‘You? A railway girl? Don’t make me laugh. A railway old biddy, more like.’
Dot stared at Reg, but he was already peering at the cartoon page of the Daily Mirror, which was spread out on the kitchen table. He had lifted his head long enough for a brief smirk and a nod to acknowledge his own repartee, which he probably considered to be of sufficient wit to share later on with his mates down the King’s Head. No doubt the family would be treated to a replay of his banter an’ all. The rat.
She hovered behind Reg, willing him to shove off and go to work. She needed the kitchen table. She had a hundred things to do this morning. She always had a hundred things to do. But Reg, oblivious or just not caring, reached for his mug without lifting his eyes from the paper and sucked in a sip of tea, swallowing it audibly. He sounded like a snake with a bad throat.
She couldn’t hover any longer. She had to press on. ‘Get fettling,’ said her mam’s voice in her head. Eh, Mam would have been that proud of her for passing the tests to be a railway girl. Mam had been one an’ all, in the last war. The last war – aye, that was what it had been supposed to be, the last one ever. The war to end all wars. Which smart alec had fed them that particular promise? And what twerps they had been to believe it. Now they were facing the whole thing all over again, except it would be worse this time. It hadn’t been so far, but it would be. Give it time.
The expected air raids and resulting devastation hadn’t materialised, which had led to the girls, in common with thousands of other mums all over the country, bringing the kids home from evacuation. Pammy had fetched her precious Jenny back, which had more or less obliged Sheila to send for their Jimmy. Dot wasn’t sure how to feel about her grandchildren’s return. It had nigh on broken her heart last September to wave them off, poor little mites. Even their Jimmy had looked like a poor little mite, with his gas-mask box, cardboard suitcase, packet of sandwiches and the brown luggage label tied to his gabardine lapel – tied with a double-knot so he couldn’t swap it for someone else’s. He had walked along with all the quietly despairing mothers and children, the only bouncy one in the whole procession, the irrepressible monkey looking forward to the adventure, only for the sight of the coaches lined up along the road outside St Cuthbert’s to transform him into a shrunken, whey-faced waif.
Dot’s heart had squeezed tight, robbing her of the ability to breathe. Then she had bustled about, searching for the children’s teacher, finding out which coach they were on, extracting a promise from Jimmy not to open his sandwiches until he was told to, and firing smiles at her daughters-in-law. Sheila and Pammy had never had anything but moral support and encouragement from her in the matter of sending the kids away, and only she herself knew how she had wept buckets night after night.
Now the children were home and, much as she loved knowing they were close by, she had the never-ending worry of how safe they were going to be when things finally got going.
Dot flung another look at Reg’s back. His shoulders were rounded these days, where once they had been broad. Mind you, she was no spring chicken herself. She caught herself: not being a spring chicken didn’t make her an old biddy.
She needed the table. She liked doing her meal preparation on it, chopping the veg, mixing the pastry, even kneading her own dough at times. You couldn’t beat home-made bread with soup. But Reg didn’t look like shifting any time soon, so if she wanted to get fettling, she would have to use the top of the crockery cupboard. Grabbing her chopping board, she made space for the vegetables and took her favourite knife from the drawer, picking up the onion to start with. Her dear old mam had always reckoned she could get a month’s worth of flavour out of an onion before she even chopped it. As the mother of eleven surviving children, such culinary dexterity had been essential. Would Dot shortly be following suit? Rationing had already started. Four ounces of bacon per adult per week wouldn’t go far.
‘Pan’s boiling over,’ said Reg without moving. He could have stretched out his hand and turned the heat down, but did he? Course not. He was a man and men didn’t do owt in the kitchen apart from eat what was put in front of them. Mr Donoghue up the road did the washing-up after dinner on Saturdays and Sundays, but no one was supposed to know that. Dot knew only because she and Mrs Donoghue had got tiddly on the cooking sherry the day after the abdication. Every Saturday and Sunday, Mrs Donoghue closed her kitchen curtains and the one in the scullery so that no one would glimpse Mr Donoghue with his sleeves rolled up. Not that Dot had ever said so to Mrs Donoghue, but there were those in Heathside Lane who said the Donoghues must be at it like rabbits behind those curtains, but at least passionate love-making was a manly thing to do. Washing-up definitely wasn’t.
Dot bustled around behind Reg to get to the cooker. She was a great bustler. It was part and parcel of being busy, capable, a fettler. Her thighs rubbed together inside her ribbed-cotton girdle as she bustled.
She reduced the heat that was squeezing the flavour and last lingering goodness out of yesterday’s chicken bones and returned to the vegetables. Together, they would make a hearty soup. She was proud of her soups, and rightly so.
