by Marie Joseph
Limping after her, Seth rubbed his chin slowly with a thumb and forefinger. In 1916 the war had been going on for two years, with no sign of it ending. Conscription had come in, and the looms in the mill at the bottom of the street were weaving cloth for bandages, or yards of cotton urgently needed for the munition factories.
Two of Lily West’s big sons were in France, and to her pride their photographs had been in the local weekly newspaper. Jim, a private in the 1st Loyal North Regiment, had described in a letter to his mother how, when they were waiting to go over the top, the enemy guns had started up. The gas played on the enemy lines had been carried back on the wind, and as the eyeglass had come out of Jim’s helmet the gas had got in and for a time he had been blinded. Bert West, in the machine-gun section of the 4th South Lancashires, was in hospital after being buried in a dugout for forty-eight hours. All Lily could do was count her blessings that they were still alive.
And now Joe was going to enlist …
Seth watched as Clara knelt down on the cut rug by the fire, the toasting fork in her hand and a pile of barmcakes on a plate in the hearth. What could you begin to tell a child of nine about the horrors of war? How could you show her the long list of casualties printed night after night in the evening paper? Overprotected his little girl might be, but she was sunshine in a dark room, joy on a cloudy day. After the initial shock of being disciplined at school, she had settled down, coming top in every subject except arithmetic, in which she was an inglorious bottom.
‘If I could put me pencil in me proper hand I could do the sums,’ she’d told her father. ‘But they come out backwards way in me head when I’m using the wrong hand.’
‘We’re having a concert in our backyard next week,’ she now told Seth, spearing a barmcake on the toasting fork. ‘It’ll cost an empty jamjar to get in, then me an’ Walter will take the jars to the rag-and-bone man the next time he comes down the back an’ he’ll give us rubbing stones.’
Seth took a yellow slab of margarine from the dresser shelf and a knife from the drawer in the table. ‘And what will you do with the rubbing stones?’ he asked, trying not to smile at her obvious earnestness. ‘Walter’s mother never mops her step, and neither do I with folks traipsing in and out of the shop all the time. I can’t see rubbing stones being much good to either you or Walter.’
Clara’s sigh of exasperation lifted her shoulders almost to the lobes of her ears. ‘Well, we’ll sell them, won’t we? To people like Mrs Davis at the top end of the street. She stones her front every morning.’ A piece of bread had caught fire, and Clara blew on it fiercely, before adding it to the plate. ‘We’ll tell her the money’s for the soldiers, then she’ll likely give us double.’
‘Clara!’ Seth put down the knife and, sitting in his rocking chair, gently but firmly took the toasting fork from his daughter’s hand. He was not angry. Anger was slow to run in his veins, but his face was troubled. When he spoke again his voice was deceptively quiet. ‘And the money for the soldiers? What will you and Walter do with that?’
That was a hard one to answer. Clara had already spent and respent the expected pennies in her mind. For a penny you could get a whole quarter of toffees or, for a little more, a halfpennyworth of chips and a pennyworth of fish. Walter had seen a penknife in the window of a shop in Penny Street for fourpence, and for twopence she could treat Joe to a haircut, with a bay-rum squirt to follow. He’d have to look his best if they were going to let him into the war. Then there were Comic Cuts with stories of Weary Willie and Tired Tim. The possibilities were endless.
‘I’m busy thinking about it,’ she said innocently, tucking a wayward strand of hair behind an ear. ‘But whatever we get, me and Walter, we’ll split it between us. Walter might give it to his mam. She’s always saying she hasn’t got no money.’
‘So you’d be lying when you told Mrs Davis the money was for the soldiers?’
‘Only a little lie.’ Clara wrinkled her nose. ‘Everybody tells little lies.’
‘And Joe was stealing from the cinema manager when he let you in free?’
‘Not like taking it out of the manager’s pocket! Not pinching it, Dadda. The manager’s rich. He’s got a car. An’ a coat with a fur collar on.’
‘Put that down!’ Seth’s voice rose to a hoarse whisper that seemed louder than if he’d shouted aloud. ‘Leave the toast and look at me!’
