A Ration Book Childhood

by Jean Fullerton

  ‘Jerry Brogan,’ he said, stopping next to him.

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘Brian O’Connor,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘We met when the St Patrick team played St Bridget’s and St Brendan’s a few months back.’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ said Jerimiah, shaking his hand. ‘I remember it well. Four–three to us, if my memory serves.’

  Brian smiled. ‘Indeed, although a blind man could see your last goal was offside.’

  They laughed.

  ‘Can I buy you a pint?’ asked Jerimiah.

  ‘No, I’m grand, thanks,’ said Brian. ‘But am I right in thinking you helped move the Ibbertsons from Diggon Street to Fairfield Road?’

  ‘You are, just last week,’ said Jerimiah, slurping the froth off his drink.

  ‘Well, I wonder if you could do the same for my sister,’ said Brian. ‘She was bombed out and is staying with us but you know what it’s like having two women in a kitchen . . .’

  ‘I most certainly do.’ Jerimiah laughed, thinking of the daily ding-dongs between Ida and his mother.

  ‘Well, thankfully,’ continued Brian, ‘Mary’s found another house for her and the kids in Chigwell.’

  Jerimiah pursed his lips. ‘That’s a bit of a trek from here, isn’t it? I mean, it would take me a day there and back.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Well, now.’ Jerimiah took another mouthful of his drink. ‘What do you say to three quid if there’s someone to load with me or four if not. And I could take her on Wednesday?’

  Brian chewed his lips for a moment. ‘Done, it’ll be worth it just to have me tea in peace and I’ll send my lad to help out. We’re in Thurza Street, number twelve.’

  Jerimiah offered his hand. ‘I’ll be there at eight on Wednesday.’

  Brian took it and then strolled back to the door.

  ‘Not bad for a day’s work,’ said Pete after he’d gone.

  Jerimiah took another mouthful of beer. ‘I’m not complaining.’

  ‘That’s four you’ve moved in as many weeks, isn’t it?’ said Pete.

  ‘It is,’ said Jerimiah. ‘But sure, I’m only doing it so old Samson can have a day out in the country.’

  ‘And three nicker,’ laughed Pete. ‘You carry on like this and you’ll be able to retire to the country yourself.’

  Jerimiah smiled, and Pete went off to serve another customer.

  Lifting his pint to his lips Jerimiah took another large mouthful. He didn’t know so much about retiring to the country but perhaps having the horse and cart might provide a way of keeping the wolf from his door for the duration.

  As he’d promised Ida that morning, Jerimiah pushed open the back door and entered the kitchen just as the last five o’clock pips fell silent.

  The aroma of simmering cabbage and roasting meat were all but swamped by the starchy smell of the washing that hung from the dryer hoisted above the kitchen range and the family’s smalls draped over the clothes horse in front.

  This was only to be expected, given it was a Monday, but what was a surprise was that Ida wasn’t in the kitchen to greet him with a cup of tea. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked into the house after a long day’s work and not found her getting supper ready.

  Frowning, he took off his coat and hung it over several others on the back door.

  ‘I’m home,’ he shouted.

  ‘I thought I heard you,’ said Queenie, as she came through from the parlour. ‘Good day?’

  ‘Not bad,’ he replied. ‘Where’s Ida?’

  ‘She came home a couple of hours ago with a face like thunder saying she had a headache and she was going upstairs to lie down,’ Queenie replied. ‘Supper won’t be ready for an hour yet so why don’t you put your feet up in the other room and I’ll bring you a cuppa. Jo’s in there.’

  ‘Thanks, Ma,’ said Jerimiah.

  They exchanged a fond look. Jerimiah loosened his neckerchief and went into the back parlour.

  One of the advantages of the work he did was that he was able to furnish the family home with quality items which he acquired on his travels. The massive dresser in the kitchen was one such item, as was the button-back leather porter’s chair that he relaxed in each evening. It had a wobbly arm, true enough, but you can’t have everything.

  He’d found a carved wooden chair with a padded seat for Queenie but he’d had to saw two inches off each leg so her feet could touch the floor, but his best find was the tapestry armchair with padded arms that he’d got for Ida. It had cost him double what he’d usually have paid but it was worth it so that after a long day scrubbing other people’s floors and caring for the family she could sit in comfort by the fireside each night.

