Ragamuffin Angel

by Rita Bradshaw

  ‘You’ll never find anyone else who loves you like Wilf does,’ Connie had said gently when Mary had poured out her fears about marriage and commitment.

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘And with him going away to fight . . .’

  ‘Oh, Connie.’

  ‘You were going to have to say yay or nay one day, lass, so it might as well be tomorrow. It’s only fair for the lad to know where he stands and he’s been patient, you’ve got to admit that, Mary.’

  ‘I know.’

  The end result had been Mary coming back flushed and happy the next day with the cheapest ring the jeweller’s shop had boasted, which she wore with touching pride.

  And then the next day Ellen had been unable to come to work due to her youngest being ill so again they were short manned, and it was the Friday morning, when the papers were full of the news that German and Austrian civilian internees had rioted at a detention camp on the Isle of Man, having been part of the national round-up of aliens at the end of the previous month, before Connie could get away.

  She caught the tram to the top of Ryhope Road, and although the icy rain and bitter wind of the last few days hadn’t let up, Connie was oblivious to the weather as she alighted at her stop. All her thoughts were on the forthcoming confrontation with Dan’s mother.

  Ryhope Road had changed little in the last fourteen years, and as Connie walked briskly down the wide and pleasant road, her three-quarter-length mink-coloured coat and hat in thick good cloth bought at a fraction of the original cost from the old market in the East End at the beginning of the autumn effectively keeping out the worst of the cold, the hard knot in her stomach became tighter.

  In her mind’s eye she could see three little ghosts – one a slim and beautiful golden-haired woman, the others a boy and a girl – walking down this same road, and for a moment the desire to go back in time was so acute she could taste it. Fourteen years ago they had been here, her mam and Larry, alive and warm and breathing. She had been able to touch them, to see them, to hold them . . .

  Stop it, stop it. The voice in her head was strong. Deal with now, you can’t go back, and she’ll seize on any weakness she senses in you. Think about what you are going to say, concentrate on that and that alone. You are a respectable businesswoman, you are. She can’t intimidate you or frighten you because you aren’t going to let her.

  The house was exactly as she remembered it as she opened the fancy wrought-iron gate set in the high stone wall, and the pebbled drive just as immaculate, even the giant oaks – their gnarled limbs devoid of leaves as they had been that morning fourteen years ago – appeared frozen in time.

  Connie’s heart was thudding as she mounted the seven horseshoe-shaped steps to the front door, but after she had pulled the bell she remained on the top step with her head held high and her back very straight.

  ‘Good morning. I’d like to see Mrs Stewart please.’

  It was Kitty who answered the door, and as Connie spoke the Irishwoman’s face stretched a little before her head jerked and she said, her voice quivering, ‘Eh lass, lass, it’s you, isn’t it. What have you come here for?’

  The words themselves could have been presumptuous, but spoken as they were, in a gentle, pleading fashion, they took on a quite different connotation, and now – knowing how fondly Dan thought of this woman – Connie said, ‘I have to see Mrs Stewart; there’s been some unpleasantness and I have to clear it up but I’d prefer to do it without Dan being upset. Could . . . could you tell her I’m here?’

  ‘Lass, are you sure? She’s bin in a right two-an’-eight since she found out about you and Dan and there’s no reasoning with her. Dan knew that.’

  ‘It’s not about our relationship. There’s . . . been letters, nasty letters. I can’t let it continue.’

  ‘Aw, lass, no. No, not that. Oh, it’s heart sorry I am, lass. What are things coming to?’

  Connie swallowed before she could answer – the other woman’s understanding and warmth was welcome but it undermined the anger she needed to feel to empower her to take on Edith Stewart and win. Finally she managed to say, her voice low, ‘I do need to see her, Kitty.’

  And then, in a repeat of that morning fourteen years ago, an autocratic voice demanded from inside the house, ‘Kitty? Who is it?’

