ANNE BENNETT
THE CHILD ON THE DOORSTEP

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Anne Bennett 2018

Cover photographs © Gordon Crabb (Girl); Tony Charnock/ Alamy Stock Photo (houses)

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008162337

Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008162344

Version: 2018-01-05

Dedication

In loving memory of Denis Bennett

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

ONE

Angela took her coat from the hook at the back of the door and stepped out into the early morning. The day was a chilly one – it was early yet but Angela was glad the bite of winter seemed to be gone at last, though it was only early March 1926. In the children’s verse March was supposed to begin like a lion and end like a lamb so she knew they weren’t quite out of the woods yet. But they were on the way to spring and that morning a hazy sun was trying to break through the clouds. Funny how it cheered a body to see the sun.

But then her good mood was dispelled a little when, despite the early hour, she saw Tressa Lawson on the road before her, carrying a cushion and an army-issue blanket. As the eldest in the family it was her job to lead her father, Pete, by the hand for he had been blinded by mustard gas in 1915. He wore his great coat against the chill of the day and immense pity for the man rose up in Angela.

‘Why does he go out so early?’ she’d asked Tressa one time.

‘He says he gets the best pitch then,’ Tressa had said. ‘He positions himself by the tram stop in Bristol Street.’

Angela had nodded; she knew he did, for she had seen him there herself and never passed without greeting him and dropping some money in the cap on the floor before him.

‘He says he gets the people waiting for the tram and those getting off, as well as those walking into the city centre by foot.’ Tressa had chewed on her bottom lip before going on, ‘Sometimes though, for all he sits for hours, often chilled to the bone, especially in the winter, despite his cushion and blanket, he has collected precious little. I hate the look on his face then. He hates the thought that Mammy has to take in extra washing from the big houses in Edgbaston, that he can’t provide adequately for his family. He often says he feels a failure.’

Angela’s intake of breath had been audible and she had hissed to Tressa, ‘Your father is no failure.’

‘I know that,’ Tressa had said, ‘but it’s what Daddy thinks.’

Angela remembered him marching away to war, so proud that he had the opportunity to serve his King and country. And when it was over, four gruelling years after it had begun, they called it the ‘Great War’. 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 had been promised a land ‘fit for heroes’, but in fact those who returned had nothing but the dole queue and poverty awaiting them.

Somehow, Angela could never see the decent and respectable Pete Lawson without feeling a pang to her heart. That bloody ‘Great War’ had also taken away Angela’s beloved husband and Connie’s father Barry, and at the time Angela had thought she would never get over the tremendous loss she’d felt.

The lovely letter of commendation that she had received from his commanding officer, who had said how brave and courageous a soldier he was, hadn’t helped the searing ache inside her. The letter had told her that Barry had eventually lost his life saving another. While her mind screamed ‘Why?’ she imagined in the heat of battle there was little time for logical thought and Barry would have acted instinctively. But that act was the culmination of this very brave soldier’s career; the officer had said he was recommending him for an award and in due course she received the Military Medal.

Angela still thought it cold comfort and if her husband had been a little less brave he might have been one of the ones who had marched home again. His mother, Mary McClusky, on the other hand, had been ‘over the moon’ that her Barry had received a medal for gallantry and Angela thought Connie might like it as she grew. It would show her what a fine father she’d had, for she was too young to remember him at all, and Angela had put the medal away carefully to show her when she was older.

In the end, despite commendations and medals, she had learnt to cope with her profound loss because she had Connie to rear and Barry’s mother Mary to care for too, for they lived together. Anyway, she was by no means the only widow and when the Armistice was signed and the men who had survived were demobbed, it was only too obvious how few men there were about.

As Angela made her way to the Swan public house where she cleaned, she reflected anew on all the changes brought about because so many men had not returned from the war. She could well remember what George Maitland, her old employer, had said on a similar subject.

He had no children and this was a great regret for him, but when the war began and the casualty figures began appearing in the paper, he had said to Angela one day when she was collecting her groceries, ‘You know I’ve never had chick nor child belonging to me and at times that has been a cross to bear, for I would have loved a family. But now I look at my customers and see the ones who have lost sons and wonder if it is worse for them who have given birth to a boy and reared him with such a powerful love that they would willingly give their life to save him. But they are unable to save him from war and when he dies for King and country, the loss must be an overwhelming one. I have had women in the shop crying broken-heartedly about their beloved sons who will never return and at times I am almost thankful I have no sons of my own to suffer the same fate.’

