‘You’ve
got
to. What’s the matter with you, in heaven’s name? Just lying here – get yourself up!’ Another tug on his arm. ‘You’re already late – they’ll sack you if you keep this up, and then where will we be? I’m hardly getting any work living in this slum – we’ll end up in the gutter!’ She stopped pulling at him and put her hands over her face, breaking into deep sobs. ‘I can’t do everything: I can’t manage . . .’
Her tears seemed to get through to him and Katie saw Patrick sit up as if it pained him, as if a pile of lead weights had been heaped upon him. He dragged his hands down over his hollow face. He looked so sad, but all he said was, ‘All right, all right, Vera. I’m up now. Don’t be shouting. Just leave me be.’
But there were days, just a few, back then, when he couldn’t get up at all. Katie didn’t notice very often, especially once she was old enough to go to school. She hardly realized that jobs came and went. He worked in factories, on building sites, at the wharf, came home black for a time when he was a stoker in the retort house at the gas works. He would lose one job, find another.
But there were other days when he bounced about, as if he had more energy than anyone else. He would get very excited, talk loudly and endlessly, and there was always a plan for something big.
‘I’m going to start my own little firm very soon,’ he’d say. At first Vera had seemed to believe him, not knowing the pattern. In spite of everything, she looked up to him. He’d had an education. Patrick’s schemes – for making umbrellas, then a new kind of wheelbarrow, a car even, then sweets another day – all sounded marvellous and almost plausible. He knew exactly how to do it: whatever it was, no one had ever done it this way before. He knew where to get money, he had his eye on some premises somewhere and he knew just the fella to help him and get the business up and running. They’d soon be out of here, living in a grand house in the suburbs with a vegetable garden and roses.
Patrick had a particular love of the psalms, and amid the stories from Irish folklore and the songs he sang to Katie in his tuneful voice as she stood at his knee, he often read her psalms. In what Vera came to call his ‘quick moods’, he saw very particular significance in them – some lines shining out, intended specially for him.
‘Come here now, Katie,’ he’d say, his ocean eyes aflame with excitement. Scooping her onto his knee, he’d hold the scripture in front of her – his worn old Douay Bible, one of the few possessions that he’d carried back with him from Uganda. She could feel his scrawny legs under her and see how shiny thin his trousers were, so old that the black had faded to grey and smelled unwashed. His shirtsleeves were frayed at the ends and his jacket patched repeatedly by Vera. Around her, Katie would feel his body thrumming and twitching, never still. His breath smelt of tea, or sometimes of camomile or rosemary. He had a great belief in herbs as being good for him in some way
‘See here now – this is it: “For thou shalt eat the labours of thy hands: blessed art thou, and it shall be well with thee.” D’you see now? That shows for certain we’re going to prosper – it’s all going to happen, see?
See
? And look here . . .’ Flick, flick. ‘“Thou hast understood my thoughts afar off: my path and my line thou hast searched out.” It’s all God speaking, loud and clear: “The Lord is my helper, I will not fear what man can do unto me.”’ Phrases were flung out, using the Bible like a fairground lady with a crystal ball. ‘“Thou openest thy hand, and fillest with blessing every living creature.” Oh yes – the tide’s turning, girls, you can be sure of that.’
In his slow moods, he would never ever have addressed Vera as a ‘girl’.
Katie came to know and love the words and rhythms of the psalms through these strange conversations, while Patrick’s dry fingers flicked the pages restlessly back and forth. And for his kindness and attention to her, she came to love him too.
Sometimes Patrick disappeared for several days and came back even more whippet-thin. He told them he spent the days walking, out to the Lickeys, the Clent Hills, or wandering the roads, as far as he and his shoe leather could last, while the burning desperation had taken hold of him. Katie remembered him coming back looking completely spent, having inexplicably lost all the buttons from his coat, the flaps held round him with a piece of farmer’s twine, his socks gone and the shoe leather splitting away from the soles.