‘Always put the best you can in your soup,’ her mam had taught her, and she always had. When she was a nipper, they had had a really poor family in their road. Everyone was poor round their way, but the Raffertys were the poorest and their soup was made from well-water that they didn’t always have the wherewithal to heat up, and carrot and potato peelings that their neighbours donated out of what was destined for the pig bin. Dot and her brothers and sisters used to taunt the Rafferty kids for eating pig-swill soup. Aye, children could be cruel. She had tried to bring up her lads to be kind and considerate, but it hadn’t been easy with Reg poking fun at her for it.
‘Your mam’s soft-hearted,’ he used to tell the boys, smiling as he said it as if it was a compliment, though there was an undeniable element of man-to-man joshing that invited them to be like him, not her.
At some point in the years that followed, he had progressed from pretend-compliments to outright jibes.
‘You know what your mam’s trouble is, don’t you, Harry … Archie?’ … ‘You know what you’re ma-in-law’s trouble is, don’t you, Sheila … Pammy? …’ Even to the children. ‘You know what your nan’s trouble is, don’t you, Jenny … Jimmy? She sees a pie and she’s got to stick her fingers in, that’s what.’
He made her sound a right busybody, but she wasn’t. She was a coper. She was the one who helped everyone else; the one who’d looked after Jenny when she’d had such a terrible time teething, so that Pammy could snatch some shut-eye; the one who did Mrs Naughton’s washing when she had three little ’uns under five all weeping and wailing with the chicken pox; the one who’d chased a so-called window-cleaner up the road when he’d helped himself to old Mrs Porter’s life savings, aye, and bashed him over the head with her frying pan an’ all; the one who’d cooked and cleaned for Alice Forshaw for a month when she had the baby blues so bad her mam was scared she might top herself; the one who’d helped the Ryans pack up all their worldly goods when they were meant to move house and then helped unpack it all when the rent man gave the new place to someone else.
That wasn’t being a busybody. That was being helpful, reliable, kind. It sprang from coping, from caring, from not letting things get on top of her. She was the first person her daughters-in-law turned to, and that was summat to be proud of. She loved helping them. It was a wise woman who loved the girls her sons chose for their wives … even if one was posh and t’other a slattern, with the untidiest house you ever saw. But Pammy and Sheila loved her boys and had given her two wonderful grandchildren, so what did anything else matter? Especially now that Harry and Archie were away fighting. Dot had made a private vow that in their absence she would take extra care of their wives and, now that they were home again, double-extra care of Jimmy and Jenny. It was a promise she renewed every night, tacking it onto her nightly prayers for Harry and Archie to stay safe and in one piece.
At what point had she twigged that her prayers and promises didn’t include Reg? Did that make her a bad wife? She was certainly a flaming tired one. She was tired of her rotten husband doing her down in front of the family, but that was his way and she couldn’t object, because he would delight in telling everybody, ‘You know what your mam’s … ma-in-law’s … nan’s … auntie’s problem is, don’t you? She can’t take a joke. She wouldn’t recognise a joke if one got up and bit her on the bum.’
Aye, and the biggest joke of the lot was her marriage.
What a thing to happen first thing in the morning – and today of all days! Just when Dot needed everything to run smoothly, to show she could manage her house, care for her family and do a full-time job all at the same time, she had come downstairs to find her saucepans had gone AWOL, thanks to her daft grandson giving them to the rag-and-bone man for melting down.
She hammered at top speed down Heathside Lane. Either she was going at such a lick that the snow couldn’t catch her out or else her carpet slippers had a better grip than she would have expected. Carpet slippers! Talk about undignified. Mind you, that was nowt compared to having her rollers on show for the world and his wife to gawp at under the hairnet she wore in bed, which she hadn’t had time to exchange for her turban. Even so, it could have been worse. She could easily still have been in her dressing gown.
Her heart swelled and thudded as she made her mad dash to catch up with the horse and cart. Despite the early hour and the grey light, the cart was already piled high with all manner of bits and bobs.
‘Any old rags? Rag-bone,’ called the bloke in a powerful sing-song.
Dot caught up, clutching the side of the cart to prevent herself from collapsing in a breathless heap. The rag-and-bone man reined in the plodding horse, which wore a blanket covering its back, with an overcoat spread out over the top. The man turned on the bench-seat to look down on her with an expression that was half startled, half amused. He was a tough-looking chap, with gaps where various teeth should be. Not I’ll-beat-you-up tough, but out-in-all-weathers tough. White hair stuck out untidily from beneath his cloth cap.
