Water Gypsies

by Annie Murray

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ More tears welled in his large eyes. ‘I can’t stay here. I thought this’d be my life’s work, in this place. I’m lost, Mrs Bartholomew. How can I go on?’

  Maryann stared back at him. She sighed, a long, deep sigh which seemed to have been waiting there for years to be expelled.

  ‘I don’t know. But you will. You’ll find the strength, same as we all do.’

  Forty-Seven

  August 1944

  ‘Mom – Mom!’ Joley and Ezra came tearing along the bank where they were tied up near Napton. ‘Look – it’s Dot and Sylvia, and Bobby’s got his arm round Dot!’

  Maryann pulled the panful of sausages off the heat and hurried outside, where the faces of her sons, swarthy with a combination of grime and suntan, were lit up with excitement. A pair of boats was chugging steadily towards them and she narrowed her eyes. Sure enough, it was a pair of Grand Union Canal Carrying Company boats heading south towards them, and yes, there was Bobby at the helm, tiller held easily in his left hand, the other apparently draped in a relaxed way round Dot’s shoulders. The children were already shrieking and waving and she saw Dot and Bobby recognize them and start waving back. Sylvia was waving from the butty boat as well.

  ‘Sylvia – Auntie Sylvia!’ Rose leapt up and down on the path with excitement.

  ‘We’re tying up – just up here!’ Bobby called. Within a few moments they’d found a place to pull in and all the Bartholomews were hurrying along for a grand reunion on the bank in the late afternoon sun. Rose ran straight to Sylvia, who picked her up, and Maryann smiled at the sight of Rose’s dark, curling hair against the paleness of Sylvia’s.

  ‘Ooh, you’re getting a heavy girl now!’ Sylvia said, kissing Rose’s pink cheeks.

  Joel and Bobby greeted one another warmly and stood slightly apart, talking boats and gauges and cargoes, while Maryann and the children all crowded round Sylvia and Dot. At first no one could get a word in edgeways. The children were all asking questions at once. Maryann saw Sylvia making a special effort to draw Sally out. She was still quiet and withdrawn, although she was much better than she had been straight after her terrifying time with Norman Griffin.

  ‘It looks awful just seeing you with the Esther Jane and no Theodore!’ Dot’s powerful voice rang out above the children’s chatter.

  ‘You poor things – whatever has been happening to you?’ Sylvia planted a kiss on Rose’s cheek. ‘Let me put you down now, darling – my back won’t stand it. Of course we heard through the grapevine that there’d been a fire, a couple of months ago now, wasn’t it? And that there was all sorts of to-do at Tyseley, but no one’s told us properly. You must have had a terrible time!’

  Maryann nodded. A lump came up in her throat at the thought of the last few months, the raw, fearful wretchedness of it all. But she didn’t want to let go of her emotion, not now. She swallowed hard.

  ‘We’re managing,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Essy Barlow’s got us another butty for when we get back this time. Joley and Ezzy are sleeping out in the hold most nights as it’s warm. You lot tied up for the night now?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dot said. ‘Bobby says we’ll not get much further than here tonight in any case with them all locking up so early. The water’s so low they’re rationing who goes through. It’s a gamble to try and get over the top at Tring these days – they only let so many through, then close all the locks!’

  Maryann watched her in wonder as she spoke. She was so suntanned and strong looking and, yes, happy, in a way she’d never been before. Maryann grinned.

  ‘So – I see Bobby’s steering with his arm around his first mate these days!’

  Dot gave her hooting laugh, and blushed. Sylvia was looking fondly at her.

  ‘Oh, we’ve got lots to tell you. But let’s get the tea brewed first, eh? I’m absolutely parched – and famished, as usual!’

  ‘Bobby and me’ll be off then,’ Joel said. The meal was over, chores finished for the night and the children getting ready for bed.

  ‘All right.’ Maryann smiled at him gratefully. Bobby and Joel would enjoy getting a few pints inside them at the inn along the bank, and she knew Joel was giving her the chance to catch up with Dot and Sylvia. It would be a night like old times, even though in a strange cabin, not the Theodore, but she was full of a welling sense of pleasure at the thought of female company, a sensation which even now took her by surprise.

