by Anne Bennett
HP Sauce workers had to wear overalls too, and again their hair had be hidden under caps, but the working apparel was a lot smarter than that worn at Kynoch’s. Here there was no swirling yellow dust and the only smell that of vinegar. The women worked on a conveyer belt, packing bottle after bottle of tomato sauce into crates, for the troops, the other girls said.
‘So,’ said Lily, as they went home that first night, ‘we are still doing our bit, for how would the men manage to kill Germans without a bit of sauce? And this way we don’t risk being blown up for our war effort.’
On 11 November, the church bells started to peal out joyfully. The factories sounded their hooters and people spilled onto the streets, aware that the war, that dreadful war that had lasted for four terrifying and bloody years, was finally over.
Children were released from school and many factories closed down for the day, HP Sauce included. People seemed to have a need to be together. The streets were so filled with happy, celebrating people that many drivers, unable to get through the grid-locked roads, abandoned their vehicles and joined the mêlée. Aggie felt so sorry for those in the widows’ bonnets. For them peace had come too late.
That night she said to Charlie and Clara, ‘The war’s over and your daddy will be home soon. Won’t that be nice?’
However, for Charlie and Clara, their father was a shadowy figure that they could barely remember, while Aggie and Lily were real flesh-and-blood people that they loved dearly. Charlie remembered Aggie saying she would leave when the war was over, so he gave the question serious consideration and then said, ‘Dunno, really. Don’t know what a daddy does. I really think that I would prefer it if you and Lily stayed.’
‘And I would,’ Clara echoed.
Aggie was saddened by the children’s response and recounted it the next day at work.
‘At least that Polly has got her man and he is coming home,’ Aggie’s workmate said. ‘As for the rest of us, I can’t see as there will be that many men left to go round.’
‘Yeah, the best of them are littering some foreign field,’ put in another.
‘Like my bloody fiancé, killed in 1914,’ said the first woman. ‘God, he had only been in the army weeks. No, I reckon this will be a generation of spinsters and widows.’
‘She could well be right,’ Lily said when Aggie told her this on their way home.
‘Good job I am not in the market for a husband then,’ Aggie said. ‘And for God’s sake don’t look at me like that. I want no man. Don’t you think that I have had enough to do with men already to last me a lifetime?’
‘Your life could be different now, though,’ Lily protested. ‘Respectable.’
Aggie shook her head. ‘I want no man in my life,’ she said. ‘None of that malarkey ever again.’
Lily and Aggie knew it was time for them to move on and they began to look for new lodgings. They tried in the roads around Aston Cross first, to save on tram fares and travelling time. Most places were only too willing to let out rooms to two respectable-looking women in full-time employment.
In the end they rented two rooms in Vicarage Road, just a step away from HP Sauce. One room was a bedroom with two beds side by side, a wardrobe, chest of drawers and a dressing table. The other room was a living room with a small kitchenette leading off from it. This had a sink and slopstone, running water from a tap, a couple of gas rings, a few battered saucepans, a kettle and a shelf with assorted crockery on it. To the two women it was like a palace, especially when they learned that there was a bathroom of sorts on the floor below, with a boiler to boil the water for a bath if they wanted one.
‘Our own place,’ Lily said. ‘And we’ll soon have it brightened up.’
‘Yes,’ Aggie said. ‘Only one thing worries me and that is it’s on the third floor and you were puffing like a steam engine when you reached here today. Will you be able to do that every day?’
‘Course,’ Lily said confidently. ‘And twenty times a day if I have to. I am not as young as I used to be, that’s all, and there’s not a thing you or I can do to change that so don’t start fretting until there is something worth fretting over. This is another chapter in our lives, Aggie.’
When the children realised that Lily and Aggie were leaving, they were inconsolable. It tore at Aggie’s heartstrings that they cried themselves to sleep that night.
‘I’m as sad as the children,’ Polly confessed that night, when it was eventually quiet upstairs, ‘and I knew it was coming. Can’t you stay a little longer? Till we have word that Georgie is demobbed, perhaps?’
Aggie shook her head. ‘No, we really must go. I am sad too because I will miss you all so much. But from what the children said to me the other day, they can’t remember their father. In fact, Charlie said he didn’t know what a daddy did. You must use the time before Georgie comes home to tell them about their daddy. Dredge up all the nice times you remember and tell them so that they will look forward to their father coming home. And, believe me, it will be much easier to do that without us around muddying up the water.’
‘She’s right, lass,’ Lily said. ‘And you’re luckier than many, for your man will soon be by your side to help raise the children. Charlie in particular needs a father, and yet many boys his age will be without one.’
‘I do know how lucky I am really,’ Polly said. ‘It’s just that we have got on so well. I have never had such good friends.’
‘We’ll only be in Aston Cross,’ Aggie reminded her. ‘We can still see each other.’
‘It won’t be the same.’
‘Course it won’t,’ Lily said. ‘Nothing will be the same, and for you it will be better.’
‘You must come for Christmas,’ Polly urged. ‘It will make the day for the children and there is precious little in the shops to buy them anything in the way of toys.’
Aggie and Lily knew how true that was so they agreed to spend Christmas Day at the Palmers’ house.
