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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: The Hamiltons Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
County Armagh, 1932. For Sam Hamilton and Robert Scott, the world has changed greatly since the days when they played together outside their fathers' forge. Now in their fifties, with families of their own, they are grateful to have work at a time of mass-unemployment and little security for many of those who do have jobs. Focusing on the heartache of Sam's younger son and namesake, and the loneliness and anxiety of Robert's beloved youngest daughter, Ellie, For Many a Long Day is a story of courage and friendship, of disappointment and achievement, and most of all, of the final triumph of patience and love.
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For Many a Long Day
ANNE DOUGHTY
For all my Canadian friends and cousins known since childhood or recently discovered
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I must begin by apologising to the inhabitants of both Armagh and Peterborough, Ontario, for taking liberties with their commercial activities. Freeburn’s in Armagh and Robinson Lumbering in Peterborough are entirely fictitious. Sleator’s did exist in the 1930s, but I have modified it to suit my purposes.
As with all my novels I try to be accurate about both the social and the economic situation in which my character find themselves, together with the actual geographic setting where they live and work. While the city and countryside of Armagh is very familiar to me, I could not have been as confident about Peterborough, Ontario had it not been for the Canadian Library and Archives Service.
For an extremely modest fee they provided me with a ship’s manifest which allowed me to locate the family of my great-uncle, who went away and never came back. With the help of a childhood friend, my cousins were contacted and my questions about Peterborough answered with documents, photographs, old books and a bicycle ride around Quaker Oats.
Here in Belfast, I must thank the television company, now resident in my great-aunt’s tall, terrace house, who let me stand on a chair among their computers so I could look out the attic window and refresh my memory of the Antrim hills and the view over Moonstone Street.
Ellie Scott is the gentlest of my protagonists, but she is typical of many Irish country girls. They have little formal education, but possess tenacity and common sense, virtues which stand to them whether they help to open up the Canadian forest at Scott’s Plains or make a life and home in the difficult 1930s in a country town like Armagh.
Finishing this novel in the autumn of 2008 with the dark shadows of recession and unemployment making daily headlines, I hope this fiction may bring comfort to all those women who will do what Ellie does and make the best of all their capabilities at a difficult time.
CHAPTER ONE
Salter’s Grange, 1932
Robert Scott drained his mug of tea, retrieved his cap from the fender, pushed back his chair from the table and headed for the open door of the kitchen. Once outside, in the freshness of a fine May morning, he paused under the wrought-iron arch that framed the solid front door of his long, low dwelling. Though his eyes were dazzled by the light and still watering from the shimmer of fat smoking in the heavy pan his wife, Ellen, had used to fry soda bread for his breakfast, he gazed down the path to the forge, along the lane beyond, across the main road and up the sloping fields on the far side to where a clear, blue sky rested easily on the low, green hills he’d known throughout his fifty odd years.
All was quiet. As so often at this early hour, no vehicle moved on the county road, no cattle lowed in the cool of morning, no friend or neighbour came tramping up the short lane to his workplace.
He took a deep breath, drew in the familiar scent of hawthorn and glanced across the front of the house. The windows reflected the almost cloudless sky except where they were dappled by the flutter of leaves on the flourishing climbing rose. There were tiny splashes of colour on the window sills where his youngest daughter, Ellie, had lined up a row of pots, the slips of geranium she’d cared for indoors over the winter.
He smiled to himself. She was taking no chances with them. If there’d been a thought of a frost at bedtime last night, she’d have had them into the kitchen should she have gone out in her nightdress to get them.
In the broad open space beyond the windows, the hens paused in their scratching and gave him quick, darting looks. It took but a flick of their bright eyes for them to see he was not the bearer of food. They returned at once to their random movement backwards and forwards across the stony area between the remains of the old ruined house where Ellie had her small garden and the well-tramped area beside the water barrel. Round this ran a path that passed under the gable and into the largest of the handful of orchards surrounding both the forge house and the neighbouring farm.
Having surveyed his territory, he limped quickly down the path, the surviving sign of his old injury so long forgotten he rarely noticed it.
The lower half of the forge door was closed, but the upper half stood open. He leant inside, silently withdrew the bolt and stepped quietly over to his anvil, his eyes screwed up in the darkness as he peered towards a small space above the low lintel under which he had just entered.
Before he’d even had time to listen for the tiny seep, seep of the fledglings, a wren flew past him, inches from his face. She shot back out into the light, as indifferent to his presence as if he were a piece of machinery or the handle of the bellows.
All well there too, he said to himself. He raked out the cinders and added small pieces of coal to the smoored fire, till a thick, white rope twisted its way up from the hearth. It gathered in the broad chimney and then rose straight into the still air above the trees and bushes that enfolded his small parcel of land.
‘Cheerio, Da. See you tonight.’
He paused, turned from the hearth and saw his daughter standing outside his open door, the sun glinting from her hair and reflecting off a spotless white blouse.
‘Yer in good time the mornin’, Ellie,’ he said, surprised to see her, setting down the tongs he’d only just picked up. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead, the sweat already breaking from the heat of the fire.
