by Maggie Ford
On Sunday Ben promised to take her on a tug early in the morning. This was not normally allowed but he’d wangled it; they would go just a short way along the river and back. She was looking forward to sharing a little of what he did day after day, to smelling the warm whiff of oil and sooty reek of smoke. She would stand there with Ben, who would have one arm on the steering wheel and one around her, the breeze in her face. Then they would come back here and pop up to the church to see the vicar about calling the banns. Then after that, weather permitting, they’d go on to Southend, on to the beach.
Putting all aside she concentrated on Josie’s worries. Josie asked if she thought her selfish to be questioning her feelings towards Arthur Monk and her yearning for just a little of that life she was describing.
‘If you want my honest opinion,’ she told Josie, a little cautiously so as not to upset her, ‘I think you’re just reaching for the unreachable. If you did come anywhere near it, you’d be a fish out of water.’ She cringed at both clichés, was in danger of adding more and had to steel herself in the darkness to find words that sounded halfway philosophical and wise. It was a battle she was swiftly losing. ‘You see, Jo, it’s like asking oil and water to mix. What I mean to say is I know we don’t exactly live in poverty, we’re not poor by some people’s standards, but we are, or would seem to be to those sort of people you admire. We both have different standards, and I’m sorry to say it Josie, but their standards … or more their morals aren’t like ours. They stay up till all hours, they live a free and easy life, get up to all sorts of things that would horrify people like us. I mean, look at film stars. There’s always scandals about divorces and remarrying and things. And some of the dresses those sort wear, well, nothing’s left to the imagination, is it? You wouldn’t fit in. Ever. You’d be made to feel a laughing stock. What society people are is born in them. They’d spot you coming. Honestly, Josie, I’d say forget all that. Concentrate on your nice young man. By what you’ve told me he sounds as if he’d make you a really good husband one day, But you’re too young yet of course to think of getting married. You must be certain of your own mind and that the man you have is the one you really love. Why don’t you bring him home to meet Mum and Dad? Perhaps that way you get your mind made up to what you really want, or what’s the best and sensible way for you. I don’t think you ought to go getting all excited about what’s only wishful thinking after all.’
She was coming to realise that she must sound like a Dutch aunt giving out all this good advice, so she shut up abruptly, merely to finish on, ‘Well, think about it, Josie,’ and hurriedly turned over with a whispered ‘Goodnight, and hope I’ve not hurt your feelings.’
In the darkness she heard Josie murmur, ‘No,’ and then ‘Goodnight.’
It was easy fo Connie tosay. She was settled, with her wedding all planned, with no ambition but to be married and bring up a family, no doubt rejoicing that she could give up working as girls usually did when they got married. Being a housewife and in time a mother was work enough.
All Connie had said, she had said with a sincere heart. There was no more sincere heart than Connie’s. But she was wrong in this instance. It wasn’t so easy to forget a dream you’ve had for so long it has become a part of you. But there was something else too, something that wouldn’t affect Connie but would her. Annie and Pam had gone, Danny spent most of his free time with his girl, and was seldom at home. Five weeks from now when Connie would be married and living in London, there would only be herself, rattling around in this room that once held the four of them. It felt alarming. She was quickly beginning to hate this house, this fast-emptying house she had once loved so much. She could hardly wait for tomorrow and to be out of it for a few hours, lording it up London in her new dress. She wished she need never return, apart from missing Mum and Dad, and Danny of course when he was there.
As it was with Josie, so it was with Danny, and even their father. It was as if the house had lost its soul. Danny made all sorts of excuses not to take Lily home; he spent much of his time at her house with her parents. She was an only child and made much of by them. It made him feel wanted seeing the way they behaved about her, and him too: ‘She’s a very good girl,’ they’d say as though putting her up for the marriage market. Yes, she was a good girl, and very lovely, delicate and lovely, so that he was sometimes scared to hug her too strongly in case he broke something. Yes, it would be nice to marry her, but he wanted to bide his time for a while yet. Meanwhile he was having to make all sorts of excuses why he wasn’t taking her to his home any more, evading questions like, ‘Are you going off me, darling? I sort of feel you are.’ He swore he wasn’t and said the only reason for not taking her home was all the preparations for the coming wedding. It seemed to suffice for the time being. Later, things at home might revert to normal, but it felt it was going to be a long time before that happened.
