Angel of the North

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘Please, take me up to Beverley to see Mam, and call in at Uncle Alfred’s on the way back, so I can see Alfie,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Of course he will, as soon as we get enough petrol,’ Mrs Elsworth said. ‘But the trip to Malton’s used the ration up for this week, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that, Marie, love,’ George called from the passage. ‘I’ll take you up on the motorbike.’

  Mr Elsworth looked at his wife and raised his eyebrows, then turned again to Marie. ‘If we can do anything to help, you just let us know.’

  ‘I’ve been talking to a chap in the Legal Department,’ George said, after the table had been cleared and his mother was in the kitchen, washing the tea things. ‘He says if I can find Nancy’s address, I can get a solicitor and make a claim against her for the money she took. I don’t suppose you might have it, being as you were her best friend?’

  Marie shook her head. ‘I haven’t heard from her since before . . .’

  ‘The funeral? Or the mock funeral, rather.’

  ‘Yes. I mean no. I don’t know where she is,’ said Marie, very glad not to know.

  ‘Never mind. I dare say there’s ways and means of finding out,’ he said, replacing his empty cup in the saucer. ‘We’ll go up and see how your mam’s doing now, if you like.’

  ‘Do you mind if we don’t, George?’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t dare. I don’t think I’m up to a spin on a motorbike just yet. It’s painful to breathe, and I have to be careful how I walk.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I was forgetting – although I don’t know how I could, seeing I was the one who dug you out. Lucky I heard you, though, wasn’t it?’

  Lucky for her, Marie thought, wondering how anyone could forget saving someone’s life.

  George brought the forms the following day, and Marie sat down with them after tea, completely flummoxed at some of the questions. ‘They’re asking me what my dad’s income was during a representative working year,’ she said. ‘How do I know? He never talked about money, and now he’s dead, the house is flattened, Mam’s in hospital, and I can’t get there to see her.’ She read on. What other earnings went into the house, what pensions had they? Well, there was her dad’s war pension, but she wasn’t sure whether that had stopped when he died. Her mother would know, but she wasn’t fit to be worried with questions. And what scholarships? None yet, but Pam might get one before long. Did she still count as a member of their household, seeing that the Stewarts seemed to have taken her over, and she might never come back home at all? Not that there was a home to come back to, unless Marie could find somewhere affordable to rent, where she could look after Pam and Alfie, and her mother – if her mother pulled through. Nothing was settled. Everything was an ‘if’, and what was true today might not be true tomorrow. There were endless questions enquiring into the minutest details of their lives, demanding to know things she didn’t know herself, and that her mother had probably forgotten. At the end of it all came the demand for a medical certificate to be attached to the form, which would mean trailing back to the hospital and waiting hours until Dr Steele could see her.

  ‘I can’t fill this in, George,’ she said. ‘Apart from telling them what our names are, and what the address was, I can’t answer any of these questions.’

  ‘Just guess,’ he said, ‘and write a note at the end, explaining. That’s what other people do. One of the chaps at the Relief Office says he thinks some people make it up as they go along, and claim for all sorts of stuff they never had in the first place.’

  ‘And then I suppose they end up in court for trying to defraud the government.’

  ‘I’ve yet to hear of one.’

  Marie looked again at the form, unconvinced. But she’d have to make a stab at it; living off George and his mother was something she couldn’t contemplate. She began to write down her guesses, picturing herself sitting in a gaol cell if they turned out to be wrong.

  George suddenly jumped up and went into the passage, reappearing with his jacket half on. ‘Right! I’ve decided! I’m going to go and see Nancy’s mother and get her address,’ he said ‘I shan’t tell her I’m starting court proceedings; better let her think I want Nance back, for now, although I definitely don’t. She’s made a complete laughing stock of me, and she’s going to pay me everything she owes me, or else. Including giving back that engagement ring. I haven’t forgotten that, either.’

  ‘Why not just let it go, George?’ she said. ‘It’s eating you away.’

