Snowflakes in the Wind

by Rita Bradshaw

  ‘Where did Mrs Kirby work?’

  Betty told him, adding, ‘Not right that, her workin’ all hours while he sits on his backside at home, an’ not a mark on him. There’s plenty round here whose menfolk came back gassed or blinded or havin’ lost their limbs, but Edgar Kirby is as fit as you or me.’

  The constable snapped his notebook shut. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hammond, that’ll be all for now, but doubtless we’ll be back after tomorrow.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Or should I say today? In the circumstances it doesn’t seem quite right to wish you a merry Christmas.’

  Betty went upstairs to the children’s bedroom and collected some clothes for morning, before she again joined the policeman waiting for her in the kitchen. Looking down at the remains of the pot roast congealed on the stone flags, she murmured, ‘Shall I clean this up before I go?’

  ‘Leave it, lass. It’ll be seen to.’

  ‘What will happen to him, Edgar Kirby?’ Betty lowered her voice even though it was just the two of them remaining in the house now the constable’s colleagues had taken Edgar to the police cells and Molly’s body to the morgue. ‘It’s a cut-and-dried case, isn’t it? I mean, he’s as guilty as sin.’

  ‘It’s not for me to say.’ And then the constable lowered his voice too as he added, ‘But as you say, it’s a cut-and-dried case, all right. He strangled her, so . . .’

  ‘It’ll be a hanging job,’ Betty finished for him. ‘Oh, them poor bairns, them poor, poor bairns.’

  Abby heard Mrs Hammond when she returned to the house and then the sound of murmured conversation from the kitchen. She was lying with Robin in a single bed that Shirley, the eldest daughter, had given up for them, having joined her three sisters in the other bed – a double – that the cramped room held. The Hammonds’ three sons occupied the second bedroom, with their parents sleeping in the marital bed in the front room.

  The doctor whom the police had called to the house had given Abby and Robin a dose of bitter-tasting medicine before he had left – ‘To help you sleep, hinny,’ he’d said kindly to her when she had objected – and now Robin was fast asleep, curled into her back. The powerful sedative hadn’t knocked her out completely, however, but had merely added to the terrible, nightmarish panic that held her in its grip. Her mam wasn’t dead, she wasn’t, she wasn’t, she told herself over and over again. It would all come right, it had to. She would wake up and things would be back to normal. But even through the swirling sick lethargy in her head and the dull heaviness of her body she knew she was crying for the moon.

  The urge to scream and keep screaming – as she had done when Mr Hammond had prised her from her mother and carried her into his kitchen where all his children had stared at her and Robin with shocked, wide-eyed faces – was strong, and she had to bite down on her fist to prevent the sound emerging. Her mam hadn’t looked like her mam, not with her bulging eyes and her red face and lolling tongue, and when she had shouted at her da to do something, he had raised his head and stared at her as though she was a stranger before putting his hands over his head again like he had when he’d wedged himself under the kitchen table that time.

  Mam, Mam, oh, Mam. She whimpered, before biting harder on her fist to quell the sound. She didn’t want to wake Shirley and the other girls. They were all older than her – Shirley was grown up and due to get married in the spring – and with the tact of age they’d refrained from questioning her when they’d come to bed, but she had seen the avid curiosity in their faces. And one of the policemen who had come to see her in Mrs Hammond’s kitchen had said he would come back to talk to her when she was feeling better, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone. And she would never feel better. Tears stung her eyes and slipped down her cheeks. She wanted her mam. More than anything in the world she wanted her mam. Please God, please let her not be dead. This is the night when Your Son came to earth as a little baby, a time of miracles, so do one now. Bring my mam back to life like You did with Lazarus in the Bible.

  On and on Abby prayed, frantic, silent prayers. Outside in the snowy night a dog barked somewhere, and once she heard some late-night revellers, clearly the worse for wear, singing Christmas carols and shouting drunkenly until their voices faded into the distance, but these normal sounds weren’t comforting. They only emphasized how her own world had fragmented into a thousand pieces.