No one felt the atmosphere more than Daniel himself. Peggy went around all silent. She sided with him on the business of – no question of putting a name to it, but it didn’t stop the hurt Peggy must be feeling caused by her own daughter.
It was a relief to be out of the house sometimes. Out on the boat with his brothers about him, and his son and an extra lad to stay in the bawley while the four of them raked the mud for its harvest, Daniel could forget his life and all that had happened in such a swift time. Yes, he could stare at the horizon and forget all about home troubles. It was calming, seeing the low hills of Kent and the deep break where the River Medway pierced them, the North Foreland of Thanet, a headland reappearing as a misty promontory between water and sky, then the bare line of the North Sea meeting a cloud-streaked sky; on this side of the estuary the blunt protuberance of Foulness before land was lost from sight running up towards the seaside towns of Essex and Suffolk. He could stare at it all and pretend to himself – after a double out here on the mud flats, the wicker baskets full to the brim with cockles, as heavy as a man could carry, the holiday trade already stepping up – that he’d return to a home that was busy and happy. It was only as he came into the Ray to chug quietly up Leigh Creek that the reality of home life would hit him again and he’d be sullen and silent, incapable of saying a sociable word to anyone.
For now he felt good, the sting of a stiff clean breeze on his face, its salt taste on his lips full of the tang of seaweed and the cockles they had already gathered. The tide had turned, was rolling back in; this would be their last haul before turning for home if done quickly. Just enough time remained to fill the final two baskets before the water reached them and got too deep for them to rake. They mustn’t be greedy, and with the mud covered, the trail, the seed of the cockle, would be washed away. It must be left here to grow into young.
The four skilled men worked as a team, each raking at the mud towards a central point, then starting again a little further to the left until a whole circular area was raked. The smaller shellfish got thrown back to grow on, conserving the stocks.
‘Right!’ Daniel bellowed, as three of them went down the narrow-runged ladder. As he was about to step on to it after them, Daniel glanced up. ‘Bloody hell!’
‘What is it, Dad?’ To his ears came the faint puff-puff of a small engine.
Ignoring his son, Daniel scrambled back, grabbed for the binoculars hanging against the bulwark and trained them on a boat passing a short way beyond in deeper water with its brown sails unfurled. Even before he clapped the binoculars to his eyes he had already identified it. Intuitively he knew whose it was. Shrimpers, their craft anchored out in the Ray, each with sails furled looking identical to other folk, could row out unerringly to their own boat in the darkness of early morning without hesitation. Many in a close-knit fishing community could identify the boats of others. Daniel identified this one immediately.
‘Tauntin’ us!’ he roared. ‘Damned swine’s tauntin’ us. That stinkin’, Godforsaken shrimp-catcher’s got the bloody audacity ter come out within range of us out ’ere.’
�
��Who is it?’ Danny asked, but he already knew by yet another string of rich epithets.
‘You know who I’m talking on. Takin’ the bloody piss out of us. I bet he’s set his bloody snivellin’ son up in a place with that … with her.’
Unable to utter his daughter’s name, even now, Daniel threw down the binoculars and clambered blindly over the side of the tilted vessel, with a vague notion to race dementedly through the incoming water, swimming the rest of the way to the shrimper to do physical battle. Even as the men on the mud watched, rather than let himself down by the free swinging ladder, a slow way to alight, he leaped the full six feet from the boat, landed on an unexpectedly firm area of sand amid the mud and went over in an awkward heap, letting out a cry of rage and pain.
‘Aah! Me ankle! I’ve done it in. Sod that damned Bryant.’ Sitting in the mud, splattered all over, clutching his left ankle, he was rocking in pain.