  On these light, sultry nights it would be hard for the boys to get to sleep outside, so she settled them inside on Joel’s and her bed, parting from them all with dire warnings that they must go to sleep and not monkey about. Even now, climbing out of the cabin, she felt a reflex of fear at the thought of leaving the children alone.

  Don’t start that again, she told herself. He can’t hurt us any more. Never.

  But how long would it be, she thought, weeds brushing her bare ankles as she walked the towpath, before she could say she had recovered from it, from him, and close the door on it all as she longed to do? Would that ever happen?

  ‘Look what I’ve got!’ Sylvia greeted her jubilantly from the back of Magpie, their monkey boat, waving a bottle of Johnnie Walker. ‘At last I’ve got someone to share it with! Bobby’s an ale man.’ Her hair was up in a pale blue scarf and she’d put on her favourite geranium red lipstick.

  Maryann grinned. ‘Got yourself a sweetheart in a distillery?’

  ‘No – still working on that one!’ Sylvia said.

  Dot appeared, all in black still, her short shirtsleeves pressing tight into her plump arms. She looked like a nice, wholesome cottage loaf, Maryann thought.

  ‘Let’s not sit inside.’ Sylvia jumped up onto the cabin roof, using it as a table to pour Scotch into white cups. ‘Not until those blasted beasties nibble us too unbearably.’

  Dot and Maryann perched comfortably on the gunwales at the back. Another pair of boats was tied up behind, but not too close, a line of washing flapping along the hold and their children out on the bank. The evening was bathed in rich light, and a warm breeze came over the fields. Maryann drank in the moment, this precious evening to enjoy with her friends. A year ago who would have thought it could feel like this?

  ‘Cheers!’ Sylvia raised her chipped cup. ‘Down the hatch!’

  They found they were all laughing just at the sight of one another, out of happiness.

  ‘Too much to catch up on by far,’ Sylvia said. ‘Where do we begin? Let’s take turns. You first, Maryann?’

  ‘Ooh no.’ She felt herself tense up immediately. If she told them what had happened she knew it would lead to questions. How much could she say, even now? She was so used to not telling things that it felt terrifying to be asked. She looked at Dot. ‘I want to hear all about what’s been going on here. Come on – you can’t keep me in suspense any longer.’

  Dot looked sideways at her with an irrepressibly jubilant grin.

  ‘Oh!’ Sylvia rolled her eyes in mock exasperation. ‘I’ve been living with a proper Romeo and Juliet. Makes me feel quite old and washed up sometimes!’

  ‘There was me thinking you and Bobby didn’t exactly hit it off,’ Maryann teased. ‘I wonder what gave me that idea?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t,’ Dot said brusquely. ‘But we do now. That’s all.’

  ‘For “we do now–"’ Sylvia leaned confidentially towards Maryann and almost toppled her precious bottle into the cut in the process – ‘you have to substitute the words, “We’re completely half-soaked and besotted with one another.” So that certain people on lock-wheeling duty are standing there in a complete soppy fug and forgetting to close paddles or get back on the boat at the right moment – or getting off it with no windlass and getting a proper mouthful from other boaters.’

  Dot was laughing now. ‘I only did that once!’

  ‘And in fact, “we do now” actually, I’m almost sure, means the sound of wedding bells will be in the offing soon.’

  Maryann was laughing, astonished. ‘B
ut how the hell did this all happen, Dot?’

  ‘Bobby’s not like I thought at the beginning,’ Dot said with dignity. ‘I didn’t know him, that’s all. And now I do, I know him to be kind and he makes me laugh and, well, I just think we’ll be able to rub along together, that’s all.’

  Maryann and Sylvia were both laughing.

  ‘Here speaks one of the great romantics of our time!’ Sylvia giggled.

  ‘All hearts and flowers, aren’t you, Dot!’ Maryann said. ‘But are you really getting wed?’

  Dot took a sip of tea and her face grew more solemn.

  ‘Next month. Goes without saying we want you all there with your boots blacked. All Bartholomews in a line! Actually – ’ she looked shy suddenly – ‘I wondered if Joel would agree to give me away. There won’t be any of my family there, you see.’

  Maryann saw Sylvia looking at Dot with a concerned, sympathetic expression.

