by Annie Murray
‘That did need a tidy-up, didn’t it?’ the woman said. Then she tied it back with a pink ribbon, which looked lovely against her dark, wavy locks. Katie was ecstatic and bounced happily back to her mother.
To finish this extraordinary afternoon, Vera took them both to Lewis’s tea room. Katie sat at the table, aware of her shorter hair, which also smelled envelopingly nice because the lady had sprayed something on it. Every so often she put her hand up and felt the ends of it, and the ribbon. She gazed round the tea room with its little tables with white cloths and comfortable chairs, at the waitresses in their neat black-and-white uniforms, offering cakes to the customers on three-tiered stands. Katie’s mouth was watering before the cakes got anywhere near them. There was piano music in the background, and there was nothing ugly or dirty to be seen. It was like being in heaven. If only things could always be like this!
‘I want to be a waitress when I grow up,’ she said passionately.
Vera glanced at her with distaste, then away, trying to attract one of the waitresses’ attention. ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Her voice was acid and forbidding. Katie shrank inside. Mother was back, the usual Mother who could turn on you in a second.
But she did not feel crushed for long because one of these heavenly beings came to take their order, smiling prettily as they requested tea and a cake. The choice of cake was very difficult, but she picked a delicious pink sponge with cream in the middle and cherries on the top. Vera had a scone with jam and a tiny pot of whipped cream, and showed Katie how to eat daintily with a little cake fork, and they each wiped their mouths on the starched napkins.
‘I shan’t need any dinner,’ Katie said, scraping the last trace of cream from her plate with a sigh of satisfaction. She looked across the table at her mother and saw with a new shock how she looked as if she was in the right place, in a way she never did in their poor little house.
‘Mom?’ Vera didn’t correct her this time for not saying ‘Mother’. ‘Are we rich now?’
A bitter expression passed across her mother’s face for a second. ‘No, dear. Not rich. But things will get better. We shan’t have to live in that slummy place for much longer.’
After Christmas they moved house. Katie could feel her mother’s grim relief as they left Kenilworth Street behind. Patrick hired a van to take their belongings and got a friend to help him.
‘Are we going too?’ Katie asked. ‘Can I ride on top?’
‘No, you certainly can’t,’ Vera said sharply. ‘There’s not the room, and I’m not having us perched up with our chattels for all the neighbourhood to see. I’ll take you on the tram. Your uncle will go ahead of us.
The only sad part was saying goodbye to Mrs Thomas, but both women promised that they would remain friends and visit each other. Mrs Thomas kissed Katie on the cheek and said, ‘Bye-bye, love. I’m hoping we’ll see something of you. Don’t forget your Auntie Enid, will you?’
She stood on the step waving her hankie when Katie, with tears in her eyes, waved back until they couldn’t see Mrs Thomas in her pinny any more.
They moved to a nice little house in Sparkhill, not far from the park with its lovely green space and bandstand, where Vera said there would be music on warmer days. The house had a back and a front room, three bedrooms including an attic and, best of all, a scullery at the back with a copper to heat up for laundry, and a strip of garden with their own private privy behind the house.
As they walked along from the tram stop on the Stratford Road, the van was still outside. The street was cleaner and much nicer than the one they had left, and when Vera stepped inside the new place where their belongings, including her sewing machine, were being unloaded, she put her face in her hands and burst into tears.
‘Oh, at last,’ she sobbed. ‘A halfway decent home – after all this time.’
Katie was excited by the move. She had a room of her own now, up in the attic.
‘It’s no good putting your uncle up there,’ Vera said.
She didn’t need to say more. Sometimes Patrick paced the floor for parts of the night. It would have driven them to distraction trying to sleep underneath.
Very soon after they moved in, Patrick disappeared for several days. Vera seemed calm about it.
‘He’ll be back,’ she said. ‘He likes it here really – he’ll be able to go to Mass in Evelyn Road. He just doesn’t take very well to things changing. It sets him off. Like when he came back from Africa.’ That was her explanation for things. Africa. She always blamed it on things outside him, like the weather, or Africa. She was never, ever able to acknowledge that Patrick himself had anything wrong with him.
