Chrissie's Children (7 page)

The opposing fly-half charged across and Matt fooled him with a change of pace that left him toiling along behind. The awkwardness was gone and he was running flat out now, graceful and
balanced. He covered the length of the field, swerved around the full-back and scored under the posts. His captain kicked the goal.

They restarted with only five minutes to play. Four minutes later the ball was passed out along the line of three-quarters. Matt guessed what would happen, abandoned his position and ran across
the field, looping behind the line. When the ball was dropped he swooped on it and scooped it up one-handed on the halfway line. He outran two men, swerved and jinked past two more and hurled
himself over to score under the posts again. Again his captain kicked the easy goal. They had won. Matt looked across to the touchline and saw his mother jumping up and down excitedly. He laughed,
happy now.

Chrissie gave him a substantial high tea in the restaurant of the Red Lion. She told him why she was there, eyeing him severely, and then asked, apprehensive, ready to wince herself: ‘Do
they beat you?’

He blinked at her. ‘What?’

‘The headmaster has a cane in his study, a wicked-looking thing.’

Matt laughed, ‘No! The old boy is dead set against that sort of thing. We think he keeps it there for show, in case some parents think he isn’t strict enough.’

‘Oh!’ Chrissie was relieved at that, anyway. ‘Well, your father will be pleased when I tell him about the game, but as to the rest . . .’

Matt’s thin face lengthened as he became serious. ‘The Head read you the lesson, didn’t he?’ He sighed, ‘Look, Mother, I don’t deliberately laze about and
skip work. It’s just that I keep finding other things I’d rather do. But I promise you, I will try.’ He meant it.

Chrissie slipped a half-crown into his hand as she climbed into the train.

‘I’ll try,’ Peter Robinson had told his mother when he set out before dawn. He hauled his bogey down to the shore and collected sea coal from the high tide
line. He hawked the coal around the streets then went back to collect more. He finally dragged the bogey home empty when it was past sunset. The lamplighter was going around the streets with his
long pole, a loop on the end, switching on the lights. Peter was weary but happy, with a few shillings in his pocket.

Men were spilling out of the yards that still had work, finished for the day, a sea of bobbing caps. As Peter passed Ballantyne’s he saw Billy Hackett, his seven-year-old half-brother,
begging at the gate: ‘Got any bait left, mister, please?’ ‘Bait’ was the sandwich lunch a workman took to the yard.

Peter seized Billy by the scruff of his neck, but gently. He remembered when he had begged for food in the same way when he was Billy’s age. He still ticked off the boy: ‘Your mother
would cry her eyes out if she saw you doing that, and if I catch you at it again you’ll get belted.’

Billy didn’t believe that, although he saw Peter was serious in his warning, and went with him, protesting, ‘I’m hungry.’

‘You’re always hungry.’ Peter ruffled Billy’s hair, already cut short so it stood up like a clothes brush. Then he saw Gallagher and McNally in the crowd coming out of
the yard. He hesitated, then remembered what Joe Nolan had said and chose discretion. He steered Billy on to the other side of the road and down a side street.

Billy demanded, ‘Where are we going?’

Peter told him, ‘To get some fish and chips.’

‘Great!’

Peter bought two ‘tuppenny lots’ – a penny fish and a pennyworth of chips in each. He and Billy took them home to Margaret Hackett and shared them out between the three of
them, filling up with bread and margarine.

Peter went to bed content. He would go picking coal again next day.

Chrissie had to change trains at Durham. She was in no hurry for her dinner after high tea with Matt, so she left the station and walked down the hill into the ancient town.
Tommy Johnson, Dinsdale Arkley’s predecessor as manager of her hotel, lived in Durham now. He had moved to a little house near the station after he retired. Chrissie took the opportunity to
visit an old friend.

Tommy and his wife made her welcome and wanted to feed her again but Chrissie laughingly refused the food they urged on her and settled for a cup of tea. She spent a pleasant hour with them,
talking of old times: how she had first met Tommy when she was a young barmaid, and later bought the hotel. Tommy said, ‘You saved my life then. That’s no exaggeration. The feller that
owned the place was going to sell up and it was a certainty the one that wanted to buy it would have sacked me. I’d never have got another job like that at my age and the worry would
ha’ killed me.’ His wife put her arms around Chrissie and kissed her.

