There were few passengers on the last train to Belfast that evening so Clare and Auntie Polly had a carriage all to themselves and didn’t have to bother putting all their bags and parcels up on the rack high above both their heads.
Clare dropped her things gratefully and studied the faded sepia pictures above the long, lumpy seats that ran the full width of the carriage.
‘The Glens of Antrim, The Great Northern Hotel, Rostrevor and The Ladies’ Bathing Place, Portrush,’ she read aloud.
She had seen them before, last year, when she and her mother had gone on the Mall Church Sunday School excursion. The train jerked violently and squealed, preparatory to moving off. On the platform side, the stationmaster strode past banging doors and trying handles to make sure they were really shut. As the guard blew his whistle, Clare hurried across to the other side of the train knowing that in a few minutes time when they got up steam she would be able to see all the places she knew on the Loughgall Road.
‘That’s Richardson’s, isn’t it, Auntie Polly, over there?’ she asked, as they gathered speed.
She pointed to a fragment of an eighteenth-century chimney pot just visible over a planting of mature beech trees and the curve of a low, rounded hill.
‘Yes, yes, it must be,’ Polly replied, getting up wearily from the seat where she had subsided just inside the carriage door. She came and joined Clare at her window. ‘And that’s the back of Wileys and Compstons. Look, there’s Charlie Running on his bicycle just going up the hill past Mosey Jackson’s. Maybe he’s going down to see your Granda at the forge,’ she went on, making an effort to be interested.
Clare peered down on the figure pedalling steadily up the slight incline. At this point, where the railway bridge crossed over the lane, the track ran right beside the road. For a moment, she was so close to the figure on the bicycle she could have called to him through the open window. Then, just as she was about to wave, a great cloud of steam blew back from the engine. By the time it had gone, the road had disappeared and the track had dropped into a shallow cutting where only the bright white clouds in the paling blue sky were visible above the shaggy line of the full-leafed hedgerows.
She waited patiently for the level crossing but there were no children to wave to anywhere in sight. Although it was a lovely summer evening and the sun was still shining brightly, she knew by the long shadows cast by the trees and even by the cows that were grazing peacefully in the fields that it must be getting late. Perhaps it was past the children’s bedtime.
‘What time it is, Auntie Polly?’ she asked without turning away from the window.
When there was no reply, she turned round and found her aunt was asleep. Settled by the far window she had leant her head against the rough fabric of the seat and was now thoroughly out for the count.
Clare sighed and wriggled herself more comfortably into her own corner. It was no wonder Auntie Polly was so tired. She’d been busy trying to sort everything out since she’d fetched them from the hospital. Uncle Jack had taken a day of his holidays from work so that he could drive them round in his car but even with the car it had been a very busy day. He’d done everything he could to give a hand, he’d even come with them to Lennox’s to buy clothes and underwear because all their own things had had to be destroyed.
‘Jack, what would we have done without you?’ Auntie Polly said, as they drove out of the town at the end of the morning.
‘Sure it was the least I could do,’ he replied easily.
Granny Hamilton had made them a very nice stew for their lunch and afterwards they said goodbye to William. Auntie Polly kept looking at William as they were getting ready to go and Clare wondered if he might cry, but William didn’t seem to mind staying behind at all. He hardly even bothered to say cheerio and Granny Hamilton had to tell him to wave goodbye to the car as it turned out of the farmyard and up the hill to the main road.
They drove back into Armagh again, this time to the solicitor’s office. They’d been there for ages. It was a big three-storey building in Russell Street opposite the Cosy Cinema and the RUC Barracks. With tall pillars outside, Clare thought the entrance looked more like the outside of a church than the way in to business premises. She’d had to sit for ages on a very hard chair in the outer office with the clerks.
Behind the counter where they worked there were files and folders everywhere, stacked on shelves and desks, piled up on the tops of cupboards and even heaped up on the floor. There were three typewriters all chattering away at once and going ‘ping’ at the end of every line as well as two big black telephones which rang every few minutes or so.
‘Roan Anersin,’ said the youngest clerk, who wore a black skirt and a rather crumpled white blouse.
‘Row Anderson’ said the middle aged lady with the spotted blouse and the grey cardigan.
