A Whisper to the Living

by Ruth Hamilton

  A Whisper to the Living

  Ruth Hamilton

  Transworld (1989)

  * * *

  Synopsis

  Annie Byrne was born during one of the worst winters Lancashire ever remembered. When the doctor finally got through the nine-foot drifts of snow, mother and daughter were in a pretty bad way, but both the new-born Annie and her exhausted mother - a spinner in the cotton mill - were fighters, tough and determined not to let the world knock them down.They needed to be tough, for when Annie's father was killed in the war, Nancy married again. And Eddie Higson - once he'd courted and won Nancy Byrne - turned into a nightmare of a man, terrorizing the young girl with one secret evil after another.She had two friends who helped her through these bad years. Martin Cullen, rough, uneducated, loyal, who knew he wasn't good enough for her, and David Pritchard, the doctor who had supported her through the worst times and who had bad problems of his own.Together they watched her grow into a beautiful young woman, desperately fighting the legacy of her childhood.

  About the Book

  Annie Byrne was born during one of the worst winters Lancashire ever remembered. When the doctor finally got through the nine-foot drifts of snow, mother and daughter were in a pretty bad way, but both the new-born Annie and her exhausted mother – a spinner in the cotton mill – were fighters, tough and determined not to let the world knock them down.

  They needed to be tough, for when Annie’s father was killed in the war, Nancy married again. And Eddie Higson – once he’d courted and won Nancy Byrne – turned into a nightmare of a man, terrorizing the young girl with one secret evil after another.

  She had two friends who helped her through these bad years. Martin Cullen, rough, uneducated, loyal, who knew he wasn’t good enough for her, and David Pritchard, the doctor who had supported her through the worst times and who had bad problems of his own.

  Together they watched her grow into a beautiful young woman, desperately fighting the legacy of her childhood.

  Contents

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Fall of a Leaf . . .

  1. Beginnings

  2.Neighbours

  3.My Immortal Soul

  4.Changes

  5 Moving on

  6 Encounters

  7 Communion

  8 The Killing

  9 On the Run

  10 New Pastures

  11 Losing Faith

  12 Fighting Back

  13 The Worst of Times

  14 The Best of Times

  Part Two: . . . is a Whisper to the Living

  1 Martin and Simon

  2 Edna and Simon

  3 With Premeditation

  4 Tensions

  5 Disruptions

  6 Laughter and Worry

  7 The Rape

  8 Repercussions

  9 Confrontations

  10 Dénouements

  11 Dolly’s Lot

  12 Departures

  Part Three: Anne

  1960

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Ruth Hamilton

  Copyright

  A Whisper to the Living

  Ruth Hamilton

  In loving memory of my parents.

  Also for Allison Williams, a true friend who is sadly missed.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to: My two sons who tolerate me while I write; Diane Pearson for her patience and encouragement; Lyn Andrews who made me carry on through thick and thin; Dr Sonia Goldrein for her help, support and advice; the Bolton Evening News and the Liverpool Echo for factual guidance; the people of Bolton and Liverpool, my two home towns; friends and colleagues in Kirkby, especially those at Millbridge, Millbrook, Northfield and Springfield Schools.

  This is a work of fiction. However, Bolton is a real place and although I have altered names of some streets and roads, these actual locations do exist. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. I had a tale to tell and I set it in one of the places I know and love best.

  ‘The fall of a leaf is a whisper to the living.’

  English proverb

  Part One

  The Fall of a Leaf . . .

  1

  Beginnings

  On 28 January 1940, I was born dead.

  My mother, Nancy Byrne, after suffering for forty-eight hours on a horsehair sofa under the stairs, placed me as gently as she could on the peg rug in front of a cold range, then collapsed on to the stone floor beside me.

  Fortunately for both of us, the widow from next door had, with the help of her two sons, managed to clear a way through the nine-foot drifts of snow, thus enabling Dr Clarke to put in a somewhat tardy appearance. This had been one of the worst winters in living memory and Bolton had ground to a virtual halt.

  My mother, small-boned, fragile – no more than five feet tall, had produced an oxygen-starved infant whose head, swollen and blackened from long imprisonment in the birth canal, seemed larger than its body. Mrs Hyatt from next door, before busying herself with paper, kindling and coal, hastily bundled the motionless girl-child into a blanket which she then stuffed into a cardboard box.

  Tom and Freddie Hyatt, her strapping fourteen-year-old twins, were dispatched upstairs, from whence, with much cursing and clattering, they fetched my mother’s bed. The infant remained ignored in its box, the doctor’s main concern being for the state of Nancy Byrne’s health, for the lower part of her body had lost all feeling.

  It was therefore a very shocked Tom Hyatt who heard my first mewlings, who stared down into my makeshift coffin, his mouth agape, Adam’s apple bobbing wildly as he tried to attract the doctor’s attention.

  I was snatched from the box and carried through to the scullery, where Dr Clarke cleared the obstructive matter from my throat, permitting me to express my anger at the incompetence with which I was surrounded.

  I believe that my character was formed almost completely in those first few moments of life. My fear of small spaces, my attitude to authority, my tendency not to trust or depend, all these were born with that furious ear-splitting scream.

