by Irene Carr
‘Glory be to God!’ Chrissie exclaimed. She lifted her gaze to the sky then returned it to Jack. ‘He’s not yet sixteen! He doesn’t have to know what to do with his life this early just because you and Tom did!’ As Jack opened his mouth to argue she shifted her ground and charged, ‘You’d do better to have a word with Sophie,’ knowing full well that her daughter was Jack’s favourite. ‘Now, she does take after her grandmother, my natural mother.’
Jack shrugged. ‘I never met her, as you know, but you’ve told me all about her, how she was a singer and dancer – and the rest.’
‘I’ve told you some of it,’ said Chrissie grimly, ‘but you don’t know the half.’ Her natural mother had been uncaring, had deserted her as a babe in arms. ‘She was known as “Vesta Nightingale – vocals and dance”. So far as I know, she still is. And she rolled her eyes at every man she met. That’s Sophie all over – and she knows what she wants to do, unfortunately.’
They glared at each other for a moment then Chrissie’s lips twitched and she laughed. Jack grinned, because this was an old argument and they had said it all before.
Jack said, ‘All right, I’ll take a stricter line with her.’ Chrissie remembered him saying that before, too. He asked, ‘Where is she, anyway?’
‘She went off to play tennis. She’s meeting some of her friends from school at the club, said they’d probably stay on for coffee and a chat afterwards. I said I wanted her in by ten.’
Jack nodded agreement. ‘No harm in that.’
Sophie was just one more young girl in a summer dress at the dance, except that hers was a floral silk and more expensive than the cotton frocks around her. She had smuggled it out of the house in her tennis bag along with the cheap high-heeled shoes she had bought, secretly and illicitly, with her allowance and extra shillings she had begged from her father. The lipstick and make-up had been purchased the same way. Her tennis dress was in her bag in the cloakroom.
The dance-hall was a high-vaulted cavern, its floor filled with gliding couples under a blue haze of smoke. They danced to the music of a twelve-piece band in dinner jackets who played on a stage at one end of the hall. Lights sparkled and reflected from a mirrored globe circling above the centre of the floor.
Some of the men wore dark double-breasted suits from Burton’s or the Fifty-shilling Tailors – just about a labourer’s weekly wage – and others dressed more cheaply, in sports coats and grey flannel trousers. The hands of clerks and draughtsmen among them were pink and clean but those who worked in the yards had calloused hands, bruised or burnt, grey with ingrained dirt no scrubbing would remove.
They made a sober background for the splashes of colour of the girls’ dresses. Shop assistants and office workers sat on chairs ranked along the walls and chattered excitedly while young men stood in groups, eyeing the girls, smoking and talking, summoning up the nerve to ask for a dance.
One crossed to Sophie where she stood near the band and asked, ‘Would you like to do this one?’ She had danced with several already, and eagerly, but now she shook her head impatiently and the young man flushed and strode away.
Sophie did not notice. All her attention was focused on the stage. The band’s singer, a woman in her mid-twenties wearing a close-fitting evening dress that fell to her silver slippers, got up from her chair and stepped forward to the microphone. The bandleader, out in front, pointed his baton and she began to sing. ‘I Only Have Eyes For You . . .’ Sophie sang silently with her, mouthing the words, and imitating the gestures in her mind.
When the singer was done, Sophie sought out the young man she had turned away, telling him, ‘Sorry, but I couldn’t dance then. I will now.’ She opened her arms and the startled youth automatically stepped into them before he could grumble at her previous refusal. But Sophie was back by the stage again when the singer came on for her next number.
She left at a quarter to ten, changing rapidly in the ladies’ toilet, racing to catch her tram. She ran, light footed in plimsolls, the last four hundred yards from the tram stop through the wide and tree-lined silent streets of big houses standing in expansive gardens. Her home was one of the biggest and she reached it at a quarter past ten.
She took the six steps up to the front door in two bounds. The main door was open, but the inner door with its big stained-glass panel she opened with her key. As she padded along the hall her mother called from the sitting-room on the left, ‘Sophie!’