‘Munro and Anderson’, said the Chief Clerk, the lady who sat nearest to the partner’s door. She had silver-grey hair and spoke very correctly. Clare wondered if she had been to elocution classes and whether she spoke like that when she was at home making her tea. She looked as if she might be a single lady. Perhaps she had no one to talk to except a pussy-cat. That must be very lonely and sad, to have no one to talk to.
‘Here you are, my dear, you’ve had such a long wait.’
Clare was amazed to find the silver-grey lady standing in front of her with a glass of orange squash and two biscuits on a little plate. One of the biscuits was a pink wafer one which she particularly liked.
‘I’m afraid this is very boring for you. Solicitor’s are very careful people so everything they do has to be just so.’
She had such a nice way of clicking her fingers together when she said ‘Just so’ and such a lively smile that Clare wondered if sometimes she got bored too, working in this dusty old office.
Then Auntie Polly and Uncle Jack reappeared. They said thank you and goodbye but then began to talk business all over again. The tall gentleman with spectacles said everything at least three times but although she could pick out words like ‘intestacy’ and ‘deed of family arrangement’ and ‘residue’, she couldn’t understand any of it. But he did seem to be very helpful and they all smiled as they shook hands and he came and shook hands with her too and called her Miss Hamilton. No one had ever called her Miss Hamilton before, except as a joke.
She wondered if orphans were called ‘Miss’ if they were girls. She tried to remember what that man who ate the pudding called David Copperfield when he was an orphan. But that probably didn’t count because it was such a long time ago. She couldn’t imagine William being called Mr Hamilton.
She wondered what William was doing now. He was sure to get himself in a mess if he played in the yard which was always muddy after rain. It would be even worse if he went into the fields where the cattle had been. She hoped he would behave himself and not trail around at Granny’s skirt tail like Uncle Jack had done all those years ago. William always wanted attention. Maybe that was what Uncle Jack wanted as well. But he must have grown out of it for he was really a very nice uncle now. He’d been so helpful and kind. He’d even bought her a little handbag with a purse inside and given her a whole half-crown to put in the purse as a luck-penny.
She leant back in her seat and watched the hedgerows stream past the dust-streaked windows. In a few minutes, she too was asleep.
The Great Northern Station was full of smoke and steam. As she climbed down the steep steps of the train her eyes began to smart so badly that she almost missed seeing a trolley piled high with mailbags that rattled past only a few feet away from her. High above her head the great arches of the train shed shut out the sunlight and created a dark, noisy cavern full of hurrying figures. Clare felt very small and would have taken Aunt Polly’s hand if they hadn’t both had so much to carry.
‘Porter, porter. Carry yer bags, lady?’
Clare drew back as the burly figure blocked their path and shouted at them.
‘No, thank you,’ said Polly, nudging Clare in the back with the edge of her suitcase, to tell her to walk on.
It was difficult to keep up with Auntie Polly’s hasty trot. Clare lost her twice when she got stuck behind people with huge suitcases. Once, a porter walked straight in front of her and caught the edge of the shopping bag Granny Hamilton had lent her to put her things in. It wasn’t like this when they went on the excursion to Bangor.
Outside the station there was so much traffic they had to wait ages to get across the cobbled forecourt and the street beyond. Then it seemed as if they walked for miles on broad, crowded pavements leading to a huge white building with green towers on top. Clare’s arms got sore from trying to keep her bags from catching in the legs of the people streaming backwards and forwards. Auntie Polly walked faster and faster and she was soon out of breath.
By the time they arrived at the bus stop she was longing to sit down and so exhausted that she couldn’t understand what Auntie Polly was telling her about double-deckers and trolley buses. It sounded as if the trolley buses were far handier and there were more of them but they didn’t go all the way. As they went on standing at the double-decker stop, Clare began to wonder what the point was waiting for a double-decker to take you all the way, if it didn’t come in the first place.
The bus was very full and there was no room to leave their luggage in the proper luggage space so they had to struggle upstairs with it while the bus lurched out from the stop into the traffic. Thankfully there were two seats right up at the front and when they both sat down Clare told herself that things were bound to be better now. She looked out at the shops and houses that lined the streets. Some of the streets had trees which brushed the roof and windows as they went past, but most of them didn’t. They all seemed very dirty and empty, with newspapers blowing along the gutters in the little evening breeze that had sprung up. Here and there, where a house had fallen down, rubble was piled up high and bricks spilt out of the empty windows. There were open spaces with piles of rusted metal and patches of tall weeds and boys kicking tin cans between goal posts of old buckets or rusted through dustbins.
