Fenwick Houses

by Catherine Cookson

  For answer, my mother thrust the cup into his hand, saying, "Bill!

  Talking like that! We've got big ears, me lad. " I knew the big ears were meant for me.

  "Little pigs have big ears," was a frequent saying of hers when she didn't want Dad to talk in front of us. Now he only smiled gently, and pouring some of the tea into his saucer he blew on it for me before I drank.

  The following day I waited for Sam coming out of the Infants, and taking him by the hand I led him home. When we were half-way up the hill, Don's voice hailed us, and we stopped and waited for him. And when I wouldn't join in a race down to the river he walked behind us, chanting in a teasing voice:

  "Sam, Sam, the dirty man, Washed himself in the frying pan, Combed his hair with a monkey's tail, Scratched his belly with his big-toe nail."

  I could feel Sam's hand getting stiffer and stiffer within mine. Then suddenly he tore himself from me and, swinging round, sprang on Don.

  Don, even at this age, was big and stolid, and the result was that poor little Sam seemed to bounce off him. Anyway, he is

  fell on his bottom in the middle of the road, and when I solicitously went to pick him up, he turned on me, too; then scrambling to his feet, he ran off, not towards home, but on to the fells. When I was about to follow him Don's arms went about me and pinned me to him, my back to his chest. And his voice was still laughing as he said, "If you'll come down to the river with me I won't touch him when I get in; if you dont I'll belt him. "

  I went down to the river with him. When we reached it, he decided to plodge, and with a "Come on!" ordered me to take off my shoes and stockings.

  I was nothing loath to do this for I loved pledging, but we had a special place for pledging and this wasn't it. Here the river wound round the bend, and the curve was strewn with rocks, which if you were agile enough you could use as step ping stones, but beyond the rocks the water tumbled and frothed. It was too deep for pledging. When Ronnie stood in this part it came up to his shoulders, so when Don, gripping my hand, pulled me on to the stepping stones, I cried, "Eeh!

  no, Don. not down there! It's too deep. "

  Although I had played by the river since I had played at all, I was still unable to swim. The reason for this was simple; my mother had forbidden me to go into the water with the boys other than for a plodge. Sometimes when they swam I would stand on the bank yelling and laughing and shouting at them as they dived and plunged and larked about. Even Sam at six could swim, and for a bathing costume he had a pair of little white pants that kept slipping down and which were sometimes pulled down purposely by Don who would pretend it was just carrying on;

  I had strict orders from my mother that I was never to go into the water with the boys, and that if they went up to Pol lard's bum I hadn't to go with them at all. I knew that this was because a lot of boys gathered at Pollard's burn at the week-end and swam with nothing on. But now Don was pulling me towards the deep water and I screamed at him to stop, for already the bottom of my dress and knickers were wet, and the water, spurting from between the stones, was stinging my legs like pins and needles.

  My arms about his waist I cried, "Don! Don! Let me go back."

  He stood perfectly still in the water, and looking down at me, he said, "Well, if I do, will you promise never to wait for our Sam any more?"

  "Yes ... yes, I promise, Don." I would have promised anything to get out of that swirling water.

  "Swear."

  "I swear, Don."

  "Cross your heart."

  I released one trembling arm and religiously crossed my heart somewhere in the region of my collar bone. But now, having given him the assurance that he wanted, he did not let me go back towards the bank but, his face becoming stiff, he said, "You heard me mum and dad row last night, didn't you?"

  I looked at him and nodded once.

  "It's none of your business." He grabbed me roughly by the shoulder.

  "No, Don," I said, 'no, it isn't. "

  "I'd like to shoot me dad... string him up."

  "Don!" My horror and amazement made me forget my fear for the moment, and I gasped, "I like your dad, he's nice."

  You! "

  Petrified, I felt myself being pressed backwards and was on the point of screaming when our Ronnie's voice, coming from the bank, shouting,

  "What you think you're up to? Let her go!" surprised Don so much that he did let me go, and I overbalanced and, yelling my head off, fell on my back into the water.

