by Annie Murray
‘Oh, my God!’ It was a woman, hysterical, beside herself. ‘What’re we gonna do? How can we get there?’
Other voices joined in.
‘Melly?’ She heard Tommy in the dark. ‘What’s that?’ Kevin and Ricky still seemed to be asleep.
‘I don’t know.’ She got out of bed and sat on the boys’ bed. There were more noises – Gladys’s door opening; hurried footsteps on the attic stairs. There was a further mix of voices outside, male and female, more hysterical shouting, more crying. Melly went to the window. In the lamplight she could see a knot of people.
‘It’s Dolly,’ Melly said, horrified. Happy, kindly Dolly Morrison, sounding utterly distraught.
At last the noises died away. She heard the grown-ups come back into the house and shut the door but they didn’t come upstairs.
‘I’m going to see,’ she told Tommy. ‘I’ll be back in a tick.’ She had a terrible thought growing in her. If it was Dolly, did that mean something had happened . . . ? Could something have happened to Reggie?
She found Mom and Dad and Gladys all standing downstairs. To her surprise, the clock on the mantelpiece said that it was only half past eleven. She felt as if she had been asleep for hours on end. All of them turned to look at her.
‘I heard everyone shouting,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
Gladys sank into a chair. She was shaking and seemed unable to speak.
‘Oh, Melly –’ Mom came over to her. ‘Poor, poor Dolly and Mo. There’s been an accident. The two of them were coming home on the bike – Wally and Reggie.’ Mom knelt down, putting her hands on Melly’s shoulders. ‘They hit a lorry. We don’t know anything much yet – they’ve gone to the hospital – but . . .’ She shook her head and looked down for a second. ‘It’s bad by the sound of things. We don’t know if either of them are alive.’
Sixteen
‘My boy! Oh, my lovely boy – he was always the sweetest of the lot of them! And all his life before him. Why did this have to happen? Why?’
Dolly raged and sobbed, sitting bent over their table in number three, looking as none of them had ever seen her before. Her pretty looks were mangled by grief and she seemed aged by years.
Wally was dead: twenty-one years of age and engaged to be married to Susan. He was steering the bike when the truck pulled across in front of them out of the fog and darkness on Constitution Hill. Reggie, riding pillion, had taken the impact on his right side as the bike slewed round. He was badly injured, his right hip smashed up. They didn’t know if he would ever walk again.
Melly sat quietly in the corner by the fire. She had barely been able to eat anything since the news came, two nights ago. She felt sick constantly. The grief around her seemed to invade her so that she didn’t know who she was upset for most – for Dolly and Mo, for Reggie, for herself. It was as if the pain belonged to all of them and enveloped all of them.
She had never seen Gladys as emotional as she was during those days. She comforted Dolly, her old friend, but she was stunned and unable to do anything. Her face was gaunt, her eyes rimmed with red.
‘I feel as if . . .’ She struggled to find words for Rachel and Danny. ‘I just feel as if I’ve been knocked for six.’
In a quiet moment the day after they heard, Rachel had sat Melly down, upstairs in the bedroom.
‘You know – Gladys had a little boy once.’ Melly looked at her mother’s pale face. ‘This was something she knew, but had almost forgotten. ‘I think – what’s happened to Dolly and Mo – it’s brought it all back for her. She’s upset for them, of course – but it’s more than that. I’ve never seen her in such a state.’
Melly nodded, her legs dangling over the edge of her bed. She didn’t know what it meant to lose your son. She just knew that all of it was wretched and terrible. Everything had changed overnight, like a cloud blacking out the sun forever. She felt ashamed of her nerves on Christmas Day, wanting Reggie to thank her for her silly little present. Reggie could be dead now, like Wally . . . Her eyes filled with tears.
‘Mom – is Reggie going to be all right?’
Rachel moved closer and squeezed her hand. Mom had been unusually tender with them all since the news. ‘I think so, bab. It’ll take time. I don’t know much about what’s up with him, but he’s alive – that’s the main thing.’ She tilted her head and Melly felt her looking into her face. Mom’s eyes were red from crying, like all of them.