Clara’s eyes were very green in the firelight. ‘You’re not cross, are you, Dadda?’
‘Exodus, Chapter Twenty?’ Seth barked out the question. ‘Verse fifteen?’
Clara chewed her lips. She hated it when her father talked to her like this. There was something in the way his lean face darkened that terrified her. Even the minister on his weekly visit to school didn’t look like this when he talked about God.
‘And God spake all these words, saying I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not …’ Seth’s pale blue eyes were burning into her own. ‘Verse fifteen, child!’
Hurriedly, as if she was mentally reciting her ten times table, Clara went through the Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not steal!’ she said at last, on a rising note of triumph.
‘And yet,’ her father’s voice was silken soft once more, ‘you have stolen from the cinema manager and you are plotting to steal from our neighbours. You could see the thunderings and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, and yet you would not stand afar off. Not you, Clara Haydock. Do you want to burn in the everlasting Lake of Fire?’
Clara’s head drooped low. Her dadda was acting like the lay preachers who preached in the chapel pulpit on Sundays. Pointing their fingers at her as she sat beside her father in their coffin-sided pew, their throats working against high stiff collars. For most of the sermon they would speak in quiet calm voices, then suddenly, just when she was far away in a daydream, they would pounce.
‘Damnation awaits all sinners! You, and you, and you!’
She would jerk to attention, seeing herself surrounded by licking flames, with a sad and disappointed God watching from the shores of the burning lake.
Not a foot away from where she was kneeling on the rug, a piece of coal dropped from the grate sending a shower of sparks dancing across her line of vision. The heat was burning her left side and its flames seemed to be reflected in Seth’s large pale eyes.
‘Do you want to be a sinner?’ he asked her softly, lifting her chin with a finger and smiling despairingly at her.
Clara felt her insides melt with love for this gentle man with his big hands and teeth all rotted at the front from his habit of holding the nails in his mouth. She knew now that she had done a wicked thing. She knew because her father had told her over and over again that the West boys would lead her into trouble if she let them.
There were tears welling in her eyes, but she made no move to dash them away. They added to the feeling of holiness creeping over her, a feeling she sometimes got when she sang hymns. Oh yes, for her beloved dadda’s sake she wanted to be good. For his sake she wanted to be an angel when she died, singing away in heaven. Emotion swelled her chest, rising to her throat in a lump she found hard to swallow.
‘I’ll never be wicked again,’ she promised fervently. ‘Jesus won’t know me, I’ll be that flamin’ good. I promise you, Dadda, God’s honour, I promise.’
On the day Seth was busy in his shop checking a consignment of alder wood blocks newly delivered from a clogsole traveller, Clara and Walter gave their backyard concert.
It was a fine day and they had a good audience of children from the surrounding streets, each one clutching their entry fee of an empty jamjar. A few of the jars collected by Clara at the back gate looked familiar, and she guessed that they had been passed back over the wall to be presented again by jarless hopefuls, but she let it pass.
Only a week had gone by since her firelight confrontation with her father and she was still wearing an invisible halo. Her own share of any monies from the transaction with the rag-and-bone man was goin
g into the war comforts box on the counter of the pork butcher’s shop. Walter could tread his own path down the slippery road to hell, she had decided, his scorn washing over her and leaving her undismayed.
The first item was Walter doing a clog dance to the accompaniment of Alec, a cynical fourteen-year-old, beating a stick against one of Lily West’s grimy pans, whistling at the same time a chorus from ‘The British Grenadiers’.
Clara watched them impatiently. Walter was doing quite well. Joe, after one of his Saturday night visits to the Palace Theatre on the Boulevard, had given him lessons. Walter was wearing a bow tie made from one of Clara’s ribbons, and the crispness of his rap would have done justice to a professional. He had what Clara considered to be a silly smirk on his face, and she couldn’t wait for him to finish. Her heart was already beating fast and her eyes blazed. When her turn came at last she walked quickly to stand on the flagstone Walter had vacated, her hands clasped together beneath her nonexistent bosom.
‘For my first item,’ she announced, ‘I am going to sing “Roses Are Bloomin’ in Picardy”.’ A small boy sitting on an upturned bucket made a rude noise with his mouth, and she quelled him with a ferocious glance.
