Why Joyce felt so bitter about the blows that life had dealt her, was quite beyond Rose. She would never have taken her personal grievances out on Harriet, even if she was the child of a straying husband. Why Joyce persisted in doing so, and had got herself so churned up with revenge, Rose would never understand, not if she lived to be a hundred. Some good had come out of it, she supposed, in that they still had Harriet, but quite a bit of bad too.
She again wiped a tear from her eye, one of sadness this time.
‘What about your mum, she died young, didn’t she?’ Harriet had heard this story before but still loved to have it repeated. She needed to hear it now to prove that she still had a place in the Ashton and Ibbetson family tree. She felt so alone, as if the world had shifted and she was about to fall off the end of it. Even though she’d never felt close to Joyce, she still thought of her as her mother. It was hard not to, since that’s what she’d been for Harriet’s entire life.
Rose nodded. ‘Aye, my mam were sickly with TB, and died young leaving six childer. Me Dad were a docker working on the wharves, and a right bully. He’d beat the living daylights out of you soon as look at you. A Yorkshireman no less, so no wonder I never had no time for that son-in-law of mine, since he came from the same neck of the woods.’
‘Dad wasn’t violent,’ Harriet protested. ‘He never laid a finger on Mam, though he’d sometimes land Grant a clip round the ear.’
‘Aye, and the stupid lad probably deserved it.’
Harriet half smiled, glancing about as if expecting to see Grant emerge out of the crowd. She’d deliberately avoided him today, since she still felt uneasy over the fact he’d followed her down to the river the other day. Whatever little game he was playing, she didn’t find it in the least amusing.
Rose was saying, ‘Anyroad, when my mother died, Dad said he could only cope with me two brothers. Me and my three younger sisters were farmed out, split up around the family, and never managed to keep in touch. Iris and Daisy are in London somewhere, I think. It’s that long ago I can’t rightly remember. But to this day I’ve no idea where our Violet lives, or even if she’s alive or dead.’ Rose frowned. ‘Though I might’ve forgotten that too, I suppose.’
‘Oh, Nan, that’s so sad.’
‘Well, my memory isn’t what it was, not by a long chalk.’
‘No, I mean about losing touch with your sister.’
‘It happens, sometimes, in a big family. Aye well, that’s enough about me, eh? Doesn’t Patsy look pretty, and all flushed and happy. Things turned out all right for her in the end.’
Rose often stopped the story at this point, not wanting to remember too closely how she herself had been brought up by an elderly great aunt who claimed not to like children and was living on a penurious pension. She’d seemed to think that having a youngster around would be useful for running errands, cooking her meals and helping to care for her in her old age.
When the doctor had called one day to find the house fetid, the old woman almost comatose and eight year old Rose near starving to death, they were both finally taken into the workhouse. At least there someone remembered to feed and clothe her. Rose never properly recovered from her ordeal, feeling rejected and spurned by her father, and neglected by the rest of the family.
Trust, love and affection were not words that held much meaning for Rose, not until she’d met Ron Ibbetson. He’d walked into the laundry where she worked to ask what it would cost to have his shirts done every week. In the end she’d married him and washed them for nothing, but he was a wonderful husband to her and although he was only a dustman and hadn’t two beans to rub together in the early years of their marriage, they’d never gone short of love. They’d had a good life together and Rose still missed him badly.
Now she squeezed her granddaughter’s hand. ‘Happen it weren’t the brightest decision our Joyce ever made to keep this all from you, but it wasn’t easy for her to discover her husband were a cheat, and then to be made homeless, bombed out like she was, and landed with a little bundle of joy.’
‘Mam and Dad were bombed out too? I never knew that.’ Harriet’s eyes stretched wide, instantly wondering why they’d never even bothered to tell her something so important. Could the two incidents be linked in some way? If so, she couldn’t for the life of her think how. ‘Was it in the Christmas Blitz, or around the same time as the young girl, my mother, was killed?’
‘Er, one or t’other, I don’t remember,’ Rose said, sounding flustered. ‘You were only a babby, I know that.’
