by Annie Murray
The other thing was that Sybil soon cottoned on to the fact that Katie could sew. Anxious to please, Katie offered to do various bits of mending.
‘I was always a cack-handed seamstress at the best of times,’ Sybil admitted. ‘But now of course my hands are no use for anything delicate at all.’ Both her hands and feet were gnarled and painful with arthritis.
‘Oh, I’m quite happy to sew,’ Katie told her.
‘In fact, if you’re that keen . . . Can you tailor garments as well?’
‘Yes, my mother taught me! She was – is . . . a seamstress . . .’
Sybil bypassed an opportunity to be nosy here, for which Katie was very grateful. ‘There’s an old Singer out in the privy at the back. We could bring it in and get it cleaned up and oiled. You’re welcome to use it. I expect you could do with making things for the boy.’
Katie soon turned her hand to getting the machine working. It was perfectly all right, apart from dust and cobwebs and in need of a dash of oil.
‘Thank you so much, Miss Routh!’ she said. ‘I’d thought about trying to get hold of one somewhere, but I shan’t have to now. And if you’d like me to sew anything for you, you only have to say.’
‘Well now,’ Sybil said, ‘I do have some cloth that would make a frock – so if you wouldn’t mind . . . And do call me by my Christian name, for heaven’s sake. I feel like a schoolteacher being “Miss Routhed” all the time.’
‘Of course, er, Sybil,’ Katie said. ‘I can make you something based on one of your other ones, can’t I?’
Sybil produced a bolt of cloth from somewhere upstairs, of dark-blue swirls on a yellow-and-white background.
‘I’m sure it’s meant for curtains really,’ she said. ‘But beggars can’t be choosers, can we?’
‘She thinks you’re marvellous,’ Maudie told Katie a few weeks after she’d moved in. ‘She was singing your praises to several of the others after Communion on Sunday.’
Katie wondered nervously whether Sybil would expect her to go to church as well, and what she’d think if she knew Katie was a Catholic. One Sunday, when she saw Sybil getting ready to go out, in her large straw hat, she took courage and said, ‘I haven’t been very good about keeping it up, as I’ve been so busy. But I might start taking Michael to Mass soon.’
She waited for the ceiling to fall in. Sybil glanced round, then back into the glass where she was adjusting her hat.
‘Ah, you’re a Holy Roman, are you? I did wonder, with a name like O’Neill.’ She tidied her collar, putting her head on one side. ‘Queer business, church. Still, I was brought up to it, you see.’ She pressed her hat harder down onto her head. ‘And I do find that if you can stick it out, it can be frightfully entertaining.’
Thirty-Nine
Katie’s regard and fondness for Sybil Routh had increased over the months that she was a tenant in her house, but it was last winter’s freeze that had really created a bond between the two women.
The snow began in late January, so much of it that the country was gripped by a terrible freeze and a state of emergency. The novelty of the first day or two – Michael out in the street with the other children, snowballing and pulling each other along on trays – quickly wore off.
‘Well,’ Sybil announced one morning at the beginning of February. ‘It’s happened – everything’s frozen up. I can’t get any water out of the tap. Don’t go trying to flush any lavatories until I see if the downpipe is frozen as well. We’ll have to think what to do.’
‘Thank goodness!’ she announced shortly afterwards. The downpipe was still working. Soon they were all helping to melt snow in an old tin baby’s bath over the range, for flushing the toilets and having a wash. Basic living became a huge operation: melting snow, trying to get anywhere, buying food. Evenings were spent swathed in coats close to the fire in the dining room, though Sybil had insisted that the Gudgeons must have the little electric-bar fire in their room.
‘She can’t be moved, and the pair of them will freeze to death else,’ Sybil said. ‘They’re like a pair of little birds – no flesh on them.’
Soon, because enough coal could not be brought from the newly nationalized mines, the Government was rationing electricity. By early February there was to be no electricity allocated to industry and thousands of workers were laid off. Those at home would have no power between nine and midday and between two and four in the afternoon. Coal itself was in acutely short supply as well. Even sitting huddled up inside, listening on the wireless to news of twenty-foot drifts in country areas, it was hard to keep warm. The offices where Katie worked kept going on most days, and she struggled in when she could get a bus and worked wrapped in her coat and scarf, blowing on her hands to keep warm.