  I was given to my mother, who smiled wanly and said, ‘Eeh, she looks about six months old already.’ To which Dr Clarke replied, ‘Well, she must weigh at least eleven pounds – you’re very lucky, both of you.’

  My mother did not feel lucky. Firstly, she was in no two minds that my father had set his heart on a boy. Secondly, this infant did not look at all normal – in fact, it was ugly to the point of revulsion. And lastly, most importantly, would she, Nancy Byrne, ever walk again? From the waist down she had no sensation at all; it was as if she had been cut off at the middle.

  I was a bitter disappointment to her. Had I been pretty, or even manageable, then I might have been forgiven for being female. But there I was, bald and blue-black about the face, screaming incessantly, a hideous reminder of the uselessness of her lower limbs.

  She handed me to Mrs Hyatt. ‘Here, you take her home, love. I can’t cope with her while I’m this road. Give her a bottle or something.’

  So I spent the first two or three weeks of my life at number 22, while, in the kitchen of number 20, my mother drank Mrs Hyatt’s beef tea and concentrated on her toes.

  Her two short white legs lay stiff and still on top of the army greatcoat that served as quilt for the bed and she stared at them for days on end with never a word for the nurse who came in daily or for Mrs Hyatt who fed her, washed her, emptied her bedpans.

  Now that the thaw had set in, visitors began to arrive, aunts bearing black-market fruit and cigarettes, uncles with bottles of st
out and words of encouragement. They visited me too, declared me to be a fine lass, but still my mother would have none of me.

  By the middle of February, Nancy Byrne’s self-hypnosis began to pay off. She moved first her toes, then her feet, after which happy event she set about the business of learning to walk again. This proved a painful process, because her spine had been damaged during confinement, but her determination was so great that she was fully mobile by the time I was two and a half weeks old.

  She collected me from next door, carried me home in a hand-knitted shawl and, with her usual deliberation, began to know and love me. As she explained to me in later years, ‘You see, lass, you can only do one thing at a time. The road as I looked at it, I had to get me legs back. If I’d have never got me legs back, I’d have given you away. Better a foster Mam with legs than a real Mam stuck in a bed or on a chair for the rest of her life. And I didn’t want to be looking at you and blaming you for me legs, ’cos it weren’t your fault. But human nature, aye, mine included, being what it is, I would have blamed you in a way. Anyroad, all’s well that ends well as they say.’

  My father, far from being disappointed, was delighted with his daughter. As a regular soldier fighting, as he put it, ‘for King, country and a pair of bloody boots as ’11 fit’, he was home infrequently, but he lavished me with love, attention and such gifts as could be obtained during those war-torn years.

  And it was a terrible war, both inside and outside our house. While German planes droned their nightly song overhead, my mother, who would go nowhere near the air-raid shelter in the back yard, would sit in the darkened kitchen clinging to me under the table, a rolled-up Bolton Evening News clutched tightly in her hand. When the all-clear sounded, she would creep out furtively, turn up the gas mantle and begin her own war on the cockroaches, battering them to pulp with the paper and crunching them into the flags with the wooden soles of her clogs.

  Thus, having learned early on to count cockroach corpses, I was quite numerate by the time I began to attend nursery class at the age of three. Also, once my mother had recovered from her disappointment at my not being a boy, she determined to make the best of things and began the task of teaching me to read and write at a very early age. I was, as a result, precocious and very advanced in comparison to my classmates at All Saints nursery.

  The mills were still turning out cotton in spite of the war and my mother returned to her work as a doffer and spinner just after my third birthday, abandoning me to the tender mercies of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion, who had little patience with a waif as maladjusted as I seemed to be. I had been baptised by Father Sheahan in Mrs Hyatt’s scullery a few days after my birth, and was therefore designated Catholic, although my mother no longer practised her religion.

  Until I was three, my world had been very small. It contained me, my mother, a father who visited occasionally, our immediate neighbours, an aunt or uncle who would drop by from time to time and the parish priest whom I hated with an unreasoning venom known only to small children. I disliked his long black cloak, which terrified me, especially when the wind shaped it into something unspeakable and nightmarish. I loathed his silly biretta which sat on his large head like, as my mother put it, a pea on a drum. Most particularly, I objected to his big red hands reaching down, patting me on the head, or, worse still, lifting my chin so that I had to look into his grey, lifeless face. The face shaped itself into a smile sometimes, a smile that never reached the eyes.

  When my world was made larger, I noticed the same unamused eyes in the faces of the nuns and although I didn’t recognize it yet, my quarrel with Catholicism had begun.

  Miss Best was not a nun. She wore proper clothes and her legs showed. Also her eyes smiled, but not all the time. They were not smiling now. ‘Annie Byrne, get into your cot. Now – this minute!’

  ‘No.’ I stamped my new red clog onto the polished floorboards. It was daft, going to bed every afternoon. I had never been to bed in the afternoon before. Bed was for night, not for daytimes. The cots were set out in rigid rows, canvas structures on folding metal frames, each with a pink or blue blanket. Under every pink or blue blanket lay a child, round eyes popping as they stared at me, the sole dissenter.

