Keep the Home Fires Burning

Bill shook his head. ‘I don’t know how I am going to face Marion and tell her this. She’ll never manage on it. Richard can’t give her any more than he does because his wage as a junior apprentice is only nine and eleven pence. Sarah is fourteen next month and will be leaving school then, but even if she is able to get a job it won’t pay very well. Christ, Pat, I’ve been bringing home three pounds ten shillings every week, more with overtime, which I did most weeks.’

His heart sank as he remembered how Marion would often say with pride that she had never visited a pawn shop, never had reason to, not like her sister, Polly, who never seemed to be out of the place. As he and Pat turned for home again he gave a heavy sigh.

‘That’s the sigh of a weary man,’ Pat smiled.

‘A guilty one, perhaps,’ Bill said. ‘How do they expect a woman to buy food, coal and pay the rent on the pittance they allow them? And that’s taking no account of clothes and boots growing children need.’

‘I know,’ Pat said. ‘It’s a bugger, all right. Polly won’t be so bad, see, because the boys get good enough money at Ansell’s. And even in a war, people will still want beer, won’t they? More rather than less, I would have said, and Mary Ellen has been working in Woolworths for over a year now and she tips up her share too.’

Bill saw that, for the first time, the Reillys would be better off than the Whittakers. Their rent, too, was less than half what the Whittakers paid. ‘And don’t forget the Christmas Tree Fund will help you with clothes and boots for the kids,’ Pat went on.

Bill shook his head dumbly. Marion had often said she would die of shame if she couldn’t provide for their own children and had to rely on handouts from the Evening Mail Christmas Tree Fund.

Pat saw the look on Bill’s face. ‘And don’t look like that,’ he snapped. ‘Better take them and be grateful than let the kids suffer. Pride and fine principals are all very well when you have plenty of money coming in.’

Bill felt ashamed, for he knew that Pat was only trying to be helpful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s just that neither Marion nor me envisaged going cap in hand to anyone.’

‘Well, we ain’t never been at war before, have we, and so we have to do the best we can.’

‘I know,’ said Bill, ‘but I don’t think there are words written that will ease any of this for Marion.’

Pat watched his brother-in-law trudge away from him, his head lowered and his shoulders hunched, and he didn’t envy him a bit. He and Polly had had a lot of knocks in their journey through life and he knew that she would view this as yet another challenge to overcome. After all, he reasoned, they wouldn’t be the only wives and mothers in the same situation.

Marion was in the scullery where she was rinsing out the boiler that she had used for the Monday wash. She looked up when she heard Bill and was slightly alarmed by the wretched look on his face. For a split second she thought that the army had refused him. That news would delight her, but she knew that it would devastate him and so she said, ‘Did everything go all right?’

Bill nodded. ‘I am to report on Wednesday for my medical and, provided I pass that, I will be in.’

Marion knew he would pass. Bill had always been a fit man.

‘Where are the children?’ he asked. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Sarah and Siobhan have taken the lot of them down the park,’ Marion said. ‘Talk away if you must, but I will have to get on …’

‘Marion, please.’ Bill placed his hands over Marion’s, which were reddened and still damp. ‘I need us both to sit down and talk.’

She looked into his troubled eyes and realised that she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But that wouldn’t help, she knew, and so she followed him into the living room, where they sat on the two easy chairs in front of the range.

Knowing that there was no way of softening the blow, Bill said immediately, ‘When I decided to enlist, I knew that a soldier’s wages wouldn’t be near as much as I was earning, but I didn’t believe it would be so little.’

‘How little?’ Marion said in a steely voice, and as Bill told her he saw her large eyes widen in horrified surprise.

She wondered why she wasn’t shouting and screaming and throwing things about the room because it was what she really wanted to do. She also wanted to lash out at the husband she thought she knew and say it wasn’t to be borne that he could leave them almost destitute. But she did none of these things, because overriding her white-hot anger was the panicky thought that once he left there was a real risk of the family starving, or, at the very least, being put out of their house if she couldn’t raise the rent money.

