THE GREAT WAR SAGAS: Box set of 2 passionate and inspiring stories: A Crimson Dawn and No Greater Love

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘Don’t ever talk to me like that again!’ he had shouted as she fell against the table from the force of his blow. She could smell the drink on his breath.

  ‘Just promise me you’ll not touch her,’ Susan had sobbed.

  This had enraged him further and he had seized her by the arms and threatened, ‘Well, you better start acting like a dutiful wife in bed, doll, then I won’t have to go looking around, will I?’

  Susan was left with a strange feeling of guilt. It must have been something she had done, or not done, that had turned Richard into the selfish, manipulating man who now bullied their household. She strove to please him, to placate his moods, avoid confrontations with Helen. But nothing she did seemed to be enough in her husband’s eyes. She yearned for his approval, for kind words and affection, but they grew rarer.

  Susan bore the cuffs and the humiliation because she did not know what else she could do, and there was the baby to consider now. Respectable women did not leave their husbands, especially after six months of marriage, she thought miserably. Besides, she had nowhere else to go. She would have to put up with the insults and assaults and attempt to bring her unborn child safely into the world.

  But what a world! Susan thought bitterly. A violent, unpredictable father and a pathetic, cowering mother, still living in lowly Gun Street. They could afford better, Susan knew, if only Richard did not squander all he earned on gambling and drinking and taking Helen to shows. They had argued about money. They had argued about Helen. Even skinny, ineffectual Jimmy had tried to stand up to him but had been kicked out of the house for his trouble.

  Now she had no ally, Susan thought wretchedly. Aunt Violet had not spoken to them since her mother’s death, except when they passed in the street and she demanded the money that Richard owed her. But Susan was becoming immune to the daily humiliations. She would bear them for her baby, because that was the only thing in her world that was worth striving for.

  Alone, she ran her mother’s old clothes stall while Helen went goodness knows where. The girl was beyond her control, obeying only Richard. Resisting Mary Smith’s temptations to go and drink with her downstairs as her mother had done, Susan relied on a frail and increasingly demented Granny Beaton for company. But her grandmother had become a burden to them all and her senile ways a constant irritation.

  ‘The old bag’s got to go,’ Richard had threatened after the elderly woman had nearly set fire to the flat trying to light the paraffin lamp. It was the night Jimmy had left.

  ‘Go where?’ Susan had muttered.

  ‘The workhouse,’ he had answered at once. ‘The old bat’s going to the workhouse if she singes any more of my furniture.’

  Susan’s frayed nerves had caused her to snap back, ‘Your furniture? It was Mam’s best chair she burned. You’ve never spent a farthing on this place.’

  He had slapped her hard for speaking her mind and Jimmy had finally intervened, sickened by the months of abuse. Richard had given him a black eye and thrown him down the back stairs. Susan had screamed after him in the dark to come back, but all she heard was his sobbing as he ran away up the back lane.

  For three days now she had not gone out for fear of the neighbours gossiping about her bruised face and she did not want to miss Jimmy if he attempted to return. She was only thankful that her mother was dead and could not see in what hell she was living.

  ‘That feeble brother of yours been back yet?’ Richard demanded to know as he straightened his tie in the parlour mirror.

  ‘No,’ Susan answered wearily. ‘He’ll not be back in a hurry.’

  ‘Good,’ Richard grunted. ‘I don’t want him sneaking round here for food while I’m out, do you hear? He’s not getting any more of my charity, the little toe-rag.’

  Susan did not reply as she reached mechanically for the shoe polish and brushes in a box by the hearth. She polished Richard’s shoes again, wondering where Jimmy had gone. No doubt she would hear soon enough through Tommy Smith, for the two lads could not be separated for long. All her life she had taken care of Jimmy and the pain she felt at his going was far worse than her aching face.

  Richard came and stood over her. She put his shoes on for him and tied the laces. Then, in a flash of unpredictability, he leant over and stroked her cheek.

  ‘You look done in, doll,’ he smiled in concern. ‘You should go and lie down. Got to keep your strength up - think of our baby, eh?’

