Keep the Home Fires Burning

by Anne Bennett

  I told you about the incident with the water pistols, and Pat’s reaction to it. Well, early this morning the boys did something far worse. While they were supposed to be serving at Mass, the priest was called out of the sacristy to deal with something and what did those two rips do but help themselves to the Communion wine. They drank so much that they were unable to serve at the Mass, or do anything else either. The pair were once again marched to our Polly’s. Pat hadn’t left for work and Father McIntyre told him that if he didn’t thrash his son and Tony too, as you are away, then he would do the job himself. So he had to thrash them, for once. Honest to God, Bill, if we’re not careful that son of ours will end up in Winson Green Prison. When you come home I want you to have a stern word with him.

  Bill knew the boys had to be punished, but he was very glad that Pat had done the thrashing and not the priest. Father McIntyre would have seen it as his bounden duty to scourge the wickedness out of them. And yet he felt sorry that Marion had to deal with all this on her own. She did have her hands full and he could do little to ease it, but he did write a censorious letter to Tony, telling him that he was letting the family down and he had to behave himself. He only hoped that it might make a difference.

  It did make a difference. Bill had never written to Tony in that way before, and Tony valued his good opinion, so he was determined to try to be good.

  Marion was glad that he was behaving because she had so much more to worry about. She was forced to part with her wedding ring and Mary Ellen brought her one in Woolworths to replace it.

  Now Marion was really worried because she had nothing else left to pawn. Soon she would need coal again and she didn’t know how she was going to scrape the money together.

  When she mentioned this to Polly she said, ‘You must get your Tony doing what Chris and Colm had to do many a time.’

  ‘What was that?’ Marion asked.

  ‘He’ll have to go down the Saltley Gas Works real early in the morning …’ Polly said.

  ‘The carts the horses are pulling are laden down with coal,’ Marion told Tony later. ‘And when they come out the gate and speed up over the cobbles some of it falls off. You must go down with a bucket to collect it up and you must be there before seven in the morning.’

  ‘Ah, Mom!’ Tony cried. ‘That’s miles away.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Marion said briskly, though she felt for her younger son. ‘If you go down Rocky Lane and along the canal it will take you no time at all.’ Then seeing his disbelieving expression she said sharply, ‘And you can take that look off your face because that is what you must do and that’s all there is to it.’

  When Tony related this to Jack at school that morning he knew all about it. ‘My brothers did that,’ he said, ‘but I never had to. Our Chris used to say that some kids took two buckets, one for the coal and one to collect the horse shit to use on their garden or allotment.’

  ‘Ugh! That’s disgusting!’

  ‘Well, you ain’t got to do that, anyway,’ Jack said. ‘D’you want me to come with you?’

  ‘Would you?’ Tony would be glad of his cousin’s company in those inky black and dismal mornings.

  ‘Course,’ Jack said airily. ‘Anyroad, two’s better than one.’

  ‘Won’t your mom mind?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Course not,’ Jack said confidently. ‘Why would she mind?’

  Tony could think of a hundred and one objections his mother might have made to such a plan, but Jack’s parents were a different kettle of fish altogether. Tony didn’t tell his mother of Jack’s involvement, though.

  From the first day Tony was glad that Jack was beside him. Jack was much bigger than Tony, for a start, and not so easily pushed around. That was important because there were loads of other boys at the same thing. By the time they set off home Jack always had more in his bucket than Tony did. Not far from the Whittaker house, Jack would tip the contents of his bucket into Tony’s and he would take it home and tip it into the coal shed. Even with the two of them scavenging, he only had a meagre amount of coal, but he knew that every penny counted to his mother, and buying coal was an expensive business.

  One morning, when Tony had been collecting the coal for a fortnight, he was full of misery when he met Jack.

  Catching sight of his glowering face in the beam of the shielded torch he had thought to bring, Jack said, ‘What’s up with you? You have a face on you like a smacked bum.’

  ‘There ain’t nothing wrong,’ Tony muttered.

  ‘Don’t give me that.’

