by Annie Murray
She could never have foreseen how totally their lives were about to be taken over by the party. What had begun as a nationalist uprising in Spain quickly turned into a civil war, and the Communist Party seemed to be the movement responding most promptly and vocally for the republican cause.
Gwen spent almost all her time now with Daniel and the other party workers. Daniel was in constant demand as a speaker.
In the early days of the war in Spain, it looked as if cooperation between the Communist Party, the Labour Party and the Birmingham Council for Peace and Liberty would be possible. ‘About time they saw sense,’ Daniel said. ‘We can’t afford divisions now.’
Of course they all had to work together to fight the evil of fascism! There were to be joint meetings and rallies all round the city, public addresses in parks and halls and at factory gates in support of the workers’ organizations in republican Spain.
The party offices were in a constant fever of activity: organizing meetings, printing leaflets, organizing speakers and ‘chalkers’ to announce them. Now the holidays were here, Gwen was free to throw herself into the work, caught up in the emotional intensity of it all. A national committee was formed, the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, especially to support the republic.
All of them were caught up in a cause bigger and more important than their own needs and lives. Gwen found herself feeling ashamed of her petty jealousies about Esther Lane. She didn’t much like Esther whose bossy ways grated on her, but she could see her genuine commitment to the cause. And Daniel was far too busy to be paying Esther any attention. The truth was, he was almost too busy to pay any to Gwen either, but she swallowed down her periodic feelings of rejection and neglect. They were working for the party, for the revolution, compared with which individual feelings were as nothing.
One morning when Gwen arrived, the offices were already very busy. Esther was talking on the telephone in a loud voice to someone from a church group supporting Spanish aid, party workers were moving busily to and fro and a collection of cartons was piled just inside the door.
‘What are these?’ she asked Daniel, who was poring over a paper on a desk with Jim Crump, one of the main party officials.
‘Pamphlets. From King Street,’ Daniel said, without looking up. ‘Can you get some of them out? We’re going to the works along Bradford Street today – we’ll start with them there. We’ve asked them to send more for the sixteenth.’
King Street was the party’s national HQ. Gwen reached into the top box and pulled out a handful of red pamphlets. They were titled simply, Spain. The party was planning a special demonstration in the Bull Ring.
By the late afternoon that day she went out with Daniel and some of the others to Bradford Street in time for the end of the factories’ afternoon’s shifts, carrying bundles of the Daily Worker and the Spain pamphlet. Daniel had his big canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Gwen walked beside him, though he felt remote, caught up in his work. And Herbert began needling him again about the Catholic Church and its role in Spain. How could he be a Catholic when the Church was officially backing the nationalist cause?
‘Don’t start,’ she heard Daniel say tersely. He was frowning and she could hear the tension in his voice.
The Fernandez household was full of anguish over this. Theresa read the Catholic paper, the Universe, which was full of reports about Catholic neighbours killing one another, churches being burnt, nuns and priests being dragged out and shot by republicans, the very people whom Daniel was ardently supporting and she frequently said so. Gwen knew that Daniel, like many Catholics on the left, was torn in two by the dilemma and she was tempted to tell Herbert to shut up and leave Daniel alone.
They reached Bradford Street just before the factory bulls began to go off at the end of a shift. When the men streamed out of the works they were waiting with their pamphlets and papers. Sometimes a sympathetic factory worker would take a copy of the Daily Worker and leave it in the factory toilet, so others could get a look at it. Gwen handed the Spain leaflet into dirty, workworn hands. Some men appeared interested, but others said, ‘No, ta,’ with tired indifference, while others called them ‘bloody reds’ or walked straight past, ignoring them.
‘There’s a meeting in the Bull Ring – every Sunday evening,’ Daniel kept telling them. ‘Come and join us, comrades. Unite the workers. Together we are strong!’
