Faded Dreams (16 page)

   How could he have hated her so much?  She’d been good to them over the years, lent them money with no hope of getting it back, put food on their table that must have cost her a fortune on the black market. And where would their home have been without her shabby
second
-hand furniture that had become
their
shabby
third-hand
furniture?

   She’d been a bad bugger at times but he’d been far worse. He’d let her die…he’d killed Florrie’s own mam… his kids’ own granny. He half-expected her to sit upright and accuse him one final time...
I always knew you were a bloody
wastrel Joe Pomfret but I never thought our Florrie had wed a murderer
...
and it would serve him right if she
did.

  
He stumbled back to the kitchen muttering that his chest was bad again and he was too ill to go to the funeral, then coughed violently and spat a mouthful of phlegm into the fire to prove it.

*

   Florrie could smell gas even before she opened the front door. Holding her nostrils between finger and thumb she hurried through to the kitchen to find Joe lying on the floor with his head resting on his neatly folded jacket inside the gas oven. She turned off the hissing taps, flung open the back-door and ushered the children into the yard before turning her attention to him.

   After moaning, ‘Let me die,’ a few times he opened first one eye and then the other. ‘Where am I, Florrie?’

   ‘Where the hell do you think you are, you barmy bugger?’

   She quickly recognised this as another of his false deathbed scenes. He’d had plenty of time to do away with himself while she was up at the cemetery burying her mother and following it up with a boiled ham tea at The Emporium yet here he was, three hours later, not even unconscious. He must have stood at the front door until they came into view and then gone in the kitchen and made himself comfortable in the gas oven.

   Silly sod! She didn’t know what had triggered him off this time and was past caring. Ellen had gone off into one of her fainting fits at the sight of him and would need a cup of water and a Cephos when she came to. What a bloody pantomime!

    With trembling fingers she removed her hat and stared wearily down at its black lacy veil. Her mother would have been glad she’d worn it today, she wouldn’t have wanted her best hat to go to waste after all that work she’d put into titivating it up.

*

    Mabel's carved dresser and her rocking chair were the only things worth selling to the second-hand shop, but they fetched enough to pay for a little holiday, which was just what the family needed, in spite of the government’s posters asking, “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” They were lucky enough to find lodgings as  many of Blackpool’s boarding houses were already occupied by troops and war-workers.

   Granny Sefton’s well-worn portmanteau was crammed with the children's buckets and spades and a change of clothes for everybody, and two brown paper carrier bags were filled with food rations, the rule being that if you stayed for longer than six days you ate your own rations.

   The landlady at the lodging house behind the Tower provided nothing more than clean beds and a willingness to conjure up three meals a day with whatever her lodgers brought to her kitchen. In the small but cosy dining room fellow-guests sat down to Spam and chips, while Joe beamed with pride as his family tucked into a fattened-up cock-chicken, (stuffed and roasted a day earlier,) home-grown potatoes carrots and peas.  He had to admit that this Sunday dinner tasted better than when Florrie cooked it… mind you, back home his dinner had generally been over a pan of hot water for an hour or two by the time he got to it.

   Wartime Blackpool with its concrete anti-invasion blocks on the sands and air-raid shelters on the cliffs was a far cry from how it had looked to Joe and Florrie on their brief honeymoon a few years earlier, and yet the bustle and sense of urgency in the air made it a vibrant place to spend a week, far better than the soot-encrusted mill town they had left behind.

   Mornings were spent building sandcastles on the beach or joining clusters of civilians watching allied servicemen carry out precision drills on the Promenade...always followed by a round of warm applause.

   Afternoons for Joe and Florrie were spent in a sea-front pub, with Betty in charge of distributing crisps and lemonade to the younger two as they sat on the pub doorstep.

   The beach was strictly out of bounds at night but Joe, having no time for daft rules like that, strolled along there every evening to see if the German Invasion had begun; Florrie told him he was a nosey bugger who would get himself locked up if the police caught him.

   On their last evening she found a cardboard shoebox under the bed beside the portmanteau. She peeped inside, quickly replaced the lid and sank on to the bed.

   ‘Well I’ll go to buggery! I’ve seen it
all
now…what the hell’s a snake doing in there?’

   ‘Sh, not so loud, I bought it this morning when I went for a newspaper. It’s a grand ‘un Florrie, isn’t it? Now what’s all the fuss about?’

   ‘If you think we are taking a snake back to Blackburn, you’ve got another think coming… the house is already a damned menagerie.’

   It was after midnight but Joe had no choice but to return the snake. The pet shop was locked and silent but undeterred, he scaled the six feet high backyard wall and carefully placed the shoebox behind the door of the outside lavatory. It was only on counting the backyard doors on his way back to the street that he realised he had left the snake in the wrong yard. Chuckling to himself he could hardly wait to tell Florrie. He crept into their room where the children were sleeping three to a bed and sat next to her on the other double bed.

   ‘Guess what, love? That snake… I’ve left it at the wrong house.’

   ‘Oh no,’ she groaned, ‘somebody’s gonna get a shock tomorrow morning when they have their pants round their ankles and they see
that
thing.’

   ‘You're telling
me
… if they were bunged up
afore
, they’ll shite through the eye of a needle after seeing that snake.’

   With his outrageous antics he could generally bring a smile to Florrie’s face and this time she found herself giggling with him long into the night.

   The following day they got the train back to Blackburn, back to work, and for the children back to school.

