Ragamuffin Angel (41 page)
Connie nodded. The midwife had agreed to stay and nurture the infant through the night after the doctor had spoken to her, but the woman had made it clear she would have to leave at seven o’clock, having her own family to see to. ‘If he’s still the same’ – and she didn’t doubt Harold Alridge would still be beside himself; it was more his attitude with the child that had worried Connie the night before – ‘I’ll have a chat with the midwife about bringing her back here until Harold’s more like himself and can think straight.’
‘Aye.’ Mary inclined her head but her voice was taciturn as she said, ‘But you bring it back here now an’ you’ll be makin’ a rod for your own back, lass, you take it from me. It’s human nature to flog a willin’ horse. You’ll be stuck with it an’ he’ll take advantage.’
Oh, she hoped so. She did so hope so. Connie stared at her friend’s small, bespectacled face, and whatever Mary read there suddenly caused her to grin as she pushed her glasses further up her small snub nose. ‘Well, lass, I’ve said it afore an’ no doubt I’ll say it agen, there’s never a dull moment. If nothin’ else, there’s never a dull moment.’
Harold Alridge was more than willing for Connie to take his daughter until he was able, as he put it, to marshal his thoughts and make appropriate plans for the child’s future. He couldn’t have described how he felt about the child to a living soul, but even to look at it made him want to be physically sick. He had planted that thing in his Lucy and in the bearing of it it had killed her. After hours of torture, terrible, terrible torture, it had killed her. It was an . . . an abomination.
He watched now as Connie went about gathering all the paraphernalia Lucy had bought so happily over the last few months, and after a full minute of silence he had to force himself to say, ‘I am deeply in your debt. My. . . my wife was insistent her parents mustn’t have her child, but I’m really not in a position to have it here.’
That was ridiculous and they both knew it; a nursemaid would have fitted in easily at the hotel. But Connie merely nodded as though it was perfectly natural before she said, ‘I promised Lucy I would help, didn’t I, and there is plenty of room at home now we have moved. You must come every day if you like and as soon as you feel able to have her home please say, but in the meantime I’m happy to keep her as long as you want. I mean that.’ And then she straightened and stopped her buzzing about as she looked him full in the face and said, her voice soft, ‘Lucy would have wanted this so please don’t worry; I will take good care of her child.’
If it occurred to either of them that the child had been referred to throughout as purely Lucy’s, neither of them mentioned the fact, but when Connie carried the baby out to the horse-drawn taxi carriage Harold had arranged, two sober-faced housemaids following with the crib packed full of clothes and blankets and the two pap-bottles the midwife had sent out for, Harold didn’t ask to kiss his daughter goodbye and Connie didn’t suggest it.
And so it was that during the month of August, when more and more nations declared war on each other and the human casualties began to rise with alarming swiftness, culminating in the blood-bath at Mons when British, French and Belgian troops fell beneath the oncoming German cavalry, one little Sunderland bairn slept the month away surrounded by love and gently soothing arms.
Little Hazel – the name Lucy had wanted for a girl – rarely cried, but then she was rarely allowed to. From the moment Connie brought her down to the bakery at six-thirty in the morning until she went back upstairs with Connie and Mary any time after nine in the evening when they had finished cleaning and clearing away for the next morning, there were several pairs of arms reaching out to her if she so much as raised a squawk.
Ellen’s first job of the morning was to mix ten stones of flour with salt and yeast in five bath tins, and then, once the first bath tin dough had risen, to weigh out just over one pound two ounces for each loaf to be baked before working the loaves and then putting them to rise again. This was followed by brushing the bread with raw lard before putting the first batch, now duly risen, into one of the huge ovens. Once the ovens were full Ellen would prepare the tea cakes and fancy cakes, and until little Hazel’s appearance at Holmeside this stage of the morning proceedings had taken place at about half past six, when Connie and Mary had first come down. Now, however, Ellen had taken to arriving at the bakery at 4.00 a.m. and taking a break at six-thirty, which meant she was just in time to give the baby her bottle whilst the first quantity of tea cakes rose in their prover.