They went across a bridge and she looked down into a wide, grey river that swept in a big curve between broad, gleaming mud banks. The thought of the mud made Clare shudder. She thought of the little stream at the Dean’s Bridge where her mother sometimes took them for a walk. It was shallow and the sunlight glinted and sparkling as it tripped over the bigger stones in its bed. Pebbles were always so much nicer when you looked at them through the water. They weren’t the same at all when you took them out. She often thought how nice it would be if the pebbles you picked out could stay wet and keep their lovely colours for ever.
‘Not far now, Clare,’ said Auntie Polly brightly. ‘Look, there’s the school you’ll be going to next week. That’s where Ronnie went before he went to Inst. and he thought it was great. You’re sure to like it.’
At that moment Clare was equally certain that she wouldn’t like it, a red-brick building set in among the shops and houses that lined the road, with no playground that she could see and not a tree in sight. But she said nothing about her new school and just thought how nice it would be to arrive home to Auntie Polly’s house and to see Ronnie again.
It was a long time since she had last been to Auntie Polly’s house. Last Christmas. Not Christmas itself when they always went to Granny and Granda Scott on Christmas Day and Granny and Granda Hamilton on Boxing Day. It must have been the Sunday after that because school still hadn’t started and it didn’t matter that they were so late back that both she and William were asleep in the back of the car.
‘Harold’s offered me the car for Sunday, Ellie. The weather’s so mild he thought we might take a day out. What d’you think?’
It was her mother’s idea that they would visit Auntie Polly for she’d said it was ages since she’d seen her. Daddy said that was fine by him. Would she drop her a line or would he give her a ring from work?
Auntie Polly had a telephone, a big black one that sat on a table in the hall at the foot of her stairs. She had to have it for her work. Polly had served her time to a dressmaker and she made lovely things. Once, when they visited she showed them a wedding dress all wrapped up in a sheet with shiny decorations like silver pennies stitched to the skirt.
‘I copied the neckline from a dress of Princess Elizabeth’s I saw in a magazine’, she said proudly.
‘Well, all credit to you, Polly. It’s like something a film star would wear. You’ve hands for anything,’ said her sister warmly.
Later that year, Auntie Polly had brought Clare a Princess Elizabeth doll. It was actually one of her own old dolls her mother had been about to throw out, but Polly had said she knew a place where you could buy faces for dolls and the body was still all in one piece. She said she’d make it a dress out of scraps.
Clare was thrilled with her doll. It had a new face and ringlets and a long, white tulle wedding dress. And on the skirt there were three of the beautiful, shiny decorations she had so admired. They were made of tiny, tiny beads threaded on fine wire and then curved round and round and joined up till they made a gleaming circle about the size of a two shilling piece.
‘A shilling each, those were,’ said Mummy when the doll was unpacked and they had both said how marvellous it was and how kind it was of Auntie Polly when she was so busy. ‘The woman that had that dress made for her daughter had piles of money. Can you imagine what it cost, Clare? There were a hundred and fifty of those on the skirt?’
‘A hundred and forty-seven,’ Clare replied promptly.
Mummy had laughed.
‘Not a word about that, Clare’, she warned. ‘I dare say Polly reckoned she’d not bother to count them, so she kept you a few.’
Clare felt she was too old now to play with dolls but she sometimes made clothes for them with the coloured scraps of fabric Auntie Polly saved for her, the leftovers of dresses and jackets, frocks and wedding outfits. She still loved looking at her Princess Elizabeth doll.
As the bus turned off the Ormeau Road and into Rosetta Park it suddenly struck her that she couldn’t make dresses for her dolls anymore even though she would have unlimited pieces of fabric. Her dolls were all gone. And not just her dolls. Teddy too. Tears sprang to her eyes and she had to pretend she was blowing her nose so that Auntie Polly wouldn’t notice.
The Princess Elizabeth doll, the knitted golliwog with his black face and button eyes, the china baby doll called Ruby who cried when you laid her down, the square dog with the velvet nose that Daddy had bought from some American soldiers during the war when you couldn’t get toys and Teddy, her very first and only Teddy, that she’d been given as a small baby, they had all been taken away and burnt with her clothes and her books. Matron had explained it all and said how sorry she was and how sad it was for Clare to lose her special toys, but until now she had forgotten. Until they went to the Fever Hospital she had never spent a night without Teddy before.
