This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  She had had to sit Bert down and tell him that, although things were not all grand between them, they could make them good again if they tried. It was the war, she told herself, there were plenty of men like him around the neighbourhood. They looked bruised in their souls. She was lucky: some men never seemed to recover, ones like her grandfather after the Somme, who’d seen his comrades die in their thousands. But Bert listened. After a while things improved and they began to make merry in bed again, like the old days, and to sing the way they had when they first met.

  The old days, that was how their courtship seemed now. In her heart, Kathleen sees herself as the stronger of the two of them, though her husband’s family saw themselves as superior to hers. When she first knew Bert, his father was a manager at one of the big linen mills, while hers was a man with a horse and cart delivering flax from the fields: one a man of authority, the other a labourer. Bert was sent away to England for his schooling, living with an aunt in Richmond, near London, so that when he came home for his holidays he spoke with a more British accent than the people round about. It didn’t last in London; he missed the fishing in the River Lagan, and it was easier to get work in Belfast during the Great Depression, or it was if you knew someone like his father. He had an idea he might get a job on the Irish Times as a journalist but they were full up with people who wanted to scribble, as they put it. His father put him to work as a clerk in the mill, until something better came along. That’s where they met, she and Albert, as she called him then, Kathleen a girl on the factory floor.

  ‘You seem a nice enough girl,’ his mother said, when he took her home to meet his family. ‘I mean, you’re a decent one, aren’t you?’ That was what she said, straight to her face.

  ‘Kathleen is with child,’ her son said.

  There was a silence that echoed round the corners of the fancy room with the crocheted antimacassars on the chairs and a picture of King George on the wall.

  ‘I see. In the family way.’ His mother had crooked her finger above the handle of the bone-china cup she was holding. ‘Well, I do see. You’re a disappointment to me, Albert. To your father, I’m sure.’ His father turned his back so that he couldn’t see the pair of them. ‘Such shame. You could go away for a while,’ she said to Kathleen. ‘There are places for girls like you.’

  ‘Albert has pledged to marry me,’ Kathleen said. ‘My parents are angry too, but they will stand beside me in the church when we’re married.’

  The mother’s eyes filled, two watery saucers of disbelief. ‘Marriage. You can’t.’

  ‘We’re both of age, I think it is our decision, Mrs Black.’ It was so, they were both twenty-three, there was nothing to stop them except, she saw at that moment, the danger of his parents persuading him not to go ahead.

  ‘You’ve seduced him. You tart.’

  It was this that gave Bert resolve, she would think later. He moved closer to her, took her hand.

  ‘You’ll be poor,’ the father said, ‘find out what that’s like.’

  She wore a lace jacket that had belonged to her mother and her mother before that when she went to St Anne’s, the big Church of Ireland cathedral. Her parents came to the wedding, and her aunts and uncles, but her husband’s did not.

  William was their first-born, a fragile scrap of a boy. He lasted just a year. They lived in Tate’s Avenue then, the kitchen slimy with damp, and a tin bath hanging in the back yard. Poor as dirt they were, so she went back to the linen mill to work. They swore to each other they would find a better place to live when the next baby came along. They scrimped and saved those two years until Albert was born. They were able to afford more rent for a half-decent place, buy better beds, still second-hand but clean. And her keeping the house spotless. Albert was the perfect baby, and a miracle one at that, born with a caul, a sign of good luck and high intelligence, hardly ever crying, sleeping all night, and the only one of her sons to take to her breast. The memory of his mouth on her nipple stirred her even now, flooding her like the urge for sex.

  She stayed home for a time until the boy started school, making do, making ends meet. If her husband missed his parents, he didn’t complain. Now and then he appeared to have a little extra money; she figured that he saw his mother from time to time. After William died, she began to feel a little sorry for her mother-in-law. Her son was as good as lost to her, not that it needed to be that way; it was the way they saw things, or the way they had backed themselves into a corner. All the same, it irked Kathleen that her husband saw his mother on the sly. If he had come straight out and told her, she would have understood. Instead, an occasional fiver that appeared without explanation, put beside her plate at breakfast time, just as he was walking out the door, meaning don’t ask.

