ANNE BENNETT
Walking Back to Happiness

Dedication

This book is written for my mother Eileen Josephine Flanagan and is dedicated to her memory.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Hannah Delaney looked down at her sister, Frances Mullen, and knew she’d never leave her bed again. She felt tears prickle the back of her eyes as she reached for Frances’s yellow, emaciated hand, but she held them back. If Frances could be brave about her impending death, then so could she. ‘You’re a grand girl, Hannah,’ Frances said in little more than a hoarse whisper. ‘Thank you for coming.’

Hannah’s face flushed at the implied reproach. ‘You didn’t bother when I sent for you when my husband, Paddy, was coughing his guts up in the County Hospital,’ Frances might have said.

Hannah knew Frances must have been badly hurt but there had been a desperate reason why she’d not been able to come back when Paddy lay dying and one she could never share with Frances, nor with any of the family. Hannah had told Frances she had the ’flu and wasn’t well enough to travel. She hadn’t even come for the funeral and no one could guess how heartsore she was that she couldn’t come and mourn the man who’d always been more of a father to her than her own and maybe be a measure of support to her sister.

The townsfolk couldn’t understand it at all. ‘People have the ‘flu all the time and get over it,’ they’d said to Frances. ‘Why doesn’t she come for a wee visit now to see how you all are?’

‘Sure, isn’t she rushed off her feet with the fine job she has?’ Frances had answered the criticisms. But inside, she’d ached for the presence of her youngest sister. She’d reared her and had loved her like one of her own, but she seemed to have forgotten all that, for she’d not been near the place for three years.

But now she was here and suddenly to Frances it didn’t matter any more. There was little time to waste on censure and argument and Hannah certainly had no wish to quarrel. She’d always loved Frances dearly and she was saddened that she had such little time left.

‘Why wouldn’t I come?’ she said with a forced smile, giving her sister’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Aren’t you the only mother I ever knew and don’t I love you more than anyone in the whole world? If there’s anything I can do for you, you only have to say.’

Frances gave a wry smile and a little sigh. So, she thought, God does answer prayers, some prayers. He couldn’t spare her any longer and God knows at times she was tired enough not to care, but now Josie would be all right. She’d fretted about the child, worried to death that Hannah wouldn’t come, that she wouldn’t be able to ask her.

Frances studied her sister, while she framed the question she had to ask. She wasn’t worried Hannah would refuse. How could she? She’d taken Hannah in when she was just a day old, when their mother had died of childbirth fever. Frances’s third child, Martin, had been only a week old himself and she also had Miriam just fifteen months and Peter coming up to three yet she’d not hesitated to offer Hannah a home. And for that reason Hannah owed her a debt. ‘It’s Josie,’ she said. ‘Will you take Josie? Will you look after her when it’s … when it’s all over?’

‘Josie?’ That dark, secretive, plain child, the one Hannah hardly knew at all for she’d been born after she’d left the farm and always seemed to disappear whenever she’d come for her very occasional visits home.

She’d scarcely ever given the child a thought, for Frances had done what their own mother had done and had a large gap in the family and the nearest in age to Josie was Sam, who at twenty was eleven years her senior. Hannah knew from the letters her sister had written that Sam had been living in the mountains, working their grandparents’ farm since he’d left school at fourteen. If Josie was to go there, she’d become a maid of all work, her childhood would be over and Hannah well knew that.

But for God’s sake, there was a fine family of them. Surely to God one of them could look after their own sister?

But in her heart she knew she was the only one left. Peter had become a priest and was living away in the Scottish Highlands somewhere and poor Miriam was married to a man she had met on a brief visit to England. She returned with him to his home in Connemara where, according to Frances, they tried to scratch a living from the stones. At twenty-eight, she’d been married eight years and had eight children.

Miriam had not come home for her father’s illness or funeral either and gave the excuse she was almost on her time, but Frances had suspected she couldn’t afford to come. Even if she’d have offered a home to Josie, Hannah knew Frances wouldn’t have been happy sending her there.

But then what about Martin who was twenty-seven, the same age as herself, and Siobhan two years younger? Martin had coped with the farm single-handed since his father had died, but Hannah, who’d been brought up alongside him and understood him better than the others, knew he was no farmer. He’d always wanted to go to New York; he used to talk about it all the time. And now he and Siobhan had the chance. Their Aunt Norah had offered to send them the fare.

Martin had been unable to contain his excitement when he’d met Hannah off the train. ‘It’s like a dream,’ he’d said, as he’d set the old pony pulling the cart to canter over the cobblestones. ‘I thought I was stuck on the farm for years, you know, I mean with Da gone? I’d never have left Mammy and God knows I wished no harm to her but … well, the old place won’t be the same without her.’

There was no place in bustling New York and their aunt’s plush apartment for a child either. It hadn’t been said openly, but it was understood.

That left Margaret and Ellen, only Margaret was now known as Sister Ambrose, one of the ‘Sisters of the Poor’. If the war hadn’t raged on for six horrifying years, she would already be in Africa teaching the heathens about the love of Jesus. Now that it was over, she was just awaiting a ship’s return to civilian duties.

Ellen was twenty-one and getting married. But even as Hannah thought of her, she immediately rejected the idea. She was marrying a farmer and would have to live with his parents and two sisters and a brother in a small farmhouse with only two bedrooms. A young sister in tow, too, would make the place even more cramped.

She wondered suddenly where she might have ended up if it hadn’t been for Frances. She might have been pushed from pillar to post, one relative to another. Or left with her morose, sullen father who blamed her for her mother’s death. There was the rub though. Frances had been there, solid, welcoming and loving, and now her dying wish was for Hannah to care for her youngest child.

The trouble was Hannah was marrying Mr Bradley in late summer and she didn’t know how he’d take to her looking after Josie. They’d never talked about children, and she didn’t know how he’d feel being landed with a nine-year-old girl.

Well, he’d have to put up with it, she decided suddenly, for she owed her sister and this was pay out time. ‘Is it such a hard thing to ask?’ Frances asked, and Hannah realised the silence had stretched out between them uncomfortably, while the thoughts had tumbled about her head. ‘No,’ she said untruthfully. ‘No, not at all. I was just wondering how I’d manage being at work all day. And she doesn’t know me at all. How does she feel about it?’

‘She doesn’t know. How could I tell her? I didn’t know if you’d agree.’

‘When does she think … I mean, does she know?’

‘That I’m dying?’ Frances said. ‘Oh aye, she knows. At least I think she does. She’s not a stupid girl. She’s seen the doctor come and go and the priest and I haven’t left my bed now for over a week. I haven’t actually told her, but I think she knows.’

Frances was right, Josie did know her mother was dying. She’d listened at doors, a common practice when she wanted to know about anything she knew none of her family would tell her, and heard it said plainly. She wasn’t totally surprised at the gravity of her mother’s illness for she’d watched her become weaker and weaker and her skin and eyes take on a yellowish tinge, and she shed many tears that she’d kept hidden from her family.

But still she’d hoped and prayed. God, she’d spent so long on her knees and lit so many candles and said a special novena for the sick, she’d thought it just had to work. Father Mulligan said God answered prayers and if your faith was as small as a mustard seed you could move mountains. But Josie’s mother got more and more frail with each passing day and Josie lost faith in the priest’s words. She thought it a stupid thing to want to move mountains from place to place anyway, and surely to cure someone like her Mammy, who was so loved and needed, had to be easier than that.

But as her Mammy got worse instead of better, Josie had begun to feel lonely and afraid. She’d got used to her mother not being around by the time Hannah arrived, for she hadn’t been well this long time and Siobhan and Ellen had seen to things. She knew it wouldn’t last. Ellen was set to marry and Siobhan … she knew what was planned for her and Martin. Not a word had been said to her, it was amazing what people talked about when they didn’t know you were there, and she shivered in fear, for she hadn’t a clue who was going to look after her.

Josie found out who would the day after Hannah arrived, and then she stared at her mother in horror. She wanted to stamp her feet and shout and scream, but she couldn’t do that in front of a woman as sick as her Mammy. But surely she could see Josie couldn’t live with Hannah, someone she didn’t know in a strange country? God, it was hard enough losing her mother, she’d barely come to terms with that, without leaving behind all that was familiar. ‘Mammy,’ she said in a voice thick with unshed tears. ‘Mammy, I don’t want to go to England and I don’t want to live with Aunt Hannah – I don’t know her.’

‘You will, child. By the time it is all over, you’ll know her.’

‘Don’t, Mammy.’

‘Cutie dear,’ Frances said gently, ‘sit up here beside me,’ and she patted the bed.

Josie sat, but gingerly, knowing how even a sudden movement could hurt her mother for she was so thin that the bones in her body were visible. And now one of those stick-thin arms trailed around Josie’s neck as Frances held her daughter close. ‘Oh, Mammy! Why have you to die?’

Frances was a little while answering. She battled with tears behind her own eyes at the unfairness of life. How she hated leaving this youngest child an orphan at such a young age. She’d have liked to have had a few more years till she was older, maybe married, certainly better able to cope. But it wasn’t to be. She knew it, everyone knew it, and it would be no kindness to allow Josie to harbour any sort of false hope. ‘I don’t know why I have to die, Josie. Aren’t we all in God’s hands?’

‘If you ask me, he’s not doing a very good job of it,’ Josie said fiercely and Frances didn’t chide her for she’d had many of the same thoughts.

‘If I have to go anyway, can’t I go with our Ellen?’

‘You know there will be no room for you there, child.’

‘Granny’s then?’

But even as Josie spoke, she gave a shudder of distaste. She hated her grandparents’ farm high in the Wicklow hills. There was nothing cosy about the bleak, thatched cottage they lived in and no comfort to be had either in or out of it. She could never understand Sam liking the backbreaking work he had to do to scrape a living from the hills, or how he managed to live with his grandparents, their granda finding fault with everything and their granny not knowing what day of the week it was.

‘There’s no one to see to you there.’

‘I can see to myself,’ Josie retorted, bristling.

‘Aye, and you’d have to see to everyone else in the place,’ Frances said, adding bitterly, ‘I had my share of it and I don’t want it for you. Sam gets away with it for he’s a boy. Believe me, Josie, your childhood would be over the minute you stepped over the doorstep and you’d skivvy every hour of the day.’ She gave Josie a squeeze and pleaded, ‘Come on, pet. Don’t make this even harder for me.’

After that what could Josie do? She looked at her mother’s saddened face and saw that her eyes were brimming with tears and knew that she couldn’t add to her distress by arguing further.

Frances seemed to sink rapidly after her talk with Josie. Ellen and Siobhan took on most of the nursing of their mother, Margaret was released from the convent and Miriam was sent for. Josie, from the necessity of taking on many of the household jobs, often found herself working alongside Hannah. She wondered sometimes if Hannah had arranged this, but she didn’t care if she had or not. All she knew was that her mother was losing her grip on life and there was damn all she could do about it.

Hannah tried to get her talking, asking questions about the farm and school and her friends and what she did with her free time, but Josie wouldn’t play. She always answered her questions, she was too polite to ignore her altogether, but she did so tersely. She never introduced a subject herself and seemed not a bit interested in her aunt’s life or the place where she lived.

The tense atmosphere between Hannah and Josie changed a few days later. Josie had crept in to her mother’s bedroom, knowing for once she could see her alone. She intended to have one last try at convincing her Mammy that she couldn’t live in a stuffy, alien city with an aunt she didn’t know and didn’t like much either and that surely there was a friend or relative she could stay with.

The Tilley lamp was turned low and the candle before the Sacred Heart of Jesus lent little from its flickering flame. The priest had been that day and the room smelt of the oils he’d used to anoint Frances. Awed and a little frightened, for Josie hadn’t seen her mother since she’d told her she was to live with Hannah, she soundlessly crept nearer to the bed. ‘Mammy!’

Josie watched her mother dragging her heavy lids open as if they weighed a ton and she stared at her daughter through pain-glazed eyes and without a spark of recognition. ‘Mammy, it’s me, Josie.’

Frances looked at her for a moment longer before letting her eyelids drop closed again and Josie stood in the room watching her, biting her thumb, while tears rained down her cheeks. It was if her mother was already dead. Josie fled from the room, hurtling down the stairs and out through the front door, avoiding everyone gathered in the kitchen.

It was teatime before she was missed. By then, Ellen knew she had been into their mother’s room for she’d left the door wide open and none of the others would have done that. She said she’d have a few sharp words to say when Josie did come home.

Hannah put two and two together. She knew that Frances’s drug dosage had been raised to try and give her ease from the intense pain, but Josie hadn’t been told. Nor had she been told that Frances, drugged and pain-riddled, seldom knew any of them anymore. She thought for a moment and then without a word to the others, she slipped out into the yard.

She heard the muffled sobbing as soon as she opened the barn door and she followed it up the ladder leading to the upper floor, the very place she’d always made for whenever she was upset. Barely had her head pushed through the opening, than she saw Josie spread-eagled across the straw bales.

But despite the stealth that Hannah had used so as not to startle the girl, Josie heard her. She raised her head, her face blotchy from crying, but her eyes flashed fire. ‘What d’you want?’ she spat out. ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’

Hannah ignored the anger in Josie’s voice, for behind it she heard the knot of raw pain. She eased herself through the hole and sat on a bale nearby, but not too near to Josie, who’d buried her head once more into the straw and refused to look at her aunt. ‘I used to come here too,’ Hannah said, conversationally. ‘There’s something comforting about the smell of straw.’

There was no movement from Josie, but Hannah knew she was listening intently. ‘I’ll miss Frances too,’ she said. ‘She was the only mother I ever knew. And I might as well have had no father either,’ she added bitterly. ‘Frances said he was so mad with grief, he hadn’t even a name for me. The priest suggested Hannah. It was his mother’s name.’

Josie knew the story. It had often been talked of in the family. ‘Your daddy was like my daddy too,’ Hannah went on. ‘He used to talk to me if I got upset. I loved him dearly.’

Josie raised her head. ‘Then why didn’t you come to the funeral?’ she asked, accusingly. ‘Everyone was asking.’

‘I was ill.’

‘After, then. Mammy used to get upset and cry at night.’

There was a silence between them and then Hannah gave a sigh. ‘There were reasons,’ she said quietly. ‘One day I may even tell you what they were, but what matters now is you and me.’ And then, because she’d sensed the girl’s antagonism towards her from the beginning, she asked, ‘Will you hate living with me so much?’

Josie swung around and stared at Hannah and decided to be truthful. ‘Yes, I will. I don’t know you or anything about England and I don’t want to know either. I don’t want to leave here.’

Hannah thought that now was not the time to tell Josie she wasn’t keen on looking after her either. ‘We can’t all have what we want, Josie,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to get to know you the last few days, but you … Look, pet, we must make the best of it for your mother’s sake. Give it a year? If after that you’re still miserable, I promise we’ll look at it again.’

And then what? Josie thought. Maybe she could induce Martin or Siobhan to send for her to go to America, but would she like that any better? ‘At least when your Mammy died, you didn’t have to leave the place altogether,’ she cried.

‘No, no I didn’t, and like I said, I’ll always be in your parents’ debt because of what they did. After a while, people forgot I was really Hannah Delaney. I was known as one of the Mullens.’

‘Did you care?’

‘Not at first. I wanted to belong somewhere. My own sisters and brothers became like strangers till one by one they took the emigrant boats to the States till only my eldest brother, Eamonn, was left to farm the land with my father. He doesn’t really know me though and I don’t know him and for a time it was nice being thought of as one of you lot. It was as I got older that I resented Hannah Delaney being swamped altogether.’

‘Is that why you left?’

‘Partly,’ Hannah admitted. ‘I wanted to start afresh. Stand on my own two feet, just to see if I could. A good friend of mine, Molly McGuire, had left Ireland just the previous year and we promised to write to each other. She got a job easily in a hotel in Leeds. It was called The Hibernian, reputed to be the biggest, best and of course most expensive in the town. The wages weren’t great, she told me, but the tips were legion. She said she could get me a job, straight off.’

Hannah stopped there, remembering her indecision. She didn’t want to upset Frances, and she knew she would if she was to follow her friend. But she knew she’d regret it if she didn’t go while she had the chance. As she dithered, Molly challenged her. Hadn’t she always said she wanted to see something of other places? Hadn’t she always said she didn’t want to live the whole of her life in Ireland and wasn’t there a big, wide world out there to explore?

And she was right. Hannah had said all those things and meant them, too, but the actual leaving was hard, especially when she loved Frances as dearly as she would any mother and Paddy and the others, too. She knew she would miss them all.

In the end, she poured her heart out to Paddy and he patted her hand and told her not to fret, that it was natural to want to spread your wings when you were young. ‘But Frances …’ she had wailed.

‘Frances will come around, never fret, I’ll talk to her,’ Paddy had promised.

‘Was Mammy upset when you left?’ Josie asked, jolting Hannah back to the present.

‘Very. I was sad too. God, it was a wrench to go. People said I was ungrateful to leave when I could have been such a help to Frances at long last. Frances never said that and I doubt she ever thought of it, she wasn’t like that. She said she’d miss me so much, but she wished me Godspeed. It broke me up and we cried together as we hugged, and for a while, my resolve weakened. It was your father who said to go and satisfy myself and to remember I had a home to come back to if it didn’t work out.

‘Not everyone saw it like that of course, but then all my life people have been telling me how grateful I should be to Frances and I was grateful to her. But that level of gratitude gets to be a heavy burden when you’re reminded of it constantly. Not that your parents ever spoke about it, it was others, the relatives who hadn’t wanted me themselves, or neighbours who felt justified to speak as they chose because they’d known me all my life.’

‘And did you like it in this Leeds place?’ Josie asked.

‘I did not and that’s the truth,’ Hannah said, remembering her horror at the grim greyness of the place and how the opulence of the hotel unnerved her and the way she could barely understand the way the other girls spoke. She was achingly lonely and many, many times thought she’d made a mistake because she missed her family so very much. She missed the farm too and often longed for the sight of a green mossy hill, springy turf beneath her feet, and good clean air to fill her lungs with.

‘I didn’t mind the work,’ she said. ‘I was well used to work, but everything was so strange and when Molly got married and moved to London only months after I arrived, it was worse. We wrote for a while, but in the end the letters petered out. A girl called Tilly Galston shared my room then.’

‘Was she nice?’

Hannah smiled as she remembered the good friend she’d been and the way she pulled her out of the morose self-pitying attitude she’d been in danger of developing. ‘I’d have gone home if it hadn’t been for her,’ Hannah said. ‘She wouldn’t let me.’

‘How could she stop you?’

‘Oh, she was very bossy,’ Hannah said. ‘But funny too, you know. She could always see the bright side of things and could always make me laugh. She bullied me into going out and about too and making an effort with the other girls. We were good friends.’

‘Where is she now?’

Hannah shrugged. ‘Still in Leeds, I suppose,’ she said. ‘At least she was there when I left and moved to Birmingham.’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Well, no I don’t exactly.’

Josie made a face. She felt Hannah was a poor friend to not keep in touch with Tilly, but she wasn’t about to argue the point. Tilly was in the past and it was the future she was worried about. She wondered if Hannah wanted to take her back to live with her. Maybe she was against the idea, too, and it had been forced upon her. Maybe it was gratitude rearing its ugly head again and suddenly she felt a bit sorry for her aunt. ‘All right then,’ she said in an effort towards compromise. ‘Say I do come with you, where do you live in this Birmingham place?’

Hannah knew Josie was putting a brave face on it and replied, ‘An area called Erdington to the north of the city. Many call it Erdington Village, which it was once, but now it’s like a little town. It’s not anything like here. You’ve never seen so many people and cars and buses, lorries and trams on the roads, especially in the city centre. But the guesthouse, where I work, is in Grange Road and that’s not a bit like that. It’s lovely. It’s wide and tree-lined and the houses are set back behind privet hedges. There’s even a small farm in Holly Lane, not that far away, and sometimes we can get hens’ or ducks’ eggs from the farmer, Mr Freer.’