*

   School had become an increasingly exciting place for Betty and Ellen even before the war had started. It was a bit of a nuisance remembering to carry your gas mask but there were compensations. Air-raid drills, for example, when they were marched from their lessons to be reassembled in the safety of the church crypt where the roll was called to make sure nobody had been left behind to be bombed or gassed. Then before being marched back upstairs, and for no reason at all, they were given packets of Horlicks tablets and bright orange sticks of barley sugar to enjoy.

A few days before war was declared there came a huge upheaval.
The school was to be used as a First Aid Post for the duration so blackboards, desks, teachers and pupils were duly transferred to the nearby Baptist Church.

   Young strangers, refugees from France and Holland and even some from Germany arrived. Simon and David, the German twins, joined Ellen’s class but she never spoke to them… well they were boys, after all. What was more, they spoke in a funny language so they wouldn’t know how to answer if she
did
speak to them. They lived in their Uncle Walter’s big house near the park so she guessed they must be posh , millionaires or something like that.

   Ellen decided that as soon as she was sixteen and grown-up, she would marry Simon…or David... it wouldn’t matter which since they both looked exactly the same. And so, unable to tell them apart, she added
both
names to her nightly prayers.

   Johanna from Holland, with her big brown eyes and thick brown hair
was immediately
included in Ellen’s group of friends but only because she was a girl.  S
he
didn’t always understand what was going on either and always looked sad and  never laughed when the others laughed.

   Each morning during Scripture lessons the foreign children sat on a long row of chairs in the corridor. Ellen didn’t know why, but it seemed a pity that they never got to learn about Jesus like everyone else. Still, she’d have plenty of time to tell Simon - or David - all about Jesus once they were married.

   By the time the two weeks of the summer holiday were over, the idea of an early marriage to one German twin or the other had been pushed aside and an English girl, the daughter of missionaries, had become her best friend.

   One day, after school, Mary invited her to tea. Ellen followed her up the winding garden path  rubbing the back of her hand backwards forwards across her mouth  -  she couldn’t walk into a posh  mansion like
this
and then show herself up with her mucky face. She was flabbergasted that the Kingsleys could afford the big house across the road from hers. It looked like they got  paid more money than her dad just for going to Africa and talking about God.

   Open-mouthed, she gazed around the dimly lit parlour. It might have looked dreary with its brown panelled walls if it hadn’t been full of such unusual objects. Brightly coloured handmade pottery sat on the coffee table and bookcase. Vividly patterned rugs lay neatly positioned on the polished wooden floor...one even hung on the wall above the fireplace and Ellen had never seen anyone do that with a rug before!

   She caught her breath half in fear half in wonder at the life-sized carved leopard sitting in the far corner, its lips curled back to reveal enormous teeth the colour of pale custard. But there was worse to come. She lowered her gaze and her mouth dropped wider at the sight of a real tiger - or was it just its skin - stretched out in front of the fire, its once savage head rearing defiantly.

   Cluttered with relics from Mr Kingsley’s travels, the house was strangely quiet, almost church-like. Ellen was completely spellbound by the time he came into the parlour, or “the sitting room” as Mary called it, followed closely by his wife.

   ‘Well,’ he boomed, ‘so this is Ellen?’

   Ellen was convinced she was in the presence of God or at least someone who knew him better than she did. She was struck by the similarities between
him
and Mrs God, or Mrs Kingsley, as she really was.

   Both were tall and thin, plainly dressed, grey-haired with brown leathery faces, and identical tiny spectacles balanced on large bulbous noses. They could easily have been taken for twins…if  Mrs Kingsley’d had a beard and moustache!

   Ellen sat on the edge of the crimson moquette couch ,“or settee” as Mary called it, and shyly accepted a tiny fish-paste sandwich. She’d only seen butties
this
small when she’d made them for her doll’s picnic. Her mother had always told her it was bad manners to eat more than one sandwich when you were invited out to tea but whenever she’d had butties before, they’d always been proper butts – thick-cut and as big as doorsteps. To her relief the plate was passed round twice more.

   Next came a home-baked jam sponge and this time her slice was so big she struggled to cram the collapsing cake into her mouth. Not wanting to lick the jam off her dirty fingers, she wiped them discreetly with all the poise she could muster on the sides of her dress before taking the cup of tea from Mrs Kingsley.

   She was mesmerized by the flowery pattern on the china cup and saucer. The Kingsleys must be millionaires just like them Rothschilds her mother talked about, or how else could they afford all these pots that matched each other? At
her
house there wasn’t a cup or saucer that matched anything, thanks to her dad throwing them at the wall from time to time.

    She had never drunk from a cup and saucer in her life but remembered how the film stars did it and stuck out her little finger in the same fashion.  She had seen Granny Sefton pouring scalding hot tea from cup to saucer to cool it before slurping it noisily from the saucer, or sipping it through tight lips straight off her teaspoon, but that wasn’t what
real
posh folk did… it was just Granny putting on her airs and graces again.

   Her visit came to an abrupt end with the ringing of the doorbell followed by the sound of Betty calling out to Mrs Kingsley.

   ‘Tell our Ellen to come home quick, tell her our dad’s dying.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

   Ellen felt dizzy and wished she’d turned down that third paste sandwich. Grabbing her coat and satchel she ran across the street. Earlier that day her father had nothing more than his usual chesty cough but he now lay dying with a cold slimy dishcloth on his forehead. Her mother was crying which was enough to set Billy off, and Betty was shaking from head to foot.