  Susan smiled back in relief. Just when she was thinking evil thoughts about Richard, he surprised her with a tender remark and she felt wicked for having wanted to be rid of him. It filled her with hope that he would be a loving father once the baby came and everything would be all right again between them, like it was in their courting days. Perhaps she expected too much from him. She had been tired and short-tempered with him lately, so was it any wonder that he chose to stay out and drink until closing? And it was only in drink that he was cruel and uncaring.

  Richard kissed her on the head. ‘Fetch me dut then, doll.’

  Susan got to her feet and crossed to the dresser where Richard’s bowler hat sat in pompous state. She gave it a possessive brush with her hand and fixed it on his head. Without another word, Richard reached for his ebony walking cane and left by the front door, whistling.

  Susan sighed. Richard was her husband and she had promised to stay with him for better or for worse and that is what she would do. One day, life really would be better, she determined. The dream of a respectable house, full of clean respectful children and a husband who was content to stay at home after tea, wavered before her. Where there’s a will there’s a way, her mother had always said. She would make it happen.

  Susan looked across at her grandmother, dozing and mumbling in her chair. Over the past weeks Granny had risen in the night and been found wandering the streets in her nightgown, attempting to hang out washing in the moonlight. For the first time, Susan entertained the idea of putting Granny Beaton in a home. After all, she reasoned, once the baby was here there would be precious little room and she would have no time to look after the old woman as well. Would she not be better off in a home with other old people for company? And it would please Richard. Life would be so much easier for them all...

  Susan dared to think the unthinkable. The old woman was so feeble-minded it would make no difference to her where she lived out her dwindling days. She did not know where she was most of the time.

  Having broached the idea in her own mind and justified getting rid of her grandmother for the best of reasons, Susan set about sorting piles of clothing for the Saturday market in the morning. Life must go on, she told herself sternly, and she must make some money at the market to pay for Richard’s extravagances.

  ***

  Maggie put off going to see Susan until the middle of July, not wanting to think about her sister’s predicament and wary of interfering. Besides, she told herself, she had been too involved with suffragist matters. Along with other local members of the WSPU, she had been part of a deputation to the Bishop of Durham. In the grand, opulent surroundings of the bishop’s palace, Dr Moule had listened to them give details of forced feeding in British prisons. As her energy returned, Maggie felt a growing need to be politically active again.

  ‘If you gan about protesting again, they’ll throw you back in the nick sharpish,’ George had fretted. ‘Keep your head down, Maggie man, then they won’t touch you till your licence runs out.’

  ‘It’s not a protest,’ Maggie had replied breezily, ‘it’s a deputation - all very proper. So stop worrying.’

  But increasingly George seemed to worry about the slightest of things, Maggie thought impatiently. The assassination of some foreign archduke at the end of June had put him in a mood and he came home every day now with a newspaper to scan the news from the Continent.

  When she tried to tell him about their interview with the bishop, he only half listened, his attention fixed on an article headed ‘The Austrian Tragedy’ and detailing the funeral o
f the archduke and his ‘consort’.

  ‘What’s it all got to do with us?’ Maggie demanded in annoyance. ‘They’re always bumping people off in the Balkans.’

  ‘Aye, but if the Austrians retaliate against the Serbs for this murder, that brings in the Russians to defend Serbia and the Germans to support the Austrians,’ George explained.

  ‘So?’ Maggie sighed, thinking it was all so trivial and irrelevant to their political work here.

  ‘The Russians are in alliance with France and us,’ George said, his voice rising. ‘We’re at the whim of our ruling classes and their despot friends.’

  ‘Geordie man, we’re not going to get into a war over some dead Austrian royals!’ Maggie said dismissively.

  But George had not been mollified and had taken himself off to see Isaac Samuel and discuss politics with his friend.

  That evening, Jimmy caused consternation by arriving home with excited talk of an attack on Whitley Bay by foreigners.

  ‘They were trying to blow up our ships at Elswick. There were ambulances everywhere and lads on stretchers - they were takin’ them into this church hall in Jesmond.’

  ‘Jesmond?’ Maggie asked in bewilderment. ‘What were you doing over there?’