Over the next weeks Vera O’Neill set to work with her Singer, making pretty curtains to give them privacy and turning the bare house into a home. Gradually she saved up for some pieces of furniture – not new, but in reasonable condition. She found a table and chairs for the back room and a comfortable couch for the front, with a curved wooden frame and upholstered in deep-blue velvet. She bought some rugs to go by each of the fires.
Moving house also meant a new school for Katie. She was glad in a way. Cromwell Street School was all right, but ever since what had happened with Em all those months ago, they had been avoiding each other and had scarcely spoken a word, even when Em came back to school. Katie had wanted to explain – it wasn’t my fault, it was Mother – but when she saw Em playing with that Molly Fox, of all people, and looking through Katie as if she didn’t exist, it had hurt Katie’s pride. She had expected Em to be less self-sufficient and strong, to beg her to be friends. She made do with Lily Davies and a few others, but it had never been the same. Even though she would be starting at Clifton Road School when the term had already begun, she looked forward to a new start. And though it was hard at first, some of the girls were friendly and she soon settled in.
Five
Summer 1937
‘Disgraceful – absolutely disgraceful.’ Katie heard her mother’s voice as she slipped in from school and the sunny afternoon. ‘And she’s so common. I don’t know why they’ve allowed it. Is that you, Katie?’
‘Yes,’ she called, putting her worn old satchel down in the front room.
‘There’s tea in the pot.’
She knew what she would find, going through to the back room. It was Monday, washday, the day Vera didn’t work at Lewis’s. Once the morning toil of a copper full of water and the mangle was over, often Vera got together with Enid Thomas – usually in Sparkhill, because although Enid had to go to the trouble of making the journey once or twice a month, she liked coming.
‘You’ve got your house so nice, Vera,’ she’d say. ‘It’s a pleasure to visit.’
Vera was still working four days in the week and did not have much time for any social life. She had joined the Townswomen’s Guild and very occasionally went to their meetings, and was on civil terms with her neighbours, but she was so closed and aloof in her dealings with people that Enid was still her only real friend. Enid’s role, Katie could see, was to listen a great deal to Vera’s opinions and feel honoured to be her friend.
They were sitting at the table with the brown teapot in a crocheted cosy and their cups, and a plate with the remains of a cherry Madeira cake. The back door was open, giving them a view of the narrow strip of green garden along which the full line of whites hung, puffed out gently by the breeze.
‘Hello, bab,’ Enid greeted her, peering up at Katie through her wire spectacles. ‘Oh, my word, I think you get prettier every time I see you! Isn’t she lovely, Vera? Not long now, eh – and then it’ll be all over. Out in the working world.’
‘Yes.’ Katie smiled, pouring herself a cup of tea and hungrily cutting a slice of cake.
‘Your mom says you’re going to the Commercial School?’
‘Umm.’ Katie nodded, through a mouthful.
It was her last term at school. If anyone had asked her how she would like to spend her future days once her education was over, she might well have s
aid, ‘Reading.’ But no one did ask, and sitting with your nose in a book was obviously no way to earn a living. Vera had decreed that Katie should apply to the Commercial School on the Stratford Road to learn shorthand and office skills, and Katie had agreed, having no idea what else she might do apart from work in a factory or shop.
‘And what about that friend of yours – Amy, is it?’
Katie swallowed. ‘She wants to work in Woolies – like her mom.’
She saw Vera frown.
‘I think I’ll go outside,’ Katie said. ‘Leave you to it.’
There was an old tree stump a little way down the garden and she sat down, holding the remains of her cake in one hand while she pulled off her socks with the other. The cool stalks of grass felt lovely between her slender toes. There was a little apple tree at the end of the garden, which already had tiny, hard fruits on it. She breathed in, enjoying the peace, hearing the rise and fall of the women’s voices inside. No doubt Mother had resumed her enthusiastic demolition of the character of Wallis Simpson –Twice divorced! And American! – who had been the reason for the King’s abdication.