  ‘Well, what’s the use of telling you owt anyway?’ Tony said. ‘It ain’t as if you can do owt about it.’

  ‘Well, I can’t if you don’t tell me.’

  ‘All right then,’ Tony burst out. ‘Every day we stand here to collect a piddling bit of coal that does no good at all. When I come home from school, the house is always sort of cold and damp, and there’s usually just a glow in the range, nearly buried under a heap of slack.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘we know where the coal’s kept, so why don’t we wait until it’s dark, crawl under the fence and get ourselves a couple of bucketfuls?’

  Tony was doubtful. ‘Ain’t that stealing?’

  Jack considered the matter. ‘It ain’t any more stealing than picking up the lumps that fall off the carts when they clatter up the road. They fill them up too full on purpose so that some will fall off and we get to pick them up. This way we are sort of saving them the bother.’

  The way Jack explained, it sounded fine to Tony. After all, there was so much coal in the gas works mound; he had seen it through the gate. Surely they wouldn’t miss a little bit. Then Jack said, ‘Let’s see what we can get this morning anyway, and then tonight when everyone has gone to sleep we’ll go for plan B. What time in your house does everyone go to bed, ‘cos it would be best to keep this to ourselves?’

  ‘About ten or so,’ Tony said. ‘I’m not really that sure because I’m usually asleep myself by then.’

  ‘Better make it eleven, then, to be on the safe side,’ Jack suggested. ‘Meet me at the end of your road at eleven.’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’ Tony was hardly able to believe that he had agreed to sneak out of his home that night when everyone was asleep. It wasn’t something that he had ever considered doing in the whole of his life. He was scared stiff, but he couldn’t bear to see the disdain in Jack’s eyes if he said he couldn’t do such a thing, so he knew he would be there with his bucket at eleven o’clock.

  Two or three times that night Tony nearly nodded off. The early mornings were beginning to tell on him and he had to get out of bed and walk around the room. When Richard came to bed, however, he couldn’t do that, and he curled in a ball and pretended to be asleep. He dared not shut his eyes, however, but kept them wide open and forced himself to lie still until Richard’s even breathing told Tony he was asleep.

  Still he lay there until he heard his mother’s tread on the stairs. He was glad he did because she opened the door but, seeing everything was quiet, didn’t go into the room. Tony counted to five hundred slowly, and then slid stealthily out of bed. He knew that he would be dressing in the dark and so he had left his clothes out on the chair by his side of the bed in a particular way and was dressing himself as quietly as possible when Richard turned over and said, ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Ssh,’ Tony said frantically. ‘You’ll have Mom awake.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Richard said. ‘I’ll wake her all right if you don’t tell what you’re up to.’

  Tony bit his lip. Jack said to tell no one. That was all right to say in his house, where no one seemed to give a tuppenny damn what anyone else was doing, but in his house it was a different matter and he knew if he refused to tell Richard he would fetch their mother, and the plan he and Jack had cooked up would be scuppered before it had even been tried.

  So Tony said, ‘I’m going to get some coal from the gas yard.’

  ‘Tony, that’s stealing
.’

  ‘No it ain’t,’ Tony cried. ‘No more than standing there every bloody morning and fighting with every other bugger for any tiny bits that fall off the carts.’

  ‘Shurrup,’ Richard said. ‘You told me quick enough. It’s you that will have our mom awake, and she’ll be armed with a cake of soap to wash out your mouth.’

  ‘It’s all right for you.’ Tony went on, lowering his voice to a hissing whisper and ignoring the reference to the soap. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, and even though Jack comes with me all we get is a piddling bit in the bottom of the perishing bucket.’

  It was news to Richard that Jack had been going to the gas works gates every morning with his young brother, and now he had told him what he intended to do Richard didn’t know what action to take. He knew really that he ought to go across the landing and tell his mother. What would they all do if he did that? Freeze to bloody death, that’s what, and so he said to Tony, ‘Are you doing this on your own?’

  ‘No,’ Tony said. ‘Our Jack’s going with us.’