‘Delivery,’ she said, laughing at his puzzlement and patting a large, brown paper parcel laid across the basket of her bicycle. ‘Drumsollen,’ she explained. ‘The dressmaker’s coming to make new maids’ uniforms.’
‘Wou’d it not a been easier to drop it off last night on yer way home?’
She laughed again and threw out a hand in a light gesture.
‘Of course it would, Da. But nothing’s as easy as that with Missus Senator Richardson. There’s people coming over from London. I don’t know if it’s young Missus Edward’s family or Parliament people. She said she specifically did not want a delivery in the early evening when they’d be arriving. She shook her head, mimicking perfectly the haughty tone of the command.
Robert nodded and raised his eyebrows. The Senator’s wife was well-known for making her wishes clear. A different woman entirely from her new daughter-in-law. Young Missus Richardson was a favourite of his. She loved horses and understood them and unlike some of the local gentry who’d barley bid him the time of day when they came to have their horses shod, she’d stand and talk to him while he worked, never getting in his way while she made sure the animal was easy.
‘Must go, Da. Have to be at Drumsollen before eight. If she complains to the boss, I’ll get my head chopped off.’
‘Good customer, is she?’ he asked, stepping out into the sunlight to see her off.
‘The best. Pays cash. Boss loves to see her coming,’ she added over her shoulder, as she wheeled her bicycle carefully beyond the reapers and harrows awaiting repair, a sharp eye open for any bits of metal and rusty nails that might have found their way on to the short lane down to the road.
He stood watching her go, saw her wheel her bicycle to the far side of the road and catch up her dark skirt before she got on. As she took her weight off the ground, his heart was in his mouth, for the heavy parcel shifted under her restraining hand and the front wheel looked as if it might turn below her. But it was a moment only. It wasn’t the first time Ellie had delivered a bale of cloth to the big house and she was well used to coping with heavy loads on her bicycle. For her own sake and those she worked with, Robert hoped there’d be many more orders for Drumsollen.
He saw her pedal steadily down the slope and was about to go back to his work when her arm shot up in the air. She waved vigorously, though he knew rightly she didn’t dare turn her head to see him wave back.
In his family of four girls and two boys, Ellie was the youngest, now just nineteen and the only one with fair hair. It was so pale it seemed to pick up every hint of sunshine, even on a dull day. In any crowd of young people, he could pick her out a mile away.
‘There’s no knowin’ about these things,’ he said to himself, the glints of her hair in the morning light still alive in his mind’s eye. He laid a bar of one inch iron on his workbench, picked up his chalk and callipers and began to measure the four pieces he’d need to make shoes for Robinson’s big cart horse.
As far as he knew, there was no one in the Scott family with fair hair. His father had been dark before what little hair he’d had receded so fast and so thoroughly, he was seldom seen without a cap. As for his mother, he could hardly remember her, never mind her hair. Though his father said he was seven or eight when she died, it was only now and again some wee thing would even make him think of her.
If he saw a woman carrying a big Bible under her arm, or if he had to mend the metal straps on a horse collar, he would suddenly be aware of the smell of hard, yellow soap from her hands and her clothes. But the strange thing was he could never remember what she looked like.
His step-mother, Selina, a woman he’d loved from the first day his father brought her home, had asked him sometimes about his own mother. Once, he’d told her about the way a horse-collar would make him think of her and she’d said that in her young days women sometimes used a horse-collar to keep a child from straying when they had their work to do. Maybe, she’d said, gently, his mother had put him in one sometimes when he was very small.
Even when he’d talked to Selina like this, no further memory had stirred. But the more he thought of it, the surer he was that his mother must have been dark like his sister, Annie, or his older brother, James. Of course, his mother’s hair might have been thin and mousy like that of his own two sons, Bob and Johnny. He laughed shortly as another thought occurred to him. Wasn’t it a good thing neither Polly, nor Mary, nor Florence, had inherited hair like that and them so particular about how they looked and what they wore. Especially Florence.
He peered down at the chalk marks on his piece of iron and shook his head. He could barely make them out. He’d have to go round the back of the forge and cut the cow parsley. He couldn’t put it off any longer. It had grown waist high in the last weeks, the mass of feathery stems were topped with rich, creamy white flowers. Ellie said it was a pretty sight all along the road into Armagh, but it was hard on the eyes, for it made the light penetrating through his rain-streaked windows even dimmer and turned it greenish into the bargain.
He reached up above the long bench and took down a sickle from a row of hooks between the two windows. He tested its edge cautiously with his thumb, hurried out round the tall gable, walked a few yards along the short cut to Robinson’s farm, then turned aside to push his way through the rampant growth brought on by the first real warmth of the year.
The sun was well up now, the light glancing off the high-pitched roof above him, the heat shimmering over the hot surface of the felt, the dew already gone from the luxurious vegetation which fell below his hand. He was no great hand with a sickle, so he cut down only the stems that grew immediately in front of his windows. He knew from experience they were always tougher than they looked.
‘God Bless the work.’
He looked up, startled, dazzled by the light. He’d been so absorbed in keeping his balance on the uneven ground he’d heard no step. The short, dark figure was blurred, but the slight sing-song note of the voice was quite unmistakable.
‘Ach Jamsey. How are ye?’
