Anne Bennett - Keep the Home Fires Burning

Bill knew the boys had to be punished, but he was very glad that Pat had done the thrashing and not the priest. Father McIntyre would have seen it as his bounden duty to scourge the wickedness out of them. And yet he felt sorry that Marion had to deal with all this on her own. She did have her hands full and he could do little to ease it, but he did write a censorious letter to Tony, telling him that he was letting the family down and he had to behave himself. He only hoped that it might make a difference.

It did make a difference. Bill had never written to Tony in that way before, and Tony valued his good opinion, so he was determined to try to be good.

Marion was glad that he was behaving because she had so much more to worry about. She was forced to part with her wedding ring and Mary Ellen brought her one in Woolworths to replace it.

Now Marion was really worried because she had nothing else left to pawn. Soon she would need coal again and she didn’t know how she was going to scrape the money together.

When she mentioned this to Polly she said, ‘You must get your Tony doing what Chris and Colm had to do many a time.’

‘What was that?’ Marion asked.

‘He’ll have to go down the Saltley Gas Works real early in the morning …’ Polly said.

‘The carts the horses are pulling are laden down with coal,’ Marion told Tony later. ‘And when they come out the gate and speed up over the cobbles some of it falls off. You must go down with a bucket to collect it up and you must be there before seven in the morning.’

‘Ah, Mom!’ Tony cried. ‘That’s miles away.’

‘Not at all,’ Marion said briskly, though she felt for her younger son. ‘If you go down Rocky Lane and along the canal it will take you no time at all.’ Then seeing his disbelieving expression she said sharply, ‘And you can take that look off your face because that is what you must do and that’s all there is to it.’

When Tony related this to Jack at school that morning he knew all about it. ‘My brothers did that,’ he said, ‘but I never had to. Our Chris used to say that some kids took two buckets, one for the coal and one to collect the horse shit to use on their garden or allotment.’

‘Ugh! That’s disgusting!’

‘Well, you ain’t got to do that, anyway,’ Jack said. ‘D’you want me to come with you?’

‘Would you?’ Tony would be glad of his cousin’s company in those inky black and dismal mornings.

‘Course,’ Jack said airily. ‘Anyroad, two’s better than one.’

‘Won’t your mom mind?’ Tony asked.

‘Course not,’ Jack said confidently. ‘Why would she mind?’

Tony could think of a hundred and one objections his mother might have made to such a plan, but Jack’s parents were a different kettle of fish altogether. Tony didn’t tell his mother of Jack’s involvement, though.

From the first day Tony was glad that Jack was beside him. Jack was much bigger than Tony, for a start, and not so easily pushed around. That was important because there were loads of other boys at the same thing. By the time they set off home Jack always had more in his bucket than Tony did. Not far from the Whittaker house, Jack would tip the contents of his bucket into Tony’s and he would take it home and tip it into the coal shed. Even with the two of them scavenging, he only had a meagre amount of coal, but he knew that every penny counted to his mother, and buying coal was an expensive business.

One morning, when Tony had been collecting the coal for a fortnight, he was full of misery when he met Jack.

Catching sight of his glowering face in the beam of the shielded torch he had thought to bring, Jack said, ‘What’s up with you? You have a face on you like a smacked bum.’

‘There ain’t nothing wrong,’ Tony muttered.

‘Don’t give me that.’

‘Well, what’s the use of telling you owt anyway?’ Tony said. ‘It ain’t as if you can do owt about it.’

‘Well, I can’t if you don’t tell me.’

‘All right then,’ Tony burst out. ‘Every day we stand here to collect a piddling bit of coal that does no good at all. When I come home from school, the house is always sort of cold and damp, and there’s usually just a glow in the range, nearly buried under a heap of slack.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘we know where the coal’s kept, so why don’t we wait until it’s dark, crawl under the fence and get ourselves a couple of bucketfuls?’

Tony was doubtful. ‘Ain’t that stealing?’

Jack considered the matter. ‘It ain’t any more stealing than picking up the lumps that fall off the carts when they clatter up the road. They fill them up too full on purpose so that some will fall off and we get to pick them up. This way we are sort of saving them the bother.’

The way Jack explained, it sounded fine to Tony. After all, there was so much coal in the gas works mound; he had seen it through the gate. Surely they wouldn’t miss a little bit. Then Jack said, ‘Let’s see what we can get this morning anyway, and then tonight when everyone has gone to sleep we’ll go for plan B. What time in your house does everyone go to bed, ‘cos it would be best to keep this to ourselves?’

‘About ten or so,’ Tony said. ‘I’m not really that sure because I’m usually asleep myself by then.’

‘Better make it eleven, then, to be on the safe side,’ Jack suggested. ‘Meet me at the end of your road at eleven.’

‘Yeah, all right.’ Tony was hardly able to believe that he had agreed to sneak out of his home that night when everyone was asleep. It wasn’t something that he had ever considered doing in the whole of his life. He was scared stiff, but he couldn’t bear to see the disdain in Jack’s eyes if he said he couldn’t do such a thing, so he knew he would be there with his bucket at eleven o’clock.

Two or three times that night Tony nearly nodded off. The early mornings were beginning to tell on him and he had to get out of bed and walk around the room. When Richard came to bed, however, he couldn’t do that, and he curled in a ball and pretended to be asleep. He dared not shut his eyes, however, but kept them wide open and forced himself to lie still until Richard’s even breathing told Tony he was asleep.

Still he lay there until he heard his mother’s tread on the stairs. He was glad he did because she opened the door but, seeing everything was quiet, didn’t go into the room. Tony counted to five hundred slowly, and then slid stealthily out of bed. He knew that he would be dressing in the dark and so he had left his clothes out on the chair by his side of the bed in a particular way and was dressing himself as quietly as possible when Richard turned over and said, ‘Where you going?’

‘Ssh,’ Tony said frantically. ‘You’ll have Mom awake.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Richard said. ‘I’ll wake her all right if you don’t tell what you’re up to.’

Tony bit his lip. Jack said to tell no one. That was all right to say in his house, where no one seemed to give a tuppenny damn what anyone else was doing, but in his house it was a different matter and he knew if he refused to tell Richard he would fetch their mother, and the plan he and Jack had cooked up would be scuppered before it had even been tried.

So Tony said, ‘I’m going to get some coal from the gas yard.’

‘Tony, that’s stealing.’

‘No it ain’t,’ Tony cried. ‘No more than standing there every bloody morning and fighting with every other bugger for any tiny bits that fall off the carts.’

‘Shurrup,’ Richard said. ‘You told me quick enough. It’s you that will have our mom awake, and she’ll be armed with a cake of soap to wash out your mouth.’

‘It’s all right for you.’ Tony went on, lowering his voice to a hissing whisper and ignoring the reference to the soap. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, and even though Jack comes with me all we get is a piddling bit in the bottom of the perishing bucket.’