Child on the Doorstep

TWO

Early in 1924, when Connie and Sarah were almost eleven, Sarah’s eldest sister, Kathy had left school and gone to work in the Grand Hotel in Colmore Row, Birmingham. Though she worked long hours, she loved the job and enthused about it so much that Sarah’s other elder sister, Siobhan, applied for a job there too two years later when she also left school.

Although her sisters taking live-in jobs meant that they were no longer all squashed on the one fairly small mattress in the attic, and there was more space generally and they couldn’t boss her about any more, Sarah missed them a great deal. She also knew, now that Siobhan had joined Kathy, the carefree days of her childhood were at an end, for she was the eldest girl and so she would be the one now to help her mother. She had been cushioned by the presence of two older sisters but now it was time to step up as the eldest daughter and help her mother and take a hand with her younger siblings, particularly Maura who was no longer a cute baby but a spoilt toddler. Sarah was convinced that Maura’s screams when her wishes were thwarted could shatter glass and her tantrums had to be seen to be believed.

Connie too had begun to rethink her life. She was coming up to thirteen now and in the senior school, and couldn’t miss the reports of the miners’ General Strike.

Now that the coal exports had fallen since the Great War, the miners’ wages were reduced from £6.00 to £3.90. The government also wanted them to work longer hours for that, and a phrase was coined that was printed in the papers:

Not a penny off the pay and not a minute on the day.

No buses, trams or trains ran anywhere, no newspapers were printed or goods unloaded from the docks, the drop forges and foundries grew silent, no coal was mined and, much to the delight of many children, schools were closed. The strike finished after nine days but little had changed and though the miners tried to hang on longer they were forced to capitulate in the end.

‘It is so sad really,’ Angela said, reading it out to her daughter from the newly printed newspaper. ‘We should be thankful we are so much better off than many.’

‘We could be better off still if you would let me leave school next year when I am fourteen and get a job like Sarah intends.’

‘Connie, we have been through all this.’

‘No, we haven’t really done that at all,’ Connie said. ‘You’ve told me what you want me to do with my life, that’s all.’

Angela frowned, for this wasn’t the way her compliant daughter usually behaved.

‘You know that going on to take your School Certificate and going on to college or university is what I’ve been saving for. What’s got into you?’

‘Nothing,’ Connie said. ‘It’s just that … Look, Mammy, if you hadn’t me to look after you would have more money. You could stop worrying about money, wipe the frown from your brow.’

‘If I’ve got a frown on my brow,’ Angela said testily, ‘it’s because I cannot understand the ungratefulness of a girl being handed the chance of a better future on a plate, which many would give their eye teeth for, and rejecting it in that cavalier way and without a word of thanks for the sacrifices I’ve made for you.’

Connie felt immediately contrite.

‘I’m sorry, Mammy,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate all you do for me and I am grateful, truly I am.’

‘I sense a “but” coming.’

‘It’s just that if I go on to matriculate I won’t fit in with the others, maybe even Sarah will think I am getting too big for my boots and …’

‘Connie, this is what your father wanted,’ Angela said and Connie knew she had lost. ‘He paid the ultimate price and fought and died to make the world a safer place for you. He wanted the best for you in all things, including education. Are you going to let him down?’

How could Connie answer that? There was only one way.

‘Of course not, Mammy. If it means so much to you and meant so much to my father, then I will do my level best to make you proud of me when I matriculate. Maybe Daddy will be looking down on me and be proud too.’

Angela gave Connie a kiss. ‘I’m sure he is, my darling girl, and I’m glad you have seen sense and we won’t have to speak of this again.’

Connie hid her sigh of exasperation and thought, as she wasn’t going to be leaving school any time soon, it was about time she started making herself more useful. She decided she would take care of her grandmother, rather than the other way round, and help her mother around the house far more.

So the next morning she slipped out of the bed she shared with Mary in the attic and, while her mother set off for work, made a pan of porridge and a pot of tea and had them waiting for Mary when she had eased her creaking body from the bed, dressed with care and stumbled stiff-legged down the stairs. She also filled a bucket with water from the tap in the yard and the scuttle with coal from the cellar and told her grandmother she would do the same every morning.