The men began to dribble home from the war just before Christmas, but many of them were unaware that they were incubating a terrible disease that they inadvertently passed on to their families and friends. It was called Asian flu, and was said to be spread by the fleas that fed off the rats that shared the trenches with the soldiers. Soon it ran rampant through the population, killing thousands.
The speed the disease took hold overwhelmed the doctors and hospitals, for there was no cure. It all depended on whether a person had the resilience to fight the infection or not. Many in that city were too thin and undernourished to fight anything so virulent and lethal, and the flu claimed many lives, initially amongst the very old, very young, the frail and the weak.
Christmas was low-key that year, for people were generally disheartened. As a nation they were still reeling from fighting a war of unparalleled magnitude that had killed and maimed so many. For those same people then to be attacked by a killer virus seemed monstrously unfair and totally terrifying.
But for the children Christmas was still Christmas, and Aggie and Lily were determined to find something for Charlie and Clara’s stockings. By searching diligently Aggie was able to find a skipping rope for Clara and a bag of marbles for Charlie, and Lily bought Clara a book of fairy tales and Charlie tales about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. They delivered these to Polly on Christmas Eve. So on Christmas morning the children had full stockings for Polly had already packed each of them with an orange and an apple, a small bar of chocolate and a silver thrupenny bit. For Charlie and Clara, then, Christmas was wonderful and made more especially so when Lily and Aggie arrived.
The day had been a special one for all of them. By next year Georgie would surely be back in the bosom of his family and then things would undoubtedly change. With promises to visit again soon, Aggie and Lily took their leave after tea. As they walked through the dark and near-empty streets, for there were no trams running, it began to snow.
‘Seems right, doesn’t it?’ Aggie said. ‘Snow on Christmas Day?’
‘Yeah,’ Lily agreed. ‘I think problem times are over for us at long last, so let’s look forward to 1919. All we’ve got to do is dodge this bloody flu.’
But the flu was a serous threat. As the year turned and more and more men were demobbed, the scale of the infection rose. People previously thought to be strong and healthy became ill, and a fair number of these did not recover. The government was in a panic. Theatres and cinemas closed and people were told to avoid crowded places. Though everyone was scared, as Lily said, people had jobs of work they had to go to and to reach those jobs many had to travel on crowded trams and omnibuses.
Ireland had its share of the flu too, of course, but as the number of Irish men and boys enlisting had been much less than in England, with even fewer returning, their problems were not as catastrophic as Britain’s. Anyway, Ireland had its own concerns. It was a very unstable country to be in at that time.
Nuala’s mistress was very jumpy about the regrouped IRA roaming the countryside, armed with guns. They began by attacking RIC barracks and shooting soldiers and others in positions of authority. When the British response was to take reprisals, killing men from surrounding towns and villages, the violence escalated as the IRA began forcing Unionists to leave their homes before setting light to them.
Lady Carrington spent a lot of time in the nursery and was scared to let the children out of her sight. Eventually, by the spring of 1919, her husband decided to take the family to their other house in England. This was on the outskirts of an area called Sutton Coldfield, which was a small market town just to the north of Birmingham.
Nanny Pritchard elected not to go. It was past her time to retire. Her employers agreed with her, but wanted to take Nuala with them as head nursery maid. Nuala was more than agreeable but didn’t think her parents would countenance the idea.
At first they didn’t, though Lord and Lady Carrington even went to the farm together one morning and in front of Biddy’s implacable face pleaded their case. They said how well Nuala was thought of and how the children loved her.
‘They are distressed enough to be leaving here,’ Lady Carrington said. ‘Ireland is all they have ever known and they are distraught that Nanny Pritchard is not coming with us. I don’t know how they would cope if they were to lose Nuala too. Nuala herself is agreeable to come with us and it will be a step up for her, for she will have a sizeable increase in wages and will be in charge of two junior nurserymaids working with her. Please think about it?’
‘There is nothing to think about,’ Biddy said. ‘I could not bear for my daughter to be so far away from me. The light would go out of our lives if Nuala was to leave here.’
‘We would care for her like one of our own,’ Lady Carrington said. ‘We are more than fond of the girl.’
Biddy shook her head. ‘No. I am sorry.’
The men had all been working in the lower field that day and hadn’t been aware of the visitors at all. When they came in for their dinner Biddy told them what the Carringtons wanted and her reaction to it. Thomas John was in full agreement with his wife, and Tom too was glad that his sister was to stay at home a wee while longer.
Joe expressed no opinion at first. Then he said, ‘Maybe you could reconsider.’
‘And just why would we do that?’
‘For Nuala’s own safety, maybe.’
‘What nonsense is this?’
‘Listen, Mammy,’ Joe said earnestly. ‘These are dangerous times and some of the fellers in the IRA are like madmen and would sacrifice their own mothers to further “The Cause”. I met up with a couple of them last Saturday in Buncrana. They had actually singled me out to give me a warning.’
‘A warning?’