  With Ida in mind and knowing she had a soft spot for them, he’d also gathered a collection of figurines for her to display on the mantelshelf. To his way of thinking they would have been more suitable as substitutes for coconuts in a coconut shy for the church’s summer fair, but Ida thought they looked nice and that’s what mattered.

  And he could understand his wife’s attachment to her mantelshelf trinkets because he felt the same about his greatest find: a 1913 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This sat proudly in the tall mahogany bookcase, dominating the whole room.

  Sadly, volume twenty-five was missing but even so he’d spent many a happy hour when the children were young reading to them from the various volumes.

  As he walked in to the comfortable family room, Jo, his youngest daughter, looked up.

  ‘Hello, Dad,’ she said, giving him a weary smile. She was sitting in her mother’s chair with her feet up on the battered leather pouffe. A few months short of her nineteenth birthday she was a member of the Auxiliary Ambulance Service and had worked her way up from driver’s assistant to a fully fledged ambulance driver. She had been on the day shift, which didn’t start until nine, so she’d still been in bed when he’d left this morning. Although she had loosened her tie she was still in her navy uniform and could have only been in a little while as she was holding a steaming cup of tea.

  Like her oldest sister Mattie, Jo took after his side of the family, and in more ways than just her dark colouring and turned-up nose. Jo had the look of an angel from above, but she could send you spinning with a flash of her sharp green eyes. Truth be told, like her two sisters, Jo could twist him around her little finger but that was one of the joys of being a father of girls.

  ‘Hello, me darling,’ said Jerimiah, sinking into the chair opposite her. ‘Have you had a good day?’

  ‘Busy,’ Jo replied. ‘But thankfully routine stuff like fetching people back and forth to hospital for appointments. I did get called to a woman in labour but the midwife was already there when I arrived, so I left her to it.’

  ‘You going out later?’ asked Jerimiah.

  ‘Only to phone Tommy.’ She twisted her engagement ring with her thumb. ‘Mum told you I’m going to visit him the weekend after next, didn’t she?’

  ‘She mentioned something about it,’ Jerimiah gave her a severe look, ‘and promised me you’d be in separate rooms.’

  ‘Of course, Dad,’ Jo replied, giving her father a wide-eyed, innocent smile.

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said, hoping he sounded as if he believed her.

  Jo took a mouthful of tea.

  ‘I was wondering, Jo . . .’ said Jerimiah. ‘If I knocked up a couple of sign boards in the next day or so, could you paint notices on them in your best handwriting?’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t know about best handwriting. My English teacher Miss Wood used to say my script was like a drunk spider who’d fallen in an inkwell, but I’ll have a go. What’s it for?’

  ‘Oh, just an idea that’s come to me,’ he replied.

  Queenie came in from the kitchen and handed him a cup.

  Jerimiah glanced at the door leading out to the hall. ‘Has Ida been up there all afternoon?’

  ‘She has,’ said his mother. ‘Although I thou
ght she might have roused herself when she heard you come in.’

  Jerimiah put his drink on the floor and stood up. ‘I think I’ll just go and see if she’s perhaps sickening for—’

  The door burst open and Ida walked in. She’d changed from her work clothes and was now wearing a pair of trousers and a thick jumper and carrying the briefcase that contained all the family documents, ready for another night in the shelter.

  ‘Hello, me darling,’ Jerimiah said, giving her a warm smile. ‘Ma said you had a headache.’

  Ida gave him a look that could have cut tempered steel then barged past him and into the kitchen.

  He looked at Jo, who shrugged. Searching his brain and finding nothing that he knew of that might have upset his wife, Jerimiah followed her through. By the time he got into the kitchen Ida had put the old picnic basket she took to the shelter with her on the table and was packing the sandwiches for her and Billy’s night underground.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit early to go to the shelter?’ he asked, as she slammed the Thermos flask in beside the tins of sandwiches.

  ‘Might as well beat the rush,’ she replied, without glancing at him.

  ‘Good idea,’ he replied, watching his wife’s sharp movements and tightly drawn face.

