‘Why?’ Maeve asked. ‘It’s only the Catholic Church that doesn’t recognise divorce.’
‘Aye, but he’s the head of the Church of England, isn’t he, the King?’ Elsie said. ‘No. Can’t have him on the throne and then marry her.’
It seemed Elsie was right, for, as the days passed, there was no news of a coronation. ‘I’d not want the crown at the moment anyroad,’ Elsie said. ‘The world’s a dicey place and I think the whole thing’s going to blow up in our face. I’d not want to be in the government or the Royal Family just now. I mean, look at them Germans again.’
Maeve nodded. Some dreadful tales were coming out of that country, things they’d done to the Jews that it was hard to believe. ‘Warmongers, that’s what Germans are,’ Elsie said. ‘Mark my words there’ll be trouble. Why else are they building up their armies and that?’
Maeve couldn’t answer her. Just a couple of years before, Hitler had been made Führer of Germany and conscription was brought in. Not the action of a peaceful country, surely?
Brendan said it wouldn’t affect them anyway. ‘It’ll probably come to nothing,’ he said. ‘Germany was soundly beaten last time. They’ll hardly come back for more.’
‘What about the things people say they’re doing to the Jews?’
Brendan shrugged. ‘We’re not Jews – what do we care?’ he said indifferently. ‘Things just as bad have been done to Catholics in the past.’
Maeve knew Brendan was right, but she didn’t think that just because atrocities were committed against one group in the past they should be tolerated against another group now. But surely, surely it wouldn’t come to war. The First World War was supposed to be the war to end all wars and over ten million had died to make sure it was. No country could want that carnage again; they wouldn’t be that stupid.
Even when civil war broke out in Spain in July few Britons were bothered. What was Spain anyway? It was nothing to do with them. France and Britain were right to agree to a policy of nonintervention. But when news came that Hitler’s armies and those of Italy under Mussolini were being sent to help Franco, the military dictator, two thousand British people joined the International Brigade on the side of the Republicans and sailed for Spain.
‘Bloody fools,’ Brendan declared. ‘It isn’t their fight.’
‘Maybe they have a conscience,’ Maeve retorted, angry with him because he had given Kevin a sound spanking for dropping a cup and breaking it. ‘That’s something you don’t seem to have.’
Brendan grabbed Maeve’s cheeks and squeezed them between his large muscular fingers. ‘Watch that lip,’ he said, ‘or I just might split it open for you.’
‘Oh Brendan, leave me alone,’ Maeve said wearily, jerking her head away. ‘Leave us all alone, please, can’t you?’
‘Aye, I can,’ Brendan said with a humourless laugh. ‘But maybe I don’t want to.’
And that, thought Maeve, is the truth of it. He enjoys tormenting us.
But the international situation was more unsettling than Brendan’s attitude, for wasn’t she used to that? She listened to it on the new wireless with its accumulator, which Elsie and Alf had bought themselves, and knew that war clouds were gathering all around them.
Kevin began St Catherine’s School the September before his fifth birthday. To Maeve’s shame and distress, he had no shoes and his clothes were darned and ragged, but she couldn’t even scrape up the coppers to buy better second-hand stuff. She was behind again with the rent and knew if some of the arrears weren’t paid off she’d be out in the street.
Kevin wasn’t the only barefoot or badly shod child at the school, and in October a man came to see them from the Birmingham Mail Christmas Tree Fund. Kevin came home a few days later clutching not only a pair of new boots stamped so they couldn’t be pawned, and a pair of socks to go with them, but also a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a navy jumper and shirt. Maeve was glad of the decent warm clothing, but mortified that she was unable to provide them herself, especially when she knew her husband was in full-time work for which he was paid a living wage.
What made it worse were the two hundred men who’d marched from Jarrow in the northeast of England, where unemployment stood at sixty-eight per cent. They were demanding jobs and had marched to London with a petition, but the Prime Minister refused even to see or to speak to them.
Maeve felt she could have accepted her poverty better if Brendan had been unemployed and they’d had to exist on dole money. She’d read somewhere that the average family of husband, wife and two children needed six pounds a week to keep them above the poverty line. She knew many earned much less than that, but she was pretty certain that Brendan earned that much and more, for his job was skilled. But she was lucky if she saw the odd pound of it, and while her husband seemed to have money to do as he pleased, the rest of the family were definitely in poverty.
As the year drew to a close, Edward, the uncrowned King, abdicated. He said he ‘found it impossible . . . to discharge my duties as King . . . without the help and support of the woman I love.’
Everyone was shocked at what he had done. ‘Love, my arse,’ Elsie said angrily. ‘What’s he playing at? He’s the King and that should come first. As my mother would say, love flies out the window when the bills come in the door.’
‘Well, that would hardly apply to them, would it, Elsie?’ Maeve said with a laugh, amazed that her friend should care so much.
But most people had an opinion on the abdication and she found it was discussed everywhere. But however anyone felt, by 12 December 1936 Britain had a new King – Prince Albert, who would be known as George VI. He’d married a lady called Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who would be Queen, and he had two daughters. The elder, Elizabeth, who was then ten years old, was now heir to the throne.
Maeve listened to it all on Elsie’s wireless and later read about it in the paper, but all in all she felt nothing in her situation was likely to change, whichever King was on the throne, and she looked forward with little enthusiasm to 1937.
‘Terrible world to bring kids up in, this,’ Elsie said to Maeve one day in the spring of 1938. She was eyeing Maeve’s swollen stomach as she spoke, because Maeve was six months gone again and when she’d told Brendan about it she’d borne the marks for almost a week. Still, he’d more or less left her alone after that. This was one at least she hadn’t miscarried. And there was nothing to be gained by going on about it. The world was a dangerous enough place with enough to worry about, God alone knew. Elsie often thought it was as if the whole globe was like a tinderbox and ready to go up at any time. ‘I mean, bloody civil war still going on in Spain,’ she said. ‘And that bloody Hitler and Mussolini like bosom buddies and now the Nips attacking the Chinese.’
‘Yes, but none of it affects us,’ Maeve said, ‘not really. I mean, it’s all happening miles away.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Elsie countered. ‘If you ask me, girl, we’re teetering on the edge of war.’
Elsie wasn’t the only one to think that way. ‘Needn’t think I’m fighting if it comes to war,’ Brendan growled one evening.
