Patty was pleased with herself and it wasn’t until they were on their way home on the rickety, smoky tram that she’d begun to cough; the next morning, Sunday, Linda phoned for the doctor from the phone box on the corner.
She didn’t mind sending for Dr Sanders now. He’d become a good friend to them all. She remembered the first time she’d gone to see him early in August. Patty had collapsed five days earlier.
Linda told the doctor it was the telegram that had brought it on, but she knew it wasn’t, not really. Linda guessed that her mother was secretly glad when she got the telegram to tell her that her second husband, Edward Prosser, would not be coming home from Dunkirk. He’d been a bully and Linda knew he used to hit her mom. She’d hated Ted Prosser for what he did to Patty and because he was horrible to the boys. There was another reason for hating him too, but she had never breathed a word to her mom about it – wouldn’t ever have to now, ’cos that pig was dead and gone and couldn’t hurt them any more.
However, when Patty had read the letter that came later, she had dropped like a stone to the floor in a dead faint. Dr Sanders had put her condition down to delayed shock and depression, and he prescribed tablets. He hadn’t informed the Welfare Authorities about the family though he knew he should have done. Instead, he’d arranged for a district nurse to call daily until Patty was on her feet. He’d said it was too much for any twelve-year-old, coping with a sick mother as well as the housework and cooking and looking after her two little brothers aged three years and just twelve months, even with the quite considerable help she got from the next-door neighbour.
When Patty recovered, he’d got her a job in Armstrong’s on the Lichfield Road making cartridge cases; he also used his influence to get a place for George and little Harry at the day nursery across the road.
It was great now, Linda thought. Money wasn’t quite so tight; they no longer had to hide from the rent man and could begin to pay the doctor’s bill, though he’d told them there was no rush. It grew better still when Beattie talked her Bert round into letting her take a job too. She’d said she was bored stiff at home with the lads fighting and her daughter married and living in Leeds, and anyway, she wanted to be doing her bit. But it meant that she’d pop in in the morning, help to get the boys ready and help Patty bring them back in the evening. Linda knew they had a lot to thank Beattie for. Even now, with Patty ill again, she’d taken the boys and left them at the nursery on the Monday and that day, Tuesday too, knowing that Linda would have her hands full as it was.
Patty watched her daughter bustling about, getting a meal for the two of them. ‘We’ll put the wireless on later, bab,’ she said. ‘Have a bit of music to cheer us all up.’
They hadn’t had the wireless very long and it was still a novelty. Patty had wanted one at home because they always had ‘Worker’s Playtime’ on at the factory and she loved to sing along to the songs. When any of the girls said how terrific her voice was, she always replied that they should hear her daughter Linda, as hers was even better, and she tried hard to remember the words of the songs to teach Linda in the evening. Then she heard of the ‘never never’ or ‘hire purchase’ scheme where you could make a down payment on a wireless, then pay so much back a week. But oh, the excitement in the house the Saturday it was delivered!
Linda had looked as if Patty had given her the Crown Jewels. ‘Can we afford it, Mom?’
‘Let me worry about that,’ Patty had said. ‘Any road, we need to hear the news, don’t we, or this flipping lot will be invading us and we’ll know nowt about it till the church bells start to ring.’
‘Oh, Mom!’
‘I’m only joking,’ Patty said. ‘But we do need to know what’s happening. If it gets too miserable we can always turn the dial to summat else, eh? They have good plays on, the girls at work were telling me.’
The thing they enjoyed the most was singing together, and they’d join in the old favourites belting out from the wireless. Beattie loved to hear them. Patty and Linda had been singing together ever since Linda was just a nipper, but it had all come to a stop when Patty married Ted Prosser. Didn’t like to hear it, Patty had said. Didn’t like much, if Beattie’s opinion had been asked. Didn’t seem to take to Linda either and resented any closeness between her and her mother. But then he didn’t go great guns for his own babbies either. Funny man altogether and Patty was better off without him, not that she went around telling her like, but she was.
Patty knew what Beattie thought, for even if she said nothing, her face spoke volumes. They’d been neighbours since she’d come on to the estate in 1930. Patty Lennox she’d been then, of course, and she thought she was in heaven getting one of the new houses on the Pype Hayes Estate, after living in one room in a rat-infested house in Aston since her marriage three years previously. She was so proud and kept the place like a new pin. She enjoyed looking after her husband and little girl, and hoped there would be more children to fill the house with their chatter.
However, when she lost her dear husband Billy to TB in 1932, Patty was glad she only had Linda to see to. It was Beattie who’d been her support then and helped her to pull herself together for the sake of her child. Later it was Beattie, too, who minded Linda when Patty did cleaning at the Norton pub. Patty also worked behind the bar a time or two to make ends meet, and that was where she met Ted Prosser. She often rued the day, for the man had hard fists, a vicious temper and a short fuse which grew shorter according to the amount he’d drunk. Added to that, he kept Patty short of money and when he did give her any, often borrowed it back to supplement his beer money.
Patty knew her daughter disliked him and there was something else, a wariness that had always come into Linda’s eyes when they spoke of him; and she never wanted to be left alone with him in the house. Patty had her suspicions, but didn’t know how to raise them with the child. What if she was wrong and put all sorts of ideas in her head? She’d thought Linda would come to her if there had been anything, but she hadn’t. That apart, Patty soon knew she’d made a grave mistake marrying Ted Prosser, one she’d pay for for the rest of her life, because she couldn’t see him agreeing to divorce. When she received word of his death, she felt little grief; her overriding concern was how she’d feed and clothe three children.
But the letter from the corporal told her of a husband she didn’t recognise. He’d given up his place in a boat leaving Dunkirk for the corporal because he’d been injured and lost his life because of it. The corporal said Ted had been a brave fine man and her loss must be a grievous one and he said also he would be recommending him for a bravery award. His description of Ted Prosser bore no resemblance to the bully he’d become to his wife, and Patty knew if she’d glimpsed that brave and selfless soldier the corporal appeared to know, she’d have considered herself proud to be married to him. The fault must have been hers, she told herself. She’d failed to recognise Ted’s good points and had annoyed and frustrated him in some way, so he’d been forced to lash out at her and go to the pub to escape. It had been those feelings that had overwhelmed her. She’d thought she was no good as a wife or a mother and everyone, including the children, would be better off without her. Now she knew that wasn’t true. It was just possible that Ted Prosser would have returned from the war a changed man, but privately she doubted it. What she didn’t doubt was the love she had for her children, and that encouraged her to get better, helped by medication from the doctor.
Linda was relieved that Sunday when the doctor said her mother would soon be up and about again. He said chest infections were rife in the winter and it was nothing to worry about, and she’d soon be back at work. Linda was glad she’d be leaving school herself in a couple of years, for then the money problems would be easier and her Mom might not have to work so hard. One thing she did know was that they didn’t need a man to look after them.
Just once her mother had said, ‘Well, I’ve had two
