Mrs Flannagan's Trumpet

by Catherine Cookson

  That’s all there was to it. If the coastguard hadn’t met up with Mr Reade that’s all there would have been to it and he would have been dead by now and his ghost likely would have been scampering up and down that passage with that fellow. Funny, but he couldn’t get that man out of his mind.

  ‘Where have they got him, I mean the Belgian?’

  ‘Where he will be safe for many years to come, and not only him, the captain of the boat that did the ferrying under the guise of carrying legitimate cargo, and his crew along with him.’ She paused now and patted the hand that was unbandaged, saying, ‘You did something, Eddie, when you tackled that man, for the others were merely pawns. He was the organiser, the brains, the great deceiver, for from what I hear he had the manners and actions of a gentleman.’

  He looked from his mother to Penny, then back to her again as he said, ‘Did they get all the children?’

  There was a pause before she answered, ‘Yes, all of them this time; but there have been other cargoes that weren’t so fortunate.’

  It was Penny who broke the silence that followed. In a small voice, she said, ‘You’ve been in all the papers, Eddie. They called you, “Young Dock Hero”.’

  ‘Young Dock Hero.’ He didn’t like the title, neither the word Dock nor Hero. He certainly didn’t feel like any hero, and when that knife had gone into him…On the memory he went to draw a deep breath but found his chest restricted and, looking down at the bandages and his strapped arm, he asked now, ‘How long am I going to be like this, Ma?’

  ‘Oh, some little time I’m afraid, dear. You’ll have to be patient.’

  ‘But what about me job? I’ve lost two days already.’

  He stared at her. It was good to see her laugh.

  ‘You’ve lost more than two days, boy, more like ten altogether.’

  ‘What!’

  She nodded at him, then went on, ‘As for your job, I don’t think you need worry about that. In fact, I could say there will be many openings in the town for you if you have a mind to take them.’

  ‘I don’t want to take any other job but what I’m at now, as long as I end up as an engineer.’

  ‘Well, you’ll end up as an engineer all right. But there are quicker ways to it than working in the docks.’

  ‘Quicker ways to what than working in the docks?’

  His granny had come into the room and behind her, carrying a tray, was Daisy.

  ‘What were you talking about, quicker ways than what?’

  ‘He says he just wants to be an engineer, Ma.’

  ‘Well, who’s stopping him?’ His granny was staring at him now. Her body, like a piece of thin wire, was bent towards him. Her unchanging face was on a level with his, and now she went on, ‘There’s nobody stopping you being an engineer, but you won’t serve your time laying there being pampered, will you, and having the whole blooming house running after you, waiting on you hand and foot…You want to be an engineer. Then get yourself off that bed. But first of all eat this. Give it here, girl!’ She grabbed the tray from Daisy, who was standing behind her, and, placing it on his knees in an action that was much gentler than her words, she added, ‘And don’t you dare leave a drop of that soup or you’ll get it for your breakfast in the morning.’

  Mrs Flannagan now straightened her back, flapped the palms of her hands against each other, then, looking across at her daughter, said, ‘This place is like a madhouse. Three of them downstairs demanding interviews. I’ll interview them with my toe in their backsides. Interviews!’ She turned her gaze on Eddie again and repeated loudly, ‘Interviews indeed!’ and with that she marched from the room. Daisy followed her, but not before she hunched her shoulders up around her neck, poked out her head towards Eddie and bit on her lip.

  The door closed, the room quiet again, Eddie looked from the appetisingly set tray to his mother, and when he was about to speak she put her hand out and touched his one good one, saying softly, ‘She’s in her element, she’s happy. I’ve never seen her so happy for years.’

  Happy! That was his granny happy? Well, if that was happiness you could keep it for him.

  By! The quicker he got out of here the better. Oh, to be back home and on the job again, and mixing with people, normal people; people who laughed when they were happy, and were kind when they were happy, and didn’t bellow like a bull when they were happy; people as unlike his granny as it was possible to imagine.

