by Anne Doughty
Then there was the big surprise her father had for her when she arrived home. To her amazement, he’d bought a new wireless. He hated buying anything new and avoided it whenever possible, but this time he was so pleased with himself he could barely disguise the fact.
He’d been thinking of buying one for a while now, he explained, though Ellie couldn’t remember him ever having mentioned it. The Ecko they’d had since wireless’s first came out had taken to crackling in the middle of the news, or even in the middle of one of the few programmes he ever listened to. Just when he’d made up his mind to do something about it Charlie Running had recommended a particular make and had got one for him and one for himself, at a discount. Not out of the way expensive, he thought, and my goodness you could hear every word the man said as if he were standing beside you in the same room.
What had surprised her even more than the arrival of the wireless itself was that her mother had started listening during the day. Now, in the evenings, she complained about the programmes and that seemed to make her happier than complaining about how ill she was and how no one ever paid a bit of attention to her.
Beyond all this, however, was the news from George.
She’d been very upset when she arrived home and found no letter awaiting her. Or rather, there were three letters awaiting her and none of them were from George. She was so annoyed, she hadn’t written him her usual letter and she felt badly that she hadn’t when his letter showed up a week later. That letter did change everything.
He apologised at some length for the delay. He’d been working up at the camp when his uncle sent for him to come down to Peterborough. They’d had a sudden staffing problem in one of the mills and couldn’t get a qualified man for the job for some months. His uncle had arranged a week’s special intensive training for him in the hope that he could make up for the absentee if he was given an experienced man alongside him. It had been terribly hard work at first, for there was so much to remember. The machinery they were using was highly dangerous if you didn’t know exactly what you were doing, but he’d managed to get the hang of it quite quickly.
The long and the short of it was that his uncle was very pleased with him. He would still have to do another season in a different lumber camp to get more of the experience at that end of things, but as soon as the snow came next year, he’d be coming down to Peterborough to work in the mill. Wasn’t that great news?
He also said that he and his cousin Jimmy were going to go down into the States for the winter to see what work they could find until the ice melted. That way, he could really begin saving. In no time at all they’d be together again. He could hardly wait.
If Uncle George in Peterborough, Ontario, was pleased with his nephew’s prospects, there was someone else in that same rapidly-growing city even more delighted about the sequence of events at Peterborough Lumbering.
Polly McGillvray was now well settled in her small house in Hunter Street, a few minutes’ walk from the entrance to the Quaker Oats factory. Only a week after George’s letter arrived at Salter’s Grange, she received the first happy letter she’d had in months from her little sister. She was so relieved and so excited, she could hardly think of anything else for days afterwards.
She’d hoped getting away for a bit of a holiday would have given her sister a bit of a lift, even if it was just going to Aunt Annie. With all she had to do at home when their mother took to the couch, and with no George to take her out, she didn’t have much in the way of pleasure these days. Aunt Annie was a kind soul and Ruth had always been fond of Ellie, though not as fond of her as her brother, Tommy. She smiled at the thought of her handsome young cousin arriving with his little box of chocolates. He’d always been sweet on Ellie.
But the first letter she’d had after Ellie’s return home had really upset her. Ellie always wrote so clearly and openly, Polly couldn’t fail to see how unhappy she was. She’d not mentioned George at all, which was a bad sign. What she had written about was the people she’d seen marching to the Workhouse and lying on the tramlines. In particular she’d told her about the death of a man called Sammy Baxter. He was a flower-seller and a Protestant and he’d been shot by the police when he’d been demonstrating with Catholic comrades on the Falls Road.
Ellie had admitted to Polly that when she found there was nothing to help her understand what was happening in Belfast in the Armagh papers she’d walked up to Charlie Running’s house on Sunday afternoon to see if he could explain to her why the poor man had been shot.
After a week of rioting, Charlie explained, the police had orders to clear the streets. They’d been issued with guns and it was common knowledge, the police only used guns in Catholic areas. In Protestant areas, they stuck to truncheons.
Polly knew that Charlie was a very knowledgeable man. She’d heard her father complain often enough he was never out of the Library and sometimes he talked like a book. He always said there was no use him arguing with Charlie for he had facts and figures at his fingertips you’d never even heard of yourself.
She’d read that October letter over and over again. Charlie had tried to answer Ellie’s questions, rightly enough, but in the process he’d had to tell her about the problems unemployment was creating in other countries and maybe that had only made things worse. Apparently there were six million unemployed in Germany, something Polly herself hadn’t the slightest idea about, and according to Charlie, there was a man called Hitler making speeches and holding great rallies and promising to put the country on its feet. Hitler seemed to be promising everyone what they wanted, jobs for the unemployed, opportunities for businesses to expand, even a husband for every young girl! As Charlie saw it, the man was on the up and up. There was no limit to his ambition and so far no one had lifted a finger to stop him.
Dear Ellie, she had such a soft heart, she’d end up worrying about all those poor people in Germany, just as much as she’d worried about the poor people in Belfast. As if she hadn’t enough to cope with around her own back door.