  I hadn't time to go under before Don's hands gripped me, and, pulling me upwards, he dragged me to the bank, where Ronnie, already in the water, demanded angrily, "What you think you're up to, eh? Frightenin'

  her!"

  "I wasn't frightenin' her, we was just playin'."

  "Playin'! She was cryin' ... scared." He turned his head towards me.

  "Weren't you?"

  I gulped, but did not answer him. Instead, I said, The mam'll pay me.

  look at me pinny! "

  They neither of them looked at my pinny but stood staring at each other. They were both of about the same height, only Ronnie wasn't half as thick as Don. The next moment they i7

  were rolling on the ground, punching and using their knees in each other's stomachs.

  "Give over! Give over!" I yelled at them.

  "Oh, give over!" And when they didn't I turned and ran, and never stopped until I reached the kitchen, there to cry out that our Ronnie and Don were fighting.

  But my mother took no notice of this, only of my wet state. And stripping me, she said, "You'll go to bed without any tea for this."

  Then the river and the fight were forgotten. Even sending me to bed was forgotten, for my dad came in, and from the first sight of his face my mother knew what he was about to tell her.

  She stood at one side of the kitchen table and he at the other, and, putting his bait tin slowly and definitely down and speaking to it, he said, "I wonder if it'll be the last time I'll use thee, lad?"

  I saw my mother swallow twice before she said, "How many?"

  "Over a hundred," he replied.

  My mother's eyes moved down to the table, across it, then came to rest on the bait tin, on which my dad still had his hands. Then throwing up her head and putting her hands behind her back to adjust the strings of a fancy little apron, which she had made herself out of the skin of a summer frock and which she usually wore from a Friday tea-time until Sunday night, she exclaimed, "Well, and now we know. So we can get on with it," And as she went about, putting the water into the big tin bath that stood before the fire, she talked of her plans for the future as if they had been long arranged in her mind.

  "You can apply for a bit of that land at the wood edge for an allotment. That'll keep us going for veg, any way."

  I watched her disappear into the scullery and heard the bucket being dipped into the wash house pot, and as she poured the steaming water into the bath she announced, "And I'll go back to Mrs. Durrant's."

  "Will you, lass?"

  My dad had already divested himself of all his clothes except his short pants.

  "Yes. She said that if I ever wanted work I had just to go and tell her."

  My mother had been in service at Mrs. Durrant's on Bramp- ton Hill before she was married, and although she had left the place over eight years now, there still occasionally came a parcel of clothing from her late mistress.

  My father stepped into the water and began to soap himself, and when the time came for my mother to wash his back, she said, comfortingly,

  "Don't worry. We've still got our breath and a bit of spunk left."

  She had hardly finished speaking when the door opened and my Aunt Phyllis came in. Seeing my father in the bath she turned her eyes away from him, and her voice coming in rapid jerks she addressed my mother, who was once more at the table.

  "What we goin' to do? This is the end. They'll never start again.

  It's only an excuse to shut the pit down. It's old."

  My mother tu
rned to the oven and, taking a big, steaming earthenware dish from the shelf, said, as she passed my father, "Watch yourself, lad," and she placed the dish in the middle of the table before answering my Aunt Phyllis. Then deliberately she turned and, making a motion of drying her hands on the hessian oven cloth, she said quietly,

  "We'll all have to do the best we can then."

  "And what's that ? ... starve ?"

  "We needn't starve, we've got our hands. There'll be some kind of work for women."

  "You'll go to Mrs. Durrant's, I suppose. Well, I can't see me self going skivvying for anybody, and what's more I'm not going to either."

  "That's your business." My mother still went an quietly with the drying motion, and there was a silence in the kitchen except for the pledging noise my father was now making in the water. Then my Aunt Phyllis said in thin, steel-like tones, "He'll get hiss el away and find work, there's other towns besides this, there's bound to be work some place."

