by Anne Bennett
‘Do you know,’ Joe said admiringly, ‘if we had people like you in government then we wouldn’t need to have wars ever again.’
Isobel smiled and Joe saw suddenly, and with a little surprise, how pretty she was when she did so.
‘Maybe I should have been the one chosen to talk to Herr Hitler that time in Munich,’ she said.
‘You couldn’t have done worse.’
‘Ah, Joe, just think what life would have been like without this devastating war. I would have probably still have Gregory and Gerald, and you, Gloria and Ben would in all likelihood be in London enjoying life together.’
‘Yes. Isn’t it a pity we can’t roll back the years and have another crack at it?’ Joe said.
‘It is indeed,’ Isobel said wistfully.
Isobel was worried about Ben, because the pressure and worry of the exams was enough stress without the bullying going on at school, and coping with losing his mother, and in the end she sought the help of Kevin.
Kevin was angered that Ben was being bullied, though surprised because he was a tough little nut and as strong as an ox from the work on the farm and the good food they’d had in plenty.
‘I would have thought he could give a good enough account of himself,’ he said to Isobel.
‘Maybe he could if it was just one to one. In fact he said that to me,’ Isobel said. ‘But there are three of them, he said.’
‘Cowardly bullies then.’
‘Isn’t that usually the way?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ Kevin agreed. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Isobel said. ‘I think I am the only one that he has told about the bullying and though he didn’t actually tell me to keep it a secret, I know he would hate me to blab about it.’
‘Does Uncle Joe know, or Uncle Tom?’
‘I doubt it,’ Isobel said. ‘I feel sure they would have said something if they did. Joe, I think, would probably go storming down to the school and that is the last thing that Ben needs right now. I thought that maybe you could sound him out. He is so immensely fond of you.’
‘I’ll take him up town next Saturday morning,’ Kevin said. ‘How’s that? Away from the house he might talk more.’
‘Thank you, Kevin,’ Isobel said. ‘I knew that I could rely on you.’
Kevin didn’t wait till Saturday to speak to Ben. On reflection he thought it was a long time to delay if he was in trouble of any sort. So Monday afternoon he left his school via the back wall after afternoon registration and made his way to Chester Road, where he caught a tram to Boldmere and was waiting nearby Kevin’s school when the bell went.
He semi hid behind a tree, not wanting Ben to catch sight of him until he was able to see what was happening. Ben didn’t see his cousin as he sped past, because behind him he could hear the pounding feet of his pursuers.
Ben shot up Boldmere Road, fear lending wings to his feet, and Kevin, loping easily behind them, turned the corner to see that Ben had been grabbed by two of the bullies. Ben’s progress had been hampered by a clutch of mothers with prams, babies and small children, who had stopped to chat. The two boys who had grabbed Ben began dragging him towards an alleyway that led to the back of the shops, and Kevin noticed another boy, bigger and beefier than the two who had grabbed Ben, chugging behind them and breathing heavily because he was more than a little on the plump side.
The alleyway opened on to storage yards and the two boys still held Ben fast as the stouter one eventually caught up with the others. The smaller of the two turned to him and said, ‘What we going to do with him then?’
‘Teach him a lesson,’ said the stouter boy. He pushed his face right up to Ben’s and hissed, ‘You brought this on yourself. I told you what you had to do.’
Then Kevin saw him power his fist into Ben’s unprotected stomach so hard that Ben’s knees crumpled, and had it not been for the boys holding his arms he would have fallen. Kevin decided enough was enough, and with a howl of rage he flew down the entry. The two smaller boys scattered, but the other one, whom Kevin thought was probably the ringleader, wasn’t quick enough, and Kevin grabbed him and yanked his arm up his back until he yelped in pain and fear.
‘You lay one hand on my cousin again and I will give you the same back doubled,’ he said to the trembling boy. ‘You got that?’
Then as the boy gave no reply to this he gave his arm another twist. ‘I said, have you got that?’
‘Yeah, I got it,’ said the boy breathlessly. ‘Let me go. You’re breaking my arm.’
Kevin released the pressure slightly as he warned, ‘It’ll be your bloody neck I break next time if I catch you at this type of caper. I will be keeping an eye on you from now on, so watch out.’ He released the boy then with a push, and the boy staggered and then began to run down the alleyway, rubbing his arm as he went.
Ben was looking at his cousin with a kind of awe. ‘You were just terrific, Kevin.’
Kevin shrugged. ‘I hate bullying,’ he said. ‘Was it the same thugs split your lip?’
Ben nodded as the two began to walk down the alleyway and up Boldmere Road to the flat.
‘Why?’ Kevin said. ‘What was that big kid talking about? What did they want you to do?’
‘Shoplift.’
‘What?’
‘Pinch sweets from the shop,’ Kevin said. ‘They said if I did they would lay off me. I actually considered it as well, ’cos I thought that no one really cares about me any more.’
‘How do you work that out?’ Kevin said. ‘For your information, mate, I am risking the cane coming to sort you out today. I bunked off school. How else would I be there when school finished?’
‘I dunno,’ Ben said. ‘I thought you might have had the day off or something.’
