After the Storm (49 page)

He had sketched the boy quickly and in pencil while Grace looked over his shoulder. It was good, she had said and then sat down on the suitcase propped against the compartment door. It was splitting with age and she had set her feet apart and hunched herself over her knees.

She had asked whether the Germans would really use gas and he had laughed and said of course they wouldn’t, hoping that she would not hear that Mussolini had used it in 1935 against the Abyssinians. So far though, the Germans had not used it, they used bombs instead. He lifted his head from the warmth of her shoulder and checked the wall clock. Fifteen minutes past eleven.

‘Come on, lass, up you go. I’ll get me boots out and me clothes for the morning.’ He laid his pit-clothes over the fender so that the early winter chill would be kept at bay by the small ash-banked fire.

They had called in to see Annie when they had reached Newcastle, then continued on to Wassingham and it seemed as though they had never been away; the slag-carts still churned upwards and there was that smell in the air. But as they walked on to Grace’s home, they passed white-painted kerbs and lampposts and heaps of sand which some children had spread on the pavement and turned into a soft shoe shuffle stage. It stank of dogs’ pee, he could smell it now, and so did the sandbags which were stacked in front of the library windows and shops as blast protection.

They had gone from Grace’s house to Bob’s and he had shown them the two up two down he had found for them to rent with a privy out at the back. He looked well, less drawn, and Tom had taken him and Don for a drink while Grace and Maud sorted out the house. She’d stuck her tongue out at him and called that she would tell Annie he was a pig.

It was because there was full employment Bob had gloated as he supped at his beer and the froth stayed on his upper lip until he wiped it away with his handkerchief. There’s a munitions factory opening up down the road, he’d gone on, and it’ll take our lads and they won’t have to care if the pit’s open or not. Tom laughed with Don and winced as the lad kicked him under the table. War’s done you proud has it, Bob? Don had said, and
Bob had blushed and admitted that, to some extent, Don was right, explaining that the lads would be able to get away from Wassingham now into the services or, if they stayed, they had the chance of better conditions in the factories, not the bloody pits. And of course, Tom thought, as he shut the kitchen door and climbed the stairs, he’d been right.

He boarded up the bedroom windows with the cut-down doors which Bob had unscrewed from his unused bedrooms and was in bed before the nightly raid began but the crump crump and shudder of the house made his mouth run dry as it always did and he soothed Grace who clung to him. The thudding of the ack-ack as it replied did not help his fear. He was glad that Maud was with her parents in Merthyr Terrace while Don was at the supply depot outside Manchester. She wouldn’t come to them, felt too much of a gooseberry, she had laughed, and Albert scared her and Tom could understand that. It was better to be where you felt at ease.

‘Tell you what, bonny lass,’ he breathed into Grace’s ear, making her listen. ‘We’ll take Val’s Christmas presents on Sunday shall we, take Maud and clear the garden, now that the old boy can’t cope any longer. You tell Maud in the morning.’ He pulled her hair slightly and there was a louder nearer explosion and a tremor ran through the bed and the mirror on the dressing-table rattled. ‘Listen to me, Grace,’ he had to raise his voice to be heard. ‘You go and tell her after work tomorrow.’ And then she nodded but she was like a rigid board in his arms and he stroked and kissed her but they were too frightened for passion.

He left the house at five in the morning having dozed for what seemed like a few minutes. It was still dark as he joined his Uncle Henry further down the street.

‘Everyone all right?’ he asked. ‘May, Betsy?’

‘Aye, lad, and Maud’s area’s clear an’ all but the library got it.’

‘God damn it, now where’ll I find for me bloody class?’ Tom grumbled. The dust was still falling from the bomb damage. It was in their eyes and hair but the fires were mainly under control though the glow was still bright enough to show the smoke rising in a pall from Gladburn Street where the library had been and further over, nearer the slag-heaps on the north side of town.

