Bia's War (32 page)

“I’ve come to ask for your help,
Mrs Drinkwater.” she said, looking me straight in the eye as she
spoke. She didn’t seem as meek and mild as she had been the last
time I had seen her, when she was sporting the black eye the pig
butcher had given her. She stood upright and looked me square in
the eyes.

“I know my husband was making
life difficult for you, before he was killed in the raid and I’m
right sorry that he was doing that. I heard about him carrying on
in your backyard and making a fool of himself in front of all your
neighbours. I’ll not lie to you, Mrs Drinkwater, he wasn’t a
pleasant man, he was often more of a pig than the animals he
butchered in our shop but he was my husband and now he’s dead, so
I’m on my own. Our Albert was killed last year on the Somme, so
I’ve got no-one to provide for me, but I do now own the shop. I was
wondering if you could give me some advice on getting the business
up and running again.”

“She raised her hand to stop me
before I had a chance to speak.”

“‘I know I don’t deserve your
help, seeing as how it was my husband who was threatening you in
your own backyard, but you’re the only woman I know who’s running a
business on your own and I wondered if you would help me do the
same. My shop wouldn’t interfere with your profits, cos we would be
selling different things, so it wouldn’t be detrimental to your
business. Would you consider helping me? After all, my husband died
trying to save your husband and son.’”

“While she had been talking,
there had been so many thoughts rushing through my mind, but I
nearly lost all my hard-won self-control at her last statement. Her
husband hadn’t died trying to save my husband and son, he’d
murdered them both, but my husband had killed her son and then the
most innocent of adults had ended the pig butcher’s life. So much
hatred and evil had revolved around her husband, but she was
innocent of it all. Like me, she had lost her only child and
realised that she didn’t want to stay married to her husband, but,
unlike me, she had left him when he had taken to physically abusing
her. The black eye which was the last present her husband had given
her had been the last in a long line of injuries he had inflicted
on her, so didn’t she deserve a better chance at life? She was
prepared to work for it, so who was I to hold her back? I had made
my decision.

“I’d be very happy to help you,
Mrs Dennison.” I said. “I admire people who are prepared to work
hard and it’s about time you had a better quality of life. Would
you like to come back this evening when I’ve closed the shop and we
can go through some of the practicalities of running a
business?”

Mrs Dennison did come back that
evening and we covered such subjects as suppliers, staff, stock
levels and stock control. I was reassured to discover that she had
learnt quite a lot about butchery from watching the pig butcher as
he worked and that she had a young man who was already qualified as
a butcher ready to work for her. He was one of the few young men
still at home and able to work for a living because he had been
born with a gammy leg. For some reason it had never grown at the
same pace as his other leg and so he rolled rather than walked, but
it was enough for even the army not to want him as a soldier. He
became a very valued member of her team and the fact that he needed
a tall stool permanently placed behind the shop counter where he
could rest his leg when necessary didn’t interfere with his ability
to carry out his job. All her customers were prepared to wait a few
minutes more than usual when he served them, especially as he was a
particularly good butcher.”

“I gave Mrs Dennison what help I
could in re-starting her business, even to the extent of lending
her some money at a very low rate of interest in order for her to
re-stock the shop. Within a year of the night of the bombardment,
she was running a profitable business and was able to pay me back
the money I had lent her. She harboured no great ambitions, wanting
to simply be able to live comfortably on what she earned and her
life entered a new phase with the re-opening of the butcher’s shop.
She met a local pig farmer not long after the war ended and she
sold her profitable business, married him and went to live very
comfortably on his farm for the rest of her life. I was pleased I
had helped in turning her life around and very glad that I hadn’t
turned her away when she came to me for help. Of the four of us who
had been affected most by the night of the bombardment she was as
innocent as Annie and deserved her chance for a better life.”