‘Dear God, look at you!’ Vera breathed when she saw him come in the door. Her voice held anger and pity, and a desperation of her own. ‘What will people think? And look at your shoes!’ She seized the coat and sewed on more buttons.
Katie was used to the fact that while this was normal for her, the reality of their home life was to be a secret from everyone else. People were not invited in, and none of her friends from school ever came to the house. Vera held herself apart from her neighbours: no one was to see Patrick any more than was necessary. No one was to know – not even Enid, Vera’s one friend in the district. She kept up the pretence that no one noticed.
‘One of the boys at school said Uncle Patrick is a loony,’ Katie told Vera once, while she was still at St Joseph’s. ‘He said that’s why the Fathers sent him home.’
Vera’s face tightened. Again there was one of those inner storms that didn’t break out, but you could feel its vibrations.
‘Now look . . .’ She gripped Katie’s hand so tight that she squealed. ‘If anyone says anything to you about your uncle, you say to them, “I don’t know what you mean. My uncle has been in Africa. He’s suffering from a tropical complaint.” Don’t get angry – just pass it off casually. Say you don’t know any more.’ Once more she gripped hard. ‘Look at me . . .’
Katie raised her eyes to her mother’s intense gaze. Mother was far more frightening that Uncle Patrick. She didn’t understand what was the matter with him, only that he struggled heroically day after day.
‘There is no one in this house who is fit to be called a “loony”. It’s a spiteful lie and we’re not having it – d’you understand?’
‘Yes.’ She was trembling. ‘Mother.’
One of the best things about Uncle Patrick was that he lived a very austere life. He was not a drinker or smoker, so had a few pennies to spare. Above anything else, he loved being in water.
‘I learned to swim by jumping in the waves,’ he told Katie. ‘We’d spend hours down on the strand. Nothing like it. I’ll teach you one day.’
Neither of their poor little houses had a bathroom, and Vera flatly refused to use the tin bath that hung on a nail in the yard at the back.
‘I’m not going back and forth round there with buckets of water,’ she said with a shudder. Even if Patrick offered to carry the water, she wasn’t having it. ‘I shall wash myself in privacy – heaven knows, there’s little enough of it round here as it is.’
Once every week or ten days they walked up to Nechells Park Road to the huge, ornate building that contained the Public Baths. Vera and Katie would pay their pennies for a hot bath and a towel and join the queue waiting on the benches for the bath cubicles. The soap the baths provided was a yellow carbolic, hard as a stone, so Vera brought their own soap, a cake of Lifebuoy sliced in half so that each of them could take it in with them.
You were not expected to spend much time in the bath. The attendants who came in, in overalls with their big scrubbing brushes to clean the bath after each customer, were banging on the door if you’d been in there ten minutes.
Katie loved the baths, and lying in the warm water, especially on cold winter days when you’d gone in with freezing feet, was a real treat. Sometimes they stung as she got into the luxurious, shimmering water and her chilblains would ache and itch. She would ease her long, slender body down into the warmth, pick up the soap and wash away any tide marks as fast as possible so that she could lie there, the tiles of the steamy cubicle dewy with condensation, wallowing until the banging started;
‘Hurry up in there. Time’s up – there’s plenty more waiting out ’ere!’
Katie and her mother took baths, but Uncle Patrick went as often as he could afford to the main swimming baths in the same building. He plunged his bony frame into the water and, with a jerky, awkward style, ploughed up and down, one length breaststroke, one length crawl, alternating. Whatever state he was in before he left the house, he always returned looking a bit better.
‘The water’s grand,’ he told Katie. ‘Nothing like getting in there for a good bathe.’ And occasionally, on the way back, he brought home fish and chips and pease pudding, all of which Vera seemed to think was vulgar, but she ate it anyway and Katie thought it the most delicious food you could ever have.
Every so often Patrick would promise, ‘When you’re a bit bigger I’ll take you along with me.’
Katie grew up used to her double life, the secrecy of home. But then Em’s mother Cynthia was taken away and everything was confusing. Even then, she understood dimly that what had happened was too close to home, and that it made her and her mother cruel in their fear of disgrace. Who was mad? What did that mean? How was any of this to be understood when no one ever talked about it properly? All she knew was that it was frightening and that no one wanted to be near it. It led to disaster. So she in her turn had been cruel to Em. Had
had
to be.
