by Betty Burton
One day, she came out of the school gates to see Ray waiting at the corner. At first she thought that their dad was home and Ray had come to tell her. Then she saw his face.
‘What’s up, Ray? You look white as a sheet.’
‘It’s Mum, she had a bad turn this morning. I came off early turn, I didn’t want anybody else telling you…’ He faltered.
‘Ray! Is she… ?’ She knew. ‘She died, didn’t she?’
Stopping for a brief moment, he put a tentative hand round her shoulder. ‘Yeah… I’m sorry, Lu, she passed away this morning.’
‘Oh, Ray, thank goodness you were on the ten-to-six turn, otherwise she might have been on her own.’
He nodded, not able to say that Vera had been on her own. Once again, it had been Ralph’s misfortune to suffer the shock of finding his mother in a state of bloody saturation. He had made her a hot drink and some toast, gone quietly upstairs and discovered her slumped down in bed. Asleep, as he at first thought, but she was dead. He would never tell Lu that.
No one happening to glance in their direction would have suspected that the young man with oiled hair and wearing well-pressed blue serge, and the uniformed schoolgirl with a thick copper plait hanging below her felt hat were experiencing a great crisis. Vera’s children were not like that; they did not make a poppy show of themselves.
‘Is she…? Where is she?’
‘In the Chapel of Rest.’
‘I don’t have to see her, Ray, do I?’
‘Our Kenny’s been marvellous, you’d never believe. Dr Steiner got him at work and Ken came home and saw to everything. I’ve never seen him like that, he just took over – no wonder they think so much of him there. There didn’t seem any point in getting you out of school, you couldn’t have done anything.’ There had been things to be done that he and Kenny could not have borne she should see. Dotty took away the bloody washing bundle, and Ray burnt the mattress and went out and bought another from a trader who sold bedding, guaranteed fumigated.
In death, Vera became almost celebrated in the Wilmott family. Not only had she died suddenly, but she had died dramatically, just as her husband’s ship was sailing into home waters.
On the day when he was due in Portsmouth, the older Wilmotts gathered at 110 Lampeter Street to welcome their brother Arthur to his house of mourning. May had come down from Wickham and was staying in Portsmouth until Vera’s funeral was over. But Arthur did not come.
He had already been delayed because, before the Augusta reached Portsmouth, she and fourteen other vessels of the Royal Navy had been ordered to change course for Invergordon, a port in the north of Scotland, several days’ sailing time from home.
Vera, already very ill and anaemic, in bed on Dr Steiner’s orders, liked to catch half an hour when all her three children were in the house. News of the delay came when Ken had brought home a newspaper he had found on the tram. The story was told in dramatic headlines: STRIKE! TWELVE THOUSAND MEN OF THE ROYAL NAVY WALK OFF. FIFTEEN SHIPS OF HIS MAJESTY’S FLEET UNABLE TO SAIL.
Kenny had said scathingly, ‘Look at that, “Leftist and Communist speak against RN cuts.” They’ve always got to blame the Reds.’
The story continued for several days, about scuffles breaking out at strike meetings, fights breaking out, windows being broken and an officer being injured, and each evening one of the boys brought home a newspaper. Lu was not greatly interested, but liked it when they were all together for half an hour. Lu had been quite surprised that her mother had opinions such as she expressed. ‘Whoever would have thought of the Navy striking? Who would have thought people in this country had it in them?’
Ray said, ‘With all this unemployment, I should think they’re afraid for their jobs.’
‘No,’ Kenny said, ‘it’s because the men’s got a quarter cut off their pay and the officers hardly anything.’
Kenny had said, ‘It’s the Potemkin that’s got them going – that’s what the government’s afraid of.’
‘What’s that?’ Lu had asked.
‘The Ruskies had a battleship called the Potemkin and the sailors came out – that was even before the revolution.’
Ray had said jokingly, ‘Our Ken and his revolution.’
‘Our people aren’t like Russian peasants.’
‘No,’ Vera said. ‘We make excuses to ourselves why we shouldn’t stand up against what’s wrong. We take the easy way.’
Thus Arthur Wilmott was still at sea when he heard of his wife’s death.