Her voice when she sang was as pure and true as a singing bird’s. She had learned the words from a piece of sheet music ‘found’ by Joe during a closing-down sale at the piano shop in Farthing Street. The tune she had picked up by hearing it sung just once at a Sunday School concert a few weeks previously.
‘But there’s never a rose like yeoo,’ she sang, clutching her chest and rolling her eyes to heaven. When her tiny audience fidgeted she sang a bit louder, when the boy on the bucket fell off his precarious perch she flung out her arms in a dramatic gesture, holding on to her audience’s attention by the sheer force of her personality.
A woman pegging out her washing in the next backyard came to look over the wall and listen as Clara started on her encore.
‘I shall die,’ sang Clara, ‘I shall die. I shall die tiddly-i-ti …’
‘Aye, an’ you will die, young Clara, if your dad hears you,’ the woman muttered, as Clara went on to sing the version brought back from France by soldiers on leave.
But the rudest verse was brought to an abrupt end as, with a flourish, the back gate was flung open to reveal Joe West in the rough khaki of a private in the East Lancashire Regiment, his cap set at a rakish angle over his grinning face.
‘Joe!’ Forgetting her final curtsey, Clara flew at him. ‘Oh, Joe! Oh, they’ve let you in! Oh, I do hope you get there afore the war’s over!’
Joe was in one of his comical moods. Clara could sense it even before he bowed low to the audience stolidly sitting or standing before him, determined not to go before they’d got their jamjar’s worth.
‘All together now!’ Joe shouted, linking arms with Clara and marching up and down, singing at the top of his voice:
‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.’
Excited at seeing his brother in uniform, Alec went berserk on the makeshift drums, throwing his sticks up in the air the way he’d seen the Boy Scouts do when they marched down the street on chapel parade.
‘Smile, boys, that’s the style,’ sang Walter, his clogs striking the forbidden sparks on the flagstones.
‘What’s the use of worrying?’ sang Joe, lifting Clara clean off her feet and whirling her round so that her full skirts flew up showing a good two inches of navy blue bloomers.
‘It never was worthwhile!’ Clara came to rest on her tiptoes, her arms still clasped round Joe’s neck, her rosy face an inch from his own as she smiled into his blue eyes, singing at him like an opera star at the height of her aria.
‘Stop it! Stop this row! Now, this minute. Stop it!’
Like a gramophone winding down, the singing petered out. Only Walter, because his back was turned away, failed to see Seth standing at the back door, his face distorted by anger.
‘Joe! Alec! Walter! Go home to your mother. This way, through the shop.’ He touched Joe on a khaki sleeve as he walked past. ‘There’s a good lad.’
The small audience filed sheepishly out of the backyard gate. A few of them were regular, if unwilling, chapel-goers, and Mr Haydock, as well as being Clara’s father, was the superintendent of their Sunday School. His was the power and the glory as they assembled in the big room on Sunday afternoons before going off to the vestries with their particular class. Mr Haydock led the prayers and the hymn singing, and it was sometimes hard to imagine him sitting on his stool in his little shop with his mouth full of nails when the Sabbath gave way to ordinary working days. No wonder he had looked as blazing as the hell he sometimes promised them from his platform on Sunday afternoons should they misbehave.
‘I bet Clara cops it,’ said a girl in a torn pinafore as they trudged down the cobbled back.
‘Eee, I ’ope not,’ said her friend, with a deep and mournful insincerity.
Inside the house Seth sat down in his chair, covering his face with his big hands.
Clara was ready to do battle. With her long pale-gold hair hanging down her back and her green eyes blazing she faced him, standing with arms folded on the cut rug in front of the fire.
‘We wasn’t doing nothing, Dadda. Just singing and dancing.’ She stuck out her bottom lip. ‘We was going to sing “Rule Britannia”, with Walter doing the ’ornpipe, then we was going to finish with everybody singing “God Save the King”. With me doing a descant,’ she added, ‘an’ waving a flag.’ Her head drooped. ‘Till you came and spoiled it all.’
