A Strong Hand to Hold Read online

  ANNE BENNETT

  A Strong Hand to Hold

  Dedication

  This book publishes in August 2014, the same month that my youngest daughter, Tamsin, gets married, so this book is dedicated with much love to Tamsin and Mark. xxx

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Birmingham, November 1940

  ‘Now are you all right, Mother?’ Jenny O’Leary asked, placing the breakfast tray with the pot of tea and toast spread with the last of the jam ration across her mother’s knees as she sat before the fire.

  Norah looked at her daughter with a pained expression – the one Jenny was well used to. The older woman’s furrowed brow caused deep lines to run down her face; the bun into which she had made Jenny scrape her grey hair appeared tighter than ever; and her mouth was set in a thin line. Ignoring the question, she whined, ‘The house is perishing. Put some more coal on the fire.’

  Jenny suppressed a sigh, knowing she’d be late for work if she didn’t get going soon. ‘It won’t help to put more coal on, Mother,’ she said, tucking the blanket around Norah’s legs as she spoke. ‘What’s there will burn up in a minute and warm the place, and you know we have to be careful with it.’

  She knew her mother wouldn’t believe her. The war was now fourteen months old, and despite Norah having four sons and a son-in-law in the fighting line, she still seemed to think a world war shouldn’t affect her life at all. Before Norah was able to make a reply, Jenny’s grandmother Eileen Gillespie came in from the kitchen.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be on your way?’ she snapped at Jenny. ‘Go on, I’ll see to your mother.’

  But suddenly there was a knock on the door. Jenny raised her eyes to the ceiling. Who on earth would call at this hour? They weren’t expecting any parcels.

  When Jenny saw the telegraph boy with the buff telegram in his outstretched hand, for a moment she couldn’t move. Her head swam and she fought against the nausea that rose in her throat. She had the urge to thrust it back at the boy, refuse to accept it, as if not to read that one of her brothers was killed or missing would mean it was untrue – a mistake.

  Instead, she found herself not only taking it from him, but thanking him before she shut the door. She stood with the thing in her hand, shaking so much she couldn’t open it. Her grandmother, coming into the hall to see who’d knocked, found Jenny sitting on the stairs, arms around her legs while shudders ran through her whole body.

  Eileen’s face blanched white at the sight of the crumpled telegram in Jenny’s hand and she grasped the door jamb for support as she said, almost in a whisper, ‘Who?’

  Jenny shook her head mutely and Eileen grabbed the telegram from her and ripped it open. ‘Dear God!’ she wailed. ‘It’s Anthony!’

  ‘Missing?’ Jenny asked, and she silently cried out to the Almighty to give her some vestige of hope.

  But her grandmother shook her head and went into the living room to break the news to her daughter. A howl of agony escaped from Jenny. A hard knot settled in her heart and sent spasms of pain through every part of her body; and although she cried out at the acuteness of it, her eyes stayed dry and she wondered, bleakly, how she’d get through the rest of her life without her beloved brother.

  She hardly felt the cold of the hall seeping into her as she sat on the stairs, hugging her knees and listening to her mother’s sobs from the living room and trying to come to terms with the devastating news. Anthony had been in the RAF for just five months, as he’d joined on his eighteenth birthday in mid-June. By then, the true cost of lives lost in Dunkirk was common knowledge and most people knew that just a small stretch of water separated the UK from German armies, and for the first time in many years, the British faced the possibility of invasion and subsequent defeat.

  Anthony had been desperate to join up. Knowing the fight to protect Britain would come from the air, he’d soon tired of the Home Guard which he’d joined when war was declared, and where he’d trained with broomsticks, with just a black armband to show he was in any official capacity at all.

  Jenny remembered it so well, the day he’d got his wish; he’d stood before her in Air Force blue, his hat at a jaunty angle and the light of excitement dancing in his eyes. And though Jenny was bursting with pride, her stomach had contracted in fear for his safety.

  For just a few short weeks, all the time the RAF could spare to train their fighter pilots, Anthony was stationed with the 605 Squadron in Castle Bromwich, not so far away. Meanwhile ‘The Battle of Britain’ had raged in the skies. Jenny read all the news reports. The papers used the number of enemy planes lost in comparison to the British as if it were a score at rugby. Nineteen to four, or fifteen to seven, they’d claim. She doubted the accuracy of the British losses and presumed it was done to boost morale, which she found distasteful. War was no game and every pilot lost belonged to someone.

  And far, far too soon, Anthony had become a part of it, stationed in a unspecified airfield in the South. Now Jenny began to pray in earnest for her youngest brother, for while she worried and prayed about the rest of her family, she knew that her younger brother in particular faced mortal danger on a daily basis.

  However, by the end of September, ‘The Battle of Britain’ was over, the Allies were victorious and Britain safe once more from invasion. Anthony had been home on leave for a few days. Now, just two short months later, he was dead. Jenny let out a long, shuddering groan.

