Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) (18 page)

There had been no song this time on the lips of the weary Salford men as they travelled by train to Cairo and then by road to the Mena Camp near the pyramids of Gizeh. The few days that they spent at Mena, though, had helped to revive some happier memories from their previous stay in Egypt. They had walked around the narrow alleyways and passages of the old town, exchanged greetings with the locals in the few words of the language that they had acquired during their previous stay and they had visited Groppi’s for French teas and ices. As their bodies had warmed so their minds had, by slow degrees, healed.

After a week of recuperation they had moved again and eventually they had arrived at Shallufa, just to the north of Suez. The camp was out in the desert to the east of the Canal, strategically positioned to deal with the attacks that would come from this direction. It had been decided that the enemy must be prevented from launching an artillery attack from within a seven mile zone to the east of the canal so a series of defensive works were being constructed down that side.

Edward was impressed by the new camp. They had been supplied with new first-line transport vehicles that were making their lives a bit easier and they had new, fully equipped field kitchens giving them a few interesting variations on the stews and shepherd’s pies. They had occasional visits from the Divisional Band who entertained the soldiers with music that was more normally heard in the music halls and dance halls back home in Britain. The nostalgia was revitalizing to these men who had locked out of their minds the happy memories of their families back in Salford as they had struggled to cope with the brutalizing reality of war in Gallipoli. Many a hardened soldier left the concerts early to go for a smoke and to shed a quiet tear in the sand dunes.

The men had quickly re-established a pattern of activities for themselves, much as they had done more than a year before. The concert party had been re-formed and delighted in putting on revues that took a barely concealed swipe at the commanding officers and politicians of the day. One of these depicted a portly officer wearing a ginger wig and stumbling drunkenly round the stage whilst trying to grab the buttocks of a soldier in a flowered dress. It produced loud laughter and wild applause from most of the audience though there was a steady trickle of the less enamoured that got up from their seats and left.

***

Although the sand was still warm on their backs there was already a bracing chill in the air as they escaped the sickening reminders of the hated officer. They opened the bottles of beer that they had bought from the camp bar and drank the first mouthfuls quickly.

‘There was a bloke who lived on Unwin Street who used to be like that,’ Big Charlie said eventually.

‘Be like what?’ asked Edward, unable to make the connection.

‘Be like the fella in that show. He used to dress up in his wife’s clothes on Tuesday nights when she was out at work.’

‘Perhaps she had left him to do the washing and he had nothing to change into.’

 ‘No. The whole lot, you know, knickers and brassieres. Looked a bit of a rum sod. He was tall and built like a beanpole, she was short and fat.’

‘Must have looked like a standard lamp,’ Liam suggested. He was lying on his stomach to keep the pressure off the raw flesh on his back but had to twist uncomfortably to have a mouthful of beer.

‘And it was every Tuesday.’

‘Oh come on, Charlie. You’re pulling my leg now,’ Liam said becoming exasperated. ‘You’re surely not expecting us to believe that there was a married man, living on Unwin Street, who dressed up in his wife’s clothes while she was out? How do you know that anyway?’

‘I knew the lad who lived in the house opposite. We used to go upstairs and watch from behind the curtains.’

‘Well, that’s a bit bloody nosey, that’s all I can say.’

‘It does seem a bit odd, though,’ Edward said. ‘You can understand him, perhaps, looking at them if things weren’t too good between them in that direction. But why hide himself away in the bedroom and put her clothes on?’

‘He used to come and stand at the window sometimes but if he saw anybody coming down the street he’d scarper quick.’

The three men were silent for a while as they considered the implications of such alien practises in their neighbourhood. Edward and Liam were stunned by the revelations and struggled to grasp the significance of such activities. Finally, Liam took a triumphant swig out of his bottle of beer and turned to his friends. ‘I know,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll bet he was a pantomime dame. He probably rehearsed his part while his wife was out.’

‘I’ve never seen a pantomime with the dame doing what he was doing. They’d have closed it down,’ Big Charlie said. ‘I just think he was weird. Liked the feel of her underwear and all that.’