She tried to think of something different and remembered that the Christmas visit to Auntie Polly’s in Uncle Harold’s car had been a very happy one. Uncle Jimmy was in much better spirits, he had just started a new job with the Ormeau Bakery and was feeling very pleased with himself. Auntie Polly had gone to such a lot of trouble to make them welcome. The decorations were still up and the house was bright and shining. What Clare loved most was the Christmas tree in the sitting room, a lovely big tree with tiny, gilt-wrapped boxes hanging as decorations in among the silver bells and the gleaming coloured baubles. There were little lights that winked on and off. All different colours. Fairy lights Daddy called them when he and Uncle Jimmy had sat down with glasses of the funny-smelling dark brown stuff with the foam on top they always drank when they met.
Daddy said he was amazed they’d been able to get fairy lights, with everything in such short supply. He hadn’t expected there to be any in the shops. But Auntie Polly explained that she’d brought them back from Toronto with her in 1939.
‘I suppose it was kind of a silly thing to bring, but I so loved Christmas in Canada and Jimmy and I were so happy those Christmases we had out there when Davy and Eddie were small. I packed up all the decorations and the garland that we used to put on the door, but the mice got that in the roof space of our old house, before we got the mice,’ she said, laughing.
Clare’s two big cousins, Davy and Eddie, weren’t at home that Sunday. Polly laughed and said they both had girls now, they’d gone off dressed to kill and were having their tea with them, but Ronnie, the youngest, who was still at that school called Inst. and wanted to go to the university, came down from his room where he was studying for exams and talked to them. He’d given Clare some books he’d picked up for 3d each in Smithfield and insisted they were a present.
Clare was thrilled. Coral Island, Little Women, Swiss Family Robinson, Black Beauty and Heidi. She’d read Little Women and Black Beauty from the school library box, but she loved to have her favourite books so she could read them until she knew them almost by heart. The other three she had seen in the library but hadn’t read. She could hardly wait to begin.
‘That’ll keep you busy for a day or two,’ said Daddy as Ronnie handed them over.
‘Don’t believe it, Sam. There’s no stopping her once she starts. She’ll be finished in no time,’ said Mummy, turning to Polly who was watching Clare turning the pages to see if there were any pictures or drawings.
They sat in the sitting room with the tree and then had a most marvellous tea in the living room. With both flaps of the table up, it was terribly crowded because of the big settee and the brown tiled hearth of the fireplace which stuck out. Clare and William had to sit on the settee on a pile of cushions because there wasn’t room to bring in two more chairs. Clare thought it great fun, but William slipped off sideways and cried until Mummy took him on her knee.
‘My goodness,’ said Daddy, as Polly set down steak and chips for Ronnie and the grown-ups and bacon and baked beans and chips for Clare and William, ‘Have you had a win on the pools?’
‘No such luck,’ said Uncle Jimmy, ‘But its not often we see you. To be honest it’s a put up job, Sam. Ronnie has a favour to ask you and we thought if we gave you a good tea you’d have to say yes.’
Poor Ronnie was embarrassed but everybody else laughed for what Ronnie wanted was for Daddy to fix his radio. He’d taken it to pieces because he couldn’t get the foreign stations and now he couldn’t get anything at all.
‘Aye, surely Ronnie,’ said Daddy. ‘It’s just a pity I haven’t one of Clare’s feathers with me.’
But that worked out all right, for Ronnie had a wee brush from an old paint box he’d had when he first went to school and Jimmy had plenty of oil in his toolbox. After tea, Daddy took the radio to pieces and sorted it out. Clare had watched and held some of the tiny gold screws in her hand in case they dropped them and when it was all finished and switched on it went beautifully.
Ronnie was delighted and showed her how to tune to the different wavebands and they took it in turns to pick a station and see what it was doing. They found all sorts of different music and foreign stations broadcasting in different languages. Ronnie could pick out French and German but there were others he couldn’t make out at all even when they got the call signal and he looked it up in a special magazine he had.
‘Here we are, Clare, down you go. Mind you don’t fall now.’