On top of the letter, Polly had a dreadful week after it arrived. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Jimmy was moved to the night shift. Eddie threw a tantrum and said he didn’t like school, so Davy started playing up too because he always did what Eddie did. Even little Ronnie, normally the most amenable of children, reached the next stage of teething and grizzled all the time.
So Polly could hardly believe it when, only a week later, the second letter had come like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Ellie hadn’t forgotten what she’d seen and heard in Belfast and she did mention again things that Charlie had since told her, but the whole tone of everything she’d written was so very different. When she asked about employment in Canada, particularly how things now looked for Jimmy, you could tell she was concerned, but there wasn’t that awful sense of anxiety coming through what she was writing about, as if everything in her life was going wrong.
Polly read and reread the letter, just to reassure herself. Yes, it did sound as if George was settling down at last and beginning to think a bit more about the future and their plan to get married. Nothing would please Polly more than George not being able to wait to be reunited with Ellie. That was more like the way it should be.
More than once over the late summer when Eddie and Davy were finally asleep and she was waiting for Jimmy to come off the late shift, she’d sat by her own fire and tried to bring to mind all she knew about George Robinson. He’d only been fourteen when she’d married Jimmy and left for Toronto. Nothing wrong with him she could think of at that stage, and likeable enough. She’d never heard of anything he’d done wrong other than the mischief you’d expect from a young lad. No, there was nothing against him, but she did wonder if there was anything positive to be said on the other side. She asked herself if he ever put himself out.
She smiled to herself. She hadn’t thought of those words for a long time. Putting himself out, was a phrase often used by her grandmother, Selina, a woman she’d loved
dearly. ‘Putting yourself out’ was what people did if they cared. About a person, about a task, about anything that mattered. It was a way of showing love and commitment.
Suddenly Polly remembered a particular day, sitting in the forge house with her, when she was a good deal younger than Ellie was now, and asking her how she knew her first husband Jack had been the right man for her, and then Thomas, her own grandfather.
‘You see, Polly, if a man loves you he’ll put you first,’ she’d begun. ‘Now, it’s not that you might not always let him do that, but if that willingness is not there, then however much he says he loves you, however much he thinks he loves you, that love is not going to be durable. Life can be very hard for women in ways men can’t always understand, but if they’re willing to put themselves out for you, then you can do the same for them. They may be strong, and kind, and hard-working, but they have their weaknesses and soft spots just as much as women, though they’re not supposed to show them. A wise woman knows a man’s weakness and protects him from it. But he has to do the same for her and that means he’s going to have to ‘put himself out.’ Make an effort it would be far easier for him not to make.’
She wasn’t sure she’d understood at the time. Looking back, she wasn’t sure she’d even thought about what Selina had said when she met Jimmy at a dance at the Floral Hall in Belfast when she’d had a holiday with Aunt Annie. He’d said he was going to Canada and asked her there and then to go with him.
No, she didn’t regret it. Jimmy was a good man. He’d put his hand to anything she ever asked him to do and done his best for her, though he said he was no good with children, which was a pity. He hated to see her tired, or anxious. When he put his arms round her in bed at night, she sometimes thought those moments were the only comfort she’d ever have in a world so full of work to be done and children to look after.
Unless, of course, Ellie were to come out and marry George. The thought that she might have her sister, her dear, golden-headed little sister, living in the next street, or across the park, or anywhere she could reach on foot, or by bus, was such a joy that even when Eddie shouted downstairs for her to bring him a drink of water, closely followed by Davy, whom he’d wakened, she went upstairs to settle them yet again, smiling and longing for the time to pass.
Time always does pass. It might have slowed down during the dark days of January, but now it seemed to Ellie no sooner had they had a day off work to celebrate Easter than May made a triumphant entrance with glorious sunshine, the countryside responding immediately with blossom and luxuriant growth.
Although the letters from George had not been very frequent since he’d gone back up to the camp, in every letter he now talked about returning to Peterborough, finding somewhere to live and saving up enough for their immediate needs. Surely by this time next year they would be together again, or, at the very least, she would be making her plans to welcome him home for their wedding, or saying goodbye to her friends, packing up her trousseau and sailing out to join him.
The Tennis Club re-opened and she and Daisy had taken delivery of their new racquets. They were amazed at how much having one’s own racquet improved one’s game. They played at least three times a week and were looking forward to the Annual Tennis Club Dance at the end of the month. Although Daisy would be going with Frank, she had insisted Ellie must come with Susie, Harry and Stanley. She couldn’t possibly let them all down by not going. As Daisy had said often, it was one thing going out with another fellow and quite a different matter going to support your own club along with other club members.
In one of her recent letters to Rose Hamilton, Ellie had admitted she was ‘looking forward to dancing again although I can’t go with George, especially as I made a new dress last autumn and I haven’t had a chance to wear it yet!’
Rose had suggested they keep in touch after their lunch together the previous October and Ellie had been very happy to agree. She enjoyed writing and found it very easy to write to Rose because she remembered what she’d said about missing conversations with young people. So she wrote about the shop, about her friends, about their jokes and outings and the idiosyncrasies of the customers. In return, with only the slightest encouragement from Ellie, Rose wrote about her family and whatever thoughts or memories came to mind as she read her young friend’s letters. She told a good story and she too enjoyed writing.
