by Maureen Lee
Annie, unsure what was going on, had a feeling this would be preferable, and grabbed her auntie's hand, but Dad shook his head.
'No,' he said in a thin, stubborn voice, it's about time Rose took some responsibility, like Bert said.'
'Jaysus!' Dot sobbed. 'He didn't mean the girls. Oh, if only I'd kept me big mouth shut!'
An hour later, Annie and her sister watched Uncle Bert drive away, Mike hanging out of the passenger window, waving. They waved back until the lorry turned the corner, then looked at each other nervously and went back into their new house.
Annie hated it as much as she hated the street. She hated the dark, faded wallpaper and the furniture left by the previous tenant, which Dad told Dot he'd got at a knock-down price.
The parlour was scary. There was something sinister about the tall cupboard with its leaded glass doors, the panes like a hundred eyes, glaring at her, unwelcoming and unfriendly, and the big black sideboard, full of whirls and curls, was something the devil himself might have.
She went upstairs and gasped in amazement. A bathroom! She climbed onto the lavatory with some difficulty, and stayed perched on the wooden seat for several minutes to get the feel of it, then pulled the chain. It was odd using a lavatory indoors, and rather exciting, though she'd prefer to be with Dot and Bert and the lavvy at the bottom of the yard.
She tiptoed into the rear bedroom which overlooked the backyard. 'Strewth!' she gasped, in exactly the same tone as Auntie Dot used. Like the parlour, the room was full of dark, gloomy furniture. A dressing table in front of the window shut out most of the light. Another single bed was already there, as well as their own, which meant they could have one each. Their clothes were in a box on the floor.
One by one, Annie gingerly opened the drawers in case anything interesting had been left behind. 'Strewth!' she said again, when the smell of mothballs made her sneeze. Apart from their lining of yellow newspapers, the drawers were empty, as was the wardrobe, except for three coathangers which she couldn't reach.
She unpacked their clothes and put most away, leaving the frocks for Dad to hang up. As she gravely carried out this task, she felt grown up and responsible, though she knew she was only delaying the time she dreaded: the time when she would have to go downstairs and face her mam.
Eventually, when she could put it off no longer, Annie crept down into the living room. Mam was in the armchair by the window, her head turned towards the wall.
Annie stared at her curiously. This pretty lady with the sad grey eyes and cascade of dark cloudy hair was supposed to be her mam, yet she seemed like a stranger. It was Auntie Dot who'd brought them up, taken them to the clinic and to Mass. It was into Dot's warm, rough arms they snuggled when they needed love, whilst their mam remained in the parlour, emerging occasionally on Sundays or at Christmas or if Dot had arranged a birthday tea, when she would sit, wan and pale and silent. Sometimes, at Dot's urging, the girls went in to
see her. Mam would be in bed or in a chair, staring vacantly out of the window. The girls never stayed long, because Mam never spoke, hardly looked at them, and a few times she hadn't even opened her eyes.
'It's not her body that's sick, it's her mind,' Dot had told them only a few days ago, and Annie imagined inside Mam's head being full of sores. 'It's that sodding Hitler what done it!' Dot, angry, slammed the iron down onto the collar of Bert's working shirt. 'Poor girl, such a pretty thing she was, well, still is, but the life's been squeezed out of her.'
'What did Hitler do to me mam?' Annie asked, imagining the monster personally squeezing the life out of her mother.
Dot sighed as she steered the iron around a row of buttons. 'Oh, I suppose you've got to know some time, and now's as good a time as any. It's just that you and Marie would have had an older brother if he hadn't been taken to heaven at eighteen months.' She made the sign of the cross. 'Johnny. Lovely little lad he was, dark, like your mam and Marie. He was born the first month of the war, just after our Alan.' She folded the shirt and reached for another. 'One night, after the siren went, your mam left him by himself for a minute, just a minute, mind, when the house was bombed and Johnny was killed. Poor Rose, she's never got over it.' Dot paused over a cuff. 'Mind you,' she said thoughtfully, 'she should be better by now, it's six years. Lots of terrible things happened to people during the war, but they pulled through.'
