A Sister's Promise (27 page)

The swaying clanking and very draughty tram dropped them at Colmore Row, and as they walked up that wide road towards the Council House, Molly had great sympathy for the citizens of Birmingham. She could see in the gloomy half-light, the gaping holes, often filled with piles of masonry, charred roof beams, slates and other assorted debris where once buildings had stood.

Such indiscriminate and brutal destruction made her think again of her young brother and her grandfather, and she wondered what had happened to them. The tug of worry had never left her since her memory had returned, and she was frustrated that she was unable to try to find out anything and maybe be a measure of comfort to her young brother, She wondered too how long it would be before Will should decide that it was safe enough for her to leave. She knew she had to listen to him, though, and however worried she was about her family, she would never dream of defying Will and maybe putting his family in danger, though it was very hard to do nothing at all.

‘Now, remember you are my niece newly over from Ireland to help Betty with the baby,’ Ruby said.

Molly nodded because it was what had been decided the night before. But the official who listened to her explanation said, ‘Funny time to come, when the country is at war.’

‘That’s why,’ Molly said. ‘Betty is worried about coping with the baby in the raids and all.’

‘My daughter is living with me at the moment, you see,’
Ruby said, ‘but once the baby is born and she is returned to her own home, I am registering for war work and so Molly has come to give her a hand until she is properly on her feet again.’

‘And what do you intend to do then?’ the man asked Molly. ‘Will you return to Ireland?’

Molly shook her head. ‘I very much doubt it,’ she said. ‘I think I will look for a job here.’

The man seemed happy enough with that and he stamped the ration book and handed it over, saying as he did, ‘You have to register with a grocer, greengrocer and butcher to get your allotted rations. I suppose your aunt has explained all that to you already.’

Molly had been surprised when Ruby had said she was going to look for war-related work because she had not said a word about it to anyone, though Molly knew the country had a desperate need for women to enter the workplace. She asked her about it as they made their way home.

‘It’s not something I have just thought of,’ Ruby said. ‘It started when I read about the need for woman workers in the papers before Christmas. I mean, they even had vans with loudspeakers touring the areas, urging woman to do their bit. I know if my Harold had still been alive he would have encouraged me to go for it.’

‘Well, I think it’s wonderful,’ Molly said.

‘Point is, Molly, we have got to win this damned war,’ Ruby said. ‘There is no doubt about that, and so I would say it needs every man jack of us women that can to set to and not only free as many men as possible, but make sure they have the arms they need to fight effectively.’

Molly knew Ruby spoke the truth. ‘You are right. I only wish I could do something worthwhile.’

‘You need to have patience,’ Ruby said.

But Molly was worried because she knew she couldn’t stay with Ruby for ever. In fact, every day she stayed there she was jeopardising them all, but she hadn’t a plan in her
head about how she was to support herself once she left the house.

The new year of 1941 was just over a week old when Collingsworth decided to redouble his efforts to find Molly. As he confided to Will, she couldn’t be dead.

‘If she was, her body would have fetched up somewhere by now.’

‘Not if she jumped in the canal.’

Collingsworth thought about this for a minute or two, then said, ‘No, all right, if she jumped in the canal her body might never be found, though with the traffic using the canals since the war began it might well be. But I ask you, why would she go to the trouble of escaping just to do herself in? It don’t make sense. No, I feel it in my bones that she is alive and well, and to be in that state someone has had to be helping her. When I find out who that person is, they will wish they had never taken their first breath.’

Will tasted fear in his mouth that caused it to go suddenly dry, while his heart hammered in his chest, and not for himself alone, but for Betty and the gutsy Ruby. For a moment he wished he had never overheard that conversation between Collingsworth and Ray. If he hadn’t heard it, the deed would have been done and he would have known nothing about it. Molly could have been counted as one more casualty in a war that had already claimed many innocent victims. Hearing about it, however, meant that because he was an ordinary, decent human being, he had to do something, and in doing so endangered the lives of those dearest to him.

