Molly paused for a moment, butter knife poised in the air. ‘Liz,’ she said softly.
Liz, her tongue stuck thoughtfully between her teeth, looked up at her friend. ‘Yeah? What?’
‘Ssshh,’ Molly warned her, flashing her eyes at Edie and Mags who were across the other side of the kitchen, arranging wallies, pickled onions and cabbage in big glass bowls. ‘It ain’t for everyone to hear.’
‘Is something up?’ Liz whispered.
Molly shook her head hurriedly. ‘No. No, course not. It’s just that . . .’
‘What?’
‘I’ve decided I ain’t gonna see Bob Jarvis no more.’
‘Aw, Moll, are you sure? I thought it was Simon yer was gonna dump. We’ve had some right good laughs going out together, the four of us. And yer was really keen on him.’
‘Keep yer voice down, Liz, please.’ Molly lowered her chin. ‘It’s just, I don’t like some of his ideas. All right?’
‘Danny won’t be very happy about it, yer know.’
‘I think Danny’d do well to think about whether he should stay mates with him and all.’
‘How d’yer mean?’ Liz didn’t like the serious direction this seemed to be taking. ‘Moll? Will you tell me what yer getting at?’
‘This ain’t the place, Liz, and it certainly ain’t the time.’ Molly jerked her head towards Mags who was coming over to the girls with a bowl of pickles. ‘I’ve said too much already. I just ain’t gonna see him no more. So let’s leave it at that for now, all right?’
Mags put the bowl down on the table. ‘Blimey, look at you two. Cheer up, girls. I thought I was meant to be the one with the hump.’ She put her plump, perfumed arms round their shoulders, pulling them close to her. ‘Listen, I know we’ve had a few hard Christmases round here, but look at all this grub we’ve got to share. We should be more than happy. Tell yer what, let’s share our good fortune and all, eh? You two put plenty of that nice white breast meat on a plate and cover it with a cloth and I’ll run it over to the Miltons later on.’
‘Righto, Mags,’ said Molly, chastened by the thought of how the Miltons must be suffering.
‘Then when yer’ve done that, perhaps yer can carry them sandwiches yer’ve made through to the bar. I don’t want them blokes guzzling all that beer on empty bellies or we’ll wind up with ’em all wanting to up one another.’
‘Some chance of that,’ laughed Edie, joining them at the table. ‘If they’ve stuffed a dinner down ’em like my Bert did, I reckon they won’t be able to hardly move for a week, let alone have a fight.’
As the girls went to carry the plates of sandwiches through to the bar, Liz paused at the kitchen door. ‘Look, Moll, before anything else gets said, I wanna say this one thing, all right? It’s hard for me, being pulled between you and Danny. I don’t wanna fall out with either of yer, specially not over no bloke.’
Molly pushed open the door with her foot and stepped into the bar. ‘There’s no reason why we should fall out, is there Liz?’
Danny reached right across the bar and snatched one from the tottering pile of sandwiches that Liz was balancing precariously on her plate. ‘You two fall out?’ he said, through a mouthful of goose and bread, catching the end of their conversation. ‘Never! Still,’ he added with a wink, ‘I suppose there’s gotta be a first time for everything, eh, girls?’
Liz glanced sideways at Molly, then looked at Danny and said with a smile, ‘Mind yer business, nose ointment. This is girls’ talk.’
He winked at Liz again and finished the rest of his sandwich in a single bite.
The girls went over to the piano to start offering round the sandwiches.
Katie took one, but Nora refused with a wave of her hand, she couldn’t sing and eat at the same time, and having begun a rip-roaring rendition of ‘The Wild Rover’ – the song that after a few glasses of stout she always claimed was her favourite – she wasn’t about to stop.
She had just launched into the final chorus of, ‘“So it’s no, nay never. No never, no more, will I plaaaay the wild rover . . .”’ when someone tapped her on the shoulder.
Nora stopped singing and spun round, ready to give whoever it was a piece of her mind for interrupting her song like that, but instead, much to the surprise of everyone, she stood there for a moment, open-mouthed, looking at the tall, slim man with the mop of thick, grey-tinged red curls, then threw her arms round his neck and planted a kiss on his smiling mouth.
