Angel of the North

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘I don’t know how you got out of it alive,’ Pam said.

  ‘We nearly didn’t. And your mam’s gone into a decline since, that’s for sure.’

  Pam shivered. Marie glanced at her face, and guessed at the unspoken thought: If I’d stopped here, I’d have been under all that.

  ‘Mrs Elsworth invited me to stay with them,’ Pam said, ‘but I’m not going to. It’ll be a nuisance having to travel every day, but I’m going to stay with Auntie Dot and Uncle Alfred.’

  Their mother’s eyes lit up at the sight of Pam. She smiled, and came to life.

  Pam returned the smile. ‘How are you, Mam?’

  ‘All the better for seeing you, my bairn,’ she said, her smile broadening, as she gazed fondly at her younger daughter. ‘Doesn’t she look a picture, Marie?’

  ‘She does,’ Marie agreed. ‘I’ve done soused herrings for tea, Pam, just like Dad used to do them. And a bit of lettuce and stuff from the allotment.’

  Marie made a tray up for her mother and Pam so that they could eat together in the front room, and spend as much time as possible together before they got the bus to Dunswell. She herself ate with George and Auntie Edie in the kitchen.

  ‘Hello! Somebody at the door,’ George said, when tea was nearly over. He scraped back his chair and got up to answer the knock.

  Danny Elsworth followed him back into the dining room, and sat on the empty chair, gazing around. ‘Did Pam come? I came to ask if she’d be staying at our house.’

  ‘Well, she’s here, but she’s decided to go to Dunswell, out of the way of the raids,’ Marie said.

  ‘We thought she might. Dad told me to tell you he’ll take you up there, if you like.’

  ‘He’d better be careful,’ George said. ‘I know a bloke who’s been prosecuted for improper use of the petrol ration. They’re getting as hot on that as breaching the blackout, now.’

  ‘Tell your dad thanks, but I don’t want to get him into trouble,’ Marie said. ‘He’s been had up once already; they might come down hard on him, if taking us to Dunswell lands him in court again. We can go on the bus.’

  Pam walked through the dining room with two dirty plates. Danny watched her go into the kitchen, and stared at the door until she returned.

  ‘I think you know Danny, don’t you, Pam?’ Marie said.

  Pam stopped and gave him the sweetest smile. ‘I think I remember you from school, although you were a bit older than me. You go to Hymers now, don’t you, Danny?’

  He nodded slowly, eyes riveted on her, a wide smile spreading over his face.

  ‘Do you play a musical instrument? Have you got a piano?’

  ‘Well, we used to have a piano,’ Danny said. ‘Mother tried to get Charles and me to play, but neither of us was interested and nobody else could play, so she got rid of it.’

  The spark of interest died in Pam’s eyes. ‘Oh, well, I’ll get back to Mother, I think. I want to spend as much time with her as I can before I have to go to Dunswell.’

  She left the room, and Danny took a moment or two to come out of his trance. ‘I’d better be going – to let Mum and Dad know what the arrangements are.’

  George saw him out. As soon as she heard the door close Aunt Edie gave a roguish laugh. ‘Ooh, your Pam’s made a conquest there,’ she said. ‘Did you see his face? He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Properly smitten.’

  ‘You should have seen him look at the door to the front room when we went through the passage,’ George said. ‘I think he was trying to see through it.’

  ‘Well, she’s fit to look at,’ Marie said. ‘No denying that.’

  ‘Like her big sister, then. Although I think you pip her to the post in the beauty stakes.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Marie protested.

  ‘I’ll carry the suitcase to the bus stop for you, if you like.’

  ‘You’ve been at work all day. You stay here and put your feet up. Read the paper. We’ll manage it all right between us, if we take turns.’

  ‘Tell you what, then,’ George said. ‘You get yourself there with her and that suitcase, and don’t worry about getting out in time for the last bus. I’ll come and fetch you back on the motorbike just before it gets dark. That should give you a couple of hours, with double summer time. Your mam will be all right. I’ll come straight for you, if not.’

  ‘What about improper use of the petrol ration?’