  At some time during the long night hours she must have fallen asleep, because the room was lighter when she opened her eyes and she could hear whispering from the double bed. Robin was still curled into the small of her back and snoring softly, and she didn’t turn to face the room or move a muscle. She could hear what Shirley and her sisters were saying and she knew the terrible nightmares she’d been having were true. Her mam was dead, and her da had been taken away because he had killed her.

  ‘. . . dunno what’ll happen to the bairns,’ one of the girls was murmuring. ‘Mam said Mr Kirby’s got no family and that Mrs Kirby’s mam an’ da fell out with her because she married him.’

  ‘Well, you can understand why now, can’t you?’

  ‘Aye, seems they were right. I still can’t believe he’s done away with her and at Christmas too.’

  There was silence for a moment before another whisper came: ‘Reckon it’ll be the workhouse for the bairns, then? Nothing else for it cos they can’t stay here.’

  Abby recognized Shirley’s voice when a whisper came sharp and fierce: ‘Don’t talk about the workhouse, poor little things. It’s a living death in that place.’

  ‘I was only saying, that’s all. Don’t bite me head off.’

  ‘Well, don’t talk about the workhouse then, I mean it.’

  The whispering went on but Abby had ceased to listen. Her and Robin did have someone, she told herself wretchedly. Their granda. True, he lived a long way away but a little while before the war had ended her mam had received word that her own mother had died and when the funeral was being held. Her mam had sat her down before they had made the journey to what her mam called ‘The Borders’, and had explained then, for the first time, that she and Robin had a granda and two aunties who were her mam’s older sisters. It was one of them who had written, because her mam’s parents had fallen out with her when she had wanted to marry someone outside the close-knit Border community.

  Her da had been on his annual holiday from the steelworks and had been hiking with a group of pals, her mam had told her, when they had met by chance, and it had been love at first sight. But her parents had planned for her to marry the son of the farm steward who’d had his eye on her for some time, and had been adamant she would do as she was told. There had been a terrible row, her mam had said sadly. Awful, unforgivable things had been said. And the upshot was that when her da left to return home she went with him, and they were married within the month. And she had never regretted it.

  Abby had thought it was the most romantic story she had ever heard, and had looked at her mother with new eyes, realizing for the first time just how pretty she was with her beautiful fair hair and big blue eyes. And so the three of them – her mam, her and Robin – had made the journey to the parish of Linton, in the south-east corner of Roxburghshire close to the English border, among the Cheviot foothills, for the funeral of the grandmother she and Robin had never met. It had only been some seventy miles or so as the crow flies, but the trip – travelling first by a slow passenger train and then by horse and cart – had seemed a huge adventure.

  Her grandfather, Abby recalled, was a tall man with a stern, weather-beaten face and keen blue eyes below a shock of snow-white hair. He’d barely spoken two words to her mother even though they had stayed two nights in his cottage.

  Her grandfather’s home had been a disappointment. Whenever she had heard the word cottage, it had conjured up a picture of a pretty thatched dwelling with roses round the door and a bright garden full of hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies, like she’d seen on the chocolate boxes in the sweet-shop window. Her grandfather’s house couldn’t have been
more different. The slate-roofed, brick-built building was joined to that of the farm steward’s home, semi-detached style, and the pair had stood some distance from the farmhouse and farmyard, to the back of which stretched a row of labourers’ terraced houses. According to her mother this separateness carried some prestige, but Abby had been disillusioned with the outward ugliness of her mother’s old home.

  On stepping through the front door, she’d found the downstairs of the cottage to be one big room divided only by the staircase in the middle of it; a big kitchen on one side and a sitting room on the other. Upstairs were three bedrooms. There were no gardens at the front of the building, but at the back each home had a long narrow strip of land about seventy yards long, and divided by a brick wall, for growing vegetables. At the bottom of this each garden had its own privy. She had been horrified that the privy was so far away, but her mother had pointed out that the distance kept away bad smells in the summer months.