Then she slowly turned back to face her daughter, and, with her chin held high and a grin spreading right across her face, she said to Katie in a loud, triumphant voice: ‘I don’t suppose yer remember him that well, do yer, darling? But this here’s the handsomest man that ever came from Cork City.’
‘Mum?’ Katie grabbed hold of the piano for support.
Nora clapped her hands together. ‘Sure, isn’t it Stephen Brady himself? Isn’t it yer father come to see us?’
11
IT WAS LATE Friday afternoon, the end of the first really nice spring day of 1934, and it seemed that many of the residents of Plumley Street were determined to make the most of it, sitting outside their houses, enjoying warming their bones after the long cold winter they had all had to endure.
At one end of the street, Nora, Katie, and Peggy Watts from over the road, were sitting on kitchen chairs they had parked on the pavement between numbers ten and twelve, catching up with the bits of mending and knitting that seemed so much less of a chore now they didn’t have to do them indoors in the gloom of artificial light.
At the other, blocked end of the street, Edie Johnson was also outside, but she was standing on her chair. Balancing precariously on her stout legs, she was giving her shop window its first thorough clean of the year. She had caught a shocked glimpse of the state of the glass when the spring sunshine had filtered through the grime that had accumulated there during the wet, foggy winter, and had decided to do something about it there and then. Bert had tried to persuade her to leave it, telling her that when his leg was feeling a bit better he would do it for her, but Edie had refused, insisting that he had enough to do, before getting on with the job herself. She had refused his offer very gently; her Bert was a proud man and she knew that his injury from the Great War was not only a constant source of physical pain to him, but also of regret, as it meant that he could not do what he thought was a fair share of the work it took to run the shop, and that hurt him almost as much as his damaged leg.
Next door to the shop at number three, there was no sign of Mr and Mrs Milton; they weren’t outside the house enjoying the sunshine, nor was there any clue as to whether they were at home, as the front room curtains were tightly drawn even though it was still broad daylight. But in the gutter outside the house, there was plenty of evidence of the Milton kids. Barefoot and dressed in an ill-fitting assortment of hand-me-downs supplied by Katie and the church jumble, they were playing with Timmy and Michael at a complicated game involving stones and bits of knotted string.
The youngsters and their doings were being closely observed by Phoebe Tucker. She was just waiting for any behaviour that could in any way be described as a nuisance, so that she could knock on the Miltons’ door or go over to the Mehans’ to complain about them. She was accompanied at her post outside number seven by Sooky Shay, who had fetched her own chair from number five next door.
The two women, with their shoulders hunched and eyes narrowed, were like a pair of dusty old crows, as they sat there in their dark frocks, their crossover aprons, rolled down stockings and ever-present slippers, drinking tea and smoking foul-smelling roll-ups. The pair of them disapproved of just about everybody and everything, but they saved their most spiteful venom, as they gossiped and chattered, for their husbands. But Albert and Jimmo were used to it and, as soon as they saw their wives setting their kitchen chairs on the pavement, they made themselves scarce by sloping off to Ricardo Street to pass an opinion on an old pal’s newly painted pigeon loft. If they had have hung around, t
hey knew what they were in for: Phoebe with her talent for conjuring jobs out of nothing, would have them limewashing their backyard walls, or replacing the putty in the front windows, or some other such nonsense just to get them at it, while she and Sooky supervised and complained and told them how useless they both were.
Further up the street, Frank Barber had come home early when he’d been told there was nothing down the docks for him. He and Theresa were in the back kitchen, getting their tea ready. Frank had, as usual, offered to share their meal with Nutty Lil from upstairs, but, also as usual, she had merely shaken her head and carried on singing her hymns in her high warbling falsetto.
Frank felt bad that Lil would never accept his invitation to eat with them, but he knew she got by well enough and he would never intrude. But that didn’t get away from the fact that he would have liked to have done something for her, if only because he felt it would have made up in some way for how good people had been to him since he had lost his wife. Sarah Barber had died less than an hour after giving birth to their baby son. Their little boy had survived for just a few moments longer. It had been a terrible time, but it would have been a whole lot worse without his neighbours; he wouldn’t even have been able to go to work if it wasn’t for Peggy Watts from next door, keeping an eye on little Theresa when she came home from school until he got in of a night.