‘The only ones who have days off are Catholics, who have Holy Days,’ Kevin said. ‘State schools don’t give days off, and if I have been missed I am for the high jump. But now I am here tell me who else couldn’t give a monkey’s about you?’
‘Well, you know …’
‘This is all to do with your mother, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Look, Ben,’ said Kevin, ‘it don’t matter whether your mother dies or runs off. The fact is, she ain’t here now.’
‘I know that,’ Ben said scornfully.
‘All right then, I will tell you something that you don’t know,’ Kevin said. ‘When my mom died I hadn’t seen her for nine weeks because she got pneumonia. The day she died, well, that was the day she was discharged from the hospital and Dad went to fetch her in Paul’s car. The neighbours were all there, a party tea done and everything, and I never saw either of them again.’
Ben heard the catch in his voice and for the first time realised the level of Kevin’s suffering when he had been only five years old.
They reached the flat. Ben opened the door and they went inside before Ben turned to Kevin and said, ‘I’m sorry for what I said before, Kev, about it not being so bad for you and everything because your mom died and mine ran away. That was a horrible thing to say.’
‘’S all right,’ Kevin said magnanimously. ‘It hadn’t long happened then, and I think you just wanted to hurt someone else like you’d been hurt. But I’ll tell you what I envy you for.’
‘What?’
‘That you can remember your mother,’ Kevin said. ‘Sometimes I can hardly remember what mine looked like. Uncle Tom said to look at Molly because she is the spit of our mum, but it’s not the same. And there’s my dad as well. They are like shadowy figures to me and I wish they weren’t, and I would love it if my mom and dad were in America rather than dead and gone.’
‘You think I should write to her, don’t you?’ Ben said, and when Kevin nodded, Ben went on, ‘She’s had a baby, you know? And they got married when Mum was already married to Dad.’
‘I know,’ Kevin said. ‘Uncle Joe told Molly he’s getting divorced as soon as possible. He said it will be best for the baby
.’
‘But I don’t think you can get divorced as a Catholic.’
‘Maybe not,’ Kevin said. ‘But you can in law and that’s what matters. And it would be better for your sister.’
‘Half-sister.’
‘Don’t split hairs,’ Kevin said.
‘Anyway, it won’t mean anything to me, will it?’ Ben said.
‘Not if that’s the way you think, it won’t.’
‘She’s in America and has a little baby. I can hardly send her a letter.’
‘You should ask Aunt Gloria all about her, and they don’t stay babies for ever,’ Kevin said. ‘When Molly went to Buncrana, I missed her lot and I couldn’t really write properly so Granddad said to send her pictures. So I used to draw things for her that she said often made her cry because if I drew our house I put Mom and Dad in the picture too. Point is, Ben, that little baby might really want to have a big brother who cares about her when she is older, but you are the only one who can decide this. She can’t. She is helpless and innocent.’
After Kevin had gone, Ben went over and over his words. That night, after they had eaten, Joe said he was going into the bedroom to write a letter. He had put it off all weekend and hated to do it now. He had never written to Gloria before and didn’t know the kindest way to tell a mother that their child did not want to have any communication with her, and he rose from the table with a heavy heart.
Ben swallowed deeply before saying, ‘Are you writing to Mom?’
‘You know I am, Ben. One of us has to.’
‘Maybe both of us should and if you leave the letter open I will put a note as well.’
Joe’s eyes met his son’s over the table and he smiled his slow and easy smile as he said, ‘D’you know, son, that is the best idea I have heard in ages.’
Before Joe left to write his own letter, he put a pile of letters beside Ben’s plate. ‘They are from your mother,’ Joe told him. ‘As I told you, she wrote every week.’
‘I only agreed to send a letter for the baby’s sake, not Mom’s,’ Ben stated flatly. ‘If she cared about me she wouldn’t have gone, so I’m not interested in anything else she has to say.’
‘Well, that’s up to you,’ Joe said. ‘They’re there if you want them. That’s all I’m saying.’
TWENTY-SIX
Ben had intended leaving the letters on the table when he went into his room to do his homework, but for some reason he picked them up too. He wasn’t going to read them, though, he thought as he laid them on the chest of drawers in his room. He hadn’t time. He had masses to do.
He turned his back on the letters, sat down at his desk and opened up his arithmetic homework book. The figures danced before his eyes and he couldn’t seem to make either head or tail of the problems. The urge to read what his mother had to say to him niggled at him so much that in the end he decided to read just one, the first one she had written, and then settle to his homework.
Over an hour later, he was sitting on his bed, the letters scattered around him, some of the words smudged from the tears that had fallen from Ben’s eyes. Gloria wrote as she spoke, so that Ben could almost imagine her in the room as she reminded him of the time the two of them explored London together, stirring up his memories of that time together.
He would never forget the blitz, but some of his mother’s letters brought that terrifying period to life again and he recalled struggling from his bed, alerted by the siren’s wail. He was often still half asleep and trying to struggle into a siren suit that seemed to have more arms and legs than he needed. And then hurrying through the streets alive with ack-ack guns barking into the night sky, lit up by the
incendiary bombs already dropped and the beams of the roving search lights, hearing the drone of planes and often the crump of bombs exploding not that far away.
