For Many a Long Day

by Anne Doughty

  She left the window open as she undressed, the night warm and the small room stuffy. From the marshalling yards came the clank and groan of goods wagons being manoeuvred into sidings or coupled up for night journeys. She got into bed and lay in the darkness looking up at the dark sky. There were no stars in the city either.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sunday was a happy and lively day at 621, Lisburn Road. Despite a recurrence of his sciatica, Uncle John was able to walk as far as the newsagents for his usual Sunday paper. Tommy arrived late morning by train and tram from his living-over-the-shop employment in a men’s outfitters in Bangor. Wearing a new sports coat and flannels, his woolly hair well slicked back with Brylcreem, he carried a small box of chocolates for his cousin and a bulging carrier bag for his mother.

  ‘Ach, Tommy, a present for me, sure you shouldn’t have troubled yourself. Will I open it now or later?’ she asked effusively, as he handed it over.

  Annie’s teasing was as good-humoured as Tommy’s when he proceeded to enquire after his ‘wee cousin up from the country’. Bobby wanted to know how many more dress patterns his big sister had bought since Ellie had been up last year, while Ruth had insisted that if it weren’t for the dress patterns there’s be less chance of the odd threepence for him. There was much laughter throughout the morning and good appetites were displayed by all at the special meal Annie had prepared on the ancient gas cooker that smelt of gas even when not in use.

  ‘Will I give the rest of this to the birds?’ asked Tommy soberly, as he carried the plate that had held the apple tart back into the kitchen.

  ‘No don’t do that’, said Ruth seriously. ‘They might only fight over that one crumb.’

  After Tommy and the two girls had done the washing up, Bobby disappeared to meet a lad from Moonstone Street. Annie and John settled for a wee doze in their respective armchairs leaving the three young people to go for a walk. They made their leisurely way westwards along the leafy avenues and lanes till they came to the banks of the Lagan. Standing on the King’s Bridge looking upriver towards the old brickfields, they watched a flotilla of swans sailing towards them in perfect formation, their images reflected in the brown water.

  The afternoon was warm and pleasant, only the chestnuts seriously marking the advancing season, their pink and gold leaves fluttering down to lie on the dry pavements as they passed. Late flowers still bloomed prolifically in the allotments that lined large parts of the avenues between the Lisburn and Malone roads, sweet peas clustered at the highest point of the pea sticks provided and the dahlias stood at attention, red and yellow, as bright as traffic lights.

  Ellie enjoyed every moment of her unaccustomed leisure. She put out of mind the laundry that would be waiting till next Saturday afternoon, the blouses she would have to wash and iron for her return to work. Poor Da, she thought suddenly, as she eyed an impressive pair of wrought iron gates he would most certainly have stopped to examine and admire. He’d said he could manage for a week and he always did, but unless her mother got tired of his hit-and-miss cooking, he’d not get a decent meal till she got back home.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you beautiful ladies after tea,’ said Tommy sadly, as they strolled down from Notting Hill, crossed the Malone Road and turned towards home.

  ‘I take it there’s an even more beautiful lady in Bangor,’ said Ruth, laughing and tossing her dark curls.

  She turned away from him and gazed across the road, taking in every detail of one of the handsome, double-fronted houses. Approached by short, gravelled drives, decorated with pillared porches and colourful flowerbeds and discreetly screened by flourishing shrubs and young trees the comfortable residences of Cranmore Park looked out over the trees to the park itself. They stood solid and quiet in the sunshine of a peaceful Sunday afternoon.

  ‘No, I fear not,’ he said soberly. ‘A much less happy reason. The boss’s brother is on the Board of Guardians of the Workhouse. He says there’s going to be trouble tomorrow. There’s a strike of relief workers and he’s not sure how it will affect the city. He’s taking no chances, wants to make sure we’re in the shop in Bangor at 8 a.m. so I was only let come home on condition I go back tonight,’ he explained crisply.

