Durham Trilogy 02. The Darkening Skies

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  Sara wanted to ask why, but was wary of antagonising her new friend, so she asked him about his own uncle instead.

  ‘Uncle Sam’s an important man in the union,’ Raymond said proudly, ‘and popular too - except with the bosses and men like Cummings. That’s why he’s been unemployed more often than not. Auntie Louie didn’t want me to gan down the pit, so I took the job at Sergeant’s - naff pay mind.’

  Sara was on the point of asking about pay when Joe Dimarco strolled into the cafe and the question died on her lips.

  ‘Ciao, Raymond,’ Joe greeted him with a playful punch. ‘Sorry you lads lost the match yesterday. Still, the saints were on our side,’ he joked.

  ‘Luck of the devil, you mean,’ Raymond grunted. Joe laughed, unoffended.

  ‘Waiting to see my sister, are you?’ Joe’s tanned face grinned. ‘Well Rosa’s washing nappies all day, so you’re out of luck.’

  Raymond’s white face turned crimson. ‘Get lost! I hardly know your sister. Any road, I don’t care about lasses - they’re too much bother.’ Then he caught Sara’s quizzical look and added quickly, ‘Not all lasses, mind. Joe, this is Sara, she’s new in Whitton and doesn’t know her way about. We just came in for an ice-cream.’

  Joe swung round to look at her properly and recognition dawned.

  ‘Hello again. I see you’ve got a taste for Dimarco’s ices?’

  ‘Aye, best in County Durham so they say,’ Sara said dryly.

  Joe laughed. ‘And is your ankle any better?’ Sara blushed, realising she had quite forgotten about hurting it.

  ‘On the mend,’ she mumbled.

  ‘So you know Sara?’ Raymond interrupted, his face disappointed.

  ‘We bumped into each other at the football,’ Joe grinned, his dark eyes appraising. Then turning back to his friend he asked, ‘What were Normy Bell and Scotty arguing with you about before the game started?’

  ‘Nowt.’ Raymond was reticent.

  ‘Were they giving you a hard time again?’ Joe demanded.

  ‘No more than usual,’ Raymond muttered. ‘It’s you that’s bothering them - said I was to warn you off.’

  ‘Why?’ Joe laughed.

  ‘You know why,’ Raymond answered with embarrassment. ‘Normy doesn’t like you seeing Olive Brown - says there’ll be trouble if you try and see her again.’

  ‘I’m not scared of Normy Bell,’ Joe was scornful.

  ‘He’s looking for trouble, Joe,’ Raymond warned, ‘and I don’t see that Olive Brown’s worth the bother.’

  Joe clapped the other youth on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after you, Kirkup.’

  Raymond shook him off with embarrassment. ‘Didn’t say I was bothered about Normy or Scotty, did I?’

  Sara, annoyed by talk of the popular Olive Brown, stood up. ‘We better be getting back to the shop, Raymond.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re working at Sergeant’s, too?’ Joe asked, regarding her once more.

  ‘Aye, it’s me first day and I’m already in her black books for spilling sugar everywhere.’

  ‘Joseph!’ his father called across the shop. ‘We have a business to run. Help Paolo while I speak to the traveller.’

  ‘Know what you mean,’ Joe touched her shoulder with a smile. She felt a ridiculous thrill at the gesture.

  Ta-ra, Raymond - Sara.’ He left them.

  Sara followed Raymond out of the parlour, glancing back.

  ‘You like him, don’t you?’ Raymond nudged her playfully.

  ‘Who?’ Sara took on an innocent air.

  ‘Joe Dimarco. You went all pink when he was talking to you,’ the boy smirked. ‘He has that effect on lasses.’

  ‘Not me,’ Sara pouted, then as casually as possible she asked, ‘Who’s Olive Brown?’

  ‘Last year’s Carnival Queen. Joe’s been seeing her, but Normy Bell thinks she’s his lass. If Joe’s got any sense he’ll leave her alone - Normy’s a bad’n’.’

  Sara quashed her jealousy for the unknown Olive by changing the subject.

  ‘And who’s Rosa?’ Sara grinned. ‘The mention of her got you in a flummox.’ She nudged him back.

  ‘No it didn’t!’

  ‘Rosa, Rosa,’ Sara sung the name aggravatingly. ‘What a romantic name.’

  ‘Haway,’ Raymond gave her a shove. ‘I’ll race you back.’