She stole a glance at Josie and went on, ‘I suppose living here you’re thinking, “So what?” Believe me, if you’d been subjected to the rationing restrictions Britain has had to put up with, you’d know how wonderful getting the odd egg is. I’ve had a word with Mrs Emmerson and she doesn’t mind in the least putting you up for a while. She’s very kind and anyway, I’ll be getting married in September.’

Married! That gave Josie a jolt. She thought Hannah would have given up all thoughts of marriage. She was old, almost as old as Miriam, and she’d been married for years and years and had a whole tribe of children now, though no one seemed pleased about that either. Still, that wasn’t her problem. What was, though, was the man Hannah was to marry. ‘Does Mammy know that?’ she asked.

‘Aye, she does,’ Hannah said. ‘We talked about it. He has a largish terraced house of his own. There’d be plenty of room for you in it.’

‘And how does he feel about me?’

Hannah crushed down the worry she had about that and the less than welcoming letter she’d received just that day in answer to hers that she’d written, telling her fiancé what her sister had asked her to do. He’d written that he didn’t want to take on the responsibility of a child and he’d been surprised at her making a decision without consulting him. It was, he’d said, no way to start married life.

Hannah would win him round, she had to, but now Josie needed reassurance. ‘He’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Haven’t I told you about the size of the house? Why would he mind you sharing a wee piece of it? He knows it’s the right thing to do and Mr Bradley always does the right thing.’

Josie stared at Hannah. ‘Mr Bradley!’ she said incredulously. ‘Hasn’t he a first name? You don’t call a man you’re marrying “Mr”.’

But it was how Hannah thought of him. Solid, rather dull Mr Bradley – Arthur Bradley – the one Gloria Emmerson told Hannah she must grab before someone else did. He was her stab, perhaps her only stab, towards respectability.

Not of course that Mr Bradley knew anything about Hannah’s past. Oh dear me no, that would never have done. But Gloria knew and she liked Hannah and wanted the best for her.

That’s why she found her a job in her thriving guesthouse and then latched on to Mr Bradley, a commercial traveller, who’d confided in her that he was sick of the road. ‘To rise in the firm though,’ he’d said dolefully, ‘I need a wife. The boss thinks married men are more steady and reliable.’

If Gloria thought Arthur Bradley was just about the steadiest person she’d ever met, she gave no indication of it. ‘But,’ Arthur had gone on, ‘I don’t want to marry and anyway, I’ve nothing to offer a wife. The house went with my father’s job, you see. After he died, Mother had the house during her lifetime, but when she died it went back to the firm. So I don’t even have a permanent place to live.’

That had all changed a little later when out of the blue, Arthur inherited a large terraced house in Harrison Road, Erdington, after the demise of an elderly uncle. Gloria immediately began to think of him as a suitable catch for Hannah. First, though, she had to win Hannah round to her way of thinking, for she’d shown no interest in any men in the time she’d known her.

Hannah wasn’t the least bit interested in Arthur Bradley either. She felt sorry for him at times but didn’t really know why. He seemed a lonely sort of man, out of step with the rest of the world somehow. Gloria said it was because he’d lived all those years with his mother. ‘How many years?’ Hannah asked. ‘He’s not that old.’

‘I’d have said he was going on for forty.’

Hannah was surprised. ‘Do you think he’s that old?’ she asked. ‘Was he in the war?’

‘No,’ Gloria said. ‘He had flat feet or some such he told me. Anyway, it doesn’t bother you him being so much older than you, does it? I mean, he doesn’t look his age.’

He didn’t, Hannah had to admit that. Despite Arthur Bradley’s thinning brown hair and the wire-framed glasses perched on his long, narrow nose, he didn’t look his age. She supposed that was because he was quite skinny, wiry almost, and he looked worse because he was so tall. His whole face was long, too, and had a mournful look about it, particularly his dull brown eyes, and Hannah realised while Mr Bradley didn’t look his age, he certainly acted it.

‘Don’t you want to be a respectable married woman?’ Gloria demanded.

‘Of course,’ Hannah said. ‘If everything had gone to plan, I would be married now, but I don’t want to marry just anyone.’

‘Look,’ Gloria said. ‘I don’t wish to be harsh, but your lad’s body is lying buried in the sands of a Normandy beach. He isn’t ever coming back and you have to accept that. Do you want a life of loneliness?’

‘I don’t love Mr Bradley.’

‘Do you like him?’

‘Aye, I suppose.’

‘Then you’ll rub along well enough, I’d say.’

‘Gloria, there is more to marriage than that.’

‘Yes, there is. One thing is, can he provide for you? Well, Arthur can. He has a good job and a fine house that you would be mistress of.’

‘Those kind of things don’t impress me.’

‘Well, they should. Money is a hard thing to get along without.’

‘How do you know, anyway, that Arthur will be for it?’

‘I don’t,’ Gloria admitted. ‘But the boss is on to him to get himself married and I know he’s gone on you.’

‘Don’t be daft, I’m sure he’s not,’ Hannah snapped.

Gloria wondered why it was that Hannah didn’t realise how truly lovely she was with that glossy mane of auburn hair, creamy-coloured skin and startling green eyes. And then Gloria had played her ace card. ‘Don’t you ever want a child, Hannah?’

Hannah wanted a child more than anything in the world, and Gloria knew that, but she’d accepted the fact that with Mike dead there would be no child. But now to have the chance to marry and to be able to have her own baby, a child, to hold in her arms, to love and to watch grow up … Well, it was more than she’d ever expected from life. Was it possible? Could she take Mr Bradley on for life, and it would be for life, in order to have that child?

Yes, yes she could, her whole being cried. She’d walk over red-hot coals if it would fill the empty void in her life and help heal the ache in her heart. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Sound Mr Bradley out if you must, but you may have a shock. He may not want to marry me at all. He doesn’t strike me as the marrying kind.’

And that had been that. She had committed herself. But Josie was right, she must stop thinking of him as Mr Bradley. ‘His name is Arthur,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Come on, dry your eyes and let’s go in.’

‘Will I get into trouble?’ Josie asked tremulously. ‘Will they all give out at me?’

‘Maybe,’ Hannah said. ‘But I’ll stick up for you, don’t worry. It’s you and me in this together from now on. You and me against the world.’

Josie liked the sound of that. She got to her feet, scrubbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan and dusting the pieces of straw from her clothes. ‘I’m ready,’ she said and she followed her aunt down the ladder.

Chapter Two

Frances’s funeral was well attended and everyone spoke of the fine woman she’d been and what a great loss it was to the whole family. The eldest of the Mullens, Peter, officiated at the Requiem Mass. Hannah knew that would have pleased his mother and also too that Margaret had got dispensation from her convent to attend the service.

What would have upset her, though, would have been to see Miriam. Hannah had been so shocked at the young woman only a little older than she was herself who she hadn’t seen for years. Miriam’s face was gaunt, though ruddy in complexion, and deeply lined and her hair, which had once been burnished auburn like Hannah’s own, had streaks of grey in it and hung in limp strands around her face. Her black clothes were respectable enough and Hannah guessed they were borrowed because her shoes were scuffed and down at heel. Beneath her coat was the swell of yet another pregnancy. Miriam resembled a woman nearly twice her age and Hannah felt sorry for the life she led.

But one of the worst aspects of that day for Hannah had been meeting her father. She’d made no move to visit him since she’d come over, knowing she wouldn’t be welcome, and he greeted her with a curt nod as if she were a person he’d seen before, but never really knew. Her brother Eamonn took her in a hug that Hannah knew he’d done just because it was the thing everyone expected but in fact, she felt closer to Mary, his wife, who greeted her warmly and said she must come up to the house.

She knew she wouldn’t go. Her father’s continual rejection still hurt her, cutting deeply. Now, together with the pain of losing Frances, she felt misery almost engulf her.

She’d been in no mood for the riotous wake after the funeral and was glad that she and Josie were leaving soon. She told the others that work was pressing and that Gloria had written asking about her return and Hannah felt she shouldn’t be away too long, especially as Gloria had been so good both about giving her so much time off and allowing her to bring Josie back with her.

Most of the family had been relieved that Hannah had agreed to take on the care of Josie as their mother had wanted, though little was said about it. Hannah thought it was probably embarrassment and guilt stopping their tongues. Only Peter and Margaret had said that Hannah’s reward for her generosity would be in Heaven.

Hannah was tempted to say that was a long time to wait and ask Margaret what was so appealing about black heathens that she could turn her face towards them so stoutly and ignore the needs of her young orphaned sister.

But of course she said none of this. She just thanked them. Martin eventually spoke about it as he drove them to the station. ‘It’s really good of you to do this,’ he said. ‘Taking on Josie and such. I suppose you think me and Siobhan really selfish taking off for America, but it’s what we’ve both wanted to do for years and it’s been like a carrot dangled in front of me what with me being unable to take it, especially after Daddy died.

‘If we don’t go now,’ he went on, ‘we’ll never go, neither of us. Siobhan is as anxious as me. She knows as well as I do that there’s nothing here for me. She sees the life Miriam has and shudders, like I do myself. God! The man she married must be an inconsiderate brute.’

‘There are inconsiderate brutes in America too,’ Hannah reminded him. ‘They are not the prerogative of the Irish, you know.’

‘I know, I know,’ Martin replied. ‘But … anyway, we both think there’s nothing to keep us here now and you agreeing to look after Josie has made it possible. You won’t lose by it – financially, I mean. As soon as I’m settled I’ll send you something for her.’

‘Well, though I’m not saying the money won’t be useful, the point is it’s rationing that’s the problem,’ Hannah said. ‘I’ll have to see about getting Josie a ration book as quickly as possible.’

‘There won’t be rationing for ever,’ Martin pointed out. ‘And there might be a bit of money too once the farm is sold. The beasts are all but gone, your father’s had some of them, and the farm goes up for sale tomorrow. ’Course it will have to be split between us all, but there’ll still be a little.’

‘However big or small, I’ll put that away for Josie. She will want money in the future,’ Hannah said.

‘Aye. That’s a good idea,’ Martin said. ‘Pity I’ll not get to meet this man you’re marrying. Fair sprung that fact on everyone. If you could put the wedding forward a month, it would be before we sail and me and Siobhan could come over.’

‘It’s all settled for mid-September,’ Hannah said, and she was glad it was. She didn’t want eagle-eyed and outspoken Martin over there increasing her apprehension about marriage, for she knew Martin would not find much to admire in Arthur Bradley.

But Martin did not know the whole story and never would. Martin could never know how Hannah longed not only for marriage, respectability and a baby, but also for a man of her own, who would love and cherish her above all others, like her father had never done. Mike had, and oh how she’d missed him and had shed bitter tears when she found out he was dead.

Josie, Hannah was to find out, was not a good sailor. Her face had taken on a greenish tinge even before the shores of Ireland had totally disappeared from view.

Josie had never felt so miserable in all of her life, nor had she ever felt so sick, had never been so sick either.

By the time she’d been half an hour on the boat, her whole stomach ached with vomiting. She leant against Hannah, who was sitting beside her on the bench on the open deck, braving the sharp winds that whipped the seas to rolling white-fringed breakers and carried the drizzling rain with it. Cold and damp though it was, it was better than inside which smelt of Guinness, cigarettes and vomit. Hannah felt a stab of sympathy for the child who must be feeling so lost and afraid and so sick, for her face was still wan and pale, her long brown hair straggly and glistening from the unrelenting mizzle which had thoroughly dampened both of them. But Josie took comfort in Hannah’s arms around her, like she had when Hannah had held her head as she was sick over the side of the boat, pulling her hair back and wiping her face later with a damp cloth she had with her.

Ever since that day in the barn, Josie had felt differently about Hannah, but for all that, those last traumatic days of her mother’s life were fraught ones and Josie was frightened of the future. But she now trusted Hannah and often sought her out. Hannah was frightened of the future, too, for Arthur’s attitude to her bringing Josie home hadn’t softened. He totally ignored all the reasons she’d listed for having to return with Josie in the second letter she’d written to him. Posthaste, his reply came back. Hannah was to leave the child in the care of the social services who would now be responsible for her welfare.

Hannah had been simultaneously horrified and angry and she’d hurled the offending letter into the fire, lest Josie catch sight of it. She thought the child had enough to put up with. She’d been wrenched from her home, with her parents dead and her sisters and brothers spread about the globe. She had only Hannah and she’d have to make Arthur see that. She wouldn’t allow Josie to feel the rejection she’d always felt herself.

Josie would never forget her first view of Birmingham as they emerged from New Street Station. She’d recovered quickly once she’d left the rolling boat and had quite enjoyed the train, though she’d been very hungry and glad of the reviving tea and sandwiches Hannah had bought at the platform buffet at a place called Crewe, where they’d had to change trains.

She seen little of Dublin as they passed it on the way to the Port of Dún Laoghaire, but the noise and bustle seemed all around her as she surveyed Birmingham, her new home. Hannah had been right that day in the barn, Josie thought, for she had never seen so many lorries, or cars or people – hundreds of people thronging the shops, or alighting from large rumbling buses or swaying trams that rattled alarmingly along the rails set into the road.

Not that she had time to stand and stare, for she had trouble keeping up with Hannah’s easy strides, especially hampered as she was by a case and a bundle. And all the time Hannah talked, pointing out this shop and that, and telling her she’d take her to something called the Bull Ring soon.

At last, they stood at the bus stop opposite the police station in a road aptly named ‘Steelhouse Lane’ outside a large building which Hannah told her was a general hospital. ‘Used to be the workhouse, I’m told,’ she said. ‘Gloria Emmerson said the older people still don’t like going in when they’re sick or anything.’

Josie studied the grim building and honestly didn’t blame them, but before she was able to reply, the bus screeched to a halt beside them. Josie was glad Hannah had chosen a bus. It was unnerving enough and nothing like the cosy single-deckers she was used to where you knew everyone on board, but the trams frightened her to death.

They sat upstairs, so that Josie could see more of the city she’d come to live in, while Hannah pointed out landmarks to her, like the large green clock at Aston Cross, and Salford Bridge that spanned the canal, unaware how horrified Josie was by everything.

She’d been as surprised and shocked by the back-to-back houses as Hannah had been when she’d first arrived and depressed by the grim greyness of the whole place. She looked with horror at the huge factory chimneys belching smoke into the spring air and became aware of the pungent stink that tickled her nose and lodged at the back of her throat. She thought the canal, that Hannah pointed out with such pride as she explained that Birmingham was ringed with such waterways, was horrible. She’d never seen such brown, oil-slicked, stagnant water and it made a sharp contrast to the rippling stream near her old home that had glinted in the sun as it babbled over its stony bed.

As the bus rumbled its way towards Erdington, Josie felt depression settle on top of her. She thought everywhere drab and without a blade of grass anywhere. Homesickness swept over her, so strong she felt tears prickling her eyes. She wondered how Hannah could stand living in such a place. She was frightened of arriving at her destination, frightened of Mrs Emmerson and her guesthouse where Hannah worked and wished with all her heart she was back in her home in Wicklow.

But Hannah had not exaggerated about Grange Road. It was lovely. The pavements were as wide as the road and had trees planted every few yards and that alone went some way to making Josie feel better.

Gloria Emmerson wasn’t frightening either. She was plump and motherly. Even her face was round, but it was kindly-looking with a smallish mouth and a squashed-up nose and really bright sparkly eyes. Josie smiled at Gloria as she swept them into the house and through to her personal rooms at the back. She had a casserole cooking in the oven and the smell of it revived Josie’s spirits somewhat as she realised that, despite the sandwiches and tea at Crewe, she was still very hungry.

Gloria watched them surreptitiously as they ate. Josie, she thought looked very pale, though she supposed that was from the upset of her mother dying and the tiring journey they’d had. She thought her a plain little thing with her large brown eyes standing out in her head and her brown, nondescript hair.

Not a patch on her aunt, she thought. Not that it had done her much good in the long run, she reminded herself with a sigh. She didn’t know whether she was doing her a favour or not pushing her into marriage. But then, Arthur Bradley was nothing if not respectable and after all, it was the best she could expect in the circumstances.

Arthur was waiting for Hannah in the house he’d inherited in Harrison Road, just off Erdington High Street. It was a fine terraced house with three stone steps up to the front door, while an entry ran around to the back door and strip of garden.

Initially, it had given Hannah a thrill of pleasure to realise that, after her marriage, she would be mistress of such a house. The front door opened onto a marble-tiled hall with the door to the front room with a bay window to the right-hand side, which Hannah decided would be the parlour, and carpeted stairs to the left. Behind the front room was another slightly smaller room and at the end of the hall was the door to the breakfast room, leading through to the kitchen and scullery, while a large cellar ran from front to back beneath the whole ground floor.

It had originally had three large bedrooms upstairs, but at some time Arthur’s relative had cut one of the double rooms in two to make a much smaller bedroom and an indoor bathroom and lavatory. It was an unheard of luxury, though Arthur said in the daytime, he would prefer the lavatory outside to be used so as not to spend time traipsing up and down the stairs and thereby wearing out the stair carpet.

Still, not to have to go out in the middle of the night was a bonus, and there was running water into the bath, provided you remembered to light the geyser. They had proper bathrooms at the hotel of course, one between four rooms, and Gloria had one in her living quarters which she allowed Hannah the use of once a week. Other times, Hannah had to make do with a bowl of water in her bedroom. What luxury to be able to have a bath when she liked.

In fact, the whole house would be a joy to care for. It was even adequately furnished. It wasn’t her choice, but, in those austere post-war days with shortages and utility being the watchwords, she thought herself and Arthur fortunate to have the problem of furnishing a house solved for them. ‘In time, when things are easier, we might replace some of the furniture,’ she told Arthur on her first visit.

‘Hmph, yes, my dear,’ Arthur had said. ‘But you know money might not be so plentiful. I shouldn’t want to go into debt for anything. This hire-purchase scheme is not one I should like to get involved in.’

Hannah, who’d never owed a penny in her life, agreed with Arthur’s sentiments. Gloria, when she told her, said it just showed what a sensible man he was, and wasn’t it just as well they hadn’t to buy even the basics before they could start married life, though she advised Hannah to buy if not a new bed, then certainly a new mattress.

But that day, Hannah had more on her mind than a new mattress. She hoped Arthur would come to see that she had no alternative but to bring Josie home with her, without getting cross about it.

He wasn’t the sort to rant and rave, but he could go very cold if he was displeased. And she knew this news would greatly displease him. He’d made his views adamantly clear in his last letter and would have presumed that Hannah would have carried them out.

That was why Hannah had asked him not to come to the guesthouse that evening after he finished work, but go to the house instead where she would meet him as soon as she could get away.

When she’d been a few minutes in the house, having told Arthur straight away about Josie, she knew she’d been right to come alone. He made no shout or cry of protest, but instead had gone very still, his mouth a tight line of disapproval, his nose pinched, his eyes coal black and sparking with anger, while a tic beat at the side of his temple.

Arthur Bradley had looked forward to seeing Hannah again after a few days away. He didn’t love her – he’d never loved anyone but his mother, but he admired her.

Before he’d had the house, his mother having died some years before, he’d stayed often at Gloria Emmerson’s guesthouse for he was more often in the Midlands area than anywhere else. For a start, the factory and head office he worked from was in Aston, just outside Birmingham. And then, Birmingham itself and the surrounding area being the home of light engineering, had many factories making the goods his firm needed to make the wireless sets they put together.

