In the first week of the war, young Eddie got his wish and enlisted in return for the King’s shilling.
When I asked him how he’d managed to get himself into the army at such a tender age, he gave me a big wink and said, ‘Easy. I told the recruiting sergeant I was seventeen and one month. The sergeant said, “I didn’t hear you properly. Did you say eighteen and one month?” “I did!” I replied. That was that and I was in!’
Like his schoolmates at Swinton Industrial School, Eddie was in the unusual position of having done his drilling and his square-bashing in advance, so he needed only a minimum of further training before joining the British Expeditionary Force which was being sent to France.
Manchester and Salford became garrison towns and Heaton Park in the north of Manchester had been turned into a vast military camp. In the early days, there weren’t enough uniforms or weapons to go round and parades were taken in civvies, with sticks for rifles. As a sergeant in the Territorials, Danny had been sent to Heaton Park along with other experienced NCOs to begin the mammoth task of licking the thousands of raw recruits into shape and ready for battle. Danny was unhappy with this posting and was for ever bemoaning his fate.
‘Why they have to send young whipper-snappers like Eddie to France whilst experienced men like me have to remain behind, I’ll never know. This Kitchener’s Army is a right bunch of riffraff. Fred Karno’s Army isn’t in it.’
‘You count your blessings, Danny,’ I told him. ‘You’re obviously needed more here training troops than going abroad yourself.’
Eddie, along with many of his Swinton companions, was amongst the first contingents to be posted to Heaton Park. The atmosphere there was more like a boys’ holiday camp than an army training centre. On summer evenings, after their sons had finished gruelling military manoeuvres during the day, the families of the young soldiers would sometimes gather on the grassy knolls for a get-together. It was on one of these occasions that, thanks to Danny pulling a few strings here and there, we succeeded in getting a group of friends and relatives together for a farewell picnic before Eddie went to France. Hilda was there, and her brother Eric, and Angela and Jimmy. Cissie came with her intended, Keith Atherton, and his twin brother, Ernie, and it was true what she’d told us, they were like two peas in a pod, tall and thin, which prompted Jimmy of course to make his usual personal comment.
‘You know, Cissie, if your man Keith there were to slip down a crack in the pavement, you’d have a back-up copy in his brother Ernie.’
‘We’re not exactly the same,’ Keith grinned. ‘For example, our tailor knows that we dress on different sides.’
For some reason I was never able to understand, the men roared with laughter when they heard this.
Eddie brought a few chums from Swinton but his special friend seemed to be Alf Higgins - they spent much of the time laughing and skylarking about. And finally, surprise of surprises, along came Mam with her two young ones,
John and Hetty, but no Frank McGuinness. We were so glad to see her because, although we had sent her an invitation, we hadn’t expected her to turn up.
It was a happy meeting with lots of laughter and good- natured kidding. We had brought mountains of sandwiches, cheese and piccalilli, ham and chicken, to be washed down with a few bottles of Guinness and Mackeson’s stout.
‘Enough here to feed the whole battalion,’ Eddie remarked as he tucked in.
Making use of one of the little stone fireplaces that were dotted conveniently about the park, the young soldiers demonstrated how they would light a fire when they got to the trenches and how they would make a brew-up in a billycan.
‘First,’ said Eddie, ‘we build up the fire with thin chips of wood, next boil the water, then put the sugar and the tea into the can.’
‘We always save a little tea,’ added Alf Higgins, ‘and dip the corner of a towel into it to wash our faces.’
Eddie grinned. ‘Next we dip our shaving brushes into the bit remaining and work up a lather. Nothing’s to be wasted in the trenches.’
It was left to Jimmy and Tommy to provide the lighthearted banter in a double act that wouldn’t have been out of place at the Queen’s Park Hipp.
‘If you take that bugle of yours, Eddie,’Tommy quipped, ‘and let off a few notes at the Jerries, you won’t see their heels for dust. I’m only sorry I won’t be there to witness it.’ ' *
‘Shame about that, Tommy,’ Jimmy countered. ‘From what I’ve heard, your hammer toes are what’s stopping you. I don’t understand that. With hammer toes, you could have been useful at the front nailing barbed wire on the fences.’