Danny and the others were at his side immediately, helping him up, and back on board. It was a long job. By the time Daniel Bowmaker was over the side with a good deal more swearing and cursing than might be necessary, more out of fury than pain, sitting on the deck nursing his throbbing ankle, the rakes and the two still-unfilled baskets hauled up too, the shrimping boat had gone and the incoming tide was washing an inch or so deep around the Steadfast’s hull.
‘That bugger can’t leave me in peace,’ swore Daniel, and glared at the horizon, now empty of shrimping boats though busy with other shipping. The shrimpers had departed for cleaner waters; a long haul now for many years with the oil-polluted Thames driving the shrimps further round the coast. That point seemed to have escaped Daniel, blaming this injury solely on his bitter enemy whose boat he had just seen.
‘But for him, the sod, I wouldn’t’ve ricked my bloody ankle,’ he raged as they waited for the Steadfast to come afloat. ‘All these years and he’s still driving me to drink cold tea! And two on my baskets empty still because on him. An’ my own daughter sides in with ’em. I’ll see her dead afore I ever see her set foot in my house again, treacherous little bitch.’
Danny let his father rail on. The man was in pain; saw himself abused and insulted by the mere sight of his adversary’s boat passing so close by, awakening old scores. It eased him to strike out at anything and anyone, Pam leaving as she had without a backward glance, or one word of apology or regret. Danny couldn’t say who was to blame, Pam or Dad. His father nursed an old hate that for him would never heal, and Pam hadn’t been born at the time of the trouble. All Danny knew was that his father would make life hell for everyone at home with his hurt ankle and his hurt pride, would be impossible to live with for the next week or so.
As his dad said after they had got him home and bound his now-swollen ankle which Dr Freeman said was a torn ligament, bad as any break to heal, after they had got Dad to bed where he wouldn’t stomp about and make it worse as he was sure to do, he just hoped he’d be fit for Connie and Ben’s wedding in four Saturdays’ time.
Chapter Eleven
After Connie left, Pam stood gazing about the living room-cum-kitchen, one of two rooms she and George had found themselves at the top of a house in New Road. Lovely Georgian houses they were, but that was where the similarity to good living ended. The top two rooms of this house were no more than attic rooms, furnished and let out to those who could afford nothing else. Still, they were home for now. Perhaps, Pam hoped, they might be able to afford something better one day.
These two rooms had only come to them out of the good graces of his parents, because she and George possessed hardly a bean between them. Mr Bryant, whom she had seen only from a distance for much of her life, when she had come face to face with him proved to be a mild sort of man, grey, thin, and of medium height like his son, with a moustache that had grown bristly and strong with the years: the only strong-looking thing about him, she’d mused. How he and her father had ever got into a fight beggared the imagination, he looked too frail. But then, perhaps all those years ago he hadn’t been so. While not too approving of what the pair of them had done, he had at least stood by his son to some extent, more than her father had done by her, enough to pay for the small, plain, registry office wedding with no frills, no reception, and with just him and his wife there. No one of her own had been present except Connie and Ben who’d attended without telling anyone else.
One hand caressing her growing stomach, Pam thought about her sister’s visit, paid before she went up to London to see Ben, having been allowed that Saturday morning off from work for the occasion. Connie had come once a week since Pam had left home, saying it was no one’s business but hers what she did and always asking was there anything she needed. And she always brought a little something with her, a loaf of bread, a tin of corned beef or fruit, half a pound of butter – something well beyond Pam’s reach – best butter from Wainwright’s Dairies with its distinctive daisy imprint from the butter bats that shaped it into a brick. Pam accepted her sister’s gifts with humble grace and her visits with tearful longing for things to have turned out so much better than they had.
Over a cup of tea, Connie had talked of the coming wedding – her and Ben’s coming wedding. Not intending to provoke envy and regret, Connie could not help but talk of the dress she had chosen, the two-tiered cake Mum was making, the car they had booked to take them up to the church, her amusement at everyone else having to negotiate the steep climb up to it on foot. ‘I just hope it doesn’t decide to rain,’ she said and had then turned serious. ‘Pam. I’ve decided. whether anyone likes it or not, you’re invited to the wedding service. You and George.’