  That was not what George wanted to hear. ‘It’s obvious nobody’s ever done the dirty on you, or you wouldn’t talk like that,’ he snapped. ‘She’s a Judas, Marie. A Judas!’

  She heard the slamming of the front door as he left; she would have had to be stone deaf not to. Let him go then, the idiot! She had enough troubles of her own without listening to him, harping on all the time. She was beginning to see why Nancy had gone. If only she’d insisted on going to Dunswell in that ambulance, instead of letting him persuade her to come here, so he could din his complaints about Nancy into her aching ears every minute of the day.

  When that reaction subsided she felt a spasm of guilt at harbouring such uncharitable thoughts about the man who’d saved her life. George had been very good to her, and she ought to remember it. She turned her attention back to her forms, to struggle with them unaided – not that he could have helped, anyway. If she couldn’t answer the questions, what hope had he, for all his promises? She put the form aside. She’d write to Pam, instead. That would be a pleasanter occupation than form-filling, if only by the narrowest margin.

  ‘You’ll be happy to know we’re still alive, if you can remember who we are, now you’ve got your new relations, who aren’t related to us,’ she began. Her mam was at death’s door, she was injured, the house was blown to smithereens, and they hadn’t seen Smut since the bombing, she continued, and ended with: ‘Hope you’re having a lovely time in Bourne and doing well with your piano lessons.’

  Aunt Edie emerged from the kitchen with three beakers of tea as she put the finished letter aside.

  ‘Where’s George?’

  ‘Gone to see Nancy’s mother.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To get her address.’

  ‘I hope he hasn’t decided he wants her back. She’s not worth it. He won’t touch her with tongs again, if he’s got any sense . . .’

  Aunt Edie drank the extra beaker of tea herself, intermittently slaking her throat throughout her excoriations of Nancy and ‘sluts like that’.

  After she’d returned to the kitchen Marie read through her letter to Pam, and tore it up. Her father was dead, and her mother might not be long for this world. It looked as though they’d lost Pam, so what good could such nastiness do? And really, was it fair to blame a girl of thirteen for wanting to be safe, and get the best from life?

  George was back an hour later, very pleased at his own cleverness in getting Nancy’s address by playing the broken-hearted lover. ‘Well, that was a good ruse,’ he laughed, ‘and Nancy’s mum fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I even got tea and sympathy! “Poor George,” she said, but you wait: it’ll be “poor Nancy” by the time I’ve finished with her.’

  Marie was appalled. ‘But you lied, George!’ she said.

  ‘Of course I lied! She wouldn’t have given it to me if I’d told her I was going to drag her daughter through the courts, would she? When you’re dealing with liars, you play by their rules, or you lose! Nancy started it, and I’ll finish it – by being a better damned liar than she is.’

  ‘But did she ever actually tell you any lies, George?’

  He gave her a look of fury. ‘Of course she did!’

  ‘When?’

  His face flushed and twisted in anguish, and brimming tears glittered on his lower eyelids. ‘When she told me she loved me!’ he almost sobbed. ‘She lived a lie!’

  Marie looked away and there was a minute’s painful silence. When she glanced at him aga
in George’s tears were gone, and in their stead she saw an icy composure.

  ‘Do you want her address?’ he asked. ‘I’ll copy it out for you. You can write to her yourself.’

  ‘I’d better not. I wouldn’t know what to say, and I’ve got too many other things on my mind just now.’

  ‘Say the same as me. Give her the Scarborough Warning, like a true friend. Tell her: George is out for blood, so you’d better pay him what you owe him – or else! That’s all she needs to know.’

  In the privacy of her own room late that evening Marie did write – to Charles.

  It hadn’t crossed George’s mind that if I did write to Nancy, I might have some news of my own – like being bombed out of my home and having my mother at death’s door in hospital. It’s the deliberate, malicious way he’s going about it that turns me off. It wasn’t like that with Nancy. She thought she was in love with fly-by-night Monty. She left George without a spiteful thought in her head . . .

