Faded Dreams

By Eileen Haworth

CHAPTER ONE

   ‘Have y'heard?  War’s broke out...we’re at war with Germany.’ The woman hurrying from The Market Hall collided with Florrie Pomfret.

  ‘Who said so? Are you sure?’ Florrie struggled to make her voice heard above the clamour.

   This wasn't like any ordinary Saturday in the Lancashire mill-town; there was tension in the air and people went about their business with voices louder than normal.

   ‘It's right enough...it’s all o'er Blackburn.’ The agitated woman was quickly swallowed up the crowd.

   Gathering up her two small daughters Florrie ran for a tram that was already crammed with people desperate to reach  the safety of home before the bombs came raining down.

  
However, it would take more than the outbreak of a second world war to keep Florrie’s
husband
Joe
and his cronies  from their Saturday afternoon drinking session. The catastrophe threatening Europe, frightening as it was and definitely worthy of discussion, would become less so after a pint or two of  Thwaites’s ale.

   The tram trundled noisily up Preston New Road shaking and groaning beneath the weight of its nervous cargo.
It dawned on Florrie, after listening to better-informed passengers,
that her neighbour’s declaration of war had pre-empted an expected statement from the Prime Minister.

   But it was no wonder folk were jumping to their own conclusions, what with emergency procedures already in place and evacuees from Manchester billeted all over town. After being on tenterhooks for weeks it might even be a relief when the war started, then at least they would  know what they were up against.

    Florrie had tried to prepare for whatever lay ahead.  The shops had all but sold out of torches and batteries.  Candles were like gold-dust  but she’d managed to lay her hands on some ornamental ones and stored them on top of the high black-leaded fire range in readiness for any emergency. A length of cloth smuggled out of the mill had been dyed and made into four blackout curtains.  Now there was nothing more to do but wait and see what happened next.

   In the safety of her kitchen only the scraping of the children’s spoons on near-empty plates and the ticking of the mantlepiece clock broke the silence. Her thoughts turned away from the imminent arrival of the Germans and concentrated on the imminent arrival of her drunken husband.  On second thoughts  'imminent' was a word unknown to Joe and so with no realistic hope of seeing him until after turning-out-time she covered his dinner plate with an upturned one, placed it over a pan of boiling water and sat down with the girls.

   Sometimes she wished she'd never met Joe Pomfret and yet fourteen years earlier the future had looked so promising.

*

   At nineteen Joe was handsome in the same dramatic way his gypsy grandmother must have been…and he knew it. Shop-girls batted their eyelids and heralded his arrival by signalling to one another with exaggerated coughs as he swaggered through Woolworth's. They  were wasting their time, his interest lay firmly fixed on the girl behind the haberdashery counter. 

   Some might have said she was plain yet there was something about the rosy-apple cheeks, the emerald-green eyes  and that pale-gold mane tumbling to her waist that made her a bit of a beauty - which was more than could be said for the wobbly-faced, wobbly-bottomed customer waving a bundle of knickers-elastic with one hand and with a sixpence at the ready in the other.

   ‘Hey Fred, look at the size of
h
er,
’ Joe whispered to his friend as they drew nearer, ‘she’ll need more than one bundle of ‘lastic for
h
er
bloomers, she’s got an arse like an house-side.’

   ‘Come on lass, waken up,’ the woman was losing her patience. ‘I haven’t got all day. I’m not standing here for the good of me health, y’know.’

   As the girl turned her back Joe reached over the polished counter and tweaked the navy-blue ribbon at the nape of her neck. She spun  round blushing red as a beetroot,  just in time to see him dashing off grinning from ear to ear, his pal tagging along behind. 

    It wasn’t the first time Florrie Sefton had seen the lad with the black curly hair hanging around on a Saturday afternoon but it was the first time he’d done anything as forward as
that.
She smoothed her hair, re-tied her ribbon and busied herself sorting through the boxes of buttons and lace. She was sure he was making fun of her and her old-fashioned long curls?  She longed to be “all the vogue”, bobbing her hair and bobbing her hemlines like some of the older lasses , “them
shameless buggers”  her
father called them.

   Jim Sefton had no time for lasses like that. In fact, he had no time for women in general. His marriage to Florrie’s mother had brought little joy for either of them, what with Mabel’s domineering nature and him alternating between silence and violence.

               .        But perhaps his coldness was a result of his early experiences. He was just 4 years old, the middle child of five, when his mother died of consumption. Out of nothing more than necessity his father quickly took a second wife, an uncaring woman who needed little provocation to starve and beat her clutch of motherless children. Hardly surprising then that Florrie's father, abandoned and deprived of lasting affection by two mothers, grew to be a man with little regard for women - least of all his wife Mabel, the mother of  Florrie  and Harold.

   At Roe Lee Mill, where he had worked from the age of 12, Jim Sefton was perceived as a man with nothing of importance to say. In truth, he was well versed in politics and world affairs and yet, even within the confines of his home, he kept his opinions and feelings largely to himself, unless that is, he’d had a bellyful of ale.

   'Y'need a trade in your fingers,' he told Florrie when she left school at fourteen, 'if the weaving-shop's good enough for me it's good enough for thee.'

   Florrie soon picked up the weaving skills but she was a pretty young lass and it wasn’t long before the overlooker was overlooking her more intently than he was overlooking her cloth.

