Angel of the North

by Annie Wilkinson

  There seemed to be no escape for Marie from the drudgery and privation and strain of looking after the house, and the cantankerous invalid her mother had become, on top of the constant dread of air raids or of struggling with their horrible consequences. For the first couple of years of the war the raids had been few and relatively mild, and day-to-day contact with people at the hospital had provided interest. She had a vital job of work to do and it had even been uplifting, the feeling that they were all in it together, working for a greater good. Her job, and regular outings to dances and the pictures with Margaret and Nancy or her current admirer, had added a sparkle to her life. Meeting Charles again put the icing on her cake. Her future had been settled, and it looked rosy. Sirens and bombs might scare her for the moment, but they couldn’t squash her zest for life. She had leaped out of bed every morning with an unquenchable optimism and absolute faith that they would all come through unscathed.

  Margaret’s death had shown her how misplaced such blind faith was, and her father’s death and her mother’s devastating injury drove the lesson home. Now Nancy was dead, as well. For Marie, the companionship of her friends and the cheering visits to dance halls and the pictures were over, and with Charles away with the army all the joy had leached out of her life. For her mother’s benefit, Marie kept up a façade of determined cheerfulness, but faith and optimism were at a low ebb.

  The wireless was her sole remaining pleasure and saver of sanity, and she played it all day long. She was standing in the kitchen with her hands in the sink, squeezing suds through the net curtains, half listening to Forces Favourites, broadcasting requests from servicemen. She was singing along to some of the music when her heart turned over at the sound of a familiar, cheerful voice.

  ‘Hello, Marie! This is Charles!’

  Her hands became still. As she listened intently to the words she felt that Charles was almost in the room beside her.

  ‘You accused me of not being romantic, but just now I’m as romantic as anyone you can name, from my East Yorks cap to my size ten army boots,’ he said. ‘I’m sending you all my love, so keep it safe, all right? You’re always in my thoughts, and I can’t wait to see you again. I hope you’ll like the song. I mean every word.’

  A male vocalist started singing ‘It Had to Be You’. She would have given everything to have Charles there in reality, to take her in his arms and listen, while she poured out every fond thought in her mind. ‘For all your faults, I love you still,’ the singer crooned. Tears welled into her eyes and rolled down her cheeks at the tenderness of it, for their hopes of a future together, and the sadness of separation. His next leave was probably a long way off, but that he was alive and she would see him, and hold him in her arms, and love him were the sweetest feelings of that bitter-sweet moment. The bitterness came with the thought of poor George and also Margaret’s husband, Terry, so that the programme, intended as a morale-booster, filled her with a sorrow so overwhelming she opened the back door and sat on the kitchen step well out of sight and hearing of her mother, with her heart bursting and eyes streaming.

  Alfie came crashing through the door of the yard with his bike, home from school. He leaned it against the wall, then crouched down beside her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, round-eyed with concern. ‘What’s up, Marie? What’s up? Is it Nancy?’

  She dabbed her eyes on her frilly apron, her voice thick. ‘It’s everything.’

  ‘You’ll be all right, don’t worry. Anyway, she might be all right. One of the assistants at the Co-op when I went for my sweet ration said she doesn’t think Nancy’s dead. She says she could have sworn she saw Nancy in the station before the hospital got bombed, getting on a train.’

  Marie shook her head. ‘She’d got nothing to get on any trains for,’ she said, ‘and even if she had, she’d never have gone without a word to any of us. Your assistant must have seen somebody who looked like her, that’s all.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose she would,’ Alfie said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Oh, well, we’re alive, and we’ve got to soldier on, till we beat old No-balls. So come on, buck up.’

  She laughed through her tears at this child who was sometimes so like a man. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute, Alfie. I’m in a funny mood, that’s all. Don’t tell Mam. I’ll pull myself together, then we’ll have a cup of tea and a lump of vinegar cake, all right?’

  ‘Right-o. And what about a game of battleships?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She heaved herself up and put the kettle on, then rinsed the curtains and pegged them out before making a pot of weak tea, sparing the rations.

