Authors: Anne Bennett
Ida’s sleep was broken by the children home from school, and after seeing to them she popped next door to relieve Rita so she could have a break before taking over the night shift, passing Georgie and Bernadette playing in the yard. Rita was at the range when Ida went in, putting a stew on the hob.
‘That priest was here hours,’ she said. ‘In fact, he’s not that long gone. Wouldn’t take time for a cup of tea, he said. Christ, Ida, he could have had a three-course meal.’
‘How’s Rosie after it all?’
‘Well, I popped up just after he left, but Rosie was asleep, and I haven’t been near since, not wanting to disturb her like.’
‘I’ll stay if you like and you can take a bit of a break,’ Ida offered.
‘I will in a minute. D’you want a cuppa?’
‘When do I ever say no?’ Ida said. ‘You mash the tea and I’ll creep up and have a look at Rosie.’
Ida crept up quietly enough, but her progress down the stairs was swifter and noisier and when she burst into the room, tears were raining down her face, which was aglow, and her mouth opened in a wide smile. ‘Oh Sweet Jesus,’ Ida cried, leaping across the room and clasping Rita’s hands. ‘The
fever has broken. She’s sleeping normally and naturally. Maybe the mumbo-jumbo worked after all.’
Rita shrugged. ‘Who cares what it was. She’ll get better. Oh thank God,’ and the two women held each other and cried in relief, mightily glad Georgie and Bernadette were out in the yard and not there to see the carry-on, for they could never have explained it to their satisfaction.
When Rosie opened her eyes the next morning she felt, if not better, certainly better than she’d felt for a long time. The doctor called that afternoon and Rosie started to press him about the bill and only when she was told everything had been paid up-to-date could she relax. He was delighted that Rosie was so much better, but told her that the road to full recovery could take many weeks. ‘You’re not very good at looking after yourself, Mrs Walsh,’ he said sternly, though his eyes belied the stance he took. ‘Nor at doing as you are told, but unless you are to find yourself dreadfully ill again you need to take care, and I will tell your stalwart neighbours the same.’
He went on to tell Rita and Ida too that Rosie had to have the best of food and when he’d gone Rita remarked that with the doctor’s bill paid and the cost of the good food he said Rosie needed, she’d be lucky if she had much of that ten pounds left by the time Rosie was totally out of the woods.
However, the flu had frightened the life out of Rosie and for once she was prepared to follow the doctor’s instructions to the letter, for she was aware how close she’d come to dying.
Rosie found the doctor to be right. She was incredibly weak and though she was impatient to get better quicker, Doctor Patterson said she was doing fine.
She was bored in bed, though, and there was little to inspire her when she looked out of the window onto the dingy yard. It was hard to believe it was nearly spring. By early March
in Ireland, the ground would be filled and new plants sown, early spring flowers would be seen in the hedgerows and buds apparent on some trees, and new lambs would be gambolling beside their mothers in the lush green fields.
Here, the greyness and grime of everything depressed her and only Bernadette could cheer her in any way. As soon as she was deemed not to be infectious any more she demanded to see the child, though at first a few minutes of her company was all she could manage. But now Bernadette spent a long time in her mother’s company and the more Rosie saw of her daughter, the more she realised how precious she was, because after the doctor’s predictions she did not want to try for more children.
Rosie would have to make that clear to Danny. She couldn’t go through the pain of losing them over and over. Danny had to see that.
But by the time he came home she wanted to be fully recovered and able to welcome him properly and join in planning his demob party, and so she began walking around the bedroom. She was unsteady at first and could only manage a few steps. But each day her strength improved and soon she was able to walk right around the bed. When she could walk the length of the room, she said she wanted to come downstairs.
There she was able to lend a hand. She could prepare vegetables in a bowl before the range, or watch a boiling pot and do any darning needed. She took up knitting again and spent hours unravelling woollies Rita and Ida would get from the rag market and remaking them into things for the children. She was not averse to amusing the children either and would often snuggle into the chair with Georgie one side of her and Bernadette the other and read or tell them a story, and she taught them both to play Snakes and Ladders and Snap.
By the time Danny came home on 31st March, Rosie was feeling much stronger. March had been a gusty, squally month.
