Bia's War Read online

  “When we were first married, we had lived with his parents and I soon learned that he would sulk if he thought he wasn’t getting the attention he thought he deserved. I put this down to the fact that his mother spoiled him like a child, waiting on him hand and foot and even anticipating his needs so that he never even had to look for the newspaper; she would be there holding it out to him when she thought he wanted it. When we moved to Albion Street and set up house on our own, I took the first opportunity that came my way to explain to William that he couldn’t come first anymore because I had Simon to care for. He was only a baby and his wants and needs came before anyone else’s, even mine and that the sooner his father accepted that the better. William took great exception to this and managed to sulk for almost three months. In fact, he only stopped sulking when he made the decision to enlist.”

  “So, I took the absence of letters from William as proof that he was indulging in a huge sulk about the shop and put all thoughts of him from my mind. As I said before, I was very busy with the shop and Simon and the four properties and so forgetting about William wasn’t difficult. But I did have something else on my mind. I was looking about for a new house to buy, not one to rent out, but one that all our family could live in and that would have larger shop premises than the one I currently rented from Mr Vine. It was ridiculous that I was a landlady, yet I didn’t own the house I lived in. And in saying ‘all our family’ I was including Annie and Peter as family. I was so close to both of them by this time that I didn’t want to leave them behind when I moved.”

  “Both of them earned a salary from me, but I was aware that a large proportion of that money was swallowed up by their rent and I knew that Annie repeatedly did without things that she needed in order to feed and clothe Peter. I knew what it was like to love your child to distraction, but most children grow up and live independently of their parents. It was unlikely that Peter would ever do that and I had a vision of Annie working until she dropped dead, in order to care for him. Added to that, Annie was now like an older sister and a mother all rolled into one for me, so I looked on her as my family and families look after their own.”

  “You would have needed a big property to have enough bedrooms for all of you and have space for a shop.” Victoria said, her practical side to the fore.

  “It wasn’t only the size of the property that was important.” Nana continued. “I needed more space for both the living and business parts of our lives, but I also needed the new house to be in the right position in the town. I didn’t want to move any nearer to the docks area, even though it would be easier for collecting goods from the ships and trains, but that part of town was becoming more and more dilapidated and the ‘rougher’ element had moved into it. I also needed the new house and shop to be on a street that people used as a thoroughfare, so that the shop would pick up plenty of passing trade. Houses in the areas I wanted to move to were at a premium and I was aware that I was going to have to pay quite a hefty sum of money in order to get what I wanted, always supposing that I could actually find what I was wanting.”

  “That was where Sam came up trumps again. He had called in to tell me about a house he had found near the railway station which he thought would be ideal for us to buy, so I had to tell him why I didn’t have the spare cash for it at that moment. I was reluctant to confide in him, because I did like to hold my cards close to my chest, but I believed in honesty between partners so he deserved to know why I was holding back from another business commitment.”

  ‘What sort of property are you looking for?’ he asked, when I had confided in him my reason for not buying another rental property.

  ‘I need one that’s big enough for Simon and I, but also has room for Annie and Peter, because I don’t want to leave them behind. Added to that, I want a property that has a bigger shop floor, so that I can carry more stock with space somewhere for a storeroom. I also want it to be on one of the main streets so that I can catch any passing trade, but not too far from where we are here on Albion Street. I don’t want to lose the customer base that I’ve already built up.’

  ‘You’ve certainly put some thought into this Bia and your list of criteria is a pretty long one, but I think I may have the answer for you.’

  “I could hardly believe it. I had been searching for weeks for a property that fitted my wants and here was Sam, telling me he knew of somewhere within two minutes of my mentioning it.”

  ‘I’ve heard that Mrs Rudge is giving up running the corn shop on the corner of Queen Street and King Street. She’s selling up and going to live with her daughter in Normanby. You can’t blame her; she must be seventy if she’s a day and its heavy work shifting bags of grain around. Anyway, there’s the shop and a kitchen downstairs, four rooms on the first floor and two more on the top floor. That would give you ample room for you and Simon and Annie and Peter could have the whole top floor.’

  ‘But how do you know so much about it?’ I asked him. ‘It’s not been advertised or anything or I would have seen it.’

  ‘ Old man Rudge took me up into the attics one day, years ago, to show me his collection of fishing rods, cause that’s where he used to store them.’ Sam said with a knowing smile. ‘I reckon he thought he would be able to sell me a few, but I just wasn’t interested. Fishing’s never been an interest of mine, I would be bored stiff in half an hour. But you should go round and see her before anyone else steps in in front of you. I’m sure you would be able to negotiate a good price for it because she’s desperate to sell. That place is far too big for her since her old man died.’

  “I could have kissed Sam at that point because that shop was exactly what I was searching for. I used to collect grain from there for my Dad’s chickens when I was a kid and I knew how big the shop was. It was like a cathedral in comparison to the house in Albion Street, with three large, plate-glass windows which fronted Queen Street and King Street. I would have ample scope for making wonderful window displays which would attract customers into the shop. Added to that it was on one of the main streets which led down to Middlesbrough Road, so anyone going to the big shops would pass mine before they got there. It was an ideal location and once I’d given it a new coat of paint I was sure it would be bright and airy. I also remembered that it had a large back yard, with plenty of room for storing any overflow from the shop, if Sam would build a shed for me.”