  ‘Have you been crying?’ her mother asked when she took it through to the front room. ‘You haven’t been crying just because I told you the windows were smeared, have you?’

  ‘No, Mam,’ Marie said, delving into the sideboard drawer for writing materials. ‘I’m going to write to Charles.’

  ‘Pass me a couple of sheets of paper, will you? I’ll write to our Pam while you’re doing that. You should write as well, and so should you, Alfie.’

  ‘What for?’ he demanded. ‘She never writes to me.’

  ‘She would if you wrote to her.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t. She thinks I’m not good enough for her, now.’

  Marie handed him a sheet of paper and said, softly: ‘Just write, will you? Not to upset your mam. Just put: “Write to your mother, will you, Pam? She looks for a letter every day.” You don’t have to say anything else, if you don’t want to.’

  Alfie glanced at his mother, and sat down, seeming more than happy to send this reproach to his sister. Marie started a long letter to Charles telling him all the news, ending with things she would never have said on the phone at his parents’ house.

  She sealed it, feeling much better. A good cry and an hour’s peace and quiet had made her ready to look on the bright side again. If her mother was well enough to be constantly picking and fault finding she might soon be well enough to be left while Marie went back to nursing, and work a lot more rewarding than cleaning windows to her mother’s exacting standards.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Is your Alfie in?’ Jenny asked. ‘Me dad’s come home. They’ve sent me out to play for a bit.’

  ‘Come in,’ Marie said. ‘He can show you his shrapnel collection, and teach you how to play battleships while I go and peel the spuds.’

  ‘Did you manage to get Alfie off with the evacuees?’ George asked, a week later.

  ‘Not a hope in hell. When it was time to go, I searched high and low for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. Later on Danny Elsworth came round to tell us they’d had a phone call from my uncle Alfred saying he’d landed at their place. Uncle Alfred’s not objecting and we’re obviously fighting a losing battle trying to make him go anywhere else, so we’ve left him there.’

  ‘He’s a wilful little blighter, isn’t he? Well, the reason I’ve come is, I’ve had a bit of an upsetment,’ George said with a perplexed frown on his face. ‘I’d been meaning to do it all week, and today I finally managed to get to the bank to draw Nancy’s share of our savings out, to give them to her mother. Nance never made a will, and I thought: her mother’s not well off, and I’ve got a decent job, so she’s got more right to the money than me, seeing me and Nance weren’t married. Well, I couldn’t find the book, and when they looked into it at the bank, it turns out that Nancy drew all our money out the day before she died, all bar the shilling that you have to leave in to keep the account open. I just don’t know why she’d do that, or where the money’s gone. We’d no plans to buy anything. I can’t understand it, and I wondered if you knew anything about it.’

  Marie felt her face drop.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ George asked. His wounded grey eyes searched her face intensely and a sudden heat flooded Marie’s neck and cheeks. Out of the corner of her eye she caught her reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece, and saw that she had turned brick-red. But to open her mouth about the awful idea that had
struck her was impossible. After all, she might be wrong.

  ‘Look, George, I don’t know anything,’ she said, ‘so I can’t tell you anything. If I were you, I’d go round to see her mother, and tell her what you were going to do.’

  A cloud of suspicion settled on George’s transparent face. ‘You know something, don’t you?’ he said.

  Marie felt like a butterfly on a pin: no escape whichever way she squirmed. ‘Oh, George, I don’t know anything,’ she repeated, her voice betraying her anxiety. ‘Go and see her mother, and tell her what you were going to do. Just see what she says.’

  ‘She might think I’m lying. She might think I decided to keep all the money, and I’m trying to throw the blame on a poor lass who can’t defend herself.’ He had a point. It would seem like that to anyone who didn’t really know him. Poor George, he looked like a wounded puppy. Marie wavered for a moment, and then much against her better judgement said: ‘She won’t if I go with you. I will, if you want me to.’

  ‘Has she written to you?’ Nancy’s mother demanded, as soon as they were inside.

  George’s jaw dropped. ‘Written to me? How can she? We buried her last week.’