By the evening, Gwen was off with Daniel on the speaking trail. Some evenings he did several, one after the other, and they had to have a car to get the speakers from one place to the next. Tonight there were only two meetings: Saltley followed by Alum Rock, and for once Esther needed to be elsewhere. Gwen sat in two drab halls, her stomach rumbling with hunger, while Daniel spelled out to his audience with apparently tireless passion the iniquities of the National Government and the means test, the betrayal of the working class by the Labour Movement, the plight of the Welsh mining towns and the Spanish republican causes of justice, collectivization and the power of workers’ movements. In the car on the way back he was still full of life.
‘I could see it in some of their faces tonight,’ he said, on fire with his own oratory. ‘They were hearing me. Really hearing. It’s no good, see, thinking you can just go out and feed people propaganda. It’s like Comrade Lenin said – the people have to have the political experience for themselves. They have to be reborn politically. They have to feel it in their blood.’
Gwen listened, leaning against his chest, tired and hungry. She could feel when he took a breath, the strong muscles of his chest. She leaned round and looked up at him.
‘Do we have enough money for fish and chips? I’m ravenous.’
Daniel laughed, though she could sense his impatience with her. He wanted response, debate. ‘You don’t leave the ground for long, do you?’
‘Well.’ She was determined not to rise to this. ‘An army marches on its stomach – that’s what they say. Anyway, aren’t you hungry too?’
‘Come to think of it, yes.’
She looked solemnly up at him. She was longing to spend some time with him. Although they were so much in each other’s company, they were seldom ever alone these days. She put her lips right up to his ear.
‘Are you coming back to Millie’s?’
Both of them knew what she meant. That they would sneak up the dark stairs, make love in the dip of the old bed. That she would hold him close, longing for a day when he would not have to get up and creep out again, to the dark streets, but that day had not come, nor could she see that it was going to. She would have to be content with being left to sleep alone.
‘D’you want me to?’
‘I wouldn’t have asked otherwise, would I?’ She kissed the tip of his nose.
‘You’re a very forward woman.’
They were both whispering, trying not to laugh and attract the attention of the party worker who was driving them. She was forward, she thought. Sometimes she felt like someone different altogether. Who was the person who had lived in Worcester and had been going to marry Edwin Shackleton? Did she miss her? No – scarcely ever. In those moments she was perfectly happy because Daniel had come back to her again, to be close, and that was all that mattered.
Daniel squeezed her. ‘I’m coming with you all right.’
Going back to Millie’s now felt like retreating into a different and increasingly irrelevant life, and the more caught up she became with the party the more glad Gwen was to stay out, even though it made her feel guilty.
Millie was seven months pregnant and was feeling huge and ungainly. Now the heat of the summer was here she was suffering with swollen ankles. The doctor had told her to rest and keep her feet up as much as possible, so she was no longer able to escape to her mother’s as often as she had done. Her face was puffy and her hair hung limp and straggly so that she looked quite altered. She was always complaining about her hair, of which she had been rather proud until now.
‘Why don’t you go and get it trimmed?’ Gwen had as
ked the day before, trying to be patient as she bustled about, just in from the party offices. There they were, she and Daniel, involved in making the revolution happen and all Millie could think about was her hair. ‘It’d make you feel better.’
‘Oh, it all feels too much effort.’ Millie was sprawled along the couch, sipping a cup of tea. ‘And Lance will keep on about me spending money. You know what he’s like. There’s some tea in the pot if you want it.’ Reproachfully, she said, ‘Where’ve you been again? You’re never in. I thought now school had broken up you’d keep me company more.’
‘Oh, I will – I’ll try.’ Gwen took her tea and sat on the chair opposite.
‘You’re always with Daniel, I suppose?’
Gwen felt her face light up at the mention of his name.
‘Mostly, yes.’ She managed not to make a face at the tea, which was lukewarm and bitter.
Millie sighed and looked at her. ‘I don’t understand you. I thought that Edwin chap of yours seemed very nice.’ After Edwin’s arrival and Millie and Lance having to look after him, Gwen had had to explain what was going on.
‘He is nice. I just don’t feel for him the way I do for Daniel.’
Millie almost glared at her. ‘You’re really in love, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Gwen was aglow.
