by Anne Doughty
Clare peered down on the figure pedalling steadily up the slight incline. At this point, where the railway bridge crossed over the lane, the track ran right beside the road. For a moment, she was so close to the figure on the bicycle she could have called to him through the open window. Then, just as she was about to wave, a great cloud of steam blew back from the engine. By the time it had gone, the road had disappeared and the track had dropped into a shallow cutting where only the bright white clouds in the paling blue sky were visible above the shaggy line of the full-leafed hedgerows.
She waited patiently for the level crossing but there were no children to wave to anywhere in sight. Although it was a lovely summer evening and the sun was still shining brightly, she knew by the long shadows cast by the trees and even by the cows that were grazing peacefully in the fields that it must be getting late. Perhaps it was past the children’s bedtime.
‘What time it is, Auntie Polly?’ she asked without turning away from the window.
When there was no reply, she turned round and found her aunt was asleep. Settled by the far window she had leant her head against the rough fabric of the seat and was now thoroughly out for the count.
Clare sighed and wriggled herself more comfortably into her own corner. It was no wonder Auntie Polly was so tired. She’d been busy trying to sort everything out since she’d fetched them from the hospital. Uncle Jack had taken a day of his holidays from work so that he could drive them round in his car but even with the car it had been a very busy day. He’d done everything he could to give a hand, he’d even come with them to Lennox’s to buy clothes and underwear because all their own things had had to be destroyed.
‘Jack, what would we have done without you?’ Auntie Polly said, as they drove out of the town at the end of the morning.
‘Sure it was the least I could do,’ he replied easily.
Granny Hamilton had made them a very nice stew for their lunch and afterwards they said goodbye to William. Auntie Polly kept looking at William as they were getting ready to go and Clare wondered if he might cry, but William didn’t seem to mind staying behind at all. He hardly even bothered to say cheerio and Granny Hamilton had to tell him to wave goodbye to the car as it turned out of the farmyard and up the hill to the main road.
They drove back into Armagh again, this time to the solicitor’s office. They’d been there for ages. It was a big three-storey building in Russell Street opposite the Cosy Cinema and the RUC Barracks. With tall pillars outside, Clare thought the entrance looked more like the outside of a church than the way in to business premises. She’d had to sit for ages on a very hard chair in the outer office with the clerks.
Behind the counter where they worked there were files and folders everywhere, stacked on shelves and desks, piled up on the tops of cupboards and even heaped up on the floor. There were three typewriters all chattering away at once and going ‘ping’ at the end of every line as well as two big black telephones which rang every few minutes or so.
‘Roan Anersin,’ said the youngest clerk, who wore a black skirt and a rather crumpled white blouse.
‘Row Anderson’ said the middle aged lady with the spotted blouse and the grey cardigan.
‘Munro and Anderson’, said the Chief Clerk, the lady who sat nearest to the partner’s door. She had silver-grey hair and spoke very correctly. Clare wondered if she had been to elocution classes and whether she spoke like that when she was at home making her tea. She looked as if she might be a single lady. Perhaps she had no one to talk to except a pussy-cat. That must be very lonely and sad, to have no one to talk to.
‘Here you are, my dear, you’ve had such a long wait.’
Clare was amazed to find the silver-grey lady standing in front of her with a glass of orange squash and two biscuits on a little plate. One of the biscuits was a pink wafer one which she particularly liked.
‘I’m afraid this is very boring for you. Solicitor’s are very careful people so everything they do has to be just so.’
She had such a nice way of clicking her fingers together when she said ‘Just so’ and such a lively smile that Clare wondered if sometimes she got bored too, working in this dusty old office.
Then Auntie Polly and Uncle Jack reappeared. They said thank you and goodbye but then began to talk business all over again. The tall gentleman with spectacles said everything at least three times but although she could pick out words like ‘intestacy’ and ‘deed of family arrangement’ and ‘residue’, she couldn’t understand any of it. But he did seem to be very helpful and they all smiled as they shook hands and he came and shook hands with her too and called her Miss Hamilton. No one had ever called her Miss Hamilton before, except as a joke.