‘I’m the best at all. I have sweet milk for herself. Is she up?’
‘Aye, she is. She made m’ breakfast the day.’
Without another word, Jamsey walked past him and turned up the lane to the house, his total attention focused on the jug he carried, his thumbs jutting awkwardly as if they didn’t fit properly with his hands. The unexpected, late son of an elderly mother, Jamsey was a biddable child, once one made due allowances, as Robert and his family always did. Sadly, however, there were those who treated the young man’s abruptness and his frequent, sullen silences as if they were intended.
Robert dragged the cut stems away from the windows with the point of the sickle and left them to ret down where they lay, tramped back to his workbench and wiped his blade with an oily rag.
‘That’s a bit more like it,’ he said, as he glanced down at his chalk marks and found he could now see them clearly.
As the sun rose higher and the shadow of the forge grew shorter, the air itself warmed up. A new and more delicate scent mingled with the familiar perfume of hawthorn. Before Robert had even stepped into the orchard behind his own house to refill the bucket of drinking water he carried to the forge every day, he knew what he would see.
Even so, it still amazed him, year after year, the way the fat pink and white buds of the apple blossom would linger and linger. Then, between one hour and the next on a warm afternoon, suddenly unfurl, the petals opening almost as you looked at them.
He paused only a moment to breathe the perfumed air, for even as he filled his bucket, he remembered yet another job he’d promised to have ready by the evening. How he was going to do it, he had yet to figure out.
He carried the white enamel bucket back to the forge and set it down beside the wooden seat just inside his door. From the embrasure of the window behind, he took up a shoebox and brought out a clean, delph mug. With it, he baled cool spring water into the soot-marked tin mug that sat all day on the hearth within reach of the anvil. He drank deep, throwing his head well back to let the water rinse the dust from his throat. Then he put the delph mug back in its box with its fellow and from a nail on the wall nearby unhooked a square of material, patterned with daisies and neatly hemmed on all four sides. He spread it carefully across the surface of the bucket and picked up his hammer again.
‘Da, you can’t offer your customers a drink of water out of that mug of yours,’ Ellie had remonstrated. ‘And look at all those bits of soot and the metal flakes in the bottom of your bucket.’
She’d laughed when he protested it wouldn’t do them a bit of harm. They wouldn’t see the bits down at the bottom. What the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve.
‘And what about the ladies?’ she’d come back at him. ‘What about the Misses Cope and young Missus Richardson,’ she’d added slyly.
So she’d gone away and found a pair of decent-looking mugs, not china, but not tinker’s delph either, and put them in one of the shoe boxes Florence had left behind, with a couple of pieces of tissue crumpled up in the bottom to keep them from chipping each other.
The cover she’d made was a remnant so small it had never sold in the shop. It was only just big enough to hang over the rim and cover the surface of the water, but it did keep out the soot and sparks that flew everywhere when he really started hammering.
As he shaped and curved metal the long, slow notes now echoing on the still air, carried as far as the parish church up on the hill, the small shop at Scott’s Corner a mile away towards Loughgall and, on the Armagh side of Robinson’s farm, as far as the stretch of bog that ended in a deep quarry and a projection of grey stone known as Reilly’s Rocks. The lighter notes from the hammer’s dance didn’t carry beyond the forge itself, but they punctuated the long steady strokes, the balancing rhythm his father had taught him to help ease the pain of throbbing muscles and keep at bay the dull ache of fatigue.
He worked steadily and without apparent haste throughout the long hours of the day, the list of jobs diminishing and then increasing again with every dark figure who stood in the doorway and greeted him. Even before it was time to stop for the evening meal, he was tired and he knew it, but that was the way it was at this time of year. Like the farmers who would be on the land as long as there was light to see by, he’d work on till the shadows filled the forge or his own fatigue got the better of him.
‘Is it not time you stopped, Da? It’s near eight o’clock and Ma’s says she’s hardly laid eyes on you all day. You haven’t even lain down for half an hour to give your head a rest.’
He glanced up at the sound of Ellie’s voice.
‘Ach, I’m all right,’ he said dismissively, only now remembering what the doctor had said about the headaches.
‘You look worn out,’ she added, coming closer.
‘Mind yerself now,’ he added quickly as she moved towards him. ‘You don’t want a dirty mark on that nice wee dress of yours. Are you and George for the dance?’
‘Aye, he’s going to borrow his brother’s motor cycle, so I’m meeting him down on the road,’ she said, suddenly beaming at him.
‘Is he a good dancer?’
‘The best at all,’ she laughed. ‘I don’t know where he gets the energy from and them so busy on the farm.’
‘Ah, it’s great to be young.’
Maybe it was just the tiredness getting into his voice, but the easy remark didn’t come out as he’d meant it. He saw the change in her bright face, the light go from her eyes. She had opened her mouth to speak when they heard a vigorous tune on the horn of a motorcycle.
‘Away now and enjoy yerself,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ve only one wee thing to finish, then I’m for soap an’ water an’ my pipe. I’ll see ye in the mornin’. Run on now, ye can’t keep your young man waitin’.’