  And then Bert, as she had taken to calling him after the second boy came, left for the war, and there was just the two of them, her and the child, dodging the bombs, watching the cathedral get bombed, and some of the big mills, including the one her father-in-law ran, so she supposed that he might be poor, too.

  Wartime wasn’t all bad, her and the boy going for picnics on sunny days, taking their walks in the beautiful gardens that lay beside Queen’s University, just up the road from Sandy Row. Kathleen tried to imagine what it would be like to be educated. She couldn’t see it for herself, but it would be a wonderful chance for a boy. Her son seemed clever to her.

  So Daniel was a surprise, ten years younger than his brother, and they were desperate hard up again. But a gift, their Danny, as God is my judge, which is what the name meant and it was the right one for him: they had been judged and found worthy of another boy. That is what her husband said, and it was odd to her that the new boy was, perhaps, the one he preferred, although he kept this to himself. It was just something she knew inside herself. She thought Daniel might have saved her marriage, but it was little Albert she cherished, her companion through the bad years, the one who had survived with her in the hard darkness when the sirens shrieked, her special mortal boy.

  And, once Albert got over the gunk of it, the sense of displacement that he expressed when he first learned of Daniel’s coming, he was as tender with his little brother as if he were a lass, rocking him when he cried, walking him when she was bushed, singing the songs she had sung to him. Oh yes, he was the perfect big brother. If he sometimes looked sideways at his father when he was ministering to the baby of the family, she pushed away the thought that he was trying to find favour. No, it was real, this love he had for the little one. All of these things.

  There are other things she remembers; they run in a loop through her brain, over and again. If she stands at the window she can hear the skirl of bagpipes, the flutes and the drums, see the arches hung with orange bunting and flags of the Empire over the street. In the picture, she has hats for the boys, red, white and blue, which merge with the crowds. It is the day of the Orange Parade when the Protestants show that they own Belfast. There are men in shabby suits like the one her husband wears, men in kilts, thousands of people marching to the sound of the music. The words of ‘The Sash’ echo in her ears:

  So sure I’m an Ulster Orangeman,

  from Erin’s isle I came

  To see my British brethren all of

  honour and of fame

  And to tell them of my forefathers

  who fought in days of yore

  That I might have the right to wear,

  the sash my father wore!

  Sometimes it doesn’t make all that much sense to her, but she keeps these thoughts to herself, and come the day of the march every year she is as excited as everyone.

  Young Albert had gone only reluctantly on the last march before he left for New Zealand, hadn’t wanted to put on the sash. He was just turning eighteen at the time. She didn’t understand his behaviour, not at all, as she said to him afterwards, until they came alongside St Patrick’s Church where the Parade would stop to sing ‘The Sash’ extra loud, shouting the chorus, hoping that those inside would be driven lik
e rats to their holes.

  . . . if the call should come we’ll

  follow the drum, and cross that

  river once more

  That tomorrow’s Ulsterman may

  wear the sash my father wore!

  You’d see people scurrying out the side doors, barrelling away down the street, though the priests stayed inside.

  It was while they were outside that Albert wheeled away from the marchers, and the next thing she knew he was skulking beneath the big tree out front, the leaves awash with summer light, and there was a girl, and they were looking at each other and laughing. The girl passed him the cigarette she was smoking, and Kathleen saw him draw a long drag off it, as if he were all grown-up. And then there were two boys alongside of the pair of them, and Albert was ducking for cover, merging with the marchers and not turning to look back. Had she imagined it, or had she seen the flash of steel?

  It’s all right to have a Taig for a friend, she would say to him afterwards, when the day had turned to night and they were all back at home and Daniel in bed with the door firmly shut on him. ‘I stand beside a woman all day at the mill who is of a different cloth. But it is not all right on the Twelfth. You put us to shame with this girl. You’re an Ulsterman.’

