by Anne Bennett
Mary still looked doubtful. ‘Do you think it right though to play cards on Christmas Day?’
‘I can’t see that we are doing anything wrong,’ Stan said. ‘Honestly I can’t. As long as no money changes hands it’s just a game. Let me teach you all to play whist and you will see how harmless it is.’
‘All right,’ Mary said and Angela was glad because she too wanted to learn a few card games. In fact the McCluskys picked up the rules of whist very quickly and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
They had played four games when Connie woke. ‘I best get tea,’ Mary said and everyone groaned for no one was hungry, but Mary insisted. ‘Well I’ll put it out and cover it with tea towels and you can please yourselves. Connie will probably be ready for something anyway.’
‘Shouldn’t bank on it,’ Angela said, holding the baby in her arms. ‘She’s had a good plate of her own mashed-up dinner and then a fair few forkfuls of Barry’s because he had her on his knee and he of course gives her anything she wants.’
‘You can’t be giving out to the child,’ Barry said. ‘It’s Christmas Day for goodness’ sake.’
‘Who’s giving out to the child?’ Angela said to Barry. ‘It’s you I’m giving out to. You’ll have her spoilt. If you’re not careful.’
‘Fathers always spoil daughters,’ Barry said. ‘It’s their prerogative. Anyway my own Daddy used to say better that way than the other way.’
Angela well remembered hearing Matt say that and she smiled at the memory. And it was true and she was glad that Barry loved Connie so deeply and was not afraid to show it. ‘Hand her over,’ Barry said to Angela. ‘Me and Stan will keep her amused while you’re busy.’
‘I need to change her first,’ Angela said. ‘Unless you would like to do that too?’
‘No,’ Barry said, giving Angela a cheeky grin. ‘Women are much better at that type of thing. I’m more than ready to admit that.’
‘Oh I bet you are,’ Angela said, but she laughed as she took Connie upstairs to make her more comfortable, for she had to agree with him, men didn’t change nappies. And if any did, and it was found out, they would be a laughing stock. In fact most of the day-to-day care was down to the women, but Angela considered that right and proper.
When she returned to the room though and handed Connie to her father she said, ‘Don’t throw her around much, you may drop her.’
Barry stared at Angela as if he didn’t believe his ears and then asked incredulously, ‘Why would I drop her? I have never even come close to dropping her before.’
Angela knew that but she also knew how many beer bottles had been emptied and vast inroads had been made in the whisky too and she was a bit concerned because Barry was unused to alcohol and she doubted Stan was a big drinker either generally.
However, her words fell on deaf ears and Barry and to a lesser extent Stan were soon tossing Connie in the air and spinning her round the room till she was breathless. There was no doubt that she enjoyed these games for she was screaming with laughter and shouting for more although Angela’s heart was often in her mouth.
It meant though that Connie was far too wound up to eat much tea yet, despite this, Angela put a veto to any more rough-and-tumble games with Connie after tea lest she lose the bit she had eaten.
Undeterred, the men carried her over to the rug for more tower building. As the women washed up they could hear Connie’s squeals of excitement as she sent the towers crashing and Mary remarked to Angela, ‘You’ll never get her to bed tonight.’
‘Well not till Stan goes home,’ Angela agreed. ‘Her father is as bad, but I can manage him. But I think Stan has had a good day, don’t you?’
‘He would be a hard man to please if he hasn’t,’ Mary said with a smile. ‘And I don’t think for one minute that he’s an unreasonable man.’
Stan had had a wonderful Christmas with the McCluskys and though he was usually quite a sober man, he had imbibed a little too freely and Mary thought him too unsteady to go home on his own, clutching the parcel of goodies Mary had packed in his bag along with his socks. ‘Go along with him, Barry,’ Mary urged. ‘See he gets home safe.’
