April 1942
Millbrook, County Down
Alex Hamilton closed the door of his office firmly behind him, strode along the short corridor to the main entrance of the tall building where he had spent most of the working day and stepped out into the freshness of the early evening. For a moment he paused, took a deep breath of the cool, rain-washed air, then ran his sharp, dark eyes around the wide expanse of tarmac stretched out between the brick cliff of the mill rising behind him and the curving access road that swept up the steep valley side to the main road beyond.
Even at this relatively late hour, there were two vehicles still loading. Bales and boxes stood piled high, as men in dungarees streaked with engine oil and lubricant lent a hand to the drivers and their helpers as they manhandled the bulky products. The spinning floors were running double shifts, working through the night, the only pause in the constant roar of their rotating spindles twelve hours on a Sunday to allow for essential maintenance.
Before he’d picked out Robert Anderson among the moving brown figures, Robert himself, the foreman of the evening shift, caught sight of him, raised a hand and moved briskly over to the elderly Austin which Alex was still permitted to use by virtue of the war work being carried out at all four mills.
‘We’re all set, Boss, if the worst happens,’ he said soberly as he came up to him.
‘Good man, Robert. I’ll come straight over if I hear anything, but if you get the signal ring anyway, just to be sure. Emily will tell you if I’m already on my way.’
Robert nodded, turned towards the half-loaded vehicle behind him, thought better of it and added, with a small awkward smile, ‘I hope ah won’t see you till the morra.’
Alex nodded, his heavy and sombre-looking face transformed as he responded warmly to the brave attempt at humour.
‘We live in hope, Robert, as they say in these parts,’ he replied, the softness of his speech reminding his long-time colleague that although Alex Hamilton had come from Canada long years ago, he had never lost his accent, nor his pleasure in the particular phrases and expressions of the place he had always called home.
The Austin was elderly, but had responded to Alex’s gift with machinery and his love of driving. It sailed up the slope with the greatest of ease. He whistled softly as he always did when he was quite alone, turned right on the empty road leading to Banbridge and passed briskly through the almost deserted streets. On the outskirts of the town, he took the road heading east in the direction of Katesbridge and Castlewellan, the Austin the only vehicle moving under a clearing sky patched with great expanses of blue between piled up towers of dazzling white cloud.
The days had lengthened and with the clocks now moved back to create Daylight Saving Time, the sun was still high. Here and there, it cast fingers of brilliant light into fields and hedgerows fresh with new growth, illuminating the palest of greens and turning them into an even softer shade of gold.
With long hours of work and little enough time to spend with his family, his drives were the one chance he had to look around him and observe the changes in the countryside he knew so well. They also gave him time to turn over in his mind the strange thoughts that had come out of nowhere, thoughts that now returned to him at any quiet moment of the day and haunted his dreams at night.
At fifty-three years old, or thereabouts, a long-married man with even the youngest of his four children soon to be eighteen, a responsible job as Technical Director of Bann Valley Mills, he never ceased to be amazed, that after all these years, he should suddenly begin to puzzle himself about his background. Why should he be at all concerned about his unknown parents and the circumstances which had left him, a child of five or six, an orphan on a ship bound for America.
Why now, he would ask himself. Why was it suddenly important that around fifty years ago his only possessions were the clothes he had been given and a label, a creased parcel label, attached with string to his coat collar, just where it rubbed and scratched his ear however much he tried to push it away.
‘Alex Hamilton,’ it said. That and nothing else. It was his entry ticket to an upbringing in institutions in Canada and the USA. It had led to his being placed, first, as a child worker and then as a farm labourer. Had it not been for broad shoulders and a robust constitution he would not have survived either the rigours of the orphanage regime or the beatings handed out by some of the men with whom he’d been sent to work. But he had survived. Long enough for a chance meeting with a Trade Union worker in an out-of-the-way place called German Township.
That whole episode was ridiculous when you came to think of it. The man’s name was McGinley, a friendly sort, well-educated, but not stand-offish. He had a shock of red hair, a soft Irish accent and his boots looked as if he’d recently been tramping across a piece of wet bottom land. After his address to the meeting on agricultural wages and conditions, he’d gone up to him to ask about membership of the union. When he’d given McGinley his name, he’d replied with a grin: ‘That’s a good Ulster name. I have a sister, Rose, married to a man called Hamilton. They live at a place called Annacramp, in County Armagh.’