‘Funny man!’ replied Tommy. ‘I don’t suppose you heard that I was also suffering from Hallux Valgus on each foot.’
‘Yes, I did. I asked my doctor about it and he said you’ve got bunions.’
As everyone was laughing happily, I suddenly had a mental picture of these splendid young men facing the German machine guns on the Western Front, and an involuntary shudder passed through me. But the talk on this balmy summer evening was about the thrill and adventure of going abroad to fight a brutal enemy. It had little to do with King and country and flag-waving, and more to do with youth eager to prove its manhood. They talked as if they were about to have a fortnight’s holiday in the Isle of Man. The young men seemed to regard the war as high jinks and an opportunity to sow their wild oats, a bit like the young Zulu warriors Gran’ma used to tell me about. Washing of the spears, she said they called it.
In his usual tactful way, Jimmy turned to Hilda’s brother, Eric, to ask, ‘How do you feel about going to fight your German relatives?’
Eric was equal to the question. ‘About the same as King George fighting his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. He’s a crazy Prussian and he’s got to be stopped. Apart from that, Hilda and I are both as English as you are. Mancunians, in fact.’
‘In many ways, I envy you young lads,’ Jimmy continued. ‘How I’d like to join Kitchener’s Army and take a trip to France! A bit of excitement to pep up a dull existence would suit me down to the ground right now. Instead, I’m compelled by the government to stand operating a lathe for the duration.’
‘If you want excitement,’ Angela remarked, fluttering her eyelids, ‘you’ve always got me. Anyroad, the army wants young fit men, not old fogies like you.’
Three weeks later, Private Eddie Lally and his mates sailed to France as bandsmen with the BEF. The other young lads at the picnic - the twins and Hilda’s brother - joined the Salford Pals Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. Six months later, they too were in France. Around this time, we celebrated two weddings. Cissie married her twin boyfriend, Keith, and Hilda and Danny finally tied the knot in a ceremony at St Chad’s.
Tongue in cheek, Danny explained the reason for the wedding. ‘Hilda may as well have the army marriage allowance,’ he said.
‘I see,’ I replied. ‘So love doesn’t come into it. It’s a business arrangement, is that it?’
‘Exactly,’ he replied, grinning from ear to ear.
Deep down, I was overjoyed to hear that Danny was to be married and to Hilda, such a kind, gentle girl. I loved the idea of my younger brother marrying, settling down and having children. I could see it in my mind’s eye - his kids playing with mine in Queen’s Park or going to the Saturday matinee together. It was all happening, my long- cherished dream of the extended family coming together.
As for Tommy, though he’d failed his medical, he was determined to do his bit for the war effort. Jimmy came to the rescue and found him a job doing night work at Henry Wallworks on Red Bank. The work would involve production of motor car parts for vehicles destined for the Western Front. Not that Tommy knew anything about engineering or had mechanical skills but he would be useful fetching and carrying for those who did. His hours were 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. but even that was not enough. Every morning he kept his hand in at Smithfield Market by doing a couple of hours on Deakins’ stall.This meant that he stayed in touch with his old market friends and customers, and it also gave him the chance to pick up extra food for the family table.
Tommy was still a great believer in the value of the rabbit and he made sure we had a steady supply, with the occasional hare thrown in.
The autumn months of 1914 brought news of battles whose names were enough to cause a shudder - Mons, the Marne, the Aisne and, the bloodiest battlefield of all,Ypres, which our men called Wipers. Tommy bought a map of Europe with little packets of flags to mark the front line and he and Jimmy followed the war closely. As the line bulged into France towards Paris, they slowly came to accept that we would not be in Berlin by Christmas after all. Every day, we scanned the endless lists of casualties published in the newspapers, praying that none of our loved ones would be featured there. Sometimes, we recognised familiar names of soldiers killed in action - Lieutenant Harold Lamport-Smythe of the Cheshire Regiment, Danny’s old friends from the workhouse and Swinton, the two Foley brothers of the Lancashire Regiment. And the war came close when we saw the name of our next-door neighbour, Paddy Kenyon, killed atYpres. Madge, his wife, was inconsolable and she spent a great deal of time telling us what a wonderful husband he’d been. It was of some comfort when she found that the pensions awarded to her by the War Office and the Salford Gas Department were truly generous. In January 1915, we heard that Eddie had been hurt at the Marne. It wasn’t serious, thank God - a broken arm and a fractured collarbone. Bomb blast had sent him flying through the air and he’d landed badly. Everyone said that Eddie had been lucky - he’d got minor wounds that would earn him a spot of leave.