Standing by her mam, Annie felt overcome with misery. She didn't want to be in this dark, quiet house, away from Dot and Bert and her boisterous cousins. She badly wanted to be kissed and cuddled and told everything was going to be all right. Marie
M
was in the kitchen, chattering away. Dad just grunted in reply. Mam didn't appear to have noticed Annie was there; her face was still turned away. Annie climbed onto her knee and lay there, waiting for an arm to curl around her neck. But her mother remained as still as a statue. After a while, Annie slid off and went upstairs to sit on the bed and wonder what was going to hap|:>en to them.
A few minutes later, Marie crept in, her impish little face downcast. 'Don't like it here,' she said tearfully. 'Want Auntie Dot.'
'Sit on me knee,' commanded Annie, 'and pretend I'm your auntie.'
So Marie climbed on her sister's kiicc, arui they sat there, smfhng miserably, until Dad called to say tea was ready.
A month later. Dot appeared with a black pram containing a tiny baby with bright red hair and bright blue eyes. Her belly was back to its normal size, and she looked lean and pretty, in a white cardigan over a green skirt and blouse, and with a green ribbon around her carroty curls.
'This is Pete,' she said proudly. 'Your new cousin.'
She left the pram outside and carried the baby indoors. The girls were so pleased to see her they clung to her skirt, hugging her legs. They'd feared they might never see Dot again.
'Where did he come from?' Marie demanded.
'Can I hold him?' asked Annie.
'I found him under a gooseberry bush,' Dot twinkled. 'Sit down, Annie, and you can nurse him for a while. Careful, now. I'd have come before, but as you can see, I've been rather busy.' As soon as the baby was deposited in Annie's arms, Marie climbed onto her aunt's knee.
Dot turned to Mam, who was in her usual chair by the window. 'How are you, Rose? Have you settled in, like?' she asked brightly.
Annie looked up from examining the baby's face, his short ginger lashes, his petal pink ears, curious to see Mam's reaction. She scarcely moved from the chair all day except to make the tea, when she would waft in and out of the kitchen like a ghost to peel potatoes laboriously and mince meat in the curious rusty machine left by the previous tenant. Often, the potatoes hadn't boiled long enough and were hard inside, and Dad had to do them again. He brought the meat home in his saddlebag, and at weekends did the washing, hanging their frocks and petticoats and knickers on the line. When Mrs Flaherty, the widow next door, offered to help, 'Your poor wife being ill, like,' he churlishly refused.
Mam rarely spoke. Even if the girls asked a question, she mostly didn't answer, just looked at them in a vacant way, as if they were invisible and she wondered where the voice had come from.
'I think so,' Mam whispered in response to Dot's enquiry.
'And how are you coping with the girls. Rose? Don't forget, I'd be happy to have them if they're too much for you. We've missed them a lot. In fact, Alan cried every night for a week after they'd gone.'
Not to be outdone, Marie said quickly, 'We cry too. Auntie Dot. Me and Annie cry every single night.'
'Do you now!' Dot said in a tight voice. 'And what do you do with yourselves all day?'
Annie and Marie looked at each other.
'We draw.'
'And play with our dolls.'
'Have you been to the park yet? And there's sands not far away.'
'No, Auntie, we haven't been anywhere, 'cept to the shop for a loaf sometimes,' Annie said importantly. 'Our dad leaves the money.'
'I see!' Dot's voice was still tight. 'Shall we go to the
sands now?'
'Yes, please!' they chorused.
'Get your coats, then. There's a chill in the air for June.'
Dot didn't say another word until they were outside. As they walked along Orlando Street with Pete tucked up in his pram and the girls skipping along each side clutching the handle, she asked casually, 'Are you eating proper.-* What do you have for breakfast?'
'Cornflakes,' replied Annie, 'and we have bread and jam for dinner.' She didn't add, because she felt Dot wouldn't approve, that it was she who got the cornflakes because Mam usually forgot, and by the time they were hungry again and there was no sign of food on the horizon, she would cut four thick slices of bread and smear them with margarine and jam. Twice she'd cut her finger as well as the bread, but the blood merged with the jam and was hardly noticeable.
'Bread and jam? Jaysus, that's no meal for two growing girls,' Dot said caustically. 'You got better than that in our house.'
'Bread and jam's me favourite,' Marie piped, so Dot said no more, though later, as she steered the pram across the busy main road, she said firmly, 'From now on, your Auntie Dot'll come as often as she can.' Then she muttered, half to herself, 'As for your mam, I'm not sure whether to feel sorry for her, or give her a good kick up the arse!'