  ‘Ach!’ George exclaimed, loading that one syllable with as much derision as it could hold. ‘Improper use of the petrol ration my foot! I’ll come for you.’

  ‘I hope Alfie warned you we were coming,’ said Marie.

  ‘He did, and she’s welcome,’ Auntie Dot said.

  Uncle Alf smiled a welcome and took the suitcase from Pam, his eyebrows rising slightly at its quality, and that of Pam’s outfit. ‘What did you think to your mam, then?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought she’s aged terribly, and she seems very tired. And I thought that awful scar might have faded,’ Pam shuddered, ‘but it hasn’t, not at all.’

  Marie was amused to see the reaction of her uncle and aunt to Pam’s BBC tones. They looked completely thrown.

  The extent of their attachment to Alfie showed itself when the conversation turned to his attempt to rescue Jenny. They quickly realized that Pam knew nothing about it.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell her, Marie?’ Auntie Dot asked.

  ‘I just never got around to it, I suppose,’ Marie said, her face impassive. She knew that both Pam and Alfie would have a very good idea why she hadn’t. Pam had displayed no interest in Alfie’s welfare when he’d lived in Bourne, and Marie had seen no point in troubling her with any further news of him.

  Uncle Alf made up the deficiency. Pam got the full story, every detail of Alfie’s heroism and presence of mind, and his admission to hospital.

  ‘So, there you are, Pam,’ Marie said, pointedly. ‘A different version of your brother from the one you got from the Mortons.’

  Alfie sat reading his Spotter, with nothing to say.

  Pam had the grace to look abashed for a moment or two, and that was all. Then she turned to Marie with resentment in her tone: ‘How was I expected to know, if nobody told me?’

  The wireless was on in the background, with Forces radio playing. Marie pricked up her ears at the name Lieutenant Elsworth, as another message from Chas came drifting over the airways. Auntie Dot heard too, but kept silent.

  ‘Isn’t that Charles, Marie?’ Pam asked. ‘Turn it up, Auntie Dot.’

  Uncle Alf obliged, and the strains of ‘It Had to Be You’ filled the room.

  ‘Huh! Never be cross or try to be boss?’ Pam repeated, when the song had finished. ‘So you’re cross and bossy with him as well as me. I don’t know why he puts up with you.’

  Uncle Alf turned the wireless off, and Pam’s remark was left hanging in the air like a bad smell, until Auntie Dot muttered: ‘I don’t know why she puts up with him.’ Nothing else was said, although Marie knew she’d have had to stand a lot of leg-pulling had they not known about Charles’s affair with Hannah. She was just glad she hadn’t been at the Maltbys’ when the song was played, considering some of the remarks that would have greeted it there. Aunt Edie had already accused Chas of keeping a harem.

  Pam’s pale complexion slowly turned pink. ‘I don’t know why you’re all looking at me like that,’ she said, with a toss of her head. ‘She is bossy. But if Charles Elsworth enjoys being bossed about, well, that’s his lookout.’

  Chapter 29

  Pam came down to see her mother with Alfie every day that week, on Auntie Dot’s old bike. Their visits were a tonic to their mother. She began eating better and took more interest in things, and had started talking a bit more hopefully about keeping the family together after the war.

  ‘You could probably come back now, love,’ she told Pam a couple of days later, when Pam returned from a walk round the town centre, where she’d been taking snaps with her Brownie box camera, like a regular bom
b-site tourist, with Danny Elsworth as her guide.

  Pam’s reaction to the devastation was the same as Marie’s had been. ‘All the beautiful buildings I grew up with have been destroyed,’ she said. ‘Nearly everything I remember from my childhood, gone. Some terrible things have happened here.’

  Again Marie read her thoughts by the expression on her face. They might have happened to me.

  ‘We haven’t had a raid all the time you’ve been here,’ their mother went on. ‘You’d be all right at Dunswell. You could live with Uncle Alf and Auntie Dot, like Alfie. It would be nice for you to be together again.’