  ‘Not your dad?’ Maryann asked hesitantly. ‘Isn’t he going to give you away?’

  Dot cradled her cup between her hands and spoke, looking down at the floor.

  ‘Appears not. Course, apart from a couple of stray cousins who I barely know, Daddy’s the only real family I’ve got left now. I took a couple of days’ leave and went up there a month ago. Mainly to tell him about Bobby. I mean I thought I should at least tell him, although I wasn’t too surprised at the upshot.’ She drew in a deep breath.

  ‘Odd, being back there. Seeing the house. Garden was a mess. Daddy saying he’s doing some sort of war work, hush, hush, but I’m not sure it’s true. He’s just trying to sound terribly important as usual. I’d gone to stay the night, but I just couldn’t. I missed the last train back, so I slept on the platform …’

  ‘Oh, Dot!’ Maryann was horrified. That great big house, her home, and poor Dot didn’t even feel she could take up a little corner of it!

  ‘Daddy and I had a conversation which lasted about a quarter of an hour.’ Again she paused. A bee lumbered past. ‘He made himself abundantly clear. If I lowered myself by marrying like this, I could forget that I was his daughter – you know, inheritance and so forth. Apart from these inescapable financial factors – ’ she looked up now, with her ironic grin – ‘forgetting I’m Daddy’s daughter won’t feel all that new or troublesome.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’ Maryann watched Dot’s face.

  ‘Yes – she’s had a rough time,’ Sylvia said.

  ‘You must really think a lot of Bobby.’

  ‘Yes.’ Dot smiled. ‘I suppose that’s how it was for you and Joel?’

  Again the plunge of misgiving. How much could she say? Yes, she’d loved Joel, but how much more there had been to her running away, her quest for safety. ‘Yes,’ was all she said.

  ‘Bobby’s done wonders for me.’

  Maryann could see that he had.

  ‘Of course we’ll be at your wedding.’ She reached across and squeezed the top of Dot’s arm. ‘We wouldn’t miss it for anything.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Dot said briskly. Maryann saw her eyes fill with tears, but she soon had them under control again. ‘That means a lot. More than you might imagine.’

  ‘So – you’re going to be a boatwoman! Sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’

  ‘I think I’ve a fair idea,’ Dot said dryly.

  ‘And you still want to do it!’

  ‘Well – would you swap it?’

  ‘No.’ Maryann sighed. ‘Not most days, anyroad.’

  ‘It’s Bobby’s life. He doesn’t know any other. We just want to carry on working, and Sylvia can crew for us, for as long as they need her – Inland Waterways, I mean. Once the war ends, who knows?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sylvia sighed, sliding down from the cabin roof. ‘I’m going to have to face up to the mess my life’s in. It sounds awful, but I almost don’t want the war to end. When it does, I’m going to have to decide all sorts of things I’d rather not think about. Come on, girls – let’s go in. I’m starting to get nibbled more than I can stand.’

  The evening was cooling and they sat in the Magpie’s warm cabin, light and a breeze coming in through the door.

  ‘I can’t go back to Roy – not after all this,’ Sylvia said, pouring more water into the kettle. ‘I’ve thought and thought. I feel I should for the children’s sake. After all, what can I offer them on my own? But I just can’t. They weren’t happy with us at home. That’s why I sent them away in the first place. And it’d be like climbing back into a cage!’

  ‘Lion’s den, more like,’ Dot commented.

  Sylvia gave a wan smile, putting the kettle back on the heat. ‘You know, I never thought this would happen to me. I used to look down terribly on women who couldn’t make their marriages work. As if it was always their fault, for a start! And the truth is – ’ she sank down on the side bench next to Maryann – ‘mine barely even worked right from the beginning. There’s something terribly wrong with Roy, I’ve known that really. But it’s amazing how long you can kid yourself something is working, that it’s normal.’

  ‘What will you do?’ Maryann asked.

  ‘Don’t know. I’ll stay here as long as I can. My sister’s been having the children, but she can’t manage all the holidays. I’ll have to bring them on here for the last two weeks.’ She looked solemn, but determined. ‘In the long run, I don’t know. I’ll have to find a job and somewhere to live … Roy’ll carry on paying the school fees. He’s dead set on that. But I know now that I can do it. I’d never have been able even to begin thinking that before I came away.’ Her face cleared and she chuckled. ‘What a year, eh? And goodness me, Maryann, for you more than any of us the last few months, by the sound of things. Do tell – what on earth’s been happening to you all?’