It was late in the evening when Chrissie walked up the hill to the station. A stocky, broad-shouldered man carrying a small suitcase preceded her. As they came to the foot of the last steep bank
another man stepped out of the shadows and appealed to the stocky man, ‘Carry your case up to the station, sir?’

The stocky man brushed past him and said, not unkindly, ‘No, lad, I can manage this meself. Mebbe better than you can,’ because the other appeared sunken cheeked and hollow eyed in
the harsh light from the streetlamps, and walked with a limp.

Chrissie stared at the disappointed man for a long second, not wanting to believe the evidence of her eyes, thinking she must be mistaken. Then he glanced her way and she saw him flinch with
shock as he recognised her. Chrissie said, ‘Hello, Phillip.’

Phillip Massingham started to turn away but Chrissie caught his arm and held him. The arm felt thin as a stick in her grasp. For some seconds they were silent. Chrissie did not know where to
start. She said, ‘What are you doing here?’ then stopped, because the answer was obvious. He was trying to earn a few coppers by carrying the cases of passengers up the long haul to the
station. She amended: ‘I mean, I thought you were in America. Elsie wrote to me . . .’

Phillip tried to turn away and avoided her gaze. He muttered, ‘I suppose she told you I’d made a mess of things and run out on her.’

‘
No!
’ Chrissie tugged him around to face her again. ‘She said you’d been ill and very noble, gone off so you wouldn’t be a burden. I don’t think it was
noble. I think it was bloody silly. So – ’ she drew a breath – ‘how did you get here?’

He still would not look at her, but he answered, in jerky sentences as if the words were forced out of him, ‘There’s millions on the road over there. A lot die alongside the railroad
tracks. Or in the hobo jungles, places where they sleep on the outside of towns, under a bridge or a tree. I was on my own and the States was a foreign country to me. I wanted to come home. A
skipper of a ship let me work my passage and put me ashore at Glasgow. After that I walked or got lifts, heading south, but I’ve been here for three weeks. I remembered the people around here
were kind to me before – years ago, when I met you. So I stayed, I thought I’d build up my strength.’ He had paused after every muttered sentence and there was a longer pause now.
Then: ‘I had nowhere to go anyway . . .’ He petered out and stood silent, patient, beaten.

Chrissie swallowed then linked her arm through his and urged him into shambling motion, heading up the hill. ‘Come on. I’m not letting you go now I’ve found you – and by
a miracle.’

He went along with her, unquestioning except when she bought his ticket at the booking office and he asked, ‘Where are we going?’

Chrissie had foreseen this and answered, ‘To find you a bed for the night.’

He tried to pull away then, saying, ‘I don’t want to go to your home.’

‘You’re not. Don’t worry.’ Chrissie had guessed he would prefer anonymity to the Ballantyne house with its curious adolescents.

She took him to the Railway Hotel, installed him in a room and had a meal sent up on a tray. While he was eating that she took a taxi home and brought back a set of Jack’s pyjamas and a
dressing gown. Back at the hotel she took away Phillip’s clothes and threw them out.

Next day Jack went with her to buy some new ones for Massingham. ‘Poor devil,’ he said. ‘Wonder how long it will take for him to get back on his feet
again?’

‘I don’t know,’ Chrissie answered. ‘He needs a long rest and feeding up.’

Jack nodded, recalling Phillip’s gaunt face. ‘And some work, some aim in life. That’s just as important for a man like him.’

Chrissie thought she knew the answer to that, but she waited a week, putting off the moment, before she finally took the plunge and telephoned long distance to London. After she had got past two
layers of secretaries: ‘This is Chrissie Ballantyne. Do you remember me, Mr Tourville?’

His deep voice came down the crackling wire. ‘I remember you well.’ Chrissie could picture his smile, confident. ‘Very well . . .’

She stumbled on, ‘When we met you mentioned your interest in the film industry. Have you heard of a man called Phillip Massingham?’

There was silence for only a second then Tourville said, ‘Massingham Films.’

‘That was his company.’

‘He got an offer from the States, sold out and went over there. That was over ten years ago.’

‘Yes, but he’s back in this country now.’ Chrissie took a breath and asked, ‘Can you get him a job?’

