by Maureen Lee
‘She must think I’m the devil in human form,’ Harry said as she closed the door. He winked at her. ‘I’m not that bad.’
‘I suspect you are,’ Mollie told him. He held out his arm for her to link, but she ignored it. The night was warm and most front doors were open with people sitting on the steps. It was dark enough for the lamplighter to have started on his rounds.
‘Are you scared to touch me?’ Harry taunted.
‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘I don’t want to give anyone the impression that we’re courting.’
‘You could do worse.’
‘I could do better.’
He laughed. ‘I’m quite likely to get an inferiority complex if I see much more of you.’
They began to walk along the street, Mollie making sure there was a good distance between them.
‘You couldn’t get an inferiority complex to save your life,’ she said.
This seemed to please him. He said, ‘How do you manage to read The Times every day? I’d’ve thought you’d be too busy working.’
‘I am working.’ She explained about the mornings spent with Mr Pettigrew. ‘He’s a horrible man with horrible views. He thinks Adolf Hitler is a decent chap and he adores Oswald Mosley.’ Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists to which the blackshirts belonged.
‘Me, I wouldn’t work five minutes for a bastard like that.’ He leapt upon a tin and crushed it with his boots, as if it were Oswald Mosley’s head, then continued to walk, like a child, with one foot in the gutter and the other on the pavement, hopping from one to the other.
‘Well, you’re not me; you haven’t got four children and a mother-in-law to feed. The money I get puts bread on the table and that’s all I care about.’
‘There’s such a thing as dying on your feet and living on your knees,’ he said a trifle pompously, reminding her of Tom.
It was her turn to laugh. ‘For goodness’ sake, Harry. I’m not working for Hitler or Mosley, just a ninety-year-old man who can hardly walk. Sometimes, I worry he’ll die and I’ll lose the ten bob a week. I just hope he stays alive until I don’t need the money any more.’
‘I like it when you laugh.’ He stood in front of her. Mollie’s stomach lurched at the look in his eyes. They’d reached the end of the street where the lamp hadn’t yet been lit and the cobbles glistened in the pale moonlight. Before she realized what was happening, he was kissing her on the lips. She pulled away a fraction later than she should have.
‘Don’t do that!’ she said sharply.
‘Didn’t you like it?’ He sounded surprised.
‘No.’
She turned on her heel and walked quickly back to the house. She didn’t look back. When she got in, she discovered Irene had gone to bed, in a huff no doubt. There was a cup of faintly warm tea in the pot and she took it into the parlour. If she didn’t finish both gloves tonight, it would prey on her mind and she’d never sleep. She lit the gas mantel, drew the curtains and discovered her heart was racing. Harry Benedict was only the second man in her life to kiss her like that and she felt ashamed. ‘Tom,’ she groaned for no reason at all. ‘Oh, Tom.’
Her hands were shaking too much even to thread the needle, let alone sew. There was blood on her palm where she’d pricked it; she’d wash it later. ‘I don’t love him,’ she whispered, ‘but he makes me feel like a woman.’ It was a long time since that had happened, since a man had wanted her and told her she looked nice. Tom used to say that she was beautiful.
The door opened and Brodie crept in. Her little face was flushed and she’d been crying. ‘Dandelion hasn’t come home,’ she said in a subdued voice. ‘I rattled his saucer on the step for ages, but he still didn’t come. Grandma gave him her worms to eat, and I heard him being sick in the yard. I think he might be dead.’
Mollie lifted her daughter on to her knee; she felt hot and clammy. ‘It wasn’t really worms, darlin’; it was mincemeat, though not very nice. It was probably some other food he’d eaten that made him sick.’ Dandelion was a terrible scavenger. ‘But he’ll come back. Doesn’t he always come back?’
‘Yes but, Mammy, I worry about him something awful.’
‘I know you do, Brodie. We all worry.’ But not as much as Brodie, who loved Dandelion as much as any mother loved her child. Mollie dreaded that he might come to some harm, more for Brodie’s sake than her own. She was too sensitive for her own good, Joe too. Both were easily hurt and not fitted to live in Turnpike Street where children needed to be hardy and resilient like Megan and Tommy. Brodie’s sweet, sad face plucked at her heartstrings. ‘Tell you what, darlin’, shall I make us a cup of cocoa?’ It wasn’t often she had time alone with her youngest daughter and she’d finish the gloves tomorrow.