And she did and Angela was pleased at her thoughtfulness. On Monday morning Connie began rising even earlier to try to be the first one to fill the copper in the brew house with water from the tap in the yard, light the gas under it and sprinkle the water with soap suds as it heated. Then she would carry all the whites down to boil up while Angela made porridge for them all before she left for work. By the time Connie had eaten breakfast and seen to her grandmother, the whites were boiling in the copper and she would ladle the washing out with the wooden tongs into one of the sinks and empty the copper for others to use. That was as much as she could manage on school days and her mother would deal with everything else after she had finished at the pub, for lateness at school was not tolerated and all latecomers were caned.

In the holidays Connie would help her mother pound the other clothes in the maiding tub with the poss stick, or rub at persistent dirt with soap and the wash board. Then whites were put in a sink with Beckit’s Blue added, and sometimes another with starch, before everything was rinsed well, put through the mangle and pegged on lines lifted to the sky with long, long props to flap dry in the sooty air.

For all they were such a small household, it took most of the day to do the washing and most of Tuesday to do the ironing, unless of course it had rained on the Monday, in which case the damp washing would probably still be draped around the room on Tuesday, cutting off much of the heat from the fire and filling the air with steam. Connie never moaned about this because she knew it was far worse for many bigger families, like the Maguires for instance. She could only imagine the amount of clothes and bedding, towels and clothes they went through in a week, though Sarah said that was another thing that had become easier since her sisters had left home.

‘I can’t wait to do that myself either,’ Sarah said.

‘What?’

‘Leave home,’ said Sarah. ‘Siobhan and Kathy are going to keep an eye out for a job at their place and as soon as I am fourteen I’m off.’

‘Does your mother know that?’

‘Course. Only what she expected,’ Sarah said. Then she looked at Connie and said, ‘Your mammy wants you to take your School Certificate exam and go to college, don’t she?’

Angela nodded her head.

‘Do you want to?’ Sarah asked

‘No,’ Angela said. ‘I want to get out and work. All my life Mammy has worked and provided for me and Granny and I want her to take life easy for a change. If I am earning she will be able to do that. But …’ she gave a shrug, ‘she has her heart set on it. She has been to see the teacher and she says I am one of the children that could really benefit from a secondary education and so that is what she is determined I will have.’

‘How will she afford it?’

‘I asked my granny that when she first said it and Granny said all through the war when Mammy was earning good money in the munitions, every spare penny was saved for that very purpose. She said there is a tidy sum in the post office now.’

‘Is your granny for it too then?’

Angela shook her head. ‘Granny thinks no good comes of stepping out of your class.’

‘Yeah, my mother thinks that too,’ Sarah said. ‘I mean, we live here in a back-to-back house and when we marry it will likely be to someone from round here. And, as my mother says, where will your fine education get you then? And my father says there’s little point in teaching girls any more than the basics because they only get married. He said they should spend less time at school and more with their mothers learning to keep house and cook and rear babies.’

‘I can see that those things might be useful,’ Connie said. ‘But we sort of learn to do those things anyway, don’t we? And I like school.’

‘I know you do,’ Sarah said. ‘Everyone thinks you’re crazy, especially the boys.’

‘Huh, as if anyone gives a jot about what boys think or say.’

‘One day we might care a great deal,’ Sarah said, smiling broadly.

‘Maybe we will, but we’ll be older then and so will they, so it might make better sense,’ Connie said. ‘But for now I wouldn’t give tuppence for their opinion.’

‘All right but your opinion should matter,’ Sarah said. ‘Tell your mother how you feel.’

‘I can’t,’ Connie said. ‘She’d be so upset.’

She remembered how her grandmother told her how her mother would go to put more money in the post office.