‘Where were you all living?’
‘Ancoats.’
‘I mean where in Ancoats? What street?’
Rose’s expression became dead-pan, as it sometimes would when she’d walked into the kitchen and forgotten what she’d come in for. ‘Nay, don’t ask, you know how confused I get.’
‘You surely must remember your own address, Nan?’
‘Nay, we was allus flitting. You did in them days. First we were in the Dardanelles, then moved on to Ducie Street and, eeh I don’t know. . . we never seemed to stop in one place for very long, what with the war and everything. It were something fanciful or flowery, I seem to recall. I think there were a pub on the corner with a Scottish-sounding name, although it might be gone now. I can’t say for certain. Eeh, will you look at them flowers Betty Hemley is setting out on the tables. If she ever sends Patsy a bill for that lot, the poor lass’ll have to declare herself bankrupt.’
Something like panic had come into the old woman’s eyes and Harriet was instantly filled with compassion and worry for her grandmother. She was getting very forgetful all of a sudden. Surely she wasn’t going senile? Oh, she did hope not.
‘Come on, chuck, I’m starving hungry, let’s get stuck in.’
Harriet laughed. ‘At least you haven’t lost your appetite.’
‘Oh, no, I can still remember where me mouth is.’
Chapter Eight
Curiosity got the better of Harriet and she decided to do a bit of snooping on her own account. The next day, being a Sunday, she persuaded Steve to go with her to Ancoats and see what she could find out. He wasn’t too keen at first, warning her that delving into the past sometimes made things worse, not better.
‘You don’t understand,’ she argued, ruffled that he couldn’t see how angry she felt at having been lied to so heartlessly all these years. ‘I have to know who I am, and what happened. But then it’s my life, not yours, so how could you possibly understand?’
‘I’m trying to understand, Harriet, I am really. I want only to protect you.’
‘I don’t need protecting, not by you, not by anyone. I just need the truth, something which everyone seems determined to keep from me.’
So here they were, walking along Great Ancoats Street. It was hard to imagine that this had once been green countryside where farmers had cultivated their land, and grand mansions once graced meadows that sloped down to the River Medlock. The industrialisation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had put paid to all of that rural idyll but now change was again in the air. The ramshackle cottages and unsanitary terraced houses were being cleared away, as were the bombed out houses left by the war.
‘Where did they live?’ Steve asked.
Letting him take her hand, even though she still felt a bit cross with him, Harriet matched her stride easily to his. ‘According to Nan you go along Great Ancoats Street, up Union Street, and their house was near some mill or other.’
‘Oh, that’s helpful. There are any number of mills in Ancoats, and were probably even more then.’
‘She’s also mentioned warehouses, when she’s talked before about living in Ancoats.’
‘Which warehouses? There are plenty of those too.’
‘I don’t know, do I? I’m doing my best to remember.’
Now Harriet was wishing she’d asked more questions, found out more details which were admittedly vague, before embarking on this exercise. ‘Nan couldn’t seem to remember the
address as they were constantly flitting, because of the war or whatever. But she thought it might be something fanciful, maybe like Paradise Street, but then she started talking about flowers. Oh, and there could well have been a pub on the corner with a Scottish-sounding name, although that might be gone now.’
‘Great! Something fanciful, or possibly flowery, and a Scottish pub that might or might not still be there. Fat chance after all this time.’
‘You could try to sound a bit more optimistic.’
‘I am, but we don’t have much to go on.’ Then seeing Harriet’s gloomy expression, gave her hand a little squeeze. ‘Why don’t you admit this is a complete waste of time, love. Like I say, it probably won’t do you any good in the long run.’
‘No, I absolutely refuse to give up so easily. We can ask someone. I mean to find out what happened.’
Steve sighed. ‘Think hard then. Your nan must have dropped some other clues in all the times she’s talked about her childhood, and yer mam’s. Did she ever tell you anything really useful, like an address?’