‘Maybe, when he’s a bit better, you could go in and see him?’ Rachel said.
Melly looked at her in horror. Go and visit Reggie? No, she couldn’t possibly! This had taken Reggie right out of her reach. He was so much older and now, his body badly hurt, his brother dead. How could a child like her face him – he wouldn’t want to know!
‘No.’ She shook her head and looked at her hands, holding a hanky in her lap.
‘All right,’ Rachel said gently, getting up. As if to herself, she said, ‘I wonder if he’ll be all right to get to Wally’s funeral.’
Everyone in the yard did everything they could think of to look after the Morrisons. Mo, only just sixty, turned into an old man overnight. His strong, solid body moved slowly, with more effort, his good-natured features sagged, borne down by his suffering. His hair, already well on the way to white, took the last stage at a run.
The family stuck together. Eric, the oldest, who was married, called every day. Jonny and Freddie helped every way they could and little Donna seemed to grow up almost overnight. She became thinner and quieter and helped Dolly about the house.
One night, just before the New Year, Rachel and Danny were lying in bed together, still awake, though it was late.
‘You don’t know what to do for them, do you?’ she said, lying in Danny’s arms. The calamity had brought them closer again. ‘If it was one of ours – I mean, I don’t think I could stand it.’
Danny didn’t say anything, though she felt the muscles in his arms tighten around her. Sometimes it frustrated her when Danny wouldn’t talk about things, but she knew that it was his way of keeping terrible memories at bay.
‘Sorry, Danny – does it bring it all back? Losing your mom and everything?’
When Danny and his sisters were in the orphanages – he in one, they another – his middle sister in age, Rose, died. She was only ten. The other two, Jess and Amy, eventually came back to them, but by then they were all strangers to each other. They both had lives now, outside Birmingham, and Jess was married, but the bond between them had been broken forever. They no longer knew where Amy was living.
‘A bit,’ he said, at last. He kissed the side of her head in the dark. ‘I s’pose all you can do is try not to think about it – when you can’t do anything, I mean.’
‘I can’t stop thinking about it,’ Rachel said. ‘I hope to God Reggie’s going to be OK. Dolly and Mo went to see him – they said he’s in a terrible mess. He knew them though, thank goodness.’
‘He’ll be all right,’ Danny said. ‘He’s a good strong lad.’
‘Shh – what was that?’ A sound, muffled but definite, had come from somewhere outside.
They heard it again: a cry, a howl of anguish from the inside of one of the houses. It came three times, then no more. The sound was so primal, so desolate, that it brought Rachel to tears again.
‘That was Mo, wasn’t it?’ she whispered.
‘Must be,’ Danny said. His voice was husky as well.
‘Oh, God, Danny, the poor man,’ she wept. ‘Poor, dear old Mo.’
‘But they’re not Catholics, are they?’ Rachel said, when Gladys told her where the funeral was to be. ‘I’ve never known them go to church.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Gladys reported. ‘But Dolly said her mom was Italian and they used to go to church as kids. Made her First Communion, white dress and all that. After that I don’t think they bothered with it.’
‘So – we are going to go?’ Rachel asked cautiously. Her friend Netta was Catholic and Gladys who was staunch
C of E had always been a bit sniffy about it, Italian mission to the Irish and all that.
Gladys looked at her in astonishment. ‘Of course. What’re you on about? We’ll be there with our boots blacked. I wouldn’t miss going for anything, whether it’s smells and bells or whatever it is. That’s not what matters.’
On a bitterly cold day in the fledgling new year, they filed into the church of the Sacred Heart and St Margaret Mary. Melly looked about her fearfully. Even though she went to the parish church with Gladys most Sundays, this felt strange and different, the walls at the front of the church glowing with gold, the candles burning, the statues up near to the altar and the smell of wax and incense. It was beautiful, not dark and frightening as she had expected.