  ‘I can’t, Mum. I’ll have to go back to Bourne on Monday,’ Pam said. ‘I’ve got a music exam, and there’s no piano here for me to practise on. I really ought to practise for at least two hours every day. I’ll have to go back.’

  Her mother’s disappointment showed on her face.

  ‘I thought there might be a piano at Uncle Alf and Auntie Dot’s, but there isn’t,’ Pam said, giving the impression that a piano might have kept her in Dunswell.

  Their mother’s scarred brow creased in perplexity. ‘Oh,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know where we could get one from.’

  ‘Come and give me a hand with the washing-up, Pam,’ Marie said. When they were out of her mother’s hearing, she asked: ‘Can’t you stay a bit longer? It’s bucked her up no end, having you here every day. Another week, and she might have turned the corner.’

  ‘Well, I might if there was anywhere I could practise, but there isn’t. And it’s not only that,’ Pam said, with a certain disdain in her eyes. ‘They’re very rough, aren’t they, Uncle Alf and Auntie Dot? We might have been poor, but Mother was always so particular. And there’s nothing to do there.’

  ‘No, they’re not rough. They have to work hard on the smallholding, that’s all. And there’s a million and one things to do. You could help them.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about working on a smallholding, and I don’t want to. I’ve got my music exam coming up, and I don’t want to fail. I have to practise, and there’s no piano here. I only came because you made it sound as if Mother was on her deathbed, and she’s not.’ Pam’s expression seemed to indicate that she thought she’d been dragged to Hull on false pretences.

  ‘People can’t die to order, you know,’ Marie said. ‘I genuinely did think she wouldn’t be here long. In fact, she probably wouldn’t be, if you hadn’t come. What’s bucked her up so much is having you here.’

  ‘I’m going back to Bourne on Monday,’ Pam said.

  On the bus journey back from Corporation Pier, Marie unburdened herself of her irritation with Pam by scribbling her first unrestrained letter to Charles since her shock at his continued involvement with Hannah. She was still uncertain how much she wanted to speak to him, but she so desperately wanted to have someone to confide in about her sister’s behaviour.

  Pam patiently waited a whole week for her mother to die, which is a lot more than I expected, but when she didn’t oblige, she hopped it back to the Stewarts, and beautiful unbombed Bourne, and her piano, with a camera full of snaps of bombed-out Hull to show them, including one of our old house. That should convince them that sending her back here would be tantamount to murder. She was pining for them, or their way of life, rather – the piano most of all, I think. There’s nothing to do here, she says, while she stands watching everybody else work their fingers to the bone. For two pins, I could have left her to go back on her own. She managed it after the raid, so why not? But years of being told to look after the younger ones got the better of me, so I helped her to lug her suitcase and saw her safely onto the ferry. She’s promised to come back after she’s taken her music exam, but I don’t believe she will. I’ll be surprised if my mother sees her again this side of the grave . . .

  Marie’s hand became still, as she thought of their goodbye. Pam had looked distant – not quite sad, but as if she were bringing a chapter of her life firmly to a close, with just a little regret. Alfie had seen further than she had herself, Marie reflected. Because of the war, their once close and loving family had been shattered, and scattered, and finished. Nothing would ever be the same.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she wrote, her attention back on her letter, ‘we didn’t have a single air raid while she was here. But I expect we’ll have another one before long . . .’

  She spilled her feelings onto the page and felt considerable relief, then, wondering whether she was really doing the wisest thing in sending it, she finally dropped it into the post box.

  She was wrong about the raids. August turned out to be comparatively uneventful – with only one air raid in the middle of the month, which demolished three shelters, killing twenty people and badly injuring fifteen, and a rather more successful one at the month’s end, which managed to kill and injure more than twice as many people, and to damage sixteen shelters.

  With Pam gone, Marie was back in the old routine of housework, allotment gardening, and caring for her mother – which exempted her from war work. Alfie visited a couple of times a week, Terry called nearly as often to take her dancing for an hour or two, and when he was on duty George occasionally stepped into the breach, although he had started walking out with a girl from the Guildhall, called Eva. A trip to the pictures with Nancy, Mass at St Vincent’s and a visit to the graves on Sunday completed the weekly round.