There was no course open to him but to go on with it now. Ray, when he had recovered sufficiently, had readily told Collingsworth all he knew about Molly that she had recounted to him in the shelter, and the things that Charlie had checked out, and so Collingsworth learned about the grandfather, who Ray found out had died, and the brother
who was probably in Erdington Cottage Homes in Fentham Road.

‘She doesn’t know this?’

‘Well, I didn’t tell her, and when she left she would have no memory of a brother or anything else much. If she has recovered herself sufficiently now, and her memory has returned, she will easily find out, as Charlie did.’

And so a watch was put on Molly’s grandfather’s house and another was sent to keep an eye out at the entrance to the Cottage Homes. Will knew of this, but told no one at the house in case it alarmed them. He told Molly only that she wouldn’t be able to make a move just yet a while.

A month later they were no further forward and the search was called off in the middle of February, though Collingsworth said he could feel in his bones that the girl was alive and somewhere in the city. Of course, he told himself, they wouldn’t have had to go to all this bother if Morris hadn’t screwed up so badly in the first place, and his frustration turned to anger directed against the man. He wished he had let the heavies go on and finish him off that time. Well, that could be remedied he thought; Ray Morris was nothing to him.

Ray was no fool and he knew the way the wind was blowing with Collingsworth. When he saw his heavies outside his flat, just after the search was called off, he shook with fear. He had barely recovered from the first beating that Collingsworth had authorised and he guessed that if he stayed around for this one, then it would be the end for him, and he climbed out of his window, down the drainpipe and was away.

Once in the streets, he had no idea where to go at first. His flat was closed to him now, so he just had the clothes he stood up in and the money in his pocket. He also knew too much for Collingsworth to just let him walk away. The bullyboys would be after him and he needed to put some distance between him and them.

To do that he needed money, and the only way he knew to get ready cash, without putting himself in much risk, was to head for his home in Sutton Coldfield. His mother was always pleased to see him and he could wheedle money out of her with no bother at all – he had done it often enough in the past – and then he could put real distance between Collingsworth and himself.

Collingsworth didn’t know straight away that Ray had done a runner, because there had been nothing packed up in his flat to indicate this and he had no idea that he had caught sight of his heavies at his door. He thought he was going about some business of his own, so it was over a week later when he tumbled to it.

Will was unaware of this, but he did know that they had given up the search for Molly at long last. He told her he thought it was safe for her to travel to Sutton Coldfield to try to pawn the cufflinks.

He had drawn a map for her of where the pawnshop was in relation to the train station. ‘You come down Station Road here,’ he said, pointing to the diagram with the pencil, ‘and you will be in Mill Street. You go along Mill Street to Victoria Road, and that’s where you will find the pawnbroker. I don’t know the name of it and couldn’t ask without raising suspicions, but you can’t miss it, because there are three balls hanging outside.’

Molly had no desire to go into a pawnbroker’s shop and get money for something that wasn’t even hers, but there was no alternative. She knew she would have to leave very early in the morning before most people were abroad to avoid being seen by many, and not return till after dark.

She said to Will, ‘When I am rid of the cufflinks, as I will have time to spare, I will see if I can find out anything about Kevin and Granddad as Erdington is so close to Sutton Coldfield. I promise I’ll keep a low profile.’

‘Oh, Molly!’

‘You can’t expect me not to do this, Will,’ Molly said. ‘That is unreasonable. You know how anxious I have been.’

‘I know,’ Will said. ‘But it is just when people start asking questions …’

‘I’m only asking the neighbours to start with,’ Molly said. ‘And you said the search has been called off now.’

‘It has, but …’

‘Will I can’t stay here for ever,’ Molly said gently.

Will sighed. ‘I know. But you will be careful, won’t you? Keep your eyes peeled.’

‘Course I will, and try not to worry so much,’ Molly said, but she knew that Will would fret every minute she was away.

The interior of the pawn shop was just as dark and dingy as Molly had expected, and she was heartily glad the place was empty. The door had pinged as she had entered the shop, and from the back an oldish man shambled out. He was dressed all in black in a suit that had probably been smart at one time, but was definitely shabby-looking. His face was lugubrious and long, and he reminded Molly of the man in the Jewish baker’s shop not far from her old house, where her mother might send her for fresh bread on a Sunday morning.

