Keep the Home Fires Burning (11 page)

A couple of days after Bill had left, Polly said to her sister, ‘Look, Marion, if you won’t take any
money off me then at least let Tony and the twins come to our house dinner time for a bite to eat. You and all, if you want.’

Marion hesitated and Polly said, ‘Go on, Marion. Don’t be so stiff-necked.’

Marion knew Polly could afford to give the children something wholesome. Then bread and scrape for tea, and thin porridge for breakfast would matter less. On the other hand rationing was coming in soon and everyone would get only so much. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to take yours,’ she said.

‘We don’t know what’s going to be rationed yet,’ Polly pointed out. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. But now Pat, the boys and Mary Ellen eat their dinners in their works’ canteens and so I’ll save on any rations they would eat.’

‘All right,’ Marion said. ‘Thank you, Polly. We’ll see how it goes. But you just see to the children. I’ll get something for myself.’

Polly knew she probably wouldn’t. She ate not nearly enough, in her sister’s opinion, but at least Polly could ensure that the children were well fed once a day.

The children were delighted when Marion told them they would be having dinner at their Auntie Polly’s. They all loved her crowded and untidy house. Aunt Polly wasn’t one to be always on about people washing their hands either, and as there were barely enough chairs to sit down at the table, which was mostly cluttered anyway, they
usually stood around with food in their hands, which the Whittaker children thought wonderful.

‘The only downside to all this,’ Marion said to Sarah one evening when the younger ones were in bed, ‘is that Tony sees even more of Jack.’

‘Jack isn’t that bad,’ Sarah protested.

Marion shook her head. ‘I’m worried about Tony and the power Jack seems to have over him. I’m very much afraid our Tony needs a father’s hand to stop him going to the bad altogether.’

In a way she was right, because Tony missed his father so much it was like an ache inside him. Richard, sitting in Bill’s chair when he came in from work and rustling the paper he often bought on the way home, as his father had, just annoyed Tony more and he tended to gravitate more to his uncle Pat and envied Jack that his father came home each night.

In fact, he envied Jack for many things, not least because he could think up such exciting things to do. When Tony was with him and up to some mischief or other, he didn’t miss his father half as much.

At some point, most boys tried to hitch a ride on a horse-drawn dray, and Jack and Tony had done so many times. The journeys never lasted long because the driver was either aware they were there or a passer-by would alert him. ‘Oi, put yer whip be’ind,’ they would shout, and any clinging boy would drop swiftly from the cart before the driver’s curling whip could bite into his skin.

However, when Jack suggested doing the same to a clattering swaying tram Tony thought it the most exciting thing he had ever done. Neither the conductor nor the driver noticed them, but they were thrown off into the road when the tram took a corner at speed and they narrowly missed being crushed to death by a delivery van, whose driver swerved just in time to avoid them.

Marion was told this by the policeman who delivered the shamefaced and tearful Tony home, but his contriteness was wasted on her when the policeman told her that the delivery driver might never be the same again. After hauling her son inside, she paddled his bottom with a hairbrush and wished she could administer the same punishment to her nephew.

All the other children were shocked at what Tony had done and both Richard and Sarah told him so.

‘Haven’t you got a brain in that bonehead of yours?’ Sarah railed at him. ‘Didn’t you think for one minute what a stupid idea it was?’

Tony was silent. He was feeling incredibly miserable. His bottom felt as if it was on fire and his stomach yawned emptily, for he had been sent to bed without anything to eat. It hadn’t seemed stupid when Jack suggested it. It had seemed daring, and that’s what he tried to tell his sister. Sarah looked at his brick-red face and his eyes still so full of tears that his voice was broken and husky but she felt no sympathy for him.

‘Well, that one daring act might have cost you your life,’ she cried, and added witheringly, ‘Oh, you must be very proud of yourself.’

‘I ain’t,’ Tony sniffed. ‘I never said I was proud of it. I just thought it would be a bit of fun.’

