Winnie of the Waterfront (3 page)

At first the other children had been curious about her legs being in irons and the fact that she had to sit in the chair all the time. Some had teased her, others had simply ignored her, but gradually they took her presence for granted. Several of the girls even stayed in at playtime to keep her company.

Getting to school and getting home again was her main problem. Her mam refused to push her there because she said it made her back ache. This meant that Winnie had to leave the house at the same time as her dad did, so that he could push her to school before he caught a tram down to the docks. As a result, she arrived almost an hour
before
anyone else and had to sit outside and wait until the school opened. She then had to ask one of the teachers to push her into the classroom.

At night it was the same routine. A teacher would push her out onto the pavement and leave her by the school gates until her dad arrived back from work and wheeled her home.

Most of the time she didn’t mind at all, but when it was pouring with rain, even though there was an overhanging roof by the school gate that provided some shelter, she did get very wet. In the winter it was also very cold, but that wasn’t so bad because her dad always made sure that she had some good thick blankets to wrap around her to keep herself warm. On very cold mornings he filled a stone hot-water bottle and tucked it in beside her for extra warmth.

She didn’t mind the waiting either, not once she had learned to read. She’d always got a comic or a book of some sort down the side of her carriage. Even if there was no one to talk to she was quite happy to sit and read until her dad arrived or the school opened up.

Things had become so much better since she first started school. Miss Phillips had been very patient and encouraged her to do extra work and paid special attention to her in class. Winnie was grateful that Miss Phillips had done all she could to make sure that she caught up with all the lessons she’d missed.

At first, Winnie had found it a tremendous struggle to understand all the intricacies of reading and writing. She badly wanted to be able to read.
She
loved it when her dad read stories to her and the thought of being able to read them for herself spurred her efforts on. Once she could read, she told herself, she’d never be lonely or unhappy again. There were hundreds of books in the world and they were all different, so it was going to take her years and years to read every one of them.

Her determination was rewarded. One day she was struggling to recognise all the strange shapes and symbols and the next they had clicked into place and she was reading. Or that was how it had seemed to her.

Once she could read, then learning to write had seemed easy. It was only a matter of copying the letters from her reading book onto her slate. As soon as she had succeeded in doing that properly she was allowed to copy them onto the lines on a sheet of paper.

Sums were quite different, but her dad was good with them and helped her every evening. By the end of her first summer term at school, Winnie found that she had achieved more than she had ever thought possible and Miss Phillips was delighted by her progress.

‘When you come back after the summer holidays,’ Miss Phillips told her, ‘you will move up into the class you should be in at your age.’

Winnie’s chair was not only a means of getting out and about. During the summer holidays, when she was seven years old, her dad had made a tray to fit across her lap so that she could use it as a table. She was able to use it to hold her plate and
cup
at mealtimes. First thing each morning while he was getting her breakfast ready, her dad would bring her a bowl of water and rest it on the tray-table so that she could wash her hands and face. Then he’d hand her a mirror and she was able to comb her hair and make herself ready for school.

Her long black ringlets had been cut off while she had been in hospital, and now, from time to time, her father trimmed her hair so that it stayed in tight curls around her face.

‘It’s easier to manage that way,’ he told her when she asked him why she couldn’t grow it again. ‘You don’t want long hair that gets full of tangles, now, do you? Think of all the trouble that would be.’

‘No, but I’d like it to grow a bit longer,’ she pleaded.

A few months later as they studied her reflection, her dad agreed with her. Once they had let her black curls grow so that they framed her heart-shaped face they both found it did suit her much better. In fact, when she smiled, she looked quite pretty.

If only her legs worked, Winnie thought wistfully, she’d be the same as all the other girls at school!

But they didn’t, and it seemed they never would so she knew she had to give up daydreaming that one day she would walk again. She sometimes wondered why she still had to wear the heavy irons that were so uncomfortable, since they weren’t doing any good. Her dad didn’t seem to have the answer to that either, but he persuaded
her
that she ought to go on wearing them because that was what the doctor had said she must do.