Arthur disliked the travelling and staying at indifferent guesthouses. He’d done it for years and he’d been complaining to Gloria about it yet again one day when she seized her chance. ‘My boss, Mr Banks, is a family man himself, you see,’ he’d told Gloria. ‘He likes married men in the firm. Says you can rely on them. It’s all the married men who work in the offices and seldom have to go on the road.’

‘Maybe you should think about marriage yourself then?’ Gloria had suggested.

‘I never thought to marry,’ Arthur had said. ‘Anyway, I know no one suitable.’

‘What about Hannah?’

‘Hannah!’ Arthur had noticed Hannah of course, he couldn’t have failed to. Everyone who came to the place noticed Hannah.

‘Well, if you’ve got to be married, you could look further than Hannah and fare worse,’ Gloria had said. ‘She’s a well set-up lass.’

‘I know that all right,’ Arthur had said. ‘But I know my faults, none better. I’m a dull sort of chap for someone like Hannah.’

‘She’s not in the full flush of youth,’ Gloria reminded him.

‘I know that and I’m surprised. I thought someone would have snapped her up before now.’

‘Aye, well there’s been a war on, you know. The one who might have married Hannah never came back from it.’ No harm, Gloria thought, in telling him that much. ‘Ask her,’ she urged.

She wasn’t worried about Hannah’s reaction. She’d already talked her round and she knew what her answer would be and hoped fervently that she’d done the right thing.

Arthur was overjoyed that Hannah had agreed to marry him. In the early weeks of their courtship, however, Hannah had often doubted her decision, even with the house that Gloria saw as such a prize, and it was always the thought of one day having her own baby that held her on course. Arthur Bradley wasn’t a demonstrative man, nor one, as even Gloria was heard to say, to flash his money about overmuch.

He seldom took Hannah out and whenever he did, even when they were alone, he was so respectful, he appeared aloof and cold. There had been no snuggling for them in the back row of the cinema the odd times they’d gone together. There were no stolen kisses in the entries in the darkening winter nights, or cuddling on the sofa in Arthur’s front room and taking comfort in one another. No further than that of course, but Hannah would have welcomed being held and caressed and kissed. That wasn’t Mr Bradley’s way, though, she told herself and anyway, she didn’t need such things, after all she was no lovesick teenager.

A few weeks after their engagement, Arthur came to see Hannah in an ecstatic mood. He told her that they’d both been asked for dinner with his boss and his wife, Mr and Mrs Banks. Such a thing had never happened to him before.

The evening was a success. They all got on remarkably well, so well in fact that the Banks insisted Arthur and Hannah call them Reg and Elizabeth. Arthur could see how Hannah had charmed his boss and his wife. In fact, Hannah and Elizabeth had seemed like old friends together.

He knew some of his colleagues couldn’t imagine what Hannah saw in him. He’d seen the looks of puzzled envy on their faces when he’d taken Hannah to the annual dinner-dance, just after she’d agreed to marry him. He’d thought himself a lucky man. If he had to have someone looking across the table from him every day, then Hannah he felt could do the job better than most. Added to her looks, she was compliant, eager to please and had never opposed him in anything.

And now … now she stood bold as brass and told him not only that she’d defied him and brought her sister’s child home, but that she was to live with them and that she’d promised her sister on her deathbed that she’d look after her.

‘You had no right to promise such a thing without consulting me.’

‘Arthur, she was dying,’ Hannah said, her voice rising in distress. ‘Not long after that first day, she was having so much morphine she didn’t know where she was and could recognise no one. Should I have asked her to wait while I wrote you a wee letter?’

‘Don’t shout, Hannah.’

‘I feel like shouting,’ Hannah snapped. ‘Have you no feeling, even for the child? How do you imagine she feels, her parents both dead, her brothers and sisters scattered to the four corners of the world? She is alone, Arthur.’

‘The authorities would …’

‘I wasn’t leaving her with any authorities,’ Hannah said. ‘How could you expect me to do that after promising my sister I’d see to her?’

‘Well, I don’t want her here and it’s my house.’

‘Then she won’t come and neither will I,’ Hannah said angrily, astounded at Arthur’s uncompromising attitude.

‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

‘Yes, I do. I won’t bring her here under sufferance,’ Hannah said. ‘She’s gone through enough. You were lucky to have your mother until you grew up. I never knew mine and without Frances and her abiding love for me, I would have been lost. I owed her so much and if you want to know I’m glad I have the opportunity to pay back some of it. If you can’t see it that way, you’re not the man I thought you were and maybe we’d better call the wedding off now before it goes any further.’

She removed her ring as she spoke and laid it on the sideboard. She’d not removed her coat and hat and without another word she turned and left, slamming the front door behind her.

On the way home, though, she wondered what she’d done. Gloria had agreed Josie could stay till the wedding, but she didn’t know if she’d want her staying there for good. And if she didn’t, Hannah would be out of a job and a place to live.

Back in the house, Arthur, too, was having second thoughts. What Hannah had said about his mother had hit home for he’d been devastated when she’d died. Then he thought of his work colleagues when he told them the marriage was off. He imagined the nudges and winks. ‘Knew it wouldn’t last. She was miles too good for him.’

And what of his boss? He’d think Arthur a failure for not hanging on to Hannah. And if they should ever find out the reason that Hannah had walked out on him, he had a horrible feeling that they’d see and understand her point of view, not his.

He was a devout man and eventually he walked along to the Abbey, his parish church, to ask the advice of one of the priests there. There were confessions every night till eight o’clock, so he knew there would be someone about.

Father Fitzgerald was pulling his coat about him as he stepped out of the church, for there was rain in the air, when he saw Arthur coming up the path. ‘Can I walk with you, Father? It’s advice I’m after.’

The priest’s heart sank. He hoped Arthur Bradley wouldn’t keep him long; the church had been chilly and he was also very hungry. But then, he told himself, Arthur wouldn’t have known that. ‘Talk away then, Arthur,’ he said.

Arthur told the priest everything and though he told him of his own misgivings, he also told him the truth about Hannah’s promise to her sister and the debt she felt she owed her and the priest listened without a word.

They’d reached the door before Arthur had finished and they stood with the wind gusting around them and yet the priest felt himself going hot with anger at Arthur’s words and actions. He told him he’d been less than charitable and whatever his feelings, he should honour Hannah’s promise.

‘We have just fought a war of unparalleled magnitude,’ he said. ‘A time when there was much grief and loss of life, but also when there was more neighbourliness and helping one another. I’m ashamed that you even hesitated to take this poor orphan child in. You have a good job and a fine house, many have far, far less and yet would welcome that child. Your inability to share shows a serious flaw in your character and one that should be attended to.’

Arthur was shaken by the priest’s condemnation of him, there was no doubt about it. But he was a man of honour and knew there was only one thing to be done. He went straight round to the guesthouse after leaving the priest. Gloria opened the door. ‘Can I see Hannah?’ he asked.

But Gloria had already heard an account of the quarrel from an indignant Hannah and she said sternly, ‘I’m not having Hannah any further upset.’

‘I’m not here to upset her.’

‘Well that’s as may be …’

‘Please,’ Arthur said earnestly. ‘I’m here to apologise.’

Well, thought Gloria, that’s more like it. She asked him to step into the dining room, all the guests having now finished their evening meal, and that was where Hannah faced him a few moments later.

Arthur saw that two spots of colour stood out in Hannah’s cheeks and her whole manner suggested that she would stand no nonsense. But Arthur wasn’t there to spout nonsense. What the priest had said had wounded him deeply and had made him ashamed of his behaviour at the house. Though he made no mention of the priest, this shame is what he told Hannah as he asked for her forgiveness.

Hannah’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Why the sudden change of heart?’

Arthur still didn’t mention the priest. He had the feeling it wouldn’t help his case. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘When you’d gone, I thought about what you said. I was wrong and I’m sorry, truly sorry, and sorry too if I upset you.’

In spite of herself, Hannah was impressed. It took courage for a person to admit they were wrong about something and ask for another’s forgiveness.

‘Please, take back the ring?’ Arthur said, holding it out to Hannah.

But she had to be certain. ‘And Josie?’ she said. ‘How do you feel about her now?’

Arthur was a truthful man. Eventually he replied, ‘You must be patient with me. I know nothing about children, I’ve never had dealings with any.’

‘I don’t expect you to be a natural father,’ Hannah said. ‘I expect you to be welcoming, to be kind to her.’

‘I’ll do my best, I can’t say fairer than that.’

‘No,’ said Hannah, slipping the engagement ring back on her finger ‘No, you can’t.’ But though she spoke the conciliatory words, Arthur’s earlier attitude had shaken her. Despite her longing for a child, she knew if she hadn’t got Josie’s welfare to consider, she’d have probably called it a day with Arthur Bradley there and then and to hell with his fine house and steady job.

Chapter Three

Arthur and Hannah were married the second Saturday in September and everyone said it went off a treat. Gloria sat in the pew watching Hannah walk down the aisle on the arm of Tom Parry, the husband of her best friend and neighbour Amy, and thought it hard she had no one belonging to her but Josie at her wedding.

Why couldn’t the two off to America have delayed their departure until after the wedding? Or the one she said was living with the grandparents, or the one that wasn’t long married come over for a few days? Then she had to walk down the aisle on the arm of a comparative stranger when her own father was apparently alive and well. And it wasn’t that he hadn’t been asked. Hannah had written and asked him did he want to come and would he like to give her away, but his refusal had been brief to the point of rudeness.

It had been the same with her brothers and sisters. They were all in America except the one and he said it was a bad time to leave the farm, claimed he was up to his neck in the harvest and had a couple of cows ready to calve.

‘It’s a crying shame, that’s what,’ Gloria said angrily to Josie.

‘Sure, she hardly knows them anyway,’ Josie said. ‘It’s my family she grew up with.’

But deep down, she knew it had hurt Hannah. She’d heard her muffled crying in the attic room they shared when she thought Josie was asleep. She hadn’t comforted her then, though she wanted to, because she had the feeling Hannah wouldn’t want her to know. In the same way she wouldn’t tell Mrs Emmerson she’d been upset, because she thought she’d be letting her down in some way.

In the time they’d been living together at the guesthouse, Josie had drawn even closer to Hannah. She knew she’d taken her in because she’d been almost forced to, but she’d never shown her that. She’d always been kind and considerate. In those first early weeks, sometimes Josie had been so homesick, she could neither eat nor sleep. It had been Hannah then who wrapped her arms around her and promised things would get better, or sat by her bed, often for hours, stroking her forehead to relax her enough to drift into sleep.

Josie knew she’d never forget that. She wished, though, she wasn’t marrying Arthur Bradley. Not that he bothered about her much, he mainly ignored her, and as the youngest in a large and busy family, she was used to being ignored, especially by men. Her father and her brothers were always either too busy to bother about her or off on business of their own and would hardly give her the time of day.

No, it wasn’t the way Arthur was with her that bothered Josie about the marriage, it was the man himself. Hannah was beautiful, truly beautiful, but much of her beauty came from the light that danced in her eyes that lit up her whole face. She’d seen heads turn when she’d gone into a room. Every guest who came in had been almost mesmerised by her and she’d even seen people turn to look at her at Mass.

And yet she’d bothered about none of them and certainly didn’t encourage attention. In fact, there was a certain something Hannah had, a certain aloofness with men, that put them off slightly, though she was always polite. She’d wanted to ask her about it, but could never seem to find the right words, or the right time to say them. Still, Josie had the feeling that with the slightest encouragement, the men would be falling at her feet.

She knew all about the soldier Hannah had been engaged to who died on the beach in Normandy around D-Day. She’d heard it from Mrs Emmerson and it had been the first time she’d known it, for in the letters Hannah had written to her mother, she’d not mentioned a word of it. ‘I think he took part of her heart with him and that’s the truth,’ Gloria said. ‘That’s why she wants no other.’

So why then did she pin the rest of it on Arthur Bradley? Josie thought. ‘She doesn’t love him,’ she’d cried in protest to Gloria. ‘She can’t love him.’

‘What’s love, pet?’ Gloria asked sadly. ‘I didn’t love my husband, but we got along all right. No children, and that was a blow to take, but it meant we were able to work hard. He had a shop then and it did all right. But when he dropped dead of a heart attack when we’d been married just ten years, I sold the shop, lock, stock and barrel and bought this place.

‘I could have married a man I loved and one that loved me,’ she went on. ‘And there was one. But with him, I’d probably be living in some back-to-back slum with a squad of children and not a half-penny to bless myself with. I did what I had to do for me and Hannah’s doing the same.’

‘What happened to the other man – the one you loved?’ Josie asked, intrigued by Gloria’s revelations.

‘He went to America,’ Gloria said with a shrug, and a flush of shame coloured her face for a split second as she went on. ‘Told me I’d broke his heart. Stuff and nonsense, of course. Don’t you worry none about Hannah. She wants a home of her own and someone to care for her.’

But did he care for her? Privately, Josie doubted it. They didn’t match somehow either. It was like a snail getting married to a butterfly.

Still, a wedding was a wedding. And something to write to Eileen Donnelly about. She’d been her friend at school in Wicklow. When she’d been so homesick, Hannah had advised her to write to someone and tell her how she felt. She said it might help.

And it did. Josie wrote reams and reams, covering page after page with how depressing the place was, the noise, the traffic, the squashed-up houses, the stinking factories that tipped their filth and waste into the sluggish brown canal. She told her of the greyness, the drabness, the absence of green meadows and mountains and streams, and she begged for news from home.

When Eileen’s reply had arrived, Josie had been so disappointed that she’d cried. Eileen said everything was just the same and her mother was having another baby.

There was so much Josie longed to know. So her next letter was full of questions which Eileen answered, but briefly and without elaboration in any shape or form.

By that time, Josie was well settled into the Abbey school. She’d thought her accent might have made her the butt of jokes, but she found many of the children were Irish, or from Irish families, and she was soon settled in. She got on well with the girls in her class and made a special friend of a girl called Mary Byrne who also lived nearby. She found the teachers very strict, not at all like the sleepy easy-going village school she’d gone to.

Her sisters always said she could count herself lucky, for there had been no village school for them and they were taught at the convent, almost three miles away, while the boys went to the Brothers’ almost as far away.

But it wasn’t the distance alone. They’d always told her that the nuns were the very devil and they’d beat the hands off you for the merest thing. The village school had come to Josie’s rescue and although they might have been shouted at, Josie never saw anyone struck.

That wasn’t the case at the Abbey school and she knew her sisters had been right about the devilish nuns that taught them being hot on punishment, for the headmistress at the Abbey was a nun from the nearby St Agnes Convent. She wielded a cane to help exert her authority and had no hesitation in using it. Sometimes, after playtime was over, there was a line of children, who’d been sent in by the dinner ladies, waiting outside the headmistress’s room, to be ‘dealt with’.

So far, Josie had never had the cane, but the prospect of it was held over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. But school didn’t occupy her whole life and with the homesickness receding and with Mary at her side, she was finding out some of the advantages of city living and she wrote to Eileen and told her all about it.

Erdington village is no distance away. Soon, after Hannah’s marriage, it’ll be just at the end of the road. There are so many shops you wouldn’t believe, and crowds of people, like the town on a fair day. But even better, they have a cinema. They do dances there as well, but that’s for older people. They have special films for children on a Saturday morning and it costs sixpence, but most Saturdays Hannah lets me go.

If not, we can go swimming because they’ve got a proper baths and Hannah has bought me my first bathing costume. She says if you have no choice about a place then you must make the best of it and so I am. There’s a library here too, a massive place with a proper children’s part, and you can borrow two books and keep them for a fortnight.

She posted that letter with relish, hoping Eileen was consumed with envy on reading it for she was proving a great disappointment as a correspondent.

And now there was the wedding to brag about. She wished Hannah would be married in a white floor length dress made of silk and decorated with lace and little rosebuds so that she could describe her looking like a princess to Eileen. But she wasn’t wearing white, nor a dress either. ‘It wouldn’t be seemly with everything in such short supply and a wicked waste of clothing coupons,’ Gloria told Josie. ‘That navy costume trimmed with cream is much more practical and it can be worn again. It will look nice enough, especially now Amy’s decorated her hat to match the cream shoes and handbag Hannah has.’

Hannah looked more than just nice, she looked lovely, but then she always looked lovely. She didn’t look like a bride, that was all. Josie supposed it was more practical, but did you want to be practical on that one day of your life? She did take on board the bit about clothing coupons, though. She knew they were a headache and one of the first things Hannah had to see to after her arrival was to fit her out with a ration book and a set of clothing coupons.

Josie, coming from the land of plenty in comparison, had imagined that now the war was over, everything would be back to normal, but it was far from that.

And yet Hannah had used some of those precious clothing coupons to get material for a dress for her that had been made up by Amy. It was pale blue and in shimmering satin that fell from her waist in soft folds. It was the nicest and prettiest dress that Josie had ever owned and she had an Alice band covered in rosebuds holding back her hair and pure white socks and black patent leather shoes.

That was another thing, her hair. Gloria had given her a hairbrush and said she must brush her hair one hundred times every night to make it shine and after a month or two, when it had got long enough, she rolled rags around it after her bath on Saturday, so that it would be wavy for Mass on Sunday.

Josie never skimped on the hundred brushes after she’d overheard Amy telling Gloria that Josie’s hair was shining like burnished copper. Burnished copper! Josie said the words to herself, liking the sound of them.

Amy went on to say that her hair was her best feature, for she was a plain little thing, not a patch on her aunt, but if she made the most of herself as she grew up she’d make a quite presentable turn-out in the end. Josie hadn’t been a bit offended by Amy’s remarks for she knew she only spoke the truth.

She had no illusions about her looks and if she’d ever had, they’d have been dispelled the day her mother took her as a small child to visit her great-granny, who lived in the hills, and was ill in bed. She’d been taken by the hand into the bedroom where an old toothless lady with a bonnet covering her head had peered at her with small gimlet eyes in a face screwed up in a scowl. ‘Is this the one?’ she said. ‘The afterthought?’

Then she’d turned her gaze from Josie and looked Frances full in the face and said, ‘Well girl, I don’t know what you’ve done with this one, but she’s as plain as a pike staff.’ And so, at the age of three or four, Josie had learned what she looked like. She knew her eyes were too big for her face, although they were deep brown and could have been attractive in anyone else, her mouth was too big as well, and her skin had a sallow look to it.

But then she’d learned that her hair, which no one had ever bothered much with before, was her best feature and that she might make a good turn-out after all, and for someone who’d thought she was plain as plain could be, that prediction was a soothing one.

So she’d walked behind Hannah down the aisle of the long church, filled with pride as she noted the numbers of people crowding the pews on either side. There was not a relative amongst them, but many of the neighbours and the friends Hannah had made in the area and in the church were there for her special day and Gloria had invited friends of her own to make the day more of an occasion.

Arthur seemed to have few friends and no relatives either. But he’d invited some work colleagues and his boss, Reg Banks, and his lovely wife Elizabeth, and with them all the church was almost full.

At the altar, Josie had taken the bouquet of roses and carnations from Hannah and slipped into the pew beside Gloria, who’d squeezed her arm in support, even while she dabbed at her eyes with a screwed-up lace hanky she held in her hand.

Hannah knelt at the altar beside Arthur, letting the Latin words of the Mass wash over her, soothing her, telling her she was doing the right thing. She didn’t love Arthur, but she’d not deceived him. She’d never said she loved him, nor had he said those words to her. She’d known his reason for marrying her, he’d done it primarily to please his boss.

The boss’s wife, Elizabeth, who Hannah had taken to straightaway, had confided in Hannah as they’d washed up in the kitchen the first time they’d been asked to dinner. ‘Reg thought Arthur a bit of a cold fish. The sort of man married to his mother, you know the type?’

Hannah had nodded. ‘He was very fond of her,’ she said. ‘It upset him greatly when she died. He told me all about it.’