Angela had often thought about George’s words as the war raged on and could understand his reasoning so very well, but then she often did. In her opinion he was a very wise man. She had worked in his shop for two years before her marriage and just after it and had become very fond of him, and 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, which he had lodged in the bank with authorisation saying it was for Angela alone. It was totally separate from the will, in which everything presumably was left to his wife, Matilda.

Angela had never taken to Matilda, mainly because of the way she had been with George. She was a cold woman, who never seemed to have a high regard for him, and in Angela’s hearing had never ever thrown him even a kind word, and there was no place in her life for children, or sex either, so people whispered.

By now Angela had reached the pub and would have to settle her mind to the job in hand. She went in the side door and called out to the landlord, Paddy Larkin, as she did so. She was very grateful to Paddy for offering her this job after the war, for she couldn’t in all honesty say either her father-in-law, Matt, or her husband, Barry, were regular visitors there. She was more than happy to have it though, because it eased the financial pressure, and with Constance at school and Mary to see to her in the holidays, it was perfect for them all.

Angela seldom saw the landlady Breda Larkin for she was usually getting herself ready upstairs. She often wouldn’t come down before ten thirty or so to open the pub at eleven and Angela would usually be on her way back home by then. However, one morning when she had been at the cleaning for three years or so, Breda got up early. She greeted Angela pleasantly enough, but when she had left she turned to her husband and said, ‘She’s wasted on the cleaning, that Angela McClusky.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look at her, you numbskull,’ Breda said impatiently. ‘Despite everything she is still a beautiful woman, blonde, busty and pleasant. She has a smile for everyone and she will bring the punters in, especially on Friday and Saturday night.’

Paddy might have bristled at being called a numbskull by his wife but he had to acknowledge what she said made sense. Angela was not only a very good-looking woman, but she had something a little special, and though she was always agreeable, she was not flirty – too flirty a woman behind the bar could cause all manner of problems. And so he put the proposition to Angela the next day. She knew it would be extra hours and so extra money and she also knew she couldn’t have considered it if she hadn’t Mary at home, for she would not leave Constance alone for the hours she would be behind the bar. She told Paddy she would have to ask Mary, for she would be the one looking after Connie, but it was only more for courtesy.

As she’d anticipated, her mother-in-law had no objection.

‘Why would I even think about objecting?’ Mary said to Angela. ‘It is only two nights a week you’ll not be here and I shall do what I do every night: sit before the fire and do a bit of knitting and a bit of dozing. But surely to God you won’t be doing the cleaning as well?’

‘No, well, I’m going to put a proposal to Paddy,’ Angela said. ‘He wants me Friday and Saturday night and Sunday lunchtime. So I could do the cleaning on Monday to Thursday, and if he was agreeable ask Maggie to take over the cleaning over the weekends.’

‘Oh you do right to think of her,’ Mary said. ‘That poor girl.’

Angela knew how Mary felt for her best friend, Maggie, who was also Connie’s godmother. She had married Michael Malone after the war, having been sweet on him for years, even before the war began, and had written to him when he was in the army. A few of the men from their town had been part of a pals battalion and had fought alongside each other and Angela had found out later that the shell that had killed Barry while he’d been trying to save another had blown Michael’s left leg clean off.

He had thought any future with Maggie was scuppered, that she wouldn’t want to saddle herself with a one-legged man, but Angela knew her friend was a bigger person than that. And Maggie had said that it made no difference to the way she felt about him and Angela knew she spoke the truth. She also knew if Barry had lost his leg, but came home to her, she would have rejoiced. Though getting Michael to understand that took Maggie some time.

A major slump after the war meant that, with strapping able-bodied men finding any sort of employment hard to come by, no one was prepared to even consider employing a one-legged man, and he felt bad that he couldn’t provide for Maggie. Maggie had said she didn’t need providing for, and besides, as he had been so disabled in the war, Michael had been awarded a pension of twenty-eight shillings a week. Angela was pleased for them both, but was a little confused that as a war widow she qualified for a pension of only eighteen shillings, with an extra shilling added for Connie.

‘No understanding the way governments work,’ Mary had said when this had been explained to her after the war.

Angela had quite a sizeable nest egg in the post office because of her well-paid war work in munitions making and delivering shells, as well as the money Barry was sending her. But savings didn’t last for ever if you had to draw on them constantly and so when Paddy Larkin had offered her a job she hadn’t even had to think about it. She knew Maggie too wouldn’t hesitate, because any job was better than no job, and it would do her very well for now.