  On reading the letter through before sealing it, it struck Marie that Nancy had left without any thought for George at all. Malicious thoughts showed some feeling, at least. After years of devotion and planning for their future together George had been treated as if he counted for absolutely nothing. It must have struck like a dagger through his heart. The quiet, self-effacing lad of old, who’d never had much to say for himself, who had never attracted anybody’s notice, was certainly intent on being noticed now. For Nancy’s sake she hoped that ‘Monty’ – or whatever his name really was – turned out to be true to his promises.

  The sole topic of conversation at the Maltbys’ in the days that followed was Nancy. Hitler, Goering and the entire German armed forces couldn’t match her for infamy, in the eyes of George and his mother. Nothing could deflect them from the subject. Marie’s mind was full of her own disaster, but let her start talking about her own worries and by some convoluted path or other the discussion came back to Nancy. Everything came back to Nancy: Nancy’s treachery, Nancy’s lies, and Nancy’s ‘sticky fingers’, and how Nancy was going to be made to pay back the money and suffer court proceedings if she didn’t. The constant repetition of it all made Marie feel that the message was being purposely directed at her, as Nancy’s friend.

  The post brought her a letter from Chas early on Saturday morning, and she took it upstairs to read it in her bedroom. He was full of sympathy for the ‘hellish time’ she was having, and frustrated at being too far away to help. He’d always thought George an insipid sort of a chap, but he couldn’t blame him for his attitude to Nancy. She should go to stay with his parents, then she wouldn’t have to be bothered with it all. He couldn’t get compassionate leave since she wasn’t in danger, but he was desperately trying to get home, to swap leave with anyone he could. She should keep listening to the wireless, he would keep asking for songs to be played for her. ‘You’re always in my thoughts,’ he ended, and signed off, ‘With all my love, your own, Chas’.

  ‘He can’t get home,’ she told them at the breakfast table, before George set off for work, disappointment written on her face and loaded in her voice. ‘He says because I’m not at death’s door, and we’re not married, they won’t give him any leave.’

  ‘Well, at least he tried, and he’s written to you; you’ve got to give him credit for that,’ Aunt Edie sympathized. ‘Nancy would have done a lot better if she’d had the decency to write to George, as well as her mother.’

  ‘She’d have done even better if she’d had the guts to tell me what she intended before she buggered off, and she’d have done better still if she’d left my money alone,’ George added, and took a vicious bite out of his toast, cut thick as a doorstep.

  ‘She hadn’t the guts. She’s a coward, as well as a . . . well, there’s a word for women like her, who jilt decent young men and hop off with their mother’s fly-by-night lodgers, but I’m not going to soil my mouth on it,’ Aunt Edie said, turning her wide, short-sighted eyes in Marie’s direction.

  It was too much. Marie’s nerves were wrecked by her aching ears and painful ribs. Even taking a deep breath was agonizing. She was shattered by the bombing of her home and the loss of everything she had – every penny, everything she owned, except the pyjamas she’d been buried alive in. That was more than enough to deal with. George and his mother had been kind in their way, but the strain of being expected to take the opposing side in a war against Nancy, of being sucked into George’s vendetta, was too much.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, more to herself than to George and his mother.

  Aunt Edie’s wide-open eyes were still on her. ‘Go?’ she asked. ‘Go where?’

  Chapter 17

  Marie stepped carefully along Clumber Street in her too-large dress and her too-large blue sandals and her skimpy cardigan, inhaling the fresh air as deeply as she dared, trying to avoid an agonizing grating of her ribs. Through an open door she could hear a radio, and laughter. Probably It’s That Man Again, or some other skit, she guessed. She stopped for a moment beside the skeleton that had once been their home. The front wall was almost gone, and the slates were off, but the staircase was intact. Paneless windows stared down at her like sightless eyes. She had a sudden vision of her mother, much younger, sitting on the sills to clean the outsides of those sash-windows, and the memory was so vivid she said: ‘Mam.’ The pavement sparkled with glass splinters that had had the benefit of her own smeary attempts at cleaning only a week or so ago. It hardly mattered now. All those days of hard work, washing and ironing curtains and running around trying to do everything to her mother’s liking – it had all been labour in vain. If only she’d known.

