Angel of the North

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘How awful. I don’t envy you a bit.’

  ‘I’m dreading it, especially telling my sister. And I’m dreading having to leave her afterwards, to get back to Hull. But I work at the hospital. I’m on an early shift tomorrow, and I can’t miss it, we’re so short staffed.’

  ‘No, I suppose the hospitals are packed. Here we are!’ the woman said, as the ferry slowed for the approach to New Holland pier, where the coaches were waiting.

  How different from the bombed streets of Hull, Marie thought, as the coach travelled through the quiet countryside south of Lincoln and dropped her on the edge of Bourne. Some people lived charmed lives; they escaped everything.

  She was amazed at the size of the house where Pam was staying, all gable ends and creepers up the walls, and a front garden full of spring flowers with neat, pruned roses just coming into bud. The sight of it made her glad she’d dressed carefully. She’d thought long and hard before taking her last remaining pair of block-heeled nylons out of their Cellophane packet, but had finally put them on with her smart new navy costume. It was a good decision: this was no place for the slacks and old checked jacket she’d have been far more comfortable wearing.

  A plump lady in late middle age, with grey hair and rosy cheeks, answered the door and gave a restrained smile as she extended her hand in welcome. Marie shook it.

  ‘You must be tired after your journey. Hungry, too, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m Morag Stewart.’

  Marie followed her into the largest drawing room she’d ever seen. A grand piano stood in one corner, with a fringed silk shawl draped over it. Morag led her to a leather wing-backed chair by the bow window.

  ‘Sit here while I find Pamela, and then I’ll leave you together for a while.’

  Pamela. She was just ‘our Pam’ at home. After about five minutes, Pamela appeared alone, dressed in unfamiliar clothes, looking every inch a child of the upper-middle classes. Marie got up and threw her arms round her, clasping her tightly. Pam’s response was more restrained.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ Marie said, releasing her and drawing her towards a chair. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  Pamela sat with her hands folded, bewildered, but quite composed.

  ‘Our mam’s in hospital. She was caught in an air raid and badly hurt. She was unconscious for a day or two, and she’s still very, very poorly, and . . .’ Marie blurted it all out like a dam bursting, and ended by dissolving into tears. Pam stood beside her chair, patting her shoulder and murmuring words of comfort, while Marie mopped her floods of tears with her embroidered handkerchief, conscious while she did it that this was the exact opposite of the scene she had imagined.

  ‘What about Dad?’ Pam asked, when Marie’s sobs had abated.

  ‘He’s dead, Pam! He must be, short of a miracle. He went into the shelter on Ellis Street, and it got a direct hit. Everybody inside it was killed, and some of the bodies they’ve found couldn’t be identified. He hasn’t been seen since. I can’t see how he can have escaped, Pam.’ Marie delivered the last with a strangled sob, her tears flowing copiously again.

  Amazingly cool and collected, Pam said: ‘I’ll go and get you some clean handkerchiefs, and I’ll ask Aunt Morag to bring the coffee in.’

  A little later, with her make-up ruined and face blotchy, but with some of her self-possession restored, Marie sat by the bay window with Pam and Mr and Mrs Stewart, looking out at the beautiful spring flowers. The coffee was all milk, she noticed, and the scones thickly buttered. There seemed to be no shortage of anything here, and nobody mentioned coupons. The fertile fields of Lincolnshire evidently didn’t stint the people who lived beside them.

  After a string of platitudes followed by a long silence, Mr Stewart said: ‘Why don’t you play your sister something on the piano, Pamela? I’m sure she’d like to hear you.’

  Pamela turned towards him, and with absolute assurance said: ‘I won’t if you don’t mind, Uncle Alec. I think I’ll go to my room now.’

  He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘All right, dear. We realize how terribly upsetting this is for you.’

  Marie watched her sister’s retreating back and thought: we’ve lost her. At the door Pam turned, and Marie was struck by her fair hair, long and loose, and falling in waves to her shoulders, how like a pale rose petal her skin was, and how perfect her features, her blue eyes and lithe little figure, just beginning to take on a woman’s shape. Funny how she’d barely noticed these things when Pam was at home.