  The creaking of bed springs and the sound of hushed activity cut into Abby’s thoughts. The girls were getting up. She lay tense and still, silently willing her brother not to wake until she was sure they had gone downstairs, and then carefully sat up. The dull half-light of dawn filtered into the room through the thin curtains at the window and it was bitterly cold. She brought her knees up to her chin and sat with her arms round them, her long, silver-blonde hair falling in a curtain as she lowered her head.

  What was she going to do? Panic and fear took over again, catching her breath and pressing down on her chest. She couldn’t let them take her and Robin to the workhouse. She had heard enough tales about that terrible place to know that if they were transported into its grim confines, she and Robin would be separated and it could be years, if ever, before they saw each other again. And her mam would expect her to look after Robin, she knew that.

  Abby bit down on her bottom lip to stop herself crying. Tears would help no one, she told herself desperately. She had to think.

  If she told the constable or someone in authority about her granda and they contacted him and he wouldn’t take them, then that would be that. And she couldn’t say with any certainty he would want to give them a home. She pictured his hard face and piercing eyes, and shivered. But it was him or the workhouse.

  The more she sat and thought, the more she began to think that she and Robin had to turn up on her grandfather’s doorstep to have any hope at all that he would take them in. And even then he might see to it that they were shipped back to Sunderland. But she had to try. It would be too easy for him to refuse them if they weren’t standing before him in person. But how would they get to the Borders and the village of Linton? It was impossible. She had no money for a start, and she couldn’t remember her grandfather’s name or the name of the farm where he worked.

  It was another hour before Shirley poked her head round the bedroom door just as Robin was beginning to stir. She dumped some clothes on the bottom of the bed as she said, ‘These are your things that Mam got last night. If there’s anything else you need she’ll get it later after breakfast, all right?’

  She smiled at Abby, but for the life of her Abby couldn’t dredge up a smile in return.

  Robin sat up in bed rubbing his eyes and her brother’s first words told Abby he hadn’t understood what had happened the night before. ‘Is Mam better now? Are we going back home?’

  The two girls exchanged a glance before Shirley said hastily, ‘I’ll see you downstairs when you’ve got dressed, all right?’ and with that she disappeared, shutting the door behind her.

  Abby turned to her brother. She had been nearly two and a half years old when he had been born on an icy December day and from the moment she had seen his red, screwed-up little face she had loved him. With the war and then her mam working long hours, she had taken on the role of a second mother rather than a sister and now she took him in her arms, cradling him as a mother might do when she said softly, ‘We can’t go back home, Robin. Not ever.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mam isn’t coming back. She’s in heaven.’

  He struggled away from her, his face crumpling. ‘No, she’s not. She’s not. You’re lying. An’ what about Da?’

  She knew she had no choice but to tell him everything.

  Robin listened without interrupting, biting down on the fist he’d got to his mouth as he tried to stem his tears. It was only when Abby tried to take the small taut body in her arms that he exploded in a storm of tears and screaming, but then after a few moments he collapsed against her, holding her so tightly it hurt.

  It took a while to calm him down, but then after persuading him to get dressed, Abby caught his arm before they went downstairs and brought him to face her. ‘Da’s not a bad man,’ she whispered, ‘whatever people might say. He’s ill, Mam said so now, didn’t she? The war did things to his mind, things you can’t see on the outside but they are there, sure enough. Look at how he was when you fell off your bed that time.’

  Robin stared at her. ‘He didn’t have to do that to Mam, though, did he. She never did anything wrong. I hate him.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true, I hate him. I wish he was dead and Mam was alive. We were all right before he came home and everything changed.’

  For once Abby didn’t know how to help him, partly because she was fighting feeling the same way. And yet the pain of her turmoil and grief was tempered by the terrible lost look on her father’s face when she had walked into the horrific scene in the kitchen. At first he hadn’t seemed to know where he was or what he had done. He was ill, she told herself for the umpteenth time. This wasn’t his fault.