  ‘Me and Tommy followed them. They said they’d come by train from Whitley to Walker, then on ambulances and carts.’

  ‘Who said?’ Maggie demanded.

  ‘The wounded soldiers!’ Jimmy cried.

  ‘Have you gone potty, Tich?’ Maggie gasped. ‘Are you telling me we’ve been invaded?’

  Her brother grinned. ‘No, they were just acting - rehearsing for a real invasion.’

  Maggie picked up an apple and threw it at him in her annoyance and relief.

  ‘Don’t you go giving me a heart attack, you little bugger!’

  Jimmy caught the apple and began to munch. ‘But it’s what’ll really happen if them foreigners try and land at Whitley Bay. They wouldn’t be practising if it wasn’t likely to happen.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft.’

  ‘I’d join up the morra if there was a war,’ Jimmy declared.

  Maggie snorted ‘You’re too young - and too tichy. They’d not have you.’

  But the incident shook Maggie and the future suddenly seemed even less certain than before. She decided it was time to make her peace with Susan.

  Maggie found her alone in Gun Street one Saturday afternoon. Susan appeared nervous and jumpy at her sudden appearance.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded suspiciously.

  ‘Thought it was time to come and see you - give a hand with things while I can,’ Maggie offered.

  ‘Why should I need any help? I’ve always managed just grand,’ Susan answered stiffly. ‘Even without Mam ...’

  ‘Aye, Mam,’ Maggie said sadly. ‘I’ve been to her grave... Oh, Susan, it was terrible not being there when it happened.’

  Susan winced. ‘It was terrible being there, you mean. There was nothing I could do. If you’d been there, it might never have happened. She was arguing over you!’ And she burst into tears.

  Maggie felt winded by the accusation, but it was no more than she deserved. To her dying day she would feel guilty for bringing the anxiety and strain upon her mother that had caused her death. She tried to pat Susan’s shoulder in comfort, but her sister turned away from her as if she could not bear her near. Susan blew hard into a handkerchief and wiped her face.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ she muttered. ‘If Richard finds you here, there’ll be hell on. Your name’s muck around here.’

  But Maggie would not be got rid of so easily. ‘Good things grow out of muck.’

  Maggie glanced about, noticing the differences for the first time. There was a new dresser in the corner and curtains at the window. Their mother’s worn, comfortable old chair was gone from the fireside and Jimmy’s truckle bed had been replaced by a wooden crib. In the corner stood a baby’s high chair. Maggie’s jaw dropped open and she turned to scrutinise her sister.

  ‘You’re going to have a bairn?’ she gasped.

  Susan’s head went up proudly. ‘Aye, I’m six months gone.’

  Maggie stepped forward to hug her but felt her sister flinch at the contact once more.

  ‘That’s grand! I’m that pleased for you, Susan,’ Maggie smiled, despite her sister’s coolness. ‘Tich never said anything about you expecting.’

  ‘Tich?’ Susan questioned sharply. ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘Aye, he’s living with me and - and George Gordon.’ Maggie felt herself blush.

  ‘George Gordon?’ Susan gasped. ‘When did you wed?’

  ‘We didn’t,’ Maggie told her defiantly. ‘We don’t believe in the slavery of marriage.’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ Susan answered in shock. ‘Living out of wedlock - and corrupting our Jimmy with your wicked ideas. You send him back here at once!’

  ‘He won’t come.’ Maggie was blunt. ‘He’s had enough of Richard Turvey knocking him about. And he’s told me all about how he treats you like dirt and carries on with our Helen. You don’t have to put on any airs for me and pretend everything’s rosy - I’m your sister, remember? Why don’t you kick him out? I’d not put up with such carry-on and you shouldn’t have to either.’

  Susan turned hot with outrage. ‘How dare you tell me what to do! You’re nowt but a trollop and a criminal - you should still be locked up! Well, you’ll not go causing trouble round here! My Richard’s a good husband and treats me canny. I can have anything I want,’ she declared, waving at the new pieces of baby furniture. ‘You’re just jealous that I’m married and having a baby and getting on in the world, while all you’ve got to show for your life is a prison record and a man who doesn’t respect you enough to marry you!’ Flecks of spittle spattered Susan’s chin from her vitriolic attack. Maggie watched, astounded.

