A Whisper to the Living (3 page)

‘Be quiet, Mother.’ Tom stood and raised his hand. ‘Hush your noise. Give the man the benefit of the doubt.’

‘And what about ’er?’ Mrs Hyatt jerked a thumb in my direction.

‘I’ll watch out for her,’ answered Tom.

‘Aye, well. You’d best grow eyes in t’ back of your ’ead, then.’ With this final remark, Mrs Hyatt grabbed her coat from its peg and, picking up a tall white jug from the dresser, announced her intention to go to the outdoor licence for a drop of stout.

A few minutes after her departure, Freddie went out to the air-raid shelter – which he now used as a pigeon house – to tend his prize birds, leaving Tom and me as sole occupants of the kitchen.

I gazed into the fire once more, wondering yet again if I could trust my instincts and place my faith in Tom. Most grown-ups got mad if you asked questions. Those who didn’t get mad treated you as if you were soft in the head or something. But Tom never got mad with me. Would he now? There was only one way to find out. Without turning my head, I asked, ‘Is he a bad man, Tom?’ The clock ticked noisily.

‘I don’t know, Annie.’ This was promising. Adults were usually so positive, so sure of their ground – an admission of indecision could be a step in the right direction.

‘What did he do?’ I asked carefully.

He came slowly round the table, then squatted down on his haunches in front of me. ‘Annie, love – I can’t answer your questions. But I will say this to you. If anything ever worries you – anything at all – you come straight to me. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘You know I was there when you were born. If it hadn’t been for me . . . well, never mind all that now. You’re almost a little sister to me, Annie. If anything ever happens to you . . . if anybody . . . well, you just come straight to your Uncle Tom.’

‘I will.’

‘No matter what?’

‘No matter what, Tom.’

Footsteps in the narrow lobby made him rise to his feet. My mother, flushed and smiling, burst into the room, her eyes sparkling as she cried, ‘He’s coming home Friday, Tom. Ooh, I can’t believe it. He’s near ten stone again – he was only seven and a half when he got back. I’m that excited – we must have a party. And guess what, Annie?’

I stared at my radiant mother as she threw her handbag down onto the table and ripped off a white cotton glove to reveal a narrow gold band with a small shining stone set into its centre. ‘Your Mam’s engaged – you’re going to have a new Dad, Eddie’s going to be your Dad. Isn’t that great news?’

I looked from Tom to my mother, then back to Tom.

‘Well? Have you nothing to say, Annie?’ she cried.

My hands were shaking as I rose to my feet and I gripped the fireguard tightly as I positioned myself next to Tom, leaving the table as a barrier between us and her.

‘He will not be my Dad,’ I heard myself say. My mother, seeming to deflate visibly, sank down onto one of the ladder-backed kitchen chairs.

‘No, I know he won’t be your real Dad, but he’ll be your new Dad.’

‘NO. NO. HE WON’T.’ I stamped my foot on the hearthrug. ‘You are choosing him, Mam. I’m not. If I wanted a new Dad, then I’d choose my own. And I don’t want one, anyway. Especially him. He’s ugly and . . . and . . .’ I groped for words, then Mrs Hyatt’s statement, after echoing in my head for a split second, fell out of my mouth. ‘He’s got sly eyes,’ I announced.

The silence that followed was nearly deafening. My mother looked almost pleadingly at Tom, but he turned his back to reach a pipe from the rack to the side of the range.

‘What can I do with her, Tom?’ For answer, he shrugged his shoulders.

‘She can’t run my life for me. I’m too young to be . . . well, you know, to be without a husband. I need to settle down again and I know he’s right for me. And I might not get another chance, being as I’ve got An . . . being as I’m not on me own.’

Tom stuffed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe before turning to face her. ‘It’s a bit soon for the lass, Nancy. Billy’s not that long gone, maybe the child needs to serve out her mourning.’ The implication that Nancy herself was not mourning did not miss its mark.

‘You can’t mourn forever, Tom,’ she said quietly. ‘And kids gets over things quicker than what we do. She’ll get used to him.’

Tom stared at my mother for some time before answering, ‘If you say so.’ Whereupon he turned to light a spill at the fire.

‘You don’t like him, do you, Tom?’