  Sara responded to the challenge, chasing after the swift youth up Pit Street and into Mill Terrace. They fell against the back door of the shop just as Mrs Sergeant appeared round the corner in her pork-pie hat.

  ‘Stand to attention,’ Raymond muttered under his breath and Sara suppressed her urge to giggle. At least with Raymond around, working for Dolly Sergeant might not be such a drudge, Sara thought with optimism.

  But by the end of the first week, life in Whitton Grange seemed bleak. Raymond spent most of the day out on his deliveries and Sara was left to the full wrath of Dolly Sergeant. Tuesday was a day of disasters; Sara managed to drop a box of eggs and then burst a bag of split peas which scattered into every corner of the shop. On Wednesday she lost the key to the spice drawer and on Thursday nearly injured Mrs Sergeant by letting go of a toffee tin from the top of the ladder. Her employer scolded and threatened her into a useless, rumbling idiot and Sara wondered, anxiously, if she would be out of a job by Friday.

  At home, there was tension in the Cummings’ household. Her Uncle Alfred had badgered Colin into going to see Naylor, the under-manager, as there were rumours at the Eleanor that boys were being taken on at the pit. When Colin returned unsuccessful, his father had been so incensed he had locked him out for two nights. Sara had seen him from her bedroom window, sleeping with his dogs in their kennel, his legs exposed to the night rain, and felt sickened by her uncle’s heartlessness. She had gone out in her nightclothes and given Colin a blanket from her own bed, retreating, embarrassed, by his stuttering thanks and the dirty hands that reached out to touch her as he took her offering. But Marina had watched her go and relished landing Sara in trouble by telling her mother who reported it to Alfred.

  ‘You’ll spend your evenings in for the next week,’ he had raged, his small brown eyes merciless, ‘and do Ida’s mending and any other jobs she can find for you. Do you hear?’

  Her aunt had put her to making a new patchwork blanket to replace the one spoiled by Colin’s dogs, so Sara had not been able to explore the town after work or hang around the ice-cream parlour which seemed such a popular haunt of the young. She thought now and then about Joe Dimarco and once heard a motorcycle roar down the back lane, but it was gone by the time she got to the window and she did not know if it was his.

  Anyway, she concluded as she spilled out her feelings in her diary, he’s probably never thought about me twice. Raymond says all the lasses fancy him, so why should he bother with me? she wrote. Then guilt gripped her to think that Sid Gibson probably still thought of her as his lass and yet she hardly thought of him. A letter had come from her mother, passing on regards from Sid and she had been engulfed with homesickness to read how much she was missed at home. She thought of her mother constantly.

  To compound her unhappiness, Sara received a shock on Saturday afternoon. After Raymond received his wages, Sara had the temerity to ask for hers.

  Dolly Sergeant gave her a thunderous look. ‘I’ve handed them over to your uncle, you cheeky madam. You must know about the arrangement?’

  ‘What arrangement?’ Sara asked sharply, her frayed patience dangerously near snapping.

  Mrs Sergeant drew herself up behind the counter where she was consulting her books. ‘Mr Cummings thought it best we had an arrangement - so you’ll have to speak to him about it.’

  Sara looked at her, astounded. Suddenly, after all the disappointments and upsets that week, she was filled with anger.

  ‘He doesn’t have any right to me wages,’ she protested. ‘You should have given them to me!’

  The middle-aged woman gasped at her boldness. ‘He has every right,’ she snapped ba
ck. ‘He’s giving you bed and board, isn’t he? Besides, young lasses don’t know how to handle money these days - you’d just throw it away going to the pictures or the dance hall, more than likely,’ she spoke with disgust.

  ‘But I’m supposed to be sending money back to me mam,’ Sara persisted, defiantly.

  ‘Well, that’s your concern. You’ll have to have it out with your uncle.’ Mrs Sergeant stabbed the inventory with fingers like sausages, ‘We have our arrangement and that’s that. If I hear any more complaints from you, you can pack your bags and be off.’

  Raymond came inside from winding in the tattered canopy to hear this last threat. He was swift to interrupt before Sara said anything rash.

  ‘Finished, Mrs Sergeant. I’ll be off, then. You coming, Sara?’

  Sara nodded, stony-faced, as she pulled on her cardigan and stuffed her overall savagely into her string bag. The shopkeeper had gone back to entering totals in her account book.

  ‘Be here sharp Monday morning,’ she told them without looking up. ‘If you’re late again, Raymond Kirkup, I’ll dock a day’s pay.’