Blasts of wind would lift the rubbish from the gutters to send it swirling and dancing down the streets, lift ash from the courtyard and splatter windows and brickwork, and seep into the draughty houses to cover everything with a thick layer of dust.
But when Danny stood in the door he didn’t notice the dust-laden mantelpiece, or the even the fire in the range in an attempt to drive the chill from the room. He didn’t even see the table laid for a party and the ‘Welcome Home’ banner, which they’d put above the fireplace, for Rita had said there was no good putting anything outside for it would be blown away.
He had eyes only for Rosie and Bernadette standing beside the range, and he was so filled of love for them both he felt as if his heart would burst. He threw his kitbag to the floor, crossed the room in two strides and, scooping Bernadette up with one arm, he put the other one around Rosie and felt her tears of joy dampening his shoulder.
Rosie loved having Danny home, although she tried not to show that too much in front of Ida and Rita. However, they had been marvellous about the party and shown no spark of resentment, only cautioned Rosie about spending so much on it. But, the euphoria of Danny coming home had driven all sense of reason from Rosie’s head and by the time she’d bought all she wanted she only had a few shillings left from the ten pounds Betty’s sons had left her. Rosie thought it worth it as she saw the look in Danny’s eyes when she was able to draw his attention to the spread.
Soon, however, the realities of life took over. At first, Danny was optimistic about soon finding employment. ‘I’ll wear my greatcoat you see,’ he told Rosie. ‘It shows I’ve done my bit.’ And to help him while he searched for work as an ex-serviceman, he was entitled to a special benefit called Out-of-Work
Donations. This amounted to twenty-nine shillings for himself and Rosie, with a further shilling for Bernadette.
It was riches to Rosie and she resolved to put anything she had over each week into the post office. ‘How long will it be paid out for?’ she asked Danny.
‘Not long,’ he said. ‘I’ll not be unemployed long, you’ll see.’
This optimistic stance was taken towards the middle of April, when Danny had been out of work just a fortnight.
Grateful though Danny was for the Out-of-Work Donations, it made him feel less of a man to have to rely on it. Something else made him feel less of a man too, and that was Rosie’s lack of sexual interest. He’d been patient and as kind and considerate as he knew how to be, but still Rosie spurned his advances upon her. ‘I’m sorry, is it too soon?’ he asked at first, and Rosie gave a brief nod.
The next time was almost a week later. ‘I’m not ready,’ Rosie had replied, and eventually, after the third time, he’d said, ‘When will you be ready, Rosie?’
‘Never.’
‘You don’t mean that?’
‘I’ve never meant anything more.’
‘But Rosie…’
‘Don’t “but Rosie” me,’ Rosie had spat out. ‘I can’t risk becoming pregnant. Don’t you see that?’
Danny hadn’t argued further, because he did see, and as much as he wanted a son, after what the doctor had said he too didn’t want to risk pregnancy. Rosie had been through enough already.
Over the next few months, as summer took hold in the city, Danny travelled the length and breadth of it searching for work. He went to the Gun Quarter and off to the BSA (Birmingham Small Arms) in Small Heath; he toured the Jewellery Quarter, knocking on every workshop door, and he
visited all the brass foundries. He went to the numerous small factories making buckles and buttons, pen nibs, hair grips and safety pins; and the larger ones making bicycles, sewing machines, motorbikes and cars, and even Fort Dunlop in Holly Lane in Erdington which made tyres.
Each day he returned home footsore and frustrated. The soles on his army-issue boots grew paper thin and his feet blistered, and almost everywhere the answer was the same, they hadn’t work for their regular people, they were taking no-one else on.
Danny’s boots needed soling and heeling after tramping the city, but he was hesitant about spending money on himself when he was bringing none in. ‘For God’s sake, Danny, you’ll be walking on the uppers if you don’t get something done soon, and they let in so much water every piece of cardboard you put inside is soaked in minutes,’ Rosie told him angrily one day. ‘Give me the boots. If you get a job after all this tramping in wet feet you’ll be in bed sick and not able for it.’
Danny handed over the boots to repair, but reluctantly, and Rosie took them to the cobbler. She felt so sorry for her husband, who was frantic that he could find no job. She knew what made it worse was that Jack, Ida’s eldest, now twelve, had obtained work after school and on Saturdays at a greengrocer’s on the Lozells Road, and that he proudly presented his modest pay-packet to his mother each Saturday evening. ‘Just last year he could have been full-time,’ Ida said, for they’d only put the school-leaving age to fourteen the previous year. ‘But, still, we’ve got to be grateful for small mercies, eh?’
