Remember Me (9 page)

‘That’s another old Blackpool family,’ Dan told
her. ‘John Bickerstaffe was the first chairman of the Blackpool Tower Company, so I believe.’

‘I would love to go for a sail,’ said Maddy, just a little regretfully. ‘I noticed that there are steamboat sailings from the North Pier as well. But I’m not on holiday, am I?’ She gave a shrug and laughed. ‘I’m here to provide the entertainment – well, some of it – not to be entertained.’

‘Never mind,’ said Dan. ‘There’s always another time. Perhaps, sometime, you might be able to have a holiday here, who knows?’

‘Who knows?’ she echoed, and they smiled a little shyly at one another.

‘But you do have some free time, don’t you?’ asked Dan. ‘When you’re not on the stage… I would love to show you some of the other parts of the town. That is, if you would like me to?’

‘Yes…yes, I would. Thank you very much.’ She nodded, but not as eagerly as she might have done. She was, in truth, delighted at the prospect, but she had only just met this young man and she knew it would not be seemly to appear too enthusiastic.

‘But aren’t you busy as well,’ she enquired, ‘with your job in the shop and the boarding house? You said it would be a busy week.’

‘Ye-es, but I am allowed a little time to myself, at this time of the day, for instance. Sometimes I go to the library to study for a couple of hours, but you know what they say about all work and no play?’ He gave a sudden grin. ‘And what the eye doesn’t
see the heart doesn’t grieve about – that’s another good old cliché – and I doubt if Mammy will be any the wiser.’

‘Oh dear!’ Maddy laughed, looking at him quizzically. ‘I don’t want to be responsible for you neglecting your studies. I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble with your…er…mother.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ he replied. ‘I noticed that you smiled before when I referred to her as Mammy,’ he went on. ‘I know it sounds a little odd to some people, but it’s because we’re Irish, you see. Well, my mother is, so that makes me half Irish; but my brother and I were born in Liverpool.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Maddy. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

‘You didn’t,’ he assured her. ‘It’s what she’s always liked to be called, and so it’s what we’ve got used to, Joe and me.’

‘I shouldn’t have smiled though; it was tactless of me. But it did sound a little strange. In Yorkshire, and in Lancashire too, we usually say “me mam”. But I’ve been trying to speak more…“proper like”,’ she laughed, ‘since I went on the stage.’

‘Come along,’ said Dan, holding her elbow and guiding her towards the tramtrack. They waited whilst a huge Dreadnought tram trundled past, and then waited again at the kerbside, which separated the tramtrack from the road, for a couple of motor cars and a horse-drawn landau to pass by.

‘My mother was from Galway originally,’ Dan
continued as they started to walk back northwards. ‘Her family – quite a large family – moved “across the water”, as they call it, when she was a little girl, and they settled in Liverpool, like a lot of Irish folk do. That was where she met my father, eventually.’

‘And does your father help to run the boarding house along with your mother?’ Maddy asked.

‘Oh no, Daddy’s a builder,’ replied Dan. ‘He got a job as foreman with a local firm soon after we arrived here. It was Mammy who was hankering after moving here and running a guest house, and Daddy gave in to her. People usually do,’ he added. ‘She’s a very strong-willed woman.’

‘It’s usually the women who run the boarding houses, isn’t it?’ said Maddy. ‘Where we’re staying Mrs Jolly is in charge, and Mr Jolly has a job as a joiner. He just helps out now and again.’

‘Yes, that’s generally the way of it,’ replied Dan. ‘This area here…’ he pointed to the right-hand side of him, ‘it is what you might call the – er – not quite so salubrious part of Blackpool.’ The long gardens of the houses, it appeared, had been taken over by stalls of different kinds. ‘They used to call this part South Beach,’ he continued, ‘but now folks are starting to refer to it as the “Golden Mile”.’

Maddy stared, fascinated, at the various booths and stalls they were passing. Stalls selling rock, oysters, ice cream, or mugs and cans of strong tea; ‘Quack’ doctors proclaiming the efficacy of pills to cure all ailments, and hair restorer which would
make hair grow on the baldest of scalps. There were sideshows where skittles were knocked over, hoopla games, and coconut shies, and a gaudy tent in which sat a fortune-teller.

‘Apparently a lot of these stalls used to operate on the sands,’ Dan told her, ‘but then the Town Council stepped in and made it illegal, so now they’ve all moved over here. With the consent of the house owners, no doubt, but it is becoming the more seamy side of Blackpool. Another day we could walk further north, perhaps, towards the cliffs at Bispham?’

