Chrissie's Children

by Irene Carr

  Chrissie asked, ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’

  ‘I had a lovely time,’ Sarah replied, and meant it.

  Matt and Tom had been camping in France, wrangling and laughing, talking far into the night by their fire. Sarah would pass both of them with smiles now if she met them in the hotel when they came to see their mother, but she was still shy. To them she was just a rather skinny girl who worked in the kitchen, deserving their courtesy and respect but having no common interest.

  When Tom went back to work he was in overalls because he would be spending a year working on the ship itself rather than in the office. Like many of the other men, he took with him his ‘bait’, sandwiches for his midday meal, prepared by his landlady and wrapped in a red and white spotted handkerchief. His can with its wire handle, and lid that served as a cup, held tea leaves, sugar and a dollop of condensed milk, ready for wetting.

  Jack told Chrissie proudly, ‘I hear he is doing very well.’

  Then there was Matt. He had received a School Leaving Certificate, albeit not a good one, but had not found a job. Chrissie pressed, ‘I think we ought to give him one more year.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to go back to school,’ Jack pointed out, ‘and there’s a doubt as to whether they would take him. The Head suggested as much when you saw him, remember?’

  Chrissie agreed, but insisted, ‘His reports said he had a talent for art.’

  Jack qualified that: ‘He likes sketching.’

  ‘Well, then, there is a good art school in the town, so why not send him there for a year? He might develop a real interest.’

  Jack said unhappily, ‘I doubt it. I would hope so, but I doubt it.’

  Chrissie wanted more time for this boy of hers, hoping he would find his way eventually, but she, too, was uncertain.

  They put it to Matt, his sandy hair tousled and black oil streaked across his brow. The three of them sat in the spacious sitting-room one evening, with its pictures of Ballantyne ships, while Sophie was upstairs in her room with Helen Diaz, playing records.

  Jack said, ‘We’ll give you a year at art school to see if you have the talent or interest to make a career in that line. But in August next year you’ll be eighteen. If you haven’t made up your mind what you want out of life by then, you go to work in the yard. I’m not supporting you after that.’

  Chrissie hated the ultimatum but accepted it, remembering how she had to work as a young girl. She urged Matt, ‘Whatever you really want to do, we’ll back you.’ Jack had not meant to go that far – he liked to know what he was getting into before he committed himself – but he grunted agreement.

  Matt was silent for a moment, on the edge of revolt, but he told himself he could only argue against, he could not argue for anything, and he did not want another row. He said, ‘Well, that’s fair, I suppose.’

  He went off for a walk in the dusk and found Sophie walking down to the tram stop with Helen Diaz. He told Sophie the verdict, omitting to acknowledge Helen in his abstraction.

  Sophie said, ‘You’re lucky to get the year. Some fathers would have taken you straight into the yard whether you liked it or not.’

  Matt grumbled, ‘I can’t see me being an artist for the rest of my life.’

  Helen, annoyed at being ignored, said, ‘There are plenty of young chaps around this town that would jump at the chance of a year at art school – or a job at Ballantyne’s yard.’

  Matt blinked at her, startled, then snapped, ‘I don’t see that it’s any of your business.’

  Helen was red faced and angry, but her tram came clanking and rumbling at that moment. She climbed up into its lit interior and was driven away, wishing she had slapped his face.

  Later that week Pamela Ogilvy sought out Sophie at school to tell her, ‘I was talking to Matt last night . . .’ She paused to gauge the effect of that.

  Sophie knew Matt had ‘bumped into’ Pamela: he had told her. Sophie suspected it had been no accident and that Pamela had arranged it. Now she only smiled and said, ‘I talk to him all the time.’

  Needled, Pamela said, ‘Don’t you think he should be going into his father’s yard instead of taking this art course?’

  Helen Diaz was standing by, and before Sophie could answer, she snapped, ‘What has it got to do with you? It’s his life.’

  Pamela was startled into silence for a moment but then recovered to say primly, ‘It’s my business because I don’t want to see him waste his time messing about with little pictures when he could be following a career. He’s a gentleman’s son – but you wouldn’t know anything about their standards.’