‘What does that feel like?’ Millie pushed herself up a little on the cushions. Her ankles were mottled and puffy. ‘What does being “in love” really feel like?’
All Gwen could feel was a deep stirring inside her. How could you ever put that into words?
‘I’m not sure I can tell you. I just know I am.’
Millie sighed, putting her cup and saucer on the table. ‘Better you don’t tell me, anyway,’ she said grumpily. ‘I’d better not know what I’m missing. I’m not going to have the chance to find out now, am I?’
On 16 August there was a Communist Party weekend for Spain in Birmingham with a rally in the Bull Ring. Gwen stood out in the sun selling the Spain leaflets, looking over the sea of heads at the CP and BCPL banners and straining to hear the speakers as they railed against the neutral stance Baldwin’s government had taken on Spain. Between them they sold five hundred pamphlets in the centre alone, and there were other meetings scattered round the city.
As Gwen patrolled Spiceal Street that afternoon with her leaflets, a figure came towards her from the crowd whom she suddenly recognized. Small and urgent looking and dressed in a baggy cream frock patterned with huge blue roses.
‘Hello, dear.’
‘Oh!’ Gwen was startled. It was so strange to see another of the school staff in a different place. Though with Lily Drysdale it seemed less strange. ‘Hello, Miss Drysdale . . .’ Her mind raced. Lily Drysdale was here at the rally. Had she just come as an interested bystander or could it be that she too was a party member?
‘I’m a supporter of the BCPL,’ Lily Drysdale announced. Lily’s dress had short sleeves and with her soft, rounded arms protruding from them, she looked rather attractive. ‘Are you a Communist? A member, I mean?’
Gwen blushed. ‘Yes, I am,’ she said defiantly.
Lily nodded. ‘Well, I can understand it. But if I were you, dear, I’d keep very quiet about it when you’re at school. Mr Lowry doesn’t hold with that sort of thing. You don’t want him finding out.’ She squeezed Gwen’s arm for a second. ‘See you about the place.’
As she walked away, Gwen saw a tall, bearded man join her, at her side. Gwen watched, fascinated. Was that Lily Drysdale’s secret lover, whom Millie had told her about? No wonder Lily knew when to keep quiet!
‘Letter for you.’
Millie slipped the envelope under Gwen’s bedroom door with a slight grunt. It was the following Tuesday and Gwen was getting ready to go out again. The writing was familiar but it took her a moment to recognize, with a horrible jolt, that it was her father’s hand.
The reality that she was supposed to have been marrying Edwin this coming Saturday flooded in on her. She had behaved so badly, not going home to face things, to sort it out! When Edwin had left here, the pain of her answer to him written on his face, she had known he would be the one to tell her parents. How shameful that she had left him to face it for her! She sat down on the bed, her heart thudding, telling herself she was lucky to get away with just a letter. Her parents might have arrived on the doorstep to remonstrate with her. At the same time, the fact that they hadn’t taken the trouble to was hurtful. She was the one in the wrong and should have gone home. Yet they didn’t care enough to come and find her.
She stared at the envelope. Perhaps she’d delay opening it until tonight. But then the dread of it would hang over her all day. Shakily she got up and found her paper knife to slit it open. The letter did not even cover a whole side of the paper:
Gwendoline
Just her name. He couldn’t even bring himself to write ‘Dear’. He wrote in deep blue ink, with his precise, pharmacist’s handwriting.
Your mother and I have waited for you to come home and explain yourself, the least you could manage in the circumstances. Instead, it was left up to poor Edwin, who has been treated atrociously. You have behaved in a deceitful, cowardly and selfish manner, bringing shame and acute embarrassment to your mother. Have you even given a thought to all our friends and to all the preparations which were in train? I would never have expected anything like this from my own child. A complete disgrace.
It’s no good coming back now, thinking you can make amends. Your mother and I feel that we have washed our hands of you. She can’t bring herself to communicate. Since you seem to want to live an independent life you’d better consider that you have left home. Don’t think you can just come running back when it suits you.