  My father now turned his head over his shoulder and, looking at my Aunt Phyllis asked, "You thinking about going with him, Phyllis, then?"

  For answer my Aunt Phyllis gave him one long look, before i9

  turning on her heel and going out, slamming the door after her. My mother went to Mrs. Durrant and got three mornings' work a week. My father did as she bade him and took a piece of ground on the outskirts of the woods, and we had always plenty of taties and things, with the result that our table remained the same. The smells of cooking perfumed the house, and nothing was changed for at least three years, except that we couldn't send our shoes to the cobblers and my dad did them and the nails stuck through and tore my stockings.

  But there were more men lining the bridge at the bottom of the hill where it crossed the river. Some sat on top of the wall, some sat on their hunkers with their backs to the wall, some dangled sticks with string on and played at catching fish, and some did catch fish, but on the sly, for they would get something if they were caught fishing without a licence in the river.

  For coal my father went to the tip and brought back bags of slack, and at first my mother had her work cut out on baking days, until she got the idea of wetting the slack and putting it into tins. It fell to our Ronnie and me to gather the tins.

  Next door they did not fare so well. Although my Uncle Jim had come in with Dad in the allotment, his heart was never in the work, and I heard my dad say he dug as if he was using a spoon at a tea party.

  This was odd because I also heard Dad say that there wasn't a better hewer in the pit than my Uncle Jim.

  Hardly a day went by but my mother set up Don and Sam to a meal, and so they became to me like our family, until one day this procedure was brought to an abrupt stop.

  There had been a lot of talk of late between my mother and Aunt Phyllis about Don, doctors, and hospitals. It was all very mysterious until one evening Don joined us by the river. We knew Aunt Phyllis had taken him to the doctor's because Sam had told us. Sam, Ronnie and I were at our usual pastime, they at swimming and I at pledging. Don hailed us as he came running down the hill, and when he stood on the edge of the bank he could hardly speak for lack of wind and excitement, and when we gathered round him he told us excitedly that he was going into hospital.

  "And you know what?" he said. We waited in silence, our eyes fixed on him, "I'm going to be split up, there and there." He made two clipping movements with his forefinger up his groins, and when my face screwed up in horror, he said, "That long." His fingers on his groins measured about nine inches, and I felt my stomach heaving in horror at the thought of what he would have to endure.

  That night I said to my mother, "Poor Don is going to be cut up, Mam,"

  and she said, "Nonsense. Who told you that?"

  He did. "

  She went away mumbling, yet I thought I made out what she was saying.

  Yet I knew that I couldn't have heard aright, for what I imagined she said was, "Good thing if he was."

  Don went to hospital, and after a few days he returned, covered in glory. Somehow it had been very nice while Don was away, because Sam was different. He talked more, laughed more, he had even told a Pat and Mick joke at the table, and my mother choked on her food as much in surprise at Sam telling a joke as at the joke itself. But once Don came back Sam was quiet again.

  On the afternoon he returned we made an expedition, not to the river, but into the wood to gather blackies, for it was blackberry time and my mother wanted to make as much jelly as she could. But we wefe some time getting started on our picking for we were all listening open-mouthed to Don's description of the hospital and the things that had happened to him there. He got so excited in relating what had taken place that nothing would stop him from illustrating it, and when he lay down and started to perform an imaginary operation on himself, Ronnie threw cold water on the whole proceedings by saying, "Oh, get up man, and dont be so daft, you would have been dead if they had done that!"

  Don got up and without further words we started our picking, but I sensed that he was huffed at our Ronnie not believing him, and I felt sorry for him. I didn't like it when people didn't believe me, and didn't laugh when I told a funny joke. It made me feel silly, and I knew that was how Don was feeling. So I started picking near him, and when quite close I whispered, "I believe you, Don." He looked at me, then taking my hand pulled me away round the bushes, and there he whispered, "Do you?"

  I nodded, then emphasized, "Yes, I do."