  Ellie thought of Charlie Running. She’d not spoken to him since that evening in the forge when he’d sat on the bench inside the door and said there’d be trouble in the city. Now, as they strolled on in the sunshine, all he’d said to her about unemployment in the city came back to her. She made up her mind to ask Ruth and Tommy the questions she would have put to Charlie.

  ‘We’ve a wee while yet to teatime,’ said Tommy, as they approached one of the park gates. ‘C’mon and we’ll go and sit on a seat an’ I’ll tell ye all I’ve heard. Sure if we walk on down through the park, it’s only a couple of minutes home.’

  Ruth wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the plight of the unemployed, so she left it to Tommy. It seemed they’d just put forward a new demand for an increase in payments to fifteen shillings for a man, eight shillings for a wife and two shillings for each child. Ellie listened, wide-eyed, wondering how you could feed a family even if they got the increase they were asking for.

  But it wasn’t just money for food. How could they pay their rent? And what about fuel? The afternoons were still warm but the nights had started to get cold. When the sky had cleared last evening and Uncle John had announced there’d be a frost before morning, she’d been glad of the extra blanket Ruth had brought her.

  She shivered at the very thought of a family that couldn’t afford a fire, of the men tramping through the city looking for work that was seldom to be found. According to Tommy, the shipyards had no orders, the linen mills were closing one by one as the depression bit deeper and other manufacturing companies were just as affected.

  ‘But why, Tommy? Why are places closing like this, what’s happening and why doesn’t the government do something to help these poor people?’

  ‘You’re not the only one asking that, Ellie. It’s not the government’s fault there’s a depression. It started in America and now it’s spread across the world. As far as I can get the hang of things it’s about money and powerful business interests and banks. You could hardly credit how wicked people can be when all they want is money.’

  He paused, the look on his face more sombre than Ellie had ever seen it before, his dark eyes a confused mixture of anger and sadness.

  ‘People say our government could do more, if they wanted to,’ he continued. ‘But they don’t seem to care and that’s what’s making people so angry.’

  Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, a small cloud, generated by the warmth of the afternoon, moved across the sun. It cast a chill shadow across the green-painted summer seat, where they sat side-by-side watching the well-dressed inhabitants of Marlborough and Cranmore taking their Sunday afternoon stroll. As if someone had flicked the switch in her attic room, the light went out and all the colour was drained from trees and flowers and women’s dresses.

  ‘I think it’s time we were going home for our tea,’ said Ruth briskly, as she got to her feet. ‘There’s nothing any of us can do so there’s no good talking about it,’ she added, as Ellie and Tommy stood up. ‘We just need to make sure we don’t land up like that ourselves. Isn’t that right, Ellie?’

  Her tone was so sharp and dismissive, Ellie was shocked. She glanced at Tommy to see how he’d taken it. He shook his head sadly, but he said nothing. Suddenly, she was aware that the difference she had always sensed between herself and Ruth had grown much wider.

  As they moved off down the path, they became aware of a pleasant-faced, elderly woman coming towards them, walking with the aid of a stick and holding the arm of a middle-aged man. The three young people stepped off the narrow path to let them pass and Ellie smiled and said a friendly ‘Good Afternoon.’ Both man and woman returned the greeting courteously as they drew level.

  Ellie was glad of the slight diversion for it allowed her to avoid respon
ding to Ruth’s question. Clearly, the plight of the unemployed was not a subject Ruth wished to discuss.

  ‘D’you think you’re doing the right thing at all over George?’ Ruth asked, as she finished applying cream to her face.

  She passed the small pot over to Ellie, who sat on the end of her cousin’s bed, still wearing her best dress.

  Ellie sniffed at the perfumed face cream in the pretty little pot. There was nothing devious about Ruth. If she was sometimes hurtful or tactless, it was never intentional. She was kind and good-natured, but she didn’t believe in beating about the bush.

  It was almost a relief she’d taken the chance of this quiet moment to ask about George. Although Ruth’s visits to Salter’s Grange were brief and infrequent, because she couldn’t stand her Aunt Ellen, she’d been there often enough to have met George himself and to have cast an appraising eye over him. Unlike Daisy, at least Ruth had met him.