‘It’ll be money the government won’t know about because Paddy pays you in hand,’ Angela pointed out. ‘Will Michael mind that it’s you working and not him?’

‘He may well mind,’ Maggie said. ‘But he is above all a realist. And so he will not show any resentment to me or give me any sort of hard time.’

‘He’s a good man you have there, Maggie.’

‘I know it,’ Maggie said. ‘But the war exacted a heavy price from us one way and the other. Oh, I know Michael survived and Barry and our Syd didn’t so maybe I shouldn’t moan, but I would like to take the look of failure from his face. He knows in the present climate he hasn’t the chance of a sniff of any form of employment and I can’t even give him a child.’

She caught sight of Angela’s face and went on, ‘I see you think it irresponsible to bring another life in the world just now when our financial position isn’t great and not likely to improve very much. But, oh, Angela, how I long to hold my own child in my arms – a wee girl like Connie, or a boy the image of his father. I don’t think it will ever happen, that’s the point, and that’s hard to bear.’

Angela was upset to see her friend so downhearted and the worst of it was everything she said was true; none of the girls she worked in the munitions with had become pregnant. This was such a phenomenon across the country that investigations had been made and it was found that the sulphur many of them worked with had made them infertile.

Angela had wished at the time she had become infertile too and then there might have been no repercussions from the terrible attack that day she had driven to the docks for the first time. She had been one of the first and only female delivery drivers, transporting munitions around the country. It had been on one of these trips that something terrible had happened, something she had tried to push out of her mind but which had come back to haunt her and caused her to make the most heart-breaking decision of her life.

One dreadful night she had been attacked and viciously raped when making a munitions delivery at night in a strange town. Her assault had left her scarred, but worse, it had left her with child. With no other course available, with a husband away fighting at war and nowhere to turn, Angela had been forced to leave the child, a young girl with fair hair and blue eyes like her own, on the workhouse steps. The shame and the pain of it had stayed with her and Angela had had to shut off the past to keep the pain at bay.

At least she had Connie, though, who she loved with all her heart and soul, while poor Maggie had nothing. Angela had pushed all the awful memories away. Better to focus on the present and Connie’s future.

Maggie was grateful for the chance of employment at the Swan and took herself off to see Mr Larkin. They got on fine and the upshot was that she was to take on the weekend cleaning, while Angela worked behind the bar.

In fact Paddy felt it was scandalous that two women, one a widow and one with a disabled husband, should have to take on jobs like the ones he was offering to keep the wolf from the door.

‘Those men fought for King and country, both of them,’ he said to his wife one night as they prepared for bed. ‘You’d think their relatives would be taken care of if they were killed like Barry McClusky, or crippled like Maggie’s husband, or Pete Lawson, blinded, and so many more.’

‘You’ve just said it though, haven’t you?’ Breda said. ‘So many more. Think about it, there were thousand upon thousand killed and even more injured. I should think it takes a great deal of money to fight a war and so they haven’t got the money to provide adequately for all the dependants.’

‘And since when have the government cared about the likes of us anyway?’ Paddy said morosely. ‘Cannon fodder, the common people are.’

‘That’s about the shape of it,’ Breda said. ‘And people do what they can to survive. And now Maggie doesn’t have to make a decision this winter whether to order another hundredweight of coal or buy the makings for a dinner, and neither does Angela, so at least we have made two of those dependants happier.’

‘And that’s all we can do, I suppose.’

‘It is,’ Breda said decidedly. ‘Now come to bed and stop fretting about things you can do nothing to change.’

As Angela worked, whether it was pulling pints behind the bar or cleaning, she was always well aware of what she owed Mary, for without her stalwart help in caring for Connie, she knew their lives would have been financially harder. But she didn’t just appreciate Mary for the help she gave but she was glad she was there with them. She had been part of her life since as far back as she could remember and she hadn’t a clue how she was going to manage without her. And though Mary might have years to live yet, she somehow doubted it. The news of Barry’s death had hit her for six, combined with the death of two of her other sons in 1912 as they had travelled to America on the Titanic to seek better prospects, and the grief had done much to hasten the death of her husband. The bad times were wearing her down and Mary hadn’t the resilience of youth.