  He paused in his thinking—perhaps she was happy because she’d apparently got part of her hearing back.

  Oh, she was a puzzle to him. He wished he could understand her. He wished he could tell himself he liked her.

  Huh! That would be the day when he told himself he liked his granny. It’d be such an event they’d have flags flying from all the ships on the river. Aye, right from Shields to Newcastle.

  Chapter Nine

  It was the middle of December. The snow was lying a foot thick all around the house and for once it seemed to have deadened the sound of the waves against the rocks.

  Inside the house everything was warm and cheerful, especially in the parlour where, except for Daisy who was in the kitchen, the whole household sat before the blazing fire. Mr Reade was sitting with them.

  Mr Flannagan sat in his usual high-backed chair to one side of the fireplace and Mrs Flannagan at the other. To Mr Flannagan’s right Penny, her feet curled around her, was on the couch, with her mother next to her, and in the middle of the couch sat Ted Reade with Eddie on his right within an arm’s length of his granny’s chair.

  They’d all had a fine tea, a birthday tea, for today was Mrs Flannagan’s sixty-sixth birthday. And now she was about to do something that she had promised Eddie when in one of her rare softer moods. ‘Some day,’ she had said, ‘when the time is ripe and we’re all together, at least all those concerned, I’ll tell you about that man in the peak cap.’ And so she had chosen the night of her birthday to explain the mystery of the man who haunted the passage, and the reason why the passage had been built at all.

  ‘Well now’—she looked from one to the other—‘I know what you’re all waiting for, you not least of all, Lily’—she pointed to her daughter—‘for you’ve been kept as much in the dark as I was when I was young. But when I finish telling my tale, which is no fairy tale but the gospel truth, you’ll see the reason why we’—she indicated her husband with a flip of her hand—‘have kept mum about the passage all these years. And we will want you all here to do the same from now on.’ She paused. ‘But we’re not all here are we? Where’s that Daisy? Get off your perch, boy, and go and fetch her. You know’—she nodded round the company—‘he’s getting as lazy as he’s long; he’s living on his past glory. He is. He is.’

  ‘Aw, Gran!’ Eddie got to his feet, indignation in his tone. ‘I’ve been wanting to go back to work for…’

  ‘Now none of your old lip and go about your business and fetch her in.’

  As Eddie went out of the sitting room into the hall the sound of laughter followed him and his chin jerked. Aw, his granny!

  In the kitchen Daisy was busy putting away the last of the crockery and she turned and looked at him and said, ‘If you’ve come to give a hand you’re too late.’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ he said, grinning at her.

  ‘Aye, I dare say it will.’ She grinned back at him.

  ‘Me granny says you’ve got to come in. She’s gonna tell us about the passage an’ why it was built.’

  ‘Oh! Oh, good. But I’ve got to finish here first and tidy meself up.’

  ‘Never mind that. Come on!’ Impulsively he reached out and grabbed her hand. ‘She’s in full cry the night and she’ll eat us alive if we don’t get back.’

  ‘But eeh, look, I’m not tidy for the sittin’ room.’

  He now pressed his head back and looked her up and down, then said airily, ‘You look all right to me…Aw, come on.’

  She allowed him to pull her up the kitchen, but as they entered the dim hall she dr
ew him to a stop and stood peering up at him for a moment before she whispered, ‘I’ve never thanked you, Eddie, for what you did for me. Eeh! I lie awake at nights and shiver an’ think what might have become of me if you hadn’t been there.’

  ‘Aw’—he moved his head from side to side—‘if it hadn’t been me that put a spoke in their wheel, somebody else would have, like Mr Reade or the coastguard…And anyway, they did more than their share to bring things to a head. Oh aye, if it hadn’t been for Mr Reade I wouldn’t be standin’ here nattering to you. Now would I?’

  ‘No, I daresay not.’ She was whispering up at him again. ‘But it was you who came down to the cove and got me; the missis could never have done it on her own.’

  Her eyes were large, her face was bright. He stared down into it; then the next moment he almost toppled backwards as her arms came round his neck and her mouth fell full on his.