  ‘I know you say you love him, Ellie, or at least you think you do, but you’ve never been out with anyone else. How do you know you mightn’t love someone else far more if you ever let yourself give it a try?’

  She broke off, instructed Ellie in the correct way to apply skin cream to her face, then continued.

  ‘George is perfectly all right, nice looking, speaks well for a country boy, but has he any sense? It all sounded great going off to Canada, but how much has he saved? How long do you think it’ll be before he comes home for you or sends your ticket? Besides there’s you to consider too. Do you really want to go out there?’

  The questions struck a familiar note. Daisy was younger, less confident than Ruth and much less willing to upset her, but she had asked the very same ones.

  ‘But Ruth, even if I wasn’t entirely happy about going, I’ve said I’ll marry him and women have to go where their man’s job is. You know that. That’s why Polly went to Toronto and now Mary is going to Indiana. I’m sure if Florence found a man she wanted to marry, she’d go wherever he went.’

  ‘Aye, if she ever found a man,’ said Ruth dubiously. ‘Or maybe that’s why she’s never let herself find one. Anyway, you and George aren’t engaged yet, are you?’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but …’

  ‘If he’d had any gumption about him, he’d have bought you a ring,’ Ruth said sharply. ‘It needn’t have cost much. Even a dress ring would have done. It’s more the look of the thing. And he could have borrowed the money from his uncle, given the big pay he was going to have,’ she went on firmly. ‘What did happen about that motor-bike? Did you ever ask him?’

  Ellie shook her head.

  At twenty-two, it could certainly not be said that Ruth was uninformed about the ways of young men. Since she’d begun work in a small dress shop on the Lisburn Road itself, her one ambition was to get on, get a better job, earn more money, have enough to let her dress as she chose, go to the dances she preferred and mix with the kind of young man more likely to live in the leafy avenues of south Belfast than in the crowded streets off the Woodstock Road where she herself had first seen the light of day.

  So far, however, Ruth had not found a partner that met her exacting requirements. She had plenty of invitations out, certainly, and she accepted many of them, but she would never go out more than twice with a young man who did not appear to have ‘prospects’.

  ‘What about this man you met at the Tennis Club, Sam Hamilton? What’s he like?’ Ruth asked, as she took off her dress, hung it carefully on a hangar and shook out the skirt.

  ‘He’s very nice.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ellie, if the Devil himself put a hat over his horns and said ‘Good morning’ to you, you’d say he was nice,’ said Ruth irritably.

  Ellie laughed. Partly it was the unfamiliar image of the Devil wearing a hard hat that flashed across her mind, partly the look of complete outrage on Ruth’s face.

  She stopped laughing and tried to see Ruth’s point of view. Perhaps being much more experienced, Ruth could see things she couldn’t see herself. But then, Ruth had made up her mind about what she wanted and she hadn’t had to because George had always been a part of her life. He’d never been a boyfriend, or an admirer, or a ‘catch’, or any of the other words Ruth might use about the many young men she’d encountered.

  ‘Ruth dear, I couldn’t let George down when he hasn’t done anything he shouldn’t have done. He had to take the chance of going to Canada. I made a promise, or rather, we had promised each other … well, as you know we’d planned to get married as soon as something turned up. We’d both been saving, but neither of us wanted to move in with the Robinson’s. There wasn’t room anyway …’ she broke off, aware suddenly that what she was saying didn’t seem to explain anything.

  ‘I suppose it’s different in the country,’ admitted Ruth grudgingly. ‘There’s not much work going apart from farming. Oh Ellie, would you really have wanted to be a farmer’s wife?’

  ‘But I wouldn’t be “a farmer’s wife”, I’d be George’s wife.’

  ‘If a house had come up, do you really think you’d have got married?’

  ‘Well, the problem wasn’t just finding a house. We couldn’t have lived on ten shillings a week. George’s father would have had to give him a bit more to make up for his free bed and board and his clothes, but there was no use asking him about that until we had a place to go. So George said.’

