Whenever we needed help we always went to the one place we knew we could get it, like we did when my dad died. The church, you think. But at St Michael’s, Father Muldoon would send us on our way with a blessing and a sprinkling of Holy Water. And we couldn’t live on Holy Water. What about our relatives living nearby - Gran’ma, Auntie Sarah and Uncle Barney? No use. They’d got nowt to offer but advice. No, for down-to-earth practical help, we turned to the old lady next door, Annie Swann, the pawnbroker’s runner. Why did we need her? ‘I can’t be seen taking our things to the pawnbroker,’ Mam said. ‘I’d be too ashamed. What would the neighbours say? Imagine the gossip if they saw me pushing the bassinet loaded up with our things! Best to get Annie - she doesn’t mind what the neighbours say.’ Mam still had her pride. How long could she keep it?
Annie came into our living room with her mongrel dog nervously looking around in case our cat should put in an appearance. Annie cast a professional eye around the room. ‘You’ve got some lovely things, Mrs Lally,’ she said. ‘They should keep you going for some time.’ She picked out our prize possessions - a wall clock which Dad had inherited from his parents before he was married, and on the mantelpiece a boat-shaped teapot, a wedding present from
- as Mam was always telling us - ‘my grandmother, Mary Molly McGinty’. We thought we’d miss that clock if it went, for it was part of the family and we were so used to hearing it chime out the hours and register the passing of the years. We wouldn’t miss the teapot as much because Mam never brewed tea in it. But what could we do? Annie took the clock and the teapot down and put them in the bassinet, covering them up with a blanket.
An hour after Annie had left, Mam turned to me and said, ‘I’m leaving Lizzie and Danny in charge while you and me go to get some money from your uncle.’
‘Uncle?’ I asked. ‘Which uncle? It’s no use going to Uncle Barney, he never has nowt.’
‘No, you daft ha’porth. Uncle Solly. Annie should have the stuff there by now. We’ll sneak into his shop by the back door.’
Solly the pawnbroker had his shop on Butler Street at the corner of Mellor Street. There was a big sign in his window which gave his name in gold lettering: Solomon Goldstein: Moneylender and Pawnbroker. Pledges taken in strictest confidence. Underneath that it said: I Buy Anything. I used to wonder about that ‘Anything’ bit when I passed the shop on the way to school. Would he buy the hefty blue bloomers gran’ma had forced on me? Would he buy the jam jar of tiddlers our Danny caught in the River Irk last Saturday? If the answer was no, he should have taken that sign down and changed it to ‘Almost Anything’. Hanging from the wall, I saw three golden balls.
‘What do they mean,,Mam?’ I asked.
‘People in Ancoats say they mean the chances of ever getting your stuff back are two to one. But if you want to
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know, you’d better ask inside.’
At the corner of Mellor Street, Mam stopped and looked nervously over her shoulder. Shifty-eyed was the expression
that came to my mind. ‘See if you can see anyone coming,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t want to be seen going into the shop.’ When we were sure the coast was clear, we moved quickly down a side street to the back entrance.
Behind the counter inside the shop was a wall of shelves right up to the high ceiling. To reach the top levels there was a sliding ladder and a long pole with a hook on the end. Everywhere we looked we saw thousands of labelled bundles, each one someone’s prized possession, someone’s family heirloom, someone’s best clothes, someone’s dignity. A young assistant showed us into one of the many cubicles to await Uncle Solly.
‘This is like going to confession,’ I whispered.
‘Shush, someone might hear you.’
I expected a grille to open and to hear Solly greet us in Latin, ‘In nomine Patris , et Filii , et Spiritus Sancti. How can I help you, my child?’
‘Bless us, Father Solly, for we are broke,’ I would say. ‘It’s over a month since we had a decent meal.’
After five or six minutes, the great man himself joined us. He was little and shrivelled-up with yellow skin and beady, watery eyes.
‘So your clock and your teapot I’ve seen,’ he began. ‘To borrow on them you’re asking what kind of money?’ Solly had this funny way of asking questions backwards.
‘The clock cost over twenty-five pounds a few years ago, and the teapot was a present,’ Mam faltered. ‘I thought maybe ten pounds for the two.’
‘I should live so long,’ Solly chuckled. ‘They’re not worth that much today. The clock’s a cheap japanned model that runs on springs and it’s finished in poor quality black lacquer. As for the teapot, who needs one shaped like a boat? The most I can give on them is fifty shillings.’
‘That’s only two pounds ten,’ Mam gasped. ‘A tenth of what they’re worth.’
Solly shrugged. ‘Take it or leave it.’
We took it. He handed over five grubby ten shilling notes and a numbered pawn ticket.
‘You may redeem your clock any time you wish by repaying the loan with interest. After a year, 7, if I wish, may sell it to recover the money I’ve lent you.’
Mam nodded her agreement. As if she had any choice.
On the way out, I asked him the meaning of the three golden balls.
‘They’re the coat of arms of a famous money-grasping Italian family called the Medici - crooks who used to cheat the poor by lending money at crippling rates. Not like me. I charge only a shilling in the pound per week.’
‘That’s five per cent per week,’ I said. At school Gerty had been ramming percentages down our throats.