It was Rose who suggested on one occasion that given all the practice they both had corresponding with the far-flung members of their families, they ought to embark on an epistolatory novel which could be published in weekly parts like Dickens’s novels had been, until the entire ramifications of their two families had been laid out for the entertainment of their devoted readers.
Ellie had never heard the word epistolatory before but it wasn’t too hard to guess what Rose meant. She’d laughed, thinking of the wide spread of her own brothers and sisters and intrigued by the even wider spread of Rose’s much larger family. In her next letter, she’d asked her if she could tell her all the places she had family. She had a reply almost by return.
Here you are, my dear. I don’t actually write to ALL of these places. I often instruct parents to pass on my news and greetings. Sadly, some of the grandchildren of my own older brothers, now long gone, are only in touch at Christmas, but here is a list of places where Hamiltons are presently to be found:
All the counties in Northern Ireland, County Donegal, Dublin, Scotland, Prince Edward Island, Cambridge and Gloucestershire, London, Paris, Berlin, New York and New York State, Pennsylvania, Vancouver Island and Sydney, Australia.
Neither can I guarantee that these people are exactly where they last told me they were. Sarah, was in Berlin with her husband, Simon, but she may have returned to their home in Cambridge, or be visiting her sister Hannah, either in Gloucestershire or in London. And then, of course, Sarah’s eldest son Hugh may be no where on earth at all, but, like Miss Amelia Earhart, in the skies! Slater, James’s son, last heard of building a bridge in Sydney, might now be in Ceylon or the Caribbean. It certainly keeps me up to the mark trying to keep up with their activities.
Ellie often entertained herself on her journeys in and out of Armagh by trying to construct a family tree for Rose. Constructing such trees was, of course, a normal pastime in the forge. Ever since she’d been a little girl, she’d listened to visitors engaged in ‘placing’ someone.
‘Now would those be the Taylor’s of Hockley, that had the farm down the back of the wall? The eldest girl was a teacher and married an Armagh man.’
‘Not at all, man dear, they’re a different family entirely. These Taylor’s lived over by Maghery and he was the land steward for Sir Capel Molyneux. The daughter went to New York and married some man with pots of money. They bought a big house in County Down for their holidays, but yer man couldn’t stand the rain, so they went to Arizona or Mexico, I forget which …’
What Ellie found so extraordinary was the way people moved around, emigrating perhaps to Australia and then moving on to Canada. Some got rich and came home, wanting to spend their last years in the places they had once loved like Rose’s younger brother, Sam McGinley. Others simply disappeared from view. They may have died, of course, or just never felt the need to keep in touch.
Rose had told her that John had had two brothers who went to America and never came back, though it looked as if one of them had left a son in Liverpool. He, poor child, had been sent as an orphan to Canada with his name on the collar of his coat, but he’d come back to Ireland looking for his family. He’d found them too, married a local girl, and was now living in her own old home at Rathdrum.
Life was so full of these extraordinary stories of people travelling thousands of miles and meeting up with people from just down the road. It might not be thousands of miles, but her own meeting with Rose in Belfast was just such a story. Indeed, she’d heard from Charlie about how pleased her father was to retell it for the entertainment of visitors to the forge, though he’d never told it
when she’d been present.
But an even better story than Ellie’s meeting with Rose was already on its way to Salter’s Grange. Before the apple blossom was well in bloom, Ellie had a letter from Polly, so thick she’d had to use a whole row of stamps to cover the postage.
It had happened like this. Jimmy had offered to look after the boys while Polly went to the shop, as long as she took the baby with her in the pram, for he didn’t think he could manage if the wee one cried with his teeth. Taking Ronnie with her was no trouble to Polly. Apart from the teething, he was the most good-tempered baby. He’d sit outside the shop and wave at the passers by and with the carrier underneath she’d not have to carry home the potatoes.
It was only a short distance to the corner shop, but Polly set off as if she were going for a long, leisurely walk. It was as good as being out on her own, walking in the sunshine with no Eddie and Davy pulling at her skirts and asking for sweets.
The Corner Store was a small, overcrowded shop full of the mixed smells of soap and candles, cured bacon and ham, spices and ginger cookies. Polly always enjoyed going there. She parked the pram where she could see it through the window, waved at her youngest child, who smiled and waved back.
‘Good mornin’ Mrs McGillvray. How are you the day?’
‘Good mornin’ Jim,’ she said, returning his greeting, smiling at the familiar phrase, ‘the day’ and the faint trace of an Ulster accent living in Canada had not entirely removed. Peterborough was full of people of Scots or Irish descent, but however often she met them she was still touched when she heard the sounds of home.
‘No Rebecca today to help you? Is she all right?’
‘Aye fine. She’s away to our eldest granddaughter. Wee one due any time,’ he said smiling. ‘My son’s giving me a hand, though he’s supposed to be on holiday from Quaker. He’s out the back fillin’ up the paraffin cans.’