It was only moments after the rapid note of the bike died away in the direction of Loughgall that it was replaced by the throb of a much heavier engine. He shook his head. They must be getting a good crowd if there was a motor coming from Armagh direction, he thought to himself, as he began the last shoe of the day, for a child’s pony he was expecting to shoe in the morning.
As he put his hammer down a few minutes later and turned to plunge the glowing metal into the water tank, he was surprised to see a tall figure standing in the doorway quietly watching him.
‘God Bless the work.’
‘Ach, Sam Hamilton,’ he exclaimed above the cloud of steam and the noise of bubbling brown water. ‘Man, how are ye? I haven’t seen ye since you brought your mother over to Selina’s funeral. That’s near three years now,’ he added, as he took the outstretched hand firmly without even wiping his own on the back of his trousers.
‘Aye an’ the time before that when we met it was my father’s funeral and you and Ellen and Selina came with Ned Wylie and Peggy over to Banbridge.’
‘Dear aye. Isn’t it a sad thing when we only see other at funerals?’
‘Or when misfortune brings me a beggar to your door,’ Sam Hamilton replied promptly.
‘Dear goodness, an’ what would make a good man like you a beggar?’ Robert replied, half amused, half curious.
‘Did you hear the motor?’
‘I did surely. Have you bought a motor?’
‘No, Robert I have not,’ he replied with a short laugh. ‘To tell you the truth, even if I had the money, I get enough of motors and lorries every day.’
Sam Hamilton was a broad-shouldered man in his fifties, his face brown from exposure, his wispy hair combed back from a high broad forehead. He came in and settled himself easily on the visitor’s bench. Robert set the shoe aside, leant back against the shaft of the bellows and stretched his aching back.
‘One of these days maybe I’ll buy a pony and trap,’ Sam went on thoughtfully. ‘We had a wee mare called Dolly when I was a boy and I loved looking after her. I used to take Ma into Banbridge on a Saturday afternoon or maybe drive Sarah and Hannah out somewhere of a fine evening. We had some grand times with Dolly,’ he added, a hint of wistfulness in his tone.
‘Aye, we never know when we’re well off,’ Robert nodded. ‘As the saying is, you never miss the water till the well runs dry.’
Sam Hamilton smiled his gentle, slow smile, collected himself and explained why he had his boss’s car for the night and why he hadn’t been able to finish the piece of work he was doing for him for want of oxygen in his acetylene welder.
‘Well sure that problem’s easy solved,’ said Robert nodding, pleased enough to help his old friend. ‘Work away there while I finish this wee shoe an’ then I’ll make us a pot of tea we can take outside till I hear all your news.’
The dusk was fading in tones of pink and grey, the air still warm, as they sat down on the grass bank under the pear tree at the gable end of the forge, the county road visible at the end of the lane now deserted. Robert had fetched sweet milk from the silent house, for Ellen had gone to her bed, and the two men sat side-by-side, the two delph mugs filled full of a strong brew and watched the light go.
‘D’ye mind when the Hamiltons set off for Banbridge with their bits an’ pieces on Sinton’s dray?’ Sam asked suddenly, his mind travelling back to a day when he and his brother and sisters had sat on this same grassy bank beside the pear tree waiting for the dray to come and collect them.
‘Aye, that was the year of the terrible bad accident on the railway, wasn’t it?’
Sam nodded, his mind still engaged with memories of the part of his childhood spent in the now ruined house across the lane. His family had lived there when his own father, John, had worked with Robert’s father Thomas in the darkened forge behind him.
‘There’s some of us lucky to be here to remember it,’ Sam said suddenly, realising he’d not said a word for quite a while.
‘I mind m’father comin’ back from the railway banks with blood dried on his clothes an’ didn’t even know it was there,’ said Robert abruptly.
It had only just occurred to him that his mother must have been there in the house when her husband and John Hamilton had come back from collecting up the dead and carrying them to be laid out in Armagh. But he still couldn’t remember her. All he remembered of that night was his father asking Annie was there anything you could use to get the stains out.
‘Now then,’ said Sam, drinking deep, ‘tell us how all your ones are. Is Bob a Bank Manager yet?’
He settled back to listen to his friend and to take the good of the evening. It was a rare moment of rest at the end of a long day for which he would give thanks like the good Quaker that he was when he said his prayers.
No, Bob wasn’t yet a manager, but it wouldn’t be long till he was, for he was not only good with figures, he had a knack of sizing people up. Johnny, wasn’t as clever as his brother, Bob, but he’d served his time as a grocer and was up in Belfast now getting a bit more experience. Doing well. Polly was still in Toronto with Jimmy and the two boys and the wee one, though she was worried about Jimmy’s job. Sure wasn’t that the way it was everywhere these days. Mary had taken a chance and gone out to her two years back and had got started in Eatons. Florence was up and away to London and she knew not a soul there. She was working in the dress department of a big store. Right up her street and she loved it. Ellie had been walking out for two years now with George Robinson next door and they were expecting a wedding once the harvest was over.
Sam had to concentrate hard, for in the years since he’d last been to the forge itself the children he’d seen playing in the orchard had grown into young men and women. He could just remember Mary handing round sandwiches after Selina’s funeral, but he couldn’t call to mind the youngest wee girl at all.