‘Well, there’s not much wrong with that is there?’ Liam put his bottle back down in the deep hole that he had made in the sand.

‘Doesn’t seem right to me,’ Big Charlie mumbled, slightly disconcerted by Liam’s challenge. He felt uncomfortable in finding that his views on such an essentially private matter perhaps differed from those of his friends but felt the need to explore it. ‘Dot used to do the ironing sometimes then ask me to take her stuff upstairs and put it away. I used to leave it where it was. Not for me to do it.’

‘Perhaps she was trying to say something, Charlie,’ Liam suggested.

‘Oh aye, like what?’

‘Maybe it’s her way of getting you to relax a bit and enjoy sharing these little intimacies,’ Edward said.

‘Maybe she is trying to get you roused so that you will give her one,’ Liam added more directly.

Big Charlie took a large gulp of his beer and ran his hand over the back of his neck. He felt that already he had gone too far. He couldn’t mention the tension that he often felt was gripping her and he was fearful of their response if he shared with them his constant apprehension about the unpredictable and vitriolic rages that his wife would be seized by.

‘Aye, well. You have to tread a bit carefully sometimes with Dot.’

***

29 Myrtle Street

Cross Lane

Salford 5

Great Britain

4th February 1916

Dear Dad,

FLOPPY IS GONE AND I’LL NEVER SEE HIM AGAIN, EVER. WE HAD HIM FOR CHRISTMAS AND I DIDN’T KNOW BECAUSE MAM SAID WE WERE HAVING SOMETHING THAT WAS A BIT LIKE CHICKEN.

Our Edward had tried to grab Floppy when it was escaping under the back yard door and its tail came off in his hand. He told me that Mam had said it was no use now without a tail so he took it to the greengrocer and he saw to it. I was sick for three whole weeks and I might have died but then our Edward and our Ben were eating all Mam’s angel cakes so I had to force myself or there would have been none left by the time that I got better. I will have another cry after because I am writing this down and it has reminded me about lovely Floppy.

Blacky won’t go near our Edward now even though he told it that nobody wants to eat a cat anyway but I told Blacky not to trust him. Dad, don’t you think that that is really, really disgusting and especially when Floppy was so beautiful?

I am sure that your very strong think did come through to us on Christmas Day because our Sadie found Mam crying in the kitchen and she said that she was thinking about your poor Dad and then we all started crying. We went to the service at the Mission afterwards and said prayers to God to let you come home soon and to keep you safe. Nobody must have ever said a prayer to keep Floppy safe because he was already dead by then and I didn’t know.

I hope that these people in this place that you are in now are a bit more friendly than those people at the last place. Our teacher said that they were Turks and they used to own lots of countries called the Ottoman Empire and they don’t like us because we are making them give some of them back to the natives. But if they are natives then perhaps Turkey was just making them great like we do with the countries that we own. I told our teacher that but she just said ‘I don’t know what will become of you, child,’ and then she said ‘Who threw the blotting paper ink bomb at Sarah Greenacres who already has enough sadness in her life?’

Mam told us that you have gone back to work in Egypt now so you will have somebody to do your washing. She said that everybody feels a bit better when they have clean underwear to put on but I think that she was saying that for our Edward. Sometimes he forgets to change his on Saturday morning and Mam finds out on Monday when she does the washing. She shouts at our Edward but she has finished the washing by then. He tries, as well, to get out of having a bath on Saturday because he says the tin bath is too cold and a draught comes under the door in the scullery.

Edith Hardcastle has started having piano lessons for nothing from Mrs Jones because she felt sorry for her. Edith said that Mrs Jones always says that we all have to rally round and play our part. She said that she also keeps saying ‘Chin up, my dear’ but when she does that she can’t see what she is playing.

Please try and hurry up in Egypt because we are all missing you.