‘It was all she thought about. Granny said she was even worse when she found out about the death of Barry. Mammy said the physical loss of him was one thing but she would make sure his daughter did not suffer educationally. She said she owed it to Barry to give me the best start she could. What the teacher said cemented that feeling really.’

How then could Connie throw all the plans she had made in her face? Connie was well aware of the special place she had in her mother’s heart and for that reason she couldn’t bear to hurt her. She knew she had a special place in her grandmother’s heart too and it pained her to see her growing frailer with every passing month.

‘I really don’t know what I’ll do when she’s not there any more,’ she confided to Sarah one day as they walked home from school together.

It was mid-June and the days were becoming warmer and Sarah said, ‘She is bound to rally a little now the summer is here. The winter was a long one and a bone-chilling one and, as my mother says, enough to put years on anyone.’

Connie smiled because Sarah’s mother was a great one for her sayings.

‘And she is oldish, isn’t she?’ Sarah put in.

Connie nodded. ‘Sixty-five.’

‘Well, that’s a good age.’

‘I know, but that doesn’t help,’ Connie lamented. ‘She has been here all my life and very near all Mammy’s life too. The pair of us will be lost without her.’

‘You’ll have to help one another.’

‘Mmm,’ she said, knowing Sarah probably didn’t understand the closeness between her and her granny because both her grandparents had died when she was just young. It wasn’t just closeness either; she could tell her grandmother anything, more than she could share with her mother. She loved the special times they shared when her mother worked in the evening in the pub. Her granny liked nothing better than to talk about days gone by, which Connie sometimes called ‘the olden days’ to tease Mary, and Connie loved to hear about how life was years ago. It was the only way she got to know anything, for her mother seemed to have no interest in how things had been.

‘What’s past is past, Connie, and there is no point in raking it all up again,’ Angela had said.

That was all very well, but now she was thirteen Connie wanted to know how it came about that Mary had brought her mother up from when she was a toddler. That bit of information she had gleaned. She knew her mother’s mammy had died in Ireland, but didn’t know when, or anything else really.

Mary knew why Angela didn’t want to talk or even think about the past and the dreadful decision she had been forced to make. Connie didn’t know that, however, and Mary thought she had a point when she said, ‘Mammy thinks that what has passed isn’t important because she has lived it and doesn’t want to remember, but I haven’t and I want to know.’

Mary thought that only natural. The child didn’t need to know everything, but it was understandable that she wanted to know where she came from.

‘I’ll tell you, when we have some quiet time together, just you and I,’ Mary promised and she did, the following day, which was a Friday night. With Angela off to work and the dishes washed, Connie sat in front of the fire opposite her granny with her bedtime mug of cocoa and learned about the disease that killed every member of her mother’s family. Angela had survived only because she had been taken to Mary McClusky before the disease had really taken hold.

‘Your dear grandmother was distracted,’ Mary said. ‘She didn’t want to leave Angela, but the first child with TB had contracted it at the school and your namesake, Connie, knew she had little chance of protecting the other children from it because they were all at school too. But Angela had a chance if she was sent away.’

‘Did she know they were all going to die?’

‘No, of course she didn’t know, but she knew TB was a killer, still is a killer, we all knew. Angela’s family, who were called Kennedy, were not the first family wiped out with the same thing.’

‘And only my mammy survived,’ Connie mused. ‘Did you mind looking after her?’

‘Lord bless you, love, of course I didn’t,’ Mary said. ‘I would take in any child in similar circumstances, but Angela was the daughter of my dear friend and, as your grandfather, Matt, often said to me, the boot could have been on the other foot, for our children were at the same school. To tell you the truth, I was proper cut up about the death of your other grandparents and their wee weans, but looking after your mammy meant I had to take a grip on myself. I knew that by looking after Angela the best way I could I was doing what my friend would want and it was the only thing I could do to help her. It helped me cope, because I was low after Maeve’s death. She was followed by her husband who was too downhearted to fight the disease that he had seen take his wife and family one by one.’

‘What part of Ireland was this?’