  Outside, Raymond whistled with relief. ‘And a happy weekend to you too, you old cow,’ he said over his shoulder. Sara was still seething too much to laugh with him.

  As they walked on, her companion warned, ‘Don’t cross the Sergeant-Major about brass again, mind. She’s that touchy about her money. Your uncle will give you some pocket money, won’t he?’

  ‘That’s not the point. I don’t want to be beholden to him,’ Sara fumed. ‘How will I ever be able to save money for Mam and return home, if Uncle Alfred keeps it all?’

  ‘Is that what you want,’ Raymond asked shyly, ‘to gan home?’

  ‘Aye, of course,’ Sara said crossly. ‘I hate Whitton Grange! I hate Sergeant’s and I don’t want to stop a minute more than I have to with the Cummingses. Me uncle’s a bully and Marina’s always whingeing on - and as for Colin and those dogs barking all night long!’ She looked desperately at the lad beside her, realising how she dreaded returning to South Parade. ‘It’s not me home. I miss me mam and me sister Chrissie. And I’ve got a lad called Sid who wants to get wed.’

  Sara flushed at her own words, not knowing why she should mention him to Raymond. If she was honest, she had hardly given the quiet, dependable Sid Gibson more than five minutes’ thought in the whole of this past week, let alone dwelt on marriage. But she was angry and miserable and adding him to her list of wants seemed to give strength to her case against Whitton Grange.

  Raymond watched her in dismay, wondering whether to feel insulted by her attack on the village he loved. He pitied her, but what help could he be? Lasses were either moody like Nancy Bell in the next street, or mysterious like the shy and pretty Rosa Dimarco who sometimes came into the shop for household soap. This one, he glanced at Sara in awe, appeared to be both and he would do best to leave well alone.

  ‘I’ll see you Monday,’ he said abruptly, abandoning the idea of asking Sara to his home, ‘I’ve got footy practice.’ He took off up Holly Street without a backward glance, head buried in his enormous cap.

  I don’t have any friends here, Sara thought bitterly; even Raymond could not wait to get away from her. She realised she was close to crying and brushed at her eyes to prevent tears falling. Yet she would not give in to self-pity, she told herself harshly, or let the world see her unhappiness.

  It was half an hour till tea-time. She would not go home immediately, not caring if her truancy got her into trouble. Turning round, she set off down the hill to wander along South Street and peer into the shop windows. Sara was drawn to the posters outside The Palace cinema, wretched that she had no money to buy a ticket for the matinee.

  As she did so people began to stream out of the early performance of a George Formby film and Sara watched them enviously as they chattered. With a jolt she recognised Joe’s dark head above the crowd, as he pushed his way into the street.

  Sara pulled back her untidy hair and pushed it under her beret, conscious of how bedraggled she must look after a day clearing out the storeroom. An instant later he seemed to be looking her way and for a second or two they held each other’s gaze. Joe was smiling and Sara’s heart began to beat with excitement.

  Then a pretty girl with wavy, bobbed brown hair and a fashionable pink cotton dress emerged at his side and linked her arm through his. It was someone other than Olive Brown, for Raymond had told her Olive was plump and fair.

  Sara stood back, her rising hopes that he was about to speak to her dashed. A moment later, the young couple were beyond her, swallowed up by passers-by and the chance encounter was over.

  Had he recognised her, or had she just imagined it? Sara gulped back the tears in her throat. What did it matter? she asked herself harshly. Joe Dimarco was a waster and a womaniser who, this particular Saturday afternoon, was courting an attractive brown-eyed girl in a pretty summer dress. Whereas she stood limp and grubby in a patched skirt and home-knitted cardigan, her hair a tousled mess under a green school beret. No wonder Joe Dimarco had ignored her. Best to forget all about him. Sara bit her lip in disappointment and walked away.

  Chapter Eight

  It was not until Sara had been at Sergeant’s for nearly three weeks, that she first met Rosa Dimarco. Raymond was away delivering a parcel of quality Darjeeling tea to The Grange, with Mrs Sergeant’s warning not to dawdle ringing in his ears. She made it sound as if the Seward-Scotts would be drumming their fingers on the tea table that very moment in anticipation of the smelly scented leaves, Sara thought with derision. But the speciality tea was one of the few items the illustrious coalowner’s household ordered from Sergeant’s and they would not be kept waiting a second more than necessary.