Love

Laura

***

Edward lay back in the sand, inhaled deeply on his cigarette, and gazed up into the clear Egyptian night sky. It always amazed him how every corner of the visible sky was filled with these bright, twinkling stars. Somebody had told him once that there were more stars up there than there were grains of sand on Blackpool beach. You couldn’t say that about this beach that we are on now, though, he thought. You’d need a big sky to fit that lot in.

They had just played the 5th Manchesters, who were the in-form rugby team at the moment, and had been soundly beaten. Unfortunately, a few key players had been missing. Their regular full back, who could tackle a camel to a standstill, was injured. Their arch schemer, Liam, at scrum half, and the mighty Cyril, who could have made quite a difference at prop, were also out. They were all unavailable because of severely blistered bottoms.

Liam’s woes in the hospital tent had been exacerbated when he had mistakenly passed the still fuming, but unfortunately illiterate, Cyril a bottle of Sloan’s Liniment instead of the calamine lotion that he had needed to dress his wounds. The mighty roar that had erupted from the mountainous bricklayer had galvanised Liam into a hasty, though very painful, departure from his comforting bed. The sight of the large, shrieking, red-faced man, his shirt tails flapping over his glowing nether regions and a trenching spade waving in his huge hand, stumbling painfully after the tortured but panic stricken Liam round the camp on his mission of revenge had raised the spirits of the whole battalion.

After the latrine incident, Liam and Cyril, still seriously impaired in their movements, had been assigned to the chain gang that hauled the pontoon stage across the Canal during the day. It was hard work that nobody liked but they had been told that it would keep them fit at the same time as teaching them to have greater respect for army property. Liam had sworn never to hold selection meetings on the privy again and Cyril had said many unkind things about Liam’s parentage in asserting that he would never even consider playing for a team that was captained by him.

It was generally agreed in the battalion that Liam’s recruiting drive had not been a very successful tactic. The 5th Manchesters had revelled in the opportunities for ribald jokes and gestures that had been presented to them by the Salford lads’ misfortunes and they had exploited it on the field by running in ten unopposed tries.

Edward now sought solace in the cool of the desert just outside the camp and wondered once again whether he was sharing this view of the moon with his wife, Laura. The thought warmed him even though he knew that it was unlikely because of the time difference. Most of the time he tried to push away the thoughts of Laura and the kids because it felt as though somebody was trying to drag chunks out of his insides when he did. It pained him to think about them, to picture what they might be doing at that moment in time, when he couldn’t see any end to this separation. Originally, he had come away thinking that it would just be for a few months, but now it seemed as though a huge physical barrier had been built between them and he felt helpless in the face of it.

There had been many times, though, in Gallipoli when he felt that he had been sustained by that gentle voice, by that last, whispered entreaty ‘Keep safe, Love.’ When he had been scared almost to the point of rigidity as he went over the parapet he heard her voice. When he had felt that his mind was being pulped by the noise of battle and his senses paralysed by sights and the smells of the ritualised slaughter, it was then that she reached through and touched his consciousness. When, later, he had lain desperately ill in a hospital bed, he had heard her voice and relived the soft, parting kiss on his cheek. He knew that he had to fight; he had to cope with everything that was thrown at him, so that, when the time came, he could go back.

He picked up handfuls of the desert sand and then let them dribble back slowly through his fingers to rejoin the endless billions of their brothers that lay beneath him. He saw in much sharper focus now the importance of his family. Things that had become routine and commonplace when he was at home in Salford had crystallized into a desperate need, the endearing gentleness of his wife had become a yearning that he cried out for.

He had always loved her voice. It wasn’t loud and shrill like some women’s. It had a soft, warm timbre that gently embraced and calmed you. Even when they were kids and she had played in their football team, or when they played ‘Which Direction?’ round the streets, she never screamed like some of the girls. Her voice had befriended him. He wondered if young Laura would grow up like her. She was a lot like her now. She had the same slight mischief in her face, the spark in her eyes. She shared her mother’s determined spirit that challenged things, a drive that made her keep going at difficulties until she found a way round them in her own quiet little way. Perhaps it was the red hair that they both had. Her Grandma had said that it was the Irish blood in her. That’s probably where she gets her spirit from.