Another silence, longer this time, then Tourville said, ‘I remember the work he did over here and I’ve seen some of the films he made in the States, too. But the last was three or
four years ago and it’s what he can do now that matters.’

‘I’m sure he does good work.’ Chrissie tried to sound certain, prayed she was right.

Tourville chuckled, then: ‘For you, I’ll give him a try. Where do I find him?’

‘You can write to him here.’ Chrissie gave him the address of the hotel then added, ‘I’m very grateful. If ever I can do anything for you . . .’

Silence, then another chuckle and, ‘I may take you up on that.’

March 1936

The club was only two or three streets from where Sarah Tennant lived, a few minutes’ fast walking through the rain. She hesitated for a moment at the foot of the steps
leading up to the big double doors. They flapped continually as working men in cloth caps and scarves shouldered in and out. Nervousness made Sarah swallow but she told herself that she could not
give up now she had got this far. She took a breath, climbed the steps and pushed in through the doors.

An elderly man sat at a small table in the hallway, a glass of beer before him. He rose to his feet as Sarah entered, and challenged the slight, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl: ‘Now then,
lass, what d’you want in here?’ But his friendly grin took the edge off the words.

Sarah answered, ‘I wondered if they were needing some help behind the bar.’

He shook his grey head. ‘Not as I’ve heard, but you’ll find the steward down the passage there, in his office.’

Sarah followed the direction of his pointing finger. There were two doors at the end of the passage and one of them opened as she came to it. The man who stepped out was hardly taller than
herself. She asked, ‘Excuse me, but are you the steward, please?’ Then she saw over his shoulder that the room he had come from was not an office. It was big, with a bare wooden floor,
and several young men were skipping and shadow-boxing. She could just see one corner of a roped boxing-ring.

The little man smiled and said, ‘No, lass. I’m Joe Nolan, the boxing trainer. The steward is in there.’ He nodded at the opposite door.

‘I’m sorry.’ Sarah turned away, blushing with embarrassment.

As Joe Nolan walked off up the passage he laughed and called back to her, ‘Never mind, lass!’

Sarah knocked at the door and a voice bellowed, ‘Come in!’ The steward’s office was a small cubby-hole and the steward almost filled it. A big, burly man with a wide, red face
and hard blue eyes, he stood behind his desk, glared coldly at Sarah and rumbled, ‘Aye?’

Sarah whispered, ‘I wondered if you wanted . . .’

He cut her off, bawling, ‘Can’t hear you! Deafened! Guns in Flanders!’ He tapped one ear with a thick finger.

‘I’m sorry.’ Then Sarah realised he would not hear that, either. She raised her voice. ‘I’m sorry! I wondered if you wanted any help in the club? I mean, part time,
at night?’

His glare was unwavering and he shook his head. ‘You’re too young to wait on. I can’t have a bairn like you pulling pints, it’s against the law.’

Sarah kept trying: ‘I can do cleaning. I’m really strong.’

Still he glared. Sarah decided she had failed, and was about to turn away when he guffawed, his wide, red face splitting in a grin. ‘I can see that. You’re a regular Samson.’
Then the grin slipped away as quickly as it had come. He said tersely, ‘Can you wash glasses without breaking half o’ them?’

Sarah answered eagerly, ‘Aye, I can.’

He grumbled, ‘If that’s true you’ll be the first. Can you start now?’ He had sacked his regular washer-up the previous night after she had dropped a tray full of glasses
after too many illicit nips of port. He saw Sarah nodding quickly and said, ‘Right you are, then. I’ll give you two and six a week.’

Two shillings and sixpence! Sarah knew she and her mother could survive with that extra money. She took off her coat and put on the apron she had brought with her, in hope. She washed glasses in
a little room behind the bar from seven till ten, then hurried home.

At first she was filled with elation because now she and her mother would be able to make ends meet, but then her worries began to crowd in on her again. She was afraid of Fannon and afraid to
tell her mother because it would upset her. Sarah knew she had to get away from Fannon somehow.

When she arrived home and opened the front door she heard her mother coughing. It was a sound Sarah had lived with for months, but she had not grown accustomed to it. It seemed to be tearing her
mother apart. The doctor had given her medicine but had said there was nothing more he could do. He had taken Sarah aside and told her, ‘Call me if she gets worse.’ Sarah wondered how
much worse her mother could get, and was afraid for her.