The bus drove off leaving them on the pavement near where two roads went off at an angle to each other. Between them was a white building with black paintwork that called itself The Tudor Stores. Clare looked around wearily.
‘You know where you are now, don’t you?’ said Auntie Polly encouragingly.
But Clare didn’t know where she was. There were just houses everywhere, semi-detached and detached and a road leading on through yet more houses. As they began to walk, she saw a street sign saying ‘Mount Merrion Park’. She knew that was where Auntie Polly lived because she had written the addresses on the Christmas cards while Mummy wrote the message inside, but she still didn’t see anything she remembered or recognised.
All the houses looked the same except that half of them had the front door on the left and the other half had the front door on the right. Only when they came to a bend in the road and she saw a gate, unlike any of the other gates she had passed as they tramped up the park, did she recognise something that she knew.
The gate was one of Granda Scott’s. She’d seen gates like this one lying in bits on the ground outside the forge while he cut the pieces of metal to size, she’d seen them propped up on billets of wood while he coated them with red lead and then, a couple of days later, with silver paint. She’d seen him hammer the twists and curlicues on the anvil before they were welded onto the topmost member. Never before had she seen a finished gate anywhere except in the fields and farms near Salter’s Grange where most of Granda Scott’s customers lived.
She felt a sudden overwhelming longing to go straight back to the station they had left over an hour earlier.
Tired and weary and wanting only to go to bed she stood on the doorstep waiting for Uncle Jimmy to come and let them in.
‘Ach, hello Polly, hello Clare. Sure we weren’t expectin’ you till tomorrow,’ he said, taking Clare’s shopping bag as he stepped back awkwardly into the hall and edged his way round a brand new bicycle which was parked against the banisters.
‘Sure I rang you las’ night from the box at Woodview,’ said Polly, an edge of irritation in her voice. ‘An’ whose, might I ask, is this?’
‘It was an awful bad line, Polly. Ah coulden make out the haf o’ what ye were sayin’,’ he said sheepishly. ‘An’ that’s Davy’s,’ he went on hurriedly. ‘He says he’ll put it in the shed when he gets a chain an’ lock for it. He doesen want it pinched. It cost a fortune.’
There was a funny smell at the bottom of the stairs and as they went into the living room, Clare was sure she smelt bacon and egg. The kitchen door was open, she could see the draining boards were stacked with dishes. There were saucepans parked on the floor and on top of the meat safe. It looked as if no one had washed up for days.
In the living room, Eddie sat with his feet on the mantelpiece, a stack of Picturegoer magazines beside his chair. The table was covered with sporting newspapers where Uncle Jimmy had been studying form before he filled in his Pools coupon. A teapot, an almost empty bottle of milk and a couple of large mugs had been parked on the polished surface of the sideboard. Clare knew what her mother would say if she saw the room in a state like this.
‘Can I go to the bathroom, please?’ she said, grateful she had remembered that Auntie Polly had a proper bathroom and not just a lavatory outside the kitchen door.
‘Yes, love, you know where it is.’
Clare nearly caught herself on the pedal of Davy’s bike as she hurried past the table where the telephone sat.
As soon as she stepped into the bathroom she sneezed. She saw immediately what it was she’d smelt the moment they came through the front door. The bath was full of sheets steeping in Parazone. Auntie Polly must have been in such a hurry to get to Armagh when she heard about Mummy and Daddy that she hadn’t time to rinse them out. They’d be very clean by now, but as her mother always said, ‘Overnight is one thing if they’re in a bad way, but more than that you’re just wearing them out’. These must have been here for days.
The bathroom was in a mess. There were shaving things everywhere, foam on the mirror and shirts and socks lying all around the laundry basket. It was true Uncle Jimmy had a bad back, but surely Davy and Eddie could pick things up. And where was Ronnie?
There was no toilet paper left so she had to do without and she felt very damp and uncomfortable as she went back downstairs. She had to squeeze past Auntie Polly at the foot of the stairs because she was in a hurry too.
In the living room, Uncle Jimmy was gathering up the things on the sideboard, but Eddie hadn’t moved. He hadn’t said hello either.
‘I’m sure yer tired out, Clare. Would ye like a drop of milk before ye go tae bed?’