‘That’s your problem,’ grunted his uncle and they nodded as they passed more miners coming out from doors and alleys to start the shift. Henry was rubbing his eyes, dragging his hands down his face though his eyes were no more red-rimmed than everyone else’s, the dust and coal took their toll and the tiredness just came on top of all that, ‘Bloody shattered I am. This fire-watch is too much at my age. We’ll need some more young ’uns in the pits too, soon. I’m 55 lad.’

Tom gripped his shoulder. ‘You’re all right, Henry. Good and strong.’ But decided he would take more of the face-work. He knew he was a fool to still be in the pits himself but somehow he couldn’t make himself take an easy option. It would be bad luck somehow and after all Annie must come back safely.

Their boots were loud on the cobbles as they walked along to the pit-yard. The buildings crowded in on them and the dawn had yet to break though there was a lightening of the sky.

‘I hear there’s talk of striking,’ said his uncle quietly as they waited in the queue for the cage. Men were murmuring all around them. There was the noise of boot against cobble, bait-tin against bait-tin. A miner spat.

Tom nodded. ‘So Bob says.’ His muffler was tight up round his throat and his foot was hurting as it always did but it did not swell quite so much these days. He knew he was thinner, his face was drawn and etched with sharp lines that were not there before the pain. A pain which was with him every day, every minute since Olympia.

His uncle was close up to him now, his head near him. ‘It’ll not do us any good in the country, lad. The press’ll have a ruddy field-day and I don’t know as I’d blame them, it’s wartime, lad, and I don’t hold with striking.’

‘Aye, I reckon you’re right but you can’t blame the men. The pay’s lousy, the hours are longer and longer along with poorer maintenance and now there’s talk of drafting pitmen and their lads back here into the pits, just when the poor buggers thought they’d a chance for some to get away. Why should they be drafted back is what the miners feel, drafted back out of the factories and the war to be killed by coal and for a bloody pittance too? They’ve still got to support a family, Henry, for God’s sake.’ His voice was rising and his uncle pushed him along as the queue moved.

‘Keep your bloody voice down, lad, or you’ll end up being locked up like your pal Mosley and how would you like that?’

Tom pulled at his lip and submitted to the match search before squatting on the floor of the cage. ‘Piece-work should be abolished an’ all.’

His uncle glared as the men squashed close up to them laughed.

As the cage sank, Tom was quiet. The stench was always the same, the thick dust on the floor of the cage, the dropping, the scream of displaced air and then the crunching of the cockroaches beneath their boots as they wound their way along the main seam, hearing the rats darting away as they approached. They turned off into the tunnel to the face they had been allocated.

There was more than two inches of water today and, as they bent over to squeeze further into the flattening seam, his uncle cursed. ‘Picked a right one for us today, haven’t they, lad. Might do well to keep your mouth shut, if you ever could, that is.’

The heat was stifling and Tom took the hewing this time with his uncle on the shovel. He lay down stiffly and angled his pick but work was slow and difficult. There were not going to be many trollies pushed down the seam today and it meant his pay would be down again and they’d not enough to cope as it was.

He tugged and tore at a lump which had wedged itself. Thank God, Grace worked in the factory and could pass some over to her da. It was bloody good of Don to have put him in the shop while he was away, it gave him a bit of dignity as well as some wages, and between that and Grace, her parents would survive. He’d write and tell Annie about that, she’d be right pleased.

He groaned as he shifted his weight off his back and his foot and hoped to God he didn’t get a chill through lying in the water. It gave that remaining kidney too much to do, said the doctor, but there was a fat lot he could do about it with an overman like his. He heard Henry ease up a pit-prop.

‘How many today then, Uncle?’ he panted, straining his head round to see.

‘Just the two again, lad, for each section.’

Tom swore and went back to work listening to the sounds the props made, listening for a rush of dust, a creak and groan that
would mean the coal had finally got him. They needed three props, three bloody props, not two. He turned on his side and heaved at the coal again. There had been two men killed yesterday and that had been less than the same day last week and it would go on if basic safety was ignored.