  He didn’t remember how his hands had got on each side of her waist but when he realised he was holding her he didn’t draw away. He knew that he was red up to the ears and he wanted to take in a deep breath. He did so, and as he let it out, he said, ‘By! You’re a cheeky monkey.’

  ‘Aye, I know.’ She was laughing at him now.

  ‘You want your lug skelped.’

  ‘Aye, I know.’

  ‘And one of these days I’ll skelp it for you…you’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that.’

  ‘Eeh! By!…Aw, come on.’ He grabbed her hand again yet didn’t move immediately; but what he did next took more courage than he had needed to go up the dark stairs of Biddy McMann’s cottage, for now he leaned quickly forward and kissed her on the cheek. Then he almost lifted her off her feet as he spurted across the hall and only in time pulled them up at the sitting-room door. Here, dropping her hand, he aimed at adopting a nonchalant attitude, but when he saw the look on her face he bent down to her and hissed, ‘Don’t look like that or she’ll twig.’

  For answer Daisy pursed her mouth, moved it round and round, then stretched her upper lip away from her nose, widened her eyes and attempted to get her expression back to something like normal; but what she succeeded in doing was to make Eddie clap his hands across his mouth and bite tight on his lip to stop himself from laughing outright.

  Then turning from her, he stared at the blank face of the door for a moment before thrusting it open and marching into the room.

  ‘You’ve taken your time, where’ve you been? Doing another rescue?’

  ‘Aw, Gran.’ He wished he could think of something else to say but, Aw, Gran, yet if he dared to say to her what was in his mind he would no doubt have to make a run for it.

  He now pushed Daisy past his grandmother and onto the sofa next to Mr Reade; then he resumed his own seat and made himself return his grandmother’s stare. She was looking right through him. Had she twigged what had happened out in the hall? He wouldn’t put it past her; she was a witch.

  Slowly she took her gaze from him and settled herself back in her chair, then said, ‘Now, here I go, and I’ll start at the beginning as I know it. When my grandfather was a boy …

  ‘Well, his name was Benjamin McAlister and he was brought up along the coast there when Shields was little more than a fishing village, that was in 1770. His own father had been drowned off the sands, together with his two elder brothers, and his mother was determined that the sea wouldn’t get the only one she had left, so when me grandfather was but nine years old she apprenticed him to a stonemason. One of his first jobs was to lead the horse that carried the slabs from the quarry. Eventually he gravitated to the yard itself, and from sweeping up he learned to chip and rub, and as he did so there grew in him a love of the stone; so much so that he promised himself that one day he’d build his own house of it. Yet he knew that was a big-headed ambition for a lad who was earning a shilling a week.

  ‘Now in his spare time, but mostly on a Sunday, he walked these cliffs and the beach down there. And one night, it was in the height of the summertime and a new moon was coming up, and it was a rare night for these parts for it was so hot he couldn’t sleep indoors, so he wandered out and right along the coast here. And when he turned the point where the rock juts out just down below’—she thumbed towards the window now—‘what did he make out but four dim figures treading back and forward in the water unloading a boat. Now at the sight of them he froze and pressed himself against the rocks because there were some nasty customers went in for smuggling in those days. Well, they had to be men of a certain calibre because once caught it could be a long stretch, or even transportation.

  ‘Well, as he stood watching them, petrified with fright, the whole bunch of them stopped what they were doing, then slowly as if taking a walk they moved along the edge of the tide until they were within a few yards of him. Then like wild animals they collared him, and it was only by one of the men letting out an oath that he saved his skin, for he recognised the gruff Scottish tones of the cutter whom he worked under and he yelled out, “Mr Brady! Mr Brady!”

  ‘The four of them now stood over him where he lay cowering on the sand, and it was the man, Brady, who said, “Why, it’s young Ben McAlister. God, boy, what are you doin’ here?” and he answered truthfully, “Taking a jaunt, Mr Brady, ’cos I felt stuffed up inside.”