Annie started school in September. On her first day. Dad went into work late and took her on the crossbar of his bike.
St Joan of Arc's was in Bootle. Her cousins were already there and could 'keep an eye on her', Dot promised. It was a long walk, but Annie was glad to return to the familiar bombscarred streets, where women sat on their doorsteps on sunny days, and children played hopscotch on the pavements or whizzed around the lampposts on home-made swings. No-one played out in Orlando Street. Most residents were old, and if a child dared so much as kick a ball, they were told to play elsewhere.
One of the best things about school was the dinners. Dinners were almost as nice as lessons. Because she wanted the nuns to like her, Annie paid close attention during class. She was one of the first to learn to read and do sums, but her favourite lesson was drawing. The nuns called it 'Art', and were impressed with her pictures of 'pretty ladies in nice dresses'. One, Sister Finbar, wrote a note to Annie's mam to say she must be 'encouraged with her artwork', but Mam merely held the unopened envelope on her knee till Dad came home and read it.
'Good,' he mumbled tiredly.
Annie's dad was an insurance collector. He went into the office each morning to 'bring the books up', and spent the rest of the day riding round on his bike collecting payments, a penny here, twopence there. He came home at seven, exhausted. This was because he had a gammy leg. Dot told them. He'd broken it when he was little and it hadn't set properly.
'That's why he didn't fight in the war like your Uncle Bert. Poor Ken, he should have a sitting-down job, not be riding round on that sodding bike eight hours a day,' Dot sighed. 'Who'd have thought our Ken would end up like this, eh? Your gran, God rest her soul,' she crossed herself, 'thought the sun shone out his arse. She hoped he'd go to university, him being a scholarship
boy an' all, but he met your mam, and . . . Oh, well, it's no use crying over spilt milk, is it?'
Annie hadn't been at school long when Colette ReiHy asked her to tea. She enjoyed being made a fuss of by Mrs Reiily.
'Our Colette's little friend!' she cooed. They sat down to jelly and cream and fairy cakes with cherries on top. Then Mrs Reilly cleared the table and they played Ludo and Snakes and Ladders and Snap.
'When can I come to yours?' Colette demanded as Annie was leaving.
'Don't be rude,' Mrs Reilly laughed. 'Wait till you're invited.'
'I'll have to ask me mam,' said Annie. She pondered over the matter for days. If she could go to Colette's, it seemed fair Colette should come to hers, but she couldn't imagine Mam making jelly or fairy cakes, and she felt uneasy asking someone to the dark, gloomy house which was exactly the same as the day they'd moved in. Although Uncle Bert had offered to decorate - 'A bit of distemper'd go over that wallpaper a treat, Ken, brighten the place up no end' - her dad had turned him down as churlishly as he'd done Mrs Flaherty when she'd offered to help with the washing. 'I like it the way it is,' he said stubbornly.
Eventually, Annie plucked up the courage to approach her mam. 'Colette wants to come to tea,' she said nervously.
Mam was in her dressing gown, the blue one with silk flowers round the neck and cuffs. The red one with the / velvet collar had gone to the dry cleaner's on Saturday. Mam wore her dressing gowns a lot. She looked at Annie, her lovely grey eyes vacant, empty. 'No,' she said. 'No.'
That night when Annie was in bed, Dad came in.
'You must never ask children to this house,' he said in his faint, tired voice. 'Never.'
So Annie never did. In a way, she felt relieved. She didn't want anyone to know her mam couldn't make jelly and wore a dressing gown all day and didn't know how to play Snakes and Ladders.
If the nuns expected another star pupil when Marie Harrison started school, they were to be sadly disappointed. Marie was in trouble from the first day, when she stole another new girl's ball and threw it on the roof where it lodged in the gutter. Annie had been looking forward to her sister's company, but at going-home time, Marie was nowhere to be seen. She was off to play on a bomb site or down a crater or in North Park with a crowd of boys, and came home hours late with grazed shins and torn clothes, though Mam didn't seem to notice.