  Helen flinched as if struck and Sophie shoved in front of her. She told Pamela, ‘You’re a stuck-up cow,’ then she grabbed Helen’s arm and hurried her away.

  On a fine summer’s afternoon Lizzie Diaz walked down Church Street on her way home, a basket of shopping on her arm. In the warmth of the summer she just wore an old cardigan over a thin cotton dress. As soon as she got home she would put on her pinny to keep the dress clean. The streets on her right around Society Lane, narrow and cobbled, were being demolished. The cramped little houses, huddled together in rows, were empty, their former tenants moved to the new estates being built far away on the outskirts of the town. Lizzie saw the workmen knocking down a house a hundred yards or more away, saw also the children playing in and out of the empty houses close by. But her mind was on her own child, Helen.

  She was well content with the girl, who was gaining good reports at the grammar school and was set on following the course her mother had advised. Lizzie was sure that one day her daughter would be a nurse, a sister, maybe even a matron. It was a fine career, respected in the community. If she had not married Paco . . . And Paco was the trouble. To him his son, Juan – though the boy’s friends all called him John – was the most important person in the family after himself. Juan came first in his father’s thoughts and always had, to the almost total exclusion of his daughter. Lizzie flinched as a child shrieked and then laughed somewhere in among the old buildings. She wished those bairns wouldn’t play in there.

  Paco Diaz treated Helen as little better than a servant for him and his son, as he had treated Lizzie; and she, meek, gentle and loving had accepted the situation for herself. However, now she sensed danger ahead because Helen had a mind of her own and was becoming rebellious. The girl had not defied her father – yet – but she had complained to her mother about the work heaped on the pair of them while Juan did nothing in the house. Lizzie worried over it, wanted to stand up for her daughter but was afraid to confront the man she had married and loved.

  The shriek came again, this time followed not by laughter but a sudden rumbling crash. Lizzie saw the children, dirty faces frightened and shocked, running out of a gap in the old walls. She called to one of them, ‘What’s wrong?’

  The boy stopped beside her and the others gathered around. He panted, ‘The ceiling fell in and Freddy Williams was underneath it.’

  Lizzie whispered, ‘Oh, my God!’ then she ordered them, ‘Go and fetch the men. Tell them we might want an ambulance. Run, now!’ They did, racing down the road towards the workmen.

  Lizzie ran too, into the gap from which they had come, stumbling over the litter of rubble – stones, brick and lumps of rotten timber. She could see where the ceiling had come down because a pall of dust still hung in the air inside the shell of one house. The side walls still stood, holding up the roof, but the front and back had collapsed and what had been the ceiling of the ground-floor room, and the floor of the room above, had fallen in. There was a pile of debris almost as high as Lizzie, great chunks of plaster still adhering to the laths it had been spread on, with broken rafters poking out at odd angles. And somewhere under it all was little Freddy Williams.

  She could hear him, a plaintive, frightened, small voice mewing from under the pile: ‘Mam! Mam!’

  ‘It’s all right, bonny lad!’ Lizzie called to him. ‘I’m coming to get you out! Just lie still!’ She began di
gging into the wreckage, tearing at the laths that in turn tore her fingers. When she strained to lift and shove lengths of the rotten timber that had been the rafters she left bloody imprints on the dirty wood. Her flowered cotton dress was torn and filthy, her cardigan ripped in a dozen places, but she found the boy.

  First she uncovered a leg, a bare foot shoved into old plimsolls with holes in uppers and soles, scratched, bruised and dirty skin. Then shorts that had been patched in the seat, followed by a jersey worn into holes through which showed a shirt washed thin. Lizzie lifted one more baulk of timber, held it propped up with her shoulder as she balanced on the pile of rubble and tossed aside the last of the plaster that covered little Freddy. She grabbed him by the waistband of his shorts and hauled him out of the hole in which he lay. He scrambled to his feet and Lizzie told him, ‘Go and find your mammy.’

