The Loom (3 page)

‘Now stop that Leah. Your Dad won’t eat you.’

Leah sniffed. ‘I know that, but why couldn’t Darkie go? He’s not a bit scared of me Dad.’

She stared at her mother defiantly. Why was it always her that had to cadge money?

Emma had a coughing fit for a minute and Leah looked at her anxiously. She was worried about her Mam, but Darkie should do a bit more. Instead it was always her and Janey who had to look after the house, and
make the meals whilst her Mam was sick.

‘Why can’t Darkie go?’ Leah said again.

Emma raised her eyes to the ceiling. Give me patience God, she thought, because it was growing very thin.

‘Now you know Darkie’s on the late shift and he won’t be home till later and I need the money. I haven’t got two half pennies to rub together, and well you know. I haven’t even got a penny for the gas and if you don’t want to sit in the dark you’d better go and see your Dad.’

Leah sighed. ‘All right then, but I just wish he’d give you the money when he should. I hate that place where he lives and it’s that dark. They never seem to draw the curtains back and Agnes Smithson scares me.’

‘Ee, don’t worry about Agnes,’ Emma said. ‘She’s not a bad sort. Now all you have to do is knock on the door and ask your Dad if he can let you have a few shillings. He owes me that, anyway. It’s like getting blood out of a stone with him. Now go on, Leah and take Janey with you and make sure you get back before dark.’

Emma ignored Leah’s pleading look and turned over with a sigh of relief. Leah was hard work sometimes! She opened one eye to see Leah trailing slowly out of the room, as though she’s going to be hanged, Emma thought.

Emma heard her close the door and walk heavily down the stairs. She began to drift off to sleep thinking it would be next week before Leah got to Waters Street if she didn’t get a move on.

Janey was sitting on the settee in the living room when Leah finally made her way downstairs. Unlike Leah, who was extremely thin, Janey was quite buxom as well as tall. She had her feet up and was reading one of her numerous film star magazines, an obsession of hers.

‘
Look at this,’ she said as Leah came in. ‘John Gilbert. Doesn’t he look gorgeous?’ She held up the photo in the magazine. Leah wasn’t really interested. She liked the silent pictures, but she wasn’t as obsessed with them as Janey.

‘
Hm…He is handsome. Look, Janey, we’ve got to go to me Dad’s so you’d better put that stuff down.’

‘You can go on your own, can’t you?’

‘No I can’t. Mam said you have to come with me.’

Janey looked sulky. She flung the magazine down and jumped off the settee in a huff and followed Leah out of the house.

Glebe Street had not changed in the ten years since Emma stood on the ladder and created such a commotion. Leah and Janey walked quickly up the street to the top where the Co-op now stood, some of it built by Harold and his cronies, all those years ago. It was bitterly cold.

‘
We should have put our coats on,’ Leah said, shivering. Janey nodded, although she didn’t seem to feel the cold as much as Leah did.

‘
More meat on her bones,’ Emma always said.

Waters Street, where their Dad lived was only a ten-minute walk from Glebe Street, and yet in those ten minutes they travelled through a social hierarchy of at least four levels, Waters Street being the lowest.

After Emma left Harold he’d shown very little interest in his children, especially when the booze really got him. Emma was glad of this. She didn’t want them seeing that side of Harold, but sometimes they were forced into his company, when she was desperate for the money and too sick to go and get it herself.

Emma’s feelings towards Harold were naturally reflected in her daughters. They had an aversion to him, although Emma had never indulged the natural tendency to criticize. She hadn’t needed to, really. The girls had made up their own minds. Darkie was not quite so adamant in his denunciations and Emma thought him particularly tolerant about his father. Sometimes she even felt a little peeved about it, especially when he’d admitted (once only, after seeing Emma’s face) that he felt a bit sorry for him. Men were all the same, Emma thought in exasperation, stuck together like glue, whatever the situation.

She couldn’t complain about Darkie though. He was a good lad. He worked hard down the pit, although there again, he’d followed in Harold’s footsteps. She hadn’t wanted him to work in the mines, but Darkie had been adamant because the money was good.