‘Fun!’ Sarah repeated as if she couldn’t believe she had heard right. ‘Well, do you realise that you have probably cost that van driver his job? He more than likely has a wife and children dependent on him and, according to what the policeman told Mom, he might never be able to drive again. So you think on that, Tony Whittaker.’

Tony did think about it, though he couldn’t help wondering what Jack felt about it all now. He knew that his family would probably not be half as harsh with him. Uncle Pat might even laugh at his antics. He often did. That was always a great puzzle to Tony.

The thin porridge the next morning didn’t even go part way to assuaging his appetite but he did feel ashamed when he noticed lines of strain on his mother’s face that he had never seen before.

‘I have enough to worry about as it is, with your dad away and us barely having enough to live on,’ Marion said to him as she cleared away his bowl. ‘You can at least try to be good and listen more to me and less to Jack Reilly.’

‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ Tony said sincerely. ‘It was just a lark but I won’t do it again.’

‘See you don’t then,’ Marion said grimly. ‘You could have been killed.’

‘I know. I really am sorry.’

‘All right then,’ Marian said, mollified a little. ‘We’ll say no more about it.’

Jack and Tony gave trams a wide berth after that little episode. It had given them quite a scare, not that either of them ever admitted that.

Marion opened the door the following Saturday morning to see the priest, Father McIntyre, on the doorstep. She was a little flustered because she hadn’t been expecting him, but she smiled and said, ‘This is a surprise, Father. Come away in and I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘No, Marion,’ the priest said stiffly. ‘This isn’t a social call.’

‘Oh?’ Marion felt her stomach sink as she looked at the priest’s disgruntled face and suddenly she knew that her younger son had something to do with Father McIntyre’s ill humour. Jack and Tony, like most Catholic boys of their age, had been trained to serve at Mass, and they should both have been serving at early Mass that morning. ‘Did the boys not turn up, Father?’ Marion asked anxiously.

‘Oh, they were there, all right,’ the priest said. ‘And afterwards showed total disrespect for the Church and the sacrament they had just taken part in.’

‘What did they do, Father?’ Marion asked fearfully.

‘They each had a water pistol and I caught them filling them up from the holy water font.’

‘Oh, Father!’ cried Marion, shocked. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s not your place to be sorry,’ the priest said. ‘It’s up to your son to be sorry and mend his ways. Jack Reilly admitted that both pistols were his and that he had given one to Tony.’

‘Somehow Tony seems to lose all sense of right and wrong when he’s with that boy,’ Marion said. ‘I will deal with him, Father never fear. Where is he?’

‘Knowing that your husband is away, I have taken them both to Pat Reilly’s house to let him deal with the pair of them.’

‘Thank you, Father,’ Marion said. ‘I will be away now to fetch Tony home.’

And she did fetch him and berated him every step of the way. That night she wrote to tell Bill all about his recalcitrant son.

Bill smiled when he read that because he could well imagine Pat saying it, and knew he himself would have taken the same line and viewed it for what it was, a boyhood prank. He also knew that Marion would never see it like that. She was really upset over it.

A week after the last upset with Tony, Marion pawned the silver locket Bill had bought her the year after they were married and the delicate chiming carriage clock that had been Lady Amelia’s present to her when she’d left service to marry Bill. It had pride of place on the mantelpiece in the parlour for it was easily the most beautiful thing the family owned. Marion shed bitter tears when she was alone for she hated having to part with such treasured items.

Sarah missed the clock almost straight away, but she said nothing because she could see from her mother’s sad face and woebegone eyes that she was heart sore that she’d had to take it to the pawnbroker. When her grandparents had been coming to tea every Sunday, one of the jobs that Sarah did on a Saturday was to dust the parlour. She used to dust that clock with very great care indeed, always afraid that she might drop it or damage it in some other way. Now she thought the mantelpiece looked terribly bare without it.

And so it did, but Marion needed the money. She was a week behind with the rent again, badly needed coal, and she would liked to have her leaky
boots resoled. Also she wanted to pick up a trinket for the children for Christmas, which was only two weeks away. She knew that it would be a poor one for the family this year, with no presents and nothing in the way of festive food either. She made a bit of an effort, though, and brought the little Christmas tree down from the loft, and hung around the garlands the children had made over the years.