  ‘Do you realize,’ Pam said, ‘that if we hadn’t been evacuated, Alfie and I would have been in that shelter with Dad?’

  Alfie and I. It would have been ‘me and our Alfie’ two short months ago. Pamela hadn’t forgotten her grammar in her grief, and she hadn’t been slow to realize that she might also have been killed, had she stayed in Hull. Marie finished her coffee and took leave of the Stewarts, and then walked rapidly towards the address she’d been given for Alfie. Pam – Pamela – was evidently so well settled in her new home with her new, doting auntie and uncle that except for her Hull accent – already far less pronounced – no one would guess she’d ever lived anywhere else, or known any other background. She’d always been their mother’s pet, and now she was the pet of a couple of retired teachers with no children of their own, who gave her music lessons and sent her to dancing classes, and generally treated her like a princess. They were friendly with other teachers and lecturers, the sort of people who have friends round for musical soirées on the piano and the violin. The cultured sort, devoted to music, literature and painting, and everything that makes life civilized. Even the Elsworths looked like barbarians beside them. Marie had left the Stewarts’ house feeling that if Pam hadn’t already forgotten them all she probably intended to. And what a beautiful new knitted jumper she’d had on, in blue Robin Pearl with a lacy feather stitch. Marie recognised the pattern; she’d seen one of the nurses on nights knitting a similar one. Pam seemed to belong more to the Stewarts than to her own family now. And since she was taking it upon herself to provide Pamela with clothing perhaps Auntie Morag had better start knitting her something in black, Marie thought, grimly.

  An overfed and malevolent-looking grey cat sat in the front window of a modest little end terrace house on Hereward Street, staring at Marie as she raised her hand to knock on the green gloss-painted front door. It was opened before her knuckles made contact with the wood by a tall, sour-looking woman, her dark, greying hair tied severely back.

  ‘Go round the back, will you?’

  Marie went round the back. No creepers here, all was unrelieved brick and concrete. At the back, mangle, mop bucket and zinc washtub took the place of roses and spring bulbs.

  ‘You’re half an hour late. You’d better come in.’

  ‘Sorry. You must be Mrs Morton,’ Marie said, stepping into a beautifully clean but cheerless kitchen. There was no fire in the grate, but Marie noted the Calvinist motto worked in cross-stitch prominent over the mantelpiece: ‘Thou God seest me.’ Very cheering. Marie had a feeling that Mrs Morton’s god might be the spiritual equivalent of the boss of the Gestapo.

  Mrs Morton looked aggrieved. ‘You’re late,’ she repeated. ‘It would have been a bad job if I’d had to go out, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I had a bit of trouble finding you,’ said Marie.

  ‘Can’t think why. It’s easy enough. There aren’t that many streets in Bourne. Not like Hull.’

  Alfie was sitting unnaturally still on an old chaise longue under the window, beside an older boy. He was scrubbed to a shine but he looked pale, and skinnier than when Marie had last seen him. She was struck by the dark circles under his eyes.

  ‘Hello, Alfie,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Marie.’

  ‘He’s clean, for once. It’s nearly killed him, having to sit there for half a day and keep clean. He’s forever bringing mud into the house on his boots, and getting his clothes dirty, aren’t you, Alfred? This is my son, Ernest,’ Mrs Morton said, noddi
ng towards the older boy.

  ‘Hello, Ernest.’

  ‘Hello, Marie.’

  Marie didn’t like the uninvited familiarity from a youngster. ‘Don’t you like to go out with your friends, Ernest?’ she asked.

  Ernest assumed a virtuous expression. ‘Not when we’ve got visitors, Marie.’

  ‘I’ll boil the kettle again, then. Stop picking your nose, Alfie,’ Mrs Morton said, and then directed her accusing gaze at Marie. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s having to stand in my own kitchen, watching him picking his nose.’

  ‘And he wets the bed,’ Ernest sniggered.

  The picking stopped. Alfie looked browbeaten.

  ‘Be quiet, Ernest. Don’t embarrass the poor lad in front of his sister,’ Mrs Morton said, and in an undertone to Marie she added, with a sniff: ‘Makes no end of washing, though, and him eleven years old! But we’ve all got to make sacrifices in wartime, I suppose, and I won’t have it said I’ve done less than anybody else.’