  She saw him start, running out through the gap in the wall, then she tried to throw off the timber pressing on her shoulder. As she did so she slipped on the rubble and fell, the timber falling on top of her. It was no heavier than other lengths she had thrown aside but she was tiring now. She fumbled to lift it, awkward because of her position, lying on her side. Then she heard a creaking and groaning, looked up and saw the roof sagging. Its beams had been holding the two side walls apart, but now the roof collapsed and the side walls fell inwards. Lizzie saw the whole mass dropping towards her and screamed, screamed again, then was silent. The dust rose in a much bigger cloud this time, standing above the other houses for long minutes before the wind dispersed it.

  Peter Robinson was one of the many who ran to the scene and helped to clear away the rubble. He saw the crushed body as it was uncovered and recognised it as that of a woman from the street next to his. It was gently lifted out by a score of hands and he stood back, shaken and shocked, as it was carried past. He could not know that he was soon to witness another violent death.

  Paco Diaz arranged the funeral with the help of the neighbours. Some of them advised that he order horses to pull the hearse and carriages, being traditionally more in keeping with such a solemn occasion, but he settled on a black motor hearse because that was cheaper. Afterwards there was the usual tea with boiled ham and some discussion as to how much compensation would be paid – but not in the hearing of the family. Paco never told anyone how much he received.

  Helen was pale and hardly uttered a word for a week. Her mother had been taken from her without warning. Helen had kissed her in the morning as she left for school and never saw her again. They would not let her look at Lizzie in her coffin because even the undertaker’s art could not conceal the battering she had received from the tons of timber and brickwork.

  On the morning after the funeral Paco sat back from his empty plate, having eaten the breakfast Helen had cooked for him on the fire. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand then told her, ‘Now you must look after the house and everything. Fetch some paper and write what I say.’ He had never tried to write English. When Helen brought a sheet of paper, pen and ink bottle, he dictated: ‘Dear miss, now I am alone I must have the daughter to keep the house so she finish school today.’

  Helen pleaded with him while the ink dried on the pen and the paper, with the letter only half done. She told him how important it was for her to get her School Certificate and then go on to be a nurse, told him it was her mother’s wish. He only shook his head, implacable and uncaring. ‘No, no. School no good for girl. Other girls can be nurse but I need you here. This is woman’s place.’

  Juan, still eating, put in, ‘That’s right. Same as we have to work. Cleaning and cooking is a woman’s job.’

  ‘No more talk,’ said Paco. ‘Write the letter,’ and he lifted his hand. Helen dipped pen in ink, finished the letter in a shaky copperplate and gave it to her father to sign.

  She took the letter to school, gave it to her headmistress and returned home. She had not seen Sophie or any of the other girls and could not have trusted herself to say farewell without bursting into tears. But she cried when she got back to the empty house, cried for what she had lost – her mother and her hopes and ambitions – and for what lay ahead of her: virtual slavery as the servant of the two men.

  Then she dried her eyes and started work.

  Next morning Chrissie drove Jack to work in the Ford. He was on his way to the Balkans to try to obtain a contract for a ship to be built in the yard. His case was in the car but he had to pick up some papers from his office. As Chrissie steered the Ford across the bridge and turned down the road to the yard, Jack said, ‘This civil war in Spain is a bad business.’ The war had broken out only weeks before with Franco leading a revolt against the Spanish government.

  Chrissie nodded agreement. ‘There was a report in the paper this morning of nearly two thousand being executed by Franco’s men.’

  Jack said flatly, ‘Franco and Hitler are two of a kind.’

  Chrissie braked the Ford at a T-junction to let a lorry loaded with coal pass by. The lorry was grinding along slowly and as Chrissie eased the car forward she saw a youth running some fifty yards behind the lorry. He wore a collarless shirt, its sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and patched dungarees. He was carrying a shovel. Then Chrissie swung the car in through the open gates of the Ballantyne yard and he was lost from sight.