When she wasn’t at work, Katie did everything she could to help Sybil. She felt responsible, somehow, as the only other woman in the house, and she was always keen to earn Sybil’s approval. Sybil was also a person with resources that she could tap. In the storeroom behind Katie’s attic bedroom there seemed to be a stash of all sorts of things.
‘Old family stuff,’ Sybil told her. ‘Heaven knows what’s in there! The siblings won’t bother with it. It’s hardly been touched for years.’
Sybil’s five surviving brothers and sisters were scattered widely from Perth in Australia to Cape Wrath in Scotland. Only one lived anywhere near – a brother in Bournemouth. She seemed to have a regular correspondence with them all, but they scarcely ever saw each other.
It was in this cluttered storeroom, after ferreting about a bit, that Sybil had found the material that Katie made into a frock for her. She had been very pleased and admiring of Katie’s sewing. And one day during the great freeze, when Katie came home, Sybil announced, ‘I’ve been having a clear-out – found some things to burn. There are chairs up there that are full of worm, and I never want to see them again, ugly old things. So there’ll be some extra firewood for a start. There are still a few logs out in the garden. If we could get Mr Jenkins busy with an axe . . .’
Geoff Jenkins, the accounts clerk, did not, on the face of it, look the axe-wielding type, but he dutifully set to the next Saturday morning with surprising energy and produced a heap of chunks of wood to keep them going.
When Sybil and Katie stepped outside to see how he was getting on, Sybil suddenly stepped close to Katie and said, ‘Take a glance up at next door’s window.’
Katie looked up, as instructed, to see Mrs Arbuckle at the back window, staring fixedly at Mr Jenkins’s striving figure.
‘Susan-fodder, d’you think?’ Sybil murmured.
‘Isn’t he a bit young?’ Katie objected. Geoffrey Jenkins must have had ten years on Susan.
‘Oh, that’s never stopped her yet,’ Sybil said.
‘That’s a fine specimen of a man you’ve got there,’ Katie said, imitating Mrs Arbuckle’s breathless voice.
Sybil guffawed, then called out, ‘Fine work, Mr Jenkins! Keep it up – I’m most grateful to you!’
Geoff Jenkins straightened up, pink in the face, and smiled. He looked as if he was rather enjoying himself.
‘Makes a change,’ he said. ‘You know – from sitting at a desk.’
‘You’re being watched, by the way,’ Sybil said. ‘From next door. I expect she wants you to marry her daughter.’
The look of alarm that spread over his face sent both of them inside in a fit of giggles.
‘Poor Susan,’ Sybil spluttered. ‘It must be rather like having a shark for a mother!’ Her face sobered. ‘Actually, though, Katie – I rather think it’s you he might be interested in.’
‘Well,’ Katie said tartly, though she had realized this, as Geoff Jenkins had started paying attention to her, ‘he can forget about that right away.’
At the height of the freeze Mrs Gudgeon was taken seriously ill and had to be moved to Dudley Road Hospital, where she died two days later. They tried to be kind and helpful to the bereaved Mr Gudgeon.
‘Oh, the poor man!’ Edna Arbuckle
had cried, appearing on the step to find out what was amiss. She was bundled up in a huge tweed coat, a mustard-coloured hat like a large pie sitting on top of her head and a pair of little boots with zips up the front. ‘I suppose he’s all on his own now!’
‘Well, we’ll do our best to see that he doesn’t just hibernate,’ Sybil said drily.
For several months afterwards Mrs Arbuckle had pursued Mr Gudgeon with what he appeared to find a horrific amount of interest – not this time on Susan’s behalf, but for herself.
‘He could move in with us, you know,’ she told Sybil, who relayed the offer to Katie with twinkling glee. ‘I know how to look after a man, even though my Harold has been on the other side for a good many years now.’