  She looked up and he noticed her eyes were red-rimmed.

  ‘I saw Ellen today in the market,’ she continued, as her stare bore into him like two hot needles.

  ‘Ellen?’

  ‘Yes, Ellen Gilbert,’ she said. ‘Surely you remember her?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do,’ said Jerimiah, unease creeping up his spine. ‘She was a good friend to you, to both of us.’

  ‘Yes, she was, wasn’t she?’ Ida gave him a brittle smile. ‘She had Michael with her.’

  Jerimiah frowned. ‘Michael? Michael who?’

  His wife’s hazel eyes, flint-like with pain, fixed on his face. ‘Michael. Your son.’

  The breath caught in Jerimiah’s lungs and the blood stilled in his veins.

  ‘My . . .’

  ‘Son,’ Ida repeated. ‘Michael. That’s what she called him. He’s about ten and so like our Charlie at that age he could have been his twin.’

  Jerimiah’s jaw dropped. ‘Ida, I—’

  ‘Aren’t you going to say there’s some mistake,’ Ida cut in.

  Jerimiah opened his mouth, but no words came as jumbled images, long buried and forgotten, resurfaced in his mind.

  ‘Or perhaps, “He couldn’t possibly be mine, Ida, because I’ve never been with Ellen,”’ she continued, tears springing into her eyes again. With pain and anger reddening her face she glared at him, daring him to say something. Several heartbeats passed before Jerimiah found his voice.

  ‘Let me explain, Ida,’ he said. Crossing the space between them, he tried to capture her in his arms.

  She stepped back. ‘Don’t you touch me.’

  Jerimiah let his arms fall to his sides and he stood there, helpless, as she dragged her coat from the nail at the back of the door and put it on. She snapped the hamper shut and heaved it off the table.

  She opened the door to the parlour. ‘Tell Billy to meet me at the shelter, Jo,’ she shouted through to her daughter.

  ‘Righto, Mum,’ Jo called back from the living room.

  Ida closed the door then giving him another murderous look she crossed the kitchen and went out into the backyard. She marched across to the gate, but Jerimiah got there first.

  ‘Ida, please,’ he said, trying to take her arm but she knocked his hand away.

  She spun around to face him, tears glistering on her cheeks. ‘By my reckoning you and she must have had your bit of fun about eleven years ago. Eleven years ago, when James died. I hate you, do you hear? I hate you, so don’t you dare touch me, Jerimiah Brogan. Not now, not ever again!’

  Tearing the gate open she stormed out.

  With a yawning chasm opening in his chest, Jerimiah stared helplessly into the dark side alleyway as the woman he’d loved from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her marched away, taking her love with her.

  Chapter Three

  ‘THAT’S THE LAST of them,’ said Jerimiah, heaving the cardboard box of Player’s cigarettes he was carrying on to the corner shop’s counter.

  ‘Thanks, Mr Brogan,’ said Lena Robinstein, the shopkeeper. ‘You’re a lifesaver. There’d have been a riot if they hadn’t arrived today.’

  It was late morning on the next day and he was standing in Robins & Sons general store between an artistically arranged pile of OMO washing powder and a stack of galvanised buckets.

  Lena and her husband Morris had owned the shop at the corner of Tailor Place and Ben Johnson Road for as long as Jerimiah could remember; they had also been leading lights in the Brady Boys’ Club in Durward Street before it closed at the outbreak of war. They now put their considerable philanthropic efforts into finding homes for Jewish children who had been smuggled out from the horrors across the Channel.

  Like many shops of its kind, Robins, which served several local streets, was crammed full of household essentials, from arsenic-coated fly paper to dried baby milk and everything else in between.

  Jerimiah had just arrived at the Methodist Hall to parade with the Home Guard the night before when the potman of the Old House at Home public house around the corner came into the yard. He’d had a frantic telephone call from Morris saying he was clean out of fags and urgently needed his monthly supply of cigarettes collected from the warehouse in Canning Town; his van’s radiator had sprung a leak and he wondered if Jerimiah could help.

  Jerimiah had been happy to oblige: it would give Samson an easy day plus it was thirty bob for half a day’s work.