‘And all well and healthy, Thank God,’ he said soberly, as Robert finished his tally.
To Robert’s surprise, Sam Hamilton said less than he’d expected about his own large family. The two older boys were well settled, both in the police force and Bobbie was now in Irish Road Motors. The eldest girl, Emily, had come home from New York with her husband, Kevin, and he was working with a man who’d started making body work for motors. They were just down the road in Richhill. Rosie and her husband, the doctor, had had a third child, the wee girl Richard had so wanted. Jack had got Emily’s old job at Fruitfield, in the office doing the books. Dolly was the only one at home now. She’d become a dressmaker and was very good at it.
Robert threw the last dregs of his tea into the long grass and wondered if he’d missed something, for he was sure there were nine in Sam’s family. He puzzled over it for a minute or two as they sat in silence, then he remembered one of the wee girls had gone and lived with her aunt who had no family. He couldn’t remember her name and he thought it rude to ask about her without having her name.
‘Martha well?’ he asked shortly.
‘Grand. Working away. And how’s Ellen?’
‘About the same. Good days and bad.’
There was a pause which began to lengthen as each man reflected on this ritual exchange about the well-being of their wives. Neither had made a happy marriage. Martha Hamilton was sharp and had little time for the father of her children. Ellen Scott had little time for anyone but herself. She was one of those people who never find anything in life to be pleased about. She complained continually about her health and anything else that displeased, her so that Robert and those who knew her best had long since ceased to pay the slightest attention to anything she said.
‘Sam, that’s it.’ He could not imagine how he could have forgotten his friend’s namesake, the good-natured young man he’d met a couple of times now, most recently when he’d gone into Armagh to see about a more respectable bicycle for Ellie when she got her job in Freeburns.
‘An’ what about young Sam?’
‘Aye, I was coming to young Sam. Not good Robert, not good.’
‘Ach, dear, is he poorly? And him such a fine lad.’
In the dim light, the whites of Robert’s startled eyes stood out in sharp contrast to his dark and grimy face as he waited anxiously for a reply.
Sam Hamilton ran a hand over his thinning hair and shifted uneasily where he sat.
‘Young Sam was to be married in June. A girl from Portadown. They’ve been going together three, maybe four, years now. He’s been working all the hours there are to save up for furnishing a house when they find one. He’s even been cycling home of an evening to work with me for a few extra bob to add to his wages. It’s a good, steady job he has at the cycle shop, but not great pay. An’ you know yourself there’s not much hope of betterment these days, there’s so few jobs going,’ he said, shaking his head, and looking Robert in the eye.
‘Well, about March time, Sammy … Sam, I should say, for he doesn’t like to be called Sammy now he’s a man. Off he goes to Rountrees and buys a bedroom suite and a dining table and chairs with a sideboard to match and a dresser and kitchen table and chairs to go with that. He paid cash for the whole lot and goes off in great glee to tell her what he’s done. Well, she’s not one bit pleased. She says he should have asked her to choose the furniture. He says he’d asked her what she’d like and they’d looked at stuff in the shop windows together. He’d picked out just what she’d admired. But that was only the start of it. She kept finding fault with him and he begins to get very uneasy.
‘Well, at the heels of the hunt, it seems there was some other fellow had a fancy for her and the parents came in on his side and said what a good match it would be. The long and the short of it is, Robert, she jilted him, and I could hardly believe how badly he took it. Sure he cried like a child when he told me and I couldn’t think of a word of comfort I could offer him. All I could do was get him to go over to see Rosie, for she and him were always very close. But our wee Sammy … Sam, I should say, is a different man.’
‘Ach dear, that’s a hard thing, and him a soft-natured man. Sure there’s no badness in him. What did he do with the furniture?’
‘Well, fair play to them, they gave him every penny of his money back, for the stuff had never left the showroom and he went straight out and got drunk for the first time in his life. Then he bought a motorbike. A racing model, for he said he fancied entering the T.T. races. And I don’t know which I’m more afeard off, him killing himself off the bike or him taking to the drink. I know I must put my faith in God, but I’m heart sore every time I look at him.’
‘Aye you would be. Sure, it’s desperate to be young and feel that way about a woman,’ said Robert in a tone that any other time would have made his friend sit up and take notice, but Sam Hamilton was thinking only of his son as he turned to Robert and finished his story.
‘An’ the worst of it is, Robert, he told me the other night that he thought he’d never marry now. That indeed he’d be unlikely even to look at a woman for many a long day.’
CHAPTER TWO
The burst of applause and the roar of voices when the band stopped playing made it clear to Ellie and George that the small, wooden hall with its galvanised roof and peeling green paintwork, built some ten years earlier to accommodate a newly-formed Orange Lodge, was packed to capacity. Through the open door and the thrown-up sash windows, the beat of dance music throbbed out again into the evening quiet of the surrounding fields and lanes.
Close to the hall, against every convenient bush, tree and gatepost, bicycles were propped up. Released from the shafts of their traps, a few ponies tethered along the boundary hedge munched away quietly. At the entrance to the weed-grown and neglected field surrounding the hall itself, two motors were parked one behind the other almost blocking the narrow country lane.