Suddenly, he forgot the question he was going to put to him. It was as if he could think of nothing but this place in Ireland where there were Hamiltons. So he asked instead exactly whereabouts in County Armagh Annacramp was to be found. From that moment on, he had but one idea in his mind and that was how and when he was going to get there.
It was on a rough piece of road a short distance before he was due to turn up the steep slope of Rathdrum Hill that his eye caught sight of the waving needle on his dashboard. He stopped whistling abruptly, cursed quietly, and remembered the words of his old friend John Hamilton, the man who had once welcomed him as a member of his family purely on the set of his shoulders and his resemblance to his own father, Tom, who’d been a blacksmith.
‘I’ve changed and modified and improved every working part of hundreds of motors, but I’m damned if I’ve ever been able to make a fuel gauge more reliable,’ he’d declared. ‘The only safe way with fuel gauges, was to keep your tank topped up so that you never had to rely on the needle, unreliable even on the smoothest piece of road.’
Knowing John for the wise man he was, he’d always followed his advice, but things were very different now from how they were after the last war. Whatever petrol John needed for his continuous movement between the four mills, he’d simply to sign a chit at Bann Valley’s own pumps, which he might well pass several times a day. Nothing was that simple now with petrol so strictly rationed. Even when he had the necessary coupons from his entitlement, their authorised supplier in Banbridge might have nothing in his tanks to give him.
There was nothing to be done about his fuel supply between here and home beyond slowing down even further and avoiding having to stop on the hill. There should be a gallon can for such emergencies up against the stone wall at the furthest end of the workshop, kept well away from a chance spark from the metal cutter or the acetylene welder.
But he was still annoyed with himself as he scanned the road ahead. There was so much to think about these days, so many extra problems with the machinery running at full stretch, but when it came to the bit, that was no excuse. First things had to come first. What would he do tonight if he was needed and he had no car to collect the three extra men from Ballievy and get them over to Millbrook to join the others?
He slowed down rapidly as he picked up a distant roar of engines and pulled in as far as he could to his own side of the road, grateful there was a rough, grassy verge when it might just as well have been a water-filled ditch. Moments later, a convoy of Army lorries accelerated towards him. It was a regular hazard these days to meet these large and powerful vehicles on the narrow country roads. Often driven by inexperienced drivers, they roared past without reducing speed. Tonight, they were so close he could have touched their dark canvas covers without stretching out the hand that rested lightly on his open window.
He waved to the young men in camouflage as they passed, helmeted and carrying rifles. Smiles began to crease pale faces as they returned his greeting. English boys mostly. Yorks and Lancs was the name of this particular regiment, but according to his own son, Johnny, the rank and file were from all over the north of England, mostly the old industrial cities. No wonder they looked so uneasy when he saw them swing on ropes across the swollen waters of the Bann or found them in the field behind Rathdrum trying to navigate cross country with a pocket compass and a badly copied map.
Judging by the hour, it looked as if they might be heading north to Slieve Croob for a night manoeuvre. Often enough on his way to work he’d seen a convoy return in the morning, faces blackened, eyes listless with fatigue. But, of course, this lot might just be moving on. Troops came and went without any preliminaries. They arrived as strangers and were made welcome. Dances and socials were organised for them. They became friends. Then they went away. Sometimes one heard where they had gone and how the regiment had fared, but, whether things went well or badly for them, they seldom came back.
He sounded his horn and waved at wee Daisy Cook, who sat on the wall of Jackson’s farm, her arm round a sheepdog puppy. It had been Cook’s farm for years now, but for him it would always be Jackson’s, the farm at the foot of the hill where he’d boarded when he’d first arrived back from Canada, visited John and Rose Hamilton at Ballydown and been taken on by John as his assistant at the four mills. It was at Jackson’s farm he’d met Emily, an orphan like himself, living with her aunt and uncle.
Tonight as he tooted and waved to Daisy, he thought of the April night he’d driven his good friend Sarah Sinton and her children back home from Dublin after the Easter Rising. He and Sam Hamilton, Sarah’s brother, had gone down together in two motors when they’d heard the railway lines had been dug up north of Dublin and Sarah would have no means of returning. Emily had been so anxious about his going. She said she’d be waiting up till she heard the motor going past on the way up to Ballydown, no matter how late it was.