Thank God, Annie was out of all this and the bombs, the cold and the hunger. She’d written that Singapore was out of this world with just the right temperature and just maybe she’d get to see Georgie. It was pretty close to India wasn’t it, he’d asked Grace, and she looked it up in the library and said he was right. Well, at least the bonny lass was in the sun, living like a bloody duchess and looking at the fabrics. Just as long as she was enjoying herself, that was the thing; she’d earned it, every bloody minute.

Durban had been glorious with its surging and plummeting surf. Sun, sea and everything that England had been without for two years but Singapore was incomparably better, Annie thought as she and Prue sat at Robinson’s Hotel for coffee as usual on their day off. It was a pattern that had been quickly established in the three weeks they had been here, though it seemed longer because she had become so used to the life of ease and splendour.

It was all so beautiful, so different to Wassingham that it was hard to believe the cold dark hardness of the mining town still existed when life could be as it was here. It was early December now and the sun was still so hot that Christmas seemed an impossibility. She and Prue would have tea at Raffles this afternoon and look for presents until then in the crooked streets which were full of shops and arcades and yellow or blue-white houses splashed with red Chinese lettering. Full of the noise of trading, of birds and fowls that squawked and fluttered in wooden cages, of motor horns and rickshaws and the revving of cars. There was colour everywhere, material which would have made Tom’s mouth water and silk which hung in bales in small shops and invited touching.

What on earth would he think of the cathedral which they passed on their way into the centre from the nurses’ home? It was like some icing-sugar sculpture. He’d either like it or loathe it and she was pretty sure it would be the latter.

In the narrow streets, washing hung out, not on washing lines but on bamboo poles hoisted across from window to window and fish dried on pavements amongst fowl that scattered as cars thrashed by; flies swarmed over everything. The odour and noise were always present.

Annie smiled as she thought of the first time they had driven
out to the suburbs. It was like her first view of Gosforn. A sense of space, of light, only far more so as the palatial white houses of the Europeans blasted back the light. Bougainvillaea, calla lilies and frangipani clustered in the grounds and were repeated in all the parks and their lushness made her want to stop and touch, bury her face in their colour and their warmth.

The early mornings were the best though, she had decided, with the breeze flicking in off an ocean which was even bluer than Prue’s eyes. She stood each morning in the hospital grounds listening to the rattle of the palm fronds as they were disturbed by the freshness and again in the evening watching the birds as they settled on the telephone wires and wondered how she could be in amongst this and still have an emptiness, an ache which only Georgie could fill.

She and Prue had only been out into the countryside once, and that was with a couple Prue had known in India, the Andertons, who were now happily settled in Singapore where he, who was moustached, neat and correct, held a post in Government House, and she, Mavis, wore head-hugging hats and presided at receptions. They had climbed into his open car last week and Prue had held firmly on to her hat but Annie had removed hers and let the wind rush through her hair, tumbling it around her face and cooling her.

They had driven past mangrove swamps and coconut groves and she had seen again the coconut shies at the fair where they had slipped the lead coins and heard the lady with the varicosed legs. She had screwed her hands in the car and watched as though from a distance the rubber plantations with their latex smell and the jungle scrub which lay all around.

They had driven past two reservoirs which were as large as lakes and then on past the Causeway before she had pushed her memories back into the box and nodded as Mavis pointed out the villages which were called kampongs. Changi jail was on their route and Annie wondered how anyone could bear to be locked away from all this sun, this life. Was Dippy Denis still in his cold dark prison?

The port was chaotic when they drove through, horn sounding at the Tamil labourers who were everywhere around them, carrying goods into and out of the go downs which loomed high along the docks full of different wares. These warehouses were cheek by jowl with fuel tanks, offices and
customs sheds and it had been a relief to relax on the verandah at the Anderton’s home that evening drinking pink gin brought by servants and talking of the war in Europe, talking of their good fortune at being where they were, in the peace of Singapore. But that was not what Georgie’s letter had said, Annie thought as she sat here in the sun with Prue and moved uneasily in her chair. That’s not what he had said at all. Get out, he’d insisted.

Prue interrupted her train of thought.

‘Annie, these strawberries are scrumptious, absolute heaven.’