Keep the Home Fires Burning. Anne Bennett
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I find it reassuring,’ he said. ‘If we do eventually go to war, then I’d like to know that the Government has been making plans for it.’
Only a week or so later Marion’s sister, Polly, popped round to announce that her two elder boys, Chris and Colm, had got jobs in Ansell’s Brewery on nearby Lichfield Road, taking the place of two boys just a little older, who had been conscripted. Polly’s sons were sixteen and fifteen, and had not had jobs since leaving school. Marion was glad that the lads were working at last and hoped that would make life easier for her sister.
Polly was married to Pat Reilly, who was a wastrel. If he had got work of any kind and looked after her sister properly, Marion might have forgiven him for taking her down when she was only sixteen, but he hadn’t done that. Polly’s house was little more than a stone’s throw from Marion’s, yet it was part of a warren of teeming back-to-back houses and as different from where Marion lived as it was possible to be.
When Polly had married Pat they had had nowhere to live but with Pat’s riotous family, but a little after Chris’s birth, a scant three months after the hasty marriage, they had acquired the house. Marion thought it little more than a slum. Entries ran down at intervals from the street to a squalid back yard, onto which Polly’s house and five others opened directly. The yard, usually crisscrossed with washing lines, housed the brew house where all the women did their washing, the tap outside it however, which froze every winter, had been the family’s only source of water until it had been piped into the houses just a few years before. Even now, Polly shared with two other families a miskin, where the ash was deposited, a dustbin, and a lavatory, which was situated at the bottom of the yard.
The house itself consisted of a scullery, which was little more than a cubbyhole at the top of the cellar steps, a small living room, a bedroom and an attic. Attached to Polly’s house was one just the same, which opened onto the street. There was a smell about the whole place: the smell of human beings packed tightly together, the stink of poverty and deprivation mingled with the vinegary tang from HP Sauce halfway up Tower Hill just behind them, and the yeasty malty odour from Ansell’s Brewery on the Lichfield Road, and you heard the constant thud of the hefty hammers from the nearby drop forge.
Marion blamed Pat for not working harder to get a job so that he could lift the family into something better. She thought Polly was far too easy on him and that she should tell him straight to steer clear of the pubs until he found employment. Polly, however, claimed he did try to get work but all the jobs he could get were casual or temporary, and that a man had to have a drink now and then.
So now Marion said to her sister, ‘No chance of Pat getting set on there, then?’
‘He did ask,’ Polly said, ‘but it was young fellows they were after. Anyroad, I don’t think it would do Pat any good to be working at a brewery. He might be tempted to taste the wares.’
‘He’d not reign there very long if he did that.’
‘He did ask the lads if they ever got any free samples.’
Marion wasn’t surprised at that. ‘He would.’
‘Anyroad,’ Polly said with a grin, ‘while they don’t actually give free samples, each worker gets a docket for two pints of beer a night. Colm and Chris won’t yet, of course, because neither of them is eighteen. Chris said when he is, he will give his dad his allowance, but I said he might be in the army when he’s eighteen so Pat may have to do without his beer.’
‘Yes,’ Marion said. ‘Worrying times, these, to have boys the age they are. I tried to get our Richard interested in the joining the Territorials. They’re looking for recruits and they might have taken him next year when he’s sixteen. Thought it might keep him out of the regular army for a bit, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said until he is old enough to enlist he’ll do his bit in the brass foundry.’
‘My lads are the same,’ Polly said. ‘They said that Ansell’s will do till they are eighteen and then they both want to join the Royal Warwickshires. The brass foundry is probably making summat for this bloody war everyone is certain sure is coming our way, anyroad. Pat says a lot of firms are doing that now.’
‘It is. Richard said they’re getting new machines in soon, and new dies fitted to the old ones, and all work then will be war related.’
‘All this talk of war is scary,’ Polly said. ‘Pat seems to think that it’s inevitable.’
‘So does Bill.’
‘Makes you wonder where we’ll all be in a year’s time.’
‘Maybe it’s a good job we can’t see into the future.’
‘I suppose,’ Polly mused. ‘Funny how life turns out. You always seem to fall on your feet, though.’
‘That’s not really fair,’ Marion said. ‘A lot of my good fortune is because I married Bill and he has a good job.’
‘Yeah,’ said Polly. ‘And you kept your legs together till the ring was on your finger, though if I hadn’t been expecting, Mammy and Daddy would never have agreed to me marrying one of the Reillys.’
‘Maybe not,’ Marion said. ‘But that’s not really any excuse for … Look, Polly, when I spotted you staggering down the gravel drive carrying the bass bag you had taken with you into service that afternoon in June 1923, the blood ran like ice in my veins.’ She still carried that mental image with her. Her sister had always had more meat on her bones than she had, and her hair veered more towards blonde than brown, but apart from that they were very similar and both were pretty girls. Polly had just a dusting of pink on her cheekbones, a cluster of freckles below her eyes. That day, though, her face had been bright red and swollen with the tears she had shed and her hair falling over the face, and even her straw bonnet had been askew.
Polly nodded. ‘You knew what it was all about then, didn’t you?’
‘Course I did,’ Marion said. ‘That’s about the only reason that anyone is dismissed from service. Tell you, I was almighty glad that promotion to lady’s maid meant I had a room of my own and I could grab you before you alerted the house, and hide you away in there.’
‘You nearly shook the head from my shoulders.’
‘Can you wonder at it, Poll?’ Marion demanded. ‘I wanted you to say that you weren’t in the family way. I would have been so pleased that day to have been proved wrong.’
‘I never remember feeling so miserable,’ Polly said. ‘And you went wild when you knew who it was I’d lain with. And he didn’t take me down, not really. I mean, he didn’t make me or anything.’
‘Be quiet, Polly,’ Marion said, genuinely shocked. ‘Have you no shame? Don’t talk in that disgusting way. Did you at no time think of the consequences and that your disgrace and shame would taint the whole family?’
‘No,’ Polly said. ‘Not then I didn’t. I loved Pat, see. I wasn’t really a bad girl.’
Marion knew she wasn’t. Polly didn’t have a nasty bone in her body, but she had been very gullible then, and anxious to please when she was younger, and, Marion had to admit, hadn’t changed much. Polly had always wanted to be liked and probably still did.
There was only one answer, one way out of this terrible dilemma. ‘Well, Pat Reilly will have to be made to marry you, that’s all,’ Marion had said, but even as the words were out of her mouth she knew what Polly’s life would like, married to such a man. She doubted she’d ever have a penny piece to bless herself with and a houseful of babies before she was able to turn around.
‘I never minded marrying Pat,’ Polly said, and added a little defiantly, ‘and he didn’t have to be forced either. Despite everything, I still don’t regret that marriage. I was really glad that Lady Amelia gave you leave to go home with me and tell Mammy and Daddy,’ Polly added fervently. ‘I think Mammy might have killed me stone dead that day if you hadn’t been there.’
‘In all honesty