‘Oh, I know it did,’ Elizabeth said, handing Hannah a plate. ‘I’m not meaning to make light of it, but somehow while she was alive, he didn’t seem able to let go and get on with his own life. You do understand me?’

Oh yes, Hannah fully understood.

‘Of course, my dear, you’ve known him some time.’

‘I wouldn’t say I knew him well exactly,’ Hannah said. ‘After his mother died he’d come and stay at Mrs Emmerson’s guesthouse when he had business in the Midlands, often for weeks at a time, but I’d never spoken to him more than mere pleasantries. Then, not long after he’d inherited the house in Erdington, he asked me to marry him. I had no idea he was interested in me in that way.’

‘My dear, any man in the land would be interested in you,’ Elizabeth said with a laugh. ‘My own husband is quite besotted. Oh, don’t you blush, my dear,’ she chided, seeing the crimson flushing on Hannah’s face. ‘You must know how attractive you are. Tell me,’ she went on, turning to Hannah in a confidential manner. ‘Was Arthur your first love?’

Hannah swallowed deeply. She’d told no one about Mike, no one but Gloria, but she’d never been asked so directly before. ‘Don’t be upset or embarrassed, my dear,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It would never go any further than here.’

‘There was someone,’ Hannah admitted. ‘I … I was engaged to him. We … We were going to get married by special licence, just in a registry office, you know. He had leave coming up, but we knew it was likely to be just forty-eight hours. We were due to tell his parents then, but we didn’t foresee any problems. We’d met many times and they liked me well enough.’

Hannah had stopped even attempting to dry anything and stood with a plate in one hand, the tea towel held to her chest with the other, distress showing in every inch of her body. Her eyes were shining with tears and the sense of loss struck her suddenly and with such force, it almost took her breath away.

Elizabeth knew that Hannah was back there with her soldier and she made no movement, nor any attempt to speak. The room was very still and Hannah, her voice made husky with the tears that had squeezed out of her eyes and dribbled down her cheeks, went on. ‘It was all arranged when suddenly all leave was cancelled and he was transferred south.

‘Everyone was talking about the “Big Push”, but although I wanted the war to be over, I also worried for Mike. He’d been injured before, but I had a funny feeling about this. I suppose I sort of knew when the letters stopped, but I hoped. You see, I had received no official news. That went to his parents.

‘I didn’t know that at first. When I’d had no letters for almost three weeks, I called to see them, frantically worried. They lived in Dewsbury in Huddersfield, quite a distance from the hotel where I worked then. I found their house in darkness. Boarded up! Empty!

‘It was about another couple of months before I heard any more,’ Hannah said, ‘and that was from his friend, Luke,’ remembering the letter Tilly brought to her just before she fled from the home. ‘He told me Mike had been killed minutes after landing on the beach. He’d been caught in the blast himself and ended up in hospital on the south coast. He’d been out of it for a few months and not in any state to write to anyone.

‘It was his mother visiting him that had given him the news that Mike’s family had just disappeared. He’d not taken it in at first. He was very ill and still getting to grips with Mike being dead. They’d been special friends for years.

‘It was afterwards he realised I would probably know nothing. He still couldn’t write because he’d broken nearly every bone in his body in the blast and was in plaster up to the eyeballs. He dictated a letter to the nurse telling me everything he knew, which was precious little. I … I remember I went a little wild at the time.’

She looked at Elizabeth suddenly, her face contorted in grief, her eyes ravaged. ‘I was beside myself,’ she said. ‘Half the time, I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew I had to get away, everything in Leeds reminded me of Mike, places we’d been to together, people we knew. I couldn’t stay.’ She stopped and her voice dropped to a mere whisper. ‘If I’d had Mike’s parents’ support, things might have been so different. As it was …’

‘Is that why you came to Birmingham to Mrs Emmerson’s?’ Elizabeth asked gently.

Hannah barely heard the question. She remembered how fearful she’d been then, beaten down with shame, panic-ridden. Nowhere she could turn to. The plate she hadn’t been aware she’d still been holding slipped through her fingers and shattered to pieces on the tiled floor.

Stupefied, Hannah stared at it for a couple of seconds before dropping to her knees and beginning to gather up the pieces into the towel while she gabbled, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Mrs Banks, truly sorry. I really don’t know what came over me. I just … I don’t know how it happened. What must you think of me?’

‘My dear! My dear!’ Elizabeth said soothingly, lifting Hannah to her feet as Reg’s voice called from the other room, ‘You two women having a smashing time out there?’

Hannah looked towards the kitchen door, terrified Reg would appear there any second and order her and Arthur from the house. Elizabeth caught the look and made a dismissive flap of her hand towards the door. ‘Don’t mind him, that’s his attempt at a joke. As for the plate, don’t worry about it. It’s just an old thing.’

It was no such thing, it was one of a Wedgwood set that Elizabeth was very fond of, but she felt Hannah had been so terribly upset by the revelations and remembrances that she’d urged her to tell, that she didn’t have the heart to tell her. Elizabeth had felt the raw emotion running through Hannah, making her whole body quiver, as she’d helped her up and now she eased the young woman into a kitchen chair. ‘Now you stay there,’ she admonished. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea and that broken pottery will be cleared up in no time.’

Hannah had been glad to sit, for her legs had shook so much and a roaring had begun in her ears and filled her head and she’d been afraid she was going to faint. But to her great relief, she didn’t and eventually the pounding of her heart eased and her breathing returned to normal.

That incident between Elizabeth and Hannah was never referred to again, but it had forged a friendship between them. This had been noticed by both Arthur and Reg and while Reg had been pleased, Arthur had been delighted. He’d told Hannah over and over what an asset she was to him already.

So, kneeling beside her at the altar, Hannah knew Arthur thought he’d made a good bargain in the marriage. What of her? What had she latched on to Arthur for? She knew well why she’d married the man; because she wanted a home of her own and to be a respectable wife and most importantly, the desperate longing in her for a child.

She was glad Josie had come into her life when she did, although initially she hadn’t wanted to look after her. Her coming had eased the ache Hannah carried inside her. This had especially been the case when homesickness had made her vulnerable and upset and Hannah could soothe her.

Eventually, she would have a child of her own, not that she imagined Arthur would make excessive demands on her, and although Arthur was a man who’d never touch her heart, she would be a good, dutiful wife. And then hopefully before too long, a devoted mother. Her life would then be complete and she’d be content.

Gloria watched the couple kneeling at the altar and wished Hannah and Arthur could have had a week at Blackpool, rather than just a mere three days. Josie had been keen to help, before and after school. The child had learned a lot since she’d come from Ireland and now she was a dab hand at many things in the kitchens and grand at serving the meals. She seemed to like doing it too, or at any rate she was always willing enough, so Hannah didn’t have to worry about her.

But, somehow, she didn’t think it had been Hannah’s decision to have such a short honeymoon, but Arthur’s. Hannah claimed he couldn’t afford it, but Gloria was sure he could. One thing that did worry her about Arthur was his streak of meanness and she hoped Hannah could get him over it.

Gloria had told Hannah before the wedding that she should put her foot down. ‘Start as you mean to go on, my girl,’ she advised.

‘He’s saving for the wedding and honeymoon and all,’ Hannah said. But Gloria was sure he’d have a bit put by, for hadn’t he been working for years with only himself to see to and she could bet his mother left him something. And then his boss, so Hannah said, had promised him a rise on his marriage, when he would have a wife to keep.

Hannah, too, was afraid that Arthur was mean. She’d never told Gloria because she would go on and on about it. But the few times they’d been to the pictures, he’d never bought Hannah anything either going in, or in the interval. The first time, as the lights went up in the interval and the girls had gone down the aisles with the ice creams and such, Arthur had remarked. ‘Never buy anything here. Places like these rip you off, don’t they?’

They probably did, but there was something just so right about sitting in the cinema, eating sweets or licking an ice cream. That was what she’d enjoyed with Mike on his short leaves home, when she’d beg, cajole and bribe fellow workers at the hotel to change shifts to be with him as often as possible.

And after the ice creams, they’d take advantage of the darkness to snuggle together. Not that Arthur did that either. He sat stiff and erect in the seat beside her and never ever held her hand which she would have welcomed. It would have been comforting and Hannah, above all things in the world, needed comfort, comfort and tenderness.

But what odds now? Hannah thought, as she got to her feet as the organ began to play. The die was cast and it was too late for any regrets. Hannah was now Mrs Arthur Bradley and would stay that way for life.

Chapter Four

Hannah had been terribly excited to be going to Blackpool for her honeymoon and it was a shame that it turned out to be such a letdown for her. Her pleasure had been sustained in the train journey, especially when Arthur sat and held her hand, and had only begun to slip when she stepped out of the taxi outside the small and rather dingy hotel where they were to stay.

The crabbed woman who described herself as owner showed them to their room and issued them with a list of hotel rules and regulations and did so without even a show of welcome from her sullen mouth and hard, cold eyes.

Hannah circled the depressing room. The paintwork was a drab brown, the faded wallpaper was peeling in places and the bed, she tested by plumping herself down on it, was lumpy. She glanced up at Arthur and said, ‘Not very nice is it?’

She was immediately sorry when she saw Arthur’s face colour. ‘It wasn’t easy finding anywhere,’ he said.

‘I know. I’m sorry. That sounded very ungrateful,’ Hannah said, contrite.

‘And at least we have the meal to look forward to,’ Arthur said. ‘They usually serve dinner at one o’clock, but I persuaded them to cook us a full meal when we arrived as a special favour. I knew we’d probably be hungry.’

Maybe a meal would put a new complexion on the matter entirely, Hannah thought. Maybe food would also still the panicky doubts that she’d done the wrong thing in marrying Arthur that were making her feel a bit sick. She pushed the doubts away, stood up and forced a smile on her face. ‘You’re right, Arthur. It’s hunger making me so miserable. Shall we go down?’

Just a little later, Hannah was to sit in the dark, unwelcoming dining room and think that while the hotel staff might have agreed to serve them a full dinner, they were doing so begrudgingly. Arthur and Hannah were the only ones in the room, for high tea – the usual meal at that time of the evening – was well over and the guests had dispersed either to their rooms, the residents’ lounge or the small bar their landlady had pointed out on their arrival. Hannah couldn’t blame them, glancing around the room as she waited for the food to arrive. She knew it wasn’t a place she’d have chosen to linger in.

And then the insipid, unappetising meal came and Hannah felt her spirits plummet. It was served by a girl with a sulky face and lank, greasy hair who laid the plates before them in a ‘like it, or lump it’ style.

And Hannah did not like it. The grey meat was tough and stringy, the vegetables over-cooked, the mashed potatoes lumpy and the whole lot of it covered with glutinous gravy that was barely warm. However, she refused to get totally depressed by it, even when the apple pie she’d ordered had more pie than apple. The custard she’d declined, remembering her experience with the gravy. Never mind, she told herself, we shan’t spend much time in the hotel. Except, a little voice inside her said, for the bedroom.

She glanced across at Arthur and her stomach contracted as she thought of what lay ahead. Arthur caught her look and smiled. ‘Do you fancy a walk, my dear?’

Hannah was glad that Arthur seemed to want to postpone the moment when they’d have to retire to that uninviting and chilly bedroom as much as she did and she agreed eagerly.

Once outside though, she wondered at the wisdom of such action, for the wind was fierce and snatched away all attempts of conversation. But as they neared the promenade clutched tightly together from necessity rather than desire, she heard the tantalising music of the fair.

Anyone who’d ever been to Blackpool told her about that fair, the Golden Mile they called it, and she’d caught a glimpse of it as they’d passed it in a taxi earlier that evening. But it was one thing to pass it quickly in the dusky half-light, quite another to come upon it in its full glory, ablaze with flashing lights of all colours, now that night had fallen over the town. Music from various rides was thumping all around them, mixed with screams and laughter.

Hannah had never seen anything like it and her eyes were everywhere and wide with astonishment. Beautiful carousel horses pranced round and round with laughing people astride them and just feet away, there were other carriages attached somehow to a huge big wheel spinning wildly, those inside them screaming like mad. And no wonder, Hannah thought. ‘Oh, Arthur,’ she said, breathless with the excitement of it all. ‘I’d be frightened to death on that.’

Arthur laughed and squeezed her hand. Hannah passed many rides that night that alarmed her. One had little cars running around a track, which dropped so suddenly that Hannah gave a little cry of terror, sure a car would be thrown from the tracks, spilling out its unfortunate occupants. Arthur hugged her tighter, touched by her fear brought about by her inexperience of such things.

She stood mesmerised by a small area where cars darted about and seemed intent on bashing into other cars. They were attached to wires or something in the roof, she noticed, which sparked in a frightening way. ‘What are they?’ she asked Arthur. ‘And what are they doing?’

‘They’re bumper cars.’

‘Don’t people get hurt?’

‘Not often,’ Arthur said. ‘Look at the thick rubber around them. That’s the whole point of it.’

Other booths advertised the ‘Ghost Train’, or ‘House of Horrors’, or ‘Hall of Mirrors’ and Arthur and Hannah were encouraged to sample the delights inside. ‘Come on, sir,’ said the woman outside the Ghost Train. ‘Dark as pitch inside and filled with goolies. Gives you a chance to hold your young lady tight.’

Smiling, Arthur shook his head and turned away and then Hannah saw her first pink candyfloss. ‘Oh, what’s that?’

‘Candyfloss.’

‘It looks like cotton wool.’

‘It tastes nothing like it. It’s spun sugar,’ Arthur told her. ‘There are toffee apples too.’

But he didn’t offer to buy Hannah either and she was too shy of him to ask, but she felt disappointed and told herself not to be silly, she couldn’t sample all the delights of the place on her first evening. Arthur didn’t offer to take her on any ride either and in fact, told her firmly that they were a waste of money.

Hannah supposed they were, but they appeared such fun. ‘People seem to enjoy them though, Arthur,’ she ventured.

‘Hmph. A fool and his money are soon parted,’ Arthur said pompously.

‘But we could spend a little, couldn’t we?’ Hannah said. ‘To sort of get value out of the place.’

‘“Value out of the place!’” Arthur repeated. ‘My dear, we’ve just had a wedding which was not cheap, despite the help Mrs Emmerson gave us and there was the train journey here, and the lodging house we’re staying in. Believe me, there is little over for indulging in a fair. Never mind,’ he went on consolingly, as he patted her arm. ‘Women are not supposed to understand such matters.’

Hannah opened her mouth to argue, but shut it again. She’d paid for Josie’s outfit and her own, but the small reception in the room behind the Lyndhurst pub afterwards had been paid for by Gloria on her insistence. The honeymoon was Arthur’s contribution, and maybe it had cost a lot and there was little over, but surely just one or two rides wouldn’t break the bank?

‘Tomorrow,’ Arthur said, ‘we’ll take a walk along the front. That at least won’t cost us a penny. And now, I think we should make for home. I’m ready for bed myself.’

Hannah felt her face flame. The pleasures she’d lovingly shared with Mike Murphy she could now share legally and properly with her husband. She hoped he’d never need know that she wasn’t a virgin, for she knew a man like him would expect her to be.

But Hannah needn’t have worried. They returned to the hotel frozen, their red cheeks and dishevelled clothes showing the power of the wind. Arthur smiled at her as she took off her coat and tried to flatten her hair. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘You look lovely. Would you like a nightcap?’

Hannah had never cared overmuch for any alcohol she’d ever tasted, so she said, ‘Not for me, Arthur. I’m chilled through and I’d really like a cup of tea.’

Arthur laughed. ‘Really, my dear. You can’t have a cup of tea. If you want warming up, I’ll buy you a brandy. That should do the trick, but don’t get too much of a taste for it. It’s very expensive stuff.’

Hannah, from the first sip, knew she’d never develop a taste for brandy. She thought it was like the worst medicine she’d ever been forced to swallow. It did warm her up, however, although she felt her throat to be on fire.

It didn’t stop the shaking inside though, for that wasn’t due just to the cold, and her heart began to jump about in her chest when Arthur whispered in her ear just as she drained her glass. ‘Shall we go up?’

Upstairs in the bedroom, Arthur seemed like a different being. His eyes looked heavy and his mouth rather slack and Hannah knew he was filled with desire for her. She wished she felt something for him, but he stirred her not at all.

But, she reminded herself, she’d married him. Because a priest spoke words over them and they had a paper proving they were man and wife, Arthur had a perfect right to do as he pleased and she had to submit to him. She’d never felt she’d submitted to Mike. She’d wanted sex as much as he had. And now, though she didn’t love Arthur, she liked him well enough and in a way longed for fulfilment, so why was she shaking and afraid? She at least knew what it was about, though she’d have to hide that fact from Arthur, so there was no need at all for her to feel nervous. It was perfectly normal and natural and she told herself to get a grip.

She undressed hastily and slid under the covers, hiding her nakedness. ‘Put out the light, Arthur,’ she begged, and Arthur did before getting into bed beside her. Hannah felt Arthur trembling and knowing he was as nervous as she was, she put her arms around him. ‘You are a very beautiful girl, Hannah, do you know that?’ he said and without waiting for a reply went on, ‘I feel a very fortunate man tonight.’

‘Oh Arthur …’ Embarrassed, Hannah began to protest. However, she got no further for Arthur kissed her, but not the tender, tentative kiss she’d been expecting and would have welcomed. Arthur’s kiss was like a stamp of ownership and Hannah felt her lips pushed against her teeth. And then Arthur parted her lips and pushed his tongue into her mouth till she felt she would choke and she began to thrash her head backwards and forwards.

This seemed to excite Arthur further. Panting heavily, he released Hannah and then he sat astride her, kneading her breasts savagely with his fingers, squeezing her nipples until she cried out in pain.

Arthur smiled, taking Hannah’s cries to be born of desire, and slipped one hand between her legs while the other trailed over her body.

Hannah opened her eyes that she’d kept closed in pain and saw Arthur’s face contorted with desire and she felt excitement building inside her. And yet, she felt no hardening of Arthur’s penis against her and looking down, she saw it between her legs, as soft and flaccid as when he’d begun.

Arthur caught Hannah’s eyes on him and his face flushed crimson with shame. He threw back the covers from them both and sat on the bed, his head in his hands, and began to sob.

Hannah dampened down her own frustration, for she felt sorry for Arthur and she knelt up in bed and gently put her arms around him. He raised his eyes, hardly able to believe what Hannah was doing. He felt inadequate and very ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Ssh, it doesn’t matter.’

‘You … You don’t mind. You don’t despise me?’

‘No. No, of course I don’t despise you. The very idea!’ Hannah said.

‘But … But it’s our wedding day … Our wedding night.’

‘And such a lot of nonsense spoken about it,’ Hannah said fiercely. ‘It would put a lot of stress and strain on anyone. It’s a wonder any couple does it the first night. Maybe they don’t indeed. No one would ever know. Don’t worry, Arthur. Haven’t we the rest of our lives to get it right?’

Arthur felt relief flood over him. He’d been aware of this problem all his adult life, though it had never bothered him, but he’d thought and hoped that with Hannah, whom he admired and respected, it might resolve itself.

And yet Hannah proved to be so understanding, so sympathetic, so special, that Arthur began to feel better about himself. He allowed her to coax him back to bed where she snuggled down under the covers, and curled her body around his. She lay awake long after Arthur slept and vowed to herself that she’d never make Arthur feel bad about that night.

The next morning, Arthur seemed fully recovered and was his usual attentive self and Hannah knew that that was how he was going to deal with it – pretend it had never happened.

She took her lead from him. That day, they strode out after breakfast up to the front. Hannah had never seen the sea, except for the grey expanse of water she’d crossed on her way to Ireland.