  ‘If you really loved Mam you would hate him too.’ Robin’s voice was fierce but choked with the tears he was holding at bay.

  Abby stared at her brother sadly. It was no use talking about this now, she could see that. She opened the bedroom door. ‘Come on, we’d better go down,’ she said quietly, wondering how she was going to get through the day.

  Chapter Four

  The murder was the talk of the town and the newspapers made the most of it, happy to concentrate on something other than the state of the country which was becoming less and less ‘A Land Fit for Heroes’ as unemployment began to rise and rationing restricted food supplies. Folk wanted to hear about poor souls who were in a worse position than they were, taking comfort from it even as they expressed their shock and horror at such goings-on.

  Constable Walton, along with his inspector, returned to talk to Abby on Boxing Day, writing down everything she said whilst keeping a studiously blank face and refusing her request that she be allowed to see her father. She pleaded his case, saying that he was ill and had been since he had returned from the war, but even as she spoke she could see her words were falling on deaf ears.

  ‘We have to deal in facts, hinny,’ Constable Walton said quietly, ‘and according to Dr Graham your father is fit and well.’ He paused. ‘Did he often lose his temper with your mam, Abigail?’

  She stared at the two policemen. They were trying to catch her out and make her say things about her father. ‘No.’

  ‘Or with you and your brother?’

  ‘My da never lost his temper, not in the way you mean.’

  ‘And what way is that?’

  She couldn’t find the words to express herself. After a few moments, she murmured, ‘He’s ill, I told you. My mam knew he was ill and she tried to get help for him but no one would listen to her. What . . . what happened isn’t my da’s fault.’

  The questioning had gone on for a little while, and afterwards Abby felt tired, and sick in the pit of her stomach. No one was listening to her. They’d all made up their minds that her da was bad, even Mr and Mrs Hammond. She could read it in their faces.

  Two days later Constable Walton returned, this time to talk privately to Betty Hammond. Mr Hammond and his sons and the three older girls were at work, leaving at home only the youngest daughter who was due to leave school in the summer, and Abb
y and Robin. After shooing the three of them out into the back lane, Betty remained ensconced in the kitchen with the constable for some time.

  Hannah joined a couple of the older girls who were her cronies. They were looking after younger brothers and sisters who were playing on a long slide they’d made in the lane, much to the annoyance of the neighbourhood grown-ups who’d come to grief on it more than once. Within moments Hannah and her pals were whispering avidly, glancing over their shoulders now and again to where Abby and Robin were standing by the backyard gate. Abby knew they were talking about them and what had happened, and it added to her misery and despair.

  The air was raw, cutting her throat like a knife, and her feet in her old boots were blocks of ice within minutes. She made no effort to keep warm as some of the children were doing, however, by jumping up and down or stamping their feet. She noticed Robin glancing at the group playing on the slide, and said quietly, ‘Go and have a play for a bit. Ivor’s over there, look. And Tim. Go on, Robin.’

  He shook his head. He’d remained so close to her since Christmas Eve he could have been attached by a piece of rope. Abby didn’t press him, her mind chewing over the problem of finding her grandfather. She was in no doubt whatsoever that the constable’s visit meant time was running out and the spectre of the workhouse was looming ever closer. And this feeling was strengthened when, on being allowed back into the house after Constable Walton had left, she asked Mrs Hammond point blank what he had wanted.

  ‘Nothin’ for you to worry about, hinny,’ had been her answer. But Mrs Hammond hadn’t met her gaze.

  And later that evening, once everyone was home and the kitchen was a hubbub of chatter, she had seen Mrs Hammond murmur something to Shirley. Abby had been blessed with particularly keen hearing, and she had heard Shirley’s response of, ‘Poor little devils! Oh, Mam, can’t somewhere else be found?’ before Mrs Hammond had shushed her daughter.