The only flaw in her plan was that poor Mr Gudgeon fled every time she appeared, and eventually she gave up on him, declaring him too old and set in his ways.
‘He’d only take advantage,’ she confided to Sybil. ‘You know the type – ask them in for a cup of tea and the next minute they’ve installed themselves, slippers and all.’
Mr Gudgeon continued to live in the big room at the front on his own, but because of its size it was also a cold room. The warmest place in the house was Sybil’s dining room, where she kept a fire going. In these days of extremity she made it clear that they were welcome to sit there whenever they liked, to keep warm. Coal supplies had to be eked out, the wood was soon going down and it was a case of making do, rugs over their knees, wrapped in layers and layers of clothes while the house was muffled in snow and spiky with icicles, the ground hard and slippery as glass. Mr Gudgeon usually disappeared upstairs first, and Geoff Jenkins – who seemed to have taken the hint quite quickly that Katie was not interested in him – stayed to chat for a while, before leaving Katie to talk to Sybil.
One night in late February they had settled as usual, chairs pulled in close to the fire. Sybil treated herself to a nip of malt, Katie refusing as ever.
‘One day,’ Katie sighed, cradling a cup of tea between her hands, ‘we’ll be able to have a proper bath!’
Sybil laughed. ‘Surprising what comes to seem a luxury, isn’t it? We’re all right though, really. Think of all those poor people still laid off at Longbridge, not getting paid. And some of the houses – so inadequate. Goodness knows how some people are managing. The wind’s bitter out there tonight.’ She grimaced. ‘I used to be a midwife. I’ve seen some sights in my time.’
She paused to take a sip of her whisky.
‘My father used to say, after we came home from Africa, “We take too much for granted!” He was really quite vicarish at times. “We live a life of comfort, and we don’t even know it.” There was always a bit of finger-wagging that went with that.’
‘How long did you live in Africa?’ Katie asked.
‘Oh, I was born there, stayed until I was seven, when we came back here, the whole gaggle of us: seven children. If you’re not careful, I’ll bore you with the family albums – of which I seem to be custodian.’
‘I’d like that,’ Katie said. Sybil’s life seemed so exotic.
‘Oh, I’ll dig them out one of these days . . . Anyway, my parents thought I needed rescuing. I had no concept of race – you don’t, until someone tells you you’re supposed to, I don’t think, though of course they start on you very young. But I used to play with anyone and everyone. I was quite native, really! Much more so than my other siblings. My best friend, Nancy – well, that was her English name; I expect she had another one – was the cook’s daughter. We were of an age. But that wasn’t the reason we left. I was about to be sent home to some ghastly boarding school anyway. No, my mother was having my youngest sister, and her health grew worse and worse. The missions were all a great trial to her really. Not that she wasn’t an open-minded woman – she liked to see the world, and she was some sort of Christian. But she did get so poorly at times. One of the mission doctors said to my father, “You have two options, Cyril. You stay with the mission here in Uganda – or you go home and save your wife.” So home we came, I’m glad to say. Which saved me from boarding school and proved to me that my father was sensible at heart and not a religious fanatic. He was stern at times, but he didn’t put his ideals or his so-called vocation before real people – that’s always such a bad idea.’
Katie had been listening, fascinated. ‘I had an uncle who was a missionary in Uganda,’ she said.
Sybil’s head swivelled round, eyes gleaming with curiosity under her dark brows. ‘Oh? Who? Do tell!’ Then she remembered. ‘Ah, of course. He wasn’t one of ours.’
‘He was a White Father. Well, Brother. But they sent him home – it didn’t suit his health, either.’ Katie found tears spring unexpectedly into her eyes.
‘You were attached to him?’
‘Yes. You see he lived with us while I was growing up. My father died when I was very young, and Uncle Patrick came and helped look after us. He suffered . . . Well, mentally, really.’ Again, this tough admission. Blood flooded her cheeks. ‘And then he . . . He died as well . . .’
‘Leaving how many?’
‘Oh, not many – just my mother and me.’