The Augusta, which had been Arthur Wilmott’s only real home since he was a boy, was a stirring sight as it sailed towards Spithead. Dressed overall, pennants flying, a full complement of men lining her decks, looking from a distance like a newly-painted picket fence, the Augusta whooped signals of her arrival in the home port, and received a salute from the shore guns. This was the sight and sound that stirred British hearts, inspired nationalistic sentiments, and persuaded Portsmouth’s young men to sign up to spend a large part of their lives away from home for very little pay.
Vera Wilmott’s husband had been one of the men standing legs astride and hands crossed behind, eyes fixed on the shore. His home town had slipped past – Hayling, the sandbar, Southsea shoreline, castle, pier, sea-front hotels, houses, gardens. Steaming on along the deep narrow channel that divides Portsmouth from the Isle of Wight, ploughing steadfastly through the deadly, swirling, sucking fast current that ebbs and flows there, past the town pier, the ancient fortifications, harbour-master’s tower, old dockyard buildings, and on more slowly into the great crane-lined dockyards.
* * *
The Wilmott family waited all day. Hector went down to the ship, and then asked around the dockland area. A matelot who could have been him had been seen in one or two pubs. He had left his kit-bag in one, and in another a hat with an Augusta ribbon had been found. A barman remembered a sailor sitting on his own doing some pretty serious boozing, ‘like he was drowning his sorrows’.
Hector thought it looked serious, so the police were informed.
Arthur was missing for a day and a night. Two fast tides had sucked him into the harbour mouth, and two more had swirled him back out before his body was grappled by the crew of one of the pilot tugs. The coroner had not had much option other than to issue a death certificate stating death by drowning and institute an inquest for a later date.
The complications over his death delayed the arrangements for Vera’s funeral. Lu couldn’t bear the thought of her lying there so long waiting and waiting, so she suddenly decided to go and visit her mother at the Chapel of Rest. Because it was Kenny’s place of work, the mortuary chapel did not make her feel at all apprehensive; in fact, when she encountered the combined smells of wood, polish, scent, disinfectant and slow corruption, they were the familiar ones Kenny carried about him. Because Kenny was in the trade, as he would insist on calling it, Vera was laid out in the kind of coffin not often seen in the Lampeter area. Kenny said, ‘She’s had a lot of visitors. I never knew so many people knew her.’
‘What do they do when they come here?’
‘Same as all people do. They just stand for a minute, say, don’t they look young or something? People said she looks peaceful.’
‘That’s a blimmen lie, Kenny. She don’t look peaceful. Why should she be, she had a rotten life.’
‘It’s no good blaming people, they don’t know what to say. It’s always seemed to me like talking behind somebody’s back.’
‘Where have they put him?’
‘Dad? Not here.’
‘Is that because he’s…?’ She wanted to get out the words, ‘Because the fish got at him?’, but it wasn’t Kenny’s fault that she felt so angry with their father. He couldn’t even come home when he did have the chance. He had drunk himself silly and fallen over the sea-wall. She wanted to do some violence to him, but he had escaped. He deserved to be dead, but her kind, gentle mother did not.
And it was Arthur who was in her head as she stood in s
ilence pouring her resentment over the remains of Vera.
I’m not sorry he’s dead. He’s never been here, he never cared about the boxes of work everywhere. He never saw you ill, or worried about money. He was always at sea when there wasn’t money for the rent. I hate him. He never wrote to us, just a few cards saying nothing. Did he think that was being a father? I hate him because she felt guilty because she didn’t want to take in a lodger. I hope that we haven’t yet sunk that low, she said.
Ray had often told about how he used to come home from school and feed Lu bread and milk from a cup, and give her rides in the basket of the errand-boy’s bike on Saturdays. What was Ray doing working on Saturdays when her father was enjoying himself out there in those beautiful, sunny places on the postcards? Join the Navy and see the world. He shouldn’t have been seeing the world, he should have been looking after their mum and them. I hope the fishes had a good meal.
