Made In Myrtle Street
B A Lightfoot
Originally published 2009 byRanelagh Books Ltd
Kindle edition
Copyright 2009 & 2011 B A Lightfoot
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. Nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Phill Watson
Photograph on the Front Cover courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
(negative number Q5242)
Published by B A Lightfoot 2011
To Pippin - thanks for your lovely family
Three ordinary men who cope with the extraordinary years of WW1 through their camaraderie and humour. The sometimes quirky interpretation of life at home in a young daughter’s letters to her father and a quest for revenge against an alcoholic Major.
Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Postscript
Chapter 1
Autumn 1914
Edward looked on uneasily as his wife Laura carefully washed the bacon rashers under the cold water tap, dabbed them with the pot towel, and then placed them, spitting and raging, into the hot fat of the cast iron frying pan. She turned the bacon over with a fork and the fat sprayed with a renewed vigour over the cooker and down the pinafore that protected her long black dress. She stared implacably at the spluttering frying pan, barely seeing its contents; locked into her unshared thoughts.
He was crouched in the small square space between the living room and the scullery that he used as a temporary workplace; just for small to medium jobs like fixing mops and brushes, cleaning shoes, varnishing chairs and repairing drawers. When it came to actually making things such as rocking horses, breadboards, toy prams and tea caddies he worked down in the cellar. Occupying this area in the winter he would get the smoky warmth from the living room with its rich smells of baking bread and burning coal. In the summer he could open the cellar door and benefit from the cooling air that came from its whitewashed depths. From this space a step led down into the scullery and he would often sit here, leaning his back against the wall where the lead gas and water pipes ran along the skirting boards, to read the newspaper or to talk to Laura. If the weather was hot he might choose instead to sit on the step that led into the paved back yard.
Now, with jobs to complete before he left, he had positioned himself in this space at the top of the cellar steps to repair the clogs for his younger son, Ben. He rubbed his thumb nail vigorously on his dark head and cursed quietly so that the children wouldn’t hear. Distracted by his wife’s alien silence, he had just inadvertently hammered his thumb. His eldest brother, Jim, had told him years ago to rub a hammered finger on his hair to prevent bruising. It always seemed to work although he didn’t know why.
Positioning the clog on the cast iron last, Edward extracted another tack from between his teeth and hammered it into the clegg that he was fixing on the heel. He felt helpless in the face of her silence; her normally warm and communicative lips seemed set in a grim, cold line.
The bright sun outside was throwing shadows onto the slightly uneven, white distempered walls of the scullery. The speckles of fat from the bacon gleamed like raindrops on the wall around the gas stove and over the grey stone flags of the floor. Laura turned the rashers once more before finally lifting them onto a plate. She replaced them in the pan with two rounds of bread. Fried bread as well. This was a special treat for a special day. Like the condemned man’s breakfast, he thought grimly.
He heard his seven year old daughter shouting angrily from the back yard where she had gone to clean the rabbit hutch. She was also Laura but nicknamed Pippin by her Dad to avoid confusion. His eldest son was named Edward, like him, but his wife’s tone of voice seemed, somehow, to make it clear who she was addressing. He was also out there, polishing the greengrocer’s bike that was the prized acquisition of his new job. He could just about handle it. ‘You leave my Floppy alone our Edward, or I will let the tyres down on your horrible bike.’
The nine year old lad was mocking and unrepentant. ‘Don’t be such a big soft girl. This is how you’re supposed to hold them. That’s why they have these big ears like handles. Look, it smiles when you jiggle it up and down.’
The shriek from his daughter drew no response from her mother who continued ladling fat over the yolks of two eggs. ‘Stop pulling my hair you stupid girl. Pack it in or I’ll belt you.’
The moistness that appeared on his wife’s eyes and ran down her still immobile face forced Edward into a relieving response. Normally, Laura would have rebuked the children to stop them arguing but the tenseness in her face and the occasional gulping movement in her throat showed her struggling with some deeper turmoil. He didn’t want the memories that they would hold after he had gone to be of an angry, bullying father but he would have to intervene. ‘Look, you two. Stop arguing or you will be frightening the coalman’s horse in the yard at the end.’
‘Our Edward is frightening my Floppy,’ his daughter protested.
‘Edward, just give the rabbit back to Pippin and you get on with doing your bike. You’ll be needing it later.’