He pressed gently on the accelerator and built up his speed. With any luck, he could take a smooth line up the steepest part of the hill without meeting one of the heavy lorries from the newly-opened quarry beyond Rathdrum. They weren’t supposed to come down this way because of the steepness of the road, but following the new quarry road north to the main road did make their journey longer if the crushed rock was hardcore for one of the many new airstrips being built in the south of the county.
The only sign of life on the long, steep hill was a bicycle parked against the garden wall of the farmhouse at Ballydown where Emily and Alex had made their first home after Rose and John moved up to Rathdrum House itself. Danny Ferguson, the new mill manager at Ballievy, would be down the hill in minutes if the signal went up.
He caught a glimpse of pink blossom as he moved steadily past. He wondered if it was Rose’s camellia, the one she and John had cherished for all the years they had lived there, planting a garden from scraps and cuttings Rose had brought from her very first garden, back in Annacramp in County Armagh.
As he crested the hill and prepared to swing under the trees into the avenue leading to Rathdrum House, Alex was amazed to catch sight of a lorry parked closely against the hedge on the down slope some way beyond his own entrance, the tarpaulins that had covered its load neatly folded and roped down.
Even before he caught sight of the tailboard and read the familiar name, his face lit up. As he expected, it read: Fruitfield Jams and Preserves. He knew only one man who could park a lorry that close and that straight.
‘Sam Hamilton. You’re a stranger. How are you, man? It’s great to see you,’ he said, beaming, as he stopped the Austin in the cobbled yard at the back of his house and shook hands with the tall, broad-shouldered figure who’d hurried out into the yard to meet him when he’d caught the first throb of the vehicle on the road up the hill.
‘Great to see you too, Alex,’ replied Sam, grasping his hand firmly. ‘Emily’s been givin’ me all your news, but she was afraid ye might not get back before I hafta to go.’
‘Ach Sam, can ye not stay a while?’ Alex asked, his face clouding.
‘I can stay a wee bit longer,’ Sam replied, reassuringly, ‘but I hafta get back in daylight. This blackout is a desperit thing. No matter how careful ye wou’d be, ye can see so little with these masked headlamps. An’ sure a lorry like mine cou’d kill half a dozen soldiers if they’re on manoeuvres and had no white markers.’
‘You’re right there,’ he agreed. ‘We’ve had so many accidents round here lately. And not just the blackout. With all these Army vehicles we’ve had some bad ones in daylight as well. There were four roadmen having their tea thrown into the hedge this time last year. None killed, thank goodness, but two of them left in a bad way for quite a while. People are just not used to this sort of fast traffic at all hours of the day and night. Their reactions are too slow.’
They moved together towards the back door where Emily stood watching them.
‘Alex dear, there’s some dinner in the oven, but I must go down to Cook’s now you’re home. Johnny was in for his tea earlier and we’ve no milk for the morning,’ she explained with a wry laugh. ‘I’ve just made you a pot of tea and left you some cake,’ she added, as she picked up her shopping bag and set off.
‘Has Emily given you your supper, Sam?’ Alex asked, as he picked up the tray she’d left and led the way to the sitting-room where a bright fire burnt on the hearth.
‘No. Your good Emily offered me my supper the minute I set foot in the house, as Emily always does,’ he replied warmly, ‘but I was given a meal at Chinauley House when I delivered to them. Guest of the King’s Own Rifles,’ he added smiling. ‘An’ very good it was too. They said on their wee menu that it was chicken, but if I know anything it was rabbit. Aye and none the worse for that,’ he added vigorously, as Alex handed him a mug of tea.
‘There’s a great warren just across the road from that big house,’ he went on. ‘The Nut Bank, it used to be called when I was a wee boy. They’ve a pontoon bridge across the river and it’s a rifle range now. Bad luck on the rabbits,’ he added sharply.
Alex laughed.
‘Bad luck on us all, Sam. One man’s wicked ambition that leaves poor people frightened out of their wits and half-starved and even kills the rabbits.’
‘Aye, given how bad things are we’ve a lot to be grateful for and only the one loss so far in our family. I can’t remember if I wrote to you about it,’ he said cautiously. ‘Sure it’s well over a year since I got the chance to come over,’ he said, breaking off, as he saw the anxious concern creep over Alex’s face.
Alex shook his head slowly and waited.