She wondered if orphans were called ‘Miss’ if they were girls. She tried to remember what that man who ate the pudding called David Copperfield when he was an orphan. But that probably didn’t count because it was such a long time ago. She couldn’t imagine William being called Mr Hamilton.
She wondered what William was doing now. He was sure to get himself in a mess if he played in the yard which was always muddy after rain. It would be even worse if he went into the fields where the cattle had been. She hoped he would behave himself and not trail around at Granny’s skirt tail like Uncle Jack had done all those years ago. William always wanted attention. Maybe that was what Uncle Jack wanted as well. But he must have grown out of it for he was really a very nice uncle now. He’d been so helpful and kind. He’d even bought her a little handbag with a purse inside and given her a whole half-crown to put in the purse as a luck-penny.
She leant back in her seat and watched the hedgerows stream past the dust-streaked windows. In a few minutes, she too was asleep.
The Great Northern Station was full of smoke and steam. As she climbed down the steep steps of the train her eyes began to smart so badly that she almost missed seeing a trolley piled high with mailbags that rattled past only a few feet away from her. High above her head the great arches of the train shed shut out the sunlight and created a dark, noisy cavern full of hurrying figures. Clare felt very small and would have taken Aunt Polly’s hand if they hadn’t both had so much to carry.
‘Porter, porter. Carry yer bags, lady?’
Clare drew back as the burly figure blocked their path and shouted at them.
‘No, thank you,’ said Polly, nudging Clare in the back with the edge of her suitcase, to tell her to walk on.
It was difficult to keep up with Auntie Polly’s hasty trot. Clare lost her twice when she got stuck behind people with huge suitcases. Once, a porter walked straight in front of her and caught the edge of the shopping bag Granny Hamilton had lent her to put her things in. It wasn’t like this when they went on the excursion to Bangor.
Outside the station there was so much traffic they had to wait ages to get across the cobbled forecourt and the street beyond. Then it seemed as if they walked for miles on broad, crowded pavements leading to a huge white building with green towers on top. Clare’s arms got sore from trying to keep her bags from catching in the legs of the people streaming backwards and forwards. Auntie Polly walked faster and faster and she was soon out of breath.
By the time they arrived at the bus stop she was longing to sit down and so exhausted that she couldn’t understand what Auntie Polly was telling her about double-deckers and trolley buses. It sounded as if the trolley buses were far handier and there were more of them but they didn’t go all the way. As they went on standing at the double-decker stop, Clare began to wonder what the point was waiting for a double-decker to take you all the way, if it didn’t come in the first place.
The bus was very full and there was no room to leave their luggage in the proper luggage space so they had to struggle upstairs with it while the bus lurched out from the stop into the traffic. Thankfully there were two seats right up at the front and when they both sat down Clare told herself that things were bound to be better now. She looked out at the shops and houses that lined the streets. Some of the
streets had trees which brushed the roof and windows as they went past, but most of them didn’t. They all seemed very dirty and empty, with newspapers blowing along the gutters in the little evening breeze that had sprung up. Here and there, where a house had fallen down, rubble was piled up high and bricks spilt out of the empty windows. There were open spaces with piles of rusted metal and patches of tall weeds and boys kicking tin cans between goal posts of old buckets or rusted through dustbins.
They went across a bridge and she looked down into a wide, grey river that swept in a big curve between broad, gleaming mud banks. The thought of the mud made Clare shudder. She thought of the little stream at the Dean’s Bridge where her mother sometimes took them for a walk. It was shallow and the sunlight glinted and sparkling as it tripped over the bigger stones in its bed. Pebbles were always so much nicer when you looked at them through the water. They weren’t the same at all when you took them out. She often thought how nice it would be if the pebbles you picked out could stay wet and keep their lovely colours for ever.