It wasn’t all bad. Mary still thought a great deal about her other two sons in America who had gone ahead some years before the Titanic disaster, and she was glad they were so happy in their new lives. She often wished she could see them again just the once, but she had known when she kissed them goodbye it was final. They wrote regularly though, and she was grateful for that, especially when they included dollar bills folded inside the letter. They wrote about things she could barely imagine, like the flashing neon lights in a place called Times Square and the trolley buses and the trains that ran underground in the bowels of the earth and the motor cars they helped build that were now filling the wide straight roads of America.

And they wrote of their marriages – for Colm had followed his brother Finbarr and married a Roman Catholic girl – and sent pictures of their weddings. But Mary could barely recognise her sons and their wives, and the babies born later were like the photographs of strangers, names on a page, and sometimes she was heart-sore knowing that she would never hold her sons’ children in her arms and take joy in them. Connie helped there, for she still had to be looked after, and Mary knew Connie loved her with a passion that eased the pain in her heart.

As Connie grew up, she became very good friends with a girl in her class called Sarah Maguire. Angela had no problem with her having Sarah as her special friend as she herself had been best friends with Maggie Malone, née Maguire, at a similar age. She was friendly with Sarah’s mother Maeve and knew them to be a respectable family and was glad to see Connie making friends of her own. It wasn’t as if she’d be all that far away in any case, for the Maguires lived just a wee bit down Bell Barn Road on the corner of Great Colmore Street.

The Maguire home was so different from Connie’s – although cramped and noisy it was filled with a vibrancy and vitality often lacking in her own. She liked them all, even Sarah’s parents. She saw little of Mr Maguire but what she saw she liked. He was called James and his eldest son, wee Jimmy, was named after him. He had big swollen muscles that often strained against the fabric of his shirts, which he usually wore folded up to the elbow so that his lower arms looked like giant hams, and led to large, red, gnarled hands. His face was equally red, with his nose sort of splashed against it and his wide, generous lips tilted upwards so it looked as if he was permanently smiling. He did smile a lot anyway and laugh, and a full-throated and very infectious laugh it was too. Added to this he had a fine head of brown hair which was sprinkled only lightly with grey.

Mrs Maguire, Maeve, had an equally dark head of hair though it was always tied away from her face in a bun of some sort. She wasn’t as pretty as Connie’s own mother – few people were – but Maeve Maguire’s face had an almost serene look seldom seen on those with a houseful of children. Connie had never heard her raise her voice and Sarah said she almost never did. So her face had a contented look about it, with no lines pulling her mouth down, although there were creases around her eyes which were a strange grey-green colour.

‘Do you mind me coming round so often?’ Connie asked her once. ‘My granny says I mustn’t annoy you.’

Mrs Maguire gave an almost tinkling laugh. ‘Child dear, you don’t annoy me in the slightest,’ she said. ‘You are like a ray of sunshine. And anyway, when you have so many, one more makes little difference and there is more company for you here. The children’s friends are always welcome and you help Sarah with the jobs she must do, so you must assure your granny you are no trouble.’

Maeve Maguire had hit the nail on the head, for Connie, though she loved her mother and grandmother dearly, was often lonely. There was something else too. Sometimes her mother seemed far away. She was there in person but when Connie spoke, she sometimes didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear her and her eyes had a faraway look in them. She had asked her grandmother about it and Mary had said that her mother was still remembering her daddy, Barry.

‘You said that when I asked you why she was sad at Christmas.’

‘Yes. She’s remembering then too.’

‘But, Daddy didn’t die at Christmas.’

‘No, but Christmas is a time to remember loved ones, especially those you might not see again,’ Mary had said and added, ‘Don’t you feel the same when you remember your daddy?’

Connie didn’t; in fact, if she was absolutely honest, she didn’t remember her daddy at all, just the things people had told her about him. But even though she was a child she had known her granny would not like her to share those thoughts and so she contented herself by saying, ‘Mmm, I suppose.’

So she went for company to Sarah and the Maguire house. They sat together at school and met often on Saturdays and holiday times and on Sundays at Mass.

‘Beats me how you don’t run out of things to say,’ Angela commented dryly as they sat down for an early meal before she went to serve behind the bar one Saturday evening.

It was funny but they never did. They often talked about their families and one Saturday as they went along Bristol Street, fetching errands for Maeve and pushing the slumbering baby Maura in the pram, Connie suddenly said, ‘Aren’t your mammy’s eyes an unusual colour?’