  Kitty didn’t answer, she just continued staring at Connie and it was a moment or two before the door opened fully and Edith Stewart stood framed in the aperture, her manner abrasive as she said, ‘For goodness sake, woman, I was speaking to you. I asked you –’ And then her words were cut off as though by a knife.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Stewart. I need to talk with you and I’m sure you know what about.’

  If Edith was taken aback by the cool authority in Connie’s voice and manner she didn’t betray it by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. She seemed to rise in stature, her small, thick body bridling, and Connie watched the invective fill the chunky frame before it spewed forth in spitting rage, her eyes flashing as she said, ‘Get off my property, you trollop you! How dare you come here!’

  ‘Oh I dare, Mrs Stewart. I most certainly dare.’

  ‘I’ll have the police on you.’

  ‘I think not.’ Connie’s voice was controlled and steady, in stark contrast to that of Dan’s mother, and no one looking at her would have guessed her insides had turned to water. She kept her head high and her gaze directed full on Edith’s furious face as she said, ‘In fact I think that should be more my line than yours in the circumstances.’

  ‘You’re mad, unhinged! The life you lead has unbalanced you, you filthy –’

  ‘That’s enough of that.’ Connie was aware of Kitty’s fascinated gaze on the perimeter of her vision but her focus was concentrated on Edith’s countenance which looked evil. ‘You wrote some letters to me, disgusting, horrible letters, and the police have a way of checking handwriting, Mrs Stewart. I think they would be very interested in what I have to say.’ She was bluffing, she had destroyed each letter as it came – most unread – as the thought of keeping such poison had been insupportable, but Dan’s mother didn’t know that, and she knew she was on the right tack as the other woman’s face changed. ‘There was another letter too, in the same handwriting, and I feel sure Mr Alridge would be only too pleased to show that to the police. I wonder how your fine friends would view such behaviour, Mrs Stewart? Or perhaps they wouldn’t mind associating with someone who was in court answering such charges?’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare!’

  ‘As I’ve already said, Mrs Stewart, I would most certainly dare.’ There was a definite note of authority in Connie’s voice now and it seemed to incense the woman in front of her, because Edith Stewart suddenly cast all caution to the wind and fairly shouted at her, ‘Every word was true! Every word! And you’ll rot in hell before you’re finished, you dirty little strumpet.’

  ‘No, no I won’t, Mrs Stewart. When I die I shall go to join my mother and she is certainly not in that place.’ At the mention of her old enemy Edith looked as though she was about to have a seizure, her face turning a more vivid shade of scarlet and her eyes seeming to pop out of her head, and now Connie continued coldly, ‘If you write one more letter or your eldest son bothers me one more time I shall take every scrap of correspondence to the police station so I warn you.’

  ‘You warn me?!’ The words were deep and guttural. ‘And what’s this about John bothering you? What are you suggesting?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything, I’m telling you. He has tried to make advances to me several times and I know he was responsible for daubing obscenities outside my property a few mornings ago.’

  ‘John making advances to you? He wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole, girl! And Dan will see through you, don’t think he won’t. You might be keeping him sweet at the moment but he’s only after one thing and you know it at heart. He’ll use you for his pleasure and then throw you back in the gutter where you belong.’

  ‘Dan and I are engage
d to be married, Mrs Stewart.’ It was quiet but deadly and for a moment Edith stood as though turned to stone, her eyes as round as buttons as she stared at the hand Connie was holding out, Dan’s ring flashing bright, and then she let out a cry of fury and raised her doubled fist at Connie.

  That the blow would have hit Connie full in the face but for Kitty catching her employer’s arm and wrestling her away was in no doubt, and the action revealed as much about Edith’s origins as the spate of obscenities that followed.

  It was a full thirty seconds before Edith became limp in Kitty’s grasp but Connie hadn’t moved, and what she said now, her voice trembling slightly was, ‘I will do as I have said, Mrs Stewart, so don’t think I won’t. And Dan will be with me on this. But then you already know that, don’t you. He has made his choice and that’s what sticks in your craw.’