Mary, in particular, found this desire of her mother’s to hold and pet the infant more than a little surprising, due to the fact that Ellen had never shown a pronounced maternal streak with her own brood.
‘That’s different, lass.’ When Mary had voiced her feelings her mother had been quite unrepentant. ‘You can’t give ’em back when they’re yer own, an’ when ye’re workin’ yer fingers to the bone an’ knakky-kneed with exhaustion it’s enough to keep ’em fed an’ watered.’
‘Aye, I suppose it is.’ Mary had stood staring at the thin, scraggy figure who looked twenty years older than her forty-seven years and then she had gone across and hugged her mother for the first time in a long time. Her mam had been through it an’ all, and her da, bless them, and they had tried to do the best for all their bairns in their own way, she thought soberly. And since she’d started to take Wilf round for an hour or two some weeks they had made him so welcome – you’d think she was being courted by royalty rather than a porter who barely earned enough to keep body and soul together. How they would ever afford to get wed she didn’t know, not on Wilf’s money; not that he’d asked her anyway. But she had the feeling he would if his prospects were a bit brighter. And what would she say if he did? She had asked herself this more than once lately, and the answer was always the same – she’d face that when it happened. Wilf was a canny body, aye, he was, and she ought to be thanking her lucky stars he was so keen on her, but. . . that other side, the side that came with marriage. It scared her to death. But then so did the thought of Wilf going away to war and her never seeing him again.
There were more and more young men joining up to ‘teach that damn maniac, the Kaiser, a lesson he’d never forget’. Thinking he could go cocking a snook at the British and knocking hell out of them poor Belgians; he’d learn, he would, by the time they’d finished with him. It was the universal opinion of Britain’s working man and frequently expressed in the pubs and working men’s clubs, inciting more and more lads, who didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other let alone what it took to kill a man, to ‘show what they were made of’.
What men were made of was spread all over the battlefields, from Belgium in the north to Alsace and Lorraine in the south. In under a month the Germans had swept over most of Belgium, crossing the Sambre and Meuse and forcing a French retreat to the Somme, the last barrier before Paris. At the end of August the Russian army suffered a terrible defeat on the Eastern Front in a battle at Tannenberg, which raged for days in heavily wooded country along the borders of East Prussia.
Angry and shocked northerners read in their newspapers that General Samsonov’s Second Army had been cut to pieces in a hail of German shellfire. Something like 300,000 men were believed to have taken part in the titanic struggle, it was reported. Cavalry swept through the villages under a blazing sun whilst white-bloused Russian infantrymen recklessly charged emplacements to use the bayonet against the grey-clad German machine-gunners.
It made the British with their sense of fair play mad – fighting mad – and by the beginning of September almost as many men were joining the army in a day as were normally recruited in a year, and still Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, was asking for some 500,000 more. Lord Kitchener had ordered the number of training centres to be rapidly expanded, and those recruits without rooms in barracks would receive two shillings a day board and lodging in addition to their one shilling pay. And who could say fairer than that? And so the youth of Britain – and some not so young – continued to enlist. And the slaughter went on.
It was in the second week of September that Kitty McLeary paid an impromptu visit to her Aunty Ida in the East End. She was upset, she was very upset, and she needed the warmth and comfort of family and her Aunty Ida in particular. So when Vera, one of the daughters-in-law, met her at the door saying, ‘Eee, Kitty, it’s not your usual day, is it, lass? Anythin’ wrong?’ before continuing, ‘Mam’s bad in bed, she’s got the Father with her,’ she felt somewhat deflated.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Had a fall comin’ out of church last night of all places, I reckon that’s why the Father’s here this mornin’, likely feels a bit responsible,’ Vera whispered back, before adding, ‘Go on in, lass.’
‘Oh no, I won’t bother her now, Vera.’ She hadn’t been inside a church in years and the guilt weighed heavy on her at the best of times; the last thing she needed was to have to sit and make small talk with one of Ida’s priests!
But then the decision was taken out of Kitty’s hands as her aunty’s voice, as full-bodied as ever, called from inside the front room, ‘Vera? Who is it, lass?’ And at Vera’s reply of ‘Kitty, Mam,’ – ‘Tell her to come in then, we don’t stand on ceremony here.’
