by Anne Bennett
Personally, Angela thought there was actually not anything ‘great’ about that war at all. It was supposed to be ‘the war to end all wars’ and all the men fighting in it were promised a land ‘fit for heroes’ on their return, when in fact those who returned had nothing but the dole queue and poverty awaiting them.
Angela often thought about George’s words as the war raged on. Before her marriage she had worked in his shop for two years, beginning at the age of fourteen, when a neighbour visiting her daughter, who lived near Maitland’s, saw a sign in the window asking for an assistant.
Angela remembered with a smile that George had been a little dumbfounded when Angela said she’d come about the job, for he’d never thought of a young girl applying, for he’d always had a young lad in the past. But he agreed to give her a trial, and by the time her probation period was over, George wondered what he had ever done without her. Angela thought George was such a kind man and a considerate employer, and she had become very fond of him. And George said it was like a breath of fresh air every morning when she entered the shop. She was polite to the customers and had a ready smile for all, a very cheerful disposition altogether. He had thought a lot of her too – so much so, that after he died she found he had left her his mother’s jewellery that he had lodged in the bank with authorisation, saying it was for Angela alone and totally separate from his will. Angela had presumed he had left everything to his wife Matilda.
TWO
Angela knew the shop would be a different place with Stan at the helm. She was still a little nervous, so before her courage failed her completely, she opened the door. She blinked as she stepped into the busy grocer’s shop, for the sun spilling through the big picture window brightened the whole place. Her brilliant blue eyes were fastened on the shopkeeper, Stan, the man she told herself never to think of by day, and who haunted her dreams by night. She was surprised he hadn’t looked up when she heard the ping of the shop bell as she opened the door. Stan knew she was there though, she was sure, because their gaze had fleetingly met before she’d plucked up every ounce of courage she could summon, and stepped inside the shop that had once been so familiar to her …
For shopkeeper Stan it had, until that moment, just been a normal Friday morning. The sun was spilling through the big picture window, bathing the whole shop in warmth and light. His grocery shop was busy with customers stretching the last of their week’s housekeeping to buy food for the weekend. Then he saw a figure making her way tentatively towards the shop door. Could it be …? Stan’s heart sank. Yes, it was. Angela McClusky. Until he heard the ping of the shop doorbell, Stan kept a vain hope that she might walk on by.
Instead he felt a sinking in his heart when she pushed the door ajar. He purposefully kept his back to her, knowing he was being rude, but not trusting himself to turn and greet her. He listened to her footsteps drawing nearer to him with trepidation, wishing more than anything that he might never have to see or speak to Angela McClusky ever again. Angela had been his friend for years, but he had always harboured a hope that one day she would become more than a friend. Then his son Daniel had suggested it would be better to tell Angela how he felt and see her reaction. Stan had bolstered up his courage and told her, only to have his hopes dashed and his soul crushed when Angela had made it plain that she found the idea of being more than friends utterly repulsive. Humiliated and hurt, Stan knew beyond doubt that there was no place for him in Angela’s life. They had both tried their hardest to avoid one another at all costs since that wretched day, so Stan wondered what on earth she was doing coming to his shop now.
There were a host of much nearer grocery shops to Angela’s house, for his was a fair step from Bell Barn Road. He couldn’t imagine what she might want, but he also couldn’t bring himself to be the first to speak, so he kept his back to her.
Stan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, even look her in the eye, thought Angela, making her feel even more nervous than she had been on the walk over to his shop. But she knew she had to try and make peace with this man who had once meant so much to her. She’d spent weeks, months even, plucking up the courage to come and try one last time to extend an olive branch to him, playing the scene over and over in her head, her heart racing at the thought of being shot down once again. Summoning every ounce of strength she had, Angela said in a voice that shook with emotion, ‘Stan – please, we need to talk.’
She watched, unable to breathe, as Stan turned slowly. His desolate eyes looked incredulous, as if he couldn’t believe what he had heard. For a few moments he didn’t speak, just stared at Angela, and she quailed inwardly at the look in his eyes that made her afraid to say anything further.
‘Talk?’ Stan eventually whispered into the strained silence. ‘You want to talk?’ His voice was getting louder now. ‘The last time I tried to talk to you, I disgusted you. The time for talk between us is dead and gone.’
Angela had deliberately tried to push from her mind the details of the last time they’d met, because remembering it upset her so much. But they had been such good friends and she had found the months she had stayed away from him even harder than seeing him. So she tried again: ‘Stan, please. Nothing you could say would ever disgust me.’
‘No?’ Stan asked, moving away from his browsing customers and lowering his voice once again to a haunted growl. ‘Well, let’s just say you have a funny way of showing it. When I tried talking to you, expressing my … feelings, you showed me plainly what you felt for me. Disregard and repugnance.’ Stan’s eyes were darker than Angela had ever seen them, and his words were like chips of ice in the air as he continued: ‘My words of love caused you to shudder with disgust. So you see, the time for talking is well past. There is no need to pretend you have feelings that you don’t really have.’ He paused, then continued in a softer tone of voice: ‘I am glad to see that you are all right, but now we must go our separate ways. I wish you well, Angela – you and your daughter. But this needs to be goodbye from me.’