Ellie had never been on a motor-bike before and she’d caught her breath as the warm evening air raced past. It felt as chill as a winter gale, whipped her hair backwards and forwards across her face, gusted and swirled round her bare legs and plucked at the full skirt of her pretty, floral-patterned summer dress as George speeded along the twisty lanes through Ballybrannan, round the foot of Cannon Hill and on to Mullanisilla.
She’d clung tightly to his tweed jacket for warmth as well as safety, but when they came to a standstill and she climbed stiffly off the pillion and stepped on to the stony path leading away from the field-gate, she found she was shivering uncontrollably. As soon as she got her feet on the ground George left her and strode off, pushing, not his brother’s borrowed bike, but his own new bike, his one thought the need to find a safe parking place.
Well at least it will be warm inside, she thought to herself, as she watched him go. She dabbed her dripping nose, ran her fingers through her tangled hair and shivered fiercely. Well, you live and learn, she said to herself, hearing her father’s voice. She smiled ruefully, wrapped her arms round herself, covered up the expanse of goose-pimpled skin exposed by her scooped neckline and rubbed her arms vigorously to see if she could generate a little warmth in them while she waited.
Minutes passed. When George still failed to appear, she moved a little further in the direction he’d taken and found him eyeing a drainpipe at the side of the building. She watched as he took a chain from his pocket, attached one end to the drainpipe and fed the other through the spokes of the motorcycle before attaching a small padlock. He turned a key in the lock, tested it several times, then put the key carefully back in his top pocket. He stared all around him to see if there was any hazard he might have overlooked. Satisfied at last that no harm could come to his new possession he glanced towards her.
‘That should be all right now,’ he said, a bright smile on his face. ‘Don’t want anyone pinching MY new bike.’
He took a final look over his shoulder as she came up to him, dropped an arm round her, marched her up to the door of the hall and produced his two half crowns for the pair of men guarding it, so large they almost filled the entrance.
When they moved marginally apart to allow them to pass between them, she followed him as he elbowed his way towards the crowded dance floor, an indeterminate area between a deep line of girls on one side and a less deep line of men on the other. Here couples were entwined, if not actually able to dance. He turned to her, put his arms round her and used his superior height and weight to propel them round the floor.
The band stopped. The applause was enthusiastic.
‘Big crowd,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, fishing in her pocket for her hanky and dabbing her nose, now dripping even more vigorously than it had outside.
She was warming up now, for the atmosphere was like a warm blanket, but was much less pleasant. From somewhere nearby, there was an overpowering smell of cheap perfume and sweat. All around her, men with shiny foreheads were mopping their brows and girls with light dresses had patches of damp under each arm.
The floor was so packed, there was little opportunity for George to demonstrate his dancing skills. As the band grew more enthusiastic, encouraged no doubt by a crate of beer parked in the tiny kitchen behind their raised platform, Ellie gave up the attempt to make conversation and find out what George could possibly mean by talking about his new motorbike.
She exchanged smiles with girls she’d known since working in Armagh. Others she’d known from childhood and the years they’d spent together in the school room just inside the gates of the greytowered parish church built on Church Hill. There was a new school now, down in Ballybrannan which had only been open a year. It had a separate entrance for Boys and Girls and even separate flush toilets.
She smiled to herself. Very different from the old school-room, where she and George were taught by Master Ebbitt and Miss Taylor. The visiting Inspector complained every year in his report that there was but one office, the earth privy used by both boys and girls. Probably it was the privy that had closed the school in the end. These days there were new regulations for shops and schools and places of work. Why, even her own boss, who paid as little attention as possible to such things, had had to provide seats for all his shop assistants even if they never had time to sit on them.
‘Will we go out for a wee breath of air?’ George asked, bending down to her ear to make himself heard.
She nodded and followed his tweed jacket as he carved his way back through the somewhat narrower lines of girls and out into the grassy area surrounding the hall. All around them couples were entwining their arms and setting off in search of a grassy bank or a low wall to sit on.
‘There’s a bench outside the smithy over there,’ he said, pointing to a low, whitewashed building a couple of fields away. ‘It’s not far. I have something to tell you. It’ll be worth the extra wee walk on up the lane,’ he added, looking unusually pleased with himself.
George smiled a lot. He always had. Even when they were wee things together at school, he was known for his good-nature. Nothing ever seemed to bother him. He was on good terms with everyone. He was two years older than she was and he’d had a notion of Ellie since she was twelve or thirteen. Given they lived next door to each other, it had always been assumed they’d make a match. As their teenage years passed neither of them had objected to this assumption. Their only problem was the one faced by all their contemporaries. Where were they to get the money to get married?
To be able to get married you needed a job that paid enough to rent a house and support a wife and family. Jobs that paid well were few and far between and houses were scarce even if you could afford the rent. It made no difference that George was the second son of Tom Robinson, a fair-sized farmer for these parts of North Armagh. Still in his late forties, Tom had no though whatever of retiring and even when he did, he’d made it clear he had no intention at all of splitting up the farm his father and grandfather had managed to put together. The land would pass intact to the eldest son, young Tommy.