The fear had been like a living thing inside him, lodged in his stomach or crawling down his spine, and sometimes he would shake so much his teeth would chatter together. And his mother was always there beside him suffering too, and probably just as scared as he was, but she never showed it, and when she held him tight he always felt better.
They would stumble home hours later when the all clear went, the skies usually alight with fires burning, and sometimes they would see tongues of flames licking the smoky air that also smelled of cordite and gas and brick dust. Gloria also spoke of the night his father was injured so badly he almost died, and that terrible night when Tottenham was hit and the flat destroyed.
Do you remember the burning, glowing mounds of rubble were all around us that night, Ben? And we had to clamber over seeping sandbags and dribbling hosepipes, and then seeing the utter desolation of the whole area where our flat had once stood?
That was the reason they had had to go to Ireland in the first place, but apart from his horrible grandmother he had loved Ireland. He knew that his mother didn’t, though, and he had felt sorry about that. Gloria freely admitted that in her letters, and why she started work at the naval camp: ‘I was very lonely and a little homesick for America, and the money was needed, anyway.’
Maybe the money was needed, but Ben knew that from his mother starting work there, his father became unhappy and then the rows began. Gloria touched on this a little and then went on to say how she had met and fallen in love with Philip Morrisey.
It wasn’t anything either of us were looking for, and you were the last person in the world that I wanted to hurt, and yet I know I did and that pains me very much. I am also so very sorry that I made you choose between your father and me. That was absolutely wrong and a cowardly thing to do and I bitterly regret it. I fully support the decision you made to leave the ship, but there is not one day goes by when I don’t think of you and wonder how you are doing, and I would love it if you would write to me, even just now and again, and let me know what your life is like.
That was the last letter Gloria had written before the one to Joe telling him about the birth of the child. Ben could feel his mother’s sadness rising up from the page. She had missed him as much as he had missed her, and despite what she had done he realised he still loved her dearly.
Letters were a poor substitute for having his mother come back to live with them again, but it was better than nothing. Ben remembered what Kevin had said that day. Ben could only imagine the big hole losing both his parents had left in Kevin’s life, and he hadn’t even the comfort of letters to fill the gap even partially, and yet Kevin had risen above the tragedy and he must do the same.
He had to accept that even if he had the power to force his mother to return to them, she would be desperately unhappy. Her life now was in America with Philip. Reading through the letters again he realised that she was happy in her new life. He wrote that he loved her and missed her and was surprised by the news of the baby.
Maybe, when the baby is older, you will tell her about her big brother who lives in England and one day we might even get to meet.
When Joe popped his head around the door a little later, he saw the tear trails on Ben’s face and the letters strewn on the bed.
‘All right?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘It was just remembering it all again, but I’m all right now.’
‘If you ever want to talk about your mother or discuss anything, don’t feel that it would upset me,’ Joe said gently. ‘I know you must miss her sorely at times.’
Ben looked at his father with gratitude. ‘I’ll remember that,’ he said. ‘And thanks, Dad.’
Ben worked harder than ever at school. He had told his mother about the exam and wanted to pass because he knew that she would be so proud of him if he did. It was much easier for him at school now, because the bullies gave him a wide berth. Ben knew that Kevin really couldn’t keep much of an eye on him, but they didn’t know that. They all thought that if he had a cousin like that, then it was much healthier to leave Ben Sullivan alone.
In early in March he learned that he had passed the first part of the eleven plus. The seco
nd part was to be held at St Philip’s School the following Saturday, the tenth.
‘As it’s a Saturday,’ Joe said, ‘I can go with you this time.’
‘Can Aunt Izzy come too?’
‘If she wants,’ said Joe. ‘Though she might already have plans.’
‘It’s just that it’s a long time to wait,’ Joe said. ‘Aunt Izzy went on a tour around the shops last time because it was in town. She found that restaurant that she took me to later for lunch, but I don’t know anything about St Philip’s and you might get really fed up on your own, and anyway, she is really nice.’
‘She is,’ Joe agreed. ‘I will ask her, and if she is doing nothing she will probably be keen to come as she took you to the first one.’
Isobel was delighted to be asked and she readily agreed to accompany them both. The three of them set off early on Saturday morning because they had to take the tram to the terminus in the city centre and then take one out along the Hagley Road, Edgbaston, on the other side of it. ‘Thank God it’s dry,’ Joe said as they waited for the Edgbaston tram. ‘Though this wind is enough to cut a body in two.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Isobel said, tucking her scarf in tighter. ‘But don’t you think it too long a trek for a young boy to make every day?’
Joe was inclined to agree. He said nothing to Ben, and though he hoped he had passed the exams, he didn’t really want him to pass with enough marks to get his first choice. Bishop Vesey’s in Sutton Coldfield, which was his second choice, would be much better for him, he thought. However, it wouldn’t help to say this now and so instead he said, ‘He’s young and fit and, remember, he won’t be the only one.’
‘I suppose,’ Isobel said. ‘But what time will he have to set off in the morning to get here on time?’