  ‘Any time,’ Jerimiah said now, as Lena handed him his money. ‘I’ve given you my girl Mattie’s telephone number so just ring if you need anything else and she’ll pass on the message and,’ he pulled a postcard from the breast pocket of his waistcoat and offered it to her, ‘if you wouldn’t mind putting this in your window, I’d be much obliged. It’s tuppence a week, isn’t it?’

  She nodded.

  Jerimiah fished a shilling from his trouser pocket and handed it to her. ‘I’ll be back in six weeks with another.’

  Lena scanned the details of Jerimiah’s new business.

  ‘You’re branching out,’ she said, giving him an impressed look over her half-rimmed glasses.

  ‘I am.’ He touched his cap. ‘Good day to you, Mrs Robinstein, and give my regards to your husband.’

  After holding the door open so a mother with a toddler in tow could enter the shop, Jerimiah left. He had nothing much to do until the auction of unclaimed goods at Bethnal Green Council’s depot at three so he decided to head back to the yard. Usually, it would have been to have a swift half and a pie in the Lord Nelson, but today he just wanted to be alone and think. Think about the trouble he was in.

  Not so much how he’d got himself in such a mess, he knew that fine well, but how, if he was ever going to have a day of joy in his life again, he could persuade Ida to forgive him.

  Giving Samson an affectionate pat on the neck as he passed, Jerimiah freed the horse’s tether from the lamp-post, put his foot on the wheel hub, and leapt on to the front of the cart. Sensing the shifting weight, the gelding pricked up his ears as Jerimiah took up the reins. Kicking off the brake, he shook the leather straps and the horse set off along the familiar road towards home.

  Tucking his sheepskin jerkin around him and holding the reins lightly in his hand, Jerimiah put his feet up on the wooden guard, and rested back. He let his mind wander through the increasing list of people wanting to be moved over the next few weeks as Samson plodded homeward at his own steady pace with only the occasional tug on the reins to turn him as necessary.

  He was just wondering if he could squeeze in a quick delivery to East Ham the following Tuesday when he saw Ellen. She was sitting on the low wall by the bus stop at the corner of the street and when she spotted him she stood up.

 
Queenie and Ellen’s mother had become friendly through the mothers’ group at the church, so he had known Ellen more or less all his life. She’d been a pretty enough child who turned into a pretty enough young woman with gentle blue-grey eyes and a sweet temperament. They’d had a jig or two at Shamrock League dances with the odd kiss added in, but that was before he’d met Ida.

  Ida had joined Ellen’s class in the third year of elementary school when her family moved into the area. She and Ellen had become fast friends from the first, always together, arm in arm. And to him Ellen had always been Ida’s friend who popped in occasionally for a cuppa and a gossip. Even with the few moments of madness they had shared ten years before, that’s how Jerimiah thought about Ellen, nothing more.

  Pulling Samson to a halt, Jerimiah jumped down from the front seat as Ellen crossed the road.

  ‘Hello, Jerimiah,’ she said a little breathlessly, as she stopped in front of him.

  ‘Hello, Ellen,’ he replied, noting the half a dozen people waiting at the bus stop who looked their way. ‘I hope you’ve not been waiting long?’

  She shook her head. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘You most certainly do.’ Jerimiah took hold of Samson’s halter. ‘You’d better come inside.’

  Taking the key from his trouser pocket, he unlocked the padlock and threw open the double gates. Eyeing his manger at the far end of the yard, Samson shook his head and ambled through the gates without urging. Jerimiah stood back as Ellen followed the wagon in and then did the same, leaving the gates open so those on the other side of the road didn’t get the wrong idea.

  Catching hold of a dining chair from the pile of furniture he had for sale, Jerimiah carried it across and set it beside Ellen. She gave him a grateful look and sat down.

  Leaving her to catch her breath, Jerimiah replenished Samson’s manger with fresh hay and started loosening the horse’s harness so he could rest before his three-mile trot to Bethnal Green after lunch. Free of the wooden shafts of the wagon, the horse started munching on his lunch.

  Jerimiah lowered the shafts to the floor then, walking around to the other side of the horse, he glanced across Samson’s tufty withers at Ellen as he unbuckled the girth.