‘I suppose,’ Sarah said. ‘Neither one thing or the other. Mine are the same. Look.’

‘Oh, I never noticed,’ Connie said.

‘All us girls are the same,’ Sarah said. ‘Well, that is, Kathy and Siobhan are. Too early to tell with Maura yet and the boys both look like Daddy.’

‘It must have been more noticeable with your mother because she has her hair pulled back from her face,’ Connie said. ‘But now I come to look closer you look very like your mother.’

‘Oh, the shape of my face is the same and my mouth is and thank goodness my nose is like Mammy’s too. I would hate to have a nose like my father’s, which isn’t really any shape at all. Looks like it’s been broken and not fixed properly or something. I asked him once and he said that if it had been broken he hadn’t been aware of it. Mammy said she grew up nearly beside him on the farm in Ireland and Daddy grew up with a rake of brothers, seven or eight of them with only a year between them all. There were girls too, cos there were thirteen altogether, and Mammy said near every time she saw the boys two or three of them would be scrapping on the ground like puppies. She said Daddy’s nose could have been broken a number of times and their mother wouldn’t have had time to blow her own nose, never mind notice that one of the tribe had theirs busted.’

The two girls burst out laughing. ‘Why do boys do that, fight and things?’

Sarah shrugged. ‘Who’d know the answer to that or care either? It’s just what boys do.’

‘Glad I’m a girl.’

‘And I am,’ Sarah said. ‘And it’s a blooming good job because there’s nothing to be done about it if we were unhappy. And never mind the likenesses in my family, what about yours? You look just like your mother. I’ve never seen hair so blonde and your ringlets are natural, aren’t they? I mean, you don’t have to put rags in your hair or anything.’

Connie shook her head so the ringlets held away from her face with a band swung from side to side.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re natural all right, it’s just that I can’t ever wear my hair loose for school. Mammy insists I have it in plaits.’

‘That’s because of the risk of nits,’ Sarah said. ‘The same reason Mammy won’t let me grow mine long. But still, you’re luckier than me because when you’re old enough you can wear your hair any way you like and you’ve got the most startling blue eyes.’

‘I know, I seem to have taken all things from my mammy and none from my daddy at all.’

‘D’you remember your daddy?’

Connie shook her head. ‘Not him, the person. Sometimes I think I do because I’ve been told so much about him, but I know what he looks like because Mammy has a picture of him in a silver frame on the sideboard. Remember I showed you? I don’t look like him at all.’

‘That’s how it is sometimes though, isn’t it?’ Sarah said.

‘Oh yes,’ Connie said as Sarah’s words tugged at her memory. ‘My mammy was born with golden locks and blue eyes like mine, my grandmother said, but she’s not my mammy’s real mother. My mammy’s real mother died in Ireland when she was a babby, like I told you before.’

‘Yes,’ Sarah said, ‘she lost the rest of her Irish family and that’s when she went to live with the McCluskys who came to England. Their son Barry was your daddy.’

Connie nodded and added, ‘And my daddy was killed in the war.’

That wasn’t uncommon and Sarah said, ‘Yes, I think lots of daddies were. But maybe your daddy and your other granny are in heaven this minute looking down on us all?’

‘I’d like to think it.’

‘Don’t say you have doubts,’ Sarah said with mock horror. ‘If you have, keep them to yourself, for if Father Brannigan hears you he will wash your mouth out with carbolic.’

Connie grinned at her friend and said, ‘When I die I shall ask God if I can pop back and tell everyone it’s true.’

Sarah laughed. ‘You are a fool, Connie. You’ll have to come back as a ghost and that will frighten everyone to death,’ she said. ‘Anyway, when were you thinking of dying?’

‘Oh, not for ages yet.’

‘Good,’ Sarah said. ‘In the meantime I think we better get on with Mammy’s shopping or she’ll think we’ve got lost. And it looks like Maura is waking up so our peace is probably gone anyway.’

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.

‘It’s like a story, isn’t it?’ she said to Connie.

Connie nodded happily. ‘It’s nice knowing about your family, even if bad things happened like my uncles drowning in the Atlantic Ocean when their ship went down. Anyway Granny said she’ll tell me more tonight after Mammy’s gone to work.’

‘Chapter Two tomorrow then,’ said Sarah.

That night Connie rushed through her jobs and had only just got settled before the fire when she said, ‘Granny, did Mammy miss her own mammy?’