‘Ach dear. Well it was the Belfast Blitz. The big one on Easter Tuesday. A desperit business altogether. Young Sam’s wife, wee Ellie, had her cousin Tommy Magowan killed. It seems he was fire-watching in place of a friend of his when his parents thought he was away in Bangor with his girlfriend. It was only when he didn’t come home they began to worry. His father found him in St George’s Market the next morning, laid out with all the rest of the unidentified casualties. Not a mark on him. They said it was blast that killed him.’
Alex dropped his eyes from Sam’s candid gaze, the images of that night now springing up as brightly as the flaming, onion-shaped incendiaries that had rained down on the city.
‘Do you remember, Sam, when the last war came and the two of us sat in your workshop trying to decide what we’d do if there was conscription?’ Alex asked, as the silence lengthened between them.
‘Aye. I think we decided we could maybe get into an Ambulance Corps together, neither of us having any wish to kill our fellow men.’
Alex nodded slowly and stared into the red embers of the wood fire.
‘Sam, I was in Belfast that night and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget it,’ he confessed quietly.
‘Man dear, how did that come about?’ Sam asked, his eyes dilating with the shock of Alex’s words. ‘Were you there when it started, or what happened at all?’
For weeks after that night, Alex had thought of writing to tell Sam of his night in the burning city, but he’d not been able to face it. They’d been friends for so long and had always told each other the truth, even when it was not to their credit, but the thought of words on the page had been too much for him. So he’d said how busy he was and let Emily write the short notes they’d always used to keep in touch, two or three times a year and a longer one at Christmas. But now he’d have to make up for his evasion.
‘Emily and I had just gone to bed when I heard a noise,’ he began, easily enough. ‘Couldn’t place it at all. A vibration. Not thunder, but getting louder. I got up and went outside. It was full moonlight but I couldn’t see anything to the south with the way our trees have grown up. What I could feel was the air moving. And there was a smell. I can’t describe that smell, but suddenly I knew it was bombers and there must be hundreds of them to make the air move like that. So I went in and phoned the mill managers. By the time I got down to Ballievy, Harry Creswell who lives on a hill beyond Seapatrick had seen the incendiaries falling. He said they were coming down so fast it was like one of those pictures of Hell you’d see in these evangelical tracts people put through doors.’
Alex paused for breath and finished his mug of tea.
‘We’re well organised for fire in the mills. We have to be, as you know,’ he began again, his voice still steady, ‘but the turn out that night was a credit, though I say it myself. The four engines, fully-manned were on their way in no time.’
He stopped, shook his head and dropped his face in his hands. When he looked up again his eyes were full of tears.
‘Sam, you might as well have taken a child’s bucket and spade as our four engines. The place was an inferno, the fires beyond anything any of us had ever seen, and when we did get into the city there was no water pressure. They’d bombed the reservoir and the water mains were gone. Even where there was a fire point still standing our hoses didn’t fit.’
‘Ach man dear, I’d no idea you were in Belfast,’ Sam said, his face suddenly looking old and lined as he recalled that night himself. ‘Sure we heard what was happening from the guard on the last train up. He told the Stationmaster at Richhill and he walked over to the farm and told us. Apparently the train was leaving Belfast just as it started. Our Jack went up to Cannon Hill to tell the Home Guard patrol up there, but he didn’t have to tell them for you could see it from up there, the whole city on fire, the sky for miles around lit up with the flames. He said when he came back about all we could do was pray for the poor souls.’
Sam looked down at his hands. They were broad, thick-fingered hands, not the kind you would think best-suited to make the fine adjustments that were such a part of his everyday work.
‘So what did you do when you couldn’t fight the fires?’
‘We got out the spades and the tackle and started digging people out of wrecked houses. And we brought a few out alive from under the stairs. But most were dead. Some of those poor wee houses wouldn’t give shelter to a mouse. Those people in the government up at Stormont have a lot to answer for,’ he went on bitterly. ‘I’d heard it said they spent more time in Cabinet discussing how to protect that statue of Carson they’re so proud off than protecting the people of Belfast. I saw for myself that night. It was absolutely true.’