  “But that’s this shop, Nana. That’s where we are now, you’ve described it exactly how it is. So you owned it?” Victoria couldn’t believe what she was hearing, having always believed that her parents had bought it from the Rudge family before Victoria was born.

  “That’s right. I won’t go into all the ins and outs of buying the place, suffice it to say that by the end of May 1915, I was the proud owner of 24 Queen Street with three floors of rooms (including the shop) and its own large back yard. ‘Drinkwater’s Grocers’ moved with us and the business continued to flourish, with Annie, Hannah and I working our socks off, stocking shelves, baking pies and pasties, making soft drinks and starting a home-cooked meat section. The whole place constantly smelled of hams and legs of pork being roasted in the oven in the kitchen. Peter said the house always smelled like Christmas to him and, although Annie and I smiled at what he’d said, we both had to agree that he was right.”

  “I paid a local decorator to whitewash the whole building from top to bottom and even broke my own rule about not going into debt, by buying a new settee and chairs from Vaughan’s furniture shop on what was locally called the ‘never-never’. In other words, it was on credit and I hated every minute that I owed that shop money. I scrimped and saved so that I could pay it off in five weeks, because I hated owing anyone money. I promised myself I would never get into debt again and I never have. That once was enough for me.”

  “Annie and Peter moved to Queen Street with Simon and I, just as I had hoped that they would and it worked very well for all of us. Simon and I shared the first floor and Annie and Peter had the top floor. We v
ery rarely used the sitting room above the shop, because we all liked to sit around the kitchen table at night, talking and playing games with Peter and Simon. We were very busy once we had moved because I don’t think I lost a single one of my old customers, Queen Street was very close to Albion Street, and we did attract a lot of passing trade. I always made sure that my prices were fair and I often sold items that other shops didn’t stock, particularly as I had so much storage space since Sam had built the sheds in the back yard.”

  “Sam had bought my old house from Mr Vine, saying that he was doing so to stop anyone else using the parlour to open a shop in competition to mine and when I’d built up some capital again, I gave him half the cost so that Albion Street became one of our jointly-owned properties, once again rented out to a family with a son away at the Front.

  Chapter Five

  “1915 passed very quickly for us and it wasn’t long before we were celebrating our first Christmas in Queen Street. I must admit that I did occasionally think about William and wonder where he was and what he was doing, but I didn’t ever dwell on thoughts of him. I knew that he wouldn’t know that we had moved house and I did wonder if I should try and get in touch with him to give him our new address, but I didn’t know where to send a letter. And thinking about sending him a letter always brought me to the same point – it wasn’t our new house, it was my new house and shop and I didn’t want him in it.”

  “I can understand why you felt like that, Nana.” Victoria interrupted. “He wasn’t pleased when he came home on leave to find that you were managing very well without him, just think how much worse he would have been to discover that you’d bought a bigger property. You would have shown that not only could you manage without him, but that you were extremely successful without him. It wouldn’t have done his ego any good at all.”

  “Very true, pet. But I had moved on in the way I felt about him. When he first went off to war, I was extremely angry with him. When he came home on leave and was so petty and childish over what I had done, I was angry with him, but, by the time I moved into Queen Street, that anger had dissipated. In truth, I no longer cared what mood he was in because I was now indifferent to him. I certainly wasn’t hoping that the war would end soon, because the end of the war would signify the end of my life as a single woman as William would return home and I didn’t want him back. And I would never have dared to say that to anyone at that time. It not only made me unpatriotic, but it made me a heartless, unfeeling wife.”

  “I’m sure you were never heartless.” Victoria was shocked that her grandmother could have thought about herself as an unfeeling woman. “You were caring for your son and for two other people who weren’t part of your family. Nobody could ever have accused you of being heartless and unfeeling.”

  “I don’t know whether anyone else would have accused me, but it was enough for me that that was how I felt. I know Annie was aware of how my feelings for William had changed, but she didn’t judge me, so that eased my conscience a bit and then, as we moved through 1916, everyone’s thoughts turned to the war, because it was going so badly. When our troops began fighting on the Somme, the newspapers were full of as much detail as they were allowed to publish and they were also full of the lists of the dead. It began to seem that every person in England had lost someone on the battlefields of France and Flanders. There were enormous amounts of telegrams sent to households around Britain, all carrying the terrible news that a son or a father or a brother had died. Some women wouldn’t answer the door when the telegraph boy arrived, as though keeping that terrifying piece of paper out of the house meant that their sons or husbands wouldn’t be dead.”

  “I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to learn that your son had been killed on a battlefield, it tore at my heart to even think about it. There were nights when I couldn’t leave Simon, even though he was fast asleep in his little bed, and I would sit holding him tight, praying that this war would be over before he reached the age to go off and fight. I wondered how many other mothers, with boys older than mine, who were whispering that very same prayer as they watched over their sleeping children, all hoping that the war would end before it claimed any more lives.”