  Peter Robinson had borrowed the shovel and was following the lorry to find where its driver was going to deliver his load of coal. Peter hoped then to earn a shilling by shovelling the load into the buyer’s coalhouse. The lorry slowed, turned into a cobbled back lane then halted at one of the back gates that ran down either side. The driver switched off his engine and got down from the cab. As he did so the back gate opened and a stocky man, stripped down to a vest and trousers with braces dangling, came out into the lane. He had brawny arms and held a shovel in one big hand.

  Peter, resting on his own shovel while he caught his breath, saw that he was out of luck. This man was ready to unload his own coal. The back of the lorry tilted, the load poured out raising a cloud of black dust and the stocky man started shovelling it through the hatch into his coalhouse. Peter turned and walked away.

  Across the street was the fence of Ballantyne’s yard. His yearning for work drew him to peer through a crack in the fence, looking enviously at a world where men had regular jobs and pay.

  It was a small, secluded corner of that world. He could see the stern of a partly built ship, the steel gleaming with fresh paint and dotted with neat lines of rivet heads. Few men were working there. Gallagher, the burly, florid foreman, and McNally, his big crony with the scarred face, stood close to the fence. Another man was perched at the top of a ladder that leaned against some staging erected along the ship’s side. Peter knew him: Harry Henderson, timid and nervous, with a worn-out wife and three small and usually near-naked children. Harry turned his head now to shout, ‘This doesn’t look too safe.’

  His voice came thinly, almost drowned under the hammering and clangour of the yard. Peter wondered what Harry was on about. He withdrew his eye from the crack to wipe it because the draught was causing it to water. He heard Gallagher shout back, more clearly because he was closer, ‘That’s all right! Get on with it – or I’ll find somebody that will!’ McNally laughed raucously.

  Peter set his eye to the crack again and saw why Harry Henderson had complained. The staging had, at first sight, appeared to be wide enough for a man to walk, provided he had a good head for heights, being thirty or forty feet above the ground, but now Peter saw that it consisted of only a single plank less than a foot wide.

  Harry Henderson had taken in that scarcely veiled threat from Gallagher and, desperate to keep his job, set his feet on the plank. He hesitated, peering down at the drop beneath his feet. Gallagher shouted again, ‘We want that gear down here for another job! Now get on wi’ it!’

  Harry moved one foot, then another. Peter saw that Harry had been set the task of sending down a block and tackle and coil of rope hanging from the staging at th
e far end of the plank. He edged towards it, one foot sliding ahead of the other, arms outstretched to balance him.

  The gull seemed to appear from nowhere. Suddenly it was there, swooping past Harry’s head with a flap of its wide wings and a shrill cry, which was echoed by Harry, startled, as he threw up one hand to fend it off. As he recoiled from it, he stepped backwards into empty air. Harry Henderson’s arms windmilled wildly and then he was falling, shrieking all the way down until he landed on head and shoulders and the cry was cut short.

  The men working on the ship further along its side could not see the staging from which Harry fell as it was hidden by the curve of the stern. Nor had they heard his shriek and fall, lost in the din of the yard. Peter saw him lying there, still, saw Gallagher and McNally run to him, kneel over Harry’s body, then rise. McNally climbed the ladder and walked the plank without fear or doubt, at home up there. He used the block and tackle to haul up more planks, one by one, as Gallagher fastened them on below. He laid them on the staging so there was a walkway over two feet wide. Then he descended the ladder, joined Gallagher and they ran off up the yard.

  Peter had stood frozen with shock, but now he began to think, and quickly. Then he, too, ran.

  9

  Jack was in his office, handing over to James Irving, his manager, and picking up the papers he wanted, when his white-faced chief clerk brought the news that a man had fallen from some staging and been killed. Jack said heavily, ‘Oh, dear God.’ Chrissie stood at his side, her hands to her face. After a shocked moment, he told his manager, ‘I want a full report and names of witnesses. Someone must tell his widow or his mother. One or two of his friends should go along.’ There would be an inquest, compensation to be settled and paid. Jack knew the man by sight, could put his face to the name, knew him to be a good worker.