Anne Bennett - Child on the Doorstep

Angela had often thought about George’s words as the war raged on and could understand his reasoning so very well, but then she often did. In her opinion he was a very wise man. She had worked in his shop for two years before her marriage and just after it and had become very fond of him, and he had thought a lot of her too. So much so that, after he died, she found he had left her his mother’s jewellery, which he had lodged in the bank with authorisation saying it was for Angela alone. It was totally separate from the will, in which everything presumably was left to his wife, Matilda.

Angela had never taken to Matilda, mainly because of the way she had been with George. She was a cold woman, who never seemed to have a high regard for him, and in Angela’s hearing had never ever thrown him even a kind word, and there was no place in her life for children, or sex either, so people whispered.

By now Angela had reached the pub and would have to settle her mind to the job in hand. She went in the side door and called out to the landlord, Paddy Larkin, as she did so. She was very grateful to Paddy for offering her this job after the war, for she couldn’t in all honesty say either her father-in-law, Matt, or her husband, Barry, were regular visitors there. She was more than happy to have it though, because it eased the financial pressure, and with Constance at school and Mary to see to her in the holidays, it was perfect for them all.

Angela seldom saw the landlady Breda Larkin for she was usually getting herself ready upstairs. She often wouldn’t come down before ten thirty or so to open the pub at eleven and Angela would usually be on her way back home by then. However, one morning when she had been at the cleaning for three years or so, Breda got up early. She greeted Angela pleasantly enough, but when she had left she turned to her husband and said, ‘She’s wasted on the cleaning, that Angela McClusky.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look at her, you numbskull,’ Breda said impatiently. ‘Despite everything she is still a beautiful woman, blonde, busty and pleasant. She has a smile for everyone and she will bring the punters in, especially on Friday and Saturday night.’

Paddy might have bristled at being called a numbskull by his wife but he had to acknowledge what she said made sense. Angela was not only a very good-looking woman, but she had something a little special, and though she was always agreeable, she was not flirty – too flirty a woman behind the bar could cause all manner of problems. And so he put the proposition to Angela the next day. She knew it would be extra hours and so extra money and she also knew she couldn’t have considered it if she hadn’t Mary at home, for she would not leave Constance alone for the hours she would be behind the bar. She told Paddy she would have to ask Mary, for she would be the one looking after Connie, but it was only more for courtesy.

As she’d anticipated, her mother-in-law had no objection.

‘Why would I even think about objecting?’ Mary said to Angela. ‘It is only two nights a week you’ll not be here and I shall do what I do every night: sit before the fire and do a bit of knitting and a bit of dozing. But surely to God you won’t be doing the cleaning as well?’

‘No, well, I’m going to put a proposal to Paddy,’ Angela said. ‘He wants me Friday and Saturday night and Sunday lunchtime. So I could do the cleaning on Monday to Thursday, and if he was agreeable ask Maggie to take over the cleaning over the weekends.’

‘Oh you do right to think of her,’ Mary said. ‘That poor girl.’

Angela knew how Mary felt for her best friend, Maggie, who was also Connie’s godmother. She had married Michael Malone after the war, having been sweet on him for years, even before the war began, and had written to him when he was in the army. A few of the men from their town had been part of a pals battalion and had fought alongside each other and Angela had found out later that the shell that had killed Barry while he’d been trying to save another had blown Michael’s left leg clean off.

He had thought any future with Maggie was scuppered, that she wouldn’t want to saddle herself with a one-legged man, but Angela knew her friend was a bigger person than that. And Maggie had said that it made no difference to the way she felt about him and Angela knew she spoke the truth. She also knew if Barry had lost his leg, but came home to her, she would have rejoiced. Though getting Michael to understand that took Maggie some time.

A major slump after the war meant that, with strapping able-bodied men finding any sort of employment hard to come by, no one was prepared to even consider employing a one-legged man, and he felt bad that he couldn’t provide for Maggie. Maggie had said she didn’t need providing for, and besides, as he had been so disabled in the war, Michael had been awarded a pension of twenty-eight shillings a week. Angela was pleased for them both, but was a little confused that as a war widow she qualified for a pension of only eighteen shillings, with an extra shilling added for Connie.

‘No understanding the way governments work,’ Mary had said when this had been explained to her after the war.

Angela had quite a sizeable nest egg in the post office because of her well-paid war work in munitions making and delivering shells, as well as the money Barry was sending her. But savings didn’t last for ever if you had to draw on them constantly and so when Paddy Larkin had offered her a job she hadn’t even had to think about it. She knew Maggie too wouldn’t hesitate, because any job was better than no job, and it would do her very well for now.

‘It’ll be money the government won’t know about because Paddy pays you in hand,’ Angela pointed out. ‘Will Michael mind that it’s you working and not him?’

‘He may well mind,’ Maggie said. ‘But he is above all a realist. And so he will not show any resentment to me or give me any sort of hard time.’

‘He’s a good man you have there, Maggie.’

‘I know it,’ Maggie said. ‘But the war exacted a heavy price from us one way and the other. Oh, I know Michael survived and Barry and our Syd didn’t so maybe I shouldn’t moan, but I would like to take the look of failure from his face. He knows in the present climate he hasn’t the chance of a sniff of any form of employment and I can’t even give him a child.’

She caught sight of Angela’s face and went on, ‘I see you think it irresponsible to bring another life in the world just now when our financial position isn’t great and not likely to improve very much. But, oh, Angela, how I long to hold my own child in my arms – a wee girl like Connie, or a boy the image of his father. I don’t think it will ever happen, that’s the point, and that’s hard to bear.’

Angela was upset to see her friend so downhearted and the worst of it was everything she said was true; none of the girls she worked in the munitions with had become pregnant. This was such a phenomenon across the country that investigations had been made and it was found that the sulphur many of them worked with had made them infertile.

Angela had wished at the time she had become infertile too and then there might have been no repercussions from the terrible attack that day she had driven to the docks for the first time. She had been one of the first and only female delivery drivers, transporting munitions around the country. It had been on one of these trips that something terrible had happened, something she had tried to push out of her mind but which had come back to haunt her and caused her to make the most heart-breaking decision of her life.

One dreadful night she had been attacked and viciously raped when making a munitions delivery at night in a strange town. Her assault had left her scarred, but worse, it had left her with child. With no other course available, with a husband away fighting at war and nowhere to turn, Angela had been forced to leave the child, a young girl with fair hair and blue eyes like her own, on the workhouse steps. The shame and the pain of it had stayed with her and Angela had had to shut off the past to keep the pain at bay.