Not to be outdone, Annie began to wander the streets of Bootle and Seaforth, staring in shop windows or through the gates of the docks, where dockers unloaded cargoes from all over the world. Her imagination soared, visualising the boxes of fruit and exotic-smelling spices being packed in sunny foreign climes. As the nights grew dark, though, and the cruel Mersey winds whipped inland, her adventurous spirit wilted, and she wished she were at home in front of the fire with someone to talk to and something to eat. Since both girls started having school dinners. Mam didn't make a meal till Dad came home.
One day in November, when it was bitterly cold and raining hard, she went down the entry and in the back way, and was surprised to be met by Auntie Dot, looking extremely fierce. 'Where the hell have you been?' she demanded. 'It's gone five. And where's Marie?'
Dot was growing fat again, but this time Annie knew it was because she was having another baby. She jealously hoped it wouldn't be a girl. Dot mightn't love them so much if she had a daughter of her own.
Her aunt grabbed her arm, full of angry concern. 'Look at the state of you! You'll catch your death of cold. Get changed this minute and put your coat in the airing cupboard while I make a cup of tea.'
When Annie came down in a clean frock, she found Pete, now eighteen months, playing happily with wooden blocks. She glanced at her mam, and was surprised to see her cheeks were pink and she was twiddling with the belt of her dressing gown. Dot came in with a cup of steaming tea.
'Get those wet shoes off and put them on the hearth,' she barked. 'And I'd like an answer, madam. Where have you been till this hour, and where's your sister?'
'I went for a walk and Marie's gone to North Park.' Annie thought it wise not to mention the bomb sites and craters.
'Really!' said Dot caustically. 'It's not what I'd call walking weather, meself. As for the park . . ,' She shook her head as if the situation was beyond her comprehension. Annie fidgeted uncomfortably.
'Do you know what day it is?' Dot demanded.
'Tuesday,' Annie replied, adding, 'the seventeenth of November.' She remembered thinking when Sister Clement wrote the date on the blackboard that it had a familiar ring.
'That's right, Marie's birthday! Nice way for a five-year-old to spend her birthday, in the park in the rain -isn't it, Rose?' She turned on the hunched woman in the corner. 'I come round with a cake and presents from us all, thinking there'd be a birthday tea, and what do I find? You've forgottenl Forgotten your own daughter's
birthday! Not only that, there's no food in the offing of any description.'<
br />
This was said with such derision that Annie winced. For some reason she feh guilty. Her own birthday had fallen on a Sunday in October and they'd gone to Dot's for tea. Mam didn't answer, but began to shake her head from side to side. Dot, well into her stride, continued, 'Even worse, the girls aren't even in, and you're sitting here in your sodding dressing gown and don't give a shit, you selfish cow!'
Annie gasped. Her mam's head turned faster and faster and her eyes rolled upwards. She started to moan, and Dot leaned across and slapped her face, hard. 'Don't put on your little act with me. Rose,' she said in a low, grating, never-heard-before voice. 'You've had me fooled for years, but no longer. You're taking our Ken for a ride. If he's idiot enough to be taken in, that's his concern, but you're not getting away with it with these two girls. They're little treasures, the pair of them. I love them as if they were me own and you'll look after them proper or I'll have them taken off you. Do you hear?'
To Annie's surprise. Mam stopped moving her head and nodded. For a while, her mouth worked as if she were trying to speak, and perhaps she would have if Marie hadn't come bouncing in. Her shoes squelched and she was soaked to the skin and covered in mud, though she gave Dot a cocky smile. The smile vanished when Dot removed the shoes none too gently, and ordered her upstairs to change.
Then Dot turned to Mam, and in a gentler voice said, 'This can't go on. Rose. Two little girls wandering the streets, it's just not right. God knows what sort of trouble they could get into. In future, I'll get our Alan to stand by the gate and make sure they go home.'
Poor Alan, thought Annie, he'd have a fit. Dot
dropped to her knees, somewhat clumsily due to her big belly, and grasped Mam's hands. 'I know what our Ken was up to that night, luv, but it's time to forgive and forget, if only for the sake of your girls.'
At this. Mam's face grew tight and she turned away, just as Marie came running downstairs.
Dot sighed and got awkwardly to her feet. 'Where's the ration books? Keep an eye on Pete for me while I get some cold meat, a few tomaters and half a pound of biscuits from the corner shop. There'll be a birthday tea in this house today or my name's not Dot Gallagher.'