It was Leah who showed the most hostility to Harold and these feelings were growing stronger as she walked with Janey towards his house. How she hated having to cadge money out of him. As her mother always said, it was like getting blood out of a stone because he’d um and ah for a good five minutes before digging it out of his pocket as though digging one of his coal seams.

They crossed the Square with the huge Mercer Clock in the centre. A monstrosity with a large plaque on it that no one, not even blind Larry, could miss, extolling the virtues of John Mercer, who had invented the mercerization of cotton. Leah glanced at a huge poster pasted on the side. Lord Kitchener glared down on her with his fierce moustache and his finger pointing, at her it seemed. ‘Your country needs you’ it said underneath.

Leah was all too aware of her mother’s fear that Darkie would soon enlist.
She’d
been in tears when she thought of Darkie going to war. It couldn’t happen, could it? He might get killed! She couldn’t bear to think about it.

It began to rain, spitting at first and then drizzling. A few women, shawls wrapped tightly around their heads, then swathed around their bodies and tied at the back, hurried with heads down, intent on getting home. Leah and Janey began to run. Then the terrace house loomed dingy and gray in front of them. Leah knocked tentatively on the dirty knocker. There was no answer and the door remained firmly closed.

‘Knock a bit louder, our Leah,’ Janey said in exasperation.

‘You do it,’ Leah said angrily. She stood back as Janey knocked, much louder this time. There was a heavy tread from within. The door opened slowly and the lined, although not unpleasant face of Agnes Smithson, peered round. Seeing the girls she smiled at them with broken and stained teeth. Leah grimaced.

‘
Ee, if it isn’t Leah and Janey. Well I never. It’s a long time since we’ve seen you two lasses. I suppose you want your Dad?’ Agnes said. Before they could reply she continued, leaving the door open for them to follow. ‘Come in, come in. I’ll get him. He’s out the back.’ She disappeared into the next room.

‘I don’t want to go in,’ Leah said.

‘We’ll have to.’ Janey stepped into the room, which was very dim. Heavy curtains covered the windows and it took them a few minutes to see in the faint light.

‘
What’s that?’ Leah pointed to the table.

‘It’s a coffin,’ Janey said in a horrified whisper. The coffin was open. Leah stood petrified. She’d never seen a dead body or even a coffin before, and from where she was standing she could just see the tip of a bony nose protruding from it.

Without a sound both girls turned and raced out of the house. They ran up the street as though chased by Lucifer and his henchmen, and didn’t stop until they’d turned the corner. Leah stood panting, leaning against the wall, her face as white as the corpse in the coffin. ‘That’s it,’ she said, heaving and wheezing. ‘That’s the last time I’m ever going back there.’

Janey stood next to Leah, breathing just as heavily. ‘But we didn’t get the money.’

‘I don’t care,’ Leah said, by this time a bit calmer. ‘I’m not going back.’

‘What’ll we do then?’

Leah stood for a moment, thinking. ‘Didn’t we say we’d play cricket with Dora today?’ she said. Janey nodded.

‘Right, we’ll go and see her and ask her mother if she can lend us the money. She’s nice is Mrs. Baker.’

***********

Summer had come and gone with astounding swiftness. It had been a warm summer, long hazy days of blue skies and balmy breezes. An idyllic summer, had it not been for the war. Suddenly, however, the season broke, and there was not even a gradual slide into winter. An icy blast of cold air straight from the Arctic descended on Harwood.

As the gray light filtered through the cheap curtains of the upstairs bedroom window of number five Glebe Street, it threw into silhouette the double bed in the centre of the room. This was the only piece of furniture in it, except for a wood chair over which clothes had been flung haphazardly. There were three people in the bed. Cheap, faded oil cloth covered the floor and there was a coloured, although faded clippy mat next to the bed. It was a bare, cold looking room with only a rather garish water-colour of the Pennines on the wall.

‘
This room is really horrible,’ Leah would say to Emma, who always gave the same reply.