Everyone went, Tommy as well. They took it in turns to push him the mile or so across Aston to the church in Witton Lane.
Melly was at the end of one of the wooden pews to the left, with Tommy close beside her in the aisle. Gladys was seated to her right. They could see Dolly up in front of them with her two sisters, with little Donna and with Susan, Wally’s intended, who they could hear trying to stifle her sobs. Everyone was in black and Dolly and her sisters, like most women in the church, were wearing black lace mantillas over their hair. Dolly had given one to Mom and Gladys to wear as well, so that they did not look out of place.
The boys were waiting at the back of the church, all in sharp black suits. The church was almost full including a group of people who, Melly realized, had worked with Wally and Reggie at GEC. And Dolly and Mo were much loved: between them, the family knew a lot of people. But there was one person missing. Melly had seen no sign of Reggie. She wondered if he was too badly hurt to be moved, though Dolly had said she thought he was going to come. Eric, her eldest, was to bring him in a taxi. Melly couldn’t see Eric either. She sat waiting in the hard pew, awed and nervous.
Just when it felt as if the service must surely begin, heads turned along the middle aisle and she caught sight of Eric, pushing a wheelchair. Her heart pounded hard and she had to remind herself to take a breath. There he was – there was Reggie! She felt ashamed of the effect seeing him had on her. He was sitting back, stiffly, and she only caught sight of the left side of his head as Eric pushed him past and round the front pew to the side aisle, arranging the chair to Dolly’s left. Dolly leaned across for a moment to kiss him, her arm encircling the back of the chair.
Eric walked back speedily up the aisle, head down, and Melly exchanged glances with Tommy. She felt grateful to Tommy for the sympathetic way he looked at her. Almost as if he knew what she was feeling. For a moment she thought about holding his hand, until she remembered that he did not want her mothering him any more.
Within a moment, the organ began to play and Mo, Eric, Jonny and Freddie Morrison, with Mo’s two brothers, carried Wally’s coffin along the church and rested it on the bier in the middle, covering it with a black velvet pall.
All the way through, the priest sprinkling the coffin with holy water, the stream of words in Latin, the incense and the sound of suppressed weeping and mutters of ‘Amen’, Melly could not stop her gaze from returning to Reggie. She had liked Wally well enough, and he had always been around since they were all children. The sadness of it weighed upon her, for all of them, the terrible loss and grief of the family. Reggie felt so far away now. His injuries and the death of his brother had closed about him, shutting her out. In her mind Melly tried to fold away her feelings for him, seeing them as childish. Why had she ever thought Reggie would be interested in her? By the time the Mass was finished and they all trooped out into the grey morning, she felt numb and cold – and older.
Gladys was going to the cemetery with the family.
‘We’ll go home, Auntie,’ Danny said. ‘Take the kids. You gonna be all right?’
Gladys squared her shoulders in her black coat. Her face, too, seemed to have sunk in on itself in the last terrible days. ‘Course. See you later.’ She turned and walked towards Dolly and her sisters, who stood in a close huddle, their arms about each other. Mo, pushing Reggie’s chair, was with his brother and sons, a cluster of dark suits.
From a distance, Melly saw Reggie’s fair hair, his head lolling just above the seat of the wheelchair. His right leg was outstretched and braced straight. There were dressings on his face. She thought he looked very uncomfortable but knew this must be nothing compared to his pain inside. People were going up to him, bending to say something to him. She saw her father talking to Reggie, gentle-faced, laying a hand on his shoulder for a moment. She couldn’t go to him, just couldn’t. She looked away, unable to bear it.
She saw Gladys go up to Mo, and hold out her hand to him. But Mo threw wide his arms, drawing Gladys into them and clutching her close, his face contorted in agony.
IV
1955
Seventeen
February 1955
Rachel slipped out of the overall which protected her clothes, shouldered her coat on and stepped out through the front door of Carlson House, Tommy’s school. Inside, the children were having a sing-song to end the day and she knew she was not needed for the last twenty minutes or so.