Sophie sauntered into the spacious sitting-room, with its chesterfield and several armchairs forming islands of furniture on a sea of polished floor. The pictures on the walls were all of ships built in the Ballantyne yard, except for the one that hung over the mantelpiece, a life-sized portrait of Sophie’s smiling mother.
Chrissie was not smiling now as she looked around the wing of her armchair and accused, ‘You’re late.’
Sophie controlled her breathing and apologised meekly. ‘Sorry, Mummy. I lost track of the time.’
Jack lowered his paper for a moment and frowned. ‘Talking, I suppose.’
Sophie sat on the arm of his chair and leaned against him. ‘A bit.’
He grinned at her, then caught Chrissie’s eye on him and said sternly, ‘When your mother says ten o’clock, that’s what she means. Remember another time.’
‘Yes, Daddy.’ Sophie kissed him and headed towards the door, but diverted to the grand piano that stood by the window. She ran her fingers along the keys then sat down and played, singing softly.
Matt, his lean length stretched along the chesterfield, broke in, ‘You’re beating that piano to death.’ He could play with careless ease, while Tom did so conscientiously but laboriously and Sophie with slap-bang abandon.
Now she laughed and went on her way, softly humming.
She was still singing when Matt passed her open door later on the way to his room. He paused and glanced behind him to make sure no one else could hear, then warned, ‘They’ll find out one of these days.’
Sophie grinned at him. ‘Bet you they don’t!’ Then as he started to move on, ‘Why are you so miserable?’
Matt scowled. ‘Oh, the usual thing: Dad wanting to know what I’m going to do with my life, asking when I’m going to pull up my socks, telling me my reports aren’t good enough.’
Sophie pointed out simply, ‘Well, they aren’t.’
‘I can’t help it. I just get bored.’
She sighed then smiled at him and reached up to ruffle his sandy hair. ‘Never mind. Cheer up. I think you’re great, the cat’s whiskers.’
‘Just because I cover up for you.’ But he was grinning as he went on his way.
Chrissie thought of her daughter that night in the moments before she slept, with Jack already slumbering quietly beside her. Sophie was of an age with the girl who had come to Chrissie for a job that day, but Sophie was taller and in body a young woman. She was far removed from the grim reality of Sarah’s life, having been brought up in this big, comfortable house, so different from that where Sarah lived, and where Chrissie was born and raised . . .
‘Will he be all right?’ Margaret Hackett asked anxiously that evening. She was a drab, thin woman in her early forties with faded good looks, a clean apron over her old dress.
‘Why d’you worry about him?’ Her son, Peter Robinson, answered her question with another. Peter had kept his father’s name when Margaret married Bert Hackett. He was seventeen now, inches taller than her, still thin, but strong. He wore a patched jacket and trousers handed down from his stepfather. Peter continued bitterly, ‘He wouldn’t worry over you.’
They stood in the kitchen-cum-living-room, one of the two rooms they rented on the ground floor of an old terraced house. The fire was not lit but the fireplace was blackleaded, and the brass fender and fire irons – tongs, poker and shovel – gleamed. The oil cloth spread on the table was washed clean. This was also the bedroom for Peter and his six-year-old half-brother, Billy Hackett; they shared a bed that folded down out of the old sideboard that stood
against one wall. Bert Hackett and Margaret slept in the other room.
Peter and his mother looked out through the window into the back yard, watching Bert Hackett staggering across from the outside lavatory. He hitched his braces over his shoulders as he came into the room and peered at them owlishly. He said thickly, voice slurred, ‘Right, I’m ready. Let’s away or the bloody ship will sail without me. Fetch me bag, you,’ he threw at Peter as he fumbled his arms into his jacket and staggered out of the door into the passage.
Peter did not answer him but hoisted the big kitbag on to his shoulder. It held Hackett’s spare clothes, blankets and ‘donkey’s breakfast’ – the mattress, at one time straw filled, that would go inside his bunk. Peter told his mother gently, ‘No need to fret. I’ll see he gets aboard all right.’ She smiled at him, although the corners of her mouth turned down as he turned and tramped away down the passage.