Harriet felt filled with frustration, and irritated with him for finding the obvious flaws in her quest. ‘Nan’s so vague these days, getting quite forgetful.’ She frowned, then brightened as a memory stirred. ‘It must have been near the market, not far from Smithfield. I remember her once saying that her uncle and aunt had a stall on the market, selling fish. And they could hear the trains shunting in the goods yard.’
‘Right, well we know where that is. Let’s go and look for a flowery or fanciful street not too far from Smithfield and the railway. But if we haven’t found it in a hour, we’re going home, right?’
‘OK.’
It took them less than twenty minutes. ‘This must be it, Blossom Street,’ Harriet cried excitedly. ‘And here’s the pub, look: the Edinburgh Castle. You can’t get more Scottish than that, and it’s still here. Oh, but I expected the street to be little more than a pile of rubble yet it looks perfectly all right, as if it’s never been troubled by war at all.’
They stopped to ask a woman pushing a pram if she remembered a house being bombed in this street during the war but, laughing, she shook her head. ‘I was only a toddler, love, at the time. You’ll have to ask someone a lot older. Try Mrs Marsh at the bottom house. She’s lived here for years.’
Mrs Marsh at the bottom house must have been out, or deaf, because she didn’t answer when they knocked, but an old man next door came out to see who was making all the racket.
‘Are you talking about the Christmas Blitz?’ he asked, in answer to their question.
‘When was that exactly?’ Harriet wanted to know.
‘Christmas,’ the old man drily remarked.
Harriet smiled, used to Lancashire wit. ‘I mean what year?’
‘Nineteen forty. Manchester was ablaze. Plenty of folk were killed in the blitz.’
She shook her head. ‘No, this must have happened the following year, nineteen forty-one, the year I was born.’
The old man frowned and scratched his head. ‘I weren’t around then. I were away fighting in Africa at the time, but me wife were here, and me daughter. I’m trying to remember if they ever mentioned a bomb. Are you looking for someone, love?’
Harriet swallowed. ‘My mother. I’ve been told she was living in this street and was killed during an air raid. I just wanted to find the house.’
‘Eeh, I’m right sorry to hear that. I wish I could be more helpful but my wife’s dead too, and me daughter is living in Cheshire now.’ The old man peered short-sightedly along the street. ‘Course, stray bombs did fall from time to time, long after the blitz, and the Jerries were fond of dropping ‘em here in Manchester because they were aiming for the factories as well as the Ship Canal. I suppose there could well have been one dropped around these parts, but I can’t say for certain.’
It wasn’t a very satisfactory result but, despite asking a couple of other people, they managed to elicit no further information.
‘I shall have to try asking Nan again for the full address. Make her put her thinking cap on.’
‘Or ask your mother. Joyce, I mean.’
‘No thanks. She’d never tell me, anyroad. She’s declared the subject closed. Definitely off-limits. I can understand her attitude, in a way. I don’t like thinking about it much either.’
‘Then don’t. What does it matter? No one will know you’re illegitimate if you don’t say anything. Just forget it,’ Steve said, giving a casual shrug of his shoulders. Harriet instantly saw red and stopped in her tracks to stare at him.
‘Forget it? That’s easy for you to say. I can’t simply dismiss it out of hand. You think it isn’t important to know who my mother was, where I was born and where I nearly died? Don’t you realise that I hate the thought of being illegitimate? It’s awful, dreadful. I feel dirty in some way, besmirched, and as if I’ve been cast adrift from the life I once knew. I have to investigate further. I must!’
He looked at her sorrowfully. ‘I get the picture.’
But Harriet didn’t even hear his apology. ‘I need to know if my mother, my real mother, loved me. If she meant to keep me, and what sort of person she was. I need to find that house, the exact place where that little baby, me, was discovered. Which heap of rubble saved me from an almost certain death? Did I have something on me to say who I was? How did Joyce know I was that girl’s baby? Why won’t she tell me her name? She and Nan are still keeping something from me, I’m sure of it, and I mean to get to the bottom of this and find out exactly what happened, and who I am!’
She stopped at last, short of breath, heart pounding, her cheeks wet with tears. Harriet hadn’t even realised she was crying.