  Richard groaned silently. He might have known that it was one of Jack’s harebrained notions. Tony hardly ever thought up things like this — he left that to Jack – but he was not averse to taking part in any mischief going. However, this was more than mere mischief, and yet with Jack involved the scheme might well work.

  ‘All right,’ Richard said at last. ‘Try not to get caught, and if you are, remember I know nothing about any of it.’

  Jack had done his work well. He had gone down to the gas works as soon as he was out from school. It was becoming dark then and he’d been able to examine the perimeter fence and check where it was weakest and where they could not only wriggle underneath, but pull their buckets after them. He had still been there when the night watchman came and he had timed him for an hour until he knew his routine.

  When he met his cousin Tony saw he had entered into the spirit of the enterprise and had coated his ruddy cheeks with coal dust. Even his tousled curls, which no barber had been able to tame, were jet black.

  However, when under the light of a wavering torch he administered the same treatment to Tony with a nugget of coal he had brought with him, Tony’s sandy hair showed up like a beacon.

  ‘I should cover your hair with a hat or summat tomorrow night,’ Jack said.

  ‘Yeah, I can pinch one of the twins’ berets,’ Tony hissed.

  ‘Good,’ Jack said. ‘Doesn’t do to take chances. We don’t want to be spotted by a wandering bobby.’

  No, thought Tony, indeed we don’t. He felt the dread that they might be caught trickling through his veins as he and Jack stole through the inky blackness, the cold seeping into them as they dared not go fast. They dared not go down the canal either, because there was nowhere to hide if they met anyone. They had to keep to the back roads where there were lots of entries they could duck into if they saw or heard anyone coming, though the courting couples were probably too interested in each other to notice two skulking boys.

  The men returning from the pub were a different matter, especially if they decided to stand on a corner and talk. Tony willed them to go home as he felt his feet turn into blocks of ice and his hands tingle with the cold. Worse by far, though, were the bobbies on the beat. The boys could only be glad of their big boots ringing on the cobbles, which gave them valuable time to hide away.

  Despite the hair-raising hike to the gas works, everything ran like clockwork that first night, and the next, and the next. Each time they had two near-full buckets of coal to tip into the shed, and Jack had to go all the way to the Whittakers’ house because Tony could never have managed the load on his own.

  On the fourth night sleety rain was falling as Tony slipped outside. It soon saturated his coat and soaked him to the skin, and his teeth began to chatter; Jack was little better. Although there were few people about, there were still policemen so Jack wouldn’t allow them to hurry. If they got careless he said, that’s when they would be caught.

  Once home, Tony wouldn’t allow himself to sleep properly because he knew he had to be up and out before his mother got up the next morning so that she wouldn’t see the state of his clothes. It was the hardest thing in the world to get up in the dark of a winter morning and dress in sodden clothes and then go out into the cold. It was still raining, but that scarcely mattered.

  When he got in that morning, though, Marion felt so guilty at the state of him. She had hot water for him to wash in and dry clothes laid out ready, and a big bowl of porridge, which he was allowed two spoons of sugar on, and some milk. Tony watched all the fuss his mother made of him and felt as guilty as hell.

  He was also incredibly tired, for the late nights and early mornings were beginning to take their toll. Over the next few days he fell foul of his mother as he was so hard to rouse in the morning.

  Every morning the boys made their own bed so Marion hadn’t seen the state of the sheets until she went into the boys’ bedroom to change them when Tony had been making his nocturnal journeys for ten days or so. She was appalled to see how dirty they were on Tony’s side and couldn’t remember him going to bed in that state. As she whipped the sheets off she vowed to make her son have a strip wash before he went up that night.

  Just a few days after that in the Bull Ring she picked up a scrag end of lamb that could be the basis of a good, nourishing stew for the children. However, in those cold days, as she had to have the range on anyway for warmth, Marion had taken to cooking in the range oven to save on the gas. So that afternoon she went out to the coal shed to check if she had enough coal to feed the range sufficiently so the food would cook through. She hadn’t been in the coal house for some days, for Tony or Richard were always only too willing to fetch her in a bucket of coal, but she knew there would be very little because Tony would only be able to collect a few nuggets each day.