Seth lifted his head. The tears glistening soft in his eyes made Clara catch her breath in dismay. She moved to kneel down by the side of his chair.
‘I’m sorry, Dadda.’ Her own eyes filled. ‘I didn’t mean to be bad again.’ She rubbed at her face. ‘It’s only a bit of flour out of the tin. Not proper powder like you told me only bad women wear. An’ me lips are only red because I rubbed them with the colour from a scrap. It was me stage make-up, Dadda, that’s all.’
Seth’s voice was hoarse with sorrow. ‘Jim West has been killed. His wife just came round with the telegram. They thought he was still in hospital after being gassed, but he must have gone back up the line.’ Seth was swaying backwards and forwards in his distress. ‘He was the best of the lot was Jim. Married, with two children and his wife expecting another.’ In his distress Seth forgot that such matters were never mentioned. ‘Poor Mrs West. How many of her sons will have to die before this war ends?’
Clara couldn’t move or speak. This was her first brush with death. For her the war had been all flag waving, bands marching in the town and songs with rousing rhythms to sing. Jim had looked so handsome in his uniform on that last day when he’d come to say goodbye to his mother. Lily didn’t like his small pale wife, but on that exciting day she’d been quite civil to her, wiping the dribble from her grandsons’ chins before coating their dummies with condensed milk and shoving them back into their open mouths.
‘Getting wed’ll be the making of our Jim,’ Lily had told Seth in Clara’s hearing. ‘She’s nobbut a lass and as thin and pale as a stick of celery, but she’ll make him get up in a morning and go off to work. Oh aye, a houseful of kids’ll show our Jim what life’s all about.’
And now Jim was dead. In France. There wouldn’t even be a coffin to trundle through the streets on a cart to the cemetery with all his relations walking behind crying into handkerchiefs. He’d never tease Clara again, calling her ‘butternob’. Never prop his old rusty bike against the window bottom, then bend down to snap off his trouser clips before he went into the shabby house to see his mam.
‘Thy will be done …’ Getting up from his chair, Seth sighed the words almost underneath his breath. Then he went through into the shop and began his hammering, striking the nails in with twice his usual force.
‘Where are you going, Clara?’ His mouth was full of tacks. She heard what he said and took no notice. Like a pebble from a catapult she
flew across the street and straight into the house opposite. What kind of a God was it who could will a lovely man like Jim West to die?
With her dirty apron held over her face, Mrs West was wailing and crying loud enough to wake the whole street. The little back room was crowded with four big sons standing helplessly round their mother’s chair. Jim’s little pale wife still clutched the telegram in front of her swollen stomach. Neighbours from either side were crying into the pot of tea they were making, and Lily’s two grandsons, sitting side by side on the table in the middle of the remains of the dinner pots, were yelling fit to burst their lungs.
‘It’s Clara, Mam.’ Joe spoke quietly into the top of the bowed head, and at once the apron was lowered, revealing Lily’s face so blotched and swollen with weeping it made Clara’s heart give a great lurch of pity.
‘Me little angel! Me own little lamb …’ With a great cry Lily held out her arms, and not for the first time Clara found herself held against the musty-smelling breasts of the woman who had suckled her into life.
‘Them bloody Germans!’ Lily held Clara so tightly the breath went out of her body in a gusty sigh. ‘That bloody Kaiser! I’d shoot him full of more ’oles than my sieve’s got if I got near him. Who does the rotten old bastard think he is, taking my lad who wouldn’t’ve hurt a fly?’
‘It’s not God’s fault, Mrs West.’
Clara surfaced from her whispered reassurance to stare straight into Lily’s red watery eyes.
‘God?’ Lily’s voice cracked with grief. ‘What the ’ell has God to do with it? He can’t do nowt, can He, sittin’ up there on His backside?’
Reassured, bewildered, but somehow comforted, Clara burrowed her head back into the acrid smell of Lily’s bosom, adding her own noisy sobs to a mourning that at least made some kind of sense to her.
And that night, kneeling by her bed on the cold oilcloth saying the Lord’s Prayer, she missed out the phrase ‘Thy will be done’. On purpose. Like Mrs West had said: God couldn’t do nowt, sitting up in heaven on His backside.