There was a silence. Sybil, circling her glass round between her hands, stared into the fire. Her familiar smell, of lavender water mixed with whisky, was comforting.
‘That’s why she – my mother – took up sewing, you see. Even when Uncle Patrick was alive she needed a living. She made lovely things.’
‘She taught you excellently. And she passed away as well?’
Katie quickly wiped her eyes, her cheeks still burning. ‘No. Not so far as I know. We had a disagreement. I haven’t seen her for some time.’
‘I see,’ Sybil said, considering this. ‘And is there no mending the situation?’
Katie didn’t want to say more, to go into what had happened with Michael’s father. She had tried to bury Simon Collinge in her mind, even though she suspected Sybil must have guessed some of it. ‘She told me to leave,’ she said abruptly. ‘So I suppose I feel that the situation is hers to mend. She could find me, if she tried. She doesn’t seem to want to.’
Whether because of tact or lack of further interest, Sybil did not push on with the conversation and soon, as the fire died down, she struggled to her feet.
‘Ah!’ She gave a grunt of pain as her feet took her weight. ‘Blast this wretched rheumatism. Time to turn in, I think. Up the wooden hill. This weather takes it out of you.’
‘Yes, it does. It’s making Michael sleep like a log, that’s one thing!’ Katie tidied the room a little to save Sybil’s sore feet.
‘I heard a good bit of advice today for keeping warm in bed,’ Sybil said, limping to the door. ‘Take you knickers off and put your feet in them. You won’t wear your socks out so fast then.’
‘Oh,’ Katie said, startled. ‘Yes – well, thank you. Perhaps I’ll try that.’
‘Goodnight, dear.’
‘Goodnight, Sybil.’
Lying as instructed, with her feet tucked into her knickers, which turned out to be not a bad idea at all, she stared, shivering, up into the darkness, full of uncomfortable feelings.
The conversation about her mother brought it all back, the hurt and shame. Should she go and find Vera, make amends if she could? It was more than four years now. A cold, sad feeling filled her. Most of the time she tried to put it all out of her mind. Michael was her precious kin now – the only one – and she loved him fiercely and proudly. But her mother? When had things ever been close or loving between her and that fearful, angry widow, even when she was very young? Even in her dimmest memories of when her father was still alive, it was him she remembered running to, where there was a memory of warmth. If only he hadn’t died – things would have been so different!
Now, in this house, she realized that she felt more fondness for funny old Sybil than she ever could now for her mother. It seemed wrong, unnatural, but, she knew, as her eyes slowly closed, that was the truth of how she felt. Sybil had been
kind and made her feel welcome in this house – and that kindness was worth its weight in gold.
Forty
After Mr Gudgeon’s funeral, a very quiet affair, Sybil advertised for a new lodger in her usual way. She didn’t have to wait long.
On the Sunday afternoon, on a still, balmy day, Katie was getting ready to take Michael out to his favourite place: Handsworth Park. He loved to be able to run freely in the wide-open space. But as she was squatting down to help him put his shoes on, Katie heard voices downstairs. There was something different about them that caught her attention.
‘Sssh, Mikey – listen!’ She held up her finger to stop her son’s chatter. Eyes wide, he listened with her. There were male voices down in the hall, interspersed with Sybil’s gruff tones.
‘Stay there,’ Katie instructed Michael. She crept over and opened the door. The voices floated up more loudly, though still muffled. There were two men, both foreign, and she could barely make out anything they said. They sounded polite and rather earnest. Then she heard Sybil say, ‘There’s a gentleman in the room next door, a Mr Jenkins – he’s quiet and hard-working. And up in the attic is Mrs O’Neill, a young widow with a little boy. She’s a very nice, reserved person and the child is quiet. You won’t be disturbed.’
One of them asked a question, in a deep, bassoonlike voice that fascinated Katie. She had never heard a voice quite like it before. They were clearly struggling to understand everything.
‘Yes,’ Sybil went on. ‘It’s one room only – but it is large, so if the two of you are wanting to share for the time being . . . Why don’t you come up and see?’