  And his father, who rarely put in a word, said, ‘Your mother’s right. It is not just now, it’s in the future. You walk out with a girl from the other side and before you know it she has you up the aisle and you’ve become a Papist. They don’t come over to our way of seeing things. Their fathers would rather see you dead.’

  Kathleen guessed he was thinking that if Albert were to put a girl in the family way, as he did to her, there would be no escaping, but those things were better not mentioned, a private matter between her and her husband. At least she was a Protestant girl. She thinks they have been happy enough. They have weathered grief and hardship, and he is still her man.

  ‘You knew that girl would come after you today, that’s why you didn’t want to go on the Parade,’ Kathleen had said. ‘You didn’t want us to see you with her.’

  ‘Maureen’s just a friend, the sister of Seamus who I fish with at the wharfside,’ Albert said, those green eyes blazing and the black swathe of his hair falling over his forehead. Her beautiful boy. Her strong handsome flesh and blood.

  ‘Seamus didn’t look too much of a friend today,’ his father said. ‘They were carrying knives, those lads.’

  ‘Da, everyone carries a toolie. You know that.’

  It was true. His father carried one always, strapped inside of his sock. Just in case. You never know what’s coming at you in the dark, he would tell Kathleen. A man needs to be prepared.

  ‘So you are carrying a weapon? You’d better hand it over.’

  The room had gone quiet, just the ticking of the clock on the mantel. Father and son eyed each other up. The boy didn’t move.

  ‘I’ll beat the shite out of you, lad, don’t think I won’t.’ He was still the stronger one, his hands hard-muscled from hanging onto the handle of a spade.

  The boy reached down to his sock and she saw the slim line of the weapon. He looked up at his father. ‘I’ll stay away from the girl,’ he said. ‘She’s nothing, just a wee lass who’s good for a laugh.’

  ‘Your word on that?’

  ‘Yes, Da, my word on wee Danny’s life.’

  ‘Well then. We’ll say no more about it.’ Dismissing the knife. Or accepting it. Knowing the dangers that lay in dark nights and sometimes in broad daylight. The way things were.

  Still, the boy had been more careful after that. If he ran with the Taigs, she didn’t get to hear about it.

  Kathleen gives a deep shuddering sigh. That is all in the past. He is gone.

  Some days she looks at her husband and thinks it is his fault. Then she thinks it is hers for over-loving him, for not wanting to let him go, and her husband seeing that, and thinking he needed the chance to grow up, to go to a land of opportunity.

  She thinks of the night before he left, how he’d fooled around, acting the maggot, until it was time for Daniel to go to bed. Later she’d heard him in the room, singing to him the way he had when he was little oh Danny boy / the pipes the pipes are calling … It had been too hard to resist looking in on them. Daniel had his arms around his brother’s neck. ‘You’ll come back, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll do better than that, Danny boy. When I get rich, I’ll build a fine house in New Zealand and send for you to come and stay with me.’

  ‘What about Mam and Da?’

  ‘They can come too. They’ve got miles of beaches where you can swim, and the water’s very warm. I’ve read about it.’

  ‘Will they have fish and chips?’

  ‘I reckon. And telephones in all the houses. They’ve told me that because I’m going to work for the company, a job waiting and all, not like here.’

  ‘It sounds grand,’ Daniel said, the edge of sleep overtaking his voice.

  ‘We’ll have a great time, you and me.’

  Albert had sat there humming in the dark until Daniel’s breathing was slow and even. He looked away from her when he came out into the light, his face smudged with tears.

  Just we’ans, both of them. Her two sons.

  CHAPTER 6

  1953. As the ship pulled away from the dock, streamers held by passengers on the deck and their relatives on shore began to stretch and break, a tide of singing rolling out Now is the hour / for me to saaay goodbye. Around Albert, standing at the railing of the Captain Cook, girls began to cry. He was on his own, his family left behind in Belfast. Just as well his mother wasn’t there, he thought; it had been bad enough extricating himself from her last frantic hug as it was.