Mary shook her head. ‘She was too young,’ she said. ‘I know sometimes as she was growing up she felt bad she couldn’t remember her family. She used to study the picture – you know, the one on the sideboard.’

‘The one of my grandparents on their wedding day,’ Connie said. ‘Mammy told me that much. They wore funny clothes.’

‘It was the style then,’ Mary said.

‘It was a shame Mammy couldn’t remember anything about either of them,’ Connie said. ‘I know a little bit of how that feels because I can’t remember my daddy. I’m glad as well that I have a picture so I know what he looked like. But that’s all, so it’s good that Mammy at least knew what her parents looked like.’

‘Yes, that’s why she was so taken with the locket.’ Mary stopped suddenly and Connie watched a crimson flush flood over her grandmother’s face. She had never intended to mention the locket because it brought back that distressing time when Angela was forced to do that almost unforgivable thing. Maybe Angela was right and the past should be left in the past.

However, Connie didn’t connect her grandmother’s odd behaviour with anything she said, she thought rather that she was having some sort of seizure.

‘Granny,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

And when Mary didn’t answer she put her hand on her grandmother’s shoulder and said again, ‘Granny, is anything the matter?’

Connie’s touch and anxious voice roused Mary, who knew that now she had mentioned the locket she had to give Connie some explanation. She looked at her beloved granddaughter and said, ‘No, I’m fine. Sometimes memories crowd in my mind and just then I remembered how upset your mother was when she lost the locket, for it meant so much to her.’

‘I’ve never heard of it before.’

‘That would be why,’ Mary said. ‘It was beautiful and bought by your grandfather and given to your grandmother on their wedding day. Your grandmother gave it into my keeping when I took charge of Angela and said if anything happened to them I was to give it to Angela on her wedding day.’

‘And you did.’

‘Of course,’ Mary said. ‘Your mammy was moved to tears to be holding something in her hand that had once belonged to her mother.’

‘And she lost it?’

‘Yes,’ Mary said. ‘Maybe the clasp was faulty or something. But, however it happened, she lost it on the way home from the munitions one night.’

‘Oh, I bet she was upset,’ Connie said. ‘Did she look for it, or inform the police or something?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember the details of what she did now,’ Mary said somewhat vaguely. ‘But I believe she tried all ways to recover it.’

Mary thought of the locket, left in the care of the tiny baby on the workhouse steps, the only reminder of the mother who gave her away.

‘Ah, someone will have picked it up and pocketed it with no idea what it means to the person who lost it,’ Connie said. ‘Was there anything inside?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mary. ‘There was a miniature of the picture on the sideboard, your grandparents’ wedding day, and in the other side some ringlets from your mammy’s hair tied tight with a red ribbon, for she had perfect ringlets just as you do.’

‘Oh, I wish she still had it.’

‘It was supposed to come to you on your wedding day.’

‘Oh,’ said Connie, surprised at the disappointment she felt that this wouldn’t happen now. It wasn’t as if she remembered ever even seeing the locket.

‘Don’t ever mention the locket to your mother though,’ Mary warned.

Connie shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t. She must have been upset when she lost it and it would just make her sad. What did she do in the munitions? I know she worked there. I remember that and you used to take me to the nursery and then to school, but she doesn’t like talking about what she did.’

‘She made shells,’ Mary said. ‘It was in a very hot, noisy, smelly factory. They couldn’t wear anything metal that might cause a spark as that could easily cause an explosion – everything metal, even hair grips, had to be removed. Your mammy used to leave her wedding ring and locket here in the end.’

It was on the tip of Connie’s tongue to ask, if her mammy had left the locket at home, how had she managed to lose it coming home from the munitions. She actually opened her mouth to ask, but she was forestalled for Mary went on, ‘I was on at her to leave there at first, get something not so dangerous, but she said, though she hated doing it, there was a desperate shortage of shells. In the end though, she was seldom in the factory for they taught her to drive and she used to drive the lorries all over the country.’

‘Golly, did she?’ Connie said and she thought of her mother who, despite the fact she pulled pints at the pub, and cleaned there too, was so essentially a housewife and a mother and yet she had this quite exciting past. She thought of her behind the wheel of some of the big trucks chugging along Bristol Street and somehow the image didn’t seem to fit.

‘I find it hard to think of Mammy doing that.’