  ‘And I suppose Freeburns wouldn’t let you stay on after you were married, even for a few months.’

  ‘No,’ said Ellie shaking her head sadly. ‘That’s one advantage of the mills. They’ll take a woman and not even notice if she’s months gone, providing she doesn’t take more than a week or two for the birth. At Freeburns, like all the other good shops and offices, you get your wedding gift and you have to go.’

  Ruth yawned hugely, a way she had of showing she’d had enough of a conversation. Ellie stood up, ready to step across the tiny divide between the two attic rooms.

  ‘You know, Ellie, that blue really suits you,’ Ruth added, looking her up and down as she stood in the doorway. ‘You’re a very good-looking girl if only you’d pay a bit of attention to yourself. Come to think of it, maybe George ought to pay a bit more attention to getting that ticket. Or someone will give him a run for his money.’

  There was rain on Sunday night, but when Ellie went to the window next morning the sky was sparkling and mostly blue, except over the escarpment where a row of huge, grey-bottomed clouds sat louring at her. They looked as if they’d come crowding down from North Antrim and were now elbowing each other sideways to get the best possible view of the city below.

  The day was already planned and after a leisurely breakfast the two girls walked to the tram stop.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice just to go into town for a bit of shopping whenever the notion took you?’ said Ruth, as she handed over the pennies for their fares. ‘I could get used to a life of leisure, couldn’t you?’

  The tram pulled away with a whine as they settled themselves. Ellie had the window seat so she could look out at the view.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘Uncle John’s putting out more potatoes.’

  They both waved and just as they thought he hadn’t seen them, he straightened up, caught sight of them and raised a hand in salute.

  ‘Does Auntie work in the shop now at all?’ she asked, as they gathered speed, the whine of the tram now rising like the cry of a banshee.

  ‘Oh yes. She does Thursday and Friday. They’re the busiest days. She says she likes to keep her hand in, but she’s glad it’s not fulltime anymore. She can keep an eye on Bobby and do her church work. She has a couple of old ladies she calls on.’

  The tram was full and noisier than most, the hiss and whine of their progress and the rattle of the trolleys making conversation difficult. It didn’t really matter as Ellie was soon absorbed in watching the bustle and activity beyond her window as they made their way down through Shaftesbury Square and along Great Victoria Street to the city centre.

/>   It was even busier than she’d thought it would be, motors and horse drawn carts all mixed up together, double lines of them moving in both directions. She wondered how the horses pulling the heavy drays could stand the noise of hooters, the hiss and rattle of trams and the blare of motor horns right beside them.

  She rather dreaded getting off the tram. She remembered only too well from previous visits Ruth would be across the street before she’d even stepped off the footpath. She never quite grasped that Ellie needed time to get her bearings. It wasn’t just the noise of traffic and the press of people. Everywhere she looked, there were posters and shop signs. They all seemed to require her attention and she couldn’t take it all in quickly enough.

  She’d tried to explain, but Ruth was not good at seeing things from any point of view other than her own, so she’d invented the joke about ‘my wee cousin up from the country’ to cover her puzzlement. It was not an unkind joke and Ellie always laughed at it herself, but however often she came to Belfast, she still felt as if her head was overflowing.

  ‘Mind your step there, Miss,’ said the conductor kindly, as the now familiar whine subsided and she looked down cautiously at the crowded pavement.

  ‘Come on, Ellie, this way,’ said Ruth, taking her arm firmly, and finding space for them to alight. ‘Let’s start with Cleavers, it’s not far away.’

  The pavements seemed even more crowded than she’d remembered. On every corner clusters of men in working clothes stood together. Some of them were passing a piece of paper from hand to hand. Others were gathered around one of their number who was reading aloud from a newspaper. As they drew level with the flower sellers outside the City Hall, she saw a news board. ‘Strikers lie on …’ But Ruth hurried her past so quickly, she couldn’t see the rest.