“My businesses flourished
through that time as well. After the docks area had been cleared
and rebuilt by the authorities, I bought one of the new warehouses
which occupied a site almost, but not quite, on the ground plan of
the old one. The docks themselves were working again very quickly
after the night of the bombardment both because the country needed
the contribution those docks made to keeping the country going with
both food and armaments and because the dockworkers needed their
jobs. The railway station hadn’t been affected by the shelling at
all as though the Hun hadn’t realised that it was there and
consequently hadn’t aimed their shells at it, so food and other
commodities continued to be moved around the country by rail. I
still had my contracts with the local farmers, so my supplies
didn’t dry up, which had been a constant fear of mine throughout
the previous two years.”

“It was late 1917 when I had
purchased another shop, but this time in Eston. It was smaller than
the Queen Street shop, but had sufficient space to be able to carry
a fairly wide range of stock and I was very lucky in that I managed
to find a young man in his thirties ready and willing to work as a
manager for me. He had lost an arm in the fighting at the Front and
hadn’t thought he would be able to work and make a decent living
for himself, his wife and two small daughters ever again, but I
knew he was the one for that position as soon as he entered my
kitchen when he came for his interview.”

“He had suffered exactly the
same injuries as had William but, in every other way he was the
absolute antithesis of my late husband. He cared for his wife and
children incredibly deeply and always put them before himself; he
was a very hard worker although he was slightly limited because of
his injuries; his outlook on life was always positive and he never,
ever moaned or complained about his situation. I had employed him
because of his disability not in spite of it and, in some strange
way; I felt I was squaring the circle with a possibly vengeful Fate
over William’s attitude and behaviour. I had also taken on a young
boy to help David in the shop, a boy whose father had been killed
at the Front and his salary kept his mother and younger brother and
himself fed and housed, when an ungrateful country would have
ignored them and left them to starve. I couldn’t have explained my
motives to the rest of the world, but they made sense to me and
that was what was important.”

“Sammy understood all that I was
doing and his support, together with that of Annie, kept me always
facing in the right direction. He recognised the need in me to put
right what had gone wrong in my life and somehow make reparation
for the evil done by some of those around me. Sammy supported me
through it all, even keeping the secret of who actually owned the
shop in Eston, because I had deliberately had the name ‘Harrison’
put above the shop door, reckoning, and rightly, that few people
would recognise my mother’s maiden name. David was quite happy to
go along with my little whim and even encouraged the gossips to
think that the shop possibly belonged to him, although he didn’t
ever say that it was so.”

“Sammy and I continued with our
programme of buying houses and renting them out, although we now
moved away from houses near to the docks because I had a horror of
another visit from enemy warships, although they never did come
back during that war. We eventually put all of our properties into
the hands of a large property company based in Newcastle who, for a
fee, found tenants, arranged repairs and collected the rents. It
ate into our profits but I reckoned it was a good move because it
meant that no-one in the town had any idea of how much we owned or
how much money we had.”

“Sammy continued to work in the
iron works as the labour shortage was so acute by that time, but he
refused to do any overtime unless it was absolutely necessary. He
bought some waste land next to the railway lines and set out an
allotment, even going so far as to build a one bedroomed cottage on
the same land. It was good use of what used to be good farm land
before the railway came and the authorities looked more kindly on
developments in those days than they do now. When it was all
finished, Sammy went looking for the tramp we had met the night
that Simon died and installed him in the cottage, with instructions
to grow vegetables for me to sell in the shops. Old Walter took to
allotment gardening with a will, proving to be remarkably adept at
adapting gardening tools for his own use and set out the most
wonderful kitchen garden, even growing a few flowers to brighten
our days. He was eternally grateful to Sam for giving him a chance
in life when the rest of the world had abandoned him, but Sam
refused to take any credit for what he had done; only commenting
that there was a lot of good in so many people who only needed a
chance in life.”

“Sam was my rock all through
those dreadful days after Simon’s death. As he had promised that
night he was always available for help and advice and supported me
as I tried to get my life back together. I couldn’t have got
through that time without him. I admired him for his unswerving
devotion to family and friends, for his deep sense of right and
wrong, for his intelligence and good humour and, above all, for his
determination to gather every last speck of enjoyment out of life,
both for himself and for others. I wouldn’t have got through 1917
if I hadn’t had Sammy at my side, but he helped me through it all
and I came to rely heavily on his advice and help and unfailing
good humour.”