In February of that year, Eddie came home with his arm and shoulder in a sling. It was a joy to see him, though somehow he looked different. Tired, older and more serious
perhaps, though I think a better word might be solemn. When he told us that his best mate, Alf Higgins, had been killed whilst standing right next to him, I could understand why.
‘A shell from a nine point two,’ he said simply. ‘It broke up into splinters about the size of my hand. It was one of those that sliced the top off Alf’s head alongside of me. There was blood and brains all over the trench. Alf didn’t even see it coming. It could have just as easily been me.’
After that, Eddie hardly said a word and we didn’t press him. Whatever experiences he’d had were too awful to talk about. Maybe he thought that, as civilians, we wouldn’t understand anyway. On his first night back, we organised a family gathering and adjourned to the Land o’ Cakes to celebrate his homecoming. The usual crowd came round, including Mam and this time Frank McGuinness. Never one to miss a booze-up, I thought, but I dismissed it from my mind as uncharitable. Accompanied by our elderly resident performer on the old battered piano, we sang the songs of the day - ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Long Way to Tipperary’, ‘The Army of Today’s All Right’, and all the patriotic songs we could think of. Eddie sat there savouring every moment.
After the pub, we went back to the house for a bite to eat and a few extra drinks. It was then that Eddie opened up and told us all that had been happening to him.
‘The Germans aren’t the only enemy,’ he said, rolling a fag and lighting it. ‘Just as bad are the cold, the rain, the mud, and the vermin - lice,* bugs, and rats which feed on the rotting corpses lying around us. In the trenches, you make the greatest friends you’ve ever had, true comrades because you depend on each other for survival. The old hands used to say that if you’re going to get killed, it’s best to get it at the beginning. That way, you don’t suffer so
much. There were so many deaths, we became hard and brutal. We had to be. On my first day in the trenches, our platoon sergeant kept coming to the dug-out to ask how I was. “Is Private Lally all right?” he’d ask. If he asked it once, he asked it a dozen times. “That sergeant’s a really nice man,” I said. “Looks after me like he was my father.” Everyone roared with laughter. “You bloody fool!” someone said. “He’s drawn your name in a lottery and stands to win the jackpot if you get hit.” ’
‘The heartless bastard!’Tommy exclaimed.
‘Not at all,’ Eddie replied quietly. ‘After a few months out there, I became as bad. But there was an incident I witnessed with my own eyes that’ll remain with me for the rest of my life. It can only be described as a miracle because there’s no explanation for it.’
The little company crammed into our front parlour sat spellbound, hanging onto Eddie’s every word.
‘It took place at Mons.The BEF had been almost wiped out. We’d started with about sixty thousand men and I don’t think we had even half left. The Germans not only outnumbered us but they had better equipment and bigger guns. I was with a platoon of about thirty men and an officer called Lieutenant Willis. We were cut off in a trench and Willis said, “We can either stay here and be caught like rats in a trap or we can make a run for it. It’s the only chance we’ve got.’ We didn’t have time to think about it. We dashed into the open and we heard the German cavalry tearing after us. We turned round to face them, expecting instant death, when we saw between us and the enemy a bright cloud and in it a whole troop of angels.’
‘Come off it!’ exclaimed Jimmy. ‘You’re having us on. This is nineteen fifteen not fourteen fifteen.’
‘As God is my witness,’ Eddie replied, ‘I saw them, we all saw them, including the officer. The German horses
369
t
were terrified and reared up then stampeded. The cavalrymen pulled at the bridles but the horses had gone mad and went off in every direction. This gave us time to reach a little fort and save ourselves.’