Pam had vigorously shaken her head, aghast at visions of the look on the faces of her parents seeing her and George sitting there in the church as they came in, or turning to see the pair of them enter. She couldn’t begin to imagine what they’d do, but she did know that the atmosphere would be such that she would run straight out again.
‘No, Connie. Nice of you to invite us, but it’d spoil your whole day.’
‘Don’t be silly. I know it would be difficult asking you both to the reception afterwards, with everyone so on top of everyone else …’
‘No,’ she’d cut in. ‘But I’m glad you asked me. It makes me feel a bit better, as though I’ve got an ally.’
Connie had put down her finished tea and took both Pam’s hands in hers. ‘You’ll always have allies in me and Ben. And when we’re married we’ll come down here as often as possible to see you and George. Dad was wrong in what he did. But you know him, he won’t change. But soon you and George will have your own family and move on. We all move on. But look, it’s my wedding, Pam. I can ask who I like to it. Neither of you have done anything wrong except to love each other and you getting pregnant in the hope that it’d mend something.’
Still she’d shaken her head, obdurate. ‘That’s not how it works. You’ll spoil your own wedding day having me there, and you won’t forget it for the rest of your days. But I will be thinking of you. And thanks, Connie.’
Connie had finally left with a parting shot. ‘We’ll come straight across from the wedding as soon as we can, to see you, and I’ll still be wearing my wedding dress so you can see me in it. And I’ll send you a piece of cake too.’
She had nodded her thanks as she saw Connie out, thinking to herself that the cake would choke her if she took one morsel of it, made by Mum’s hand. Mum’s hand had turned her out as much as had her father’s. She’d stood by and watched her leave, without so much as a farewell smile on her face. No, the cake would choke her.
Leaving during the morning to go up to London, Josie had no idea of the small drama that had unfolded in the late afternoon with Dad injuring himself and ending up ordered to bed to rest a torn ligament. So the anxiety that dogged her not to be too late getting home that evening and incurring his wrath was to some extent needless. When Arthur spoke about having a meal afterwards she could see it going on until it would be a rush for her train, a train that on Saturday nigh
ts seemed to take ages with people going home after a night out alighting in droves at every station along the route.
‘We’ll make it sharp,’ he promised about the meal as the doorman for the balcony and the gallery, the gods, the cheapest seats, let them in with crowds still lining up behind them. Some had no hope of getting in, the Noel Coward play was so popular.
The foyer as they entered was bright and exciting, full of people and noise. Josie stood waiting to one side while Arthur joined the long queue for the tickets. She felt at ease, good in her silky green dress, a piece of the material of which she had sewn double to make a stole for her shoulders.
A group of young people, obviously with money, had alighted from a couple of taxis and were crowding in, in couples but with two men apparently unattached for they came in together. The men, top-hatted, each in evening dress, each carrying a slim, silver-topped cane, looked out of place without a girl on their arm. And one was quite drunk, Josie was sure. She was aware of staring when one of them, the one who wasn’t drunk, caught her eye and winked broadly at her.
Josie was on the point of lowering her eyes quickly, caught staring, but somehow she didn’t. Wide-eyed, she stared back. The young man smiled. Josie smiled too, shyly. Before she could take a breath he was at her side, his slim cane held in both white-gloved hands.
‘I say, not on your own, are you?’
‘No …’ she managed, coughed awkwardly, started again. ‘I’m … I’m waiting for my friend.’
‘Girl or chap?’
‘Chap.’
‘Ah. Well now, not engaged to him, or anything like that?’
‘No, not really. But we have been going out together for a while.’
‘Pity, that.’
From the small group came a woman’s impatient call. ‘Nigel, dear, we’ll miss the beginning. Don’t want to cause a disruption finding our seats as the curtain rises.’