‘Disgraceful!’ Katie mimicked. ‘Absolutely disgusting!’ She giggled to herself. They had all celebrated the coronation of the new King, Edward’s brother George VI, last month, and there was still bunting left fluttering across some of the streets to remind them. But even all that excitement had not given them as much to chew over as Edward’s marriage to her – that dreadful woman. Promises were made to be kept; it was disgusting. Katie could see her mother swell with outrage whenever she talked about it. She couldn’t really see why her mother got so het up about it all. Being the King and Queen didn’t sound much fun anyway.
She sat, dreamily enjoying the feel of the sun on her face and eating her cake. Voices could be heard in other gardens and, somewhere in the distance, a dog barked on and off. Sitting there, Katie realized that she couldn’t now remember the last time she had heard the sound of her mother’s weeping coming from the bedroom next door.
Over the past years while they had been in Sparkhill, things had settled down in the O’Neill household, or so it seemed.
This was what made what came later such a shock.
Vera O’Neill had turned her little terraced house into what appeared to be a haven of genteel peace. She had made curtains and covers for the beds. She had persuaded Uncle Patrick that he did deserve to sleep in a bed and not just on the floor, and had made peg rugs to cover some of the bare boards of his room. Scattered round the house, and especially in the front room, were delicate lacy mats she had crocheted, and on a larger one, placed on a side table in the front room, she kept a glass vase of flowers that she replenished every week, buying fresh ones from the lady in the Bull Ring on Friday afternoon, when she was selling them off. In front of the vase rested a picture of Katie, taken in a photographer’s studio when she was just thirteen. She had had her dark hair arranged loose over one shoulder and her head turned very slightly to her left, so that she was looking round at the camera, half smiling. Katie was quite surprised by how nicely it had turned out. After all these years of teeth dropping out and being replaced and feeling awkward, she suddenly looked more grown-up.
‘It’s a lovely picture,’ Amy had said wistfully. She was a good-natured, easy-going girl who lived the other side of the Ladypool Road, where they did a lot of their shopping. She had a gaunt face with dark rings under her eyes, a beaky nose and slightly protruding teeth. No one could have called her a looker, but she was good company.
The other picture, in pride of place, was the wedding photograph. Vera in an ivory-coloured dress, her smile frozen forever, stood with her arm slipped through that of her tall, dashing new husband Michael O’Neill, looking up at him with his glossy black hair and that smile, which would win any heart. The adoration was clear in her face.
As Katie grew older, more and more she saw her own features in her father’s smile. But what would he have been like? It was terrible not knowing. Would he have resembled Uncle Patrick at all, have been kindly but unstable? When she asked her mother that question, she got a scornful snort in reply.
‘Of course not! D’you think I’d have chosen someone like him!’ She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, indicating Patrick’s room. They were completely different – you only have to look at them.’
And it was true. How did Michael’s winning smile and handsome features in any way resemble Patrick’s ascetic, haunted ones? All that you could see in common was the shape of their hairline, a marked curve, dipping to a point in the middle and arching back – no receding hair in their family.
‘If your father had lived, he’d have been a successful engineer, not a navvy like Patrick, humping coal around.’
‘But he looks after us,’ Katie argued. ‘Doesn’t he? And he can’t help it.’
‘Huh,’ Vera acknowledged, but she couldn’t argue.
Katie didn’t like it when he mother was unkind about Patrick, even when he couldn’t hear it. Every day he came faithfully home, turning down the entry and in through the back door.
‘Don’t bring all that muck and mess in through the front,’ Vera ordered him. But Katie knew that Vera didn’t want people to see him coming in the front. She made him wash in the scullery sink before he came through into the house.
But even Patrick had settled, at least into a pattern that they could more or less predict. His moods came and went in waves, fast and slow, as Vera called them, with brief periods of calm in between, when he was almost like a normal person, before it all began again.