He listened to his son’s mumbled provocations as he handed the rabbit to his sister and felt a deepening guilt over the decision that he had made to sign on as a regular. When the declaration of war against Germany and her allies had been announced the choice had seemed clear and straightforward. He had been at the annual camp with the Territorials in Prestatyn at the beginning of August when the call had arrived to become full time soldiers. They were needed to give support to the regular army in dealing with the worsening situation in Europe. It had posed a serious dilemma for most of them when they were approached as there were many who, like himself, had got wives and young families to support but the supplications that had followed, urging them to fight for King and Country, had resulted in almost all of them signing on immediately. It had seemed so much the right thing to do at the time. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a group of oddball fanatics, a place and person that none of them had even heard of before, had seemed to have little relevance to their lives in the rapidly growing Lancashire town of Salford but the German invasion of Belgium and then of France changed things. Almost overnight it had become a sudden and alarming threat to their own homes, families and freedoms.
They had willingly agreed to take up the cudgels, to go ‘over there’ and give the Hun a bloody nose and to be back in time for Christmas but they had had no real appreciation of the possible scale of the war, little understanding of its causes and no concept of its potential cost in human lives.
Since they had been brought back from camp, the newspapers
had been carrying stories daily about the unbelievable brutality of the Germans, the bayoneting of babies and the raping of women. They also read the reports on the efforts that were being mounted by the British Government for the biggest mobilisation of armed forces that the country ever had seen. Transport, food, medical supplies, weapons, tents and blankets had all to be put into place to support an army of hundreds of thousands of men.
In the hectic days since, though, doubts had started to build in Edward’s mind. Times were already tough and they now had five children to support, including a young baby. His departure would impose a heavy burden on his wife and on the shoulders of his nine year old son. He worried over whether Laura would be able to get enough coal for the fire when the weather started to get colder. It was a good job that during the previous winter he had shown young Edward whereabouts to go at the gas works to get a pram of coke. Now, so quickly, it was the 2 September and almost time for him to leave. New doubts crowded into his mind as he struggled to put a shape to the silence that gripped his wife.
Laura took a loaf out of the white enamelled breadbin and placed it in the centre of the sycamore cutting board. Holding her hand across the top of the bread in a way that always caused him alarm, she cut a thin slice, buttered it carefully, halved it and placed it on the small plate that she had taken out of the cupboard. He preferred it plain as he liked to dip it into the fat but he understood that the butter was to make it memorable.
Edward polished the clogs and lifted the shoe last back onto the shelf above the cellar door. He bent down to pick up the clogs and Laura’s skirt brushed against his arm as she carried the breakfast plate through to the living room. She positioned it carefully on the green chenille table cloth, laid the knife and fork on either side and picked up his soft, khaki Lancashire Fusiliers cap from the centre of the table to replace it with the small bread plate. His army rucksack was also removed and placed on a chair, surmounted by the cap. His kitbag, containing all his army issue clothes and a selection of additional items that his wife had deemed to be essentials, stood on a second chair.
‘Sit down, love, and enjoy that while it’s hot,’ Laura said gently but without meeting his eyes. ‘You might not get another decent meal for a bit.’
He needed to tell her about the thirty pounds that he had brought home in his wage packet. She had been so thrilled to hold that much money that he had not had the heart to tell her that it was paying him off. He now had no job to come back to when the fighting finished.
A loud rapping on the front door thwarted his confession. Young Edward came charging through from the back yard, disturbing the sleeping cat into a spiky spitting bundle. He raced for the front door with Pippin hanging on to the back of his jumper. ‘I want to get it,’ she yelled. ‘It’ll be Amy calling for me to play out.’
‘No it won’t. It’ll be Jimmy Horrocks coming to lend me his Dad’s pump.’
Edward nudged his chair closer to the table as they battled past him to the front door. A gust of warm autumn wind swept over him and he waved a bacon sandwich to acknowledge Maggie Ellis from two doors down as she shouted from the street. Her mother had had a fall and could your Laura come and see what she could do for her. He relayed the message through to his wife then repeated her response to Maggie.
Edward looked around the small room that was the focus of their family life as he ate his sumptuous breakfast. The net curtains at the window created a heightening background to the rich green of the long, aspidistra leaves. The plant stood on a crocheted cover on the tall oak table with the barley twist legs. He enjoyed running his finger down the curving pattern that had been crafted by his father and thinking about the man that he had barely known, the Dad who had appeared so briefly in his life before he had died when Edward was only two.
The table where he now sat was pushed up against the wall between the front door and the door that led into the scullery. The flowers that he had bought for Laura two days before stood in a plain glass vase on the table in front of him. They were already beginning to fade. Laura swept past him wiping her hands on her pinafore. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, love. She must have had one of her turns again,’ she said quietly, gazing resolutely ahead of her.
He had never been away for so long before. The two week annual camp was always a bit of a wrench but this would now be for much longer. He blotted up the remnants of the yoke with the last crust of the bread. Their living room was small but it was functional and cheerful. It was a room full of vigour and life, of argument and upset, of inquiry and discussion. Sometimes, with the noise of a young family, it felt oppressively small and he would escape into the backyard, the street or even the cellar. At others, it was filled with the glowing warmth and security of loving relationships.