  Chapter 30

  ‘When did Pam say she was taking her music exam?’ her mother asked fretfully one morning, as Marie and George lifted her out of bed. ‘I’m sure it was before the schools go back.’

  Marie knew it was before the schools went back. The exam was the eighteenth, to be precise, and today was the twenty-eighth. ‘I don’t know, Mam,’ she lied, picking up the comb to tidy her mother’s fair hair.

  The letter box rattled, George went into the passage to pick up the post and returned with a letter from Pam.

  Marie opened it, and read it aloud. Mr and Mrs Stewart were taking her for a holiday to Cromer while they had the good weather, and she would come to Hull and spend the half-term holiday with her mother, instead. She passed her music exam with distinction, and what a relief that was, after missing all that practice while she’d been in Hull.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Stewart are taking her to Cromer for a holiday,’ her mother repeated, her voice sounding hollow. ‘Mr and Mrs Stewart don’t bother asking for my permission to take my daughter on holiday to Cromer, and she doesn’t ask, either. It looks as if I’ve been cancelled altogether.’

  George slid quietly out of the room, and Marie heard the front door close after him as he escaped to work.

  Aunt Edie flushed with indignation. ‘Bloody shame, that’s what I call it!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mam,’ Marie urged. ‘Just concentrate on getting better, and we’ll get a house. We can have them both back then.’

  ‘Where’s the money coming from?’ her mother demanded, tearing down Marie’s shaky castle in the air. ‘Anyway, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to manage a house, again. I’m no use to anybody now. I’ve outlived my usefulness, and that’s the truth,’ she said, putting a final stop to that well-meant but impossible suggestion.

  She ignored Marie’s protests and said very little else, but sat in silence all day, until Marie and George were lifting her back into bed that evening.

  ‘She must know how ill I am,’ she said. ‘She’s not a child. She must know I might not last until October.’

  ‘You will last until October, Mam, and a long time beyond it. If she’d thought you wouldn’t, I’m sure she’d have come.’

  Her mother said no more, and Marie left Aunt Edie sitting with her, while she got on with the housework.

  Much later, George and Marie shared a last cup of tea in the dining room.

  ‘How’s the court case going?’ Marie asked, for a change of subject.

  ‘Oh, it’s all going through,’ George waved a hand, airily. ‘Going through the motions, you might say. Monty’s days are n
umbered.’

  ‘Or Billy Boy Pratt, as Nancy calls him. She’s done a complete turnaround. She’s as keen on “doing” him as you are, now.’

  George seemed not to relish the mention of Nancy. ‘It’s in her best interests, isn’t it?’ he said, and lapsed into silence for a while. Then: ‘If we got married,’ he said, ‘me and you, I mean – we could live here until we got a house nearby, and then we could keep an eye on both our mothers, make sure they’re all right. I’ve got a decent salary; I could just about manage it.’

  ‘What about Eva?’

  ‘Eva’s all right. Nothing serious, yet, though. It’s not gone far enough to break any hearts.’

  ‘Do you think my mam’ll be here long enough for that?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Well, you were telling her so. I was just going on what you said. And if she does get better, they’ll both need a bit of help.’

  She didn’t ask: what about Charles? And neither did George. But he didn’t push his offer. He went to bed, and left her with the thought.

  Chapter 31

  From the day she got Pam’s letter, Marie’s mother seemed to lose all interest in everything. She hardly ate a thing, drank enough to swallow her pills, and not much more, and sat gazing into space for hours at a stretch. Aunt Edie persisted in trying to cheer her with pleasant reminiscences, with no success. Terry took Marie dancing for an hour on the Sunday, but when he came again a week later she shook her head.

  ‘Sorry, Terry, she’s too ill to be left.’

  ‘Surely she’ll be all right for an hour,’ he coaxed.

  ‘No, I’m not leaving her.’ Marie was adamant. With the loss of her home and her two younger children, her mother had lost the will to live, but she wasn’t going to die without at least her eldest with her.