  A man alongside him, a tall chap, perhaps four or five years older, leaned over. ‘I’m on my own too.’ He offered his hand. ‘Peter Simpson,’ he said, and for some reason they were friends straight away.

  He’d have been lonely those first nights on the boat if he hadn’t met Peter. The man from Liverpool told him he’d been out of work for a year. With a bit of graft he’d managed to scrape together the ten pounds needed to make the voyage out. What did he mean by graft? Albert wanted to know.

  Peter hesitated. He was a clean-cut fellow, what Albert’s mother would have called decent to look at. Odd jobs on building sites, rat catching, that sort of thing. Going without dinner two nights a week so he could save his benefit. Yeah, tough, but he reckoned he could make a go of it in New Zealand. He was twenty-three, it was now or never.

  When Albert said he was just eighteen these three months past, Peter looked him over, told him to hang out with him. You never knew what was around the corner. There were more than a thousand of them on the ship, men and women and some children — child migrants, Peter said. They were the ones to watch out for. They hadn’t asked to be sent, most of them had had it pretty rough. They’d pick your pockets if they had half a chance.

  ‘Not their fault,’ Peter said, ‘they’re kids out of orphanages, most of them, had the shit beaten out of them, abandoned like kids out of a Dickens novel and posted to the other side of the world.’ Albert had read Oliver Twist in school. His new friend seemed to have a literary turn of mind. A clever man who’d come up through the school of hard knocks. Well, him and himself and all, and goodness knows how many others on the ship, though it seemed he had had it easier than some. During the voyage, these Oliver Twist children appeared now and then, some quite small, barely ready for school, others teenagers. They had closed, tight little faces, as if they already knew all there was to know about life and more.

  His father had found the ten pounds that was needed to get him on board, all the family’s savings. Ten quid for the passage and a fiver to set you up when you get over there, was what he’d said. His mother had said, with bitterness at the corners of her mouth, that some of the money would have come from his grandmother, the one who lived so close but they never saw. His grandparents, she said, had had money and lost it, but his mother sti
ll liked to act as if they’d got the spondulicks tucked away. She didn’t want him to leave.

  ‘You need to get out of here,’ his father had said. ‘There’s nothing for you.’

  This was not strictly true, for the rebuilding of Belfast since the war was still going on, and there was work on the docks, but that was what it was, labouring jobs and plenty of competition for them. He wondered if his father was reflecting his disappointment at his own situation. The war had left him without a lot of strength, and the doors to a life of words were closed to him. The image of his father, scrawny in his baggy trousers and braces, his hair thinning into mousy strands, would come back to haunt him. There were times when he wondered if his father had sent him away because he thought his wife loved him, her son, more than she did him. One of those things that hung in the air. ‘You could perhaps study when you get settled in New Zealand,’ his father said.

  Albert laughed then. He had no ideas of going back to school. Here he was, eighteen years of age, and that was all behind him. Only the scholarship boys stayed at school that long, and he was not one of those. ‘I’ll be indentured in New Zealand for two years,’ he said.

  ‘Well then, you can do a trade, count yourself lucky.’

  ‘You want me to go, don’t you?’

  ‘The Catholics are on the move. They’ll take against us sooner or later,’ his father said.

  ‘Haven’t we taken against them already, Da?’

  His father gave him a hard look then. ‘Remember you’re part of the United Kingdom,’ he said. ‘Remember, you heard it from me, there’s trouble ahead of us here.’

  So there was that, perhaps: his father thought he was too close to the Taigs. He would stand, leaning against the rail, trying to make sense of it, watching the sea churn beneath him, or gazing out to a distance so vast it made his eyes ache trying to see a non-existent coastline. Sometimes he wished the ship would turn around, other times it occurred to him that he might jump in the sea and swim back home.