  My hand was still in his and quietly he drew me away until we were in a tangle of blackberry bushes, and then he whispered, "Look, lie down and I'll show you what they did to me."

  "Me?" I said. "Lie down?"

  "Yes, I'll show you what they did to me in the hospital."

  He pressed hard down on my shoulders and I shrank away from him, saying, "No, no, I'm not going to lie down. I believe you, but I'm not going to lie down."

  There was a look on his face that filled me with a sort of jerky fright. My stomach was reacting as if I was receiving a succession of shocks, it was jumping within me.

  "Lie down."

  "Not, I'll not."

  "You will, I'll make you."

  "I'll shout for our Ronnie."

  His eyes darted to the height of the bushes, then with a fierce thrust he knocked me backwards and the next minute I was yelling with the pain of the brambles as they seemed to pierce every part of my body.

  It was Sam who reached me first and pulled me up, then our Ronnie, coming on the scene, said, "You would fall into something. And where's the blackies?"

  The few blackberries that I had in my can were lost among the brambles now, and I began to cry.

  "All right, all right, dont bubble. Come on."

  Ronnie's words were tender. Ronnie was nearly always tender with me, like I was with Sam. The three of us together were joined with a harmonious thread, but Don was the needle through which the thread was drawn, and its point was vicious, and I was to learn within the next few hours just how vicious.

  We were sitting in the kitchen, my mother, Dad and myself, when I heard my Aunt Phyllis come into the scullery. I knew it was her before I saw her for she always rattled the back door latch.

  When she stood at the kitchen door we all knew something was wrong, for her thin lips lay tight upon one another and had caused a little puff of flesh at each side of her mouth, as if she was in the act of blowing up a balloon.

  "I want a word with you, Annie."

  My mother looked at me, then said, "It's about your bed time."

  "I haven't washed, Mam." I was looking at my Aunt Phyllis.

  "Oh, well then, go and have your wash now."

  I went past Aunt Phyllis as she stood in the scullery door way and something seemed to fall from her face, something hard and malevolent, and it pressed on me and drove my eyes away from hers towards the floor.

  The clean water bucket in the scullery was empty, so I took it down to the bottom of the yard and put it under the tap, then turned the tap s
lowly on. For some reason or other I didn't want to return too quickly to the house, the reason was mixed up with my Aunt Phyllis's look. When the pail was full to the top and I knew that I would have to empty some out before I could carry it up the yard, my mother's voice came sharp and harsh from the doorway, crying, "Christine!"

  I walked slowly up the yard. My mother was waiting for me at the back door, and she looked at me steadily for a moment before her hand dropped to my shoulder, and without a word she guided me into the kitchen. My dad was standing on the mat and my Aunt Phyllis near the table, and when my mother led me into the room she turned me so that I faced my Aunt Phyllis. Then she said, calmly, "What were you doing in the woods this afternoon?"

  I lifted my eyes to hers without moving my head, and said, "You know, Mam, getting blackberries."

  "What else did you do? Did you play with Don?"

  "Play with Don?"

  "Yes, that's what I said, play with Don."

  I looked at her and considered. Could what had happened behind the bushes be considered as play? I didn't think that it could, and I said, "No, Mam."

  I heard the air being taken up through my mother's nose, and in the beam of the fading sun that slanted into the kitchen my whole attention became riveted on the golden hairs that quivered on the inside of her broad nostrils. I had never noticed before that she had hairs on the inside of her nose. She jerked my thoughts back to the matter in hand by saying, sharply, "Christine, pay attention!"

  "Yes, Mam."

  "What were you doing in the woods this afternoon?"

  "Only pickin' " You know you weren't, you were doing bad things . ; naughty things! " Now Aunt Phyllis was leaning over me, and her face looked dirty, as if it hadn't been washed for a long time. But my Aunt Phyllis was always washing herself and doing her hair. I stepped back away from her face, and said, " Eeh, no, I wasn't! I never. I dont!