Rosie ached to hold Danny in her arms, to stroke his hair and smooth the worry lines from his brow. But she did none of these things, for she knew what they might lead to and knew Danny would think she was promising something she wasn’t, and she couldn’t do that to him. It was bad enough
refusing him. Many men would have had the priest out to her by now, taking her to task about her duty and a man’s conjugal rights. She wouldn’t be the first Catholic woman it had happened to. But she doubted Danny would ever shame her in that way. He was a good man, no doubt about it.
But Danny was also an unhappy man. Inactivity had always hung uneasily on him and now Rosie seemed divorced from him too. There were no comforting hugs or lingering kisses and sex was just a memory. It was a God-awful life when you thought about it.
And the job situation would be laughable if it hadn’t been so tragic. He’d once had high hopes for the National Federation of Discharged and Demobbed Sailors and Soldiers who campaigned all summer for ‘Jobs not Dole’, and he’d even been to some of the rallies. But when he read in the paper that as well as the three hundred and sixty thousand ex-servicemen claiming dole there were six hundred and fifty thousand civilians, the situation seemed hopeless. There just weren’t the jobs for so many people and any he might have done would have been snatched up by the men released from duty before he was.
Then Danny learned that his entitlement to his Out-of-Work donations would cease in August, as it was only paid out for a maximum of twenty weeks. ‘What happens now?’ he asked.
‘Have you looked for work?’
‘Everywhere. I’ve toured the city,’ Danny said. ‘I’ve tried everything.’
‘Well, you can be brought into the Unemployment Insurance,’ the woman snapped and her mouth turned down disdainfully. ‘You haven’t paid the contributions, I know, but these are waived in the case of ex-servicemen and certain other groups. You will receive fifteen shillings.’
‘I have a wife, a child. Dear Christ, fifteen shillings.’
‘We have no provision for your wife,’ the woman behind
the desk told him coldly. ‘If you can bring the birth certificate for your child you will be awarded an extra shilling a week.’
‘I can’t feed and provide for a family on sixteen shillings a week.’
The woman stared at him emotionlessly. ‘Fifteen shillings might not be paid at all after fifteen weeks,’ she snapped out. ‘You will be assessed further then and the claim will be disallowed unless you are genuinely seeking work and you remain capable and available for employment at all times.’
Danny stared at her. It was as if she was made of stone, and he knew if he was to stay and plead with her till doomsday he’d get not a penny more. So he went home with a scant fifteen shillings to tell Rosie. He hoped to God he’d be in work of some sort at the end of the fifteen weeks, for he had an idea that that ice-cold sod wouldn’t bat an eyelid if he, Rosie and Bernadette starved to death, curled up together in the gutter. What was the point of the damned war, if not to have a better society at the end of it? What was the sense of those young, mutilated dead bodies in the fields of France and Belgium if not to make ‘a land fit for heroes’, for the survivors?
Well, some society this was, and not what any of the servicemen had been led to expect on their return. But when had the working man, let alone the non-working man, been given the power to change anything? Never, that’s when.
Rosie received the news stoically, just as she had when the rent man, who’d called that morning, had told her the rent, pegged while the war was on, had been increased to three shillings a week. ‘Rita and Ida have little more,’ she reminded Danny. ‘And little chance of changing that income, or at least till their children are older. They manage and so will we. While you were away in France I picked up a lot of thrifty tips on saving a penny or two here and there, and I have a little saved in the post office from when you were getting Out-of-Work Donations. I’ll cope, don’t fret.’
Danny was glad Rosie had taken the news so well. Many
he knew would have reacted badly, but Rosie knew Danny felt the lack of money more than she did, because it reflected on him. She could make him feel better about himself, make him feel that he was important to her whether he could find a job or not, but if she did that it would involve holding him close, kissing him as she often longed to do, but she knew how it would end and what that would result in. She wasn’t prepared to take that risk, but she could at least be reasonable about the dole money they could expect for the next fifteen weeks. God alone knew how little they’d be expected to manage on after that.