‘Yes, that would be very nice,’ agreed Maddy. She was looking forward already to meeting Daniel Murphy again, but a niggling thought had come into her mind. She hoped that his mother – his ‘mammy’ – would not step in and spoil her son’s plans. She sounded a real tyrant if ever there was one!

The Golden Mile ended near to Central Station, and it was there that they turned off the promenade to make their way back to the boarding house area of central Blackpool. Maddy needed to collect her thoughts and to have a rest before setting out again for their first-house performance. Daniel walked with her to the house on Albert Road, where they said goodbye.

‘Until Sunday then,’ he said. ‘If I pull my weight on Friday and Saturday, then Mammy can’t object to me taking an hour or two off on Sunday. Our
shop – Mr Grundy’s shop, I should say – is closed for Good Friday, so I will be able to spend more time at home. And you have a matinée performance on Saturday, don’t you, Maddy?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ she replied, ‘but only one house in the evening.’

He took hold of her hand and held it for a moment. ‘Till Sunday then,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll be waiting by this gate at half past two. Goodbye, Maddy. It’s been lovely meeting you, and I’ve enjoyed our time together.’

‘Me too,’ she said, as he gave her hand a gentle squeeze, then quickly walked away.

He was there, waiting, as he had promised, at two-thirty on Sunday afternoon. Maddy had tried to warn herself not to be disappointed if he did not turn up. She had a funny feeling, somehow, about that mother of his. But there he was, and she felt her heart give a leap and a broad smile spread over her face at the sight of him.

‘Madeleine…’ He took hold of both her hands, his green eyes looking intently into her own. ‘I’ve been looking forward so much to seeing you again.’

‘Yes…so have I,’ she murmured.

‘Come along then, let’s go.’ He crooked his elbow and she, a trifle hesitantly, tucked her hand inside it. He was a few inches taller than herself, though by no means a very tall young man; five foot seven or so, with a jaunty spring to his step that matched well with her own.

‘You managed to get away without any trouble, did you?’ Maddy enquired. ‘You’ve done your duty at home?’

‘Yes, in more ways than one,’ replied Daniel. ‘I helped with the breakfasts, and with the midday meal, and in between I managed to go to Mass…to church,’ he added, as if correcting himself.

Maddy, however, had already come to the conclusion that Dan must be a Catholic, a Roman Catholic, to be more precise. Her grandfather had told her that the word ‘catholic’ meant broad or wide-spreading, and that the term ‘the Catholic Church’ really meant the worldwide church and did not just refer to those people who called themselves Catholics. There were, indeed, some members of the Church of England who called themselves Anglo-Catholics, so it was all very confusing. With regard to Daniel though, everything had pointed to it. His mother was Irish, from a large family, and probably his father’s family was from Ireland too, way back, as they had an Irish name; she had heard that there were many of that faith in Liverpool. It did not matter to Maddy though; it did not matter two hoots what religion he was; but she guessed that it might matter a great deal to that mother of his if she were to discover that her son was hobnobbing with a Methodist. ‘Mammy’, no doubt, was looking forward to the time when her son would be teaching in a Roman Catholic school. All these thoughts had been running through her
mind since Thursday, when she had first met Dan, and so his admission had come as no surprise to her.

‘Yes, I realised you were probably a Catholic,’ she said now, in quite a matter-of-fact way. ‘Which church do you attend?’

‘The Church of the Sacred Heart on Talbot Road,’ he told her. ‘It’s a very beautiful church; it was designed by the famous architect, Pugin.’

Maddy nodded, although she had never heard of him. ‘I’ve been to church too,’ she said. ‘Well, chapel, I should say. I went to the one near Central Station. It’s called the Central Methodist Chapel, not very original, but it’s a very friendly welcoming place. They sang some of my favourite hymns and I took Communion as well. So I feel much better, sort of, inside myself.’

‘And that is how you should feel.’ Dan smiled at her, pressing her arm a little closer to his own. ‘I have been thinking quite a lot about what your grandfather said, Madeleine. You told me, you remember, how he said we were all serving the same God? And he is quite right. I believe there is far too much dissension between folks who call themselves Christians…

‘Anyway, let’s not worry ourselves about that at the moment. Where shall we go? Have you any ideas?’