  ‘Ha!’ Mrs Harding’s eyes flashed, and her mouth turned down in an expression of contempt. ‘She hasn’t written to you then. I never would have believed a daughter of mine would carry on like she has.’

  George sat down on the settee, blank bewilderment on his face.

  ‘We buried nothing, George! Our Nancy’s cavorting about down South somewhere, with that bloody actor! The one I was telling you about, who needed a wedding ring to tell which one was the mother, and which was the daughter. He seems to have worked it out now.’ Mrs Harding stared at him, waiting for his reaction.

  Then Alfie flashed into Marie’s mind, with his tale of the assistant at the Co-op having seen Nancy at the station. She sank down onto the seat beside George, and watched his face turn drip-white. He was speechless.

  Mrs Harding leaned towards them, her eyes popping with indignation. ‘That same bloody tripe-hound that was sweet-talking me, that’s who she’s gone off with. He’s spinning her a yarn about taking her to see some important friends of his at some film studios; they’re going to give her elocution lessons and turn her into a film star, or so she thinks! They’ve put me through hell, thinking she was dead, torturing myself. Then I got that letter, and after I got over the shock, I could have gone and strangled her, and him as well. The bloody rotten trick she’s played, letting us all think she’d been killed.’

  Marie rallied from the shock enough to put in a word in Nancy’s defence. ‘No, I can’t believe she’d do that, not deliberately,’ she said. ‘She can’t have known about the raids; they don’t report Hull in the papers.’

  ‘Everybody round here knows that “a north-east coast town” means Hull!’ Mrs Harding said, ‘and well she knows it.’

  ‘Then she hasn’t seen the papers,’ Marie said. It had just been thoughtlessness. Nancy was so infatuated with the ‘tripe-hound’ there had been room for nothing else in her mind. It was on the tip of her tongue to say so, and then she saw George’s stricken face, and held her peace.

  ‘Hmm. Maybe.’ Mrs Harding contemplated George for a moment or two, and her anger subsided. She bit her lip, and slowly shook her head. ‘Just look at him – pole-axed! I’ve known for two days, and I still haven’t got over the shock. I should have come to see you, George, but, honestly, it’s taken me all this time to pull myself round. It’s not a very nice trick she’s done, or a very pleasant task she’s left me with.’

  ‘She’s drawn everything we’ve saved out of the bank,’ George whispered.

  ‘You can kiss that goodbye. You’ve about as much chance of getting that back as I’ve got of getting my rent,’ Mrs Harding said. ‘And that’s about as much chance as she’s got of being made into a film star.’

  ‘Everything. She’s taken everything,’ George repeated.

  ‘You knew, Marie,’ he accused, as they walked back to Clumber Street. There was an expression of absolute disgust on his face.

  ‘I knew one of her mother’s lodgers had been sweet-talking her,’ Marie said, ‘but I’d no idea she was going to run off with him. It never entered my mind until you said your savings were gone, and even then I wasn’t sure until we heard it from her mother.’

  ‘Weren’t you?’

  He said it in such a queer tone that Marie felt offended. ‘You don’t think I was in on it, do you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Weren’t you?’ There it came again, tone and all.

  Marie drew herself up to her full height, and gave him a look of disdain. ‘I thought you knew me better than that, George. I’m not the sort for tricks like that. I’m engaged myself, and an engagement means something to me. And even if it didn’t, do you seriously think I’d have gone to a funeral with you and her mother, and all her friends and relations and watched everybody sobbing into their handkerchiefs without saying anything, if I’d had the faintest idea she was still alive?’

  He didn’t answer. Marie parted from him outside her door in Clumber Street sensing that George was more than hurt. He was angry too, and he was tarring her with Nancy’s wrongdoing. Well, if that’s his attitude, she thought, let him stew in it. Trying to help people – ‘meddling in other people’s business’, as Charles called it – was a mug’s game. How she missed him, and the good sense he talked. She would certainly take a lot more notice of him in future. George had been injured, no doubt about it, but he had no reason to be disgusted with her. Marie couldn’t help resenting the injustice. The whole episode and her part in it left a nasty taste in her mouth.