Steve pulled her close to awkwardly pat her on the back. ‘I do understand how you feel, love, really I do. But just remember that you’re still you, the girl I love.’
‘And what about that poor girl, my mother, having a baby she didn’t want, and then being killed in an air raid? That’s tragic!’
Steve kissed her nose. ‘But you’re still here. And what a lovely baby you were. She’d be pleased about that, this tragic mother of yours. I know I am. So come on, love, calm down and give me one of your lovely smiles.’
Harriet managed a shy smile for him through her tears. He was so patient with her, so kind and loving, and all she did was bicker and be irritable. He was at least here with her, wasn’t he, trying to help?
‘Let me just check out the next street, then we’ll do something much more fun, shall we? The pictures are closed today, being Sunday, but we could go home by way of the canal and do a bit of necking under the bridge. How about that?’
Steve grinned. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’
Later, flushed and happy from their short interlude under the arches by the Bridgewater Canal, they sat down to lunch with Steve’s parents, as they often did on a Sunday. Harriet liked Mr and Mrs Blackstock. Steve’s father was always jolly and friendly, cracking little jokes and making silly remarks about popping in to the salon for a new hairdo as he stroked his bald pate, or claiming the sun was about to come out any minute, even when it was raining stair-rods.
Mrs Blackstock was less easy-going but still pleasant and friendly enough. She was a small, round, no-nonsense sort of woman, heavily involved in the WVS during the war and even now seemed to be on any number of committees, whose task was to raise money for worthy causes. She spent every Sunday morning at the Baptist chapel, once she’d put on the roast for lunch, and which they’d be eating up cold until at least Tuesday. Her one extravagance seemed to be to come in to the salon once a month for a blue rinse on her short grey hair and she always asked for camomile tea and a cream wafer.
Steve was an only child and in all the years Harriet had known him and his family, she’d always felt welcome in their house. She loved to be invited as the atmosphere was so much more relaxed than at home. But today, she noticed at once that something had changed. Mr Blackstock seemed unusually quiet, never quite meeting
her eye, while Steve’s mother was practically monosyllabic.
‘Can I help?’ Harriet offered, jumping to her feet as she noticed dishes being set on the table. She usually helped lay it, make the gravy or pick flowers with Mrs Blackstock in the tiny back-garden behind the tall terrace house, and watch admiringly as she deftly created a charming display for the table.
‘No thanks,’ was the cool response.
‘Shall I make the mint sauce?’
‘It’s done.’
Harriet politely took her seat. Mrs Blackstock set a plate of roast lamb before each of them, vegetable dishes were handed round, the gravy boat passed from hand to hand and then, without a word, everyone began to eat. There was no lively chatter, no questions about how Harriet’s secretarial course was progressing, as she usually took pains to enquire. She didn’t ask how Joyce was, or if they’d been busy in the salon. Not even a word about the excitement of Patsy’s wedding. Nothing.
Harriet stole a sideways glance at Steve but he had his eyes firmly fixed on his plate. After a while Mr Blackstock told his wife that the meat was ‘done to a turn’ and, looking pleased, she at last addressed a question to Harriet.
‘So what have you two been up to this morning?’
Harriet tried to quickly swallow a mouthful of lamb but before she had time to speak, Steve answered for her.
‘Nothing much. Just went for a walk by the canal, since it was such a nice day.’
Harriet shot him a questioning look, one which clearly asked why they couldn’t be entirely open and truthful and admit they’d been investigating her family’s past. But his eyes warned her otherwise as he gave an infinitesimal shake of the head.
‘That’s nice,’ Margaret Blackstock agreed. ‘You should enjoy what free time you have left together, before Stephen goes off to college in September.’ She smiled at Harriet then, though it seemed cooler than usual, more distant. ‘We’re so pleased that all his hard work has paid off. I’m quite sure he’ll do well at college so long as he doesn’t have too many distractions. We want only the best for him. But then he’s a bright lad who will go far.’
Lonely Teardrops (2008) Page 7