‘Are you sure you hadn’t just been given your ration of rum?’Tommy asked playfully. ‘It sounds a bit far-fetched.’
‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not,’ Eddie said testily. ‘I tell you I’m standing here talking to you tonight because of those angels. We took a few prisoners in that clash and they kept asking us who the horsemen in armour were who led the charge. They were seen by thousands of soldiers, English and German, religious and non-religious alike.’
‘Well, I believe you, Eddie,’ I said, ‘because I read about it in The Universe last Sunday at church.’
‘And so do I,’ added Danny. ‘Many of the walking wounded from Mons are back in Heaton Park. They swear they saw the angels and it was because of them that a massacre was prevented.’
There was a long pause while we took it all in.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ Jimmy said at last, breaking the silence. He sounded sceptical.
‘That’s the whole point of a miracle,’ said Angela. ‘It’s something that is unbelievable. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a miracle, would it?’
Our lives were dominated by the war. Eddie was given a temporary post guarding German prisoners of war in Leigh where a big camp had been built. The situation on the Western Front became ever more desperate and every day we thanked God that the two men in our family had postings at home. Hilda’s younger brother, Eric, was not so lucky. In the action atYpres he lost both his legs at a place called Hill 60, a piece of derelict ground which the generals regarded as vital. At the cost of many lives, we
had won it and then lost it again. To us at home, it seemed a terrible waste of young lives. Hilda and her family were distraught when their young man came back in a wheelchair to be rehabilitated at Whitworth Street Municipal School which had been converted into a hospital for the wounded.
My sister Cissie also suffered tragedy. In 1915 she had become pregnant and when her time was due, her husband Keith who was stationed at Heaton Park Camp had gone absent without leave to be by her side at the crucial time. The Red Caps were sent to bring him back and, as punishment, he’d been posted immediately to the front at Ypres. He was killed on his first day by a sniper’s bullet. Cissie had a miscarriage, probably because of her grief. She eventually found happiness though, ’cos some time later she married his twin brother, Ernie. So Jimmy’s quip about her having a back-up copy of Keith turned out to be true.
Our complacency about our own two young men was short-lived. So many soldiers had been lost in battle that the government gave up its policy of voluntary enlistment and announced plans for conscription. In April, Danny received orders to join a contingent of men going to France. It was a sad farewell when we took him to London Road Station. Poor Hilda, I thought, this war is hitting her badly. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Late one night in May, Hilda came banging frantically on our front door.
‘Oh, Kate! Tommy! For God’s sake, please come and help us!’
‘What in heaven’s name has happened, Hilda?’
‘Mobs have attacked our shop and set fire to it. My father and my old grandfather have been beaten up! The police said they can do nothing.’
Tommy and I got dressed quickly and hurried to the shop in Dantzig Street. There we found the place gutted and firemen dousing out the last of the flames. Mr and Mrs Muller and their aged parents were standing by in their dressing gowns and in great distress. It was not the time to be asking about the whys and wherefores.
‘Come with us/Tommy said immediately.
Shivering uncontrollably and without a word, Hilda’s family followed us up Miller’s Lane, across Oldham Road until we reached Back Murray Street. We soon had a cheerful fire going and we wrapped blankets round them in an attempt to stop their trembling. Only when we’d got a hot mug of tea in their hands did we ask what had happened and why.
‘The angry mob was blaming us for the sinking of the Lusitania last Friday,’ Hilda explained. ‘About ten o’clock at night, a crowd gathered outside the shop and began chanting “German pigs! German pigs!” Then they began breaking the windows.’
The story was taken up by her father, Edwin.
‘I have never seen anything like it,’ he said. ‘The shop has been completely wrecked and looted. The mob took everything. One thug took a flitch of bacon, another a whole side of pork, others our furniture. One hooligan pushed our piano out of the upstairs window onto the pavement below. They set fire to the premises while the police looked on. Last, they set about me and my father who is seventy-eight years old. It was to escape mob violence like this that he came with my mother to this country twenty years ago.’