  ‘I’ll not stay here to be insulted,’ she declared. ‘I only came here to make amends and see if I could help you. But you’re beyond help, Susan. You’re a stuck-up, narrow-minded prig who can’t admit the mistake you’ve made marrying that waster, Turvey. I’d rather die in gaol than have your life any day!’

  ‘Get out!’ Susan screamed.

  ‘Not before I’ve had a word with Granny Beaton.’ Maggie stood her ground.

  Watching, she saw the colour drain from Susan’s puffy cheeks. Suddenly, it struck Maggie that there was no sign of her grandmother. The fireside chair was gone; the smell of her had vanished.

  ‘Is she in the parlour?’ Maggie asked.

  Susan shook her head

  ‘Where is she?’ Maggie demanded in alarm. ‘She’s not d- ’

  ‘She’s in a home,’ Susan answered curtly. ‘We couldn’t cope with her here any longer.’

  ‘What home?’

  Susan felt alarm at the sight of Maggie’s horrified look. She gulped. ‘St Chad’s.’

  Maggie advanced on her furiously. ‘You’ve put her in the workhouse?’

  Susan backed into a chair. ‘Don’t upset me!’ she trembled. ‘I must think of my baby first.’

  Maggie halted. She suddenly saw before her a weak and frightened woman, lashing out through her own misery and guilt. Maggie no longer knew who this woman was, for she was not the caring, fussing, elder sister with whom she had grown up. Infuriating and nagging she may have been, but the old Susan would never have considered banishing their grandmother to the workhouse. Maggie thought of her dear, confused Granny Beaton wandering the unfriendly corridors of St Chad’s trying to find a way home. It made her want to weep.

  She did not utter another word to her sister but turned and left abruptly.

  Susan sat shaking in her chair, dry sobs struggling to escape her throat. Maggie was gone, but her look of condemnation haunted her. She placed her hands protectively against her swelling womb and sought comfort from her baby’s kick. Yet she could not rid her mind of Maggie’s accusing eyes.

  With Jimmy’s persuasion, George a
greed that they could look after Granny Beaton even if Maggie were to return to prison. So Jimmy and Maggie went to collect their ancient grandmother from St Chad’s Institution for the Poor. Maggie shivered with unease as they waited in a draughty hall being scrubbed by three scrawny women of indeterminate age. Its bleakness was only relieved by the occasional religious tract nailed to the wall and the summer sun hardly penetrated the high windows. It reminded Maggie all too much of prison and she was nearly physically sick at the thought.

  Old Agnes Beaton had no idea who the young people were who led her from the workhouse, but she followed trustingly.

  ‘The fire,’ she muttered, as they supported her out of the gates. ‘They’ve put out the fire. The fire is the heart of the home - there must be a fire.’

  Maggie tried to calm her fretfulness. ‘There’s a grand fire at home, Granny, don’t you worry yourself.’

  ‘No, they put milk on the fire - the last of our milk,’ the old woman wailed. ‘What will my baby drink? There’s no fire. We have to go.’

  But the dark images that haunted their grandmother seemed to subside once they had her at the cottage and sitting in front of the warm range. It was a hot July day and they would not normally have stoked up the fire so vigorously, but George had done so to welcome the old woman.

  They gave up their bed in the corner and moved into the loft, while Jimmy slept on the sofa in the cottage.

  ‘I’ll make us a proper bed,’ George promised as they nestled down in the straw.

  ‘I love you, Geordie,’ Maggie murmured into his shoulder. ‘You’re a canny, canny man.’

  They left the skylight open to the mild night air with its scents of roses and clover and newly cut logs and chickens and gazed up at the stars. For two weeks they continued to enjoy their rustic freedom and the dry balmy evenings. After the sweat and toil of the forge, George would hasten up the hill and out of the dusty, hot streets as fast as he could, while Maggie stayed close to home, attending her grandmother and impatient for his return.