‘Not far now, Clare,’ said Auntie Polly brightly. ‘Look, there’s the school you’ll be going to next week. That’s where Ronnie went before he went to Inst. and he thought it was great. You’re sure to like it.’
At that moment Clare was equally certain that she wouldn’t like it, a red-brick building set in among the shops and houses that lined the road, with no playground that she could see and not a tree in sight. But she said nothing about her new school and just thought how nice it would be to arrive home to Auntie Polly’s house and to see Ronnie again.
It was a long time since she had last been to Auntie Polly’s house. Last Christmas. Not Christmas itself when they always went to Granny and Granda Scott on Christmas Day and Granny and Granda Hamilton on Boxing Day. It must have been the Sunday after that because school still hadn’t started and it didn’t matter that they were so late back that both she and William were asleep in the back of the car.
‘Harold’s offered me the car for Sunday, Ellie. The weather’s so mild he thought we might take a day out. What d’you think?’
It was her mother’s idea that they would visit Auntie Polly for she’d said it was ages since she’d seen her. Daddy said that was fine by him. Would she drop her a line or would he give her a ring from work?
Auntie Polly had a telephone, a big black one that sat on a table in the hall at the foot of her stairs. She had to have it for her work. Polly had served her time to a dressmaker and she made lovely things. Once, when they visited she showed them a wedding dress all wrapped up in a sheet with shiny decorations like silver pennies stitched to the skirt.
‘I copied the neckline from a dress of Princess Elizabeth’s I saw in a magazine’, she said proudly.
‘Well, all credit to you, Polly. It’s like something a film star would wear. You’ve hands for anything,’ said her sister warmly.
Later that year, Auntie Polly had brought Clare a Princess Elizabeth doll. It was actually one of her own old dolls her mother had been about to throw out, but Polly had said she knew a place where you could buy faces for dolls and the body was still all in one piece. She said she’d make it a dress out of scraps.
Clare was thrilled with her doll. It had a new face and ringlets and a long, white tulle wedding dress. And on the skirt there were three of the beautiful, shiny decorations she had so admired. They were made of tiny, tiny beads threaded on fine wire and then curved round and round and joined up till they made a gleaming circle about the size of a two shilling piece.
‘A shilling each, those were,’ said Mummy when the doll was unpacked and they had both said how marvellous it was and how kind it was of Auntie Polly when she was so busy. ‘The woman that had that dress made for her daughter had piles of money. Can you imagine what it cost, Clare? There were a hundred and fifty of those on the skirt?’
‘A hundred and forty-seven,’ Clare replied promptly.
Mummy had laughed.
‘Not a word about that, Clare’, she warned. ‘I dare say Polly reckoned she’d not bother to count them, so she kept you a few.’
Clare felt she was too old now to play with dolls but she sometimes made clothes for them with the coloured scraps of fabric Auntie Polly saved for her, the leftovers of dresses and jackets, frocks and wedding outfits. She still loved looking at her Princess Elizabeth doll.
As the bus turned off the Ormeau Road and into Rosetta Park it suddenly struck her that she couldn’t make dresses for her dolls anymore even though she would have unlimited pieces of fabric. Her dolls were all gone. And not just her dolls. Teddy too. Tears sprang to her eyes and she had to pretend she was blowing her nose so that Auntie Polly wouldn’t notice.
The Princess Elizabeth doll, the knitted golliwog with his black face and button eyes, the china baby doll called Ruby who cried when you laid her down, the square dog with the velvet nose that Daddy had bought from some American soldiers during the war when you couldn’t get toys and Teddy, her very first and only Teddy, that she’d been given as a small baby, they had all been taken away and burnt with her clothes and her books. Matron had explained it all and said how sorry she was and how sad it was for Clare to lose her special toys, but until now she had forgotten. Until they went to the Fever Hospital she had never spent a night without Teddy before.