Throughout this account, the ladies in his party wept quietly.
‘It was not our fault that German submarines sank the ship,’ the old grandad tried to explain. ‘We’re simple people and know nothing about politics.’
‘And your pigeons, your lovely pigeons, Edwin!’ Mrs Muller wailed. ‘All dead.’
‘The police said they could do nothing.’ Edwin Muller held out both hands to indicate the hopelessness of it all. ‘Now I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.’
‘My place is small,’ Hilda said, ‘but you can stay with me until something’s settled.’
The Mullers stayed with us for the rest of the next day and then moved across to Hilda’s one-bedroom house. Later the whole family was interned in Lancaster ‘as enemy aliens’ for the duration of the war.
‘They tried to intern me too,’ Hilda said, ‘until they found I’d been born in Manchester. But I’m so worried for my family in that camp.’
‘It’s probably best for your family’s own safety,’ we told her. ‘At least they won’t be attacked there.’
The camp at Lancaster was a disused wagon works close to the river, a filthy, draughty place, littered with rusty scrap metal and guarded by high barbed fences. Hilda told us there were more than three thousand prisoners there, with more crowding in every day - seamen, waiters from the Midland Hotel, and even a German band which had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The attack on the Mullers was only one of many throughout our region. Many shops were forced to display a notice which declared: ‘This is not a German shop. God Save the King’. Anyone with a foreign-sounding name was suspected as a spy and when the crowd heard about Edwin Muller’s racing pigeons, they were convinced he’d been using them to send messages to the enemy.
After the attack, we saw a good deal of Hilda and whenever she had a letter from Danny she came round to tell us.
‘You can’t imagine,’ she said, ‘how hard I find it waiting,
always waiting for news. Ordinary sounds become a torture - the mantelpiece clock ticking off each hour of dread, the knock at the door bringing perhaps the dreaded telegram, the postman delivering the awful news I can’t even bring myself to think about. I’ve taken up work in a munitions factory in an attempt to stop worrying. And my own family interned like prisoners of war in the Lancaster camp.’
‘It can’t go on for ever, Hilda,’ I said, trying to console her. ‘One day this war will end and life will return to normal.’
I couldn’t tell her that I was as worried as she was.
Just before Christmas, she came to see us with joy written all over her face.
‘Kate! Oh, Kate! Good news at last! Danny has written to say he’ll be home permanently on December the thirty- first. Now there’s conscription, there aren’t enough experienced men to train the new recruits. He’s been posted back to Heaton Park! Nineteen sixteen! A new year and a fresh start for us!’
What bliss it was to see Hilda smiling again! She had suffered so much in the last year with her brother’s crippling injuries and the internment of her family. On New Year’s Eve, Tommy and I took the children over to Hilda’s to await Danny’s return. Young Mary and Flo were as excited as we were to see Uncle Danny again. At around six o’clock, there came the knock at the door.
‘It’s him! It’s him!’ Hilda called out happily and rushed down the lobby.
But it wasn’t him. At the door stood a postman with a special delivery. My heart skipped a beat when I saw this.
‘He’s probably been delayed,’ Hilda said as she tore the envelope open. The look of horror on her face said it all. Ashen, she handed me the letter, looking to me to tell her
that somehow she’d read it wrongly and had misunderstood it.
Dear Mrs Lally,
It is with great regret that I have to inform you that your husband, Sergeant Daniel Lally, was killed in the first line trenches at Passchendaele on December 29th at about four o’clock in the afternoon. The Germans were shelling our trenches and he was struck in the head by shrapnel and killed instantaneously as he was entering his dugout. It may be of some consolation to you to know that he suffered no pain. Sergeant Lally was a brave man and he gave his life for his country. Writing as I am just before the New Year, I feel most deeply how terrible your grief must be at this time.
‘Kate, Kate,’ she sobbed. ‘What am I to do? I don’t want to go on living without Danny.’