She’d never heard the roar of it, or seen a long beach of dull, beige-coloured sand and large grey and black boulders. She’d never seen the rising swells of it and the white-fringed rollers that came crashing down on to the rocks in a sea of swirling foam. Despite the biting wind, Hannah was fascinated and stood watching it until Arthur drew her away and put his arms around her shivering body. ‘Come on, you’ll get your death of cold,’ he said.

‘Oh, but, Arthur, it’s so beautiful. Majestic, somehow.’

‘And free,’ Arthur added.

Hannah wished he hadn’t said that. It spoilt the moment. After a while though, Hannah was chilled through and she looked longingly at the numerous cafés around them. ‘I’d love a cup of tea or coffee, Arthur,’ she said. ‘It would thaw me out.’

‘Nonsense, my dear, it’s not cold, just bracing,’ Arthur said. ‘And really it’s pointless wasting our money in such places. You’ll spoil your appetite for dinner at the lodgings and after all, that is paid for. We’ll just walk a little further and then turn back and be in good time for it. Hold my arm and you’ll feel warmer.’

Hannah felt no warmer, but held on to Arthur’s arm anyway, unable to think of anything further to say. Anyhow, she was interested in seeing Blackpool Tower, which Arthur told her was modelled on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, and she gazed at it in awe. There was an entrance fee to climb it with delights promised on every floor, but Arthur declared it to be a total waste of money. ‘What would you want to climb up there for, my dear?’ he asked Hannah incredulously, when she expressed a desire to go. ‘You’re complaining of the cold now. Don’t you think you’ll be blown to pieces and colder than ever on the top of that?’

‘Yes, but I’d still like to go. It’s just the experience, isn’t it?’

‘A costly experience.’

‘It’s not so much.’

‘Maybe not to you,’ Arthur said, turning away as he spoke. ‘Come along, we’ll be late for dinner if we’re not careful.’

Hannah followed glumly behind him, feeling sure the dinner they’d ordered at the hotel would be little improvement on the one they had served to them the previous night. Or indeed the breakfast that morning – lumps of tepid scrambled egg served on old, soggy toast with barely a scrape of butter on it.

Most of the other residents were much older than Hannah and Arthur and not inclined to make conversation and Hannah felt the dining room to be a dismal unfriendly place. The food was no help in dispelling this feeling and yet Arthur didn’t seem to find it a problem. It’s probably cheap, that’s why, Hannah thought later that day, as she chewed her way through sausages burned on the outside and still pink inside and tasting like sawdust. Cheapness seemed to be the only thing Arthur cared about.

It was the next day after another, fraught night when Hannah had to say similar consoling words to Arthur that Hannah finally lost her temper. It happened because Arthur declared the Winter Gardens too expensive a place to go inside.

‘All I’ve heard you say since we arrived is that this, that and the other is too dear or a waste of money,’ she cried. ‘This is our honeymoon! It’s supposed to be enjoyable. Much as I like the sea, I don’t want to remember that on my honeymoon all I did was wander up and down looking at it.’

Arthur looked affronted. ‘Hannah, if I may say so, you do not understand the cost of things,’ he said stiffly.

‘Yes I do!’ Hannah retorted. ‘I’m not a child. But if money is a problem, I’d rather not have had a honeymoon here at all. It would have been easier not showing me a host of delights I cannot enjoy or take part in.’

‘Please, Hannah, keep your voice down,’ Arthur hissed, looking around at the people in the street anxiously. ‘People are looking.’

‘Well, let them look,’ Hannah snapped. Her eyes were flashing fire and her face bright with temper as she went on. ‘I’m not putting up with this penny-pinching attitude any longer.’

What she was about to do to change it she hardly knew, but before she was able to make another retort, Arthur glared at her, horrified, and then turned from her and began walking away. Hannah realised she had two choices; either to turn after him berating him like a fishwife, or leave him to sulk and go about on her own.

She still felt too angry with Arthur to run after him and despite her spirited retort, she had a horror of showing herself up in public and so she stood for a moment, watching Arthur’s stiff back get further away from her before turning her head and walking the other way.

All in all she had a good afternoon. She had a little money of her own and she intended to use it. She’d never seen slot machines and one-armed bandits that Blackpool had in abundance and normally would have been more careful with her money, but that day she threw caution to the wind and, though she lost every penny she spent, she decided it was good fun. She then tried unsuccessfully to get the arm of a crane that was encased in a glass box to lift a watch up for her, and she put money in the laughing policeman, which put a smile not only on her face, but anyone’s in earshot.

She had little left after that, but enough to pay to climb the Tower. She stood on the top, buffeted by the wind as Arthur had prophesised, and unable to see much because of the leaden grey sky. But, she was still glad she did it. What was the point of coming to Blackpool and not climbing its most famous landmark?

Once more on the ground, she wished she didn’t have to return to the dismal lodging house for the awful stuff they put in front of you under the guise of food. She looked longingly at the succulent fish and chips she saw people tucking into in the cafés and the smell of it made her stomach rumble. But she was nearly out of money and only had enough for one small cup of coffee before making her way back.

Arthur greeted her coldly, which was only what she expected, and they ate the badly cooked lump of doughy, grisly, indeterminate meat covered in brown, tasteless gravy, that the lodging house described as steak and kidney pudding, in silence.

It was as they started on the roly-poly pudding, which was made with the same dough as the dinner, but this time smeared with jam and covered with over-sweet yellow custard, that Hannah leaned towards Arthur. ‘Come on,’ she coaxed. ‘We can’t go on like this. I did have a point this morning, say what you like, but I did. You don’t like spending money on anything.’

‘Someone has to look after the pennies.’

‘I’m not expecting you to take me to expensive places or spend every penny,’ Hannah protested. ‘But just to relax now and then and not go all stiff and starchy if I suggest we have a few goes on the fair, or stop for a drink of coffee.’

Begrudgingly, though never acknowledging that Hannah was right, Arthur did go to the fair later that day. It was not a success. It seemed to give Arthur actual pain to spend money and he showed such little emotion on any ride he went on that he dampened Hannah’s enthusiasm. The thrill of fear that rippled down Hannah’s back as the Big Wheel thrust them into the air made her want to scream, but the look on Arthur’s face stifled it in her throat, as it did her shout of exhilaration on the Carousel or the Big Dipper. As for the Ghost Train, Arthur was no earthly use to her. The long moans and sudden appearance of a skeleton looming up in the blackness and the spidery things that brushed her face and trailed in her hair caused her to start suddenly and give little yelps of terror. But no comforting arm came around her.

Even the candyfloss was a disappointment; though she pulled large lumps off, as soon as she put it in her mouth it seemed to disappear and she got incredibly sticky. But she didn’t complain to Arthur and didn’t bother asking for a toffee apple, or an ice cream.

That night Arthur made no attempt to touch Hannah and she was relieved to be able to sleep unmolested, though she tried hard not to show it.

The following morning, Hannah lay and listened to the rain hammering on the windows and she got out of bed and padded across the floor to see heavy, relentless rain, the sort that sets in for the day, falling like steel stair rods from a blackened sky. They were to go home that day and really she was glad. Maybe Arthur would relax in his own house more and she was sure if he could relax, let himself go, the problem he had with arousal would be solved. It wasn’t that she longed for the sexual act itself, knowing with Arthur it would probably be a disappointment, but she knew it was important to him, like it would be for any man. It was also necessary if Hannah was to ever have the child she longed for. She gave a sigh, turned from the window and began to dress.

The breakfast bacon was nearly raw, and the eggs scrambled and just as tasteless as those the previous day, but it hardly mattered anymore. They were going home. Hannah would be mistress of her own house and then any meals would be cooked by her. She’d been a fairly indifferent cook when she’d first come to Gloria’s, but she’d learnt quickly and now good food properly cooked and presented was important to her.

She was looking forward to seeing both Gloria and Josie again, surprised how much she’d missed them. She turned to say something about it to Arthur on the train going home, but he forestalled her. ‘This business of the child, my dear.’

‘Josie?’

‘Yes, Josie. She gets on very well with Mrs Emmerson, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Well, yes. Sure the devil himself would get on with Gloria.’

‘Quite,’ Arthur said. ‘So then, if Josie were to stay with Mrs Emmerson …’

‘Arthur, we’ve been through this,’ Hannah said with a sigh. ‘My sister entrusted Josie to me. It was almost the last lucid thing she said. I promised to look after her and she died peacefully because of it. I cannot and will not go back on that promise.’

‘These deathbed promises are all very well, but to tie yourself to a child …’

‘I’m sorry, Arthur, but that’s how it is. We had this out months ago. You said you would make her welcome.’

‘Have you considered the cost of rearing her?’ Arthur snapped. ‘At least we should have a contribution from her family for that.’

‘Who from, Arthur?’ Hannah said. ‘One brother is a priest and one sister a nun, another in Connemara hasn’t two half pennies to bless herself with. Ellen’s just recently married, while Sam just makes enough to keep himself and his grandparents, and two more are making their way in America.’

‘What of the house? There should be money there?’

‘Yes, there will be,’ Hannah agreed. ‘But split between all of them it would not amount to that much. It goes to auction next week, for there wasn’t enough interest in it, so Sam said. The money for the beasts is already banked and any farm equipment that Sam had no use for.’

‘Well, however much it is, or isn’t, when it’s all settled that money should come to us,’ Arthur said. ‘In fact, you should have a share in it. You grew up with them.’

‘But I’m not part of the family,’ Hannah said. ‘I don’t want their money and I won’t let you spend Josie’s share.’

Arthur’s mouth dropped open in amazement. ‘That money is ours by right.’

‘I’m not talking right or wrong in this,’ Hannah said. ‘One day the child may need money of her own.’

Arthur was furious. ‘I can’t be expected to bear the total cost of that child’s care until she is adult without the least financial contribution.’

Hannah knew with Arthur’s true aversion to spending money, Josie would never be truly welcome there if it was affecting his pocket and in a way, he had a point. Martin had said he would send something for her when he was settled and she’d never known him let anyone down before. But nothing had come yet, and she didn’t want Arthur to hold any antagonism towards the child. She’d feel it, even if nothing was said, and that was the very thing she wanted to avoid.

‘Then let me go back to Gloria’s to work,’ Hannah said. ‘You know she wants me to. I’d get your breakfast first and leave the evening meal ready.’

‘I didn’t want you to work,’ Arthur said mulishly. ‘Not now we’re married.’

‘I know you didn’t,’ Hannah said placatingly. ‘But think about it, Arthur. What would I do at home all day anyway?’

‘What if you should have a child of our own?’

Hannah bit back the retort that something would have to be resolved in the sexual area before that could be achieved. Instead, she said, ‘Then I should imagine I’d have plenty to do. But just for now, Arthur?’ She felt his resolve weakening and so she played her trump card. ‘And then Josie living with us wouldn’t cost you anything, I’d be able to see to her myself.’

Arthur considered the proposal. He had no desire for Hannah to work. Really he had no desire for her to go anywhere and have men look at her now she was married. She was his wife and as such his needs should be paramount in her life. But he knew children were expensive, he’d heard colleagues talking about it at work, the amount they ate and the clothes and shoes they needed.

Maybe, he thought, this would be a solution to the problem for the moment. When the farm was sold, he’d have that money, whatever Hannah thought. He was the head of the house and as such he’d insist Josie’s inheritance be passed over to him. No need though to upset Hannah by telling her that, not yet anyway. He nodded sagely. ‘Let’s try it for three months or so,’ he said. ‘See how it goes.’

‘Okay, Arthur,’ Hannah said, trying to hide her pleasure. She hadn’t thought that marrying Arthur would mean a total cessation of work from the beginning, though she’d known that her hours would have to definitely change in some way. But at first, Arthur had been adamant that he wanted her at home full-time.

After three months, things might be different, but then again they might not. ‘Gloria will be so pleased,’ Hannah said. She gave a sudden shiver of excitement. ‘I can’t wait to see her again,’ she went on. ‘Josie, too, of course.’

Arthur gave a grunt, but said nothing further, never a man for small chat. Now that the matter had been resolved satisfactorily, he retreated behind the paper he’d bought at the station.

Hannah didn’t mind. She lay back in the seat and watched the miles being eaten away. She wished she had a little gift for the two of them, but she hadn’t even a stick of rock for Josie. Guiltily, she remembered her reckless spending on the slot machines that had swallowed up so much money.

Still what was gone was gone. No use crying over spilt milk was one of Gloria’s sayings and an apt one, Hannah always felt. And that, thought Hannah, is true about my less than satisfactory marriage too.

Despite supposed to be helping Gloria, Josie had run to peep out of the visitors’ lounge window at the front of the house half a dozen times before she saw the taxi turn into the road. ‘They’re here,’ she screamed.

‘All right, all right, I’m not deaf,’ Gloria said, emerging from the kitchen as she spoke, drying her large red hands on a towel. But though her words were sharp, her eyes twinkled, and Josie knew she was pleased Hannah was home too.

Josie barely heard her anyway. She already had the door wrenched open and was halfway down the path.

Arthur and Hannah had emerged from the taxi and were standing with the cases around them when Josie threw herself at Hannah. Hannah felt a sudden rush of love for the child she’d not wanted originally and held her close in a tight hug.

Behind her, Gloria was urging them in. ‘Come in and get a meal inside you. Josie has had her things packed up since just after breakfast. The house is all ready for you. I’ve been over and seen to it. Bought you some basics to give you a start at least, if you’re determined to go there tonight. Lit the fires as well today and yesterday and aired the beds. Can’t be too careful, I say. A house not lived in can easy get damp and September can be a treacherous month.’

Hannah let her talk. It was her way and she was kindness itself. She smiled at her and the beam Gloria gave in reply nearly split her face in two.

Oh, Hannah thought, I’m glad to be back home.

Chapter Five

If Hannah could have confided in Gloria she could have told her that her contentment in marriage had lasted just six weeks, until the end of October. It hadn’t been a bed of roses until then of course, for the problems in the bedroom, which Arthur had never managed to control, had caused him great distress.

Added to that, his meanness, which had reared its ugly head on honeymoon, continued into their married life. He doled out meagre amounts of housekeeping every Friday evening, examined the shopping lists meticulously and quizzed Hannah for hours if she asked for more.

Apart from that, Hannah disliked his treatment of Josie. Despite his promise of trying his best to get on with her Hannah couldn’t help feeling that if that was his best, she’d hate to see his worst, for he’d never really taken to the child. Sometimes he was so open in showing his dislike and resentment, that Hannah became frustrated and angry with him.

Then one day, towards the very end of October, Arthur came home from work in a foul mood. He’d been odd for a few days, morose and snappy, but Hannah, thinking he maybe had a problem at work that he didn’t want to talk about, didn’t worry too much about it. But Arthur had no problem at work; his problem was his marriage and that meant Hannah.

Despite inheriting the house and hints the boss was dropping about dependable married men, he doubted he’d have been swayed to marry anyone if Mrs Emmerson hadn’t urged him to ask Hannah. And he had to admit that he’d been flattered when she’d accepted his proposal.

He’d been aware he had a sexual problem. He knew his penis didn’t go hard, but then he thought he’d never given it occasion to. Before Hannah, he’d never had any encounter of that type, knowing his mother wouldn’t have liked it. And not having discussed the matter of a hardened penis with anyone, he didn’t know how normal it was and what to do about it. In fact, he was so hazy about the sexual act that eventually, and with great embarrassment, he’d entered a shop in one of the seedier areas of Birmingham and bought himself a book on the matter.

However, it hadn’t touched on his problems at all. The book seemed to take it for granted that the desire and love the man had for his partner would make the penis erect naturally. It wasn’t something you could ask anyone about, not even a doctor and Arthur had no idea what to do.

In his heart he knew he shouldn’t have married, but he had and that was that. Initially, his abortive attempts caused him shame and embarrassment, then utter humiliation and eventually, anger.

And this anger he turned on Hannah, pushing away her arms when she sought to comfort him that night. ‘Get off me! It’s all your bloody fault,’ he shouted at her when he’d again tried and failed.

‘What is? What is it?’

‘You know what! A bloody temptress that’s what you are!’

Still Hannah felt sorry for him. She was as confused as Arthur over his sexual problem. Like him, she could never bring herself to speak about it, but she understood how it must make him feel. ‘I told you it doesn’t matter,’ she said consolingly.

‘Of course it bloody matters. Are you some sodding imbecile that can’t understand that?’

Hannah gave a small gasp. This was the side of Arthur she’d never seen before. The face he turned towards her was almost puce, he was so angry, and his eyes were wild, his hair standing in spikes where he’d run his hands through it.

Still she persisted. ‘Look, Arthur, I know it’s important, but there’s plenty of time. Shall I pop down and make us both a cup of tea?’

‘Tea! Tea! You bloody stupid bugger, you,’ Arthur cried, pushing at her so that she fell on the bed where he straddled her, holding down her arms while he spat out a stream of abuse, vile words, some Hannah had never heard before.

She thrashed on the bed to free herself, but Arthur held her fast, tightening his grip on her arms while he continued to yell obscenities at her. She closed her eyes for the light was still on and she couldn’t bear the look in his eyes, nor his thin lips, rimmed with spittle.

Eventually, the violent tirade was over and Arthur rolled away from her. Through anger, he’d felt a stirring inside him that any desire he’d felt for Hannah had never achieved, but still he was ashamed of his behaviour.

As for Hannah, she felt abused. If Arthur had had sex with her, which would have been his right after all, she’d have felt it at least showed normal behaviour. But this filthy, vitriolic abuse he threw at her was hard to bear and she hurt and ached all over, too, from his rough handling. Every time she closed her eyes she relived the scene and it was the early hours of the morning before she finally slept.

In the morning, she lay and tried to analyse the situation. Arthur was not naturally a violent man. Obviously, his frustrations had spilled over, that was all. Maybe she should battle to overcome her reticence and try and convince him to seek help. Perhaps there were things he could do, drugs he could take. They could do wonderful things these days.

Arthur, coming into the bedroom from the bathroom after a shave, saw that Hannah was awake and knelt down by her side of the bed. ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ he said, ‘really sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’

Hannah smiled at him. Hadn’t she just told herself that that was the way of it? A one-off occurrence that would never happen again and so didn’t have to be referred to at all. ‘It’s all right,’ she told him. ‘I understand.’

‘You are a wonderful wife,’ Arthur said earnestly, giving Hannah’s cheek a kiss. ‘The most wonderful wife in all the world.’

It was a little harder for Hannah to face Josie, who showed by her plain embarrassment and downcast eyes that she’d heard every word of the confrontation in the bedroom the previous night. Still, it wasn’t something Hannah felt she had to explain and certainly not to a child of nine, so she busied herself making breakfast.

Later, Hannah made her way to the guesthouse where she would help Gloria clear up after the breakfast, tidy and clean the rooms and prepare the evening meals for her paying guests.

It was only when the guesthouse was particularly full that Hannah would be required to wait on in the evenings now. Most times, Gloria said she could manage and Hannah was home in time to eat with Arthur and Josie.

Normally, she enjoyed the work and the company although that morning she wished she didn’t have to go, for she was tired. She knew too she didn’t look her best and that Gloria would be sure to remark on it. And she did, after a swift look at Hannah’s face as she entered the kitchen. ‘You all right?’ she asked ‘You don’t look at all well.’

‘No, I’m all right,’ Hannah said. ‘I … I didn’t get much sleep.’

‘Oh yes,’ Gloria said with a knowing wink and when Hannah flushed crimson she went on, ‘I mean it’s natural and you are married.’

‘There is nothing natural in our marriage,’ Hannah wanted to cry. But this was something she could not share, not with anyone, so she forced herself to smile at Gloria as she exchanged her outdoor coat for an overall and began her work for the day.

For the next week things went on as normal and on 5th November, Hannah, Arthur and Josie went to a bonfire and fireworks party, which a friend of Gloria’s was having in their garden. ‘There will be soup and sausages and things to eat,’ Hannah told Arthur. ‘Do say it’s all right?’

