Bridlington, 1939
The confrontation on the railway embankment is an important victory for Winnie and she underscores it by making Harry sleep in the front room and refusing to speak to him for days on end. If he needs to ask her a question or tell her something, he must do it through Roy, Tommy or Juggler Jane. Winnie does not enjoy the arrangement but she learns that by imposing awkwardness on the home she gains power; once she feels him to be broken by it she begins to talk to him and the house is calm and respectful again. Harry comes home each night, and Winnie goes out with him to the club more often.
She has come to loathe his drinking though, and his slurred indelicacies, stale-beer odour and phlegmy snores remind her of her father’s warnings. She thinks to pass those warnings on to Roy to ensure he doesn’t follow his father, and when she and he have eaten Sunday lunch, and she has left Harry’s plate to warm because he is still at the club drinking, she takes him into the front room to teach him a lesson. Roy plays with toy soldiers or reads his comics, while Winnie listens to the radio news about Hitler and Germany. When she sees Harry coming back from the club, perhaps with Danny beside him, both weaving a little, feet falling a little clumsily, Winnie says, ‘Come here, Roy, just look at this,’ and takes him to her side and points to Harry and Danny, and Roy laughs, which is not the response she seeks. She puts her arm around him and guides his thoughts. ‘The daft ’apeth,’ she says. ‘Look at him, he can hardly stand up!’
‘Is he drunk, Mam?’
‘Yes he is. He should be ashamed of himself.’
‘He’s funny though, in’t he?’
Win says nothing. Roy slips her grasp, and runs out of the room and down the street to his dad.
*
Through the long hot summer of 1939 the radio news carries stories of Hitler’s armies threatening Poland. Men come to paste up posters about evacuees and to cut down the iron railings outside Number 34; in the club and in the backings men and women say, Rubbish, it’ll turn out to be a lot of fuss about nowt, you watch. Winnie and Harry agree, even when the council begins recruiting air-raid wardens and more men come to build a brick air-raid shelter in the yard. If anything, the feeling of unreality draws them and the people around them together and brings a mood of, if not quite fun, then at least casual abandon. On the last day of August, as German forces gather to attack Poland, and Britain mobilises its armies, Harry drives Winnie and Roy in the motorcycle and sidecar for a long weekend at Bridlington’s South Shore caravan park with his sister Clara and her new husband, a Bolton-upon-Dearne man called Ernie Towning.
Bridlington is heaving. The 1938 Holidays with Pay Act has allowed millions of people to take a week’s holiday with pay for the first time, and rearmament has put money back into their pockets to spend on such things as caravan holidays, amusements, fried food, cheap sweets, novelty clothing, music and beer. The TUC conference is being held here and there are suited union men in the pubs and on the streets. You’ve hardly been able to shift all summer, the people in the caravan next door say; the pleasure boats have been that busy the captains have been fined for overcrowding.
On Saturday, as Winnie, Harry, Roy, Clara and Ernie queue for ice-creams and sit on the packed beach, Bridlington buzzes with war talk. Hitler has invaded Poland, Britain has told him to withdraw. He hasn’t replied but he will, he’ll pull out, you just watch. At night they have to black out the caravan windows, but still no one thinks anything will really happen; on Sunday, the day of the deadline Britain has given to Germany, the Hollingworths get up early and take the steps that run from the low, grassy clifftop down to the beach. Winnie, in her swimsuit and cap, skin reddened by yesterday’s sun, wades out to the sea and Harry sits watching her, wearing an old loose jacket and trousers and a tam-o’-shanter he has bought from one of the shops. Roy makes sandcastles and does handstands with Ernie and Clara. Around them there are men in old suits and black woollen bathing costumes, and women in flowery cotton dresses. The air is filled with the smell of salt, sand and sweet frying fat, and the sounds of children and seagulls and the North Sea waves splashing onto the sand.
At about quarter past eleven, the skies fill with the sound of sirens. ‘Chamberlain’s been on t’ radio,’ a stranger on the beach tells Harry. ‘Germany’s not withdrawn, so it looks as if that’s it!’
Winnie, Harry, Roy, Ernie and Clara sit looking at each other.
‘What have we to do?’ says Ernie.
‘I think we should go home,’ says Winnie.
So does everyone else. All around them people are packing bags and leaving, as if sitting on the beach has come to feel frivolous and distasteful.
‘Come on,’ says Harry, and he, Winnie and Roy gather up their things, climb up the cliff and head off in the motorcycle and sidecar, inland from the sunlit shore.