Now that she was in a class where the other children were the same age as her, or even a little bit older, she was more conscious of her disability. Although they accepted her and very rarely commented on the fact that she couldn’t walk or run, it made her feel different from them.

She felt so envious when she saw them running around the playground at dinnertime that it brought tears to her eyes. One day she was so sunk in her own misery that she didn’t hear anyone come into the deserted classroom and she almost jumped out of her skin when a voice asked, ‘What you snuffling about then?’

Startled, she looked up defiantly at the tall, redheaded boy, rubbing away her tears with the heel of her hand.

‘I’m not snuffling. I … I got something in me eye, that’s all.’

‘What you doing staying in here instead of coming outside?’

Winnie shrugged. ‘I like it here.’

‘No you don’t! That’s why you were crying. You wanted to be outside in the playground like the rest of us. Go on, admit it.’

‘Well, I can’t be there, can I?’

‘You could be if I pushed your chair outside.’

They stared at each other in silence. His emerald-green gaze locked with her turquoise-blue one and a spark of mutual understanding flashed between them.

‘All right,’ she said cautiously.

‘I ain’t going to play with you, though,’ he pointed out.

‘I never asked you to, did I?’

After that, Sandy Coulson, or occasionally one of the other big boys in her class, pushed her chair out into the playground at midday. Miss Phillips made no objection except to say that it caused too much disruption for Winnie to be wheeled out for their ten-minute mid-morning break.

Winnie loved it because it meant she could take part in all sorts of games with her friends. She could catch and throw a ball, play I-Spy, and join in some of the quieter games the girls played.

The boys would have liked her to join in their games. ‘Come on, we can use your chair as a battering ram,’ one of them urged her one lunchtime.

When a couple of them tried to persuade Winnie to let them lift her out so that they could have a ride in her chair, Winnie refused because she was afraid that they might damage her chair and she couldn’t let that happen. Her dad had gone to such a lot of trouble to make it for her, and he would be so unhappy if it ended up broken.

Furthermore, if anything happened to it then how would she get to school? Her dad wouldn’t be able to take her out either, because she was far too heavy for him to carry these days. Even carrying her upstairs to bed left him gasping for breath.

Miss Phillips, who was in the playground, heard
what
was said and had immediately forbidden it.

‘Certainly not! Winnie might be hurt or one of you could be injured,’ she admonished in a shocked voice.

Chapter Three

GRACE MALLOY FELT
the bedclothes lifting as Trevor crept in beside her. As his ice-cold leg grazed against her she pulled away.

‘Keep away from me – you’re like a bloody iceberg!’ she muttered irritably. ‘When I told you to stop Winnie from crying I didn’t mean you had to sit by her bedside until she went back to sleep.’

‘She was having one of her nightmares so I took her downstairs for a while until she’d calmed down, so that she wouldn’t disturb you.’

‘Bigger fool you! Senseless, the way you pander to that kid. Make a right little martyr of her you do. That’s why the mardy little madam is such a pain in the arse and plays up so much. She knows she’s only got to open her gob and yell and you’ll be there to comfort her.’

‘I only wish there was more I could do to ease her pain and suffering,’ Trevor said wistfully. ‘It’s such a sad life for the poor little thing.’

‘It’ll be an even sadder life for you if you aren’t up in the morning for work. Lose that job and you won’t find another one in a hurry, especially one where you’re sitting on your backside all day, I can tell you. With this war on you’ll be shoved into a munitions factory and be on your feet all day.’

‘I’ll be up like a lark the minute the alarm goes off, and I’ll bring you up a cuppa before I go out,’ Trevor promised.

‘Well, make sure you put two sodding spoonfuls of sugar in it, not just one,’ Grace muttered as she turned her back on him and humped the bedclothes up around her shoulders.

Within minutes, Trevor was asleep and snoring gently, but Grace now felt wide awake. She twisted and turned and thumped her pillow angrily, but sleep eluded her.