Sarah knew the twins still firmly believed in Santa Claus, though she wasn’t sure about Tony, and she thought she had better warn them about the lack of presents. ‘Santa won’t be visiting us this year,’ she told them one evening.

They all looked at her in amazement. Tony wasn’t sure that he believed in Santa any more. Jack said it was eyewash and it was just your parents filled your stockings and that, but though he usually accepted everything Jack said as gospel truth, Tony had held on to the belief that this time he was wrong and that his bulging stockings of the past had been filled by a genial man in a red suit and sporting a long white beard.

At Sarah’s words he saw at once that that wasn’t so. Jack had been right all along and that the hunting knife that he had coveted for so long would not be in his possession by Boxing Day, this year anyway.

‘Why ever not?’ asked Magda.

‘It’s because of the war,’ Sarah said.

Magda and Missie looked at one another. They
knew all about the war, but that surely had nothing to do with Santa. ‘What about the war?’

‘Well, if he set off with a sleigh full of toys the Germans could capture him,’ Sarah said.

The twins’ mouths dropped agape at that terribly shocking news. They knew how horrid the Germans were because the adults were always talking about it and what they got up to, and the girls often saw the headlines of newspapers on their way to school. So Santa in German hands didn’t bear thinking about. What if they hurt him, killed him, even? Magda thought she wouldn’t put it past them. They were as bad as it was possible to be.

So when Sarah said, ‘He thought this year he is safer staying where he is at the North Pole,’ the twins nodded solemnly. They were disappointed, but keeping Santa safe was paramount in their minds.

Marion had in the end taken the five shillings that Polly had pressed upon her so that the children could eat well on Christmas Day. To give the twins at least something to open Christmas morning she also got the two girls a couple of wind-up toys from a man in the Bull Ring selling them from a tray round his neck, but she could find nothing for Tony, and neither could Sarah and Richard. They all felt bad about that.

Then after breakfast on Christmas Day, Richard dropped a cloth bag into his young brother’s hands. ‘Happy Christmas, Tony.’

Tony’s mouth dropped open with astonishment. ‘Your marble collection,’ he said with awe, his voice choked with emotion, because it was the one thing that he had coveted for ages, which Richard would never let him touch.

Richard knew better than to comment on Tony’s reaction and instead he said almost nonchalantly,
‘You may as well have them. I never play with them any more.’

Tony tipped them out onto the table and examined them. He knew he’d be the envy of his friends when he hit the streets with those. Not even Jack had so many, or such fine ones.

‘Thanks, Richard,’ he said. ‘I’ll take real good care of them.’

Marion was glad that for Tony and the twins, a little magic of the day was retained.

After dinner Polly came around with a bundle of clothes for them all. She had a warm coat for Tony that she said was an old one of Jack’s, but Marion had never seen Jack wearing anything like it and it was rather big for Tony. However, before she was able to say anything at all, Tony exclaimed in delight and put it on, very glad to have it because the only coat that fitted him was very thin and did nothing to keep the cold out.

‘This is great,’ he said, and Marion saw his eyes were shining so, though her eyes met her sister’s over Tony’s head, she said nothing.

There were also scarves, gloves and smart berets for the twins, and a smart cap with ear flaps, the same brown as the coat, for Tony. Polly even had a couple of dresses and a cardigan for Marion she said she had no use for. Marion was moved to tears by her sister’s kindness and generosity. When she tried to say this, however, Polly waved her thanks away almost impatiently.

‘Think nothing of it. How many times did you help me out?’

‘That was nothing,’ Marion said. ‘It was just a bit and, anyway, I didn’t do it so you would feel you had to pay it back.’

‘And I didn’t do it for that, like a kind of duty,’ Polly said. ‘You made life much more comfortable for me and mine for years and years.’ She put her hand over Marion’s. ‘Now, through no fault of yours or mine, the positions have reversed a bit. It pleases me to be able to help you. Let me do it while I have the means to do so.’