‘You’re late,’ Mr Pettigrew snapped when she arrived the following day. He said the same thing every morning and Mollie always gave the same reply.
‘No, I’m not. It said quarter to nine on the clock in London Road. Your own clock must be fast.’ The grandfather clock, showing ten past nine, was squeezed between a giant sideboard - its shelves almost reached the ceiling - and an equally giant wardrobe. Mr Pettigrew’s bed, which he only left to visit the lavatory, had been placed beneath the window. A round table at the side was covered with a dark-brown chenille cloth and heaped with the newspapers he refused to be parted from until they were a month old. Mollie was often obliged to search through them for an item he wanted read to him again.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she enquired.
‘Yes, and make it strong. You know I only like it strong.’
‘That’s why I always make it strong,’ she replied. She went into the kitchen where Philomena had left a tray with two cups and saucers, a bowl of sugar cubes, a small jug of milk and a plate of biscuits, which her grandfather always ate with great relish. With its bright yellow walls and pretty flowered curtains, the room couldn’t have been more different from the one in which Mr Pettigrew was living out the last few years of his long life, but he refused to have a single item of furniture removed or the horrid olive-green wallpaper with navy-blue stripes changed for something brighter. He even preferred the ceiling, which looked as if it hadn’t been painted since the last century, to stay the same disgusting dirty yellow. Philomena, a spinster of about forty who part-owned a jewellery shop in Southport, would inherit the big house in Copperas Hill when he passed away.
Mollie returned with the tea. ‘You could stand your spoon up in this,’ she said cheerfully, but was given a sour look in return. ‘Which paper would you like me to start with this morning?’ she asked.
‘The Herald,’ he said grumpily. He never addressed her by her name. ‘What does the headline say?’
‘“Hitler bans German-Jewish marriages,”’ she read.
‘Quite right, too.’ He peered at her with old eyes that could hardly see. ‘Are you Jewish?’
‘No, I’m Irish. Can’t you tell by my accent?’
‘They’re almost as bad, the Irish,’ he grumbled.
Mollie resisted the urge to throw the tea in his face, reminding herself that he was a very elderly invalid, and that his sickening views didn’t matter. ‘George Bernard Shaw is an Irishman,’ she said, ‘And Keates and Synge and loads of other famous people.’ The old bugger liked an argument.
‘Shaw’s a playwright.’ He sniffed disdainfully. ‘I could never stand the theatre, couldn’t see the point of it. The other two are poets and I could never see the point of poetry either.’
‘Is there anything you do like, Mr Pettigrew? If so, I’ll try to think of an Irishman who does it.’
The glimmer of a smile passed over his skull-like face, remarkably unlined for a ninety-year-old. He had a full head of dark-grey hair that still retained streaks of black. His hearing was perfect and his brain razor-sharp; only his eyes and his legs no longer worked as well as they might. He must feel frustrated, lying in bed day after day, but nothing could excuse his monstrous opinions.
‘I h
ave to go to the lavatory,’ he announced.
Mollie buried her head in the paper and didn’t watch as he attempted to get up; he couldn’t abide to be helped. She could hear him grunting as he struggled to make his legs reach the floor.
‘Dressing gown,’ he barked. ‘That stupid girl’s hung it behind the door.’ By ‘girl’, he meant Philomena. The dressing gown was supposed to be left at the foot of the bed so he could easily reach it.
She fetched the dressing gown, gave it to him, and buried her head again in the paper while he endeavoured to put it on. Then he shuffled out of the room to the lavatory that Philomena had had installed on the ground floor especially for him.
‘The sun’s out,’ he said when he came back. She thought there was a wistful note in his crusty voice.
‘Would you like to sit in the front room? It’ll be lovely and sunny in there.’ He lived at the back looking out over a small yard, which the sun only reached very early in the morning and never in winter. ‘I could read to you there and we could watch the traffic pass by.’ He was completely cut off from the world outside and must feel very isolated.