‘Aye, I’m afeerd yer right about the Government. I’ve seen m’brother James a few times recently. He’s still in Economic Development, but he says there’s no go in them at all, bar one or two labour or socialists like Tommy Henderson and Harry Midgley. Sure, they only meet now and again for a couple of hours when there’s so much they could be doin’ to help people. I think James would resign, but then he knows that wou’d only make it worse. At least in his Department he can do somethin’… Maybe, Alex, all we can ever do is somethin’. Who knows what value any action of any one of us, however small, might be. It could be far more important than we could ever imagine. We must live in hope, man, and with God’s help we’ll come through,’ he said strongly.
Alex had never found any reason to expect God to help him or anyone else, even if He did exist, but then he had always recognised that Sam’s God was a different matter. Now in his late fifties, Sam had become a Quaker many years earlier. He’d practised his religion quietly and firmly and now had a steadiness and assuredness about him that Alex found quite enviable.
‘You’re right, Sam. We can only do our best. I only hope that best will be good enough,’ he said honestly, looking up at his friend as he watched him get to his feet.
The bright April evening was paling towards dusk and shadows were lengthening in the fire-lit sitting-room. Although the journey was only some fifteen miles, Alex knew well the possibility of a delay if a convoy was moving somewhere between Banbridge and Richhill.
They walked down the avenue together, the fresh foliage above their heads now fluttering in a small, evening breeze, long fingers of light spilling across their path as the sun dropped to the horizon.
‘I mind Sarah and Hugh planting these two trees here after a big storm,’ Sam said suddenly, looking up into the interlacing branches as they tramped along together. ‘That must have been a couple of years before Hugh died and you arrived back from Canada. And I mind too, you and young Hugh down there on the hill planting out wee oaks he grew from acorns,’ he added, as they came through the gates and gazed down the hill at the mature trees which stood in the hedgerow opposite the single house on the right-hand side of the road, the well-loved home they had both known, Sam as a child, Alex as a young married man.
‘Great oaks from little acorns grow. Isn’t that one of the saying in these parts?’ Alex asked.
‘Aye, and your wee friend Hugh Sinton is doing great work down on Lough Erne I’m told. James had to go to Enniskillen on business and went to see him. He’s moved there to test out some new plane he’d been working on at Shorts in Belfast. Sarah could only drop me hints in her last letter, but James told me it’s to do with spotter planes. Give the same man a while longer, he said, and we’ll not be losing all this shipping to the U-boats.’
They stopped by Sam’s lorry and Alex asked the question that had been in his mind since the moment he’d seen it.
‘Are you short-staffed at Fruitfield?’
‘No, thank goodness, we’re not. Most of us are too old to join up. It’s mainly the girls from the office that have gone, so our Jack tells me. Why d’ye ask?’
‘Well, I was wondering why the senior man who keeps the whole place running was out delivering jam.’
‘Ach, now I see what yer gettin’ at,’ replied Sam, laughing. ‘Sure I don’t mind the odd wee run out. It’s Security. If you deliver to the forces, you have to be cleared. They wouldn’t let a couple of young fellas anywhere near Chinauley House or the Gough Barracks in Armagh or anywhere else where there’s troops for that matter. It’s the same with delivering war materials. Shell-Mex in Armagh have only the one man allowed to deliver petrol. They have to be certain they’re trustworthy. Sure there’s a black market in everything.’
‘Well, they couldn’t pick a straighter man than you, that’s for sure,’ said Alex, now laughing himself, as Sam swung himself up into the cab.
‘Except perhaps yourself,’ Sam came back at him promptly. ‘Let me know how things go with the girls and young Johnny and I’ll maybe get another chance to come over in another month or two when they’ve eaten what I brought today. God Bless,’ he added, as he raised a hand in farewell.
Alex watched him move down the longer, gentler slope towards the main road, the noise of the batcher at the quarry now loud on the evening air. Breeze blocks for building. Crushed rock for hard standing. Gravel for mending overburdened roads. The quarry was working all the daylight hours, the dust from the crushers throwing a white mist over the nearby hedgerows until the next heavy shower came to rinse the foliage and leave it shining again.
He turned away as the lorry became a small moving object in the green landscape and walked back up towards his own gates, his stomach rumbling vigorously, reminding him of his supper in the oven.
The sun had gone now, down behind the low hill at Lisnaree, but there was still quite enough light to see two figures walking up towards him. One was clearly Emily. Beside her, carrying her shopping bag from which came the small chink of milk bottles, there was a man he did not recognise. From this distance, he could not even guess whether he was a friend or a stranger.