  The question roused the usual mixture of panic and longing in Maryann. The hunger both to tell and to conceal, each equally pressing. ‘It was like a scouring of inner wounds. But they’d shared so much of themselves with her now. She could tell them some of it quite easily of course, about the fire, and Charlie Dean’s chase along the towpath. And she did so while they brewed up again and drank tea round the table, Dot and Sylvia listening avidly.

  ‘Charlie was scared stiff he’d finished him off. It was just a bang on the head, though, and he came round all right. Course, there was no doubt about what they’d all done, him and that Pastor Joyce and Mr Osborne.’

  ‘Mr Osborne was always such a sweetie, though,’ Sylvia said, bewildered. ‘Least, I thought so.’

  ‘So did I.’ Maryann knew she sounded abrupt. This was another betrayal which was only now beginning to hit home. ‘Anyroad, the girl in the cellar in Acocks Green – turned out Pastor Joyce was the one responsible for her. He was blarting in the witness box, saying it’d all been an accident, that he never meant to.’

  Despite the horror of what she was telling them, Sylvia and Dot were taken back by the bitter loathing in Maryann’s voice.

  ‘The girl was called Ellen. She was eight years old and she was Janet’s sister’s grandchild. They live out at Alvechurch and he – Griffin – had gone all the way out there to track her down. God alone knows what they did to her… ’ She couldn’t speak for a moment, almost choked by rage and pain. It was anyone connected with any of us – my family, Janet’s. If we’d’ve had more relatives… ‘ She shuddered. She couldn’t look Sylvia and Dot in the eye. The others were silent. Maryann sensed that they just didn’t know what to say, were out of their depth.

  ‘But,’ Dot stumbled into speech, eventually, ‘why, Maryann?’ She spoke very gently. ‘He must be completely insane. They all must be!’

  ‘There was a girl that night in the room above the butcher’s. She was one of Pastor Joyce’s congregation, from the church. They were just the same, the three of them.’

  ‘So – ’ Sylvia was struggling to make any sense out of the horror of it all – ‘ Norman Griffin was the man who killed Jennykins that night and who … who took Sally, and all these other terrible thing
s. And you said he was your stepfather? But none of it makes any sense. Why would he do these things to you of all people?’

  ‘Oh – that’s his way of being family,’ Maryann said with harsh flippancy. She felt as if there were hands around her throat as she looked guardedly up into Sylvia’s kind eyes. Her longing was overwhelming, the need to be able to tell someone who had never known Norman Griffin or been touched by him, to lay it all out before them and have them witness and believe her and not condemn. To know that someone understood all the hurt and shame inside her and could accept her. The shame which never seemed to die, and which, roused again by all the events of the last months, still left her sickened and weeping every time her husband tried to touch her, and breaking down at other unpredictable moments. These last two months had been awash with tears. They gave her some release, but still she had not been able to break through Joel’s own pain and bewilderment and tell him the truth. She still felt as if she was living behind a mask and no one ever saw the real her underneath, the lonely, trembling her. If she could just lift the mask, even just a corner of it … But it was so frightening.

  Feeling Sylvia looking at her, Dot’s eyes on her across the table, she felt herself go weak, her palms sweating. How could she say it? Put the gross truth into words: her childhood, her sister Sal’s, Amy’s, Margaret’s. She clasped her hands in her lap to control her trembling. If she never spoke, didn’t he, Norman Griffin, in his cell in Winson Green prison, where he would stay until they hanged him – didn’t he still have sway over her? Even when he was dead, how could she ever be free? She remembered her last sight of him in the courtroom before they took him away, hatless for once, sitting hunched forward, trying to hide his face. Even in the packed court she had felt her skin crawl at being so close to him. How could she banish him, and the everlasting sense of dirtiness he had given her, and begin to live properly again?

  She knew Sylvia and Dot had sensed her inner struggle. Folding her arms, almost hugging herself, she spoke, staring down at the table top with its rings of stains.