‘I have no wish to see the traffic pass by, thank you. I am not a child. I would not be amused at the sight of a bus or a motor car.’ He removed his dressing gown with aching slowness and got back into bed. ‘Read me the letters in The Times, if you please, and remember, should I ever wish to sit in another room, I am perfectly capable of suggesting it myself.’
‘I can’t help feeling sorry for him,’ Mollie said a few hours later to Agatha, who, five years ago, had married Tom’s policeman friend, Philip Fraser, and now had two small children; Donnie, three, and Pamela, who was almost twelve months old. After four hours spent with Mr Pettigrew, she wasn’t in the mood to go home and face her mother-in-law’s wrath, so had caught a tram to her friend’s house off West Derby Road. Having witnessed the plight of Tom’s widow, Phil had turned down the offer of a police house and rented one instead. If anything happened to him, at least his wife and family would be left with a roof over their heads.
‘He sounds horrible.’ Agatha shuddered.
‘Oh, he’s revolting, but I still can’t help being sorry for him.’ She hadn’t come to complain about Mr Pettigrew, but to tell her friend about the events of the night before. ‘Irene did her nut when she saw us talking through the window,’ she finished indignantly. ‘If it hadn’t been for her, I probably wouldn’t have gone outside. All we did was walk down the street a bit, discussing politics, but now Irene will have a face on her for days.’ She didn’t mention Harry’s kiss. ‘She drives me up the wall, Agatha, but I suppose her heart’s in the right place. I’m always saying that, aren’t I? Irene, Lily, Pauline, all their hearts are in the right place, and our Megan’s, too, the little monkey. Yesterday, she was nagging me again for a new bed.’
‘I don’t know how you stand it, Mollie, I really don’t.’ Agatha’s face creased with sympathy, while trying to prevent Pamela from tearing her hair out by the roots. ‘Phil’s mam and dad are all right, but I wouldn’t fancy living with either of them for very long. His sister lives in Chester, so we don’t see all that much of her.’
‘I probably wouldn’t mind Irene if I didn’t see so much of her,’ Mollie moaned. She couldn’t have described exactly how she felt about Tom’s mother - a mixture of love, resentment, irritation and admiration for her fighting spirit.
‘It’s a pity you can’t go back to Duneathly. Mind you, I’d be dead upset if you did. I’d miss you horribly.’ She put Pamela on the floor and the baby immediately crawled across to Mollie and demanded to be picked up. Mollie hauled her on to her knee.
‘You’re spoilt, you are,’ she told the tiny girl, who immediately made a grab for her hat. ‘Is that a new tablecloth, Agatha? It’s very pretty.’ The cloth was lavender and white gingham with a broderie anglaise frill.
‘I needed a new one for second best. I got that from Blackler’s.’
Mollie couldn’t imagine shopping in Blackler’s again, even buying anything new. She was envious of Agatha, who had a husband and a house of her own, who could buy tablecloths whenever she wanted and clothes for her children that hadn’t been worn before. She’d had the same things once and if it hadn’t been for Tom’s recklessness, she’d have them still.
‘I’d better go,’ she sighed. ‘I only popped in for a minute to get everything off my chest. The later I get home, the angrier Irene will be.’
But when she arrived back at Turnpike Street, Irene greeted her with an enormous smile. ‘There’s a job going,’ she said in a rush, ‘and it’d be perfect for you. You know Betsy Evans from across the street?’
‘Of course I do.’ Betsy was the young girl who’d admired her hat all those years ago. Since Mollie had returned to live there permanently, she and Betsy, now nineteen, had become good friends. Mollie had shown her how to turn an old hat into something really fashionable with the addition of a length of ribbon, a piece of net, or a flower.
‘You know where Betsy works, don’t you?’ Irene went on.
‘She’s an usherette at the Rotunda,’ Mollie said patiently.
‘That’s right. Well, she came round earlier to say the lady in the box office has decided to retire early; she’s got rheumatism somewhere or other and can’t sit down for long. They want someone well spoken and trustworthy in her place, so Betsy recommended you to the manager. If you’re interested, you’re to go there around six o’clock for an interview.’ Irene could hardly contain her excitement. ‘You’ll never guess how much the wages are, Moll.’ She paused for effect. ‘Thirty-five bloody bob a week! You are interested, aren’t you?’ she added when Mollie stayed silent, too stunned to speak.