Barry was almost as drunk as Stan was and had no desire to go out into the cold and the wet, and Grant Street was no distance away. But then he surveyed Stan standing swaying slightly as he bid them goodnight and knew when the cold night air hit him he could easily overbalance. What if he did that and hit his head or something? He said to Angela, ‘All right if I go up with him?’
‘More than all right,’ Angela said and she hitched Connie further up her hip as she said, ‘Little Miss here will settle easy if you two are out of the way.’
Barry grinned at her for he knew she had a point and he said, ‘Wait on Stan. I’ll come along with you. I’ll just get my coat.’ And Angela gave a sigh of relief when the door closed after the men.
FOURTEEN
‘Happy New Year,’ Stan cried, bursting through the McCluskys’ door holding aloft the bottle of whisky. He also had with him a lump of coal and half a crown, because he was first footing. The first foot of the New Year had to be a man with the darkest hair and so that had to be Stan rather than Barry, as that ensures good luck for the family. The whisky is to signify the fact that they would never go thirsty, the coal that they would never be cold and the money so that they might have enough to last them all year. It was a custom the McCluskys brought with them from Ireland and though Stan had never done it before, he played his part beautifully, sneaking out just before twelve o’clock and as the hour was struck and some factory hooters sounded and people banged dustbin lids together he went back in to wish a Happy New Year to one and all.
Everyone had such high hopes for the New Year. For some time there had been unrest and clashes in Europe, though none had affected Britain and no one seemed to think Britain should get involved in countries so far away. They should deal with their own affairs.
Nearer to home though there was unrest among workers striving for better working conditions and living wages, and some workers had gone on strike. These strikes usually achieved very little and didn’t last long as the people couldn’t exist for long without their wages, however meagre they were. Barry had great sympathy for them for he knew that but for the grace of God and the goodness of Stan Bishop he could have been one of them, and he understood the desperation of Gerry and Sean to sail to America where Colm and Finbarr were making such a good living. He sincerely hoped that some of those problems could be solved in 1914.
Then there was the Home Rule for Ireland supposed to be brought into being this year. He knew it would be marvellous if it ever came to pass because freedom from the yoke of England beat in the heart of every Irish Catholic who thought Ireland, being a separate island, should have a separate government and not be under British Rule. He knew too the Ulster Unionists would oppose the Bill, but if it became law there would be nothing they could do about it, surely.
‘Oh I think they’ll likely have something up their sleeves,’ Mary said when Barry said this to her. ‘They’ll not give in without a fight. We just must wait and see.’
They hadn’t long to wait before England began to unravel. In the early spring of 1914 some bricklayers began agitating for reform and the unrest began to spread to other towns and cities. And then the management’s response in London was to lock the bricklayers out of their place of work.
‘That will cause severe hardship and sooner rather than later I’d say,’ Barry said one evening as he threw down the paper down in disgust and added, ‘The Boss said they’re probably taking a hard line in London to dampen down the protests in other places.’
Angela nodded. ‘He could be right, but you’d think they would at least listen to the workers’ concerns, possibly compromise a bit.’
‘I don’t know why you’re so surprised,’ Mary said. ‘Since when have these top-notch people given a tinker’s cuss for the rest of us?’
‘It is a bit short sighted though isn’t it?’ A
ngela said. ‘I mean, factories and so on need workers. I’m sure if they treated them right, even if they couldn’t meet all they demand straight away, they would work harder.’
‘Maybe,’ Mary said. ‘But the bosses can behave how they want really, because there are so many on the dole queues now, they can easily replace whoever proves troublesome enough.’
However, after three weeks there was no sign of any softening on either side, but Angela knew the strikers would have to give in in the end because they were starving and so were their wives, and worse, their children.
Angela hated reading the paper for she imagined the despair of the bricklayers striving for a living wage and watching their children cry with hunger. God, she thought it would tear a man to bits, yet she felt she had to read it and when she said this to Barry, he admitted he felt the same way.