Her thoughts were disturbed by a group of aunts and neighbours who came shushing and whispering in. Lu did not acknowledge them. She knew that people were saying that she was taking it badly. She didn’t care. From time to time, she would look out from within her mind where she had spent a lot of her time since it all happened, and find Ray looking at her as though it hurt him. Aunty May was keen for her to keep busy, even Kenny would keep giving her a bit of a hug and saying things like, ‘We’ll be all right, Lu. You’ll get over it. Get the funeral over.’
I’m not taking it badly. I’m not even taking it well.
Dotty cried buckets. The aunties all had cheeks widely wetted with tears, her cousins had trickled and sniffed and wiped. When Lu herself again looked down at her mother, the only emotion she could conjure up was anger, a strange anger that had seemed to fly in all directions looking for somewhere to settle, but had found it impossible to do and had consequently gone on trying to alight upon everyone who came within her range. Eventually the anger hovered over her father and settled upon him. Around her, in the chapel, she had heard the sincere platitudes. ‘How peaceful she looks.’ ‘You could imagine she was just asleep.’ ‘She don’t look no more than thirty.’
Lu had stayed chewing the lining of her mouth until it bled. Her mother looked neither peaceful nor asleep. She looked as she had looked for years: hollow-eyed, sunken-mouthed, worried and haggard. And ill. Even though it was over for her, she still looked as though she suffered. Even with her hair tied in a ribbon and dressed in one of the night-gowns she had had in hospital, she looked bad. Lu pushed her way out of the chapel not looking at anyone.
Somebody had tried to press a handkerchief into her hand, but she had pushed it away. Somebody whispered, ‘She’s taking it bad.’
* * *
On the morning of the funeral, before all the aunts and cousins started pouring into the house bringing plates of sandwiches, the three of them had sat in the scullery, silently drinking sweet tea and eating bread and dripping whilst Ray spat and polished his black shoes – his only shoes. They had been speculating about whether any of the Presley relations would come. Ray had said, ‘Don’t count on it’, and ‘I wouldn’t know one if they did’, and Ken had said, ‘They never cared about her alive, we don’t want them coming now she’s dead’, and Lu had been wondering whether she could ever do anything so bad that Ray and Kenny would cut her off from them. It had never occurred to her before to wonder whether her mum missed her family.
When the Co-op hearse had arrived, Lu half expected to start behaving like any normal girl and burst into tears and sob unashamedly as Dotty had done. ‘Poor Vera,’ Dotty had said, ‘she never deserved this. Poor Vera… poor thing, she was the best neighbour anybody ever had. I’ll be lost without her. I can’t imagine her not being here any more.’ She had put her arms out and drawn Lu into her shoulder. ‘Go on, love, have a damned good howl, get it all out of your system. Don’t be ashamed of it. If you can’t cry when your own mum goes, then when can you?’ Ashamed of her dry eyes and even drier emotion, Lu had run upstairs, hoping that Dotty would think her misery too hard to bear.
But the desired and natural grief had not come. Ray had cried, every day, silently, when there was no one about to see him. He would go out the back door, into the lavatory, and ten minutes later come out with red-rimmed shining eyes and a stuffed-up nose. Even Kenny, who nobody expected would, had cried there in the room over his mother’s body. He had walked around the coffin, smoothing the waxed finish of the wood, rearranged a lock of her hair and smoothed down the collar of her night-gown.
Lu stood between Ray and Kenny. The boys had wanted her to turn out in her new school uniform, but she stubbornly refused, saying that they would all think she was showing off. So she was wearing Granny Wilmott’s hemmed-up funeral coat which had grown too small for the old lady, over a black skirt of her mother’s, a blouse bought on the Co-op card, and an expensive black bouclé Tam o’Shanter that Miss Lake had loaned her. Ray, being chief mourner, had had to lay out money for the occasion. He’d paid cash for a black suit from a Fifty-shilling Tailor’s and wore a Dunn’s bowler-hat. Kenny, because of his job, hadn’t had to lay out for clothes.
Lu fixed her eyes on the gleaming toecaps of Ray’s shoes.