  ‘I’ll see me day with you, girl, you see if I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t frighten me, Mrs Stewart, and you didn’t frighten my mother, do you know that? She despised you, and that sick individual who is your eldest son. He wanted her – John wanted my mother – but she didn’t want him and that’s what caused everything that happened. John was jealous of Jacob, jealous. You haven’t got the faintest idea what he is really like.’

  Edith was trying to wrestle herself free of Kitty who was holding on to the furious woman with a grip of steel, and now Dan’s mother’s enraged face turned to her housekeeper as she cried, ‘Can you hear her? The lies she’s telling?’ before her eyes flashed back to Connie and she spat, ‘You’ll never have Dan, not legally, I’ll kill you both first.’

  ‘And ruin everything you have worked for all your life? You would really drag the name of Stewart into the very gutter you accuse me of coming from?’ Connie retorted scornfully. ‘I think not. You might think you love your son, Mrs Stewart, but the only person you really love is yourself. Well, you’ve got what you wanted – a beautiful home, influence, prestige and the rest. But you haven’t got Dan, and you probably haven’t got the love of your other children either. You are going to be a very lonely and bitter old woman, Mrs Stewart.’

  ‘Get out! Get out!’

  ‘I’m going.’ And now Connie’s lips curled back from her small white teeth, and she could have been surveying something repulsive as she said, ‘I wouldn’t stay here for all the tea in China.’

  It was gone mid-day when Connie returned to Holmeside, and Gladys and Art came into the shop over an hour later. It was clear Gladys had been crying, and when she handed Connie the printed, dull-yellow card it was another few seconds before Connie could force herself to lower her eyes and read it.

  ‘He’s a prisoner?’ Mary had come to stand by her, and now Connie took her eyes from Dan’s brother and sister-in-law and turning to Mary, gripped her friend’s arm as she said again, her voice shaking, ‘He’s a prisoner, Mary.’

  ‘Oh, lass.’

  ‘I thought . . . I thought he was . . .’

  ‘I know, so did we.’ Gladys was nodding her head and wiping her eyes again. ‘He gave us as his next of kin when he joined up, he’s living with us as you know, and when that card came . . . Oh, lass, I thought I’d die, I did straight. It took me a good couple of minutes afore I could look at it.’

  ‘But he’s a prisoner, he’s safe, he’ll be coming home.’

  ‘God willing, lass. God willing.’

  Aye, God willing. Connie stared at the three faces in front of her but her mind was praying, Please, God, please keep him safe, please. You know how much I love him, I can’t live the rest of my life without him, I can’t. Watch over him, protect him, please, and I’ll never ask You for another thing as long as I live. Just bring him home.

  Part Five

  1918

  Retribution

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The weeks turned into months and the months into years, and the years were full of mixed blessings for the mothers, wives and sweethearts, and their loved ones, of Sunderland. There was plenty of tragedy and the occasional shaft of joy, but every thinking man and woman was aware they were experiencing a turning point in history, not least the beginning of the emancipation of women. Women had taken the place of their absent menfolk in the shipyards, the factories, the banks and on the railways. They were acting as postmen, window cleaners, cabbies, and the first female conductors began to serve on the trams; but chiefly women were ammunition workers, thousands of them. And men – to their surprise, and in some cases agitation if not downright alarm – found women were excellent workers and well worth the good wages they were receiving.

  Connie had a double cross to bear in the first year of the war when, added to Dan’s internment, Harold Alridge followed through on his resolution to move down south and take Hazel with him. For a time she felt her sorrow was insurmountable and she cried herself to sleep each night, but gradually she did what she had always done – she coped with what had to be coped with and got on with life. Mary and Wilf’s friendship eased the soreness a little.

  Wilf’s war had been a short one. After only eight months he had been an early victim of the greenish-yellow, choking chlorine gas – the Germans’ terrible new weapon – and on fleeing from his dugout with his comrades, coughing, half-blind and panic-stricken, he had been injured by shrapnel as the Germans attacked. The end result was that he was invalided home into Mary’s arms, and they were married some three months later. Connie provided him with a job in the bakery helping Ellen, which Wilf took to like a duck to water.