Arthur had no desire after a day at work to strike out again into the cold streets to watch a fire and a few paltry fireworks, but he went for Hannah’s sake. She intimated that it was for Josie, but really she was as excited as the child.

He knew because Hannah had told him that they’d not had bonfire nights in Ireland, but Hannah had gone to her first one with friends from the hotel the first year she was in England. By the second year it was 1939, war had been declared, and bonfires and fireworks had been banned.

He wanted to please Hannah, because he still felt incredibly guilty about his behaviour and it wasn’t as if it would actually cost anything. That made the decision as far as Arthur was concerned.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I consider it an utter waste of money buying fireworks to light up the sky and can never understand people wanting to do it, but if you want to go so much, we will look in for an hour or so.’

Hannah and Josie had a wonderful time. Josie’s eyes were wide with astonishment at the fireworks. Roman candles, Golden Rain and Catherine wheels. Even the names were exciting and the bright colours of them sparking into the black night brought oohs and ahhs from more than Josie who’d eaten so many sausages, Hannah said she’d never sleep.

But she did, they all did, and the next morning Hannah got up in a buoyant mood. Life wasn’t so bad, she thought, and Arthur could be handled easily with a little care and attention. Her good mood lasted all that day and even Gloria commented on it.

But Arthur came home again that evening in a foul mood. All day he’d fought his conscience because he knew he wanted to make love to Hannah and he knew not only would he fail, but also that it would probably turn out the same as last time, and he would be ashamed of himself because of it.

Hannah was unprepared for the assault that night, relaxed and at ease. She was pulling her nightie over her head when Arthur entered the room. In two strides he was behind her, wrapping one arm vice-like around her waist while pulling the nightie from her with the other.

Hannah gave a yelp and hearing the material tear, she cried out sharply, ‘Arthur, stop! What’s got into you?’

‘Shut up! Shut your mouth!’ Arthur cried, as he flicked the light out and kicked the door closed.

Hannah was nervous of the man she barely knew in this mood, but she didn’t struggle. She had the feeling that he’d enjoyed her futile attempts to free herself the last time. This time she lay passive and felt his breath on her face as he screamed obscenities at her. She was conscious of Josie lying the other side of a stud wall and knew every syllable from Arthur’s lips would be audible to her.

And it was audible, even when she buried her head beneath the blankets and wrapped her pillow around her ears. It was filthy talk, dirty words that she’d never heard from any man in her family. Some she didn’t know the meaning of, but knew they weren’t nice by the way Arthur said them. She wondered what he was doing to Hannah while he was saying such things, she’d been very quiet since the one short shout. What if he’d hurt her, killed her even? No, if he’d killed her there’d be no point in going on shouting at her. But all the same, she trembled in fear both for herself and Hannah.

Hannah wasn’t dead, but petrified with loathing for the stranger her husband had turned into. His apologies the next morning were as sincere as ever, but when he assured her it wouldn’t happen again, she didn’t believe him.

It was as well she didn’t for the same thing happened the next week and the next and the next. Sometimes only two or three days would pass, sometimes a week. Arthur always apologised and said how ashamed he was, but he refused to discuss his problem or seek help.

‘My God, girl, you look peaky,’ Gloria remarked one day. ‘Mind you, you’ve not looked yourself for days. You’re not … you know, expecting?’

‘No,’ Hannah said tersely, thinking ‘fat chance’. Gloria looked offended at Hannah’s tone and eventually she said, ‘Sorry, Gloria, I’m tired, I’m not getting much sleep.’

‘Well, I must say I’m surprised at Arthur,’ Gloria said. ‘Didn’t think he had it in him.’

Hannah’s mind was befuddled because of lack of sleep. ‘Had what in him?’

‘Don’t act the innocent with me,’ Gloria said quite sharply. ‘You know what’s what as well as I do. Some men are the very devil, want to be at it morning, noon and night. You need to put your foot down.’

Hannah knew now what Gloria had been hinting at and hid a wry smile at Arthur being thought of as a sex-crazed Casanova.

Just before Christmas, a letter with an airmail stamp from America arrived and Hannah snatched it up eagerly, glad that Arthur always left for work before the post came. It hadn’t been the first letter Hannah had had because Martin in particular wrote often and kept her up to date with the news.

This letter was no exception and in it Martin wrote of the impending marriage in March the following year of Siobhan to a wealthy New York banker.

He wrote,

Her future is assured now and so is mine for I’ve obtained a good job in a factory belonging to one of Aunt Norah’s friends.

The farm business is now completed and Josie’s share will be a little under three hundred pounds. We all also feel that while it was very good of you to take Josie into your home, you shouldn’t suffer financially because of it. I will be sending twenty dollars a month for her and Siobhan and her husband another twenty dollars. We hope that this will help towards her upkeep.

Hannah was filled with relief at the offer of financial assistance, for Arthur had made it clear almost from the beginning that he was not clothing the child. Feeding her was bad enough, he’d said, and Hannah would have to apply to the family if she needed more money.

She’d never done this, but knew if Josie grew much more, nothing she had would fit her. Added to that, the black patent shoes she’d bought her for the wedding were not strong enough, nor warm enough, to wear through the winter, which was prophesised to be a bad one with much rain and snow.

So while the monthly allowance was a lifeline and one Hannah decided to use as needed, the three hundred pounds was Josie’s security. The future payment for a wedding and honeymoon perhaps, for Hannah knew that Arthur would not contribute to either when the time came.

No luxuries were affordable on the money Arthur gave Hannah and she was finding more and more of her wages were being used to supplement the household budget.

But Hannah seldom complained and tried hard to keep the house peaceful, knowing that if she annoyed Arthur in any way she’d pay for it later. But somehow, she had to safeguard Josie’s money for she knew Arthur would have it off her faster than the speed of light and she’d never see a penny of it again.

She wrote to Martin, thanking him for his and Siobhan’s offer of financial help for Josie. She accepted gratefully on her behalf, but Josie’s share of the sale, she said, she’d rather he kept and tied up in some fund or another to mature when she reached twenty-one, and in a way that no one else could touch it.

Josie was delighted that Hannah was eventually being paid something for her keep, for she’d felt bad about living on her and knew Arthur resented it, but Hannah’s handling of her inheritance worried her. ‘Won’t Arthur really be cross?’

‘He may indeed,’ Hannah said. ‘Sure isn’t that why I’ve asked Martin to have it tied up in trust for you?’

‘Doesn’t it … Isn’t it a bit sneaky?’

‘With Arthur, you have to be sneaky,’ Hannah told Josie. ‘He’d have the money off you before you’d had the chance to see the colour of it and that can’t be right either. Your mammy wouldn’t want that. She’d want the money to benefit you in some way, wouldn’t she? I’ll tell Arthur that Martin decided it that way, then he can’t blame either of us, can he?’ But Hannah knew Arthur would be furious when he discovered that he was unable to touch Josie’s inheritance.

Josie chewed her thumbnail. ‘I suppose,’ she said at last. ‘But what if you need it? I mean what if you had a baby of your own or something?’

‘That won’t happen, Josie,’ Hannah said grimly. ‘Believe me, that just won’t happen.’

She felt suddenly very sorry for herself. She’d married a man she didn’t love in order to have a child. And that was the one thing he couldn’t give her. And because he couldn’t give her a child, he hurled obscenities at her and abused her whenever the notion took him. It seemed to her she’d dealt herself a very bad fist indeed. It was a kind of justice, some would say.

Josie was looking at her with concern. She knew she’d said something to upset Hannah, but had no idea what it was. Hannah caught sight of the woebegone face. Whatever was wrong in her marriage at least they’d both had a choice in the matter, she told herself sternly. Josie had had none, it was nearly Christmas and she was still but a child.

She tried to push despondency aside and get into the festive mood. She extracted the dollar bills from the envelope – the first month’s payment, and said, ‘Now that you’ve broken up from school and I’m not needed at the guesthouse till after New Year, what do you say to having a day in town, just the two of us, and buying in some goodies and maybe a few presents for people?’

‘Grand!’ Josie said, glad that her aunt’s good humour seemed to have returned. ‘And,’ she went on, anxious not to be a drain on resources, ‘I do know all about Santa Claus and that, you know. A girl at school told me.’

‘That’s all right then,’ Hannah said with a mock sigh of relief. She was glad she’d used some of her wages to buy things for Josie for weeks now to make sure her first Christmas without her mother and family around her wouldn’t be a total disappointment. Santa Claus-believer or not, she would get a stocking to open on Christmas Day morning, before setting off for Gloria’s where it had been arranged they would spend the day.

And the day wouldn’t have been so bad at all, despite the lack of festive cheer in the Bradley household, if Arthur hadn’t seen fit to launch one of his verbal attacks on Hannah in the early hours of Christmas morning.

He’d been moody since he’d come home that afternoon and Hannah couldn’t understand why. He should have been in good spirits; they’d had a little party in the office at lunchtime, a few drinks with his colleagues and his boss, and he’d come home with a sizeable bonus, and a large box of chocolates for Hannah, the same as all the company wives had.

Hannah at least was delighted for, with the sweet ration still in place, chocolates were like gold dust, and yet nothing seemed to cheer Arthur.

Hannah wasn’t too worried. She knew her husband’s passion for hoarding money and for spending as little as possible and she thought it had probably upset him to have to increase her housekeeping in order to supply the few extras that even he saw they needed at Christmas time.

She took it as a hopeful sign that he agreed to go with her and Josie to the Abbey for Midnight Mass, certain the beautifully clear night with the stars twinkling and the moon shining down, lighting up the earlier fall of snow that crackled under people’s feet, would be enough to lift anyone’s spirits. ‘Very Christmassy, a bit of snow,’ she said, slipping her arm through Arthur’s.

He just grunted a response, but Josie squeezed Hannah’s other hand and said, ‘I love snow too.’

Neither of them knew of the long hard winter to come when they’d be heartily sick of snow, but that night, it had a sense of rightness about it. The world was a beautiful place, Hannah decided, and it was almost Christmas Day. What could be better?

She couldn’t believe it when she felt Arthur’s weight upon her later that night. She’d been almost asleep, the carols still running in her head when he launched his attack as he came in from the bathroom. She tried to twist away from his grasp and felt her nightie rip open as it was torn from her. ‘For pity’s sake, Arthur, will you leave me be?’ she cried.

But it was if she hadn’t spoken and somehow the obscene words that Arthur spat out that night seemed to defile all that had gone before.

Afterwards, aching everywhere, Hannah cried herself to sleep and was in no great humour for Arthur’s abject apology the next day. ‘Don’t say you’re sorry,’ she cried. ‘Just don’t. If you were sorry, you’d not do such things to me. Leave me be, Arthur. It’s not right the things you do. Surely you can see that?’

Arthur got to his feet, avoiding her eyes, and began to dress. ‘Look me full in the face and tell me what you do is normal behaviour,’ she demanded shrilly.

And then Arthur faced her, his own face expressionless and his voice cold. ‘If you’ve quite finished your tantrum,’ he said, ‘it’s time to get up.’ He paused at the door and said, ‘By the way, my dear – Happy Christmas.’

If Hannah had anything to hand she would have hurled it after Arthur. Instead she punched the life out of the pillow and imagined it to be his face. She knew that Arthur would never in a million years believe that he might be in the wrong. In a way, she wished that she wasn’t going to Gloria’s house that day. Gloria was too astute by half and Hannah knew that feeling and looking as she did, she’d not be able to convince her that her life was hunky-dory.

Hannah was right; Gloria was not fooled. She sensed the tension in every line of Hannah’s face and the smile that seemed to have been nailed there. Only Arthur seemed normal, for Josie was far too quiet, especially as it was Christmas Day.

I’ll pop over and see her one day soon, she promised herself, and have a chat. See what’s what. But she couldn’t, for the bad weather put paid to any plans she had.

At first, most people had been quite philosophical about the snow. After all, that’s what happened in winter and Birmingham only really got a sprinkling of it that didn’t last long. The children loved it through the Christmas holidays, making snowmen, hurling snowballs at the unsuspecting and making slides that were a danger to life and limb for the unwary.

The adults struggled to maintain some semblance of order to their lives, going to work and shopping and later, when the schools reopened, taking children to school. But gradually things slowed down and ground to a halt altogether in some cases. The snow was relentless and blown into drifts by the gusting winds. This then froze solid at night and was covered by more snow the next day. The skies were leaden grey and not a glimmer of sun penetrated them and so lights were kept on most of the day and fires stoked up.

This caused a further problem in the increase in power used and so power cuts began and coal was rationed. Trams and trains were very late, or cancelled altogether. They couldn’t run on rails filled with frozen ice, while buses and other vehicles couldn’t operate on roads cut off by snow. As fast as the emergency services cleared them, they were soon as bad as ever.

1947 was the first year Gloria had not gone to the January Sales in the city centre stores. Normally, she stocked up on things for the guesthouse, as well as finding a few choice bargains for herself.

Even collecting the weekly rations was a chore. Not indeed that there was much in the shops to be had, for many supplies were just not getting through. One woman that very day in the grocer’s had commented to anyone interested, ‘Looks like the bloke upstairs thinks Hitler d’aint kill enough of us already with his bloody bombs, he’s now trying to starve us to death.’

She wasn’t so far wrong either, Gloria remarked to Amy later. ‘I mean, I don’t say it’s got much to do with God, like, but some of the shelves are near empty. And it’s no joke with half the stuff on ration anyhow. I mean, if they haven’t got one thing in, then you’ve got hardly much choice to get anything else. Must be a nightmare for women with families to feed.’

Gloria was glad she had Amy to talk to, glad their back doors were not that far away and that Tom always cleared the path so they could pop into one another’s houses. She often thought she’d have gone mad in that big rambling house without Amy. Of course, normally she would have been kept busy. She was usually quieter through December, but once the New Year was over, the commercial travellers were on the road again, trying to make up the money spent out in the festive season.

But not this year. In a way, she was pleased she didn’t have to heat the whole place as well as finding coal for the residents’ dining room and lounge for there was a desperate shortage of it. As it was, she’d shut off all the house, but her own rooms, and even then she often went to bed early to save fuel.

She wasn’t in trouble yet with money. She was canny with it and had plenty saved and yet she knew she couldn’t go on with the situation indefinitely without any income.

She wasn’t the only one. Many people either couldn’t get to work, or got there and found there was no heating and often no light either. She’d seen pictures in the Evening Mail of people in shops wearing overcoats and trying to serve customers by candlelight.

But thinking of families brought Hannah to mind and how odd she’d been at Christmas. If she’d have been able to see her since, she’d have felt better. Amy knew what her friend was fretting over.

‘You can’t do anything about Hannah,’ she said. ‘She’s a married woman now.’

‘I know that, Amy, but you must admit she was peculiar over Christmas, they all were.’

Amy knew they were. She and Tom had come over in the evening for a bit of tea and you could have cut the atmosphere between Hannah and Arthur with a knife. But it wouldn’t help Gloria to tell her that. She was a proper old worryguts about the girl as it was, but she was no fool either. ‘Maybe she was a bit strained,’ she admitted. ‘They’d probably had a tiff.’

‘Do you think that’s all it was, a bit of a row?’ Gloria asked anxiously.

‘Bound to be,’ Amy said confidently. ‘Newlywed, see. Still getting to know one another.’

‘If only I could see her, check that everything is all right.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ Amy said. ‘She’s better off than us, only yards from the High Street in Erdington and Tom says they try and keep that clear. Doesn’t always work of course, but I bet Hannah can get out to shop and get coal delivered.’

‘You’re right there,’ Gloria said. ‘I thought that last coal lorry was going to overturn.’

‘Or go ploughing through someone’s garden and into their front rooms,’ Amy said with a grim smile, remembering the coal man’s valiant efforts to control his lorry that had skidded the last time he’d tried to deliver coal to them. ‘Tom says this road’s a bugger,’ Amy went on. ‘You should see him slithering and sliding over it to reach the main drag. Mind you, the kids make it worse. Them and their flipping slides. Something should be done about it before someone breaks their neck.’

‘They’re bored with the schools all closed,’ Gloria said wearily. ‘We’ll just have to put up with it. God knows, it can’t go on forever.’ She gave a sigh and said, ‘Put a few pieces of coal on that fire, Amy, before it dies out altogether and I’ll make us some tea.’

Chapter Six

‘What’s happened?’ Gloria asked, staring at Hannah in shock. Even in the gloomy half-light of Hannah’s breakfast room, for the February day was dark and overcast, she could see the blue-black bruise on her left cheek and the split lip on the same side. The rest of Hannah’s face was bleached white and her hair, once her crowning glory, was lank and tied back from her face with an elastic band. ‘I walked into a door,’ Hannah replied.

Even Josie, sitting on the chair in the room watching silently, couldn’t have stilled the retort from Gloria’s lips. ‘Walked into a door, my Aunt Fanny. This is me you’re talking to and I wasn’t born yesterday. I know what manner of door it was.’

Gloria glanced at the child. There was nowhere else she could go, for the rest of the house was like an icebox and Gloria supposed Hannah could only get coal enough to heat one room. In front of Josie she could take this no further. But she’d not let it rest there. No, by God, she wouldn’t. She’d encouraged Hannah to marry Arthur, she felt responsible. She never thought he’d be the kind to hit her, to hit anyone in fact.

But this would never do – this uncomfortable ominous silence. She must find something to break it. ‘Did you have a nice birthday?’ she asked Josie, knowing it had been two days before. ‘I sent a card, did you get it?’

To her surprise, a shudder passed through Josie’s slight frame before she said, almost expressionless, ‘Yes, yes thank you, Mrs Emmerson.’

Gloria felt decidedly uncomfortable, but she soldiered on. ‘I couldn’t get out to the shops to buy you anything with the weather you know, but I found this in my jewellery box and thought you might like it,’ and handed Josie a tissue-wrapped little parcel.

‘Oh,’ Josie cried, pushing the tissue paper aside and taking the delicate silver chain with its sparkling sapphire pendant from the velvet box. It was the loveliest thing she’d ever owned and she was almost overcome with pleasure. ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’

Hannah came forward to examine the necklace. ‘Gloria,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely, but isn’t it a little valuable to give to a child?’

‘Not at all,’ Gloria said. ‘Josie is ten now, a fine age. Double figures at last and I know she’ll look after the necklace. I haven’t worn it for years. It’ll do it good to be worn by someone who values it.’

‘You’re very kind,’ Hannah said and she smiled at Josie. ‘Take it up to your room, pet, and put it safe,’ she said gently.

There was a look exchanged between them, but Josie left the room without another word. Barely had the door closed when Gloria asked, ‘Hannah, what is it?’

Hannah sighed, a resigned and weary sigh. ‘It’s many things,’ she said. ‘Too much to tell. Josie will be back in a minute, the upstairs is no place to linger. The whole house is freezing apart from this room.’

Josie would have loved to linger, to have snuggled down under the covers of her bed and pretended what had happened two nights before, the night of her birthday, hadn’t happened.

She felt particularly guilty because she knew it had been partly her fault or at least that’s what had annoyed Arthur to begin with.

Hannah had said she could invite three friends to a birthday tea, but with the bad weather it would be best to choose three who lived close so they wouldn’t have so far to come. But that was all right for Mary Byrne, Cassie Ryan and Belinda Crosby, the three girls she’d made friends with at the Abbey school, all lived near her. ‘It’s a party,’ Josie had told them.

She’d never had a party before in her life and neither had the others. The war years had put an end to that, rationing not allowing much in the line of party fare, and when Josie saw the table filled with delicacies and the beautiful cake in the middle with ‘Happy Birthday’ written on it in icing and ten candles, she felt tears prickle her eyes.