  She got to her feet, shivering, and went into the living room, where her mother seemed awash with tears; Eileen Gillespie held her daughter pressed to her breast. Jenny would have welcomed comforting arms around her, but she knew that would never happen. Anyway, there were practical things to do, and she seemed the only one able to deal with them. She first had to phone the Dunlop where she worked as a typist, and then see her sister Geraldine and her sister-in-law Jan, the wife of her eldest brother Seamus, to tell them the tragic news.

  She didn’t want to see the priest – she felt God had let her down – but her grandmother said Norah needed him to visit and so she made herself go that afternoon. Geraldine and her small son Jamie were installed in the house by then, for Geraldine said she was worried how the news of Anthony’s death would affect Mother with her delicate state of health.

  As Jenny went down Holly Lane to the priest’s house, she wondered for the thousandth time why the whole family went on with the pretence that her mother was some sort of invalid. Norah O’Leary was nothing of the sort, and if she knew so must they – but Jenny had only ever spoken about it with Anthony. For years it had been the same, and Norah had kept her husband Dermot dancing attendance on her because of it.

  When he’d breathed his last, in th
e spring of 1939, Jenny had known with fearful trepidation that she, as the only unmarried daughter, would be expected to take over from her father. The prospect filled her with dread, for she knew her mother didn’t like her that much – and to be truthful, she wasn’t that keen on her mother either!

  She had hoped the war might postpone the grim prospect she saw before her, but when she suggested giving up her job and joining the WAAFs, the family were loud in their condemnation. Only Anthony told her to go for it. More than once, he and Jenny had glimpsed their mother through the window walking around with no apparent stiffness and without her sticks, and yet when they entered the house later, they would see her sitting in her chair, covered with a blanket, complaining of the agony she was in.

  Norah O’Leary was a fraud, and both her younger children knew it. Jenny remembered how Anthony had told her to drop the charade the others practised. ‘For God’s sake,’ he’d said, ‘stand up to Mother before it’s too late.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right for you,’ Jenny had cried. ‘You’re a man. You’ll soon be out of it.’

  ‘So could you be,’ Anthony had pointed out. ‘Join up, if that’s what you want. Mother’s not helpless and Geraldine only lives up the road.’

  But it had been no good. Jenny had been unable to withstand them all telling her how selfish and inconsiderate she was and how she should know where her duty lay. She supposed she’d scored a minor victory though in refusing to give up her job when Geraldine had suggested it.

  ‘How will you cope?’ her elder sister had asked.

  True, in the beginning it had been hard dealing with her mother and the housework as well as her job. Previously her father had seen to many of Norah’s needs; now there was just Jenny to do everything. She’d been glad Anthony was too young to join up with his elder brothers straight away, for she’d depended on him a lot and they’d grown closer still. Yet however hard it had been, and still was, Jenny knew that if she’d been with her mother day in, day out, she’d not have been able to stand it.

  And how in God’s name was she to stand this latest blow? she thought, as she turned up the garden path of the Presbytery. Who would she confide in now and tell her hopes and dreams to? Who now would deflect her mother’s anger and comfort Jenny when Norah had reduced her to tears yet again. Jenny’s eyes misted over with misery, but she refused to let any tears fall. She had an idea that once she began crying, she’d never stop – and she had to talk to the priest.

  Father O’Malley was very sorry to hear about Anthony. Jenny was not the only one of his parishioners to come to him with similar news, but it wouldn’t be helpful to tell her that. He looked at the girl, so different from her brothers and sisters in both looks and build, and saw the sorrow in her eyes. He knew, as many did, how close the two younger O’Leary children were, for there was a largish gap between them and the others. Now the girl must be twenty or so. He remembered the time before her birth when Norah had come to see him and asked him to speak to her husband, who she’d said had forced himself upon her. She was pregnant again because of it and she didn’t want the child: Francis her youngest had been six and she’d thought four children enough for anyone.

  Of course he could do nothing for the woman, but tell her firmly that she had to be grateful for any children that God sent her. He also said that it was not a woman’s place to refuse the husband to whom she had promised obedience in the marriage ceremony. Dermot, he’d said, had rights. And he must have insisted upon them – for Anthony had been born just two years after Jenny. Altogether the priest thought Norah O’Leary had had little to moan about in those days, with a fine handsome family and Dermot able and willing to work all the hours God sent to provide for them and not spend it all in the pub. Not all women were as lucky. Of course, her disability would have been hard to bear, he could understand that, and then to lose Dermot had been a big blow. Her children would have been a fine consolation for her, if the damned war hadn’t taken the young men of the family away. Thank God, he thought, she still had the girls – and Geraldine, now married, was still near at hand.

  Father O’Malley had liked young Anthony. He’d been a fine boy, like his brothers before him. As mischievous as the next, though – not averse to taking the odd sip of Communion wine when he was serving on the altar, or filling his water pistol with holy water, as he recalled. But that was boys for you. The priest sighed. He’d have to go up and see Norah and try to offer the poor woman some comfort.