‘
Well, you can’t see owt when you’re asleep, so don’t worry about it.’

The house, like most of the others in Harwood, was a ‘two up and two down’. There was no bathroom and no inside toilet. If you wanted a ‘good wash’ you used the slop-stone in the scullery, or, luxury, in winter a tin bath full of hot water in front of the fire. The toilet (the long drop) was at the bottom of the yard. If you were lucky you might see squares of neatly cut newspaper, hung on a nail on the inside of the door.

Emma had been dozing, knowing she must get up soon but was loath to leave the warmth of the bed. It was always the same thing her mind dwelt on lately - that Darkie would join up. She knew she couldn’t dissuade him. He didn’t talk about it much, but whenever she mentioned it he’d get that closed look on his face. He was stubborn, like she was! Most people were fed up of the war and a kind of resigned lethargy had replaced the initial fanatical enthusiasm. It seemed that it would never end. So many dead, missing and maimed!

Leah lay in bed between her mother and Janey, listening to the iron runners of clogs ringing on the cobbles outside the window. The first clang always made her wake with a start. It brought back so vividly those same sounds she’d heard all those years ago when her father had made his Friday night calls. She’d never forget that time, wondered if her mother had any idea how terrified they’d been. Even now, any loud noise made her heart beat faster. Only yesterday Paddy O’Shea, from next door, had nearly frightened her to death when he’d come up behind her and banged a pair of symbols he’d got from someone in the Salvation Army. She’d flown at him and boxed his ears in her anger, even though he was a good two inches taller.

‘
You silly sod,’ she screamed. ‘Don’t do that again.’

‘All right, all right.’ Paddy had been taken aback by the normally cool Leah flying at him like a tiger. He’d only meant it in a bit of fun.

Amazingly though, none of the Hammond children seemed to have suffered from the separation. Separated women were often denigrated. You didn’t leave your man and you either liked married life or ‘lumped’ it. But not Emma, in fact she was rather proud of the way she’d got ‘that lot out’. The children never tired of her endless anecdotes and she had the knack of turning even tragic incidents into a comedy. How many times had she told them of Harold in the throes of the D.Ts? She’d lost count.

‘
What a performance,’ she would begin her story. ‘Up and down the stairs, he was, like a pissing cricket. He was a Catholic, you know, was your Dad and sometimes he’d frighten me to death because he’d jump out of bed like a bullet. In the middle of the night, mind you, run down t’stairs, open the front door and say, ‘hello, Father, come in, Father.’ Then he’d close the door and run back up the stairs and jump into bed. This wouldn’t happen once! Oh no, he’d be doing it all night – up and down, up and down. You can imagine next morning he’d be worn out. And so was I.’ Emma would laugh as she told the story and wipe her eyes with her pinny at the end of it.

What she’d never talk about, and never would, was the other side of the separation: the heartache, the soul wrenching torment, and constant misery, living in the hope that the situation would improve. Then the shattering of her married life by Harold’s philandering, the devastation she’d felt. No, she’d never reveal that side of it!

Leah was aware that her mother was just dozing: her breathing was lighter, she coughed a few times, itched herself now and again, sighed. She always felt so warm and safe in the middle, although she did take up most of the bed.

‘
Like the Queen of Sheba,’ Emma would say in exasperation. ‘And why you have to lie with your elbows stuck out, I’ll never know. Janey and me’ll end up on the floor one of these days. It’s like sleeping on a clothes line!’

Leah sometimes felt guilty, but she couldn’t bear any one touching her when she was asleep, rather difficult when there were three in a small double bed. How she would love to have her very own bed. One day she would, she vowed as she heard Emma turn over with a slight a groan.

Emma was not the woman who had thrown coal all those years ago. Time had not been particularly kind to her; the continual strain of rearing three children on her own, the years of scrimping and saving to make ends meet on a wage that was only a fraction of a man’s, had all taken its toll.

Emma awoke fully as the clanging noise finally petered into her consciousness. Her eyelids fluttered and without turning, for she was aware that Leah was awake, she said. ‘Time to get up, lass.’