  She stood at the door and surveyed the level of coal in the shed with alarm. She knew that there was no way Tony could have collected that amount of coal if he had stood outside the gas works for a year or more. A feeling of dread began in her stomach and began to seep all over her because she knew there was only one way that he could have got so much.

  When he came in from school she was waiting for him like an avenging angel.

  Tony was no match for her. He was too tired, for he never allowed himself the slightest doze before he was out of bed and off to meet Jack. Then there was the fear of crawling under the wire, once they had established the watchman was nowhere to be seen, and then trying soundlessly to pull their buckets through behind them. Filling those buckets was painfully slow. It had to be done nugget by nugget, and then there was the hard slog back with the laden buckets. Tony would be nearly dropping with tiredness by then, and did little more than rub a rag over his hands and face before falling into bed and going straight into an exhausted sleep.

  Marion could see the weariness in his black smudged eyes standing out in his pale face, but she hardened her heart. ‘Go round to your Auntie Polly’s,’ she told the chattering twins, who had come in with Tony. They stood and stared at her and she snapped, ‘Go on, you heard what I said. I need to speak to your brother. Tell Polly that.’

  There were so many questions the girls wanted to ask but they dared not, not when their mother spoke in that clipped sort of way. With a sympathetic glance at Tony, they did as they were told, and not totally unwillingly because they knew their Aunt Polly would likely give them both a jam piece or summat, and there was something very satisfying about a jam piece.

  Tony wasn’t thinking about jam pieces. He knew that somehow his mother had found out about the coal and he wondered if she was going to kill him stone dead because of it. He didn’t deny anything, knowing that there was no point, though he did try to explain why he had done it.

  This time Marion didn’t beat her son. She was afraid rather than angry. She knew that this was how the slide into thieving began: justifying pinching coal because they were poor and needed it more th
an the Gas Board. She wondered how she could make her young son understand that what he had done was stealing plain and simple, and not only a sin to confess and repent of but against the law too. She felt as if a tight band was encircling her, and her face blanched in sudden fear that she was not up to the task of teaching her incorrigible son right from wrong. Tears seeped from beneath her eyelids and trickled down her face.

  Tony felt absolutely dreadful that he had made his mother cry. It achieved what no beating had done, for it made him feel bitterly ashamed. He felt a sharp pain in his heart and tears welled in his own eyes as he put his arms around his mother and the two of them sobbed together.

  At last Tony wiped the tears from his eyes with his sleeve and gave a sniff before crying brokenly, ‘I’m sorry, Mom, really sorry. I will never do anything like this again, ever.’

  Marion heard the sincerity in her young son’s voice and she held him tight. ‘Promise me, Tony?’ she said.

  Tony nodded vigorously. ‘I promise, Mom.’ Though he knew that it would be hard not to listen to and follow Jack, he wanted to make his mother proud of him and definitely didn’t want her to be reduced to tears again because of anything he had done.

  Marion went round to see her sister straight away when Tony told her Jack had been involved too, and though the twins were very curious as to why they had been sent to their aunt’s house and were now to go home again, Marion refused to tell them.

  Once the girls had gone, she lost no time in telling her sister what the boys had been up to. Polly called Jack in from the street and he freely admitted it and without an ounce of shame.

  ‘You might think that there is nothing worrying in the fact that your son doesn’t seem to know right from wrong,’ Marion told her sister sharply. ‘That’s your concern and Pat’s. My son has broken his heart in shame over it. I’ll leave you to punish Jack as you see fit.’

  Marion never laid a hand on Tony, but she did send him to bed without his tea. The others thought this punishment justified when they heard what Tony had been doing, though Richard was rather shamefaced about it. His father had asked him to keep an eye on Tony and he had failed to do that. He was impressed, however, that Tony had said nothing about him knowing all along.