‘Can I help you?’ the man asked.

In answer, Molly withdrew the cufflinks from her bag and placed them on the counter. She saw the man’s eyes gleam. ‘What would you give me for these?’

The man took up an eyeglass to scrutinise the links more intently, though he hardly needed it. He knew that they were solid gold and worth a small fortune.

When he lowered the glass, he said, ‘Where did you get these from? Did you come by them honestly?’

How glad Molly was that she was wearing Betty’s best outfit – a coat with a fur collar and a hat of the same fur, and boots with high heels. For all they were a little big for her, she looked eminently respectable. She hadn’t wanted to take them at first and Will had told her not to be so silly. ‘If you go in dressed any old how they may think you have stolen the links and give you nothing.’

She was glad she had seen the wisdom of that in the end. Those clothes gave her the confidence to draw herself up to her maximum height, look the man straight in the eyes and without hesitation say, ‘Of course I came by them honestly. They were left to me by my father, who passed away recently, and now I need the money.’

Her face was so honest and open, the pawnbroker believed her totally. Molly wondered if her character was flawed in some way that enabled her to lie so easily and so well, for the pawnbroker said, ‘I’m sorry, miss, but we have to be so careful. I don’t want the police to come sniffing around.’

‘No, I’m sure.’

‘The cufflinks are very fine. Your father must have been a man of good taste.’

‘He was,’ Molly said, glad that she could say that so truthfully. ‘And my mother was too.’ And then she added, ‘They were killed together in a car accident.’

‘How tragic for you, my dear.’

‘That’s why I need the money. Will you take the cufflinks?’

‘I most certainly will,’ the pawnbroker said, mentally rubbing his hands with glee. ‘I can offer you six pounds on them.’

Six pounds was a fortune and Molly gave a gasp of pleasure. ‘I’ll take it gladly.’

‘I shall just write you out a ticket in case you should want to redeem them.’

‘I won’t, honestly,’ Molly said firmly.

‘Even so, my dear, who knows but that your circumstances will change tomorrow and you would want to redeem the keepsake your father left you.’

Molly let the man write out the ticket, for it was easier than arguing, though once outside the shop, she screwed it into a ball and threw it in the gutter.

She didn’t notice the man who had ducked into an entry as he caught sight of her. It was Ray, and he had the urge to leap on Molly straight away and strangle the life out of
her for all the trouble she had caused, but he could hardly do that in the middle of the day in the open street.

He wondered what Molly had been doing there, so well dressed and respectable-looking, and what the hell she had to pawn. A few minutes later he was picking up and unfolding the docket he had seen her throw away. He didn’t associate the cufflinks with Collingsworth, though he knew that she must have stolen them from someone, and he pocketed the docket until he decided what to do about it.

He also wondered what to do with the knowledge that Molly was in Sutton Coldfield. If he told Collingsworth, it wouldn’t be enough that he had seen the girl. He would only want to know when he was going to do her in. On the other hand, if his mother would stop acting so tight he could be away out of this, ready to start again at something else, and he would prefer that to killing anyone and so he let Molly walk away.

Molly decided to go first to Hilda’s as it was nearest to the station, and then Gravelly Lane and see if she could find out what had happened to her grandfather. She was well aware what she might find out that day would hardly be good news, and she alighted from the train at Station Road with some trepidation.

There was a stranger in Hilda’s house, who knew nothing of the previous occupants, or where they had gone, or even if they were alive or dead, and Molly turned away dispirited. There were strangers in her old home too and Molly found it slightly unsettling to see different curtains fluttering at the window.

The woman of the house, seeing Molly standing staring, came to the door. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes, I mean no,’ said Molly flustered. ‘I mean, I used to live here.’

‘Here?’ the woman repeated in surprise and then suddenly said, ‘Oh yes, I remember now, the neighbours have
mentioned you. I mean, I suppose it was you if you lived in this house. Did you lose your parents sudden, like, a few years ago?’