His involvement with things ebbed and flowed. You could tell how he was by his comings and goings in his parish, the English Martyrs in Evelyn Road. For some weeks he’d stay away, sometimes not even going to Mass on a Sunday. At first, when they moved to Sparkhill, the parish priest, Father Daly, called round when Patrick disappeared. He soon gave up, recognizing the pattern himself. Within a few weeks Patrick would start going back to Mass, his thin hair carefully combed back. He’d gravitate, by gradual stages, from slipping in at the back of the congregation to moving forward to the front. Katie went with him sometimes, so she saw the way it went. Soon after that he would rejoin the choir. Patrick had a lovely baritone voice and it was a joy to hear him sing his heart out. He would help with the St Vincent de Paul Society, giving support to the poor, and anything he could – while he was in the right frame of mind. This would last a while and then he’d be off again, not to be seen for weeks. The choir got used to it too. That was the thing about Patrick; he was so polite and gentle, and basically lovable, that in the end he found people who tolerated him. As she grew up, Katie realized that the White Fathers must also have tolerated him for a long time before he became too much of a handful and was despatched home.
It had been similar with jobs. He’d worked in factories at first, but – having no skills – had done menial jobs, packing, fetching and carrying, which also suited his restlessness better than standing still. Among other smaller firms he’d been at Cannings and Co. in Great Hampton Street, and at Wilmot Breedon at Hay Mills. He preferred being outdoors and for a while was with Midland County Dairies. But his disappearing for three days once, without a word, did for that job.
Then he had a stroke of luck. After they’d moved to Sparkhill, he met the Lawler brothers. They were twins, though not identical, and Catholics from the neighbouring parish in Balsall Heath. They ran their own business, Lawler’s Coal and Coke Deliveries.
‘I think Father Daly must have put in a word,’ Patrick said when he’d been with them for a time. ‘They’ve been very good to me, God love them.’
The work suited him: it was outdoors and physical, and Seamus and Johnny Lawler were able to tolerate his occasional absences. They had a younger brother, Dougal, who was the ‘special’ one and not quite all there. He didn’t have a proper job, but helped out a bit when Patrick didn’t turn up. So he had been working for the Lawlers now for several years and would drag himself along t
here, however bad he was feeling now, to repay their kindness to him.
It was in his ‘fast’ moods that he was more likely to disappear. Katie liked it best when a ‘fast’ mood was building up, because Uncle Patrick would be full of energy. He would fill the house with noise coming from his room, pacing and talking, and now and then a muffled shriek, as if he was letting it all out into his pillow. There’d be endless talking and recounting of stories, tales of his childhood in Ireland and anecdotes about Uganda. Katie learned about some of the children he remembered and about miraculous healings, like the woman who had a gigantic growth in her body. To cure it she decided to carry her rosary beads everywhere with her, praying to them and kissing them morning, noon and night, and within a few weeks the growth shrank and withered right away. There were all sorts of stories about animals and snake bites, and then his money-making schemes, and after a time Katie would stop enjoying the mood because the twitching and talking and pacing increased until he was like a loose wheel that was about to spin off. And that was when he would disappear, for two days, three – even a week once – and come home bony, dishevelled and exhausted, his chin stubbly as a doormat, his shoes in need of a cobbler. And already he would have begun to sink.
Even in all this, his wild moods, she had scarcely ever felt afraid of him. Katie had spent quite a lot of time with Patrick during her childhood. Almost every Saturday, unless he really couldn’t manage it, they went swimming.
They had gone to the baths in Nechells, and now to the big brick building on the Moseley Road. Katie had taken to the water like a fish and was now a strong swimmer, so that Patrick didn’t have to tow her along by her hands, telling her to ‘Kick your legs now, Katie – that’s right, nice and strong.’ She liked going into the echoey old baths with their little cubicles for changing along the side, and it always felt like a treat. Uncle Patrick had an ancient costume, or ‘togs’ as he called it, which covered him top and bottom, its baggy blackness only highlighting the scrawny whiteness of his arms and legs. Katie’s costume was a dark-red knitted thing, which got so heavy when wet that it felt more of a hindrance than a help. But they both got in eagerly and swam up and down as best they could, amid the other earnest swimmers and dive-bombing lads. To anyone who gave them funny looks, she’d give one right back: she felt protective towards Uncle Patrick.