  “It must have been horrendous, Nana, for all those mothers and sisters and wives and then it happened again, less than twenty five years later.” Victoria’s eyes had filled with tears at the thought of so many deaths.

  Nana Lymer patted the hand which had reached out to her as the tears began to fall.

  “So much loss and death and destruction. Could it ever be justified? I often wondered about that, particularly when we went to war for the second time. I know many people found solace in religion, but that has never been an outlet for me and the older I get, the less tolerance I seem to have for those who put all their hope in a god. But I was telling you about what it was like at home when our troops were fighting on the Somme. If I keep on getting side-tracked, I’ll never get to the end of the story.”

  “As I said, the newspapers were giving out quite a lot of information on what was happening over in France and many people were beginning to read more into the official reports than they had done before, going on the numbers of soldiers who were being killed and seriously injured. There were also long lists of the missing and convalescing soldiers who were fit enough to return to their families were letting civilians know that ‘missing’ often meant blown to pieces, so that no trace remained.”

  “Everywhere that people gathered, be it on street corners, in public houses or, as in our case, in shops, the conversations were always about the war; what was happening and where, who had been killed, who was missing in action etc. etc. etc. You wouldn’t have thought it was possible for there to be that many conversations all based on one theme, but that was how it was. It was an all-consuming passion that ate away at the lives of everyone left at home, so that all of everyday life was based on what was happening on the other side of the English Channel.

  “It was during one of these discussions that Mrs Horner told us that she had heard that the pig butcher’s only son had been killed, on the second day of action on the Somme. Until then, I had known so little about Dennison that I didn’t know that he even had a son, but gossip throughout the rest of that day soon filled in all the details. Young Albert was not only the only son, he was also the only child in the Dennison family, a point which made me grieve even more for his mother, given that she had no other children to turn to. The reason for this was revealed when Mrs Horner’s cousin, Mrs Battersby, confided in the whole shop that Mrs Dennison had fallen with a second child when Albert was two years old, only to have it beaten out of her when her husband had been told that his wife was extremely friendly with the coal man. Not one of the gossips who were discussing this snippet of information actually believed that the mousy Mrs Dennison would have attracted the attentions of the tall, handsome coal-wagon driver. They all firmly believed that Mr Dennison had picked up the tale when he was drunk and had misunderstood what was being said. All agreed, however, that the resulting injuries suffered by Mrs Dennison had put paid to any hopes she may have had of having further children.”

  “Did she go to the police?” Victoria asked, appalled at the idea of such a brute beating a pregnant woman.

  “People didn’t go to the police in those days.” Nana explained, “If she had, they would probably have arrested Dennison, but she would have been too frightened of him to press charges, worried about what he would have done to her when he got home. She knew it was safer for her to keep quiet about it, but she must have suffered both physically and emotionally. I must admit, I was sickened when I learnt the true character of the man, but I was so thankful that Hannah wasn’t still working for him.”

  “Over the next few weeks, Dennison was the subject of much of the gossip in the shop; in fact his actions often made the subject of the war slip to second place in people’s minds. He had taken the death of his only child very badly, his neighbours all spreading the word
that he was to be overheard every night, bellowing about his loss to any who would listen and that he had taken to regularly frequenting the Red Lion bar and consuming huge amounts of alcohol. This made him even more aggressive than he usually was and he began taking it out on his wife. It soon became unusual to see her without a black eye and cuts and grazes on her face where he had been using her as a punch bag, but the worm turned eventually (when he broke her left arm) and she upped and left him one evening when he was drowning his sorrows in the Red Lion.”

  “He returned home that night to find his wife gone and to discover that she had taken the contents of the shop till and his strongbox, leaving him penniless and punch bag-less. It was said that his rage was terrible to behold, a statement his neighbour took great delight in expounding on, given that he had once been on the sharp end of Dennison’s fist when he had remonstrated with him for hitting his wife. Dennison had taken his meat cleaver and hacked at the marble meat slab in his shop until the cleaver had shattered, leaving pits and hollows in the marble surface.”

  “Dennison’s behaviour then became a problem for us. When he had sobered up, and word on the street said that that had taken three full days, he realised that he no longer had a willing slave to provide for his every need, both in his shop and in his house. What he wanted was his young servant girl back, so he high-tailed it round to Sammy’s house, demanding that Hannah return to her rightful employment at once, which Sam told him would only happen when Hell froze over. Sam could be quite intimidating in his own way, and because he was defending his daughter, it didn’t take Dennison long to realise that he wasn’t going to bully Sam into forcing Hannah to return to him. But both Sam and I were worried that Dennison might take it into his head to waylay Hannah on her way to or from the shop and we both knew that Hannah wouldn’t be able to fight him off. Sam, because he was working shifts in the iron works, wasn’t often at home to be able to deliver Hannah to work and then collect her at the end of the day, so we decided that it would be best if Hannah stayed with me and didn’t have to walk the streets at all.”