Molly nodded. ‘In a car crash.’

The woman nodded sagely. ‘Dreadful they said it was and then Hilda next door they said you was so pally with, like.’

‘Dead?’ Molly repeated. ‘Hilda is dead?’

‘Well, I don’t rightly know,’ the woman said. ‘She was real poorly, I know that well enough, and they came and took her away in an ambulance. The husband wasn’t coping, for all we did our best, and in the end one of the daughters came and took him away to live with them. I never knew what happened to Hilda.’

Molly felt a sudden sense of loss because whether Hilda was alive or dead, she was as good as dead to her. She could weep when she thought that she would never see that lovely round face again with the eyes that twinkled with amusement.

The distress was plain on her face and the woman said, ‘Sorry, must have been a shock, like, hearing it like that.’

‘It was,’ Molly said. ‘And yet … I thought that I had prepared myself for this sort of thing. Only now I know that you can never prepare yourself, not really.’

‘No, you can’t,’ the woman agreed. ‘Why don’t you come in a minute and have a hot drink at least? It’s cold enough to freeze a penguin’s chuff today, as my old man would say.’

‘No, thank you,’ Molly said, ‘It’s very kind of you but I need to see about my brother and grandfather.’

‘Well, I’ll not keep you if you are certain about not wanting that drink.’

Molly wasn’t sure when she started crying, she only knew that she couldn’t stop once she had begun. Two people asked if she was all right and if they could help, and she just shook her head and walked on, still crying.

At the door of the house that had used to belong to her
granddad, Molly took a grip on herself and scrubbed at the tears with her handkerchief before she lifted the knocker. There was no answer and she waited a few minutes and then knocked again. Then the woman next door came out.

‘No good you keep knocking, they are all at work …’ she began to say, and then as Molly turned to look at her she squealed. ‘Eeh, Molly. What a bloody sight for sore eyes you are, girl.’

‘What’s happened, Mrs Hewitt?’

‘Lots, duck and not good, most of it,’ Nancy Hewitt said sadly. ‘But we can’t talk on the pavement. Come in. I’ll make a brew and tell you anything you want to know.’

Molly didn’t say a word until the tea was before her and then she said, ‘Granddad’s dead, isn’t he, Mrs Hewitt?’

Nancy gave a brief nod and Molly gasped, and then, despite the shards of pain stabbing at her heart, she asked, ‘How did he die?’

‘He was killed while he was fire watching on top of a factory,’ Nancy said. ‘I had Kevin in with me. Stan always left him in whenever he was on duty and when the news came, oh, dear me, Kevin was bereft, quite distraught. The doctor had to be sent to give him something in the end.’

‘So where did he go then?’ Molly asked.

‘Well, I kept him for a few days, but with my own four and my mother-in-law here as well I just hadn’t the room for anything permanent,’ Nancy said. ‘When I told the Welfare people about you going off to live in Ireland with the maternal grandmother they were pleased and said they would contact her. They thought, well, we all thought, that she would take Kevin on too, with your granddad dead and all. I mean, he was family just as much as you were, and I agreed to look after Kevin in the meantime.’

‘But she didn’t?’

‘No. A woman from the Welfare told me the day of the funeral. They’d had a letter just that morning. And the grandmother had not only refused to take him in, but said
you both wanted nothing to do with him at all, no communication whatsoever. I tell you, this woman from the Welfare said she had seen some things in her line of work but she said the tone of the letter fair shook her up.

‘Anyroad that was that, and a few days later, the Welfare told me to take Kevin to the Children’s Receiving Centre in Summerfield Road. Must admit, it gave me a pang when I left him.

‘But, you carried on writing, Molly. I knew because I had the key for next door,’ cos I was sort of looking after the place until the new tenants took over. I used to collect the post and knew your handwriting. It did make me wonder if you had been told anything at all.’

‘No, I hadn’t.’

Nancy gave an emphatic nod of her head. ‘Thought as much. Downright wicked, that. Anyroad, I collected all them letters together and asked Social Services where he had ended up so I could send the letters on.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, see, the place in Summerfield Road is just where the kids is sent first off. They don’t stay there, like.’