  It preyed on her mind after she went to bed that night. Added to the everlasting fear of air raids it kept her awake for what seemed hours. Eventually she succeeded in putting George out of her mind by determinedly thinking of Chas, and fell into an uneasy sleep. In her dreams she and Chas, light on their feet, were dancing on air under a beautiful chandelier flare, gazing fondly into each other’s eyes and smiling, heedless of the bombs shrieking downward to explode on the tormented city far below them, engulfing it in flames.

  Chapter 14

  Auntie Dot had a pan of mash for the hens bubbling on her Yorkshire range. ‘They’ve even put restrictions on how many you can have now,’ she said, ‘or as good as. You can’t get the feed for more than thirteen, so Alf killed a couple of the old boilers yesterday. I’ve had one of them in a low oven for hours, so it should be nice and tender.’

  ‘You can take the other one home, Marie, stretch your meat ration out a bit,’ Uncle Alfred said.

  It struck Marie hard, the way he addressed his remark to her, unconsciously recognizing her as the responsible one, and relegating her mother into the place of a dependant, someone it was unnecessary to consult.

  ‘I’ve never plucked and drawn a hen before,’ she said. ‘You always did all that sort of thing, didn’t you, Mam?’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything, lass,’ Alf said. ‘You can do it while we’re having a cup of tea. Spread a bit of newspaper round for her to drop the innards and feathers on, Dot.’

  ‘Ugh!’ Marie pulled a face.

  Uncle Alfred grinned. ‘Just think yourself lucky you didn’t have to wring its neck.’

  ‘I’d like to see this,’ Mr Elsworth said, as Dot spread the newspapers. ‘I’ve been thinking about getting a couple of hens myself. They make a mess of flowerbeds, I know, but we haven’t many flowers this year. You can’t eat flowers, can you?’

  ‘Keep them in a cage, and keep shifting it about like I do. They’re good for keeping slugs and other pests down, and the manure’s good for the land.’

  ‘It must cost you a bit in fuel, boiling that stuff up for them,’ Marie’s mother commented, nodding towards the stove.

  Dot nodded. ‘It does, but we’ve got plenty of logs, and it’s handy to have the eggs. It’ll be handy to be able to swap them with neighbours for butter and sugar if eggs go on ra
tion. There’s a rumour that they will, before long.’

  ‘I might get some,’ Mr Elsworth said. ‘I’m getting quite keen on this digging for victory; I feel better for the fresh air and exercise. Of course nothing’s actually ready to eat yet, but so far so good, everything seems to be doing all right. I wish we’d taken a house outside Hull, except it was convenient for my boy going to school, and my business is in Hull, as well.’

  ‘Convenient for Hitler’s bombs, as well, eh?’ Uncle Alfred said.

  ‘Much too convenient for them. Have you seen the city centre since they flattened it? I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw it. They seem to be laying off us a bit, though, since they started on Greece. It’s just as well for Marjorie. It’s enough for her to look after the house now Hannah’s husband’s at home, without putting in extra hours with the WVS.’ Dot and Alfred looked at him, evidently wondering who Hannah was. He paused, Marie guessed feeling a bit embarrassed at displaying his middle-class affluence before the less well-off. ‘Our daily help. Her husband’s on the convoys. He’s home on leave so, naturally, she’s given herself a holiday to be with him.’

  Uncle Alfred gave a dirty laugh. ‘When a bloke’s been away at sea for months, he’s got a lot of catching up to do,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be so coarse, Alfred.’ Auntie Dot shot a meaningful glance towards Danny and Alfie and gave her husband a warning look before handing Marie a dead hen.

  Mr Elsworth’s lips twitched. ‘He deserves his catching up, after being on the convoys. We can’t begrudge him, but Marjorie’s certainly missing Hannah. Housework’s never been her favourite occupation.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Rip all its feathers out, to begin with.’

  ‘You’ve seen me do it before today,’ her mother said.

  ‘Yeah, but I’ve never done it.’ Marie began to pull, and found it a tougher task than she’d imagined. She dropped the feathers on the paper, and was arrested by one of the leading articles.