  The piano was smashed, its strings everywhere. It would take a bit of tuning now, she thought, and for some reason that struck her as funny. She chuckled, and quickly stopped, for the pain in her ribs. No, it wasn’t likely they’d ever get another tune out of that, and they couldn’t even use it for firewood, since the chimney was gone and the fireplace was hidden by rubble. That thought tickled her as well, almost to the point of hysteria, and stifling her laughter made her eyes water. Perhaps George could chop it up for his mother. She could tell him to imagine it was Nancy, and he’d have it reduced to matchwood in five minutes flat. Sheet music was spilling out of the broken piano stool, the top copy a sketch of a man’s lovesick face and the caption above: ‘It Had to Be You’. Her heart gave a painful little throb. Charles, she thought, why aren’t you here?

  She was about to walk on when Jenny’s head appeared above the rubble, her mouth moving, saying words Marie couldn’t make out.

  ‘You’ll have to shout, Jenny. Shout. I can’t hear you.’

  ‘I said why were you laughing? My mammy laughed as well, when she saw your house was bombed. Why is it funny?’

  ‘It’s not funny. What are you doing there?’

  ‘I’m playing. It’s my house now. I found Smut. He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, my poor little cat! Where is he?’

  Jenny disappeared for a moment and emerged holding Smut’s body.

  ‘Give him to me, Jenny, and don’t touch any more dead animals. And don’t play in that house. It’s dangerous.’

  Jenny clambered over the rubble and held Smut’s lifeless little body out to her. He smelled.

  The day was getting hot. Marie carefully took off her yellow cardigan with its too-short sleeves and wrapped Smut in it.

  ‘I like playing here,’ Jenny bawled. ‘I used to like playing here before, when Alfie lived here.’

  ‘Well, don’t play here again. Why aren’t you at school?’

  ‘It’s Saturday.’

  ‘Oh . . . Go home then, to your mam.’

  Marie got to the end of the street and walked up Princes Avenue with Smut in her arms. Everything was gone, even their kitten, so full of life a few short days ago. Nothing would ever be the same. The Larsens were finished as a family, their quiet, comfortable, unassuming little lives destroyed. There could be no going home ever again, and with that thought
the true horror of homelessness was borne in upon Marie. If only Chas were here beside her she might be able to face it; things might not seem so bad, but he was beyond her reach, and she his, kept apart by this awful war.

  ‘We’ll bury him here,’ Mrs Elsworth said, not forgetting to raise her voice.

  Marie looked round the enclosed garden at the rear of the Elsworths’ house. ‘Thank you, I’d like that. I love it here. It’s so lovely, and so peaceful.’

  Mrs Elsworth smiled, quietly triumphant. ‘Yes, as you can see, I couldn’t forgo my flowers altogether, and I scattered a few California poppies and marigolds between the vegetables to cheer them up too. It doesn’t seem to be doing them much harm. We’ll have enough to feed you and your mother as well as us, and masses to spare, with a bit of luck. Autumn will be busy this year; we’ll have a terrific glut to deal with unless the Luftwaffe drops a bomb on it all. Speaking of bombs, Leonard and Danny went round to Clumber Street as soon as we knew, with the last bit of petrol we had in the car to see if they could salvage anything, but there was nothing.’

  ‘They shouldn’t even have tried. They might have got hurt. It was Hannah’s little girl that found Smut. I warned her off, but I doubt if she’ll take any notice. She says it’s her house now.’

  Mrs Elsworth’s brow creased in a frown, and her lips pursed. ‘That child. She’s like a feral kitten herself, by the sound of it. A good thing Hannah’s a charwoman. You wouldn’t want her as a nursemaid, would you? Your poor little cat. Shall we go and find a spot to bury it?’

  ‘Him. He’s a boy,’ Marie said, and, looking down at his lifeless little body, she dissolved into tears, utterly distraught. ‘Isn’t it stu-stu-stupid to be so u-u-upset about a cat,’ she gasped, when she could speak, ‘after everything that’s happened?’