‘So where do they go from there?’

‘Wherever they has space, I s’pose,’ Nancy said. ‘They did tell me he might be sent to Erdington Cottage Homes in Fentham Road. That’s what I told the man who came asking too.’

‘What man?’

‘Said he was from the council, seeing that the children were being cared for properly,’ Nancy said. ‘He were right respectable, nicely dressed and well spoken and all, and yet I felt … I won’t say exactly uneasy, but odd, like, that he didn’t know where the kid was sent and he had to ask a neighbour, and I said as much too.’

Molly had a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach and she said, ‘Can you remember when he came, this man?’

‘Yeah,’ Nancy said. ‘It was after that big raid, just after
Coventry copped it, the nineteenth, that were and he came the day after.’

Molly knew then that it had been either Ray or Charlie checking up on what she had told them about her brother, seeing that he was well out of the way and wouldn’t pose any sort of a problem.

She gave a shiver of distaste at the memory of what they had planned for her, but she didn’t really want to think about them and so in an effort to change the subject, she said, ‘So did you send the letters to Erdington Cottage Homes then?’

‘No, Molly,’ Nancy said, ‘I sent them nowhere, because I wasn’t let.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Because in that letter your grandmother forbade it.’

‘D’you know, Mrs Hewitt, Kevin must have felt totally abandoned.’

‘I know,’ Nancy agreed. ‘And that grandmother of yours must be a very wicked woman.’

‘She is,’ Molly said with feeling, leaping to her feet ‘But now isn’t the time to go into it. I must go and see Kevin.’

‘Not without a bit in your mouth you don’t,’ Nancy said, pushing Molly back in the chair. ‘It is too cold to go traipsing about the streets on an empty stomach.’

Molly stood before the large ornate gates, which was the entrance to the homes, her stomach in knots and her mouth so dry it hurt to swallow. Even knowing of the callous and cruel nature of her grandmother, she could scarcely believe that she hadn’t told her of her grandfather’s death, that she hadn’t been allowed to grieve for the loss of him and attend the funeral to pay her deep respects to the man that she had loved so much.

But then, she reminded herself, hadn’t her grandmother done the selfsame thing with her own mother, Nuala, when her father died because she considered her responsible for
his death? She knew full well why she had reacted as she did towards Kevin, though, and that was because she would consider him a sinner now, a heathen. Molly didn’t know whether her grandfather insisted that Kevin go to Mass or not, but she guessed not, for if the Church had any input in their lives, Kevin wouldn’t have been put in a cottage home, but in one of the Catholic homes, probably Father Hudson’s. She didn’t care about all that, and she remembered guiltily that she hadn’t been near a church herself since she had arrived in Birmingham.

But what mattered now, in fact the only thing that mattered, was Kevin and letting him know that she was still around and that she loved him and would do all in her power to care for him as much as she was able. She pulled on the bell rope to the side of the gates. There was a large building just inside, a sort of lodge place, Molly presumed, and a man emerged from that and approached the gate, which he unlocked and opened.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes, I am here to see my brother, Kevin Maguire.’

The man’s sombre expression didn’t alter at all and he asked in flat tones, ‘You got an appointment?’

‘No,’ Molly said. ‘I have only just found out that he is probably in here.’

The man appeared to think about this for a minute or two before saying, ‘You had better come in and see Mr Sutcliffe, the superintendent, and the matron.’ He threw the gate fully open as he said, ‘Follow me.’

The man took Molly into the Lodge and left her in a little room off the hall with a curt, ‘Wait here.’

Molly looked round the unprepossessing room and thought it a dismal place, with its beige walls and brown paintwork, and just bench-type seats around the edge to sit on. But then she wasn’t there to judge the décor, she told herself, and turned at the sound of footsteps approaching.

The superintendent was quite a small and dapper man,
with thinning brown hair slicked back and sporting a trim moustache on his upper lip. He looked even smaller beside the stout and rather formidable matron in her starched uniform.