‘My, you’re keen to hand over your old stuff, love. I don’t often get ladies pursuing me down the street.’
Dot pushed herself upright and eyed him with a firmness that would have been a lot more compelling if she hadn’t been out of puff with her hairnet on.
‘I want my things back.’
‘Sorry, love. You gave it freely and I give every one of my customers one of my best donkey-stones.’
‘I gave you nowt, freely or otherwise, as you well know.’
The rag-and-bone man shrugged. ‘Difficult to say. If you did, you weren’t all hot and bothered when you waved me down from your front door.’
‘I never waved you down and I never gave you owt, and if I had, I’d have wanted a heck of a lot more than a flaming donkey-stone in exchange for all my pots and pans.’ Dot jammed bunched fists on her hips. ‘Shame on you, telling a little lad that all spare metal goes towards building planes for the RAF.’
‘Come on, missus, it’s for the war effort.’
‘When I give away my pots and pans, it’ll be to an official collection by the Women’s Voluntary Service, not to a clever-clogs who’s going to make money out of it.’
‘Careful what you say, missus. I’m not one of them war profiteers.’
‘Prove it,’ Dot challenged. ‘Give me back my kitchen things.’
‘Well, I don’t know.’ The rag-and-bone man glanced vaguely over his shoulder. ‘They could be anywhere in among that lot.’
‘Rubbish. You’ve not had ’em in your possession five minutes. Either you hand everything back – everything, mind – or I’ll fetch my sons. I’ve four lads, all at home, all in reserved occupations. One’s a policeman, one’s a fireman—’
‘All right, you win.’
He jumped down from the bench-seat, causing Dot to take a swift step backwards, one foot plunging straight into a mound of snow. A cold, wet feeling shot through her. Thank you very much. Leaning over the side of the cart, the rag-and-bone man rummaged about, probably for show. He brought out her saucepans one by one, a milk-pan with a wonky handle and a bigger pan that did for soup in winter and jam in summer. She performed a juggling act, cramming smaller into larger.
‘Thanks.’ She turned away, then spun round again. It was ruddy cold out here, but that didn’t mean her brain had frozen. ‘Frying pan.’
The rag-and-bone man cast his eyes up to the heavens, as if she was the most unreasonable creature ever to walk God’s green earth, but he produced the frying pan. Dot wanted to whip it out of his hands, but that would mean putting her other possessions in jeopardy. Bad enough being outdoors in her hairnet without sending her pans flying in all directions and landing splat in the slush.
She managed to free one hand to snatch the frying-pan handle. ‘Thank you,’ she said in her most clipped voice.
The rag-and-bone man hauled himself back onto the cart. ‘Mind how you go, Grandma.’
Grandma? Blooming cheek.
‘I’ll have you know …’ she began – but she couldn’t say that, could she, because she was a grandmother. Honest to God, just because you were closer to fifty than forty, and your hair was more salt-and-pepper than brown, people made all kinds of assumptions. Inspiration struck and she raised her voice. ‘I’ll have you know, Mr Call-yourself-a-rag-and-bone-man, though really you’re a swindler who takes advantage of little boys, I’ll have you know that, as of today, I’m a railway girl – aye, a girl. Not a railway grandma, and certainly not a railway old biddy, but an actual railway girl. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.’
Dot dumped her pots and pans on the kitchen table with a crash that made Reg jump. Good. Where had he been while she was fighting to retrieve their worldly goods? Sitting at the kitchen table, that’s where, waiting for his breakfast. If the rag-and-bone bloke had spirited her saucepans away so that she could never cook again, Reg would still sit at the ruddy kitchen table in expectation of his next hot meal.
She swung her gaze upon their Jimmy. It was lucky for him he was her grandson and the light of her life, because if he was anybody else’s she would string him up by his toes, aye, and give his mam a piece of her mind an’ all. She was riled up and cold and all Heathside Lane had seen her larking about in the snow in her hairnet, making a right spectacle of herself. Jimmy looked stricken, as well he might, but it wasn’t the way she wanted him to look stricken. It wasn’t with awareness that he had done summat wrong, summat downright barmy. It was because she had fetched back her cookware.
Jimmy gazed back at her with irresistible blue eyes. Harry’s eyes, his dad’s eyes. Blue eyes and freckles on a round face with a happy-go-lucky smile, but Harry had never given her the runaround the way this lad did. He was more trouble than a mattress full of bedbugs.