   Arthur Benson, a married man more than twice her age, had broken a few hearts up and down the mill in his time and had quite a reputation. But it was when folk starting gossiping, as though it was his Florrie that was doing the chasing that Jim Sefton took her out of the weaving shed and put her behind the counter in Woolworth’s. Now that she was a young woman it was up to him to keep a tight rein on her.

*  

   Joe's father on the other hand, had long since given up trying to keep a tight rein on his son; he had been too busy trying to keep a tight rein on The Empire, firstly in South Africa and 12 years later on The Somme.

    Bill Pomfret was lucky, or unlucky depending on how you looked at it, to have played any part in The Great War at all.  He was 40, but gave his age as 38, when he enlisted in The West Yorkshire Regiment and on the strength of his previous service in The Boer War was immediately promoted to corporal.

  
He marched off to war fully aware that in his absence nine-year-old Joe would be more than a handful for his wife Maggie.  The more Bill had tried to discipline him, the more Joe's adoring mother and four sisters  kow-towed to his every whim, allowing any excuse for his temper, any reason to forgive him.

   ‘Mark my words, woman,’ Bill said to Maggie as he said his farewells, ‘that  little bugger’ll be no good to nobody the way he’s shaping. He’ll be chucking you lot out on to the streets afore he’s 14 and then you’ll be wishing you’d let me take me belt off to him now and again.’

   By the time he was discharged from the army in 1920 his children had grown up. Joe was 14, had been half-time in school and half-time at work for the past two years, and was now working full-time in a bakery. Contrary to his father's forecast he hadn’t chucked his mother and sisters out on to the streets but, loath to relinquish his role as 'man of the house',  the prickly relationship with his father continued.

   Filled with remorse after each of his outbursts Joe made amends by cooking, cleaning, waiting on his family hand and foot, polishing their clogs, or melting his mother’s heart with a jam-jar on the windowsill full of
freshly picked bluebells.

   But peace never lasted long and things came to a head early one Monday morning when Joe's bait-box with his packed lunch was not in its usual place on the kitchen table.

   ‘Mam…where’ve you put me bait-box?’ he bellowed from the bottom of the stairs. ‘It’s half-past two…I’m gonna be late for work.’

   Maggie threw her shawl over her nightdress and rushed downstairs.

   ‘I thought you were on “nights” this week. It’ll only take me two minutes.’ She hurriedly packed a home-made meat and potato pasty and a lump of fruitcake into his tin box. ‘Sh…make less noise, you’ll waken everybody up.’

    Joe was beyond shushing and making less noise. Snatching the box from her hands he smashed it to the floor then threw a clog at the door just as his half-asleep father appeared in the frame.

   ‘What the hell’s going on down ‘ere? It’s like bedlam. Have you forgot some of us has to get up for work in the morning…wakening all the bloody house up like this? I'll put me foot under you if you don't shuddup.' He raised his voice above the pandemonium. ‘You're short of a good pasting…you noisy young bugger?’

   Joe kicked his other clog at the bait-box sending the meat and potato pasty skimming in flaky bits across the flagged floor.

   ‘I’m gonna be late for work…
she
thought I were on nights.’

   ‘Who d’ya mean…
she
?
That’s your mam you're talking about, you   ignorant sod. Now shut your gob an’ get this bloody mess tidied up afore I take me belt off to ya.’

   The threat was empty, there was no belt to take off, he stood there clad only in shirt and socks.

   Joe, taller and stronger than his father, moved swiftly towards him but it would be the first and last time he’d raise his fists to him. With a strength borne out of fury, Bill picked him up by the seat of his breeches like a rag-doll and threw him through the front door, his clogs and empty bait-box after him.

   After an exile lasting less than three weeks Joe returned home with his tail between his legs. In his usual way of getting-back-in-everybody’s-good-books he went about his cooking, clog-polishing, firewood-chopping and coal-fetching.

   Monday  was washing-day when his mother was up to her elbows in the dolly-tub, and instead of going to bed after his night shift Joe lifted the sopping clothes out of the tub and squeezed them through the heavy mangle in the yard before hanging them on the clothes-line to dry. Yet he knew it would take more than all of this, or a jam-jar full of bluebells, to win over his dad.

*  

   Bill Pomfret, sickened by the barbarity of The Great War, was a changed man. By 1918 he'd hoped  he'd seen the back of France but there had been more to be done; his fallen comrades  had to be dug up and buried before he could finally go home.

   Back home he  would sit for hours staring into the kitchen fire drawing hard on his pipe, unable to talk over his experiences with anyone, least of all his headstrong son. And yet in one unguarded moment not long after the confrontation over the bait-box he found himself telling Joe of the time he lost his beloved pipe in the trenches. 

‘I still had me baccy, but what good were baccy
to me without  me
pipe, d’ya see, lad?

Anyway, a day later we got the order to advance  and  I ran towards a shell hole thinking it unlikely another shell would drop in the same place. I lay there for  a minute or two then I noticed the bowl of a pipe sticking up out of the mud. I pulled it out and wiped it a bit and I could see it ‘ad a bit of stem left.  By God, it were just like Hell had been let loose all around us, hours and hours of it but  the first chance I got,  took me baccy out my pouch and packed it in that  bowl. D’ya know son… it were the best smoke I’ve ever ‘ad. I never knew if that pipe belonged to one of our lot or if it belonged to one of theirs, but whoever it were he’ll never know the pleasure it gave a fellow soldier.’