by Beezy Marsh
That was preferable to having to wash in the blocked sink with its pool of murky water and thick head of scum on the top. The only towel in the communal bathroom was black with grease, so anyone brave – or daft – enough to try some ablutions only came off looking worse.
Most fellas lay in bed until it was chucking out time, literally sometimes, when the dosshouse owner would come along and tip the stragglers out of their beds and onto the bare boards. They kipped six to a room, sometimes more. A good night’s sleep, like a decent meal, was the stuff of dreams and the subject of much discussion among the hostel dwellers, who gathered on street corners or loafed occasionally on park benches during the day.
You couldn’t stay put for long, because the law would be on you, and have you for loitering or begging and then you’d be up before the beak. Harry was always on the move, looking for any work he could find to get himself enough money for a bed for the night.
Sometimes he’d get up to Covent Garden early on the off chance that some of the costermongers might spare him a few pennies for helping them to move their barrows. Other days he’d queue for hours to earn sixpence for handing out some flyers to shoppers along Oxford Street. But as the weeks turned into months and he looked more down-at-heel, he was always passed over for someone who reeked less of poverty.
When he was hungry enough to stomach religion, he’d throw himself on the mercy of the Salvation Army, or the Sally Bash, as all the men like him called it. The strict rules there rankled and served only to bind the rag-tag bunch of down-and-outs closer together in their misery: no booze, no ciggies, no gambling of any sort, no talking after lights out and enforced attendance at an evening service, where they were urged to repent their sins and turn to Jesus.
As the homeless crammed in together in long rows of narrow pews in the desolate, whitewashed hall which served as a free ‘sit-up’ night shelter for the poorest, the Sally Bash soldiers handed out dog-eared hymn books to their unwilling congregation. Elbows were shoved into ribs to wake the destitute, preparing them to hear the word of God – or else they’d be out on their ear.
The superintendent, resplendent in a peaked cap and a matching navy uniform adorned with a row of shining buttons, raised his hand to speak and a hush fell over the room. ‘We are all sinners here and the punishment of the wicked shall be endless. Let us pray.’
The tramp next to Harry snorted himself back to consciousness as they started to mumble the Lord’s Prayer in unison: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us . . .’ A young lad on the other side of him clasped his hands together tightly in prayer and was mumbling a few Hail Marys.
Harry closed his eyes and pretended to pray for a minute, but the room slipped away from him, just as it did every time that he tried to get some rest. His head was pounding as the Sally Bash brass band struck up the nightly hymn and row upon row of London’s downtrodden and dispossessed started to stamp their feet in time to the music.
Harry willed himself not to, but in his mind, he was back in the bedroom in Clapham again, finding Ethel in bed with another man.
His hands were closing around Ethel’s throat and as he squeezed more tightly, he caught the look of panic on her face but the voice in his head was telling him to keep going and he wanted to, he wanted to snuff her out, to stop all the lies and make it all go away.
Then it wasn’t Ethel he saw beneath him but the German soldier he’d struck with his rifle butt in an assault on one of their trenches. He throttled him, until his face went purple and his blue eyes bulged. He held him there, down in the mud, until his enemy went limp and it was over.
Harry heard a baby crying and he relaxed his grip, but it was too late. The soldier had gone and Ethel lay there in bed underneath him, lifeless. ‘Oh, Ethel, forgive me,’ he sobbed.
Men around him were singing ‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war’ but the soldiers were in the hall, and they were in front of him, clad in khaki, clambering forward over the pews, bayonets fixed.
Somewhere, a cymbal crashed, and the big guns went off, firing their shells into no man’s land.
‘Fire two rounds for twenty seconds, two rounds for twenty seconds!’ said Harry, putting his fingers in his ears.
Men around him went over the top. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go . . .’ and they marched onwards to war, into a hail of bullets, into the mist and cordite, screaming as they fell.