Look at him now. He hadn’t been up half an hour and already his socks were round his ankles. How many times had she sewn pieces of elastic into circles to make garters? And they never lasted. If Jimmy didn’t snap them using them as catapults, then Sheila … well, God alone knew how Sheila the Slattern could have lost so many of them, but she had. Knocked them down the back of the chest of drawers, probably, never to be seen again until Dot arrived on her doorstep one fine day a few weeks from now with the offer of ‘Shall I make a start on the spring-cleaning for you, love?’
Anyroad, there would be no more garters for young Jimmy. She hadn’t spent all last summer stockpiling elastic just to keep her monkey of a grandson in catapults. It hadn’t been possible to get knicker elastic for love nor money by the time the last war ended, and she wasn’t going to get caught out this time.
‘What did you do that for, our Jimmy?’ she demanded. ‘Giving away my saucepans, I ask you.’
‘The man said it were for the RAF, Nan.’
‘Oh aye? And you thought you’d give away your nan’s saucepans so your very own Spitfire would appear by magic on the parlour rug?’
Jimmy’s eyes widened with surprise and hurt. Yes, obviously he had thought that, the daft ha’porth.
‘Don’t give away owt of mine ever again without asking,’ she said. ‘Or anything of your mum’s. Or anyone else’s,’ she added, just in case.
‘Get this clutter off the table,’ said Reg. ‘Where’s my breakfast?’
‘Hold your horses.’ Dot stepped out of her sodden slippers. Her stockings stuck to her feet like dead skin. ‘Here, our Jimmy, stuff these slippers with screwed-up newspaper and put them on the hearth to dry. On second thoughts, I’ll do it. You aren’t capable of setting foot near the hearth without ending up looking like one of them lads chimney sweeps used to send up chimneys in th’olden days.’
Reg made a clucking sound with his tongue. ‘Leave it for now, Dot, for pity’s sake. Breakfast is more important – isn’t it, Jimmy? Your poor old nan gets herself in such a state, she can’t get her priorities straight.’
Jimmy grinned, until Dot caught his eye, whereupon he subsided. After a speedy breakfast, she fetched Reg’s overcoat and held it for him to put his arms in. He shrugged it onto his shoulders, tucked his scarf inside his lapels and jammed the old bowler that had once been his dad’s onto his head. Ten minutes after Reg left, it was time to send Jimmy to school. With Sheila working at the munitions factory, Jimmy was staying overnight with them two or three times a week.
After she had cleared away the breakfast things, she peeled off her stockings and, turning her back to the kitchen fire, lifted up first one foot, then the other, like a horse at the blacksmith’s, wiggling her toes in the warmth to try to get some life back into them. Tempting as it was to pull up a chair and toast her tootsies, there wasn’t time. There was never time for things like that. She had to put together a cottage pie that she could bung in the oven when she got home from work. It was years since she had worked. That was to say, she had worked all her flaming life, one way or another, but it didn’t count when you were a housewife.
It was the women who were the true workhorses. Dot had grown up helping her mam. All the girls did and the oldest ones did the most – cleaning, mending, taking care of the younger ones – while the boys climbed trees and played conkers. They might be sent out to find firewood or pinch a bit of coal from the railway yard, but that was the extent of their responsibilities.
When she was twelve, she had gone half-time at school so she could be a lace-threader in the afternoons, threading the lace-making machines with silk or cotton, a job she had taken on full-time the following year. She hadn’t been that fussed about the job to start with, but when she was promoted to apprentice lace-maker and was given her own machine to operate, she took a fresh interest and began to enjoy it. By, that had been a happy time. She hadn’t enjoyed it for long, though. She had met Reg and that was that: madly in love at fifteen. Reg had been a handsome devil in those days. He was almost ten years older than she was. Had that been part of the attraction? As one of the oldest in such a big family, with responsibilities from an early age, she had revelled in the novelty of being the young one, of feeling she was being looked after.
Reg had looked after her all right. He had got her up the spout when she was barely sixteen. She had had Archie at sixteen, followed by Harry, practically a year to the day later. Never mind the fancy lace-work. It was the washing and darning and bottom-wiping that she had done as a lass that had stood her in good stead. Much as she loved her boys, and Reg too in those days, it had been grim to realise that she faced the same never-ending grind as her mam.
Except it hadn’t worked out that way for her. After Harry, she fell for another baby, who was due to be eighteen months younger, but in the third month, one Saturday morning when Reg was digging the vegetable patch, a dull, dragging pain had started in the pit of her stomach, accompanied by the metallic smell of blood. She had despatched Reg for the midwife, but – he had loved her back then – he had gone for the doctor, who had sent him home with instructions that everything expelled should be collected and he would be along later to examine it.