‘Clever girl,’ Solly said, sounding as if what he meant was, ‘Too bloody clever by half’.
‘That’s twenty per cent per month and two hundred and forty per cent per year,’ I persisted. I was showing off. Gerty would have been proud of me.
‘Yes, yes. Very clever,’ Solly snapped. ‘Maybe you should be running your own shop.’
He ushered us out by the same door we came in.
‘If you need me again,’ he said as we departed, ‘remember I’m here to help, especially if you have rings or precious stones. I’m Solly, the people’s friend.’
The wall clock and the teapot were the beginning of a long line of items that found their way onto Solly’s shelves: the fancy crockery, the statues in their glass shades, the brass fire irons, even the glass toys Dad had made at the Poland Street works but not, I’m glad to say, the glass swan he had made for my birthday. Solly wasn’t having
that, no matter how broke we got. We reached a stage, though, where there was more of our home in Solly’s shop than in our house at 6 Butler Court. After the ornaments, our clothes were next to go, sometimes before we even knew about it.
Danny spent one Sunday morning looking for his best trousers. ‘I can’t find my Whit Friday pants, Mam,’ he moaned. ‘Do you know where they’ve got to?’
‘You ate ’em yesterday,’ she said.
As we got nearer to Christmas, things got tighter and tighter and to feed the great pawnbroking monster that was Solly’s, we scraped the bottom of our barrel and turned to the furniture. For this he had to pay a personal visit. He walked around the house, pursing his lips and making little tut-tutting noises, which meant he didn’t think much of any of it. He slipped on a pair of half-moon glasses and wrote in his little black notebook.
‘There’s no call for big heavy sideboards like that,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘People don’t have rooms big enough to take them. Twelve bob’s the most I can offer.’
‘But Solly,’ Mam said, ‘it cost five pounds and there’s not a scratch on it. Have mercy on us, Solly, it’s coming up to Christmas.’
‘So for Christmas I should make special concessions. Tell you what,’ he said finally. ‘I like you and your family, Mrs Lally. You’re honest and straightforward. So I’ll give you fifteen and that’s my last offer.’
‘So what can we do?’ Mam said, shrugging her shoulders. She was already beginning to pick up Solly’s mannerisms.
The fifteen bob kept us going for another week. In the third week of December, we were on our uppers and we wondered what kind of Christmas we could expect.
Cissie still believed in Father Christmas.
‘Maybe this year,’ Mam said, ‘she’ll have to grow up. Then again, perhaps we’ll not ruin her childish dreams of Santa Claus and his reindeers. Growing up can wait till January.’
‘Father Christmas may not be able to come this year,’ I told her. ‘For a start, our chimney’s much too narrow for him to climb down. He’s a big fat man and likely to get stuck.’
Cissie listened to this and looked solemn and with a sad expression nodded her head to show she’d understood.
Mam was determined to have as good a Christmas as she could afford. She took two wedding rings to Solly’s - her own and Dad’s. They were both solid gold and so for a couple of weeks we were flush. She bought a few bargain- priced presents from the pawnbroker to put in our stockings.
‘This is the first Christmas without your dad,’ she said. ‘It’s miserable enough without him and so I’m going to splash out with the last money we’re likely to get from Solly. I’m sorry to lose the rings but we need food more than we need bits of metal. Maybe one day we’ll get them out of hock.’
Some hopes.
About this time, we lost our front door key. Naturally we blamed Danny who was always losing things. ‘I haven’t seen the rotten key,’ he protested. ‘Why do I always get the blame for everything?’
The mystery was solved a couple of days later. The postman in his red robin uniform came knocking at our door with a letter addressed to ‘Father Christmas, North Pole’. In it was the missing key. Cissie hid under the table as the letter was read out.
‘Deer Fathr Christmass, Are Kate sez you cant get down our chimley becos its two small. So here Is the key to are front door. Pleaz come in.’
Christmas Eve, we hung up our stockings hopefully. Even though we knew it was Mam and Auntie Gladys who were Santa Claus, we went along with it for the sake of Cissie who had been told that maybe Santa had lost weight and would squeeze down the chimney after all. Us bigger ones tried to stay awake until stocking-filler time but we didn’t make it. Next morning, we were up bright and early to find that each of us had got an apple, a tangerine, half a bar of Fry’s chocolate, and a present - a Raggedy Ann doll for Cissie, a torch for Danny, a pencil set for Lizzie, and a book called Little Women by Louisa May Alcott for me. Oh, I almost forgot, and a rattle for Eddie.
On Christmas Day, Gran’ma, Auntie Sarah and Uncle Barney came over for dinner. Mam and Auntie Gladys came up trumps with a lovely meal of chicken, roast potatoes, sprouts, and stuffing, and we even managed to have crackers to pull though Gran’ma fell off her chair with the effort.
After the dinner, we sang the carol, ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’ and when it came to the bit ‘We all want some figgy pudding’, we let rip. Mam and Gladys took out the pudding from the oven and with a big helping of custard, we soon made short work of it. Lizzie and me sided the table and washed up while the adults dozed off. There followed a treasure hunt for toffees which were hidden around the house.
That night we went to bed happily. My only regret was that Dad hadn’t been there. On second thoughts, maybe he was.