When Kitty pushed open the door she saw the priest was Father Hedley; she remembered him from her first days in Sunderland when she had stayed with her aunty and accompanied her to church. He was sitting in an armchair by the bed, drinking a cup of tea with a plate of well-buttered hot girdle scones resting on his lap, and his opening words were meant to put Kitty at her ease as he said, ‘Ah now, just what was needed. You’ll help me eat a couple of these scones, won’t you now?’
Kitty forced a weak smile as she said, ‘I’ve not long had me breakfast, Father.’ She had liked this priest, he’d been kind, had had the human touch – not like the other one who had constantly preached of the dire consequences of going against God’s holy will and of the tribulations and horrors that would fall on them all when they ignored His holy mass.
‘Aye, I said the same, and look where it got me.’
And then Father Hedley’s attempt at tactfulness was brought to nothing when Ida, ensconced in a knitted bed-jacket in an alarming shade of pink, said cheerily, ‘You remember me niece, Father? Me sister’s child from over the water? Good little Catholic she was afore she went to work for the Stewarts in Ryhope Road.’
Oh, her aunty!
‘Yes, I remember Kitty.’ Father Hedley’s voice was quiet as he stood and offered Kitty his chair despite her embarrassed protests, bringing another for himself from across the crowded, smelly room and putting it a foot or so away as he continued, a note of amusement in his voice, ‘I could hardly do anything else when you talk of her so often, could I, Ida? You’ve been very good to your aunty over the years, Kitty,’ he added softly.
He was nice, this priest. Kitty stared back into the gentle face watching her and this time her smile was more natural as she said, ‘She’s been very good to me an’ all.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
They continued to talk for some time, and Kitty was just on the verge of taking her leave when, in reply to her aunt’s lamentations about the bairns all over the world who would find themselves orphans due to the madness of one man – the Kaiser – Father Hedley said something that stayed her hand. ‘Aye, it’s a wicked thing, a wicked thing right enough,’ the priest said sadly, shaking his greying head. ‘There’s enough heartache in the normal way of things for any soul to carry. Mind, it’s the tragedies that bring out the greatness in folk, we mustn’t forget that. It’s done me heart good just this last week to hear of such a case.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘Aye. A young lass, one of the flock, Ida. You might know her. Connie? Connie Bell? She’s taken in a wee one when the mother died in childbirth, tragic, tragic. And the father gone all to pieces, so I understand.’
‘Connie Bell?’ It was Kitty who spoke and her voice was sharp. ‘You did say Connie Bell, Father? Her mother wasn’t called Sadie, was she?’
‘Aye, aye that’s the one. You know her maybe?’ It was Father Hedley’s turn to feel uncomfortable. He had just remembered Sadie’s connection with the family this woman worked for.
‘Not exactly.’ Kitty hesitated a moment before saying, ‘This girl is a little young to be looking after a child, isn’t she?’
‘Young?’ Father Hedley considered the word. ‘No, I don’t think so. She must be over twenty now and there’s plenty had one or two of their own by that age, besides which Connie was born with an old head on her shoulders, some bairns are like that.’ Father Hedley could feel a slight flush creeping over his face but he still said what he wanted to say. ‘The child had a rough start in life but she’s a survivor, is Connie, and a good girl too. Saved up for years and started a little business of her own and that takes some doing. No, I’d say she’s more than able to take care of a bairn.’
Kitty stared at the elderly priest for some moments, then bit on her lip. Dan was tearing himself apart over this lass; he had been for months and nothing would convince her that this latest – him joining up this morning – was because of Connie Bell. She’d been privy to the ins and outs of what had occurred; she’d had the story from all sides, Dan, Art and Gladys, even John, and she had felt all along that this report by the private detective Edith had hired was mostly conjecture. She had said as much to Dan after he had been to see the lass and he had agreed with her, whilst stating that it was too late now. He had acted like a jealous fool; he had accused her of all manner of things and Connie had made it plain she didn’t want to see him again. She hated him now and he didn’t blame her.
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