The children had gone by the time Arthur came in from work, Hannah had seen to that, and she was in the kitchen cooking his tea when he came through the door. But his eyes alighted straight away on the remains of the cake. ‘What’s this?’

Hannah turned down the stove. ‘A cake I got for Josie,’ she said and closed the door so that Josie had to strain her ears to hear. ‘It’s her birthday today.’

‘And where did you get the money for such rubbish?’

‘Not from you anyway,’ Hannah snapped. ‘From her sister and brother in New York, that’s where I got it.’

‘I should say that’s for necessities, not frivolous nonsense.’

‘It’s for anything I see fit to spend it on. And a cake and a few goodies is not considered nonsense when you are just ten years old. Can’t you see, Arthur, what the child has had to put up with this year?’ Hannah hissed in a lower voice. ‘This was her first birthday without her mother and family around her. I wanted to make it a little special for her, that’s all.’

‘I still say it’s stuff and nonsense.’

‘Then say what you like,’ Hannah snapped. ‘You have your opinion and I’ll have mine.’

Josie, in the other room, sitting on a cracket pulled up before the fire, had been trying to read The Railway Children, one of the books Hannah had given her, but the voices distracted her. It was a shame, really, because she’d been enjoying the story. She’d never had a book bought for her before – not one to read just for itself. She’d had school books with extracts from stories in and poetry that you had to read and then answer questions about, but never a whole book for pleasure. And now she had two, for as well as The Railway Children, she had Black Beauty.

Arthur came into the room, rustling his evening paper impatiently, and Josie leapt to her feet. She wished the house wasn’t so cold and she could run upstairs to escape the hateful glare Arthur turned on her. Hannah saw the look, too, and her heart sank for she knew she was in for it later that night as soon as the bedroom door was closed.

Suddenly she was angry. Why should she put up with it just when Arthur had the notion, the mean-spirited man she’d married who begrudged a child a birthday cake? He wasn’t normal and she knew that as well as anyone.

She’d almost asked the priest about Arthur’s verbal attacks on her in confession, for she felt sure honouring and obeying wouldn’t include holding his wife forcibly on the bed while he spat obscenities at her. But how could she tell the priest that and explain why Arthur felt the need to do it in the first place? Nice Father Fitzgerald would be so embarrassed if she asked, while Father Milligan would probably say whatever a man did was just fine. He seemed to believe in the divine right of men to do exactly what they pleased to their wives.

So it was no good appealing to the priests for help, but she was determined if he started his obnoxious bullying behaviour that night he’d not have it all his own way. She remembered with a wry smile the old lady in Ireland who said she kept a hat pin under her pillow at night. She hadn’t understood at the time, but by God, she did now. She thought a hat pin would have been a very comforting thing to have by her side.

But Hannah had no hat pin to hand later when Arthur came into the bedroom. She was in bed, clothes pulled up to her neck, and she saw Arthur smile maliciously as he began to peel his clothes off.

Hannah would not allow herself to be intimidated by Arthur’s attitude and she spoke quickly before she lost her courage and louder than she had intended. ‘Arthur, I need to talk to you.’

‘You’ve had all evening to talk,’ Arthur almost growled.

‘I need to talk to you now,’ Hannah persisted. ‘About your behaviour. I can’t have you going on the way you do. It’s humiliating.’

Arthur, now naked, turned off the light and climbed onto the bed where he knelt and looked at her. ‘You promised to obey me,’ he said. ‘Before a priest and a full congregation.’

‘Not in this sort of thing.’

‘It didn’t stipulate. You just promised to obey.’

‘Arthur, the things you say, some of them are pure filth, dirty, disgusting words. You’d need to confess them so it can’t be right.’

‘What I say in confession is not your business, you nosy bitch,’ Arthur snapped. ‘You’re my wife and you’ll do as I say,’ and with a shot, he was upon her.

But Hannah, tensed, was ready for him and she rolled away and in a second had thrown the covers from her and was on her feet. ‘You sodding bitch,’ he said and added sneeringly, ‘You want to play games, eh? Okay, I’ll play games.’ He reached her side as he spoke and as she tried to twist away, he grabbed her arms.

‘Leave go of me.’

‘Like hell I will, you bleeding whore!’

‘I’m not! How can you say things like this?’

‘All women are the same.’

Frustrated beyond endurance at her inability to get free from Arthur’s vice-like grip, Hannah cried, ‘Well, all men aren’t the same. There’s real men and half men like you.’

The blow Arthur administered knocked Hannah off her feet. But she had no memory of falling or hitting the floor and when she came to, Arthur was bending over her. He’d been horrified that he’d hit her and then further surprised to find his penis harder and more erect than it had ever been.

Hannah, knocked dizzy by the blow, lay helpless as Arthur threw her nightie above her head and after a bit of fumbling about, entered her violently and without a word being spoken.

Hannah felt as if she had been ripped in two, for despite this not being her first time, she’d not been anywhere near ready. But she only allowed herself one little yelp of pain, remembering Josie next door, and bit her lip to stop herself crying out.

Josie had already heard the commotion in the room though, and the argument and then the skirmish and the punch and thud as Hannah’s body hit the floor. Had she not been so afraid and wary of Arthur, she might have gone in then.

And then she heard the one strangled cry and gave a sigh of relief. Thank God, Hannah was all right – well, not all right, but at least alive. She’d wondered when she’d heard that thud. And then she heard the rhythmic grunts of Arthur and knew what he was doing. You can’t live on a farm and not see animals mating, the stallion rising up to the mare, or the bull servicing the cows, or even the farm dogs mating with the bitches, not to know, but she didn’t want to hear it and she buried her head under her pillow to muffle the sounds.

Arthur’s grunts eventually stopped and he lay across Hannah, spent for the moment. So that was it, he thought, the thing talked about, that he’d wondered about, for so long. The sexual act and he’d done it. True, he’d had to hit Hannah, had to knock her down to enable him to do so and that had been regrettable. She’d asked for it in a way, but he’d never ever intended hurting her.

But now at least he’d achieved what seemed to come naturally to most people and he couldn’t see what the fuss had been about. It had given him no great pleasure and he was in no hurry to repeat the process, especially if it entailed hurting Hannah to achieve it.

He eased himself from her and slowly and painfully she got to her feet and made her way to the bathroom. Arthur let her go, for something was tugging at his memory from the books on sex he had read. He switched on the light and surveyed the floor with a slight frown on his face. There was no blood and he suddenly knew he wasn’t the first person to have sex with Hannah.

He was waiting for her when she came back. She avoided looking at him. She’d taken stock in the bathroom, looking at her bruised and swollen face and bottom lip oozing blood. In the past, Arthur had raised bruises on her arms from holding her too tight and across the top of her legs from the pressure of him on top of her. But he’d never before raised his hand to her and she wondered if this was going to be a new tactic he was going to employ and how she should deal with it if it was.

She knew separation was frowned upon by the Catholic Church. Divorce, of course, not to be contemplated at all, but she wouldn’t stay and be used as a punchball by any man. But where would she go and now with Josie’s welfare to consider too? Even Gloria might not welcome them back, because kind though she was, she strongly believed marriage was for life. Hannah had heard her discussing the moral decline of modern society many a time with Amy. She often said that war had brought a host of hasty marriages, often followed by disillusionment and divorce, and the number of fatherless children or those born to married women whose husbands had been away for years, would appear to be legion.

She never discussed these matters with Hannah, of course, that would be considered insensitive, but Hannah was well aware of her views on the subject. So her thoughts were in turmoil when she came back into the bedroom and she wasn’t prepared for the question Arthur threw at her so savagely. ‘Who was it?’

She looked up, perplexed, and he went on. ‘The man you shagged, or were there so many you can’t remember?’

‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’

‘Come, come,’ Arthur said, mocking politeness. ‘I’m no fool and you were no virgin.’

Hannah wondered for a fleeting moment if it was worth telling Arthur about the bittersweet love between her and Mike. She wondered if he’d understand how much she’d loved him and in the stolen moments they had during his short leaves how she’d ached to be kissed, held tightly, caressed and loved, and the one time when they’d both lost control. It hadn’t seemed wrong. They were engaged and due to be married and it had been just one more expression of that love.

But she knew with one glance at Arthur with his nostrils pinched tight in disapproval, his thin lips curled in disdain, and the manic light shining in his cold, brown eyes that he wouldn’t understand how it had been in a million years. She must deny it. At all costs, she must deny it. But it was too late, for her slight hesitation had been noticed and it told Arthur that he’d been right in his assumption and her spluttered denial and even indignation that he should think such a thing didn’t move him a jot.

‘You can deny that you’ve slept with another before me till you’re blue in the face,’ Arthur said. ‘But I know what I know. Incidentally, I didn’t mean to strike you tonight. I regret that and I’m sorry. It will not happen again, for although you are my wife and will be given full respect in public where we will appear as a devoted couple, the sexual side of our marriage is over. I will never touch you again. I don’t sleep with whores.’

What sexual side? Hannah was tempted to ask, but didn’t for she was just relieved that there’d be no more of it. The only deep disappointment she had was that in the travesty of a marriage she was in, there would be no child. Maybe that was the punishment she had to bear, she thought, and she thanked God for Josie.

But how could she begin telling any of this to Gloria looking at her in that kind concerned way, especially as she knew Josie would be back any moment. ‘Look at it,’ she said, ‘not two o’clock and almost as black as night. You shouldn’t have come out, not in this.’

‘Tom brought me,’ Gloria said. ‘He was coming to Erdington Village anyway, he had business in the bank, and I wanted to see you were all right.’

‘And now you see I am,’ Hannah said in a tight high voice and Gloria noticed her eyes shining with unshed tears. And because of Josie, who’d come back into the room, Gloria said, ‘Yes, I see you’re fine.’

Later that same evening she said something completely different to Amy. ‘Are you sure he’d hit her?’ Amy asked.

‘Certain and with a fist, I’d say,’ Gloria said. ‘She said she walked into a door. I ask you!’

‘Did she say how it happened, or why?’

‘She couldn’t say much at all with the child in the room.’

‘Oh no, of course not.’

‘I’ll get to the bottom of it, never you fear,’ Gloria said.

A few days later, Gloria got her wish, the snow stopped and the winds, and weeks and weeks of snows on roads and pavements that had blown into drifts began to melt. With a roar like an approaching express train, thawing snow slid from roofs to lie in sodden lumps.

It was just as hard to get around with the pavements reduced to icy sludge and many of the houses that had been just cold became damp as well. There were constant reports in The Despatch and Evening Mail about the flooding in various parts of the city.

You couldn’t wonder at it, Gloria thought, as they watched the streets turn into rivers of water and the lumps of ice or snow mingle with the rushing water. But despite the problems of the thaw, most people were glad the icy grip of that terrible winter, that did its best to paralyse the country, was coming to an end.

By the middle of March, people were on the move again, the guesthouse began to fill up, and Tom Parry went to tell Hannah she could come back to work. ‘How did she look?’ Amy quizzed Tom on his return.

He shrugged. ‘All right, I suppose.’

‘She didn’t have any marks on her?’

‘Marks?’

‘You know, marks, cuts, grazes. As if she’d had a bit of a knocking about?’

‘Oh no. Nothing like that.’

‘Well, did she look happy?’

‘Christ, Amy,’ Tom said, exasperated. ‘I only exchanged a few words with her. We didn’t touch on whether she was happy or sad.’

‘He’s useless,’ Amy complained to Gloria later.

‘No, he’s just a man,’ Gloria said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it all out of Hannah when she comes back to work.’

And she did. But she hadn’t any winkling to do, for Hannah told her; she felt she’d go mad if she didn’t tell someone. She told her everything from the honeymoon to what happened the night in February when Arthur knocked her senseless and was eventually able to copulate. ‘I think power and violence work him up,’ she said. ‘I mean, it was just like he wasn’t turned on by me or anything.’

‘Well then, girl, he needs his head looking at,’ Gloria said grimly.

‘One thing, though, Gloria,’ Hannah said. ‘He knew I wasn’t a virgin.’

‘God Almighty! Didn’t you deny it?’

‘Of course I did, but he didn’t believe me.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought he was that sexually experienced,’ Gloria said thoughtfully.

‘Well he isn’t,’ Hannah said. ‘Couldn’t be could he, even if he wanted to? No, I think he read about it. He had a book on the sexual act, I saw it when I was tidying his room.’

‘So he’s moved out of the bedroom then?’

‘Oh, aye. That next day he did that, bought a new bed and a wardrobe and tallboy, all utility of course. They couldn’t deliver them till the thaw began, so he slept on an old palliasse he found in the loft. Like I told you, he said he doesn’t sleep with whores.’

‘He doesn’t know about the baby you had?’

‘No, and he’ll never need to know either,’ Hannah said. She gave a shudder of apprehension at the thought of Arthur finding out about the illegitimate baby she’d been forced to give away years earlier. But even as she thought back to that painful time she felt a thrill of excitement run through her. She had news for Gloria. It was too early to be sure, but oh God, if it should be true! Anyway, early or not, she couldn’t keep it to herself a minute longer. She turned to face Gloria and said, ‘Oh Gloria, do you know what else? My period is late, only five days, but usually they are as regular as clockwork.’

‘God, if you are, how do you think Arthur will take it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hannah said, ‘and I don’t care either. I’m so happy I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels.’ She grasped Gloria’s hands and said, ‘Don’t you see this is one baby that won’t be taken from me, one baby I can hold in my arms and one I’ll see grow up. I can put up with anything to have that,’ and she spun the older woman around the room. Gloria shared in Hannah’s excitement and happiness. She looked at the light shining in Hannah’s eyes and thanked God that sexual problems or no sexual problems, Arthur was able to perform once and that that was hopefully enough.

Arthur was more than delighted, he was ecstatic. He’d never had much time for children before; he’d accepted he wouldn’t marry, so he never envisaged himself as a family man. But now, to think in that one attempt at proper sex, he had developed a little person, a baby growing in Hannah’s womb, was to his mind almost magical.

That was the only jarring note, that Hannah with her loose morals might have any input into this child, this innocent baby. Well, he’d do his best to see she had as little as possible to do with it when he or she was born.

Reg Banks was delighted to hear that Arthur was going to become a father. It certainly cleared up some of the lingering doubts he had about the man which were obviously unfounded. Now Reg put it to his wife that he take Arthur into a managerial position. After all, Arthur did make it to work almost every day of that awful winter, walking the whole way more than once. Loyalty like that should be rewarded.

Elizabeth thought of Arthur’s beautiful wife that she’d so taken to and agreed. ‘We’ll ask them to dinner and you can tell them then,’ she said. ‘There will have to be a hefty rise, too. Babies need so many things.’

So Arthur and Hannah, who barely spoke at home, went to dinner with the Banks. ‘Can we bring Josie?’ Hannah had asked Arthur when he’d come home with the news. ‘I hate to leave her here by herself.’

‘Of course you can’t bring her. Reg Banks just asked you and me.’

‘Well, they probably don’t know Josie’s here.’

‘She’s not going and that’s final,’ Arthur snapped. ‘Ask old Emmerson to have her.’

Hannah did and Josie was glad for she didn’t really like going anywhere with Arthur, he was so cross all the time. He didn’t seem to like Gloria any more either, but then he didn’t like a lot of people.

Arthur was resentful about Gloria because he assumed she knew all about Hannah’s past, and had been laughing up her sleeve when she pushed her at him and he took the bait. He’d have liked to have gone up to her house and throttled the names of Hannah’s lovers out of her.

At the Banks’ house that night, few would have guessed at such thoughts teeming around Arthur’s head. His manner was almost meek and he was politeness itself, solicitous of his wife’s welfare to the extent that Hannah wanted to hammer him with her handbag.

‘Are you well, my dear?’ Elizabeth asked when the men had adjourned to the study to discuss business.

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘And are you excited about the baby?’

‘Very,’ Hannah said. ‘Arthur is on at me to give up work, but I don’t want to yet. It’s early days and I would be bored at home. I mean Gloria won’t let me do anything heavy and babies are so expensive.’

‘I don’t think you need worry about that, my dear,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Reg has a very inviting proposal to put to your husband.’

And at that moment, Arthur was staring at his boss, his mouth actually agape. Reg explained his new duties, the office he would have of his own and the secretary he would share, the expense account and the Ford Prefect car that would be at his disposal, plus the hefty rise and bonus scheme.

‘I’m … I must admit I’m staggered, sir.’

‘You’re a good conscientious worker, Arthur, and I’d like to see you get on. A family man needs a car and babies, children, are expensive little devils.’

‘Yes,’ Arthur said. ‘And the money will be useful. I was hoping to engage a nurse when the baby is born, just until Hannah is on her feet.’

Reg looking at him thought again how he’d misjudged the fellow. Really, he was a husband to be proud of, cock-a-hoop at the thought of becoming a father and considerate and loving towards his wife. ‘You’ll need a first class nursing home too,’ he said. ‘People say the National Health System will be in next year where no one will have to pay for any damn thing, but it won’t be in time for this child’s birth.’

‘No, indeed.’

‘Book up a good place,’ Reg urged. ‘Early mind, for they fill up quickly. I’ll pick up the tab on that.’

‘Oh no, sir,’ Arthur protested. ‘You do enough.’

‘Nonsense! Tell you the truth, Elizabeth has really taken to your wife. She would like to think of her being looked after properly. You must let us do this for you,’ Reg said, offering Arthur a cigar.

Arthur allowed Reg to light the cigar before he spoke. ‘Very well, sir. If that’s what you and Mrs Banks wish to do. But it’s very kind of you and Hannah and I will never forget it.’

He was aware that though he did work hard, he hadn’t climbed so far or fast in the firm until he brought Hannah to meet his employers. He imagined Elizabeth Banks had great influence over her husband and she’d really taken to Hannah. Not a hint of scandal about the state of their marriage must ever reach their ears and Hannah must realise that. If ever she felt the need to unburden herself to Elizabeth Banks, she would be cutting off her nose to spite her face for they’d all suffer.

But Arthur needn’t have worried. Hannah was quite embarrassed at the amount she’d told Elizabeth the last time they met and steered the conversation into safer waters. She did tell Elizabeth, though, of her upbringing in Ireland and how she’d been raised by her sister and how she was doing the same for her young orphaned niece.

‘And how old is the child?’

‘Josie is ten now.’

‘And is she pleased about the baby?’

‘I haven’t told her yet,’ Hannah confessed. ‘Nine months is a long time. I’ll have to soon of course, pregnancy is something you can’t hide.’

Elizabeth leant forward and squeezed Hannah’s hand. ‘I envy you, my dear,’ she said. ‘Your first child. You’ll be entering a journey of discovery. Oh, Hannah, I predict you and Arthur have such a rosy future ahead of you.’

Ah yes, Hannah thought, but was wise enough not to say, ‘But my path is strewn with thorns.’ In fact, she was wise enough to say nothing at all; Elizabeth was quite satisfied with the smile she gave. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘They’ll be out in a minute and Reg will start roaring for coffee,’ and Hannah followed Elizabeth into the kitchen.

Chapter Seven

The first months of Hannah’s pregnancy brought to mind the last time she’d been pregnant and how different it had been. For a start, she’d loved Mike, loved him with all her heart and soul. She had met him in the spring of 1941 at the Hippodrome in Leeds where she’d gone dancing with Tilly, the young northern girl who shared her bedroom. He told her he joined up when he was nineteen and had been one of the lucky ones rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk. But that was the last evening of a very short leave and though Hannah liked the young soldier very much, she wasn’t sure what he thought of her, yet the fact that he was Catholic and of Irish descent like herself had drawn them together. And the man was so handsome, with his blond hair and startling blue eyes. He had full lips and a determined chin and skin slightly tanned from the outdoor life and Hannah readily agreed to write to him.