‘Stan.’
‘Don’t make this harder than it already is!’ Stan pleaded, but as he turned from Angela, she saw the glint of tears in his eyes before he gathered his control and, his face implacable once more, he stepped into the storeroom behind the shop counter, shutting the door with a definite click.
Angela resisted the desire to hammer on the door. Stan had made it clear his ears and heart were closed to anything she had to say, and with a sad sigh she turned for home. The tears came as she left the shop. She wished there was some private place where she could go and cry, for she sensed she had irrevocably broken something beautiful, and all of a sudden the loss of Stan’s friendship felt as heavy as grief, but there was nowhere private for her to go. She couldn’t go home, for Connie would know something was up with her and would likely plague her with questions she didn’t feel she would be able to answer. So she walked up and down those cold, mean streets for hours, scalding tears trickling down her face, keeping her head down, lest some well-meaning individual ask if she was all right. She felt so wretched, she doubted she would ever feel all right ever again.
Hours later she turned for home and she was barely in the door when Connie, in her bubbly, forthright way, exclaimed, ‘Mum, you’re home! Where on earth have you been all this time? You must be cold to the bone.’
‘I’ve just been out walking,’ Angela answered. But her voice betrayed her, and Connie looked at her in a concerned way.
‘What’s up?’
Angela gave an imperceptible sigh. She had obviously not stayed out long enough. This conversation was what she had been hoping to avoid. Determined to change the subject, she took a deep breath and said as brightly as she could manage, ‘Nothing. What do you mean?’
Connie, who could see straight through Angela’s cheery front, went on, ‘Mum, it looks as if you’ve been crying. What has happened on this long “walk” to upset you? And don’t say you haven’t been crying, like you always do.’
Angela knew her daughter was concern
ed about her, but she just couldn’t bring herself to talk about what had happened with Stan. Her stomach was still churning with the upset, and her heart ached so badly, it felt like a physical pain in her chest. She was incapable of saying any of this to anyone, even her beloved Connie, but she knew her daughter wasn’t the sort of girl to let a thing drop. She had a split second before Connie’s piercing stare reduced her to the tears she was determined not to shed, so she snapped out, ‘Whether I have been crying or not is none of your business!’
Connie was taken aback and quite shocked. She shot a baleful look at her mother and flounced upstairs.
Connie was concerned because she knew it had to be something big that had happened for her mother to shed tears over it. She wasn’t the sort of woman to cry at the drop of a hat. But she was also hurt that her mother couldn’t, or wouldn’t, open up to her. If she wasn’t prepared to tell her what it was all about, there was nothing she could do. Neither of them spoke of it again, but all that day Connie was frosty with her mother, and both were glad when it was late enough to go to bed.
Once in bed, Angela relived the whole horrid experience with Stan. She didn’t expect to sleep well, and she certainly didn’t. It was almost a relief when it was time to get up again, and keep her mind busy rather than just replaying events over and over. One thing she was sure of, she would be too nervous of Stan’s reaction to try and contact him again. He had made his feelings completely clear and as he had no wish to see her any more, so she must put him out of her mind.
Stan also went over the encounter again and again. He vowed he could never see Angela ever again. He had loved her so deeply and for so long that when he saw her, his body would betray him and he would have to fight the emotions that urged him to take her in his arms, which was obviously the last thing she would want him to do. If she was going to make a habit of turning up at his shop she would eventually destroy him, and for the first time he began to think seriously about an alternative offer of employment that he had been asked about a few days previously.
Stan, as a member of the Labour Party, was approached by a Labour MP, who told him some news he found shocking. During the Great War the outskirts of Birmingham had been blasted by bombs dropped from Zeppelins. The area they were dropped in was highly industrialised, with many factories, and a lot of these factories were making war-related goods. Often tall chimneys were attached to these black-bricked, grimy factories which constantly blew out dirty smoke into the already smutty air, so the whole area had been dubbed the Black Country. Stan knew that other places had been targeted too – King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Hull and, of course, London – but the residents of Birmingham and the Midlands generally thought they were safe from any sort of aerial bombing attack, as they were, after all, 200 miles inland. No plans had been made in the event of any air raids, so the whole area had been totally unprepared when Walsall had come under attack. Stan could remember it now as if it were yesterday, learning that eighty-seven people had been killed and over a hundred more injured. Stan hadn’t been aware of these raids when they were happening, as he had been away fighting, but he’d been horrified to learn of them on his return.
The MP talked to Stan about all this, and he gazed at the MP in puzzlement. ‘Why bring it up now, when it happened sixteen years ago?’
The MP didn’t answer but asked instead, ‘What provision do you think was made for these people who lost their homes, and in some cases, their businesses too?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Stan admitted. ‘But though it might have been inadequate at the time, surely to God that has all been corrected, sixteen years down the line?’