It’s said that when the body suffers a terrible injury, nature comes to the rescue and paralyses the senses so that you do not feel the pain. Something similar must happen when we have emotional shock, for as I read the letter, a mental shutter seemed to come down to protect me from the agony of taking in the full meaning of the disaster. I felt numb and could not believe the dreadful news. Danny, my young brother - dead! I felt so lost and so helpless.
I flung my arms round Hilda and we clung to each other for dear life as if that might somehow alleviate the pain. But of course it didn’t.
Some people find consolation in the thought that the body is no more than a package or a shell that houses the soul.Though the package may die, they say, the real person
lives on and is indestructible. For me the idea offered no solace. I only knew that I would never see Danny again, never see him smile or hear him crack a joke. Inside, my heart was breaking but for the sake of Hilda I had to be strong.
Hilda began to shiver with the shock. She let out a moan of anguish and broke into uncontrollable sobbing.
‘Oh, Kate, Kate! Danny can’t be dead. He was everything to me, the only man I have ever loved. Before Danny, there was nothing, no real purpose to anything. I met him and my life had meaning. Now he’s gone and I am back where I started. My family’s interned and my brother Eric is disabled. I can’t see the point in carrying on.’
‘Dear, dear Hilda,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry for all that’s happened to you. I know it’s not the same but we’re your family now until you get your own back. There’s hardly a family in the land that has not been hit by this dreadful war. But this slaughter cannot go on for ever.’
‘Won’t Uncle Danny be coming home today?’ young Mary asked.
‘No, Mary my love. Danny won’t be coming home ever,’ Tommy answered gently.
I stayed with Hilda the rest of that evening, trying to comfort her. It was getting late when I left and I thought it best to wait until the next day to tell Mam the distressing news. I would save her at least one night of grief.
The following day, Saturday, I left the children with Tommy and with heavy heart walked the short distance to Mam’s place. I found her there with Frank and they must have sensed from the look on my face that all was not well for Mam said, ‘Kate, you look as pale as a sheet. What on earth has happened?’
‘I have some bad news, Mam. It’s Danny.’
‘What’s happened to him? Has he been wounded? Is it bad?’
‘I am afraid it’s worse than that, Mam. Danny’s dead.’
She frowned at me as if she hadn’t understood what I’d said. ‘Dead? But he can’t be. He’s due home on leave today. He can’t be.’
‘I only wish he weren’t,’ I said sadly. ‘With all my heart, I wish he weren’t.’
She continued to stare at me speechless, as if willing me to take the words back and say they weren’t true.
Frank’s expression was grave. ‘Has it been definitely confirmed?’ he asked hoarsely.
‘Hilda had a letter from his officer telling her how he died of wounds last Wednesday, the twenty-ninth.’
On hearing this. Mam hugged herself closely and began rocking to and fro, sobbing quietly.
‘Oh, my poor, poor Danny,’ she sang over and over again. ‘Oh, my son - my son.’
Frank made tea while I tried to comfort her by holding both her hands tightly but she didn’t seem to notice. For many years and in so many ways, Mam and I had gradually drifted apart but now in this moment of shared anguish we came together once more. How my heart went out to her, for she had suffered so much in her life.
‘He left some things with me in a suitcase before he went to the front,’ she wept at last. ‘Please take them across to Hilda. I think she should have them.’
At home later that day, in the privacy of my bedroom, I opened Danny’s suitcase to pack it tidily before taking it across to Hilda. My eyes filmed over when I came across his cozzy with the badge for swimming ten lengths and the music of the duet he and Eddie had played at Mary’s christening. Fighting back the tears, I straightened out the rest of his things but when I finally came across one of his
meerschaum pipes and caught the smell of his St Bruno tobacco, I could hold back no longer and the tears overflowed.
My memories of Danny came flooding back. In so many ways, he’d been the unlucky one in the family. He’d been the one to get caught by the Railway Police as he helped little Cissie over the railway fence, the one to end up getting the loathsome job of oakum picking in the workhouse, the one to get punished unjustly by the illiterate teacher Harold Catchpole, the one to be whipped by Old Jock the cruel workhouse master, and now the one to get himself killed on the Western Front.