Kenny’s workmates, beautifully turned out to the great satisfaction of senior Wilmotts, bore the coffins to the deep grave. Lu stared at Ray’s feet, allowed her eyeballs to become dry, and refused to let herself blink. At last, and with some discomfort, her eyeballs were sufficiently dried by the air to make her tear-ducts automatically trigger off enough moisture to brim over, run beneath her lower lashes and down her cheeks. Perhaps now they would all stop watching her.
Her mother’s coffin was lowered first. Crumbs of earth rattled on its lid. Then, when Kenny’s workmates took the strain of her father’s coffin by the straps and began lowering carefully, Lu snatched off Miss Lake’s Tam o’Shanter and ran out of the cemetery.
Later, a policeman seeing her sitting on a bleak shore at Southsea, took her home. It hadn’t occurred to her that people would be out searching. When she got back to Number i io, she was filled with remorse and ready to go along with whatever anyone said, especially when Ray and Kenny said that they would feel better going back to work if they knew she was at Roman’s Fields. Lu needed no persuading.
It was dark when Ted’s little van rattled through the gates of Roman’s Fields. May said, ‘Don’t you worry yourself about anything, Lu. If you don’t want to speak to anybody, you don’t have to. Bar will be over in the morning; she won’t know you’re here, but I won’t let her come rushing upstairs. I’ll give you some valerian to help your nerves, and some marigold to help you get a good night’s rest.’
‘Let her come up, Aunty. Bar always makes me feel better. I’m not bad, there’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘Of course there isn’t,’ Ted said. ‘You just needs a bit of peace and quiet, like Ray and Ken.’
‘I expect they’ll be glad to go out to the pub without having to worry about me.’
‘That’s just what I told them would do them good,’ Ted said. ‘We can be proud of them two in the Wilmott family. They looked like proper gentlemen.’
‘What d’you mean, looked like – there’s more gentlemen in those two lads than in a wagon-load of the likes of them in red coats that chased the fox over my strawberry beds last winter. Offered me five pounds to put it right. Five pounds! I told them to clear off; five years of their time planting new stock there would be more like it.’
Gabriel Strawbridge’s voice echoed down the passage from his room. ‘Was that Louise’s voice I heard?’
‘Yes, Mr Strawbridge. Do you want me to come and see you?’
‘Do I? My eye, I do.’
‘Go along and see him, pet. I’ll put the kettle on and then make us all something to eat.’
He was seated in his usual high-backed winged chair, upholstered in a tapestry-like fabric, which Lu used to think looked like a throne. Peering as she came in at the door, he held out his arms in welcome. ‘I
t is you. Dear love, come close and sit here.’ He put a cushion on the stool upon which he rested his leg, and took both her hands as she sat down. ‘Let me see you, I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind. I’m so sorry that you’ve had to face dreadful events so early in your life… but you’re strong and you’re intelligent. Louise, my dear child. If only I could do something… I would do anything.’
‘You could put your shawl round me, like you did before.’
‘Good Lord, I’m all fingers and thumbs,’ he said as she settled at his feet, leaning into his knees. He enveloped her in the shoulder blanket.
‘I couldn’t cry.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t think I even feel sad.’
‘What do you feel?’
She looked up at him. ‘Angry… I feel so angry. That makes me ashamed.’ It was like confessing directly to God, as though his milky eyes were clouds through which he could see her clearly and she could look directly into them.
‘Honest anger is nothing to be ashamed of, is it?’
‘Yes… because she couldn’t help dying, could she?’
‘Why are you so angry at her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘For leaving you? It’s always frightening when parents die… quite terrifying, even for older people.’
‘No. No, I was going to make up for everything. Now I can’t. She’s spoilt everything I was going to do.’
He pulled her head against him and gently caressed the side of her face where his hand rested. God’s hand, impersonal and involved, giving but not taking. ‘Of course she has. Death is the worst spoiler of all.’ His dry, fine-skinned old-man’s hands brushed tendrils of hair away from her face, as Ray had done during the nights when she was so ill and he had sat up with her. ‘None of us has any business dying. It hurts those who love us most, messes up their lives and leaves them with feelings of guilt that they are not responsible for. They want to please us, give us their achievements and love, and if we die we are rejecting all that. Anger and disappointment seem very natural responses, wouldn’t you say?’