‘Aye, for Nuala,’ Joe said. ‘They started by saying that all that were not for Home Rule were against it, and which side of the fence was this family on? I said that we wanted a united Ireland and the autonomy to rule our own country as much as the next man. They asked me, was I sure? One of them said we were Proddy sympathisers and reminded me that Finn had lost his life fighting for the English. “And now,” he said, “that sister of yours is working in a Proddy house, kowtowing to the people who have taken her homeland from her.” I started protesting then that it was only a job and all, and the other one, this chap with hard, hooded eyes, said, “I would tell her to mind her back, if I was you.”
‘Course, I had the man by the throat at that, but the other threw me against the wall, nearly knocked the breath out of me and said not to try any of that. He said that I wouldn’t be much of a farmer with two busted kneecaps. They said they had come to give me a warning and it was up to me what I did about it.’
‘Why did you not say anything sooner?’
Joe shook his head. ‘I didn’t know what to do. To tell you the honest truth, I don’t want to be part of an Ireland that is won by terrorising and threatening young girls because they don’t approve of their place of work. In my rational moments I think that the whole thing is crazy, but then some of these men are crazy.’
‘So what do you think we should do?’ Thomas John asked, a frown creasing his brow.
‘Nuala has been given a lifeline,’ Joe said. ‘Let her take it and get her away from here until Ireland is a more stable place.’
Alarmed for the safety of their younger daughter, Biddy and Thomas John went up to the Big House that afternoon. Biddy was awed by the splendour of the room that they were shown into to wait and she thought it would be a tragedy altogether if the place was set light to, though she knew in the present climate that could easily happen. Joe was right: Nuala was better out of the way altogether.
Lady Carrington saw them on her own, her husband having returned to work, and though she was pleased with their decision, she was horrified with what had been said to Joe in Buncrana.
‘Maybe it would be better not to tell her this,’ Thomas John said. ‘It would only frighten her and would serve no purpose.’
‘I understand that perfectly,’ Lady Carrington said. ‘My husband is making arrangements to travel as soon as possible.’
Thomas John felt a failure as a father and knew his life would have little meaning when Nuala moved out of it. As for Biddy, she felt an actual pain at the thought of Nuala living apart from them. She had adored and cosseted the child from the moment she was born. And that was why she had to let her go. It was better living anywhere than ending up dead in some ditch.
Although Nuala wanted to go to England, she shed bitter tears the day she left, knowing she would miss her family greatly and might not see any of them again for years. As Thomas John held his beloved child close, he felt again the pain in his heart that he had known often since Finn’s death. This was sharper than usual and he gasped.
Nuala was immediately concerned. ‘What is it, Daddy?’
‘Nothing, child, but the realisation that you are leaving us,’ Thomas John said.
Though Nuala was satisfied with that and kissed her father’s weathered cheek, Tom wasn’t convinced that that was all it was. He had heard his father give that sudden gasp before and each time the blood had drained from his face, as it had that time. He had tried asking him about it but got nowhere. Now wasn’t the time to go into it though, because the moment belonged to Nuala.
He lifted his sister onto the seat of the cart and sat up beside her to take her to the station at Derry where she would meet up with the family as there wasn’t room in the carriage for them all.
‘You’ll write, sure you will?’ Biddy asked as the cart began to roll across the cobbles.
‘I will, Mammy,’ Nuala said, ‘often, for I will miss you all so much.’
They waved till the cart reached the head of the lane, when they could see it no more, then Thomas John put an arm awkwardly around his wife and led her into the cottage.
Nuala wrote regularly as she promised, and she painted pictures for them of the place she lived in: the large house with many servants that was in the small market town of Sutton Coldfield, which was no bigger
than Buncrana; and Holy Trinity Catholic Church, which the master had found for her and where she went every Sunday morning. The family were also close to a place called Sutton Park, which was, she said, beautiful.
It is so big there are roads running all through it. There is such variety, woodland, pastureland and rippling streams feeding into the five large lakes, and it’s very popular with courting couples.
‘If you ask me that girl thinks about boys too much,’ Biddy said darkly.
Joe hooted with laughter. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if she wasn’t thinking of boys then there would be something wrong with her. I know if you had your way you would have her tied to your apron strings all the days of her life.’
‘I will not have you speak to me in that way,’ Biddy said. ‘Thomas John, have you nothing to say to your son for the way he has just spoken to me?’
Thomas John thought Joe had a point. Although he loved Nuala with all his heart and soul, and his life was poorer without her in it, he had accepted that that was how it must be. He knew that one day she would surely marry and then another man would be the most important one in her life. Biddy, though, would like Nuala by her side all the time. That wasn’t going to happen and she had to come to that understanding. Besides, Thomas John had no wish to quarrel with another of his sons. He was often haunted by the thought that, had he not argued so much with Finn, the boy might not have enlisted.
He chose his words with care. ‘I don’t think that he was being at all offensive, my dear,’ he said. ‘He was just making a point. As for the tone of Nuala’s letter, I don’t think she said anything untoward either. Both of us have to realise that Nuala is not a little girl any more.’
Biddy, though, was worried by the thought that Nuala might meet an English boy and marry him. If the child was to marry at all, she wanted it to be to a boy in Buncrana and for her to live down the road, where she could see her every day and have a big hand in raising any children she might have.