Domino whinnied, and Harry reached out his hand and felt down the animal’s flank, which was sweating from the effort of hauling the eighteen-pounder to the front. ‘It’s all right boy, we’ll be back at camp before you know it.’
The stamping grew louder, boots on boards, but they were inside his head too. There was another crash of a cymbal and a flash of white light. He was lying in a shell hole, blood gushing out over his tunic, he was cold, and his legs were shaking.
‘Cease fire!’ he whispered, digging his fingernails into his palms. ‘Cease fire!’
The Sally Bash dormitories were cleaner than the ninepenny-a-night lodgings, but they were vast and cheerless, with about fifty men packed in there. At least in the dosshouse there was the camaraderie of the kitchen, with its roaring fire and shared bread and dripping. Once you got used to the stench of your neighbours and the occasional fist fight – usually over a card game or stolen food – it wasn’t such a bad place. In some ways, it reminded Harry of his time in the trenches. There was death in the dosshouse too, but it was a lingering affair, signalled by the hacking cough of consumption, hastened by near starvation and finished off by the old man’s friend, pneumonia.
The passing of another unfortunate was usually marked by a moment’s silence and a brief reflection on ‘good old so-and-so’ before someone piped up about how much he’d owed for tea and two slices, or in gaming debts.
Harry settled himself onto his narrow bed at the Sally Bash, which had a mattress so lumpy he’d have been better off sleeping on the floor, and a lad next to him introduced himself. He recognized him as the boy who had sat next to him during the Sally Bash service.
‘Tom,’ he said, stretching out a hand across the six-inch gap between them. He was slim and blond, almost girlishly pretty, with green eyes and long lashes. ‘I’m new here, just down from Liverpool, looking for work.’ He can’t have been more than fifteen.
‘Does your mother know you’re here?’ said Harry, offering him a crust of bread he’d shoved in his jacket pocket earlier.
‘Well, I’m one of nine, so I doubt she’d know if I was missing!’ he joked. ‘I was hoping to try my hand down at the docks tomorrow. What do you think?’
‘I think you’ll get beaten to a pulp down there, lad,’ said Harry, pulling off his boots. ‘London’s no place for a boy like you. You should go home, while you’ve still got the train fare.’
‘I don’t get on with my stepdad,’ said Tom, looking downcast. ‘I’ve got a character reference from my priest back home. Look, it says I’m trustworthy. I’m hoping I might get a job as an errand boy in one of the shops instead.’ He thrust a piece of paper into Harry’s hands. ‘Do you think I should write a letter, introducing myself to my future employer? I’m educated, I’ve got good copperplate handwriting, my teachers always said so.’
Harry shook his head in disbelief. ‘Just do yourself a favour and go home.’
A whistle sounded and one of the Sally Bash officers yelled, ‘Lights out!’
As darkness descended, Tom started to snivel.
Harry reached out across the divide and patted him on the shoulder.
‘Harry?’ Tom whispered. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Newcastle upon Tyne,’ said Harry.
‘So, you are a Geordie, then,’ said Tom.
‘And you’re a cheeky Scouser,’ said Harry, with a laugh.
A body on the other side of Harry turned over and grunted, ‘Shurrup, will you?’
Tom ignored him and carried on whispering; he was q
uite the chatterbox. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Harry, but when we were in the church service, were you remembering your time in the war?’
Harry hesitated for a moment. There was something so honest about this young lad’s concern that he found himself answering truthfully. ‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘I was. At least, I think so. I don’t like all the noise. It sets my nerves off.’
‘So, who is Ethel and why don’t you go home to her?’
His question hung in the air, amid the nightly cacophony of grunting, snoring and the coughs of those living below the breadline trying to catch forty winks. Harry lay awake, staring into space until dawn broke and the whistle sounded again, this time for them to get up and be on their way.
When Tom arrived back at the Sally Bash shelter that evening, he was sporting a proper shiner.
He sat on his own, in the furthest recess of the hall, nursing a bowl of watery soup he’d bought for a penny.