Margaret Hackett slumped down into her chair, the smile gone. She recalled miserably how she had married Hackett in 1928 to give her growing son a stepfather to replace the real one he had hardly known – Frank Robinson had died of pneumonia when Peter was three years old. But Hackett had made her life hell, given her another child, Billy, and a succession of miscarriages. Now she believed she was pregnant again. She wept.
Peter strode up the street, thinking that his mother seemed better these days. That was probably because she could look forward to weeks or months of freedom from Hackett, depending on how long this voyage lasted. And she wasn’t bruised now. That had stopped a few months ago when Hackett had started to beat her for the hundredth time and Peter’s anger had exploded into equal violence. He had fought his stepfather out of the house and into the yard while the neighbours watched and his mother covered her face with her apron and wept, until Peter grabbed a coal shovel and felled Hackett.
Now he overtook the lurching man, walked with him to the tram and sat by him as it swayed, rattled and clanged across the bridge. It was fully dark now, and the lights on the ships shed yellow pools on the oily black surface of the river below. They got down from the tram and Peter shouldered the bag again and guided the weaving Hackett through the dark wilderness of the dock. They wound through black canyons between sheds, trudged beneath cranes and circled huge bollards. Peter held the bag on one shoulder and yanked at Hackett with his free hand to keep the drunken man on course. Even so, at one point, stumbling through a dark alley they fell on a pile of coal and emerged filthy and coughing on dust.
They finally came to Hackett’s ship. Peter steered him up the gangway, urged him forward to the fo’c’sle and set him on the ladder. Hackett missed the last few rungs and fell to the deck, but without injury. The men already sleeping in the bunks set around the fo’c’sle woke and swore: ‘Keep quiet! Noisy bastard!’ Peter dragged out the ‘donkey’s breakfast’, spread it on an empty bunk and shoved Hackett into it.
He climbed back up the ladder and went ashore, his duty done. A load had been lifted from his shoulders, and not just the kitbag. As he walked home he thought, Good riddance. But there was still bitterness because he and his mother needed the money that Hackett made – what little he gave them. Peter was unemployed, only making a shilling or two from odd jobs and they were few.
And winter was coming . . .
‘Wondering whether to gan in, lad?’ One of the men in the river of hundreds streaming through the gates of the shipyard on the Tyne threw the question at Tom. This was the first morning after his leaving home and he stood in the road, smart in his suit, with the crowd sweeping around him. He stared at the yard, the sheds visible through the open gates, the huge bulk of the half-completed vessel standing inside the staging, towering above the walls. The joker threw back at him as he went on with the crowd, ‘Toss a brick up! If it comes down, gan home; if it stops up, come in!’
Tom had heard that one before and laughed. His laughter came easily because he was excited and proud, and had looked forward to this day for a long time. He was going to be a shipyard worker, and earning – not much, but he would be paid and that was enough. He grinned and joined the throng, then walked in through the gates to clock on.
When he came out that evening his ears rang from the din of the riveting hammers. He was weary but happy, and walked back to his lodgings content.
But then, he could not see into the future.
Joshua Fannon, pot bellied, greasy haired and in his forties, was thinking of Sarah as he washed up the breakfast dishes in the untidy kitchen. Meggie, his wife, insisted he should clean it, as she demanded he do all the other work about the house. He obeyed, but in slovenly fashion, and she berated him endlessly.
‘You’ve got to get them Herbert Street rents today!’ Meggie bellowed at him from where she still lay, mountainous, in bed.
‘Aye, I know.’ He answered her meekly but whispered, ‘Ye daft cow!’ He would not forget the Herbert Street rents because that lass Sarah Tennant lived there.
Meggie bawled again, ‘And I want them all, mind! Tak’ no excuses!’
‘I’ll get them,’ he promised. He had no thought of rebellion. On their wedding night some ten years ago he had tried to claim his conjugal rights and she had scared him off with a red-hot poker drawn from the fire. He was still frightened and the marriage had never been consummated.
He had proposed to her because of her money: she had rents from a number of houses left to her by her father, a builder. Joshua had looked forward to a life of ease. Meggie was as big as himself, with boot-button little eyes in a doughy face, but she had posed as compliant and willing. Only after the wedding had she become harsh and domineering. She wanted a husband as an appendage, because other women had one, and she needed a servant, someone to collect her rents and do any work that was needed about the house. Now she stayed in bed until noon every day, when Joshua brought in their lunch from the fish and chip shop.