‘Yes,’ she said weakly after a while. ‘Of course I’m interested. Oh, but what shall I wear?’ she wailed. ‘I haven’t got anything decent.’ She seemed to live in a plain black skirt and an assortment of blouses that had seen better days.
‘What about your blue going-away frock?’
‘I’ve already worn that to death and it’s going thin under the arms. The pink one shrank in the wash and it’s too tight around my chest.’ It was Irene’s fault; she’d boiled the damn thing. ‘I haven’t got any more frocks except winter ones and I’d melt to a puddle if I wore one of them in this weather; besides, they’re as old as the hills.’
‘Here, take this.’ Irene pulled off her wedding ring. ‘Take it to Uncle’s and pawn it, then buy yourself a frock.’ It wasn’t unusual for Irene to pawn her ring. When Mollie had been expecting Tommy and unable to work, the ring had been in and out of the pawnshop like a yoyo, sometimes accompanied by Mollie’s own.
‘Have I got time to get to and from Blackler’s?’
‘Just about. Buy yourself some stockings, too. While you’re gone, I’ll boil some hot water for you to get washed in. You can use that eau de cologne Pauline gave me for Christmas and take one of the little embroidered hankies that Lily got me. Oh, and wear that pearl necklace and earrings you got off your auntie in New York.’
By the time Mollie returned, the children had become aware that something of importance was happening. They crowded around their mother in the kitchen when she stripped down to her pants and bra to get washed. ‘Why are you getting washed in the afternoon?’ Megan wanted to know.
‘I’ve got an important interview, love.’
‘What’s an interview, Mammy?’ Joe enquired.
‘A meeting with someone.’ She rubbed the flannel under her arms. ‘Mammy’s meeting a man about a job.’
‘A job where?’ asked Brodie.
‘In the Rotunda Theatre, love.’
‘You didn’t wash behind your ears, Mam,’ Tommy said accusingly. ‘You’re always telling me off for not washing behind me ears.’
‘My ears, Tommy,’ Megan said haughtily. ‘Not me ears.’
‘Fuck off,’ Tommy said.
Mollie stopped washing herself and stared aghast at her son. ‘Tommy Ryan, how dare you? How dare you
use that word? If your dad was alive, he’d put you over his knee and spank you.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Tommy stared belligerently at his mother. ‘Everyone says fuck off.’
‘I doubt that very much, Tommy. Some boys might say it, but they’re very wrong to do so.’ She’d have to keep an eye on him in the future, or he’d turn into a proper little scally. ‘You’re not ever, ever, to say it again. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Mam.’ He looked torn between telling her to fuck off again or bursting into tears, something he only did once in a blue moon, as he was too tough for tears. She was glad when he started to cry, though didn’t have time to comfort him.
Irene came to the rescue. ‘He probably doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’ She took Tommy’s hand, which was filthy, and led him out of the kitchen. ‘Come on, lad. Give your mammy a bit of space while she finishes getting washed. You’ve only got another thirty-five minutes, Mollie,’ she warned. ‘It won’t look good if you’re late.’
‘I’m nearly ready.’
The frock she’d got from Blackler’s wasn’t as pretty as some they’d had - beige moygashel with a collar, short sleeves, a gently flaring skirt, and a narrow belt - but it was smarter than most and it suited Aunt Maggie’s pearls.
‘How do I look?’ she asked the children, who’d been following her around the house.
‘Beautiful, Mammy,’ Megan and Brodie said together.
‘Nice,’ said Joe.
‘You look the gear, Mam.’ Tommy burst into tears again.
Irene ushered her out of the house. ‘Good luck, luv, I’ll be keeping me fingers crossed till you come back.’
They kissed fondly. ‘I love you, Irene,’ Mollie said.
‘I know you do, Moll, and I love you.’
Chapter 12
1936
There was always a big queue on Saturday night, mainly for the cheapest seats, the wooden benches at the back of the balcony that only cost threepence. The front balcony was sixpence, and the stalls, where the seats were upholstered, were ninepence and a shilling. Everyone wore their best clothes and were always in a particularly good humour as they looked forward to the show, giving every act a rowdy welcome and cheering wildly when it ended, though there were occasional boos for a poor performance.