arranged, two sober-faced housemaids following with the crib packed full of clothes and blankets and the two pap-bottles the midwife had sent out for, Harold didn’t ask to kiss his daughter goodbye and Connie didn’t suggest it.

  And so it was that during the month of August, when more and more nations declared war on each other and the human casualties began to rise with alarming swiftness, culminating in the blood-bath at Mons when British, French and Belgian troops fell beneath the oncoming German cavalry, one little Sunderland bairn slept the month away surrounded by love and gently soothing arms.

  Little Hazel – the name Lucy had wanted for a girl – rarely cried, but then she was rarely allowed to. From the moment Connie brought her down to the bakery at six-thirty in the morning until she went back upstairs with Connie and Mary any time after nine in the evening when they had finished cleaning and clearing away for the next morning, there were several pairs of arms reaching out to her if she so much as raised a squawk.

  Ellen’s first job of the morning was to mix ten stones of flour with salt and yeast in five bath tins, and then, once the first bath tin dough had risen, to weigh out just over one pound two ounces for each loaf to be baked before working the loaves and then putting them to rise again. This was followed by brushing the bread with raw lard before putting the first batch, now duly risen, into one of the huge ovens. Once the ovens were full Ellen would prepare the tea cakes and fancy cakes, and until little Hazel’s appearance at Holmeside this stage of the morning proceedings had taken place at about half past six, when Connie and
Mary had first come down. Now, however, Ellen had taken to arriving at the bakery at 4.00 a.m. and taking a break at six-thirty, which meant she was just in time to give the baby her bottle whilst the first quantity of tea cakes rose in their prover.

  Mary, in particular, found this desire of her mother’s to hold and pet the infant more than a little surprising, due to the fact that Ellen had never shown a pronounced maternal streak with her own brood.

  ‘That’s different, lass.’ When Mary had voiced her feelings her mother had been quite unrepentant. ‘You can’t give ’em back when they’re yer own, an’ when ye’re workin’ yer fingers to the bone an’ knakky-kneed with exhaustion it’s enough to keep ’em fed an’ watered.’

  ‘Aye, I suppose it is.’ Mary had stood staring at the thin, scraggy figure who looked twenty years older than her forty-seven years and then she had gone across and hugged her mother for the first time in a long time. Her mam had been through it an’ all, and her da, bless them, and they had tried to do the best for all their bairns in their own way, she thought soberly. And since she’d started to take Wilf round for an hour or two some weeks they had made him so welcome – you’d think she was being courted by royalty rather than a porter who barely earned enough to keep body and soul together. How they would ever afford to get wed she didn’t know, not on Wilf’s money; not that he’d asked her anyway. But she had the feeling he would if his prospects were a bit brighter. And what would she say if he did? She had asked herself this more than once lately, and the answer was always the same – she’d face that when it happened. Wilf was a canny body, aye, he was, and she ought to be thanking her lucky stars he was so keen on her, but. . . that other side, the side that came with marriage. It scared her to death. But then so did the thought of Wilf going away to war and her never seeing him again.

  There were more and more young men joining up to ‘teach that damn maniac, the Kaiser, a lesson he’d never forget’. Thinking he could go cocking a snook at the British and knocking hell out of them poor Belgians; he’d learn, he would, by the time they’d finished with him. It was the universal opinion of Britain’s working man and frequently expressed in the pubs and working men’s clubs, inciting more and more lads, who didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other let alone what it took to kill a man, to ‘show what they were made of’.