Meantime, George was working on the land with his brother. He had his keep, his clothes and ten shillings a week in his pocket. The motorbike was a present from his Uncle George, the Director of a Canadian timber company, well enough off to come home every seven years or so to see his brother and his family. He’d been in residence next door for nearly two weeks of his usual three week visit.
Ellie and George walked along the lane swinging their clasped hands. The May evening was still warm. After the stuffiness and overpowering smells of the hall, Ellie was more than usually grateful for its freshness. There were wild roses in the hedge, pale pink petals freshly unfurled, the first she’d seen that year.
‘Aye indeed, sure they’re early enough,’ he replied agreeably to her comment. ‘It’s an early season altogether. Ah hope to goodness we don’t get frost.’
‘So do I. I still have my geraniums on the window sill. I’m waiting till after the full moon to plant them out.’
‘Are ye now?’
He turned towards her for the first time that evening and looked her up and down, from the crown of her still tousled fair hair to her neat little feet and the shoes with their lattice work pattern her sister Florence had sent her from London.
They sat down together and he drew her into his arms, kissed her vigorously and then took her hand.
‘I have some great news for you, Ellie,’ he began. ‘You know how we’ve been talkin’ and plannin’ and wonderin’ how we could manage to find a wee house and get married. Well, I have the answer,’ he announced, pausing for effect.
‘My goodness, George, what’s happened?’ she cried, her grey eyes sparkling with excitement.
‘I’ve been offered a great job. Ye’d hardly believe how much money I’ll be earnin’. I’ll have saved up for a house in no time an’ I’ll be able to send out for ye.’
Ellie’s smile faded. Her mouth, half open to ask about the great new job, closed again as she put together the clues in what he’d said. There were no jobs with big money in Armagh or anywhere else in Ireland. Or if there were, they were not for the likes of George.
She could see he was waiting for her to tell him how pleased she was with his news. She pushed her unease to the back of her mind and asked the obvious question.
‘Is it your Uncle George’s business?’
‘How did ye guess?’
Not exactly difficult, she thought to herself, when he’d talked about nothing but Uncle George for the last fortnight. Out loud she asked quietly what the job was and whereabouts in Canada it was.
Once started there was no stopping him. The words tripped over each other as he told her all the details he’d gleaned from his uncle since his arrival. She already knew Uncle George had a timber business. Now he told her its headquarters was in a place called Peterborough. Ellie had never heard of Peterborough and George himself seemed vague as to its whereabouts, but he was quite clear the timber came from some distance away. There were logging camps in the northern forest where men worked cutting timber till the snow fell. Then they used sledges to move it out to the bigger rivers and have it ready to float down to the sawmills in the spring. As Uncle George had said, you needed to be strong and very fit.
It wasn’t hard to see why Uncle George had made his proposal, Ellie thought to herself. His nephew looked the part. Tall and broad, sun-tanned and easy going. What she couldn’t see was why George thought this plan would solve their problem. The more he talked about the camps, the chuck wagons that cooked their food and the paymasters who brought their dollars every week, the more she felt that something dreadful was happening. Instead of being pleased and happy, she grew more and more anxious.
‘But where would we live George?’ she broke in, unable to listen to any more of his excited account.
‘Oh we’d live in Peterborough,’ he said firmly. ‘Or one of the smaller places with a sawmill. But that wouldn’t be for a wee while. I’d have to learn the job out at the camps before I could be given a supervising job in one of the mills or an office job in one of the retail warehouses.’
‘And where would I be when you were up in the forest with the other men and the bears?’ she asked, a tremor threatening to break up her carefully chosen words.
‘Ach, ye needn’t worry about me an’ the bears. I shoulden’ have told ye about them at all,’ he said, drawing her close and patting her bare arm. ‘You’ll be safe here till I’ve saved up to send for you. Sure we can get married out there as well as here,’ he went on reassuringly.
Ellie shivered. Even this late in the evening, there was still no chill in the air, but the thought of going out to Canada to marry George was so different from anything they’d ever planned, she just didn’t know where or how she’d find the courage to go through with it.
‘How long do you think it might be before I could come out to you?’
‘Ach, not long. A couple of years or so. Sure you’ll not know the time goin’ an’ you can go on savin’ up a wee bit too,’ he said encouragingly.
‘What happens if you find someone else to marry, George?’ she asked, determined to get him to focus his mind on them rather than on all the things his uncle had told him.
‘Ach sure there’ll be no women up at the camps. Ye can rest easy there,’ he said with a grin, as he pulled a strand of her long hair.
‘And what happens if I find someone else that wants to marry me and stay here?’ she asked quietly, looking him straight in the eye.
‘Now don’t be sayin’ things like that, Ellie,’ he replied quickly. ‘Haven’t you and I been goin’ out together since the time you left school? Aren’t we made for each other?’ he went on, his deep voice rising somewhat as he made his point. ‘Sure we can talk it all over next week. Our Tommy’s startin’ a man on the farm, so he won’t be short-handed when I go, so I’ll be able to take you out every evenin’. We could go to the pictures in Armagh one night and maybe the Friday dance in the City Hall. They say it has a great floor and it’s never crowded like these wee places,’ he added, nodding his dark head towards the distant sound of music.