‘I’ve no feelings either way, Nancy. You know him better than I do, though I daresay there’s folks round here as have known him longer. Anyway, what should you care about the opinions of a lad not yet twenty?’ He applied the spill to his pipe, puffed for several seconds then swung round to face her once more.

My mother turned her gaze on me. ‘You coming home then, Annie?’

I kicked at the rug with the toe of my clog.

Tom nudged me gently. ‘Get on home then, lass.’

I made up my mind there and then that should my mother become Mrs Eddie Higson, then I would move in with Tom, Freddie and Mrs Hyatt. It seemed a simple enough solution. If my mother loved Mr Higson more than she loved me, then I would go and live among people who really cared for me.

It had not yet occurred to me that I would not be allowed to put this plan into action. But, having found Tom, the one adult in whom I could place a measure of trust, I went home if not happy then at least comforted, believing I had discovered some if not all of the answers.

Like many ugly babies, I had developed into an acceptably attractive child. Although I outstripped my peers by a good couple of inches in height, a fact that often made me a target for Sister Agatha’s wrath (since I was the most visible victim in my class), I was blessed with an abundance of soft yellow curls and wide-spaced green eyes. Other assets included two sets of fine strong limbs that made me an adequate competitor in games involving either sex and a respected adversary when it came to combat of any kind.

Of course, like most females, I was not satisfied with my appearance. My mouth was too big for my face, my nose silly, small and freckled, my knees were lumpy, making the long calves appear thin, while my elbows always protruded at odd angles from the few skimpy dresses I owned.

Nevertheless, I was reasonably at peace with myself, having established my leadership at school, having learned to live with, if not to like, the various compromises required by the adults who dominated my life.

My mother was fond of me; of that I was fairly sure. During the long years of war we had shared a bed, shared our hiding place under the solid squareness of the kitchen table, we had divided equally between us our odd meals of dried egg and blackened potato. We had also pooled our fears, my mother often turning to me with her worries, making me far older than my years.

Our dependence was mutual; often I played the role of comforter when she returned from long fruitless hours of queuing for food or when, in the dark hours, she would turn to me in her loneliness, her tears wetting my pillow as well as her own. For her part, she nursed me through those black days after my father’s death, never once leaving my side until I had wrung myself dry of grief. ‘We must stick together now, Annie,’ she would say. ‘You’re all I’ve got and I’m all you’ve got.’

I began to plan our future, seeing it mapped out before me with all the clear simplicity of a five-year-old mind. ‘I’ll never leave you, Mam. When I’m fifteen, I shall be a hairdresser and we’ll get a shop. You won’t have to work in the mill any more and I shall keep your hair pretty for you.’ And she would smile her sweet sad smile, looking all the while into the flickering flames of our ill-fed fire, wondering, probably, about her own future.

She was only twenty-seven when my father died, a beautiful, tiny woman with Titian curls, grey-green eyes and the sort of walk that made men turn and stare when she passed by. I knew that my mother was pretty, but I never thought of her as young or marriageable. We had had a Daddy, my Daddy. Never in my wildest imaginings did I think that she might want, or need, to replace him.

So when she turned to Eddie Higson, she turned away from me, threw away all my carefully thought out plans, dismissed me almost, from her thoughts, from her heart and from her life. She stopped loving me, stopped caring about me. And no amount of cajoling or bribery on her part or on his could alter my very set opinion.

I became louder, more boisterous at school, seeking trouble, accepting my punishments almost gladly, because I was no longer lovable and deserved to be punished. My teachers, alarmed at this change in me, sent for my mother.

‘She has gone wild, Mrs Byrne. We have all tried.’ Sister Agatha raised her eyes ceilingward, her hands rattling the large rosary that hung from her waist, because she held no whip at this moment. She never held the whip when a parent visited. ‘We in the convent have offered umpteen decades to implore our Blessed Lady to intervene.’ She turned her steely gaze on me. ‘But nothing at all seems to be setting this . . . this poor child back on to the right path.’

My mother squirmed in her chair, putting me in mind of Willy Walford from the Cottage Homes, an orphan boy who came for his lessons with his head shaved against the nits. He was a squirmer, was Willy Walford. And here was my mother carrying on the same way, the only difference being that she was bigger and had a full head of hair.