‘No thank you, Uncle Jimmy. I’m afraid I don’t like milk. Mummy says I’m a nuisance because it means William won’t drink it either. She gives us orange juice instead. We get bottles of it from the Dispensary on the Mall and you have to mix it with water. It’s really quite nice.’
‘Is that so?’ asked Uncle Jimmy kindly.
He looked at the child perched on the settee, her legs dangling inches above the floor and reminded himself that Ellie and Sam were dead. Gone. He couldn’t rightly take it in. Maybe he should have gone to the funeral, back or no back, they could have scraped up the second train fare somehow.
Auntie Polly hurried in and Uncle Jimmy grasped his newspaper as if its flimsy pages might deflect what he feared was to come.
‘Could you not even have done that much?’ she began crossly. ‘I told you the wee bed wasn’t fit to sleep in. Where’s Ronnie? I thought at least he’d do it if none of the rest of you could be bothered.’
‘Sure he’s away at camp with the school, Polly. Had ye forgot?’
She shook her head and muttered under her breath.
‘Come on, Clare dear,’ she said, putting an arm round her, ‘Come on away upstairs, these big men might want to rest themselves, they’ve been so busy all evening.’
Ronnie’s room was beautifully tidy. He had lined up his books on the windowsill and the mantelpiece and his radio still sat on the small table where she and Daddy had helped him to mend it in the Christmas holidays.
‘You can sleep in Ronnie’s bed tonight. You won’t mind, will you? The bed in my wee work room is covered with sewing and there might be the odd pin there as well,’ she explained, as she took out the new pyjamas they’d bought only that morning. ‘Will I come and tuck you up when you’re into bed?’ she whispered, as she kissed her.
‘Yes, please.’
It was longer than she intended before Polly got back upstairs to tuck Clare in. By then Clare was fast asleep. Polly noticed that she had fallen asleep clutching Ronnie’s copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. What Polly didn’t notice was that the pillow below the much-loved book was sodden with tears.
Clare woke next morning refreshed in body but sadly depressed in spirits. As she lay looking up at the unfamiliar ceiling, she listened to the sounds of the household as it began its morning round.
‘What’s keepin’ you in there? I haven’t all day to stan’ here.’
She recognised the voice though she had not seen its owner for a long time. Davy must have been out with his girlfriend last night. There was a hasty but muffled reply from the bathroom. Later, the door banged and there were trampings up and down the stairs. Clare would have liked to go to the lavatory but the thought of bumping into Davy or Eddie intimidated her so she waited till all was quiet before she slipped out of her room and across the landing.
On her way back she saw that the two older boys had left the door of their bedroom, the largest bedroom of the three, wide open. The beds were unmade. Beside each bed a high-backed chair was draped with clothes which spilt down onto the floor which was already covered with random shoes and odd socks. Surely they tidied up before they went to work. Even William, who was not the tidiest of little boys, knew not to leave shoes for someone to trip over.
As she walked away from the open door it dawned on Clare that Auntie Polly and Uncle Jimmy must sleep downstairs. That big settee, on which she and William had perched at Christmas, must be one of those put-you-ups she had heard Mummy and Daddy talking about. Poor Auntie Polly. She had the living room to clear every morning before breakfast and then all this mess waiting upstairs even before she started her sewing. Mummy would be so upset when she told her how Davy and Eddie behaved.
And then she remembered she wouldn’t be telling Mummy. She knew she could manage Davy and Eddie for a week if she was going home at the end of it, but she wasn’t going home. She had been so looking forward to seeing Ronnie but now she thought about sleeping in the tiny sewing room and walking down to that bus-stop, past all those houses, and going to that awful school with no playground and no trees for ever and ever amen.
She climbed back into bed and buried her head under the bedclothes so that no one would hear her cry. It was no use, no use at all. However kind Aunt Polly was, she couldn’t live here with these large figures and their loud voices and all these grey houses. She’d far rather go to the orphanage. At least in the orphanage there’d be other children and she’d have a teddy bear.
When the lady from Dr Barnardo’s had come to school to receive all the money from their collecting boxes, she’d brought pictures of the children to show to them. They looked so happy playing together in a garden with a swing. They each had a little bed and there were toys and books beside each one.
She made up her mind, came out from under the bedclothes and started to get dressed. She’d just have to explain politely to Auntie Polly that she really couldn’t impose on her kindness and could she take her to the orphanage right away.