However, the letters, which started off in friendship, grew more ardent as Mike and Hannah got to know each other better and when they met, over a year later, Hannah was sure she loved him. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1943, when he was invalided home, that Hannah realised the full strength of her feelings and she knew then that Mike Murphy was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

Mike’s injuries were serious enough to keep him out of the army for a while, although not life-threatening, and Hannah spent every spare minute that the hotel and hospital would allow, sitting by his side and later at his house, helping him recuperate.

She’d cried when he’d been declared fit enough to rejoin his unit but was pleased and relieved that he was at a training camp for a few months. Mike told her that he felt they were training for something specific and Hannah declared she didn’t care if he did that till the end of the war. It would suit her fine.

Then one evening in late January 1944, he held her tight and told her he didn’t think it would be long before his unit’s training would be over and then God alone knew where they’d be sent. Fear clutched at Hannah and Mike comforted her and as their passions took over, neither of them could have stopped the inevitable happening.

He’d been worried about repercussions of their passion, she remembered, but it was the last day of his leave and they could do nothing about it, but he clutched her tightly before he left and said, ‘Let’s get married, Hannah.’

‘Why, yes. We always said …’

‘No, no I mean on my next leave,’ he’d urged insistently. ‘I want to keep you safe. What if anything should happen to me? I mean what if you were to become pregnant?’

Hannah couldn’t bear the look of anxiety on Mike’s face. He had enough to worry about without adding her to his list. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said confidently. ‘It never happens the first time.’

‘Maybe not, but what about the next time, the time after that?’

‘Perhaps there won’t be a next time,’ Hannah said with a smile. ‘Do you think I’m some sort of sex maniac?’

‘No, but I do know if you love me just half as much as I love you, you’ll be unable to help yourself. No,’ Mike said firmly. ‘I’ve decided. Before I leave, I’ll buy you a ring, not the engagement ring I would want for you, that will come later, but one to sort of mark our decision. We won’t tell anyone just yet, because the marriage will have to be done in the registry office.’

‘Registry office!’ Hannah repeated and her heart plummeted. She knew that the Catholic Church would consider it no marriage at all.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Mike said. ‘Really I do. My parents won’t like it either and that’s why we must keep it secret, but things are up in the air at the moment. I sometimes don’t hear till the last moment that I’ve got leave. We couldn’t do a big church thing. We’ll have to leave that till after the war. This is just to safeguard you.’

‘Mike, it’s all right.’

‘No, Hannah, it’s not all right,’ Mike replied firmly. He took her in his arms and held her tight against him. He wished they could stay like that. That he could marry her that day, that instant. If anything should happen to his beloved Hannah because of that night and he was not there to protect her … It didn’t bear thinking about. No, she would have his ring on her finger at the earliest possible moment.

Hannah saw Mike’s face furrow as the thoughts raced through his mind and she held his face between her hands and kissed his lips. ‘All right, Mike, we’ll get married whenever and wherever you want,’ she said. ‘But please stop worrying about me.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘when I know when my next spot of leave is, I’ll phone the hotel and tell you. You book the registry office for the next day, I’ll bring Luke with me if he can get off too, and you bring a friend along as a witness and with the deed done, we’ll go and see my parents.’

‘They’ll go mad.’

‘If they do, it will be me they blame,’ Mike said. ‘But they’d get over it and they do like you.’

‘I like them,’ Hannah said, and she did like Mike’s parents, Colm and Bridie, who obviously doted on Mike, their only child. ‘When I think of some of the girls Mike could have chosen,’ his mother had confided quite early on in their courtship, ‘I’m glad he’s fallen for someone like you, a nice Catholic girl from a respectable family.’

‘I love Mike,’ Hannah had said simply. ‘And I will spend my life making him happy.’

‘I know you will,’ Bridie had said. ‘And perhaps in time and if God wills it, you’ll have a fine family. We wanted a host of children you know, but we only had Mike. Ah, but then he’s been a son in a million.’

However cross or disappointed they might be over the clandestine marriage, Hannah knew they would not risk alienating their only child. Mike was right, they’d get over it. Not so her sister Frances who would be mortified and would never countenance such a marriage. But then, she was miles away, there was no need at all for her to be told anything. Mike had no need to tell her to keep it a secret, she’d keep it to herself all right.

There was one person she did tell though; her friend, Tilly. She showed her the ring that Mike had bought her, hanging on a silver chain around her neck, and told her what she and Mike intended to do on his next leave.

‘Will you come, Tilly, and be a witness?’

‘Course I will,’ Tilly said. ‘I’d be honoured. When will it be? Has he any idea?’

Hannah shook her head. ‘He’s phoning me here when he knows,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a word with the girls who man the desk and they are quite prepared to take a message.’

Mike’s letters came regularly and as February 1944 drew to a close, Mike mentioned that he might get a longer leave than he thought.

‘Embarkation then,’ Tilly said. ‘They always give them a long leave before shipping them out. People say there’s summat brewing on the south coast.’

Hannah hoped it was just a rumour. In her opinion, Mike had done enough.

One morning in the middle of March, Hannah felt sick as she got out of bed and had to run to the lavatory on the landing that all the indoor female staff shared. ‘What was that all about?’ Tilly asked on her return.

Hannah shrugged. ‘Must have eaten something that disagreed with me. I still don’t feel too hot. I’ll not be wanting breakfast this morning.’

The sickness had passed by lunchtime and Hannah was glad of it. But the next morning it happened again. Tilly was waiting for her when she returned the third morning, wiping her mouth on her handkerchief, her face drawn and pale so that her eyes looked even bigger. ‘Don’t bite me head off, Hannah,’ Tilly said. ‘But you couldn’t be pregnant, could you?’

She saw from Hannah’s face that she could indeed, but also that the thought hadn’t crossed her mind till now. ‘Have you and Mike … you know. Have you done owt?’

Hannah gave a brief reply. ‘Only the once.’

‘Only needs the once though, don’t it?’ Tilly said. ‘When was your monthlies?’

Hannah had never taken much notice, but now forced to remember, she realised with horror, ‘New Year’s Eve. Don’t you remember we were up to our eyes serving that big dinner and I had to go running to my room?’

‘That’s right,’ Tilly said. ‘God, Hannah. Ain’t you seen anything since then?’

‘No,’ Hannah’s voice was a mere whisper.

‘Then I’d say you’re expecting all right, girl. Best write and tell him.’

‘No,’ Hannah said. ‘He’ll be home soon. I don’t want to write that in a letter for the censor to see. He’s due a leave soon.’

‘Someone will notice and they’ll throw you out,’ Tilly warned. ‘It’s happened afore. Oh, you needn’t think I’d ever tell on you, Hannah,’ she said, seeing the aghast look on Hannah’s face. ‘I’ll cover for you, but if they should guess like.’

Hannah pressed her nightie across her stomach. ‘No one will know. I’m not showing yet.’

‘It isn’t that,’ Tilly said. ‘They’ll hear you being sick every morning and put two and two together.’

But she could do nothing about it and each morning would find her galloping for the lavatory and feeling washed out for the rest of the morning.

She noticed the kitchen staff and the cook looking at her askance a few times, so when eventually she got the news that Mike would be home in late April for two days and she could go ahead and book the registry office, she was ecstatic. ‘So he’s coming back, is he?’ the cook remarked on hearing the news. And with a pointed look at Hannah’s stomach, she added, ‘And not afore time, I’d say.’

‘We’re going to be married.’

‘Not afore time there and all.’

‘They knew,’ she said to Tilly.

‘Well, they’re not saying owt,’ she told Hannah. ‘That’s good of them. If you hadn’t been so well liked, you’d have had your cards by now.’

She couldn’t wait to be married, to become Mrs Michael Murphy. She loved the sound of it and hugged herself with excitement as the day drew near.

She’d bought a full dress that would hide her slightly thickening waist. It was a shimmering blue and made of silk that cost her a fortnight’s wages and all her clothing coupons for a month, as well as some of Tilly’s, but she told Tilly she only intended to marry the once. Tilly went with her to choose her hat, shoes and handbag, the excitement mounting with each purchase.

‘Every time I think about it, I feel all jittery,’ she confessed to Tilly.

‘You better calm down,’ Tilly warned. ‘You’ll be a bag of nerves when the day arrives and won’t be able to say “I do”.’

‘Oh yes, I will,’ Hannah said with a laugh. ‘I’m practising already.’

Two days before the wedding, a letter came from Mike. He was distraught, even his writing was scrawling and disjointed, and Hannah’s heart fell as she read it.

Darling Hannah

I’m getting one of the kitchen staff to post this in the hope of getting it past the censors. All leave has been suspended or cancelled, no one is sure which. The camp is being dismantled so we’re on the move somewhere. Some say south. No one really knows. I’ll write more when I know. I love you, darling, but you’d be better to cancel the registry office.

‘Write and tell him about the baby,’ Tilly advised.

‘What can he do?’

‘Damned all maybe, but he has a right to know.’

So Hannah wrote and Mike’s frantic reply came by return of post.

Oh Hannah, my darling. I’m so sorry. What you’ve had to cope with all alone! I’ll see my commanding officer, plead extenuating circumstances, tell him all about you. Oh darling, something must be done. Even if I have just a twenty-four hour pass, I’ll make it and we’ll find a priest. It will be all right.

But Hannah and Mike’s problem did not move the commanding officer one jot. They were planning an invasion on a scale never before imagined. What was one soldier and his pregnant girlfriend in the great scheme of things?

Mike Murphy and his unit were shipped south.

‘It’s the big push everyone was talking about, isn’t it?’ Hannah asked fearfully. ‘Oh God, Tilly, what will I do?’

‘Go and see his parents. You get on with them all right.’

‘They don’t even know we were to be married. The ring Mike gave me is not an engagement ring.’

‘But they like you. You’ve always said that.’

‘They did like me. What if they think I’m trying to trap Mike?’

Tilly said nothing. She knew that parents of sons, especially only sons, often behaved in an irrational way towards girlfriends and to pregnant ones they could be even worse. But something had to be done.

‘Could you go home?’ Tilly asked.

‘To Ireland?’ Hannah gave a shudder. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking me. God, it would be awful!’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t bring that shame, that disgrace, on my sister and her family.’

‘Then where?’

‘God, I don’t know.’

Hannah sat with her head in her hands, sobs shook her body, and Tilly’s arms went around her and she held her tight. But she couldn’t tell her not to cry, not to worry, because by God, she had reason to do both.

Hannah didn’t expect Mike home. He could say nothing, but rumours flew about; army camps were emptying all over the country and almost the entire force of the United Kingdom and its allies were all assembled on the south coast for the make or break invasion.

Mike wrote again in mid May:

I’ll write to my parents and explain, I’ll tell them the child is mine and you are to go to them until I come back and then we’ll be married. It’s all right, my darling. You will be fine and I’ll be home before you know it.

‘He’s writing to his mother and father,’ Hannah told Tilly. ‘They’ll believe him.’

‘Will you go to them?’

‘No. I’ll wait until they send for me. I don’t know how long letters take these days.’

Mike’s letter did take time to reach his parents. It took him a while to even find time to write it for the whole camp was in an uproar. He’d never seen so many people concentrated in one relatively small area, nor so many tanks, jeeps, army trucks, cars and motorcycles littering the roads.

The whole area was a no-go area for civilians and those in the small farms and villages were trapped there too. Orders were given by one officer, only to be quickly rescinded by another. It was mayhem. Everyone was in a state of flux and rumours abounded.

There was little time for letter writing and certainly not for writing the type of letter he had to write to his parents. They had to help Hannah and to hell with the neighbours. His mind was constantly filled with Hannah and the child – his child – and worry about her filled his mind through the day and invaded his sleep at night.

The letter did arrive at Colm and Bridie’s home eventually towards the end of May. Bridie and Colm were shocked. They’d thought Hannah such a respectable girl for such a thing to happen. They’d got to know her so well, especially when Mike hadn’t been so well. ‘Mind,’ Colm said, trying to be fair. ‘Our Mike must have had a hand in it.’

‘Aye,’ Bridie agreed. ‘But he’s a man. Everyone knows that it’s the girl’s place to keep feelings in check.’

‘Aye,’ Colm agreed with emotion, remembering his own frustrated courtship days. ‘But still we’ll have to help the girl. It’s what Mike wants and after all, the child she’s carrying is our grandchild.’

Bridie agreed with her husband, but with reservations. She had a horror of the girl coming here with her belly sticking out and the neighbours knowing that there wasn’t even an understanding between her and their son – not that they were aware of, anyway. It would somehow besmirch their son to allow it. And yet Mike had asked them to take the girl in so they had no choice. The damage was done now.

‘Shall I go and see her?’ Bridie said. ‘Or write? I don’t know which would be best.’

But in the end she did neither, for in the early hours of 6th June, Mike was housed in a troopcarrier on the choppy waters of the Channel heading for Normandy. The short summer night was fully over; the sky was grey and the light dusky. It was cold too, the wind damp and chilly and the men shivered.

Mike was as frightened and nervous as the next, his stomach turning over at what lay ahead, but above everything else he worried about Hannah and how she was coping and hoped she was now safe with his parents. When he was out of this damned carrier and set up in camp somewhere, he’d write to Hannah, stressing his love and concern for her and their baby. Oh God, he wished he was there with her, supporting her.

‘All right?’ said Luke’s voice low in his ear.

‘Not bad.’

‘Still worrying about your bird?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I’m the love them and leave them variety, me,’ Luke said. ‘Though I have to say your Hannah’s a canny lass. Don’t worry, we’ll soon knock this lot into touch. I’m sure your folks will do the decent thing and take care of Hannah till she has the kid. You can still get married if you’re determined on it, just be a bit later, that’s all, and I’ll still stand you the meal I promised you.’

‘Thanks, Luke,’ Mike said warmly. ‘I’m really glad we’ve been in this together from the beginning.’

‘And we’ll stay together, mate, and one day soon we’ll be drinking a pint back in dear old Blighty, you’ll see,’ Luke said and Mike grasped his extended hand and shook it. ‘It’s a deal,’ he replied.

‘Stand ready!’ came the order from a young and nervous corporal and Mike looked about him. Some of the faces were apprehensive, some plain scared, and some of the raw recruits, who didn’t yet know what it was about, were excited. Christ!

The light had brightened a little, the dawn hidden by the clouds a pearly grey as the carrier got near and nearer to the sandy shore and the men stood tense and ready.

Above them, they could see and hear the German fighter planes. The constant tattoo from their automatic guns beat against their heads and was mixed with the shouts and screams as they found their mark. Mike saw soldiers wading forward suddenly jerk and then lie still, face down in the scummy sea. God, it was carnage! Another bloody Dunkirk. He was gutwrenchingly scared and he saw from the look on Luke’s face that he felt the same.

And then the carrier stuck in the sand, the sides lowered and the men were out. Waist-deep in freezing water, their rifles held above their heads, they tried to hurry for the beaches and dodge the planes trying to prevent them.

Soldiers ahead of them on the beaches had already set up anti-aircraft guns. The noise was tremendous, the roar of planes, the whine of bullets being answered by the rat-tat-tat of anti-aircraft fire, the shouts and the cries and screams of the men masking the noise of the approaching bombers.

Mike staggered to the shore, which he saw was littered with bodies. He exchanged a glance with Luke who was beside him, but before he was able to speak, a bomb blew Mike Murphy to kingdom come and blasted his friend into a hole beside him.

When Bridie Murphy went into the hall and found her husband lying still on the floor with the opened telegram in his hand, her own heart nearly stopped beating. She prised the telegram from her husband’s fingers and on reading it, knew that she’d lost her husband as well as her son. The bad heart the doctor had warned him about had finally given up.

She phoned her older sister, Christine, from the telephone box down the road, before she rang the doctor, knowing that Colm was way past a doctor’s help and her sister would know what to do.

Christine, unmarried and older than Bridie by five years, did know. It was a good job she was there to arrange a funeral for after the initial shock, Bridie had been so overwhelmed with grief she’d been under sedation ever since, unable to give any thought or concern to Hannah and her plight.

Christine was determined, despite Bridie’s condition, that the old man at least would have the dignity of being laid to rest in a proper grave and with a full Requiem Mass. Mike’s remains were probably left on the beach, like many more.

She was worried though about her sister. She had totally gone to pieces and she knew she couldn’t be left alone and decided to take her back to Wiltshire to live with her. She could decide what to do about the house later. Houses would, she guessed, be at a premium after the war and she wouldn’t advise her to sell it yet awhile. But she could let it out. She didn’t have to concern herself about the details of it. She’d instruct her solicitor to find a reputable agent as soon as possible. Unoccupied houses ran quickly to rack and ruin and anyway, with so many being bombed out of their homes, empty houses were in danger of being invaded by squatters.

She came upon Mike’s letter on the mantelpiece as she began packing some of her sister’s things and read it dispassionately.

Mike wrote that this girl, Hannah Delaney, was carrying his child. How did he know that? It could have been anyone’s bastard she was carrying, but she’d picked him to carry the can for it. Christine had heard there were plenty of girls doing that these days.

There’d obviously been no talk of the engagement, or a wedding before the girl became pregnant, because Bridie would have written to tell her. Well, Mike was no longer able to defend himself and her sister she knew was in no fit state to look after this girl, whoever she was. She was in no state to look after anyone or anything, and she screwed up the letter into a ball and threw it into the fire.

‘God, Hannah, when would he have time to write?’ Tilly said sternly to her tearful friend when there had been no letters for over a week.

By then the whole country knew that Operation Overlord, or D-Day, had begun on 6th June 1944 and was deemed a success. ‘They’re advancing in enemy-held territory,’ Tilly went on. ‘He can hardly say, “Hold on a minute,” and get the whole company to stop while he writes a note to you. Even if he managed to write, where the hell would he post it? It’s not like at the camp where there’s a handy military pillar box nearby.’

Hannah knew all Tilly said was true and she tried to make herself believe that any day there would be a letter, maybe a clutch of them, and she’d know he was safe. She wondered if he’d ever even had time to write to his parents. She’d expected to hear from them by now too. Something would have to be decided and soon about her pregnancy, but worry about Mike seemed to loom over everything.

There had been an absence of letters for almost three weeks when Hannah was summoned to the supervisor Miss Henderson’s office. She’d been expecting it for some time for she was five months pregnant and had had to let out her work and leisure clothes to their fullest extent and that morning she’d seen the supervisor’s eyes on her as she served breakfasts.

The supervisor looked at her over the top of the glasses people said she just wore for effect. Hannah had had little dealings with her since the day she’d been interviewed for the job. She hadn’t liked her manner then and she didn’t like it any better now.

Miss Henderson was thin, not just slim, stick thin, and she wore suits with fitted jackets to emphasise her shape. Everything about her was thin; her long face, her nose, her lips, even her voice had a thin snap to it.

Beside her, Hannah felt big and ungainly. But she raised her head when Miss Henderson said disdainfully, ‘You’ve been putting on weight lately, Miss Delaney?’

‘Yes, Miss Henderson.’

‘Are you expecting a child?’

There was no point denying it. ‘Yes, Miss Henderson.’

‘And how long, pray, did you intend to keep this information to yourself?’

‘I don’t know, Miss Henderson.’

‘You don’t know, I see. Who is the father of the child?’

Hannah thought of telling Miss Henderson to mind her own business. She shrugged, what did it matter now? ‘A soldier, Miss Henderson. Name of Mike … Michael Murphy.’

‘Married?’ Miss Henderson snapped in a voice full of scorn.

Hannah was shocked. ‘No, Miss Henderson.’

‘So he can marry you?’

‘We were to be married, Miss Henderson. Everything was booked. But then he got shipped south and then overseas.’

‘So now what will you do, for you realise you can’t stay here?’ Miss Henderson said. ‘You’ll upset and embarrass our guests, so when I tell you to pack your things, where will you go?’

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