‘It was Donegal,’ Mary said. ‘We came to England in 1900 when your mother was four. It wasn’t really a choice because the farm had failed, the animals died and the crops took a blight, and with one thing and another we had to leave the farm.’

‘So you came here?’

‘Not just like that we didn’t,’ Mary said. ‘We first had to sell the farm to get the money to come. Once here, we had nowhere to live, but luckily for us, our old neighbours in Ireland, the Dohertys, had come to England years before. You know Norah and Mick Doherty?’

‘Yes, they live in Grant Street.’

‘Well, they put us up till we could find this place,’ Mary said. ‘It was kind of them because it was a squash for all of us. In fact, there was so little space my four eldest had to sleep next door.’

‘Next door?’

‘Well, two doors down with a lovely man called Stan Bishop and his wife Kate who had an empty attic and the boys slept there.’

Connie wrinkled her nose and said, ‘I don’t know anyone called Bishop.’

‘No one there of that name,’ Mary said a little sadly. ‘Stan’s wife died and then he enlisted in the army and was killed like your daddy and many more besides,’ Mary finished, deciding that Connie had no need to know about the existence of Stan’s son. It would only complicate matters.

But though Connie hadn’t recognised the name, she knew about the woman who had died after her baby was born, because though she’d only been a child, she had overheard adults talking of how sad it was. There had never been any sign of a baby and so she had presumed the baby had died too.

‘You haven’t got four elder sons any more, have you, Granny?’ Connie said. ‘Mammy said two died but wouldn’t say how. She said how they died wasn’t important.’

Mary sighed. ‘I suppose she’s right in a way,’ she said. ‘Knowing all the ins and outs of it will not make any difference to the fact that they are dead and gone. They died trying to join their brothers in New York, but they travelled on the Titanic.’

Connie gave a gasp and Mary said, ‘Do you know about the Titanic?’

Connie nodded. ‘We were told about it at school. They said it was the biggest ship ever and it was her maiden voyage and she sank and many people died.’

‘Including my two sons, but there were whole families, men, women and children, even wee babies, lost.’

‘I know,’ Connie said. ‘It must have been really awful to have to deal with that.’

‘I didn’t think I would ever recover,’ Mary admitted. ‘And your granddad was never the same after. Officially he died from a tumour in his stomach, but I know he really died from heartache. It wasn’t just that the boys died, though that was hard enough to bear. It was the way they died too, for they would have suffered, they would have frozen to death. It said in the paper most steerage passengers – that’s what they call the poorest travellers down in the bowels of the ship – didn’t even reach the deck before the ship sank and, even if they had, there were not enough lifeboats for the numbers on the ship.’

‘I know,’ Connie said. ‘The teacher told us that. I thought it was stupid to build a ship with too few lifeboats for all the passengers.’

‘And so did I, Connie,’ Mary said. ‘And now that’s one mystery cleared up for you and it’s time for bed. You finished that cocoa ages ago.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Yes but nothing and don’t forget your prayers.’

‘Granny, there’s loads more I want to know.’

‘Maybe but that’s all you’re getting tonight,’ Mary said. ‘I’ll tell you some more tomorrow night.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise,’ Mary agreed and then, as Connie opened the door to the stairs, she said, ‘And Connie, while the things I have told you and may tell you yet are not exactly secrets, if your mother wants to keep the past hidden she’ll not want all and sundry talking about it.’

‘All right. I can tell Sarah though, can’t I?’

And as Mary hesitated, Connie pleaded, ‘Please, Granny, she’s my best friend and she’ll not tell another soul if I tell her not to.’

Mary remembered Angela and her best friend, Maggie, the pair of them thick as thieves and always sharing and swapping secrets. Connie and Sarah were the same and so she relented and said, ‘All right, but just Sarah, mind.’

‘I only go round with Sarah,’ Connie said. ‘I wouldn’t share things with anyone else.’

Mary knew she wouldn’t. Some children growing up had a wide circle of friends, but with Angela and now Connie they had just one best friend.

Connie told Sarah the following afternoon after first extracting a promise that she wouldn’t tell anyone else.