Your Father
Thirty-Six
‘Ah, come on – dance with me!’
John was squatting by the grate, trying to rouse a fire to cook on for when Christie came home. The doors were all open and the summer breeze blew along the hall from the garden. They lit the fire even in daylight now, risking it. The evenings stayed light too long to wait that late for food.
Siobhan was worrying at his shoulder, trying to force him.
‘What’s with you, John? . . . John, John, John . . .’ she chanted in a sing-song voice. ‘Will you not come and have a dance with your little Shiv? You’re a funny kind of a fella, John . . .’ She jigged around him like a sprite, dark hair lifting and falling, then prodded him again.
John kept his head down, blowing on the smoking sticks in the grate. Joey was crouched beside him, wrapped in a filthy old curtain that had been left in the house. Underneath, he was naked as a babe, except for his boots. He could feel the heaviness of the curtain’s dusty fabric against his back. Inside him was a tight, swelling sensation. Why did John bring the stuff for her? Why the bottles? Why make her be like that? Her voice was sweet now, cajoling, but he knew it wouldn’t last, that her mood could turn in a split second. Joey sat with the edges of the curtain gripped tightly in his fists.
Siobhan snatched her hand away from John’s shoulder.
‘You’re not natural!’ Her tone was hard, and edged with spite now. ‘You’re not a real man, are you, John? What’s the matter with you – you’re a girly, John Cliff, that’s what you are!’
Joey got up and ran over the loose tiles out into the garden. He didn’t like the feel of being naked. The curtain wafted round him, puffing little breezes against his skin. It made him remember the Christmas play at school, the kings adorned in old curtains. That was before Miss Purdy came, Christmas was. He knew she hadn’t been there then. This curtain, under the dust and filth, was a deep red with gold swirling patterns across it.
Earlier Siobhan had been tender with him, and motherly, as she could be sometimes, though that frightened him too because sooner or later her mood would change and you could never tell when. The deep, frightening hunger to be held welled up in him. It had been different when Miss Purdy held him. But Siobhan was dangerous.
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‘You’re a filthy urchin, sure you are,’ she said when he and John came back that evening. She had seemed quite well, cheerful even and with sudden energy. ‘We’re going to wash those clothes of yours, what’s left of them, God love you. Will you look at those shorts – there’s no arse left on them! John, can we not get hold of something else for the child to wear? These rags are almost dropping from him!’
‘S’pose so,’ John said in his wooden tones.
‘Come on now, fella, get them off – you can give yourself a scrub then cover yourself with this.’
Joey looked down at his little pile of clothes when he had removed them. They were nothing more than a pile of rags. He gave himself a quick wash with the cold water, feeling strange with the air on his skin.
Siobhan kept going on at him. ‘Come on, now – get some soap round that neck. Will you look at the filth on you!’ She was strange and overexcited. He didn’t like it and escaped as soon as he could, wrapping himself in the curtain while he was still wet. Siobhan pummelled at the clothes in the old sink at the back with a sudden burst of energy. She had wrung them out and now the clothes were laid across the bushes and brambles outside. The vest was worn so thin you could see through it and there were holes all over it. The clothes weren’t yet dry, but he put them on anyway and felt safer.
The air was warm and balmy. Now that summer had come and the leaves were all out, the house was completely secluded at the back. They had all relaxed about the worry of being discovered. The house next door was empty and in bad repair and no one further along seemed to want to know. In the spring there had been pink and white blossom on the two apple trees and now they were covered in tiny, unripe fruits. Joey had given himself belly ache by gnawing at them long before they were ripe. He had had to stay in that day, curled up with cramps.
Sitting on the back step, he shivered in the wet clothes. His boots were dry and bleached, the leather moulded to his feet. At least they fitted now. The feet had gone from his socks, just rotted away, so now he wore the boots with nothing inside. He pulled them off, enjoying the feel of air on his feet, and wiggled his toes. His feet were filthy and callused, with rough, discoloured patches. He stared at them indifferently for a time. Then he realized he could hear Siobhan’s voice inside, high and aggressive.