“It was that good humour of
Sammy’s that supported me through the Inquest into the night of the
bombardment. I was still very unsure about answering questions
about that night and I was terrified I would let something slip and
that the truth of the night’s events would come out, but the
Inquest was very delicately handled and I wasn’t asked any
difficult questions. I was only asked to confirm that I had owned
the warehouse and that my husband and son had taken shelter there
from the storm. The Inquest ruled that William, Peter and Simon had
been killed by the German bombardment and that Dennison, the pig
butcher, had been killed alongside them as he had tried to save
them from the shelling and the subsequent inferno. It seemed so
unfair to me that Dennison could be hailed as a hero, albeit a
failed hero, when he had in reality been a double murderer and the
reason for Peter’s death. I wanted to set the Coroner straight, but
I couldn’t do that without blackening Peter’s name and upsetting
Annie, so I had to grit my teeth and accept the pig butcher’s new
status in the town. It was only the strength that Sam gave me which
made it possible for me to rise above it and smile agreement when I
wanted to scream out the truth.”

“As that year rolled by, it got
easier to cope with day-to-day living, although I continued to miss
Simon with every beat of my heart. I was heartily glad to get
through 1917, even though the end of the year brought snow once
again to our town, reminding me of that dreadful night. The war was
still going on and it was another Christmas that saw our boys on
the wrong side of the English Channel, with little hope of them
returning home. The casualty lists lengthened and more families
lost husbands and brothers and sons and I’m sure I wasn’t the only
person who couldn’t understand the futility of it all. Life was
hard for everyone and shortages became the norm for everything;
food, raw materials, clothing, transport and, above all, hope. That
was when Sam got two telegrams, letting him know that both his
boys, George and Bill, were lost, ‘missing in action’, presumed
killed, at some unpronounceable place in Flanders, and all his joy
in life evaporated out of him and it became my turn to care for
him.”

“That was when I insisted that
he left his poky, little house and brought the other two of his
daughters to live with Hannah, Annie and I in Queen Street. We had
the attic bedrooms as well as the three on the first floor so there
was plenty of room for us all and I could make sure that he
remembered to eat every day. I knew that he didn’t sleep very much,
as I hadn’t when Simon was killed and I followed him downstairs one
night when I heard him moving around in the kitchen. The fire had
gone out because we didn’t have coal to waste and Sammy was sitting
next to the dead embers, sobbing his heart out as quietly as he
could. I crossed the room and wrapped my arms about his neck and
cried with him as he sobbed out his sorrow at the loss of his two
boys. I don’t know whether I was crying for his sons or for the
loss of my own, but I know that when we had both sobbed ourselves
dry, the huge rock which I had been carrying about in my chest all
year had reduced in size.”

Nana Lymer wriggled a little to
make herself more comfortable and then asked Victoria if she could
make her a cup of tea. Victoria managed to get into the kitchen,
brew the tea and collect some biscuits and then make her escape
back upstairs without either her mother or father entering the
kitchen. She could hear the usual level of noise from the shop and
guessed it was busy enough to keep her mother occupied and not so
busy that she was screaming for help.

As she re-entered her
grandmother’s bedroom, Victoria heard the unmistakeable sound of
the letterbox in the side door being opened and a heavy document
being pushed through it. It was an unusual occurrence because the
postman generally carried their post into the shop and gave it to
whoever had a hand free to receive it. Victoria placed the tea
carefully onto Nana’s bedside table and then ran lightly down the
stairs to remove the large brown envelope which was sticking out of
the letterbox. It was addressed to Mrs A Lymer so she carried it
back upstairs and handed it over to Nana, noticing how tiny Nana
looked in comparison to the large envelope, rather like a toddler
trying to manage a pint mug.