She tried to think of something different and remembered that the Christmas visit to Auntie Polly’s in Uncle Harold’s car had been a very happy one. Uncle Jimmy was in much better spirits, he had just started a new job with the Ormeau Bakery and was feeling very pleased with himself. Auntie Polly had gone to such a lot of trouble to make them welcome. The decorations were still up and the house was bright and shining. What Clare loved most was the Christmas tree in the sitting room, a lovely big tree with tiny, gilt-wrapped boxes hanging as decorations in among the silver bells and the gleaming coloured baubles. There were little lights that winked on and off. All different colours. Fairy lights Daddy called them when he and Uncle Jimmy had sat down with glasses of the funny-smelling dark brown stuff with the foam on top they always drank when they met.
Daddy said he was amazed they’d been able to get fairy lights, with everything in such short supply. He hadn’t expected there to be any in the shops. But Auntie Polly explained that she’d brought them back from Toronto with her in 1939.
‘I suppose it was kind of a silly thing to bring, but I so loved Christmas in Canada and Jimmy and I were so happy those Christmases we had out there when Davy and Eddie were small. I packed up all the decorations and the garland that we used to put on the door, but the mice got that in the roof space of our old house, before we got the mice,’ she said, laughing.
Clare’s two big cousins, Davy and Eddie, weren’t at home that Sunday. Polly laughed and said they both had girls now, they’d gone off dressed to kill and were having their tea with them, but Ronnie, the youngest, who was still at that school called Inst. and wanted to go to the university, came down from his room where he was studying for exams and talked to them. He’d given Clare some books he’d picked up for 3d each in Smithfield and insisted they were a present.
Clare was thrilled. Coral Island, Little Women, Swiss Family Robinson, Black Beauty and Heidi. She’d read Little Women and Black Beauty from the school library box, but she loved to have her favourite books so she could read them until she knew them almost by heart. The other three she had seen in the library but hadn’t read. She could hardly wait to begin.
‘That’ll keep you busy for a day or two,’ said Daddy as Ronnie handed them over.
‘Don’t believe it, Sam. There’s no stopping her once she starts. She’ll be finished in no time,’ said Mummy, turning to Polly who was watching Clare turning the pages to see if there were any pictures or drawings.
They sat in the sitting room with the tree and then had a most marvellous tea in the living room. With both flaps of the table up, it was terribly crowded because of the big settee and the brown tiled hearth of the fireplace which s
tuck out. Clare and William had to sit on the settee on a pile of cushions because there wasn’t room to bring in two more chairs. Clare thought it great fun, but William slipped off sideways and cried until Mummy took him on her knee.
‘My goodness,’ said Daddy, as Polly set down steak and chips for Ronnie and the grown-ups and bacon and baked beans and chips for Clare and William, ‘Have you had a win on the pools?’
‘No such luck,’ said Uncle Jimmy, ‘But its not often we see you. To be honest it’s a put up job, Sam. Ronnie has a favour to ask you and we thought if we gave you a good tea you’d have to say yes.’
Poor Ronnie was embarrassed but everybody else laughed for what Ronnie wanted was for Daddy to fix his radio. He’d taken it to pieces because he couldn’t get the foreign stations and now he couldn’t get anything at all.
‘Aye, surely Ronnie,’ said Daddy. ‘It’s just a pity I haven’t one of Clare’s feathers with me.’
But that worked out all right, for Ronnie had a wee brush from an old paint box he’d had when he first went to school and Jimmy had plenty of oil in his toolbox. After tea, Daddy took the radio to pieces and sorted it out. Clare had watched and held some of the tiny gold screws in her hand in case they dropped them and when it was all finished and switched on it went beautifully.
Ronnie was delighted and showed her how to tune to the different wavebands and they took it in turns to pick a station and see what it was doing. They found all sorts of different music and foreign stations broadcasting in different languages. Ronnie could pick out French and German but there were others he couldn’t make out at all even when they got the call signal and he looked it up in a special magazine he had.
‘Here we are, Clare, down you go. Mind you don’t fall now.’
The bus drove off leaving them on the pavement near where two roads went off at an angle to each other. Between them was a white building with black paintwork that called itself The Tudor Stores. Clare looked around wearily.