‘Get me a bit o’ haddock!’ Her shriek followed him as he set off down the passage, pulling on the old raincoat with big pockets that he wore to collect the rents. The passage was uncarpeted, just the bare boards swept clean. Joshua took turns with Mrs Bennet to sweep it. The Bennets, man and wife, lived in the two rooms upstairs. Despite her money, Meggie would not have a house to herself, nor would she buy carpet for the passage because the Bennets would not pay a share.
In Herbert Street Fannon took the few shillings and coppers from Isabel Tennant, counted them and dropped the money in his raincoat pocket. He used his cheap fountain pen to enter the sum in the rent book and handed the book back to Sarah’s mother. He asked, ‘Where’s your lass, then?’
Isabel smiled. ‘Sarah’s got a job.’
‘Has she?’ Fannon was unimpressed. His gaze wandered around the cramped little room, assessing. He saw that the grate and coal bucket were empty and the curtains, face turned to the world, were frayed. He could read the signs of dire poverty and he knew the kind of wages a young girl could earn.
He promised, ‘I’ll see you next week.’ And the week after that. The Tennants would find the rent for a little longer but soon the ends would refuse to meet, at first by only coppers, but the gap would widen. A day would come when Sarah would not have the rent and she would need help from him. She would not accept the . . . arrangement . . . easily – he had seen her unspoken dislike whenever she met him – but to keep a roof over her mother’s head . . .
4
Winter 1935
On a bitterly cold night Bert Hackett staggered out of a bar in Hamburg and blinked his eyes against the darkness and the driving rain. He hiccupped, swore and stumbled across the cobbled street, heading for his ship. She lay moored to a buoy out in the basin and he looked for the boat that would take him back to her. He had left it tied up at the foot of a flight of stone steps running down from the quay. He squinted blearily against the rain then grunted as he saw the head of the steps and lurched over to them.
He paused then, peering down and trying to focus his eyes. The stairs fell steeply into blackness,
relieved only by the glint of yellow light from a distant lamp. It reflected from the wet steps, their surfaces seeming to shiver as rain splashed on them. He thought he could make out the boat and started down, one hand groping along the wall slimy with weed, booted foot feeling for the tread.
He was close to the surface of the water before he saw there was no boat at the foot of these steps. He mumbled an oath and turned away from the wall, intending to climb back to the quay and look elsewhere, but the steps were narrower than he thought. He set one foot down in space and then he was falling. He plunged in face first, foul water driven into his mouth by the force of his fall.
He sank, rose briefly, buoyed up by the air in his clothes, but then sank again, dragged down by the weight of his sea-boots. In the second that his head was above water he started to draw a whooping breath but at the last he sucked in more water than air and went under choking. He still struggled to the surface once again with the strength of desperation. His fingers found the wall and scrabbled like claws at its weed-hung surface. He tore away handfuls of the slime but found no purchase, no hold that would take his weight. That weight was increasing now as the air went out of his clothes and water flooded in to take its place, wrapping him in its freezing embrace. So he sank for the last time. He tried to scream for help, but his lungs filled with water, drowning his cries and himself.
Margaret Hackett received a letter from the shipowners: ‘. . . regret to inform you . . .’ Peter went with her to the shipping office in Tatham Street where she collected the meagre balance of pay that Hackett had not been able to booze away in some foreign port.
Peter realised that he was now the breadwinner of the family. He tramped around the shipyards again in the bitter cold, following the dreary trail he had beaten often before. He went to a different yard each day and set out from home before half past seven, because that was when the yards started. He wanted to be at the gate before the foremen arrived to clock on. He stood in the crowd of men and boys hungry for work and chanted the enquiry like an incantation or a prayer: ‘D’ye want any men, mister?’ And time after time he was turned away: ‘Sorry, son.’ That was mostly said with regret or sympathy, the refuser subconsciously thinking, There but for the grace of God go I, because anybody could be laid off.