  On 1st April 1916, on the same day a Zeppelin’s deadly cargo killed twenty-two people and injured over one hundred in Sunderland – some of the casualties being as a result of one of the bombs landing at the Wheatsheaf and wrecking the tram office – they learnt that both of Mary’s brothers had been killed, leaving the two men’s young families without breadwinners.

  This sad occurrence prompted Connie into an undertaking she had been thinking about for some months. Her business was booming, due, in part, to several bakeries going out of business as men were conscripted, and even basic requirements like flour rising drastically in price, but also to the hard work Connie, aided and abetted by Mary, Ellen and now Wilf, was putting into the venture. Their clientele was growing daily and they now had a healthy crop of regulars.

  So in May 1916, large new kitchens were built in what had been the original backyard of the premises, with an allowance for extending upwards at a later date, and the tea-rooms and baker’s shop were enlarged.

  Once the work was finished, Mary’s sisters-in-law were employed by Connie on a part-time basis, each woman working on alternate days with the second looking after the children of both families. The arrangement had worked out very well for all concerned, and by the end of the following year Connie was in the happy position of following through on her original plans and building – with the assistance of Mr Bainbridge and the bank – a handsomely appointed first-floor restaurant above the new kitchens, approached via the tea-rooms, with a two-bedroomed flat above that for herself. This left Mary and Wilf to the privacy of their own home in the original rooms over the shop.

  The middle of 1918 saw a full restaurant each night and queues outside the shop every morning, when folk would stand and wait for bread, spice cakes, flapjacks, pies and sausage rolls – all hot from the oven – and Mary and Wilf, Ellen, and Gladys too, were forced to admit that all their pessimistic predictions of financial disaster were unfounded. Indeed the war, which had crippled so many businesses, had actually worked to Connie’s advantage, due to her foresight, business acumen and entrepreneurial flair. In October 1916, when the price of a loaf reached record levels, of ten pence, Connie had kept her prices well below those of most of her competitors, and people didn’t forget such things.

  The tighter call-up net for married men had snared both Art and John, but it was found that the twins had weak hearts – hitherto unrecognised – and they were rejected for active service and carried on running the family business in the absence of the
other brothers.

  Both Art and John were involved in the third Battle of Ypres in August 1917, which unfolded to the accompaniment of ceaseless bombardments and remorseless rainstorms according to Art’s letters home to Gladys. ‘I can’t decide whether it’s the German machine-gunner or the Flanders mud that’s worse,’ he wrote, ‘but I think the mud has it. They tell us the launching of the offensive was preceded by the firing of the heaviest load of shell yet unloosed in the war, and this, coupled with double the average rainfall, has wrecked the network of streams and dykes upon which the Flanders drainage system depends. All I know, my darling, is that the fields around Passchendaele ridge have been turned into a quagmire the like of which I’ve never seen, where men are being sucked to their deaths if they should slip from the duckboards. This is hell, Gladys. A wet, glutinous hell and still the rain comes. I think of you all the time’ – all the time was underlined several times – ‘and don’t forget to kiss the baims for me. This won’t last for ever and then I’ll be home.’

  It was the last letter Gladys was to receive.

  In October she was formally notified of Art’s death, and the shoulder she chose to cry on was Connie’s. The women’s friendship had been growing steadily over the last few months but with Art’s demise it strengthened still further, and Gladys – lonely and miserable for the first time in her life – spent most Sundays, accompanied by David and Catherine, with Connie and Mary and Wilf.

  Six weeks after they heard about Art, John was shipped home to England, minus both legs and with severe bums to his upper torso and face. His wife was told he wouldn’t last until Christmas, but John did survive, and the day after Ann was informed by a bright-faced nurse that her husband would be allowed home within the week she took the biggest decision of her life. She left him.