‘That’s what I’m on about, I suppose,’ Barry said. ‘There are people working here in Birmingham at various places full-time and yet not being paid enough to feed their families. Now we’re seeing even more stick-thin, barefoot kids in the streets. I always leave something from the dinner you put up now, for somehow it’s even worse than it was before. Lots of us do it now, because it’s hard to see such abject desperation on a child’s face and not be moved by it. But you can only help one or two and some days there’s so many of them.’
‘From now on I will make you extra,’ Angela promised, ‘and if all wives with husbands in work did the same at least we could help more of them.’
‘Yes we could,’ Barry said. ‘What makes me mad is if these blokes who have no job just give a mate a hand, say by helping out on a stall down the Bull Ring a time or two and the dole office get to hear of it, they stop the money altogether.’
‘It’s the wives that come to the rescue,’ Mary said. ‘I’ve seen them taking in washing, sometimes two loads as well as their own, and they beg for old orange boxes and the like, and chop them into sticks in the cellars to make up bundles of kindling they sell around the doors of the posh houses. It’s them that ask for tick in the shops and they are seldom away from the pawn shop.’
What Mary said was true and it depressed Angela and she thought it was small wonder that there was such unrest in the country. ‘And that Lloyd George seems to think more of foreigners than us,’ Angela said, jabbing at the paper. ‘All this happening in his England and he’s more worried about the “build-up of weaponry in Europe”. He calls it “organized insanity”, but who really cares?’
Barry thought they might be made to care a great deal before too long because no one built up weaponry for the sake of it and yet, on the other hand, there were always skirmishes and England had always kept well clear of any involvement, so this was probably the same. Anyway they could do nothing about anything other than making extra sandwiches to stop the children starving to death and thanking God that their daughter wasn’t suffering the same fate. For he knew it must tear the heart from a man when he couldn’t provide for his family.
Meanwhile he took such joy in his own child for she seemed to learn something new each day. She had ‘Mammy’ and ‘Daddy’ off pat and Mary she dubbed ‘Ganny, and she was making a stab at Stan and Maggie but was not quite there yet. But then she would surprise them by suddenly saying ‘door’ or ‘bed’ and shouted ‘more’ and ‘again’ if she wanted another game, or more food. And then one day at the beginning of February Connie, who had been getting on her hands and knees for a week or two, crawled across the floor for the first time and pulled herself up by the guard surrounding the fire and hearth. The three adults looked at each other knowing that Connie would no longer stay where she was put. ‘We’ll have to make sure the door to the stairs is kept closed at all times,’ Mary said.
‘Yes,’ Barry agreed, ‘and I’ll get some wood on Saturday to make a gate for the cellar steps, because I definitely don’t want her falling down there.’ The gate was in place and secure by Saturday evening and a good job too, for now Connie had mastered the art of crawling she could go across the floor in seconds, and what fascinated her were the places she hadn’t been allowed before, and one of those was the cellar. ‘Oh wouldn’t she just love to be down there playing with the coal?’ Mary said with a chuckle as she removed her from the gate yet again and brought her into the room. ‘Told you it’s one body’s work when they’re at this stage.’
And no doubt about it now, they were at that stage. Connie wasn’t prepared to sit in the pram while Angela did the washing, and she had to take her with her and make sure the door was shut when she did the bedrooms, and ironing had to be done when she was in bed and safely out of the way. And yet Angela wouldn’t change a thing, for her love for the child was immeasurable and she felt privileged to watch her developing into a real little person.
‘And won’t it be lovely when the spring comes?’ Angela said to Mary one day in late February as she stood at the window and watched the rain lashing the grey pavements. ‘I will be able to take Connie to the park and let her crawl all over the grass!’
‘I think we could all do with some warmth in our bones,’ Mary agreed. ‘And it’s a pity we can do nothing to hurry it along.’