The anger inside her was like a pain. She didn’t know which she found the hardest to contend with, her marriage to Trevor or the terrible burden that Winnie had turned out to be.

She must have been mad to get married again at her age, she thought morosely, especially to a weedy specimen like Trevor Malloy. He was too much the perfect gentleman for her taste. Too eager to do the right thing and always trying to please everybody.

Trevor wasn’t half the man her first husband had been. Michael O’Mara had been a rip-roaring Irishman, more often drunk than sober. Although he had a silver tongue and could charm the birds off the trees he’d fought anything that moved. He’d thought nothing of giving her a black eye, and then the next minute they’d be making love as if there had never been a harsh word between them.

He’d been a hard worker; a docker who never had to stand around waiting for a gaffer to pick him out from the crowd. He’d decided for himself
which
gang he’d work for and he’d used his fist on any man who’d got in his way.

He’d been a God-fearing man for all that. He never missed a Sunday Mass in his life and he made sure that all his family attended regularly as well. Father Patrick had loved him like a son, and, along with the rest of them, had shed tears at his funeral.

No one in Luther Court could believe their ears when less than six months later she’d announced that she was going to marry Trevor Malloy. True, he was an Irishman from County Galway, and as staunch a Catholic as Michael O’Mara had been, but he was as different from her late husband as chalk was from cheese.

Michael O’Mara had topped six feet in his socks. He’d been built like an ox with the broadest shoulders Grace had ever seen and he could bellow like a bull when his temper was roused. Trevor Malloy was as thin as a whippet. Tall and weedy, in fact, and he was so mild-mannered that he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. He never raised his voice, never cursed or swore, and was not only as gentle as a lamb but as easy-going as one as well.

His job as a timekeeper down at the docks meant that he spent his working day inside a tiny wooden box keeping a gimlet eye on the other men and noting the times they arrived and departed. He also checked in the lorries arriving with goods for shipment and the ones leaving the dockside laden after a boat had been unloaded. It was regular hours and decent-enough pay, but it didn’t broaden his shoulders or develop his muscles.

Her youngest son, Paddy, had got chatting to him, and because he’d felt sorry for him had brought him home and asked her to give him a square meal and a bed. They’d talked half the night away, fortified by a flagon or two of stout. It had been too late to bother making up a bed for him so she’d invited him into her own bed and he’d taken it for granted that she wanted him to stay.

At first she had been glad of his company, even though he was so quiet that half the time she hardly noticed if he was there or not. His gentle lovemaking, so different to Mick’s rough-and-ready treatment, had been like a soothing balm.

It had gone on from there. She’d known she would soon tire of him because he was too quiet and reserved, but she had been feeling fragile at the time and had found his quiet, caring manner highly agreeable.

She had never intended to marry him, of course! Neither had she thought she would end up pregnant, not at her age! She was almost fifty and she thought she was past worrying about that sort of thing.

Events proved her wrong, and in shocked desperation she had accepted his proposal that they should make it legal. Anything seemed to be better than having to carry the sin of a backstreet abortion. Also, too many times she’d seen the dire consequences of what happened when one of those went wrong.

It had been a mistake, of course. He was less than half her age for a start. Even her youngest boy, Paddy, was a couple of years older than
Trevor.
She had to admit, though, that marrying him had moved her up in the world a peg or two. They’d moved into two rooms in a better road than where her own squalid dump had been. They’d furnished it nicely into the bargain, because she’d refused to bring any of her bug-infested stuff with her. She’d made him buy everything new, even though he couldn’t afford it and they’d had to get it all on the knocker.

Their new place hadn’t stayed looking good for very long, though. She’d never been able to keep a decent home together. When she and Michael O’Mara had first been married it had been the kids who turned the place into a right pigsty. As they’d got older and left home it had been Michael himself who’d been the problem. He’d been an untidy beggar, kicking his boots off as he came in the door and dropping his cap, coat and muffler onto the nearest chair. When he went to bed at night he’d dump his clothes on the floor, or anywhere that was handy, and since she could never be bothered to pick them up they stayed there until he needed them again.