Irish girls and so do the Americans, and the tips they give are legion. She said she’ll miss that when she is married herself,’ for Clara was sporting an engagement ring with a huge diamond in the centre of it. ‘She’s getting married in the spring and moving down south somewhere,’ Tressa said. ‘We really need to go while she’s there to speak for us.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Lizzie had promised.
A couple of days later, Tressa watched Lizzie working in the dairy, pummelling the poss stick up and down in the churn. Lizzie’s arms throbbed with pain and her back ached, and despite the raw, black day she was sweating so much she felt it dampening under her arms and running down her back. It wasn’t even her turn to do the churning, she thought resentfully. It was Eileen’s, but she had had to mend the tear in the hem of her skirt for the dance she was going to that night.
Lizzie was also going to the dance and she had yet to have a wash and then iron her own clothes, but it was no good asking Eileen. She’d say she’d do them and then forget.
Tressa, knowing her cousin well, guessed what she was thinking about and so she said, ‘They’d manage without you here, you know. Your problem is you allow yourself to be put upon.’
And by you too, Lizzie might have said, but she knew Tressa had a point for there was Peter and Owen to help her father and even Johnnie, at eleven years old, was making a fine turn-out too. Her eldest sister Susan lived not far away and Eileen was on hand to help her mother. And she knew Eileen would have to help if Lizzie wasn’t there to cajole and coax and boss about. ‘You’re right,’ she’d said to Tressa. ‘I’ll go to this place Birmingham with you, directly Clara can get us jobs, and give the place a try-out at least.’
Of course it hadn’t been that easy. Lizzie’s own parents had to be convinced and give their permission for their daughter to go. ‘It’s all Tressa’s doing,’ Catherine remarked to Eileen. ‘If that Tressa went to the North Pole and gave our Lizzie the nod, she’d go along with her.’
‘Aye, Mammy, I know,’ Eileen said with a sigh, annoyed that her compliant sister was even contemplating leaving. ‘Still, maybe when all’s said and done, she’ll not stay long.’
‘That’s true right enough,’ Seamus had put in. ‘God knows she hasn’t a clue what city life is like and might not take to it at all. Let her get it out of her system anyhow and then she can never claim we were holding her back.’
Lizzie also thought she might not like the life, and that is what she said to console Johnnie, who was so dreadfully upset that she was moving out of his life. Looking at him, Lizzie had thought, was like looking at herself as a small child, for both of them had the dark brown wavy hair and the same deep brown eyes, snub nose and wide mouth. Only that day Johnnie’s eyes had swum with the tears that had also trickled down his cheeks. ‘Sure, I’ll be back before you know it,’ Lizzie had said, holding her young brother tight.
Of all his sisters and brothers, Johnnie loved Lizzie most. As she was seven years older than him, when he was younger he had looked upon her as another mother, and, in truth, Lizzie had done a lot of the rearing of him. With her temperament she seldom became angry and had far more patience than Eileen. In the long winter evenings it would be Lizzie who’d play cards or dominoes, or read to him to while away the time, and she was always ready to help him with his homework. And in the finer weather they’d walk together over the rolling countryside, or down to the sea to watch the huge rollers crash onto the sand leaving a fringe of foam behind them. Johnnie knew his life would be poorer without his sister, so he clung to the idea that she’d be soon back. ‘D’you promise?’ he’d said.
‘I can’t promise that, Johnnie,’ Lizzie had replied. ‘I don’t know myself how I’ll fare. We’ll just have to wait and see.’ She knew that Tressa had no intention of returning home, but for herself, she wasn’t sure how she would cope with any of it.
That morning, in late January 1930, as they’d stood at the rail of the mail boat, watching the shores of Ireland being swallowed up by the mist, Tressa had given a sigh of satisfaction and said to Lizzie, ‘I’d say we’ll be sure to catch ourselves rich and handsome men in England?’
Lizzie wrinkled her nose. ‘Let’s have a bit of fun and live a bit first.’
‘And Birmingham’s the place to do that all right,’ Tressa said. ‘So, are you glad you came at least?’
Before answering, Lizzie looked down at the churning sea the boat was ploughing its way through, which was as grey as the leaden sky, and she felt excitement beginning to stir in her. She smiled at her cousin and said, ‘If I’m honest I’m often glad when you bully me into doing something I’d not given a mind to before. I’m no good at adventures and maybe I never will be. Perhaps I’ll always be the kind of person that will have to have my arm twisted to do anything at all. So in all honesty I can say aye, Tressa, I’m glad I agreed to come and I’m so excited I can hardly wait.’
Birmingham lived up to the girls’ expectations, although Lizzie had been initially alarmed by the traffic, cars, buses, lorries and trams cramming the roads, and the throngs of chatting and often raucous people filling the pavements. She’d thought she’d never sleep for the noise and bustle around her. She shared an attic room with Tressa and two other girls called Pat Matthews and Betty Green, and on the first night sleep eluded her, despite her tiredness, and she kept jerking awake when she did doze off.
It was a full week before Lizzie slept all night, so wearied by the twelve-hour shift she’d just finished, nothing could disturb her. From that night it became easier and she began to enjoy city life, and there was great entertainment for two girls with money in their pockets, especially living where they did. They were almost in the centre of the city, where the cinemas, theatres, music halls and dance halls abounded, and at first Clara had taken them in hand to show them around.
She suggested both girls took dancing lessons soon after they arrived, for she said Irish dancing was nothing like the dancing done here. However, Lizzie and Tressa caught on quickly, for they found the years of dancing jigs and reels had given them agility and the ability to listen to and move with the music and to follow instructions.
Lizzie loved to dance and she was so looking forward to the social. Whatever Tressa said, you weren’t promising a man your hand in marriage for doing the rounds in a quick step or a waltz and she was determined to enjoy herself. The first thing to do was to find something suitable to wear.
The Bull Ring was the place where bargains were to be had, but in a way Lizzie hated going there. She knew of the slump and the men without work and she’d even seen some of the hunger marches go down Colmore Row. But there was no evidence of deprivation in the hotel, in the food served and facilities offered, for the people who came were, in the main, well-to-do and successful, so Lizzie and Tressa were inured from the poverty.
They weren’t aware of the teeming back-to-back houses not far from the city centre where families lived in a constant state of hunger, cold and deprivation, pawning all belonging to them to prevent them all starving to death. It was only in the Bull Ring that these things were brought home to them. Lizzie was sorry for the shambling women she saw there, who were sometimes barefoot, which had shocked both girls at first. They often had a squalling baby tied to them with a shawl and a clutch of filthy, ragged, barefoot children with pinched-in faces, and arms and legs like sticks. They would dart like monkeys to snatch at anything falling off the barrows before the coster could pick it up. The barrow boys would shout at them and often raise a fist, but they were too hungry to take any notice and it tore at Lizzie’s heart to see them.
Tressa laughed at her softness when one day she gave a group of children her saved