  On the way home, Jenny decided to go to her Gran O’Leary’s, for she knew no one else would bother to tell the old lady about Anthony. Norah herself hated her mother-in-law. Not that she was a great one for liking people generally, but she really seemed to loathe Maureen O’Leary. She called her fat and common, and said she’d only put up with her on sufferance while her husband was alive, and now that Dermot was dead, she refused to have anything more to do with her.

  Jenny didn’t care if her Gran O’Leary was common, but the woman her mother described scathingly as ‘fat’ Jenny herself would have called ‘cuddly’. Her lap was just the right size for a child to snuggle into, in order to lean against her soft and very ample breasts, while her plump arms were the most comfortable and comforting pillow Jenny had ever known. Maureen O’Leary always had an apron tied around her waist and her feet were encased in men’s socks, especially during the winter, with downtrodden slippers or old boots on top. Jenny didn’t care either that her gran cursed and swore a bit and hadn’t had the benefit of a decent education, Gran O’Leary was the only woman who’d ever shown her any love in her young life. She could never remember her own mother giving her a cuddle, or tucking her up in bed at night.

  But then, as her Gran said, you couldn’t make people what they were not and she had to accept that. Jenny knew her Gran had loved Anthony, and it was right that she should be informed about his death; the four eldest O’Leary children had little or nothing to do with old Mrs O’Leary, because Norah had wanted it that way. Jenny thought it a shame, especially as she’d had so much to do with them all when they’d been small, but Maureen had never complained – at least not to Jenny. She’d once told her that Dermot had had very little influence over his elder children because he’d been away so much. First the Great War had claimed him, and then, once they’d come to England, he’d had to find work and money enough to support his mother’s family as well as his own.

  Dermot had become a driver in the armament factory his uncle worked in, and had taken on any number of contracts to earn the money he needed. Maureen told Jenny that once he’d left the house, he might not come back into it for a week. That was how it came about that Norah and her mother, Eileen Gillespie, had the rearing and ruination of Jenny’s older brothers and sister.

  However, it was all water under the bridge, now. Her brothers and sister were grown up and could make their own decisions – yet they never went to see their gran though she lived but two streets away, in Westmead Crescent.

  That afternoon, Maureen O’Leary took one look at the anguished eyes of her granddaughter and drew her into her arms. She wept as Jenny gave her the news. She cursed Hitler and the whole German army and the German nation, and Jenny lay against her and wondered why she still couldn’t cry.

  Even her gran’s lodger Peggy McAllister was upset when she heard of Anthony’s death. The McAllisters were friends of her gran who lived in Ward End and when the family had been bombed out in August, Maureen offered their eldest girl Peggy a temporary home with her. Since then Peggy had become friendly with Jenny, and she had even met Anthony when he’d visited his gran on his short leave in late September.

  ‘It could have been our Mick,’ she said to Jenny. ‘He’s desperate to join the RAF and he’s eighteen just after Christmas. It’ll break Mammy’s heart if anything happens to him.’

  ‘It isn’t only the servicemen though, is it?’ Maureen said, dabbing her eyes. ‘I mean, your whole family could have been killed in the raid that blew up your house. Those poor Londo
ners are getting it every night, and hundreds killed there.’

  ‘It’s happening all over the country,’ Jenny said. ‘And the Coventry raid five days ago that killed over fifteen hundred people and injured many more will at least put paid to the stupid people who think being two hundred miles from the coast is some sort of deterrent. I think, and so do many more, that we will be next. All our defences have been stepped up. I’m on duty tonight, as it happens.’

  ‘Och, girl, they’ll understand if you go down and explain,’ Maureen said tearfully. ‘They’d not expect you in tonight if you tell them about Anthony.’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘I’d rather not just sit and think,’ she said. ‘God knows, there’ll be time enough for that – and Anthony wouldn’t want me to stay away, especially if there should be a heavy raid tonight.’

  Maureen didn’t press her granddaughter further, but Jenny knew it wouldn’t be so easy for her to convince the ones at home. ‘I’ll have to be going anyway,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘They’ll all be sitting there waiting for me to make their tea.’

  ‘I must be away too,’ Peggy said, ‘or they’ll be handing me my cards.’

  Peggy worked the night shift at BSA – Birmingham Small Arms – in Armoury Road, making Browning guns for Spitfires, and it was one hell of a trek from Pype Hayes out there every evening. Maureen secretly thought the reason she stayed on with them and didn’t look for something nearer, was because she was sweet on her son Gerry, and Gerry certainly more than liked her. In fact, Maureen thought, Peggy would be hard to dislike as she was lovely to look at with her thick hair so dark it was nearly black, and eyes to match, and her full mouth in her heart-shaped face. But best of all was her kindly nature and sense of humour. Maureen would welcome the girl as a daughter-in-law, for Gerry was thirty-three and a fine age to marry, but he was too shy to speak his mind to the girl. Maureen thought him a fool and hoped he wouldn’t dally too long, or someone else would snap the girl up.