‘Northwards, you said, didn’t you? I haven’t seen very much of Blackpool yet, apart from the town itself and the area around the North Pier,’ said
Maddy. ‘Nor have I ridden on a tram. I must do that sometime before we move on.’

‘And that will be next Sunday, I suppose?’

‘Yes, that’s right. We’ll be off to the inland towns of Lancashire. A week in Wigan, then Burnley and Bolton, before we go back to Yorkshire. And then, at the end of May, we’ll be starting our summer season in Scarborough. We’ll all become Pierrots again then,’ she laughed.

‘I would love to see that,’ said Dan. ‘I shall have to see if I can sneak away for a day, or a couple of days…’ He sounded doubtful though. ‘Anyway, we’ve got a week, haven’t we, to acquaint ourselves with the delights of Blackpool, before you go? There’s a lot I haven’t seen myself yet; I’m still what you might call a newcomer. So…let’s head off for the cliffs. Are you ready for a good walk?’

‘Yes, of course,’ agreed Maddy. The sun was shining and the clouds riding high in the sky boded no threat of rain. There was a fresh breeze, which she had come to realise was almost always present in Blackpool, especially on the seafront. ‘God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.’ The words of a poem she had learnt at school came into her mind as she strode along briskly at Daniel’s side, but she kept her thoughts hidden away. All was well, though; all was very much right in her little world at that moment.

They headed for the promenade, passing the North Pier which had become very familiar to
Maddy during the past week. To the north of the pier a good deal of work had been done, widening the promenade area and strengthening the sea defences. The Hotel Metropole, an impressive red brick building with turrets and balconies, stood in solitary splendour, the only hotel to have been built on the sea side of the promenade.

‘That’s one of the oldest hotels in Blackpool,’ Dan told her. ‘It was called “Bailey’s” at one time and it’s been there since the mid eighteenth century.’

‘Mmm, fancy that,’ said Maddy, knowing she must try to show that she was impressed or, at least, interested, which, of course she was. She could have told him, though, that Scarborough’s history went back much further than that. It had been a popular spa resort since the seventeenth century; and many moons before that Richard the Third was said to have stayed there – in the public house which was now known as King Richard the Third’s House – when he was not in residence at Scarborough Castle. But she did not say any of this.

They passed many large hotels, in particular the magnificent Imperial Hydropathic Hotel, although Maddy felt that they could not compete with the famous Grand Hotel at Scarborough.

Their walk took them along what was called the Middle Walk, a wide promenading area built below the level of the road and the tramtrack. Further down was the Lower Walk, where a strong sea wall had been constructed to keep the tide at bay. But
this did not stop the waves cascading over when there was a particularly high tide, drenching everything and everybody in close proximity. It would have been thought that the stormy weather would not be agreeable to visitors, but there were some, so Dan told Maddy, who came especially to view the raging sea. Indeed, one of the postcards she had bought to send to the folks at home in Scarborough was of a ‘Stormy sea at Blackpool’.

The sea was relatively calm though, on that sunny Sunday afternoon. The tide was in and they could hear the waves beating against the sea wall, but it was a pleasant sound, accompanied by the cries of the seagulls wheeling high above them. Blackpool was justly proud of its three-tiered promenade, and also of its cliffs at the north end of the resort, which were completely man-made. They had turned off the main promenade onto the cliff path, which was becoming gradually steeper as they climbed.

‘I found it hard to believe at first that these cliffs were the handiwork of man,’ said Dan, ‘…and not of God,’ he added. ‘But I suppose the whole of Blackpool is a tribute to man’s ingenuity. I must admit that there is no natural beauty here, apart from the sea and the golden sand, of course. Blackpool, in its early days, must have been very flat and featureless. I’ve never been to Scarborough, only seen pictures of it, but I should imagine it had a head start as a resort, didn’t it, with regard to the contours of the land?’

‘I hadn’t really thought about it,’ replied Maddy. ‘But yes, of course you are right.’ She had, in fact, been comparing in her mind the two resorts. She reflected on the appeal of her own hometown with its two magnificent bays, one on either side of the headland, and its attractive woodland walks and gardens that had been constructed on the cliff sides to the south of the resort. Compared with all that scenic beauty, Blackpool seemed stark and bare. A mass of concrete and red brick, and she had been struck by the absence of trees near the seafront. Maybe the fierce winds would have destroyed them, but the trees in Scarborough had managed to survive the gales.