  ‘Very good of you, I’m sure,’ said Marie, far from enchanted to be on the receiving end of such goodness – even if only second-hand.

  ‘And he roams about till all hours at night, till I’m worried sick and Ernie has to go out looking for him. I want you to give him a good talking-to about that.’

  ‘I will,’ Marie said.

  Ernie sat there looking smug and long-suffering, reinforcing her aversion to him. He reminded her of a sly kid she’d gone to school with, whose chief pleasure lay in inciting other children into mischief, then sitting back to enjoy the show when they got caught and punished. ‘Are you eating properly, Alfie?’ she asked.

  He shot a wary glance in Mrs Morton’s direction before saying: ‘Yes.’

  That sniff again. ‘He certainly is. He eats us out of house and home.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Marie said.

  It was apparent that Mrs Morton was not going to leave her alone with Alfie so that she could tell him the awful news in private, and she would have to tell him before she left to get the bus back. Marie took a deep breath. ‘Well, Alfie, I’d better tell you why I’ve come . . .’ Marie’s dam of pent-up misery had burst at the Stewarts’, and now she managed to tell her brother about the disaster without a tear.

  He howled. Marie handed him a couple of the handkerchiefs Pam had given her.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Morton said, with great politeness but no discernible sympathy, ‘oh dear. That is unfortunate.’

  ‘Never mind about the tea,’ Marie said, in a manner decided enough to deter opposition. ‘I’ll take him outside for a few minutes.’ She ushered Alfie to the door, with Mrs Morton so close behind that for a moment Marie thought she was going to follow them out into the street.

  ‘I’m coming home with you,’ Alfie said, as soon as they were out of earshot.

  ‘It’s impossible, Alfie. Mum’s in hospital, and it’ll take her a long time to get better. And I have to work. There’s no one to look after you. And the air raids are terrible. A lot of people have been killed in Hull. If you’d been there the other night,’ she said, repeating Pam’s instant realization, ‘you’d have been in the shelter with Dad. You’d have been killed as well.’

  ‘I don’t care. I want to come home. She’s horrible, and Ernie’s a dirty, nasty bugger. She gives him my sweet ration.’

  Her heart sank. He might be exaggerating, but even if he wasn’t he was better off here than in Hull. ‘There’s worse things than having your sweet ration pinched,’ she said, ‘and if you’d been in Casualty when they brought our mam in, you’d know that. And don’t swear. What’s the school like?’

  ‘Lousy.’

  ‘Pam likes her school. The people she’s with say she’s doing well there.’

  ‘She sucks up to everybody.’

  ‘It would be better all round if you did the same, Alfie,’ Marie said. ‘Why the hell can’t you behave yourself? Get on Mrs Morton’s good side; give her less to complain about.’

  ‘Can’t stand her, and she hasn’t got a good side. Or Ernie, either; rotten bully. Take me with you. I want to see our mam.’

  She tried to impress on him the sheer impossibility of taking him with her as they walked back to the house. When they reached the gate it was evident he’d heard nothing she had said. ‘Take me with you,’ he repeated, in a very subdued voice.

  ‘I can’t, Alfie,’ she said, despairing and exasperated with him. ‘You know very well I can’t. I have to work at the hospital. Our mam’s so badly wounded she won’t be home for ages, and there’s nobody else to look after you now. We’re fighting a war, remember? We’re all in it, and you’ll have to be brave and do your bit, like the rest of us. Anyway, the bus is full, there isn’t a seat.’

  Alfie started to weep. ‘I’ll sit on your knee!’

  ‘Come on, buck up.’ Marie pulled a lace hankie out and wiped his tears. You’ll have to make the best of it for a bit, Alfie. I’ve got to work. There’s a lot of wounded people need looking after. And apart from everything else, we need the money.’

  ‘If you’re so sure Dad’s dead, we ought to be having a funeral. I want to come to the funeral.’

  ‘I’m not sure what’s happening yet, Alfie.’ Marie said, not yet ready to give up all hope. ‘I’ll write to you as soon as I find out.’