Shortly before Christmas when Katie was nine, something happened that changed their lives. Vera O’Neill got a job in the millinery department of Lewis’s Department Store. She was employed to help with the Christmas rush, but when she had been there only a few days, she was asked if she would like to take on a permanent job, working Tuesday to Saturday. With her knowledge of sewing and her old-fashioned, ladylike ways, she was well equipped to work there and she jumped at the chance. It seemed to be exactly what she needed to restore her lost confidence.
‘I’ll be able to take on some of my tailoring still,’ she said, flushed in the face as she told Patrick and Katie that evening. ‘And you’re old enough for me to take on a job outside the house now, Katie. You’ll have to be very grown-up and responsible.’ There was a note of warning in her voice as she paced up and down the room, as if to say:
Don’t think I shan’t be watching your every move, even if I’m not here!
‘Now, I have a feeling we’re on the way up. Everything’s going to change.’
Patrick was having one of his calm days. He smiled, looking up from his paper and said, ‘That’s good, Vera. That’s very good now.’
The transformation in her mother was startling. Vera seemed younger, lighter in herself. Katie had not known, until then, what life had sucked out of her. In celebration, after school had broken up, she took Katie out for a treat, dressed in her Sunday best, a dark-red dress. They had been in Lewis’s before, of course, but then it had always been a case of: look, but don’t touch.
‘I’ll take you in to see Father Christmas,’ Vera said. She was excited herself. Katie had never before seen her in such an indulgent mood. ‘And while we’re at it, it’s high time you had your hair cut.’
Lewis’s, with its grand building in Corporation Street, was always exciting to go into, as if you were entering the world of wealth and glamour. When you walked in, there were those lovely smells, of soap and scent wafting from the perfume and make-up department on the ground floor. Then all those stairs up, up the high building, and the floors full of clothes and gloves and shoes, and soft, lacy undergarments and silk stockings – things that they could never afford, but that it was achingly fun to admire.
‘Can we go and see the pets?’ Katie asked, clutching her mother’s hand as they climbed up the stairs to see Father Christmas. ‘
Please
?’ The very fact that she felt she could ask showed that this was a day unlike any other.
Vera hesitated, as if calculating in her head, then the most wholehearted smile Katie had seen in a very long time spread across her face.
‘All right then – just this once.’
It was a day Katie would never forget. First of all they queued to get into Santa’s grotto, where she stared amazed at Santa’s long, white beard as he lifted her onto his lap.
‘Well, you’re tall, but you’re a very light little girl,’ he said. Katie put her hand up to her ear. His voice was so loud and booming! ‘How old are you then, my dear?’
‘I’m nine,’ Katie whispered.
‘My, my,’ he said. ‘Who would have thought it? Now – what would you like Santa to bring you for Christmas?’
My daddy
, was the plea that welled up in her, but she knew that was silly, so she said, ‘A nice dolly.’
She came away not with a doll, but with a colouring book, but she was pleased with that too. Then they visited the millinery department where Vera worked, behind one of the long wooden counters with brass tape measures screwed into them, and all the big bolts of cloth behind. Katie took everything in, thinking it was lovely. Her mother looked around as if claiming it in some way.
From there, they went to Pets’ Corner, where you could stroke the rabbits and guinea-pigs, and there were even chimpanzees like old men with sad, brown eyes. She loved the way the rabbits kept nibbling and watching her at the same time, as she stroked their smooth, soft backs.
‘In the summer they take them out on the roof,’ one of the ladies who worked there told her. ‘But it’s too cold for them at this time of year.’
‘Can we come in the summer?’ She looked up at her mother eagerly.
‘We’ll see,’ Vera said. It was so strange, suddenly having her mother say ‘yes’ to things or even ‘perhaps’, instead of ‘no’ as it had always been, so that Katie had given up asking.