‘Oh she did,’ Mary said. ‘And at first I was pleased that she was out of the smelly factory, but then I thought that driving those shells all over the place was no safer than making them in the first place. Really, in a war of that magnitude, people, and not just soldiers, had to be prepared to take risks and do things they wouldn’t dream of doing in peacetime. And of course it was very well paid and that was important for your mother.’

‘Yes,’ Connie said with a slight sigh. ‘So she could save some of it for my secondary education.’

‘Yes, but more than that, she’s thinking of university.’

Connie could hardly believe her ears. ‘But, Granny, people like me don’t go to university.’

Mary nodded. ‘I agree, but what stops them if they have the brains to pass the exams?’

‘Cost, I suppose.’

‘And what if your mother could afford to send you?’

‘How? Just how big is this nest egg?’

‘Not that big,’ Mary said. ‘But your mother has something else.’

‘What?’

‘Your mother left school at fourteen and went to work for a grocer, by the name of George Maitland,’ Mary said. ‘Angela loved serving in the shop and all and was so pleasant and hardworking George said she was a godsend and I think he felt quite paternal towards her. She was there before she married Barry and after, till just a few weeks before you were born. George paid good money, especially for a girl in those days, and sent home a big basket of groceries every week too. He was very good to us and Angela was quite fond of him. He died suddenly just after your father enlisted and, though his shop and all went to his wife, he left some of his mother’s jewellery to Angela.’

‘He gave some of his mother’s jewellery to Mammy?’ Connie almost squealed in excitement. ‘Is it valuable?’

‘I’d say it must be worth something for it to be lodged in the bank for safe-keeping. The bank manager was anxious for Angela to see it and give him instructions as to what she wanted to do with it. However, Angela couldn’t get there in normal opening hours for she was by then working long hours in the munitions, so the bank manager opened the bank especially so she could see what George had left her.’

‘You went into a bank?’ Connie said incredulously.

‘I did,’ Mary said. ‘I went to support Angela, for she didn’t want to go on her own and no wonder. Going into the bank in the normal way of things would have been nerve-wracking enough, but as the bank was opened especially just for us we were the only ones in there. Tell you, our boots sounded very loud on those marble floors and the lofty domed ceilings seemed to be miles away, and all around us were gleaming high counters with grilles in front of them. It was all very grand and I don’t know how your mammy felt, but I was very uncomfortable.’

‘But you saw the jewellery?’

Mary nodded. ‘The bank manager took us into a special room for that.’

‘And so what did you think of it?’

‘It was very fine.’

‘Is that all you can say?’ Connie said, disappointed.

‘What d’you want me to say?’ Mary said. ‘I know nothing about jewellery and this was during the war nine or ten years ago and I have never set eyes on any of it since. Anyway, that’s what the bank manager said when Angela asked him if any of it was valuable. He said he didn’t know the absolute value of it, because he wasn’t a jeweller, but he did say there were some fine pieces there. He offered to get them valued, but your mammy said not to bother, that she could make no decision till the war was over and your daddy was back home. Till then she was leaving them in the bank.’

‘But he didn’t come home.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ said Mary with a sigh. ‘But she had a plan for what to do with it anyway, for she told me. And if he had survived the war, Barry would have supported her, for all that pair thought about was you.’

‘What was the plan?’

‘To sell most of the jewellery to enable you to go as far as you were able in your education and save a couple of the prettiest pieces to give you on your wedding day in place of the locket. There,’ said Mary. ‘I probably wasn’t meant to tell you that, but the damage is done now.’

‘I’m glad I know,’ Connie said. ‘But I wish Mammy wasn’t so set on this. I really don’t think I am that brainy and, even if I was, I don’t want all this money spent on me. It’s her money, she’s earned it, and I would rather she spent it on herself and wore the jewellery someone was kind enough to leave her in a will or whatever. I’m sure that’s what this George Maitland intended. I bet he never imagined for one minute that she would plan to sell it all and give all the money made to someone else.’

‘I agree with you,’ Mary said. ‘But I doubt you will ever get your mother to see things that way. Educating you seems to be her life’s work.’

‘I know,’ Connie agreed gloomily. ‘And I suppose I must accept it, unless of course at the end I turn out to be a real dumb cluck and she can see for herself that funding further education would be money wasted.’

‘There is a saying that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ Mary said.

‘Of course you can’t,’ Connie said. ‘And that’s what Mammy is trying to do, make me out to be someone I’m not and someone I don’t want to be either.’

However, they knew all the talking under the sun would not change Angela’s opinion once her mind was made up.

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