The doctor had ambled along about teatime. By then, the neighbours who were caring for Dot had gone home to see to their families; Archie and Harry, who had been spirited away, had been brought back; Reg, who had nipped along to his mother’s for his dinner, had returned and was in the middle of digging every row in the vegetable patch so as not to intrude on women’s matters; and Dot, after a few hours in bed, was up and fettling, with a mound of rags stuffed inside her knickers to absorb any final bleeding.
The doctor peered into the enamel dish that Dot couldn’t bring herself to look at.
‘Knife and fork, please,’ he said without looking round.
Dot opened the kitchen drawer, obscurely embarrassed when it got stuck and squeaked. She offered him her best pair. He was the doctor, after all.
And he used her best knife and fork, the ones with the bone handles, to rootle around in the enamel dish.
‘It’s all there,’ he announced. ‘Nothing to worry about. Hot water and a clean towel, if you please. Doctor has to wash his hands. Tell your husband that will be one shilling.’
After that, her womb must have shrivelled in horror, because there was never so much as a late monthly in the years that followed, though that hadn’t prevented every nerve-end in her body, every beat of her heart, every shred of her instinct, from crying out for another child.
‘Oh well,’ said Reg when she told him of her longing, ‘having just the two lads makes the money stretch further.’
Was that the best he could come up with? Couldn’t he see how much his words had hurt her? Was that when they had started to drift apart? Had she foisted too much attention on her precious sons? Was that why Reg’s teasing had taken on first an exasperated, then a sniping, air? It was difficult to say. It hadn’t happened overnight. How could summat that had started with passion and high hopes have slumped into an obscure sourness?
Back then, everyone had taken advantage of her family circumstances. In a close-knit, working-class community like theirs, having just the two children meant she was practically childless and therefore available to help all the over-worked mothers of six, eight, ten – the real mothers.
‘You’ve got room for a few more, haven’t you, Dot?’ asked her sisters and sisters-in-law. ‘You can mind mine for me, can’t you?’ ‘I’ll send mine round to yours, Dot. Give me a bit of a break …’ ‘You’ll like having my lasses for the day, won’t you, Dot? It’ll be a big help to me.’
As a young mum, she had spent the last war keeping open house for everyone else’s nippers. As the war dragged on, and other women went out to work, Reg, home on leave, had made it clear that she wasn’t allowed to.
‘It’s not right for a married woman. Not respectful to her husband. It makes him look like he can’t afford to keep her.’
And she was young enough and daft enough to let him lay down the law. Anyroad, Archie was four when war was declared, with Harry only three, and she had wanted to be at home for them.
‘Course you do, pet,’ Mam had said comfortingly. ‘Looking after the bairns is your job when you’re young.’
‘And when you’re not so young. You’ve still got six at home and two of them are at school.’
‘Aye, it never stops. I was going to wait until our Philip and Floss had finished school, but I’ve decided not to. It’s not as though they’re tiny bairns.’
‘What are you talking about, Mam?’
‘I’m off out to work, lass. What does that poster say? “Your Country Needs You.” Well, that’s me.’
‘It means soldiers,’ Dot had pointed out.
Mam shrugged. ‘I’m going out to work.’
‘But, Mam—’
‘But what? How will I manage with the kids and the house at the same time? Listen, Dot. Keeping house and looking after the family is what women do, and we do it as well as owt else we’re called on to do. Take last week. You helped our Marnie move house, and you helped Agnes with the kids when they was all struck down with that cough, and how many pairs of socks did you knit for the troops? And did that stop you being a good housewife and mother?’
‘Course not.’
‘Course not, because that’s what women do. We’re housewives and mothers, and we take on whatever else wants doing. Well, what I’m taking on is my own level crossing and I’ll take good care of it until the level-crossing keeper comes home from the war. Close your mouth, our Dot. You’ll catch flies.’
Eh, Mam had been the best sort of woman. Dot hadn’t realised it at the time and was sorry now she hadn’t seen it sooner. She was the same age now, give or take, that Mam had been when she became a railway girl, and that felt odd. Back then she had thought Mam too old to be doing such things, but she didn’t think of herself as old now. She was going to be forty-six this year. Forty-six! If only youngsters could understand how young that felt. Her brown hair might be fading to grey, and her neck might be less firm than it once was, but she still didn’t feel old. Not inside.
‘I’ll do you proud, Mam,’ she said out loud as she flew round the house: making beds; doing the day’s dusting; sweeping the hall, stairs and landing; and starting on the cottage pie that was going to prove you could take on full-time work and still put nourishing meals on the table. ‘You managed with a family and a railway job and I will an’ all.’