But the spring hadn’t really taken hold when the Home Rule for Ireland Bill was passed in Parliament. But there was a clause for those opposed to the break-up of the union. The Conservative opposition leader Bonar Law issued pledges to all the Ulster Unionists who opposed Home Rule for Ireland. In the end Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down had the majority of pledges necessary to use the clause the government had put in place to opt out of Home Rule for six years. ‘Six years, sixty years,’ Mary said disparagingly. ‘They are already watering down what they promised us. We will never have a united Ireland now, mark my words.’
‘Maybe it was a way of avoiding civil war,’ said Angela. ‘I think the Unionists are ready for it because in the paper it said that the Ulster Volunteer Force is over 100,000 strong and they did that military exercise last month in Tyrone. That surely was to show the government what it could do if it wished. It’s a bit like bullying really.’
‘It’s a lot like bullying,’ Barry said. ‘But the damage is done now.’
‘Yes and I think the Government have their hands full with them suffragettes,’ Mary said and she glanced at Angela and added, ‘Good job you haven’t taken up with all that nonsense.’
‘No, it’s not all nonsense,’ said Angela. ‘The point is I agree with much of what they say, because if men have the vote, we should have it too.’
‘Why?’ Barry said. ‘Surely you would vote the same way I did?’
‘No,’ Angela said. ‘Not necessarily. If you have the vote it is your right to choose and I wouldn’t vote the same as you if I didn’t believe in that party. That’s what it’s all about. Someday I think we will be very grateful to the Pankhurst women and all the other suffragettes who have gone through a great deal and I even understand their frustration too. It’s just another example of governments not listening, but I can’t agree with their methods.’ And Angela had a point because the suffragettes had begun to set fire to empty houses, railway stations, sport stadiums and had vandalized golf courses.
‘Good job,’ Barry said with a forced little laugh. ‘What would Connie do if you were sent to prison?’
Really Barry was quite shocked. He’d always thought Angela would follow his lead, as head of the house, if women ever did get the vote and that idea had been turned right on its head. After a few moments though his thought patterns changed and he was proud of Angela and it showed she was a woman of integrity, saying what she did. Even the way she spoke showed she had a thinking brain and had thought things through. Surely he wasn’t thinking of her not using that brain? He realized that though he loved Angela, he had thought of her as his wife and Connie’s mother, not as a person in her own right as she so obviously was.
‘D’you think it will ever happen that women will get the vote?’ he asked. Angela shook her head. ‘Couldn’t tell you, but some women
have died or been made very ill for the cause, usually because of the harsh treatment they have received in jail and I would hate to think their sacrifices were for nothing.’
The protests went on and more sacrifices were made but Europe and Ireland were in such turmoil all over that the British government weren’t as shocked as they would normally have been when the following month in London, a suffragette named Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to a Velazquez painting in the National Gallery. No one knew how or when the violence was going to end and suffragettes were viewed as just another headache for the government. Barry said he couldn’t see why the government couldn’t just give women the vote and be done with it.
Angela agreed with him, but she was not that bothered about politics. Her concern was keeping Connie as healthy as possible and she took advantage of the warm spring weather to push Connie to the park every fine afternoon. Barry fully approved of Angela taking the child out of the unhealthy streets and on Sundays he would join them on their jaunts.
Mary was invited, but she always refused. Barry was concerned about this, especially if they were going further afield, but Mary encouraged them to go, waved them off cheerfully enough and always had a meal waiting when they returned. ‘She will never come with me either,’ Angela said. ‘Sometimes I think the walk might do her good and it isn’t as if anyone can gallop along pushing a pram. I have told her this but she always says her gallivanting days are over.’
‘She doesn’t seem to mind,’ Barry said.
‘I really don’t think she does,’ Angela said. ‘Between you and me I think she gets tired. She wouldn’t admit it in a thousand years, but I think she finds Connie a bit of a handful. She loves her to bits, no doubt of that, but children are very wearing at this age. With us out of the way she can put her feet up and have a wee nap.’