‘So when are you thinking of going?’ she blurted out, as the implications of what he’d just said dawned upon her.
‘Uncle wants me to travel back with him. It’s too good an opportunity to miss havin’ someone to go with that knows their way about,’ he explained quickly. ‘He’s booked us on the Liverpool boat for tomorrow week and we’ll pick up the Canadian Pacific ship on the Monday. It sails that evening for Quebec. So he says.’
As Ellie climbed into her large, cold bed a couple of hours later, she wondered how she’d ever managed to keep from crying through the rest of the long, long evening. Now she need try no more. Tears came instantly, running silently down her face, sinking into the crisp, white pillowcase with the decoration of pink daisies she’d embroidered in her last year at school.
She felt her head in such a turmoil, she didn’t even know where to begin to make sense of things. Between the morning and the evening of an unexceptional day, her world had changed completely. George, who had been there all her life, her fiancé in all but name, was going away. In just over a week, he’d be setting off from Armagh Station and by this day fortnight he’d be on a ship on his way to Canada. He’d even told her the name of the vessel and how they’d get off at Quebec and not Montreal, because that was the quickest way to travel to Peterborough. And within the month he’d be up in his camp with the lumberjacks and the chuck wagon.
At the thought of the immense distance opening up between them, the tears flowed faster. For as long as she could remember, he’d been next door, a minute or two’s walk down the shortcut from her own house, past his father’s barns, along the front of the substantial two-storey dwelling and into the farmyard. And if she couldn’t see him anywhere, or hear his voice echoing from stable or byre, she’d only to go to his mother in the dairy or the scullery, or even in to old Granny Robinson sitting by the fire in the big kitchen and ask them where he was.
What was she going to do?
She turned restlessly in the large bed, big enough to have taken all four sisters together when they were still small. If only she wasn’t on her own with all her brothers and sisters gone. Mary, it’s true, was always so bound up in her own affairs, she’d seldom been any help, but Florence was only a little older than herself and always sorry if something had upset her little sister. Although she might not be very good at giving advice she would always listen. She’d try to encourage her and remind her things were never as bad as one thought and often she’d been right.
It was Polly she needed now, but her eldest and dearest sister, was in Toronto with a husband, two small boys and a little one and a load of worries of her own. Not that Polly would ever let her own problems get in the way. If you asked her something, you could always be sure she’d pay attention. She had a way of looking at you as if she was hearing more than you were telling her. When you’d finished, she’d say not what would comfort you, or what she thought you wanted to hear, and certainly not what she herself would do, but what might actually help you to see your way.
If only there were more time, she could write and ask her what she thought of George’s plan and what she herself should do. But even though letters took only five or six days each way, there still wasn’t time to get an answer back before he went. She’d just have to manage by herself.
Tired out, she fell asleep at last, her face wet with tears. It felt like only minutes later that she woke suddenly, her whole body rigid with tension. A large brown bear had been staring at her and as she wondered whatever she was going to do, it began to lumber towards her. Her eyes flew open in the dim room and the whole evening with George unrolled before her once again.
She knew he loved her and indeed she had loved him for as long as she could remember. He certainly wasn’t the first young man to go away, work hard for a year or two and send for his sweetheart. It happened all the time. But the whole thing had been so sudden. They’d never even considered it themselves. Maybe if he’d told her what Uncle George was proposing, or asked her what she thought before everything was settled, it would be easier. But then, he was doing his best, thinking of how they might be together. If he was the one who had to go she could hardly say ‘don’t go’ when going was to give them the future together they’d planned.
But all the time, she felt something was wrong. Try as she would, she couldn’t see what it was, except that she just didn’t know how she could go on living at home and working in Freeburns with no George and no one but girlfriends to talk to. The very thought of it brought the tears streaming down her cheeks again until the pillow was so wet she had to turn it over before she made another attempt to go to sleep.
‘Ellie, are ye up?’
She jerked awake at the sound of her father’s voice.
Brilliant light was streaming through the dust-streaked windows and making bright patches on the linoleum. She knew without looking at her clock she’d overslept. She, who always woke early and lay, warm and comfortable, till she heard her father raking out the stove.
‘Just coming,’ she replied, jumping out of bed and pouring water from the jug into her wash basin.
The water was icy on her face and warm body but she moved so quickly she hardly noticed. Within minutes, she was dressed in her black skirt and white, shop assistant’s blouse. She brushed her hair while pushing her feet into her everyday shoes, closed her bedroom door firmly on the unmade bed and the chair with her floral dress still draped over it, and hurried across the small entrance hall to the open kitchen door.
Her father was frying soda bread in the heavy griddle, the smoke rising already from the over-hot fat, the smell of burning just beginning to taint the air.
‘Can I do that for you, Da?’
‘Aye. Yer a better han’ at it than me. Yer Ma says she’s not well.’
‘Would she like a cup of tea?’
He flicked his eyes upwards and tightened his lips. He’d forgotten to ask and he knew as well as Ellie neither of them would hear the end of it until the day was out or some better opportunity for complaint turned up.
‘Will I away and see?’
‘You’d better,’ she replied, her back to him as she bent over the pan, drawing it away from the heat and tipping it gently to redistribute the melted suet.