Back on the other side of the street, next door to Nora’s, Joe and Aggie Palmer were out in the yard. The yard took up the whole downstairs of number eight, as well as a narrow strip of ground that ran along behind the Lanes’ house and the Queen’s Arms. Joe had finished work for the day, but he was still busily polishing his precious truck, while Aggie fussed around with her hens and rabbits, and Duchess, the little grey pony that she had persuaded her husband not to part with, even though she no longer earned her keep since Joe had bought the truck and his haulage business had gone motorised.
Joe often joked with Aggie that she and her menagerie were taking up more and more of his yard every year, and how it was all because she preferred pottering around with her dumb creatures to being stuck upstairs in the flat with dusters and floor polish. But Joe would never really have complained about her. Aggie was everything to Joe, and if she had wanted the whole of the downstairs and the upstairs rooms as well turned into a farmyard, he probably would have gone along with it. He loved her, not just because she was a kind, caring woman, but because she was the one who had convinced him that he could make something of himself. Aggie had taught Joe to read and write; she had shown him that he could settle down and earn a bit of respect from decent neighbours; and had made him see that he didn’t have to stay an illiterate tearaway all his life. When he thought back to what he’d been like as a kid, and how his life could have turned out, Joe Palmer had every reason to be grateful to his beloved Aggie.
Next door to the Palmers was number six, a house that looked as lifeless as the Miltons’. But the Lanes certainly weren’t hiding themselves away. They had arrived home very publicly in a cab less than an hour ago, having been out all day. From the posh names on the armfuls of boxes and bags that the cabbie had helped Arthur carry indoors, it was obvious that they had been on a huge shopping spree up West. Or at least, that’s what Phoebe had reported to Sooky when she had fetched her kitchen chair out to join her. Sooky had lapped up Phoebe’s lurid description of Irene’s painted face, and joined in her spiteful laughter when Phoebe bragged about how she had turned the other way when Irene had waved to her.
They were all still outside when, at just gone a quarter to six, Pat appeared from round the corner.
‘Hello, love,’ he said, bending down to peck his wife on the cheek. ‘All right, Nora? Peg?’
Katie looked up at him, shielding her eyes against the final, slanting rays of the afternoon sun. ‘Hello, sweetheart, you’re home early.’
Pat nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s been a bit quiet at work again today. Well, more than a bit quiet, to tell yer the truth; there was a bit doing for me and another couple of the chaps, but not enough. Not nearly enough. Still . . .’ He pulled off his cap, stuck it in his pocket and asked his usual question. ‘Where’s the kids? What they been up to today?’
‘Danny’s just rushed in from work, got ready and rushed out again. With Peggy’s Liz,’ Katie added with a knowing smile at Peggy.
‘For a change!’ Peggy joined in.
‘And our Molly got in – when was it, Mum, five minutes ago? Then she was straight out again and all.’
Nora shook her head. ‘It was less than five minutes ago. I’m surprised yer missed her, Pat.’
‘Right hurry she was in and all. Her and Danny both didn’t bother with nothing to eat.’
‘Yer can’t tell ’em,’ said Peg, squinting at her knitting as she counted the rows.
‘Where was she off to this time?’ asked Pat, leaning back against the sun-warmed bricks and rolling himself a cigarette.
‘Going to meet some friend or other, from the tea factory, I think she said, didn’t she, Mum?’
Nora said nothing, she just carried on with her darning.
‘She was in that much of a rush,’ Katie went on, ‘I never really caught what she said.’
‘How about our Sean? If that ain’t a silly question.’
Knowing that Sean wasn’t exactly an easy topic of conversation for her neighbours lately, Peggy went to stand up. ‘Time I was going, I reckon,’ she said cheerfully.
‘No, Peg, yer all right.’ Katie sighed. She leant back in her chair and spoke softly, so that Phoebe and Sooky couldn’t make out her words from across the street. ‘He went off early this morning, just after you left yerself, Pat. To see this bloke from Stepney who he says has been paying him to do these odd jobs, whatever they might be. Mind you, at least he’s got a few bob in his pocket. Even left a dollar on the kitchen table for me before he went out.’ Katie shook her head wearily. ‘I don’t even like to think what he’s up to.’