The MP shook his head. ‘Alas, no,’ he said. ‘It cost a lot of money to fight a war and there were no funds for any form of house building planned for afterwards either. Those poor people who were made homeless bedded down where they could. Some had relatives willing and able to put them up, and they could be called the lucky ones. Others used the ruins of houses, warehouses, church halls, and in some cases they lived under bridges. The point is, many of them are still there. Recently, questions were raised in the Houses of Parliament about it. After all, so many of those who lost their homes and livelihoods were the very people who suffered four years of war: the men fighting, the women making weapons and running the country. They lost so much and now feel they have been abandoned by the government that took them into war in the first place. They are calling themselves the Forgotten People, because I suppose they feel they are. I would feel the same in their shoes. Personally, I think it’s scandalous.’
‘I agree with you,’ Stan said. ‘Scandalous is the only word, but what’s to be done?’
‘Well,’ the MP answered, ‘while some of these bombs completely destroyed some houses, others were made too unstable to live in, in their present state. The council have employed surveyors to check these out and see if they can be repaired to make adequate housing for at least some of the displaced residents, to try and get as many as possible under cover before yet another winter sets in. They also need an army of people to clear the site of rubble, sand and mounds of debris left from the demolished houses so that new houses can be built without delay. It seemed a good thing to get involved in.’
‘I agree with that too,’ Stan said. ‘But I still don’t see why you are telling me this.’
The MP said, ‘Because I want you on board. At the moment all we have to do is clear the mounds left by the demolished houses. We need as many as we can get to clear the area. That’s all for now.’
Stan stared at him. ‘If all you want is a large workforce, you can take your pick from any of the unemployed hanging around our streets just now. Spoilt for choice, you’ll be. I have a job. I run the shop.’
‘I know, but hear me out,’ the MP said. ‘My suggestion is that you get a manager in for now and come and work for me. We want you because you are obviously good at leading men. You were a gaffer before you enlisted, and had your sergeant stripes after a few months in the army, and were then in charge of soldiers. Everyone speaks highly of you. These men are not in the army now, and they may not take kindly to people barking orders at them. I am assured you don’t do that. I think they’ll listen to you, and that’s why I’m prepared to pay you more than you’d earn in the shop for your time.’
‘That’s really for others to say,’ Stan said. ‘In the army it maybe had to be a bit different, but I always think better results and a happier working environment comes from talking to people, not shouting at them.’
The MP nodded. ‘That will be all to the good,’ he said. ‘We are drafting in lots of miners, and they can be problematic to work with.’
Stan was annoyed by the MP’s obvious prejudice and said quite sharply, ‘I’d say the miners are just the same as the rest of us – glad to be able to work for a living wage to provide for their families. They’ve had it hard, especially when you consider that coal exports have fallen since the Great War, and the miners’ hours have been extended and their wages have been reduced. No one seemingly has given a thought to the families of these men, for you know as well as me that people have to eat in peace-time as well as during a war, and the rent has still to be paid. It’s the newspapers that have coined the slogan, Not a penny off the pay and not a minute on the day – not the miners themselves. I’d say it’s little wonder some miners have become frustrated and disgruntled. And I’m sure the majority of them will be glad of a job of any sort that pays enough for them to live on.’
‘You’re right,’ the MP said, reluctantly. ‘It’s just … well, they seem so aggressive at times.’
‘Like I said before, I find that quite understandable,’ Stan said, determined to try and open the Labour MP’s mind to his own constituents. ‘Hearing my children crying with hunger would tear me to shreds, as it would any decent father. And remember, many of these men were in the Forces, serving their King and Country.’
The MP nodded, and Stan hoped his words had struck a chord. ‘Well, now th
e miners are needed again,’ the MP said. ‘The surveyors go around first and find out which houses could be made habitable, with some shoring up or reinforcing in places. Those renovations would be carried out by the workforce, but they’d only start any repair work when it’s safe to do so.’
‘And they will be well paid to do this work, I presume,’ Stan said. ‘They are taking more of a risk than the rest of us, crawling into half-demolished and damaged houses. They should be financially compensated for that. I’m telling you, if you offer them a pittance, they might well refuse to do it, and then where will the council be? If you’re trying to do this on the cheap, you run the risk of annoying the miners, and you’ll lose your entire workforce.’
‘I told you they were problematic.’
‘I don’t find a man problematic because he is willing to work hard at what is sometimes dangerous work in order to provide for his family, but he wants a decent wage for doing so. I’d say a man like that is to be commended, and one I would be proud to work alongside.’
‘Oh quite, quite,’ the MP said, flustered.
Stan was barely listening to him, however. Had Angela not come into the shop, he might not have given the MP’s proposal a second thought. As it was … well, maybe it would be better to be out of the area for a wee while. After all, it would not be forever, and he would welcome the chance for hard physical labour, for it might help him sleep better and not toss and turn in the bed, thinking of the loss of Angela.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Sadie Bradshaw took over the shop while I was in the army, and for some time afterwards, as her husband was numbered among those who never came back. It would be good to be able to offer her a decent salary, and if she’s willing to do it for a few more weeks or months, then I will help for a short time.’
‘Good man,’ the MP said, shaking Stan by the hand. ‘I will be in touch with instructions and directions to the area we’re working in shortly. I believe we’re starting in Walsall.’