  Dolly Sergeant was on the telephone in the storeroom and Sara was left in charge of the shop for five minutes when a slight, dark-haired girl came in clutching a small boy by the hand.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Sara smiled, admiring the newcomer’s apricot-coloured dress and matching hair ribbon that set off her creamy skin and dark brown eyes. The chubby-faced infant was neatly dressed in velvet shorts and a yellow blouse. Something about them marked them out as different from the noisy, grubby children around Mill Terrace who usually came in for twists of sweets.

  ‘We’ve run out of baking powder,’ the girl explained. Sara turned and picked a tin off the shelf, enjoying the feeling of being in charge.

  ‘There we are. Anything else?’

  ‘Sweetie!’ the little boy pulled away from the girl’s hold and pointed at the solid jars of coloured sweets on the counter.

  ‘No, Peter,’ the girl answered with a shake of her head, ‘you’ve been eating all morning.’ She looked back at Sara with an apologetic smile. ‘I’ll take two tins of plums and a packet of pudding rice please. Oh yes, and a bag of blue.’

  ‘Sweetie!’ The boy began a more persistent cry, jumping up and down in his well-polished sandals.

  ‘Be quiet, Peter,’ the girl tried to hush him, her straight fringe falling into her eyes as she bent down. Sara thought that something about her was familiar but could not recall seeing her before. The child pushed her off, keeping up his demanding chorus. Sara leaned up and pulled the bag of rice off the shelf, then searched in vain for the plums.

  ‘They’re next to the tinned salmon,’ the girl said helpfully.

  Sara laughed, ‘I’ve been here three weeks and I still can’t work out what goes where.’

  ‘Only Mrs Sergeant seems to know that,’ the other girl smiled. Peter’s shouts were growing so loud, Sara knew it was a matter of minutes before her employer appeared to reprimand the child for making her telephone conversation with Mrs Naylor impossible. Mrs Sergeant was not shy of scolding the local children for what she considered to be bad manners.

  ‘Peter…’ Sara leaned over the counter and spoke to him, ‘… would you like a piece of liquorice? Sweetie liquorice?’

  ‘Yeth,’ he lisped, triumphant.

  ‘One bit
won’t do him any harm,’ Sara said brightly and pulled a stick of the black confectionery from a box on the counter. ‘There’s a sugar mouse an’ all,’ she offered in a spontaneous gesture. ‘We’ll not tell the boss,’ Sara grinned at the other girl. The boy sighed with pleasure at the sudden treats.

  ‘Thank you,’ the dark-haired girl replied. ‘He’s that spoilt, but it’s not easy saying no to Peter.’ She patted his head with affection. ‘He’s my parent’s oldest grandchild and only grandson, you see. Paolo, my brother thinks the world of him, too. Daddy’s bonny bambino, eh, Peter?’ she cuddled the boy.

  ‘You’re one of the Dimarcos, aren’t you?’ Sara asked with sudden realisation. The girl had the same liquid brown eyes and engaging smile as Joe.

  ‘Yes, how did you know?’ the girl seemed surprised.

  ‘Just guessed,’ Sara blushed. ‘I’ve been to your cafe with Raymond - you know - the lad that works here,’ she added swiftly.

  ‘Oh, yes, Raymond. He’s canny, always laughing. Sometimes helps my father out if we’re extra busy.’

  ‘Is there anything else you need?’

  ‘No, that’s it, ta. Could you put it down on the account, please?’

  Sara rummaged for the book. The Dimarcos must be good customers and prompt payers to be one of the chosen few for Sergeant’s credit, Sara thought wryly.

  She licked the pages as she turned them. ‘Dimarco, Dimarco - ah, here you are.’ A long list of previous orders filled the page and Sara wrote the new items into the book in her bold handwriting.

  ‘I’m Sara, by the way,’ she spoke as she wrote, not wanting the girl to rush away. ‘Are you Rosa?’

  ‘Yes.’ The girl’s open face showed surprise again. ‘You seem to know all about us. We haven’t met before have we? It’s just I don’t remember…’

  ‘No, Raymond’s mentioned you, that’s all.’ Sara glanced up slyly, but Rosa just seemed bemused. ‘Were you at school with him?’ Sara asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Rosa replied, ‘but he was two classes below me.’

  Sara looked at her more closely, realising she must be older than her girlish fringe and flat chest made her look. ‘Do you work in your dad’s shop now?’ she asked, intrigued.