  She took his hands in hers, and noticed his fingernails chewed down to the quick. That was something new. He’d never been a fingernail biter before, and he’d never wet the bed, either. She threw her arms round him for a last hug. ‘I’ll come and see you again as soon as I can, Alfie,’ she said, and fled for the bus.

  She boarded it with a bad conscience. In no mood for conversation, she sat down beside a woman who was gazing out of the window, wrapped in her own thoughts. To Marie’s relief she proved equally unsociable, and they travelled in blessed silence all the way to New Holland and the ferry. By the time they got there, the force of circumstances had helped Marie to talk herself out of her misgivings about Alfie. Almost.

  Charles was waiting for her on Corporation Pier, his hazel eyes full of sympathy. ‘Your ordeal’s over, poor girl. How was it?’

  ‘Bad enough.’

  ‘How did they take it?’

  ‘Not as I’d expected. Still, it’s over now.’ She held out the money he had given her. ‘Here’s your fiver. I didn’t need it.’

  He tucked it into his inside pocket. ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘Our Pam is. She’s got a very good place,’ Marie said, taking his arm and walking with him towards the car. ‘Trust Pamela to land with her bum in the butter. I expected her to be beside herself with grief, but you’d have thought I was talking about people she hardly knew.’

  ‘Maybe she hasn’t had time for it to sink in.’

  ‘Well, it certainly sank in with Alfie. He cried his eyes out; I couldn’t console him. And he’s with a real sour-faced widow and her horrible son.’

  ‘Perhaps he gives her plenty to be sour about,’ Charles said. ‘Most of Alfie’s troubles are of his own making, if you ask me. Remember the day he thought it would be a good joke to stick a spud up the exhaust of Dad’s car? If I hadn’t caught him it would have ruined the engine. That would make anybody sour. And when he carved his initials into your piano with that Swiss army knife some idiot gave him?’

  That brought a smile to her lips. How could she forget? Her mother and father had gone to the allotment to gather in the last of the vegetables, Pam was with a friend down the street, and she and Charles had sent Alfie out to play so they could take this golden opportunity to have an hour or two to themselves on the front-room sofa. They’d been in a Hollywood-style embrace when Charles had suddenly frozen, staring at the window. Marie had turned to see Alfie making hideous faces at them, his features distorted and whitened by the pressure of the glass. It was then that Charles had given Alfie the knife as a bribe to ‘hop it’.

  ‘That idiot was you, Chas,’ she said.

  ‘And I’ve never regretted anything as
much in my life,’ he said. ‘And I got the blame from your mother, not him, the little rotter. Still, I’ll forgive and forget, things being what they are.’

  ‘You’re all heart,’ she laughed.

  Chapter 6

  Charles was waiting outside the hospital when she finished her early shift the following day. He jumped out of the car and opened the passenger door for her. ‘I’d have liked to take you dancing on my last night of freedom, but I thought you’d be too tired, so I got us two tickets for Hull New Theatre,’ he said. ‘All you have to do there is sit and relax. They’re doing Rebecca. It got a rattling good write-up in the paper.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Marie, although she was not in the mood for either dancing or playgoing. ‘I wonder if I’m ever going to get to know something definite about Dad. Alfie asked about a funeral. If he’s dead, I’ll have to organize one.’ She sniffed back sudden tears.

  Charles put a comforting arm around her. ‘Does your mother realize he’s missing yet?’

  ‘Well, she knows he’s not with her because the nurses say she keeps asking for him, but I don’t think she realizes he’s missing in the sense of “presumed dead”. I’ve tried to tell her but it’s hard to know whether you’re getting through, because she doesn’t hear half of what you say, and she forgets the rest. God, what a mess. She wouldn’t be fit to go to any funeral anyway. It’s Pam and Alfie I’m worried about. Alfie would definitely want to come, and I wonder if I should send for them both. What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Charles with a frown. ‘Pretty gruelling for anybody, I should think. Maybe Pam’s old enough to stand it, but it might be too much for young Alfie. I’d have thought so, anyway. But you know them better than I do.’

  ‘I ought to let them know – give them the choice.’

  ‘Cross that bridge when you come to it. Until you know something definite; there’s nothing you can do. I’ll run you home, we’ll get something to eat, and then you get your glad rags on. Let’s try to take your mind off it all for our last evening together, at least.’