Edward felt especially pleased with the decorating that he had only recently completed. His older sister, Sarah, was the cook for a family that owned a wholesale stationery business in Manchester. Their home, a large house in Seedley, had recently had the hall redecorated. When there had been some rolls of anaglypta left over, the owner, Mr Muir, had kindly agreed to Sarah taking them for her brother for ‘just a small, nominal charge.’ Edward had been thrilled and had covered the lower half of the walls with it. A rich brown paint bought from the Paint and Varnish Company on Cross Lane had given it a warm finish. The same source had supplied the cream gloss for the upper half and the distemper for the ceiling. He had toyed, for a while, with the idea of stippling the somewhat plain cream top section with the brown paint, but Laura had said that it would be far too flamboyant. He had settled, instead, for nailing up some pictures along with a framed sampler that her Grandma had made. It was getting a bit discoloured now but you could still clearly see the white rose stitched proudly over the title ‘The Almonds of Morley.’
A big cupboard was built into one of the alcoves that flanked the cast iron fireplace with its heavy wooden mantle. Underneath the cupboard there were three large drawers with shell patterned brass handles. The top drawer was crammed full of freshly ironed clothes, mostly children’s, whilst the middle one was filled with towels, tablecloths, spare curtains, crocheted mats and tea towels. The bottom drawer had a varied collection of Edward’s tools including his multi-sized shoe last, screwdrivers, hammers, an axe, various tins containing a range of tacks, nails and screws, a set of chisels, a rusting rip saw and a broken-toothed cross cut saw. A variety of part-used paint cans that he had meant to sort out filled the space in the left of the drawer.
In front of the fireplace the varnished wooden floor was covered by a colourful rag rug that Laura’s mother had made. He took his plate into the scullery, came back into the living room and relaxed into the comfortable warmth of the rocking chair that had once been his Dad’s. He closed his eyes, rested back onto the crocheted antimacassar and enjoyed the solace of the traces of ancient pipe smoke.
His eldest brother, James, had inherited most of their father’s woodworking tools after he had followed him into his trade as a wood turner, but Edward was proud of the wooden mallet, pliers, awl, two old chisels, a spokeshave, two moulding planes and a sharpening stone that had been passed on to him. His Dad was thirty nine when he had died and it had left a void in his life that, despite their best efforts, his older brothers were unable to fill. He missed the guiding hand, the strong supportive presence, the special bond that counterpoints the mother’s unquestioning love. On the other hand, when he saw some of his mates’ fathers after they had had an excess of alcohol, he was grateful that he didn’t have to contend with that darker side. Even now, as an adult, he felt a thrill when he used his Dad’s tools and held the handles that his master craftsman father had held. He oiled and sharpened the blades with the same reverential care that he knew his Dad would have used. For a while he was the son of the father and the father was embodied in the son.
Pippin pushed the dummy back into the mouth of the protesting baby, Mary, who was demanding attention with reddening fury from a chair against the wall. The ungr
ateful baby, fists clenched and arms flailing, spat it out again. ‘I haven’t got all day to be standing here pushing this back in,’ Pippin said, putting her hands on her hips and unconsciously mimicking the scolding tone of her mother. ‘Mam has just gone an errand so you will have to wait for a minute.’ She had wood shavings from the rabbit hutch still nestling in her red hair.
The baby, having woken to the stimulating smell of cooking bacon, was not to be appeased. Pippin picked up a wooden sheep from the pile of toys that was carefully stacked in front of the drawers. It had moving legs but the unfortunate, cross-eyed appearance of a bemused, white dog. ‘Mary had a little lamb, its feet were white as snow,’ she chanted, waving the tormented looking sheep in front of little Mary. The baby continued crying but Edward declined his eldest daughter’s invitation to nurse the unhappy infant, unwilling to risk the unblemished appearance of his new, khaki trousers.
He had made most of the toys that were in the stack though the dolls had been his wife’s creations. The sheep had been one of his earlier efforts and was showing clear signs of abuse and neglect. He felt rather more proud of the fortress that he had created two years ago as a Christmas present for young Edward. The wood had been salvaged from the scrap bin at the sawmill where he worked and the lead soldiers had been made by his brother James using strips of lead flashing thrown away by roofers repairing a property near his home.
Jim had made the moulds from Plaster of Paris, building them up in two sections with grease proof paper in between. Edward remembered how even he had been excited when Jim had taken the molten lead out of the oven in his black-leaded range and poured it into the plaster cast moulds. Then he had been as thrilled as any schoolboy would have been when they were broken open to reveal the shiny lead soldiers.
Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) Page 1