‘So, I will have the princely sum of nine shillings and a penny to live on while you are away hunting down Germans?’ she spat.

‘I didn’t know,’ Bill said. ‘I had no idea that the wages or Separation Allowance would be so low. I would have thought that they would value our contribution to the army higher than that.’

‘Well, they don’t,’ Marion hissed. ‘And it might have been better for us all if you had made sure of the facts before you signed the forms.’

‘I know that,’ Bill said miserably. ‘I will send you what I can.’

‘Out of fourteen shillings a week?’ Marion said disparagingly. ‘With one shilling and eleven pence already taken out of your wages, and the money for the children and me as well? We might get short shrift if we relied on money from you to put food on the table.’

‘I know,’ Bill said. ‘And I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, that’s all right then, if you’re sorry,’ Marion said bitterly. ‘That will make a lot of bloody difference.’

The very fact that she had used an expletive at all, showed Bill the level of her distress. He tried to put his arms around her but she fought him off, for she heard the children coming in.

The following day Bill walked to the foundry with Richard to tell his gaffer what had transpired and to collect his wages, for they operated a week-inhand system, and also draw out any holiday money due to him. But he also wanted to snatch a private word with his son.

‘You’ll be the man of the house when I’m gone.’

‘I know, Dad,’ Richard said. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘It’s up to you to look after your mother,’ Bill went on. ‘Sarah will help you. She’s a good girl that way. And for God’s sake keep a weather eye on young Tony. There’s no real harm in him, but I know he’d go to hell and back to get into Jack’s good books.’

Richard knew that only too well. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘But I’m at work all day.’

‘I know. And if he was at school all day I wouldn’t worry so much, but your mother says most of the teachers have gone with the evacuated children, so there will be no school until they have sorted something else for those left behind. And,’ Bill added with a wry smile, ‘idleness and therefore boredom can lead to all sorts of mischief.’

Richard nodded. ‘I know. And like I told you before, I’ll do my level best to help out.’

Bill felt much relieved because he knew that Richard could be trusted. They parted at the gates and Bill went to the wages office to get what was due to him, which amounted to nearly ten pounds. Which he gave straight to Marion.

‘Go easy with this,’ he warned her. ‘I don’t know how long it will take them to sort out your allowance. Once I’ve had the medical, providing that is all clear and everything, I’m not to report until Friday, and they might not put things in motion until it is sort of official.’

‘And what if they do take weeks to sort it out?’

‘They’d hardly do that,’ Bill said. ‘They’ll know you’ve all got to live. God knows, they are giving you little enough as it is.’

Marion gave a sigh. ‘Remember, I have tasted extreme poverty before and, I’d rather cut off my right arm than let my children suffer as I did throughout my childhood.’

Bill didn’t want that either, but he was utterly helpless to ease the predicament that he had put them in by enlisting. Pat didn’t seem to feel the gut-wrenching guilt Bill did, and Bill wished he could view life the same way, but he was made in a different mould entirely from Pat.

As Marion expected, Bill was passed as A1, fit to serve overseas. He was issued with a uniform and a kitbag, and had to report to Thorpe Street Barracks at seven o’clock on Friday morning.

She was surprised when he said that Pat had failed the medical. ‘Why?’ Marion said. ‘He looks all right to me.’

Bill shrugged. ‘I didn’t get to see him after,’ he said. ‘Folk that did said he was gutted.’

‘I wish it was you,’ Marion said.

‘God, don’t say that,’ Bill cried. ‘The man could have anything wrong with him.’

‘Huh, not Pat Reilly. The man is too pickled from alcohol for germs to live long on him. And now he’s somehow managed to wriggle out of the army. Well, I’m away to our Polly’s to find what that lying hypochondriac told them on the Medical Board so that they sent him home.’

The whole family got up to see Bill off that Friday. When he descended the stairs, dressed in his uniform, his wife and children assembled below thought they had never seen him look so smart. But, as Magda said to Missie later, ‘It didn’t look like our dad, though, did it?’