Harry sat down beside him and offered him some bread and cheese. ‘You ignored my advice and went to the docks, didn’t you?’
Tom nodded, blushing. ‘I think I’ll stick to trying to get a job as an errand boy instead. They let me off lightly because they realized that I was from out of town, so I didn’t get a proper hiding, just enough to see me on my way.’ He gave a weak smile.
‘It’s still not too late to get on the next train home back to Scouseland,’ said Harry gently.
‘It’s not too late for you either, Geordie,’ said Tom, with a laugh.
‘Careful or I’ll black your good eye,’ said Harry, pretending to take a swipe at him, which finished with him ruffling Tom’s hair.
‘You’re more of a dad to me than my stepdad has ever been,’ said Tom. ‘Have you got kids of your own?’
Harry gazed into the distance for a moment.
‘I have a son,’ said Harry. ‘But I had to leave him with his mother in Clapham.’
‘You left your son?’
‘I did,’ said Harry. ‘I couldn’t go back, not after what she did – and what I did to her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I could have killed her.’
The colour drained from Tom’s face so that his skin looked almost translucent. ‘But you didn’t, did you?’
‘I wanted to,’ said Harry, chewing thoughtfully. ‘I caught her in bed with another fella and then she told me our little girl was his, not my own. It was a wicked thing, enough to destroy a man.’
‘That’s awful,’ said Tom. ‘But what about your boy? He’s still your son.’
‘Tom, when you’re young it all seems so simple, but life isn’t like that. I’m frightened of what I will become if I go back there. More than that, I’m frightened of who I might be in any case. He’s better off without me in his life. It’s like those Sally Bash God-botherers say, we are all sinners and our punishment will be endless. Well, my punishment is endless. I see it every time I close my eyes.’
‘Don’t you have family up North still?’
‘Yes, I have my mother, but she isn’t in the best of health, so I don’t want to worry her. And then there’s my sister. But what’s happened to me here is too shameful to share with them. I couldn’t look them in the eye . . .’
Tom pulled a piece of paper and a pencil from his jacket pocket.
‘You write to your sister and I give you my word I will be on the first train back to Liverpool tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can take me to the station yourself – unless you’ve got something better to do.’
Harry laughed but he picked up the pencil and then hesitated.
‘What have you got to lose?’ said Tom. ‘Look at the fellas in here, wasting away, fighting over ha’pennies. That’ll be you in a few years’ time if you don’t get back in touch with your folks. You can have a fresh start, sort yourself out.’
‘Well, there’s a wise head on young shoulders,’ said Harry. ‘Maybe those dockers knocked some sense into you, lad.’
‘Go on then,’ said Tom. ‘Get on with it.’
Harry licked the end of the pencil and then began to write.
My dearest Kitty . . .
One week later, Harry waited at King’s Cross station, just as he had promised Kitty in his letter. He skulked by the entrance, as he’d already been moved on once by the stationmaster, who thought he was just malingering to keep out of the rain, which was coming down like stair rods.
Passengers emerged through great clouds of steam, bustling down the platform as porters rushed forward with their trolleys to assist those who looked like they’d give a good tip.
Harry had almost given up hope when he caught sight of her.
She looked older, with the first streaks of grey in her auburn hair, but when she smiled, she was his sister, just as she’d always been for as long as he could remember.
He ran forward to greet her with arms outstretched, as people turned to stare at this tramp who was rushing down the platform towards a well-dressed woman.
A porter came to Kitty’s aid, stepping in front of Harry. ‘Clear off! I don’t think the lady needs your help.’
‘No, please!’ said Kitty, sweeping the porter aside and ignoring the astonished glances of the other passengers. ‘He’s my brother!’
They fell into each other’s arms.
‘Oh, Harry,’ she cried. ‘Where on earth have you been? We’ve been so worried about you!’