  ‘The men now moved away and had a confab, and when they came back it was Mr Brady who said, “Well, now you’re here, lad, you might as well give a hand,” and of course with that he became one of them. Whether he liked it or not he became one of them. And he did like it. Oh aye, he liked it. He never stopped being afraid, so I’m told, because that would have been foolish, it’s only fools who say they have no fear, but from that night he looked upon his adventure as being God-given, for now he could see whereby he could get the means to one day build his stone house.

  ‘So time went on and he became a fine stonemason and long before he was twenty he had helped to build a number of houses roundabout. It was when he was twenty-four that he took a most important step and he married Mat Brady’s daughter, Amy.

  ‘Now Amy was three years older than him, and a big fine strapping lass, and she, too, had ideas about a house, their own house. But as with him it was a dream to be worked for. And work they did, for years, right up to 1810, by which time they had two sons, Joe who was now fifteen, and Dan who was fourteen.

  ‘Anyway, it was one night in 1810 when she was helping to unload a special cargo on the coast down there and the weather was more than rough that they took shelter in the cave for a while. Now she had been in that cave countless times before, as had me grandfather and the other men, and they always made a point of seeing that they left nothing behind that might give prying coastguards a lead, but when she got back home that particular night she realised to her dismay that she had left her neck shawl in the cave. She had been soaked through and she had taken her coat off and the shawl; then because something caused the men to be uneasy, they had, according to plan, scattered in various directions, and she, in her hurry, had forgotten the shawl. So away she goes back the next morning, and there’s the shawl lying where she had left it.

  ‘The rain had stopped and the sun was out, and as is often the case after a night of rain the light appeared clearer. And as she looked at the early sun striking a part of the wall just inside the entrance she realised that only for a very short time in the day would even the entrance to the cave see any sun. So she stands and sort of admires the effect, then she walks to the far wall, and on looking up she sees a hole a few feet above her head.

  ‘Now it was only a small hole, about a foot and a half wide, more like a deep fissure, but it intrigued her somehow, stirred her curiosity like. So what does she go and do but gather some rocks and pile them one on top of the other until she could stand on them and bring her head and shoulders level with the hole. And when she pushed her head through, what did she see? Nothing, because it was black dark. But she got the feeling of space and she also got an excited feeling in the pit of h
er stomach.

  ‘Anyway, she can do nothing on her own, so back home she goes, and when her husband, me grandfather you know, came in at dinner time for his meal she tells him about her discovery, and she says, “We’ll take a lantern, Ben, and we’ll get in there. I think we’re onto something. Just imagine if there was a cave there an’ you could make that hole big enough to pass the stuff through instead of risking carting it along the coast, camouflaged in all shapes and sizes. Why, if we could store it there, we could hoodwink the whole coastguards from here to Hull, and the militia into the bargain.”

  ‘By the way’—Mrs Flannagan now nodded from one to the other—‘it was mostly baccy and brandy and silks and choice stuff like that they dealt in.

  ‘So later that day they take a lantern and they go back to the cave and me grandfather bunks her up, but she has a job to get through and so has he. Anyway, when they get up from their knees and hold the lantern aloft, what do they see but a fine big space, a cave within a cave, airy and dry. And what do they do? Their eyes meet in glee; me granny puts the lantern down, and they throw their arms about each other.’

  Here Mrs Flannagan stopped the narrative and laughed to herself. Then turning to Ted Reade, she said, ‘Get on your pins, Ted, and pour us out a drink, talking’s thirsty work. Ginger beer for these three.’ She flapped her hand in the direction of the couch, then sat back in her chair.

  A few minutes later they all had glasses in their hands and when Eddie almost finished his drink at one go, his granny cried at him, ‘You’ve got a mouth like a sink, boy! Don’t you ever take to anything stronger or you’ll spend your life lying on the floor.’

  They all laughed at Eddie’s expense, but he refrained from answering, not even to say to himself, ‘Aw, me granny!’ He just stared at her and waited impatiently for her to go on. And now she did.