  ‘Come on now, Annie, take off your clogs.’ For answer I kicked out at her, narrowly missing a lisle-stockinged leg.

  At that moment the door was thrown open and there stood Sister Agatha, headmistress, despot, monarch of all she surveyed. From her right hand there dangled a short leather whip which she was tapping gently against her thigh through the thick folds of her voluminous habit.

  ‘What have we here?’ Her Irish voice held none of the pleasant lilt common to most of my own immigrant uncles.

  Miss Best all but curtseyed. ‘Oh . . . Sister . . . it’s just that little Annie doesn’t like to lie down in the afternoon.’

  After a bone-chilling silence, the nun spoke, her voice cracking with anger. ‘Doesn’t like? Doesn’t like, is it? Well, we’ll just have to see about that now, won’t we? Get into that cot now, this instant, you bold girl.’ I said nothing, but some devil in me made me drag my eyes from the whip, forced me to stare up at her, straight into those icy eyes.

  ‘Did you hear what I said? You’re not deaf as well as stupid, are you? Did you hear me, girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, what?’

  Miss Best put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Yes, Sister. You must say yes, Sister.’

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ I muttered through clenched teeth.

  Sister Agatha drew Miss Best aside. Although my heart was pounding in my ears, I caught snatches of their whispered conversation.

  ‘. . . very advanced, Sister . . . more like a six year old . . . doesn’t need the sleep . . .’

  ‘They must conform, Miss Best . . . grow up delinquent . . . mother lapsed . . . child too big for her boots . . .’

  It looked to me as if Miss Best was getting into trouble and it was all my fault. Quietly, I slipped off my clogs and lay flat on the cot, pulling the blanket high over my head. The two women stopped talking. I knew they were staring at me, for I could feel the chill of the nun’s eyes as they swept over my body.

  This was my first remembered encounter with compromise. Many more were to follow, but this became, for me, a point of reference. For a long time afterwards, whenever I had to relinquish my principles in order to keep the peace, I would say I was ‘doing my Best’, for Miss Best was the one who taught me to make room for people, to consider others as well as myself.

  Fortunately, I knew nothing of what lay in store for me. I would be ‘doing my Best’ for many years to come.

  We war babies grew up quickly. Each day, we set off for school, gas masks swinging from our shoulders, stopping off at Connie’s corner for a ha’porth of cocoa and sugar, scurrying into the playground to stand in regimented rows beneath the eagle eye of Sister Agatha, then lining up once more for our daily dose of cod liver oil and orange juice.

  I became outwardly docile, realizing quickly that I must have no opinion, voice no objection, because if I did, I would invoke the wrath of my elders and invite the alienation of my peers. Nevertheless, I established myself as pack leader, organizing playtimes, inventing games of dragons, of princes and princesses in which I always played the chief role.

  Just after my fourth birthday, I was moved into the infants’ class because of my ability to read and write. I was heartbroken, not so much because I had been placed with a nun, for Sister Immaculata was near-human, the exception that proved the rule, but because I had to leave behind my beloved Miss Best. However, I settled quickly into the new routine, enjoying the challenge of learning, soaking up like a sponge everything that was on offer.

  The sirens often sounded as we left our school. They were part of our lives and we never hurried when they began their raucous wailing. Even at three and four years of age we were responsible for ourselves, negotiating main roads, scurrying across trolley and tram tracks, making our own way hom
e through mazes of terraced streets and cobbled entries.

  I never went straight home, but stayed with Mrs Hyatt till my mother came back from the mill. But one afternoon, as I passed my own house on my way to Mrs Hyatt’s, I noticed that our front door was open. I heard voices and muffled crying coming from within, so I sat on the step and listened. It had been my experience thus far that anything worth hearing would never be spoken in front of me.

  So it happened that I learned of my father’s death as I sat on a cold doorstep with nobody to comfort me. It was a chilly September afternoon in 1944. I stared up our sloping street towards Derby Road, remembering the times I’d watched my father running down faster and faster towards me, how, when he had reached me, he would pick me up high in the air, tossing me about, making me squeal and giggle. I recalled the smell of him, tobacco and beer, sometimes whisky.

  I had always snatched the Glengarry from his head, cramming it down onto my own yellow curls as he sang ‘A Gordon for Me’. He would never come again. Never. My Daddy was dead. My Daddy who always took me to the lions in the middle of Town, under the big clock.

  No, he couldn’t be dead, not my Daddy. He’d be there with the lions. It was a mistake. Grown-ups were always making mistakes.

  As fast as my legs would carry me, I was up and away to the top of Ensign Street, down Derby Road towards the town. The sirens were screaming again, but I never heeded them, so intent was I on reaching my goal. Blindly I ran past the deserted market place and through Moor Lane, stopping only to catch my breath as I reached the Civic Buildings.

  The Crescent was empty of people; no vehicle moved and though dusk had begun its descent, not a single lamp was lit as I climbed the Town Hall steps towards the lions. I sat, shivering on the stone slabs waiting for my father. Opposite, I could see the memorial to those who had lost their lives in the previous war, the war during which my parents had been born.