The pot of tea that Kitty bought for them at the station cafe was possibly the finest brew that Harry had ever tasted.
He wolfed down an iced bun in a flash and almost licked his fingers too, until he remembered his manners.
Kitty sat watching him, with her handbag on her lap, and pushed a teacake towards him, which he accepted hungrily.
‘You must come home with me today, Harry,’ she said. ‘Whatever has happened, we can put it right. But you need to find your feet again, back where you belong. Mum is desperate to see you; the worry has nearly broken her. She’s got your room ready for you. Will you come with me?’
Harry nodded. There was nothing here for him in London, he could see that now.
Kitty went on: ‘I wrote to Ethel countless times, but she didn’t write back. Are the children all right?’
He looked away and in the station a train whistled its departure. There were tears in his eyes.
Eventually, he said, ‘She’s with another man. She told me that Zena isn’t mine.’
Kitty gasped. ‘That good for nothing! I knew she was trouble, Harry, from the moment you met her. And there was something fishy going on with her being down in London and refusing to come back up North with you.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Harry. ‘I spoiled everything. It wasn’t her fault.’
Kitty reached out across the table and held his hand. ‘It isn’t William’s fault either. Whatever has happened, you have to be there for your son. Surely you can see that? You have got to find a way.’
‘I can’t,’ said Harry. ‘I can’t go back. She won’t have me there and look at the state of me. My boy is better off without me in his life.’
‘Harry, we can put this right,’ said Kitty. ‘A boy needs his father. He’s your flesh and blood and for all we know, Zena could be too. She could be lying about that. We have to be strong together, remember? Other people don’t understand, they can never understand, what we have been through. What’s done is done and it’s hard, but we have to find a way to carry on. Dad made us promise.’
‘I nearly hurt Ethel very badly,’ said Harry, looking up at his sister as pain and fear filled his eyes. ‘I could have done it. Who’s to say, Kitty? Everything seems so mixed up in my head. Perhaps I’m not the full shilling, just like Ethel said when she told me to go.’
Kitty was crying now, tears running down her face. ‘No, Harry, you mustn’t say such things. You’ve been through some terrible times, that’s all. You’re a good man, you’re my brother.’
Harry glanced around at the other people in the cafe and whispe
red, ‘Well, perhaps I’m more like our father than either of us might like to think.’
22
Kitty
Newcastle, March 1910
The Northern Echo lay spread out on the dining table, the headline screaming about a murder on a local train: ‘THE RAILWAY CRIME!’
All the talk in the accountant’s office today was about the killing, and the robbery of the pitmen’s wages. More than £300 in cash was stolen and the poor colliery clerk carrying the money was shot dead in one of the carriages. Kitty picked up the newspaper and began to read as Mum came in with her best steak and kidney pie. Harry was busy at the other end of the dining room with his homework. He was more studious than most twelve-year-old lads and enjoyed getting his nose into a good book, thanks to Mum being a teacher.
‘Honestly, the pair of you would eat words rather than my cooking if you could,’ she tutted. ‘Kitty, put the paper down, will you?’
Kitty did as she was asked. Mum nodded in the general direction of the front-page story and added, ‘And don’t go talking about that in front of your little brother, please, it’s a dreadful affair.’
It was indeed a shocking thing. The clerk had been shot five times in the face. His wife only lived down the road in Heaton and she had waved to him as the train went through the station on the way up to the colliery at Stannington, just as she did every week when he delivered the miners’ wages. But when the train arrived at its destination, he was dead – murdered – and his body had been shoved under a seat in one of the carriages. It sent a shiver down Kitty’s spine to think that anyone could do such a thing.
Harry looked up from his algebra homework. He was oblivious to everything once he got his head stuck into numbers.
‘Harry, go and wash your hands before you eat,’ said Mum, bustling off to the kitchen to bring the vegetables, as Kitty hurriedly got the silver knives and forks and some freshly ironed napkins from the drawer and laid the table.