I knew I was getting angry. My mother might not love me any more, but I didn’t want old Sister Nasty Knickers (as we called her on the sly) making my own Mam squirm like somebody from the orphanage. I fixed my gaze on the statue of the Immaculate Conception with the blue-glassed night light burning at its feet.

‘Have you anything to say for yourself, Annie Byrne?’

I shifted my eyes towards the black-robed figure which, silhouetted against the window, looked like a grim monster from hell.

‘No,’ I replied, my voice clear and high.

‘No, what?’

‘No, Sister.’

The nun came round the desk and stood in front of me and my mother and although this left but a few inches of space between her and us, I determinedly held my ground, though my mother did scrape her chair back a fraction, which made me even more angry and impatient.

‘Did you or did you not write those . . . foul words on Sister Immaculata’s blackboard?’ There was a long silence.

‘Answer the Sister, Annie.’ I felt very annoyed with my mother. Although her accent was never strong and her speech was virtually free of the usual Bolton colloquialisms, here she was, trying to talk dead posh just because we were in old Nasty Knickers’ office. My mother was afraid of Sister Agatha! Well, so was I, but I wasn’t going to let it show.

‘Yes. I wrote them.’

Sister Agatha’s lip curled into a snarl. ‘Then I suggest you learn to spell, girl. The undergarment you mentioned in your scribblings begins with a K. And my name, young lady, is Sister Agatha.’

My mother’s face was bright crimson by this time. No doubt she had already been informed that I had inscribed on the blackboard ‘Sister nasty nickers is a wicked old wich.’ It had only been for a dare anyway. Peter Bates had promised me his biggest, silverest bolly-bearing if I’d do it. And I’d done it, while Peter Bates had not, as yet, fulfilled his side of the bargain. I would deal with him later. Even if he did have irons on the soles of his clogs, while I had only rubbers on mine, I’d deal with him. I knew where to kick the boys to make it hurt.

‘Come on now, girl. Do your catechism,’ Sister Agatha was now saying. ‘Show your Mammy that we’ve taught you something, at least. Who made you?’

‘God made me.’

‘Why did God make you?’

‘God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.’ I paused for breath.

‘And have you any idea at all of what that means, Annie Byrne? It means that you are to be a good girl for the sake of your immortal soul.’

My immortal soul was something I had not yet managed to come to grips with. Sister Immaculata had drawn an immortal soul on the blackboard only last week. It was like a balloon. When it was full of grace, it was round and coloured in with bright pink chalk. When it was empty, it sagged and had no colour at all. Except, of course, for the black spots of sin covering it like an attack of measles. And there again, you only got the measles if the sins were venial. Should your misdemeanours be mortal, then the soul would surely be black right through to the core – black, deflated and totally without shine.

Of the location of my immortal soul I was unsure. Perhaps it was in my chest where I got the bad feelings when I was angry; perhaps that swelling, choking sensation I got was my immortal soul erupting and letting all the grace drain away. But I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I knew that my soul was in my belly where I often suffered pain after a bout of naughtiness. The whole thing was a terrible worry and I tried not to dwell on it too frequently.

‘And you will be making your First Confession soon, Annie Byrne. After which you will receive the most Blessed Sacrament of all, the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.’

I felt sick. I had no notion of cannibalism and therefore no opinion on the subject, but this did not sound quite right to me. I looked pleadingly towards my mother, who was no help at all. She just sat there staring at her shoes, her face grim and still crimson.

Sister Agatha tutted her annoyance then, warming to her subject, went on in a shrill tone, ‘My goodness, child, have you not a grateful bone in your body? Jesus Christ suffered for you, died for you . . .’

I didn’t hear the rest, because here was something I could latch on to, something I appreciated and understood. Jesus Christ was a hero. He had died for me. Well, my Dad had done the same; he was a hero too, he had died for me, for all of us, in fact. Why, he’d even died for old Nasty Knickers, though I felt sure she didn’t deserve it. My Dad had died so that the Nazis would stop bombing the mills and our houses. They were hopeless shots, Nazis. Four or five times they’d had a go at Trinity Street Station and missed. And they didn’t just miss a bit, they missed by miles.