‘Don’t worry yerself, Katie, girl,’ Nora said airily. ‘He’ll be doing a bit of labouring for someone. I told yer, worrying’s no good to yer.’
‘It’s all right for you, Mum—’ Katie began.
‘All right, all right,’ Pat interrupted her. ‘Don’t get yerself all worked up. You know what lads of his age are like. Slippery as eels, the lot of ’em. Never know what they’re up to. Like yer mother says, he’ll be doing a bit of labouring for someone what don’t fancy paying a grown man a full wage.’
Katie shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
‘And he’s never brought no trouble home, now has he? That’s what yer wanna be thankful for.’ Pat licked the cigarette paper and stuck the finished roll-up in the corner of his mouth. ‘Now, where are them two young ’uns of our’n?’
Katie pointed across the street with a lift of her chin. ‘Over there with the Milton kids.’
Peggy smiled wistfully. ‘Look at ’em, love their little hearts. Happy as pigs in muck playing with your two. They’re poor little so-and-sos. Ain’t got ha’penny to bless ’emselves with. Never have nothing, but they don’t complain.’
Pat held up the coil of thick, tarred barge rope that he had looped over his arm. ‘This’ll please ’em. I fetched it home so’s they can all have a game with it.’
‘I wondered what yer were thinking of doing with that,’ said Nora. ‘I thought yer might be planning to string up the rent man from the lamppost.’
Pat laughed. ‘Not a bad idea, Nora, but I think it might be better if I tie it round the lamppost and make a swing out of it for the kids. Remember how we used to when we was little, Kate?’
‘Are you crackers?’ Katie was on her feet. ‘Tying it to the lamppost? What, d’yer want ’em to go hanging their flaming selves? That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Me having Ellen Milton over here shouting the odds that we’ve strangled all her nippers to death.’
‘We never come to no harm playing with ropes when we was kids,’ said Pat. He shook his head at Nora for putting such a stupid idea into h
is wife’s head. He sounded and looked hurt; he and Katie had been getting on so well lately, but here she was, throwing his surprise for the kids back in his face, and in front of people too.
‘Yer just don’t think, do yer, Pat.’ Katie looked at Peggy then at Nora, appealing to their better, female, sense. ‘Men,’ she tutted, ‘they just don’t see no danger, do they? Hopeless.’
Neither of the other women said a thing; they knew better than to interfere in a disagreement between a married couple.
Katie turned back to her husband. ‘It’s just like them stilts yer made at Christmas for our Timmy and Michael.’
Pat flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter and pushed himself away from the wall. ‘I thought they really liked ’em,’ he said flatly.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Katie. ‘Course they do. ’Cos they’re rotten dangerous and they worry the life out of me every time they go out on ’em. I can’t count how many times they’ve nearly broke their flipping necks on ’em. Flaming things. Might as well give ’em a carving knife to play with – and a saw and all while yer at it.’
Pat stared down at his boots. ‘It must be me, I reckon. I can’t do nothing right. It’s like down the docks; I’ve had a right pig of a day. I was trying me best to explain to the blokes, as honest as I could, that there just weren’t enough work for everyone again. And what do they do? They all act like it’s my bloody fault. Now I come home, just trying to do something nice for me kids, and you start on me.’
Katie felt her cheeks grow warm. She bowed her head for a moment and looked through her lashes at Peggy and Nora who were pointedly concentrating on their handiwork. Then she looked up at her husband again, her angry scowl softened into a smile. ‘Hark at me, leading off. I’m sorry, Pat,’ she said, knowing how he hated having a show made of him in front of anyone. ‘I’m really sorry. It must be all this sunshine getting to me. We ain’t used to it, are we?’ She reached out and touched him on the cheek. ‘Why don’t yer go down the Queen’s and treat yerself to a drink? I wasn’t expecting yer in so early so I ain’t even got yer tea on yet.’
Just Around the Corner Page 23