It was an iron-hard winter day, the sky low and ash coloured. But it was dry and Rachel was glad of a break. Hugging her coat round her, she lit a cigarette. These days she found cigarettes more and more of a comfort. She leaned against the front wall, luxuriating in the few moments of quiet, smoke unfurling in front of her. She had had her hair cut into a sleek bob, parted on the right, the hair on the left pinned back, the way some of the teachers at the school wore theirs. The brown skirt and cream blouse she was wearing felt smart and she knew fitted well on her slim figure. For the first time in years she felt more like a young, slender and attractive woman with a thread of life going on.
Getting out to the school one day a week had changed her life. It was so good to escape from the same four walls of the house, the grimy old yard, always in some grubby and tattered frock, with Gladys bossing her to do the same round of chores. Coming over to Harborne had changed her view of things. It was an escape.
Everything in Alma Street now was tainted with grief. These days, Mo and Dolly were not the people they had been before. Sometimes it felt as if grief was sucking them down into a deep, dark place that they could not get out of. Both of them looked older, more faded. Everyone missed Mo’s sunniness and jokes. He tried to keep cheerful but even if he was trying to smile and be his usual old self, sadness weighed down every line of him.
Rachel ached with pity for them, and for their other boys. Jonny had taken refuge in his lessons and hardly raised his head out of a book. But he was also waiting to see when they would call him up for National Service. While he had been dreading it before, Rachel realized he might now be glad to get away. Freddie had become solemn and quiet. Cissy couldn’t get anywhere with him any more and their friendship had cooled.
Gladys was also more tired, bitter and short-tempered. And Rachel, with the children getting older, the constant worry that she might have another one, the endless work and demands, increasingly felt bone tired. The yard in Alma Street which had once been a refuge from her mother, a place where she and Danny could make a home, now filled her with desperation. It was true that Danny had finally bought a car – a rather battered old black Standard – which eased things a bit. But it made no difference to where they lived. Her friend Netta and family had recently managed to move a bit further out of town, into a house that was still very scruffy, but was at least bigger. Seeing it when she went to visit had brought home how everything in Alma Street was old and filthy and rotten. All she could see was the bug-ridden griminess of those leaking little houses, the slimy floor and mould in the brew house. If only they could get out, to somewhere new. She dreamt constantly of a place of their own, a nicer, cleaner house with more space. If Netta and Francis had managed it, why could they not find somewhere else as well?
From inside the school she could just hear music, some of the
children banging cymbals and drums. This place was a constant source of amazement to her. From having thought her son would have to fester at home all his life, with no help or chance of doing anything, now Tommy was doing well. The teachers were saying that one day he might even be able to get a job!
As soon as she had started at the school with Tommy, had walked into his classroom where rows of children, each with their individual difficulties, sat at little desks, each being helped and encouraged, she had thanked God for it every day. Tommy was writing well now. So long as his paper was held still with big spring clips, into a frame to stop it slipping about, he could write as well as anyone. He read and did sums and now they were talking about teaching him to type. They helped him with his eating and speaking and also encouraged him to walk more, using sticks. The doctors had taken great pains with him and he was about to go into Woodlands, the orthopaedic hospital on the Bristol Road, for an operation on his left leg. She hardly knew where to begin telling them how she felt – her gratitude for all this. But people seemed to understand.
And every Thursday she travelled across town with him and spent her time helping in the classroom and at mealtimes. She had got to know the other children, the teachers and other mothers. Some of them said she was really good with the children. Had she ever thought about becoming a teacher?
Rachel had laughed at that. Her, a teacher! Stay on at school! Little did they know how things had been in her childhood, her father’s disgrace and death, Peggy’s struggles, falling pregnant with Melly when she was only fifteen – these were things she would keep to herself. But she was flattered all the same. It was nice to have someone to tell her she was good at something.
Life for her had definitely got better – at least, until last night and the conversation she had had with Danny. She had not spoken to him this morning, she was so angry with him.